The Adversary

Chapter Nineteen

25 Ches, the Year of the Nether Mountain Scrolls (1486 DR) The Lost Peaks

Farideh’s dreams were a soup of night and fear, barely formed shapes rising out of the thick darkness and smothering her with pain and anger and terror. They were endless-I’ll never wake, she thought, I have never woken. The feeling of being watched from every angle, the wrongness hiding where she couldn’t see it. . When she finally did open her eyes, her thoughts wouldn’t accept it. She lay still, not daring to move for fear of what would bleed out of the dark next.

Then she felt the mat beneath her, the dirt below that. Her eyes adjusted to the shuttered lanternlight warming up the small, earthen-walled room, and picked out the shape of a man sitting against the wall.

“Lorcan?” His name hurt to speak, her throat was so parched.

The man stiffened. “No,” Dahl said, and Farideh was fairly certain if she weren’t so wrung out, she would have died of embarrassment. Dahl opened the lantern a little more, illuminating his face, and all the walls of the cellar she was lying in. She crawled over next to him, leaning against the wall. He handed her a waterskin, and he could have been Asmodeus himself, and Farideh would have been glad for him in that moment.

“You seem fair enough,” he said as she gulped the stale water. He fiddled with a little metal flask as he spoke.

“Depends on what’s fair,” she said. Her head was pounding and her stomach unsettled, and she felt feverish. “Did I throw up on you again?”

“Again?”

Farideh felt her cheeks flush. Of course he didn’t remember, why would he? “At the revel,” she reminded him. “I was sick up your arm.”

He looked embarrassed at that. “Oh. No. You. . kept it to the gutters every time.” He chuckled softly, nervously, eyes on the flask. “I hope it’s not a recurring thing with you and I. Shady bastards putting things in your drinks.”

“Once more and we’ll have to part for good.” Farideh took another long drink of the water, dimly recalling heaving over-sweet and burning liquor onto the frozen ground several times. “Thank you,” she said. “For getting me down here. And for coming in after us. I suppose I did need saving. This once.”

He smiled. “I think that one should count double.”

“Well good,” she said, smiling herself. “You don’t have so many to make up for then.”

Dahl snorted. “Your count’s off. The shadar-kai, the arcanist-”

“The arcanist was. .” She hunted for the right word. “Mutual.”

“The watercourse,” Dahl said pointedly.

“The erinyes,” she returned. “The Zhentarim.”

“At the revel?” he said. “Where I was-” He stopped and turned from her, looking down at the flask again. Farideh could almost hear him thinking, Where I was saving you, because I’ d led you into danger.

“The revel is a draw,” she said lightly. “Mutual again.”

Dahl was silent a long moment, still staring at the flask. “I wasn’t in your visions.”

Farideh had no sense of how she ought to reply to that. “No,” she said finally. “Should you have been?”

“You were in mine.”

Farideh’s felt the muscles at the small of her back tighten, her tail trying to twitch with nerves. Things had been so easy a moment ago-was he really going to criticize her for leaving him out of visions she had no control over?

“I’ll try harder next time,” she said a little tartly.

“Gods, that’s not what I meant,” Dahl said. “I just. .” He hesitated a moment, staring at the lantern. “I haven’t been all that fair to you over the years. You said something once that got under my skin, made me think I knew how to fix. .” He trailed off again. “I thought maybe I could undo my fall.”

“Oh,” Farideh said when he had been silent another interminable moment. “Did it work out?”

“Do I look like a paladin?” Dahl asked. “It wasn’t so. But so many things happened, made me think you’d said it to vex me or to help me or to doom me to searching for the wrong thing. I thought,” he said with a bitter laugh, “that you might have literally been sent by Oghma in a more desperate moment.”

Farideh thought of the vision of Dahl in Proskur, of the strange man with a voice like a prayer. She thought of the sight of Dahl’s soul.

