Her only contact with Kylar had been when she’d tried to kill him at the Drake house. Ironically enough, King Gunder had hired Vi, who’d tried to assassinate his son, to kill Kylar, who’d tried to protect him.

She’d had Kylar under her hips and under her knife the very day she took the contract. She’d liked him. He’d been surprisingly calm for a man in his situation. Calm and a little charming, if you thought lame humor in the face of death was cute.

And she would have killed him, but she’d hesitated. No, not hesitated. It hadn’t been lack of will that stayed her hand that day so much as pride that she’d accomplished such a difficult job so quickly. Hu never complimented her work. Though under duress, Kylar’s compliments had seemed genuine, and there weren’t that many people a wetboy could talk shop with. So Vi had given in to the temptation Kylar had laid out for her, stalling so obviously that she’d let it work.

Then the do-gooder count had broken into the room and Kylar landed a knife in her shoulder as she escaped. Months later her shoulder still throbbed at times. She’d lost a little flexibility, despite instantly heading to the wytch Hu used for his healing.

Next time, she wouldn’t hesitate.

She knew she should feel elated that she’d killed Jarl. She was free now. A master wetboy. Hu would have no say over anything in her life, and if he tried, she could kill him without worrying about the repercussions in the Sa’kagé. That is, if the Sa’kagé survived whatever the Godking had planned.

I killed Jarl. The thought wouldn’t go away. Hadn’t gone away for two days. I killed the man who was the closest thing I’ve ever had to a friend.

There hadn’t been much to the kill. Any child could climb up on a roof and shoot an arrow. She’d wanted to miss, hadn’t she? She could have missed. She could have just not taken the shot. She could have gone inside and joined Kylar and Jarl and fought against the Godking. But she hadn’t.

She’d killed, and now she was alone again, going somewhere she didn’t want to go, taking a little girl against her will, forcing a man she respected to follow her into a trap.

You are a cruel god, Nysos. Could you not leave me with more than dust and ashes? I, who serve you so faithfully. From my knife and my loins flow rivers of blood and semen. Do I not deserve an honored place for that? Do I not deserve one friend?

She coughed and blinked rapidly. She bit her tongue until it threatened to bleed. I will not cry. Nysos can have his blood and semen, but he will never have my tears. Curse you, Nysos. But she didn’t say it aloud. She had served her god too long to risk his wrath.

She had even made a pilgrimage of sorts—it had been on her way to a kill—to a small town in the Sethi wine country that was holy to Nysos. The harvest festival was dedicated to the god. Wine flowed freely. Women were expected to abandon themselves to whatever passion moved them. They even had an odd form of storytelling where men stood on a stage holding masks and enacting while the audience watched a three-part cycle full of the suffering of mortals and their need for gods to straighten it out, followed by a bawdy, vicious comedy that seemed to make fun of everyone in the village, even the writer of the enactment. The town loved it. They clapped and wailed and sang along drunkenly with the holy songs and fucked like rabbits. For a week, no one was allowed to turn down a sexual advance. For Vi, it turned into a long week. It was one time in her life that she’d felt justified in complaining about being beautiful. She’d taken to wearing baggy clothing in the hopes she would entice fewer men.

All that service, Nysos. For what? For life? Hu’s nearing forty, and for all that he says he serves you, the only times a god’s name passes his lips is in curses.

By the time Vi came back to where the bedrolls were laid out, Uly had finished the entire bag of water. She looked like she was about to be sick.

“If you throw up on those blankets, you’ll sleep in them dirty,” Vi said.

“Kylar’s going to kill you,” Uly said. “Even if you are a girl.”

“I’m not a girl. I’m a bitch, and don’t you forget it.” Vi tossed the bag with their food at Uly, who dropped it. “Eat slow and not much, or you’ll puke and die.”

Uly took her advice and soon flopped down on her bedroll and was asleep in seconds. Vi stayed up. She was tired, achingly, grindingly tired. She only thought this much when she was exhausted. It did no good to think. It was worthless.

She busied herself making the camp invisible. It was a foggy morning. They weren’t far from the road, but they were in a small hollow. The stream came burbling down from the Silver Bear Hills with enough volume that most of the noise the horses might make would be covered, and with the cold camp they’d made, the human presence was barely notable here. She’d done her best to hide the horses behind a thicket. She squatted with her back to a tree and tried to convince her mind how tired her body was.

In the distance, she heard a clatter. It was dampened by the fog, but it could only be one thing: horses. She drew a sword and a knife, and dipped the knife into her poison sheath. She looked at Uly and considered trying to magically silence the girl, but it would expose her and she didn’t know if it would work anyway, so she just pressed her back to a tree and peered toward the sound.

Moments later, Kylar appeared, leading two horses. He passed twenty paces away. He must have been riding almost straight through, switching from horse to horse. He barely slowed as he approached the ford. Vi’s horse stomped a foot and one of the horses Kylar was leading neighed.

Kylar cursed and jerked the reins. Uly rolled over as Kylar splashed through the stream. The horses climbed the other bank and clattered into the distance. Kylar never even turned his head.

Vi chuckled and lay down. She slept well.

When she woke that evening, Uly was still asleep. That was good. Vi didn’t have time to chase the girl. In her place, another kidnapper would have just bound the girl and been done with it. But the strongest ropes weren’t the kind that bound hands. Hopelessness was Vi’s weapon, not hemp. Ropes of Uly’s own devising would bind her forever.

Ropes of my own devising. I know all about that, don’t I?

She kicked Uly to wake her, but not as hard as she meant to. The girl’s salvation had been so close, and she’d never even known it.

The most valuable skill Dorian ever learned turned out to be a simple one: he figured out how to eat and drink without breaking his trance. Instead of having Solon watch him for the inevitable signs of dehydration and wake him, Dorian was able to maintain his trances for weeks.

Though he knew he appeared utterly disconnected from reality, the opposite was true. From his little room in the garrison at Screaming Winds, Dorian watched everything. The Cenarian garrison at Screaming Winds had been bypassed by Khalidor’s invasion. Most of the Khalidoran army had simply used Quorig’s Pass more than a week east. With the death of Logan’s father, Duke Regnus Gyre, the garrison was being led by a young noble named Lehros Vass. He was well-meaning, but he didn’t know what to do without a commanding officer.

Solon was giving advice that over the days sounded less like advice and more like orders. If Khalidor attacked Screaming Winds now, they would attack from the Cenarian side, so he shifted the defenses, moved the men and the supplies inside the walls. No one expected an attack, though. The truth was that Screaming Winds now protected nothing. Garoth Ursuul could let them grow old and die here, and all he would lose would be a trade route that hadn’t been used for hundreds of years.