“And all that time,” he went on, “I realize now, I made you into this. . symbol of my fall. This symbol of the restoration I couldn’t stlarning find.” He dragged his hands through his hair. “And frankly, seeing your memories-even if Tharra twisted them-made it perfectly clear. . I’ve made all that up. I was no one to you. You weren’t an angel. You weren’t a devil. You weren’t an enemy or a source of answers. You were just some girl I knew once.” He looked at her again, his gray eyes faintly bloodshot. “I’m sorry for that, even if it didn’t make a damned bit of difference to you at the time. I think I might have been a scorchkettle the last few days because of it.”

Farideh looked down at the waterskin in her lap. It was so uncharacteristic of the Dahl she remembered that she couldn’t help but feel she was suddenly sitting in the dark with an absolute stranger.

“I haven’t been all that gentle with you either.” She wanted to ask what he’d seen of her, what the visions had shown him. What was important enough between them to answer the sort of question Oota and Tharra would have asked. “Please don’t tell me you’ve been sitting down here waiting to tell me that instead of planning.”

“No,” Dahl said. “I didn’t drink as much as you did, but I’ve had my own hangover to sleep off.” He rubbed his forehead. “And I didn’t want you to wake up alone in a hole in the ground, so I stayed. So what did you find?”

Farideh shut her eyes and leaned her head as far back against the wall as her horns would allow. “It’s not good.”

She told him about the other camps, about the tower and the wall. About the carnage it had taken to bring the tower down in the vision. “And there’s another complication,” she said, not wanting to say it, but not daring to leave it out, “the devil I mentioned? Sairché? She’s not the only one involved.”

“Lorcan?” Dahl said dryly.

That burning kiss momentarily rose up in her thoughts. . chased by the odd moment pressed against the bars of the cage with Dahl. She pulled her knees a little closer. Better to never bring that up.

“I mean,” she said firmly, “a devil set against us. Gods, it’s complicated. It’s like they’re playing a game. Lorcan’s sister and this other devil. They were supposed to make this camp and gather the powers of the Chosen for Asmodeus. Only they don’t want to succeed, but they don’t want to fail either.” She shook her head. “The other devil has an agent in the camp. Whoever that is, they have the means to make the gathering happen-we need to find them and stop them before they manage.” And do it in such a fashion that the other devil was blamed, not Lorcan, she thought.

“Gods’ books,” Dahl swore. “Do you have any idea of who the agent might be?”

“None,” Farideh said. “Apparently the other devil’s been coy. But they’re almost certainly among the prisoners. They wouldn’t be drawing a lot of attention to themselves. They’re probably quiet, not trying to stir things up. If you’ve told people about our plans to escape, they might have stopped them.”

Dahl’s expression hardened. “Tharra.”

Farideh’s memories of the previous night cleared. “Oh gods. She’s a Harper though.”

“She says she is,” Dahl said. He shook his head. “I never checked. I never even thought-” He broke off with another curse and turned the flask in his hands once more. “We need to talk to her. Before Oota decides to make an example.”

“Tell me what you’ve planned while we walk.” Farideh stood and her stomach threatened to invert itself again. She leaned against the packed earth wall. Dahl stood as well, frowning.

“If you need longer-”

“We don’t have longer,” Farideh reminded him. “Tharra’s devil is going to tell her any day now to carry out the gathering-if he doesn’t try to sabotage us first. Rhand only expects me to be gone three days. We need to move and a sour stomach doesn’t change that.”

Dahl’s expression was grim, but at least he didn’t insist on holding her up as she shouldered her bag and pulled her cloak on once more. He rolled the flask between his hands.

“Will you do something for me?” he blurted. He thrust the flask at her. “Take it? I can’t. .” He looked away. “I can’t quite bring myself to throw it out. But I know better than to drink it. Not now.”

“What is it?” Farideh started to open the flask, but Dahl clasped a hand over hers.

“Don’t,” he said. “It’s the shadar-kai drink, the one they use in the wizard’s finest. I took it on the way out of the fortress.”

Farideh looked at him, puzzled, and he scowled under her scrutiny.

“I haven’t drunk it,” he said tersely. “I’m. . just about fifty ales dry at this point, and I would really like something to dull this edge, and this is just about the only thing I’ve found. But we all know what it does on the way down.”

“And you can’t pour it out?” she asked.

Dahl looked away. “Will you just take it away? Please.”

She tucked the flask into her pocket. She’d pour it out later, away from Dahl. “Tell me what you’ve planned,” she said again.

They slipped through the dark tunnels and up pounded dirt stairs, while he numbered their assets-the weapons they’d stolen, the Chosen they’d retained. The potential aid of the enclave of elves on the farther end of the camp. “You break the cages on their fingers, they might just kiss you on the mouth,” he said.

Farideh flushed deeply. “I’ll settle for having the assistance of more wizards. It’s not going to be easy getting the tower down.”

“Right,” Dahl said, nodding at a male dwarf who stood at the base of the stairs, and handing him the lantern. “Any news?”

“Nothing that new,” the dwarf said. “Last I heard, they got Tharra locked up. Oota’s still out. You got a damned garden of elves up there waiting for yon tiefling’s blessings, and-” He broke off and pointed his sword back the way they’d come. “Hold, drow.”

Farideh looked back over her shoulder and startled at the ebon-skinned man standing not a foot and a half behind her. He grinned at her. “Well met. I see the Harper’s as good as his goals.”

Something seemed to press on Farideh’s thoughts, something small and alien and serious, that made her pulse speed. The drow tilted his head at her, still smiling.

“Knock it off, Phalar,” Dahl snapped. “What do you want?”

“It sounds like you’ve got quite the little conspiracy going on,” Phalar said. “I’m assuming you’re planning to ask for my assistance at some point?”

“Not if I can help it,” Dahl said.

Phalar clucked his tongue. “You wound me, cahalil. After all we’ve been through?”

“You shoved me through a roof!”

“And you told Oota I’d given you up to the guards,” Phalar pointed out. “Well done.”

Farideh squinted at the drow and focused on the thread of power that seemed to wind up her spine and clasp her brain. The lights flared into being-purple and silver and threads of deepest night, twining together to form a sinuous rune that seemed to slip in and out of the light. “Chosen,” she said. She looked back at Dahl-and swiftly set her eyes instead on the dwarf, whose god’s mark shimmered in shades of silver and steel gray. “Is that what these rooms are for?” she asked. “To hide Chosen.”

“Aye,” the dwarf said. “Anybody too obvious.” He glared past her at Phalar. “Or too dangerous. Tharra’s idea,” he added grimly.

She let the lights fade and looked back, past Phalar and down the long, dark corridor, wondering what trick was caught up in the underground rooms. Would they collapse and consume the Chosen? Were there portals to the Hells nestled in the rooms? Or would they just mean that the prisoners were nowhere to be found when the gathering went off-would this flaw of the camp be laid on Sairché’s lap? “How many are there down here?”

“Right now?” the dwarf asked. “A score, maybe. A fair number went up to see what Oota’s about. Those as can pass,” he amended.

“And how many can it hold?”

The dwarf waggled a hand. “Eh-few hundred if they pack in tight.”

Not the whole camp, Farideh thought. So whatever Tharra’s plans were, they couldn’t take everyone. “Can you get those twenty somewhere else on short notice?” Farideh asked. “We need to make sure of something.”

“Most of ’em,” the dwarf said. “Not the drow.”

“If you want my help,” Phalar said, “it will cost.”

“Never doubted it,” Dahl said. “Go back to your room.” He grabbed Farideh’s hand again and started up the stairs. They were nearly to the door when she managed to yank her hand back.

“What are you doing?” she demanded.

He looked down at his own hand and cursed. “Sorry. It’s. . His powers get to me. I didn’t mean anything.” He closed his hands into fists, then pushed through the door, out into the low light of late afternoon.

There were, in fact, a great many spellcasters waiting for Farideh to return and grant them the same assistance she had given Armas. The half-elf sat off to the side of the crowded court, one arm around the long-legged Turami boy. Even at a distance, Farideh could see the tension that claimed the boy’s frame when she walked in with Dahl.

“We talk to Tharra first,” Dahl said, and she followed him past the spellcasters, and toward the rear of the space where the two big guards from the night before stood before a door hung in the space between two buildings.

“Oota’s not handling the aftereffects well,” the human man admitted. “She’s been up once to question her, but had to lie back down again.”

“Give me a chance?” Dahl asked.

The big man reached back and pulled the door open. “No secrets, Harper,” he warned.

Tharra sat alone, her arms bound behind her back, her face drawn and puffy. She met Farideh’s eyes as she entered. “I’ve got nothing more to say.”

Dahl reached down and pulled a pin from the inside of her jacket, a round shield the size of a gold coin. “Were you ever a Harper?”

Tharra sighed, as if Dahl were asking all the wrong questions. “Yes. I’d say I still am, but I’m bound to hear you cite the code and call me a traitor, so why bother?”

“We can still set things right,” Farideh said.

“Can we now? And how is that?” Tharra said. “Ask your brightbird-no clemency for Harpers, no matter the circumstances, when treachery comes up.”

Farideh glanced at Dahl, at the cold anger etched on his features. “I’m glad,” he said, “that I was no fledgling of yours. There’s no clemency because the choices are clear.”

Panic raced up Farideh’s core-he didn’t mean her, but he might as well have. And choices could get very murky, very quickly when devils got involved. She pulled him aside, back toward the door.

“Can you leave us alone?” Farideh asked. Dahl gave her a worried look. She rubbed her brand through the fabric of her sleeve. “You don’t want me to peer at your soul,” she said lightly, “I don’t want to discuss my. . entanglements in front of you.” She looked down at Tharra. “I doubt she does either.”

Dahl stared at her a moment, searching her face. “No secrets,” he warned.

“None that matter,” she clarified. Then added, “I’m not baring my soul or hers, because you don’t trust me to know what’s important and what’s not.” And she wasn’t telling him about being the Chosen of Asmodeus, unless it meant life or death.

He studied her a moment more. “Fine,” he said. “Remember I’m on your side though. She isn’t.” With a quick glance at Tharra, he turned and left the little room.

Tharra looked up at Farideh, warily, as she approached. “You might have figured me out,” she said. “But I’m not like you.”

“Aren’t you?” Farideh asked. “I’m here because I accepted a deal to save two of the dearest people in the world to me, and the price was far more than I expected. What happened to you?”

Tharra’s gaze flicked over Farideh once more. “Fine. We’re all unlucky ones.” She fell into a silence, her eyes shining. “It wasn’t supposed to be this way,” she said after a moment. “I was figuring out a way to make it turn right. I’m not a monster.”

Farideh’s heart ached at her own words coming out of another.

“I always assumed,” Farideh said gently, “that people ended up indebted to the Hells because they sought it out. But they come to you and there are no strings on their lures.”

Tharra laughed once. “Until there are. They like those rumors, I think. Makes it seem like you can’t be caught if you’re clever.”

Farideh settled herself beside the other woman on the cold ground. “Did he tell you what’s happening? Magros?”

Tharra’s lip curled. “As little as he could, of course. Just what I was supposed to do, but never why. He said there was another devil, another player. You.”

“The both of them together were supposed to use this camp to collect Chosen for Asmodeus-to make Shar’s followers collect them, really,” Farideh said. “But Magros and Sairché are also under conflicting orders-they need to make the plan fall apart and lay the blame on the other one, so that Asmodeus doesn’t get what he wants and the other archdevil gets faulted.”

“So you want me to break my agreement?” Tharra asked. “Switch sides and lose my soul.”

“No,” Farideh said. “I want both of us to outsmart these karshoji fiends and find a way to save these people. What were you supposed to do? What were the powers they gave you-you made me want to agree with things.”

Tharra shook her head. “That was the pin. Magros enspelled it, so I could pass for a Chosen and do my job. Keep everyone in line. Keep them calm. Keep as many as I could out of the wizard’s laboratories. That was easier than you’d think until you came along. And then-” Her eyes flooded. “He gave me a ritual-a scroll and components. I knew it would be bad. He told me as much, without saying it. ‘Make sure you dig yourself a hidey-hole and make enough time to get down to it.’ You don’t say that about anything subtle.”

“He never said what it would do?”

“The agreement did. ‘Gather the Chosen,’ as you said. He means to kill them, maybe all of us.” Tears started falling. “But I owed him.”

“How did he catch you?”

Tharra wiped her face, hesitating. “Seven years ago, a warm Eleint night, a fellow came up to me, out of nowhere. Said there were two folks being held by cultists for a sacrifice near to the village we were standing in, and they’d be dead by morning. Gave me a single clue-‘cowslips’-and vanished. I’d just been given a pin of my own and was looking for my own troubles to right. I knew the meadow he meant, the hollow hill-so I headed in and played the hero. Magros found me the next night-he didn’t bother hiding his horns that time. Thanked me for the assistance-those cultists worshiped someone he didn’t want gaining any power, and wasn’t it nice how we could help each other? I asked why he didn’t just tell me, and he smiled. ‘Where’s the fun in that?’ “So that’s how we were for years after. He’d turn up, give me a clue, and I’d save some innocents and end some evils. I’m sure someone better than I would say that helping Magros was tilting the balance-weakening his enemies only meant he got stronger-but I saved a lot of people. I got to be the hero.

“And then, the better part of a year ago, Magros came to me and said there was a Sembian force moving through the Dales. That they were going to sack one of three farmsteads-three families I knew and loved and counted on. And this time, no clue. He would tell me which it was, for a price-my soul. I told him no, made for the nearest farm, and got them packing-down to the little ones. Out of harm’s way.

“I rode hard for the next, but there wasn’t time. Magros came and made me another offer-he’d throw off the Sembians, force them from their path and save my friends. But I’d have to do something for him. I’d have to run his half of this camp scheme. I’d have to trigger the gathering ritual. And if I didn’t, my soul would be his. I thought I could handle it. I thought it was fine. And then it wasn’t. The only thing I could do was agree to this awful deal.”

“But you saved those people,” Farideh said.

“Those, yes. But Magros turned the army into the path of the ones I sent fleeing. Because I’d said no the first time.” Tharra looked up. “I wouldn’t have gathered the children, I swear. I made sure I never promised to catch everyone. I read that agreement, every word.” She chuckled through her tears. “Made that devil spitting mad. And in the end, it didn’t matter.”

“It matters,” Farideh said. “If you don’t break your agreement, you keep your soul. We can make this turn out-”

“That ritual has to go off,” Tharra said. “Even if Oota let me out of here to do that. . People are going to die. Will you tell me that you’ll let that happen?”

Farideh squinted at Tharra. “Where’s the ritual now?”

Tharra shrugged awkwardly. “The scroll’s buried under my bed. The components are hidden in the thatching. Rotate a poison or two out of them and keep it on me, for safety.”

“That’s where you got the hamadryad’s ash,” Farideh said. “Have you got any more?”

“What’s left is in a pouch in my sleeve,” she said. She met Farideh’s gaze as the warlock fished the pouch out. “What are you going to do now?”

“See if these are secrets Dahl can use,” she said. She bit her lip, not wanting to ask, but knowing she had to. “You read your agreement, and you agreed anyway?”

Tharra lifted her head. “In the moment, there were no other options.”

Farideh left the former Harper in the makeshift cell, not sure whether she was more culpable than Tharra or less, or if it mattered in the end. A soul was a soul, after all, however it landed in Asmodeus’s basket.

She found Dahl just beyond the dais, talking to a haggard-looking Oota. “What did she say?” Dahl asked. Farideh told him about the ritual, about the components hidden in Tharra’s hut.

Dahl frowned. “That’s strange. Destructive magic doesn’t make for very stable rituals.”

“Well, you can tell what it is if you read it, so that’s your task. The devil also told her to dig herself a hidey-hole and get there quick. She was pretty sure that meant the spell wouldn’t penetrate the ground. That’s why she was encouraging the shelter rooms-she was hoping she could save at least some people.” Farideh turned to Oota. “That still might be our best bet. We have to destroy the tower to break the wall. Either the ritual will do it for us, or the ritual will kill the guards and Rhand, and we’ll have a chance to take the tower down ourselves, without being attacked all the while.”

Oota frowned. “You want to carry out this devil’s plans?”

“We need to find a way to destroy the tower,” Dahl said. “That’s the only way we know of to shut the wall’s magic off. This ritual might be the simplest way to carry that out.”

The half-orc didn’t seem convinced. “The shelter rooms only hold a hundred or so.”

“We have to make them bigger,” Farideh said. “Maybe deeper. How many do you have who can move earth?”

“Torden,” Oota said. “A few of the dwarves might come out of the middle ground for this. Maybe others-but we’d have to free the captured ones to get a decent count.”

“Start with who we have out here,” Farideh said. “We need to break in to rescue the rest-even if they can’t dig, they won’t be safe if the tower collapses-but the very breath we do, Rhand’s going to know something’s happening. Then we’re all in danger.”

“Tonight,” Dahl promised. “As soon as it’s dark enough to get Phalar’s help.”

There was a commotion near the doors, and the crowd of caged spellcasters stood aside for a very regal-looking sun elf in rags just as tattered as the rest of them. “We come to parley,” he said in thickly accented Common. He held out his hands. “And to let you prove, tiefling, that you are what the Harper says.”

Oota stiffened and turned to face the elf with her cunning smile. “Well met, Saer Cereon,” she said. “And welcome to my court.”

“Please,” the elf said. “The cages first. Then we talk.”

Farideh drew up the soul lights. Greens and golds and umbers dappled the sun elf, but nothing shaped into the strange glyphs that marked the prize of a faraway god. “You aren’t Chosen,” she observed. The elf tilted his head.

“Will I become so?”

She shook her head. There was no rune, not even disguised in the light and shade of his soul. “I don’t think so.”

“A relief,” Cereon said. “Honoring the gods is difficulty enough. Pleasing a particular in times of trouble, this one wouldn’t wish it.” He held his hands higher. “Can you? Or was that not so?”

Farideh raised her palm. “Assulam.” The cages shattered into dust and Cereon flexed his long hands with a curious smile. “Many thanks, tiefling.” He looked to Oota and inclined his head the barest amount. “Now, we must see how to lay down old anger and aid our people.”

Oota raised an eyebrow and gestured to the dais. “My home is yours, then, eladrin.” Cereon gave her a cold look, but walked ahead.

Farideh looked back at Oota and spied the crimson and green swirl of lights that overtook her, the traces of gold. The lack, again, of any sort of rune. “Are none of their leaders actually Chosen?” she asked Dahl quietly, keeping her eyes off of him.

“Oota is. They call her Obould’s Shieldmaiden. .” Dahl trailed off. “Are you saying she’s not?”

Farideh looked again, but no-there was nothing there. “Nothing I can see.” She let the powers recede before she turned to Dahl, who was goggling at Oota’s back. “Maybe she can hide them?”

“Maybe she’s just good at what she does,” Dahl said. “Maybe she doesn’t need a god to aid her.” He shook his head. “Don’t tell anyone, all right? I think a fair number of them are fine following a half-orc when they think they have no choice. We have plenty of chaos as it is.”

“Someone’s been this way,” Brin said, examining the brush on the side of the path. A broken fringe of dried fern fronds lay against his palm. “Might be deer,” Havilar said. “Or an owlbear woken up early?”

“It’s too wide a path. This is people, stomping along the trail. Too wide to stick to it.”

Still could be deer, Havilar thought, but didn’t say. “Maybe it’s the Harpers?”

He shook his head. “Could be.” He looked up at her. “Or maybe it’s from the camp.”

Havilar looked up the slope of the mountain, into the thick trees. It might only go up another dozen feet. It might be thousands, right up high enough for the sun to trip over. “I think we ought to start climbing. We’re never going to get there winding around like this. Especially not before something bad happens.”

“It’s not safe,” Brin said, standing and dusting off his breeches. “We haven’t got the tools to climb.”

“We’ll have to eventually.”

“We’ll wait for Lorcan,” Brin said. “If it gets too steep, he can fly us.”

“How about,” Havilar tried again, “we climb until we can’t and then we wait for Lorcan. Otherwise we’re going to be exhausted by the time we even get there.”

“Havi,” he said sternly, “you need to trust-”

“How about you trust me?” Havilar interrupted, her cheeks burning. “I get it-I’m the fool for storming into Farideh’s room without knowing what was in there. But I do know something about tracking and traveling in the woods.” She looked up the mountain’s slope. “Whatever Mehen taught you, he taught me first.”

Brin stood, looking as if he’d been caught between steps, as if the core of him hung off-balance. “I know,” he said.

“Then act like it,” Havilar replied. She started up the slope without him.

Farideh was right, she thought. Whatever hopes she had that she might take back what Farideh’s deal had stolen from her, they were shriveling into nothing. Her glaive might as well be a hoe for all the skill she had wielding it. She couldn’t stop having nightmares that splintered her sleep into spans so short she might as well have been blinking. And Brin thought she was a stupid little girl-a millstone, a nuisance.

She heard him start up the steep path behind her, but she didn’t dare look back.

“I don’t. .” he started. He fell silent for a moment. “I don’t think you were a fool for going into Farideh’s room that night. I just. . I just wish you hadn’t. Or maybe that you’d waited for me.”

Havilar hauled herself over a short wall of rock, up to another plateau. “Then you would have been trapped in the Hells too.”

Brin gave a short, bitter laugh. “Do you think I haven’t been?”

“I think the court of Suzail is a far cry from the Hells.”

“It’s not as far as you think.”

Havilar looked back at him. “Are there devils and lava fields and things?”

“No, but there are assassins and stupid rules and noblewomen who spend their days trying to trick you into marriage so they can be queen, even though that’s not an option.”

Havilar flushed. “Armies of princesses,” she said, ignoring the twist in her stomach. “Got it.” She scrambled up the next bit of slope, crushing moss and sending little stones tumbling down.

“Ye gods,” she heard Brin sigh behind her. “I’m not bragging.”

“Didn’t think you were,” Havilar said, her eyes on her hands and her face on fire.

“Havi,” he called. “Havi, stlarn it, wait!”

She kept climbing, up over another rock wall slick with melt and moss. When she hauled herself up onto the wide ledge beyond, her throat felt as if it would close around her panting breath. You knew this would happen, she thought. Why wouldn’t it? You’re no one.

Brin’s hand grasped the edge of the rock. “Help me up?” he asked. Reluctantly, she grasped his hand, pulling him up the cliff. For a moment, they stood so close, Havilar fancied she could taste the grassy smell of waybread on his breath. She stepped backward. He held onto her hand.

“I know you don’t want to talk about this,” Brin said. “But we’re going to have to. Please-whatever you’re going to say, I’ve imagined it, I promise.” He looked down at her hand in his. “It’s not armies. It’s not bragging. It’s not even pleasant. I could quite frankly be a sparring dummy in fancy clothes, and I’d be just as much of an interest to them. There’s one-this noblewoman-who has actually taken to telling people we have a secret understanding, because once-once mind you-I walked with her. I said four words altogether, and she’s well convinced we’re in love. But you-”

“Have you told her to heave off?” Havilar interrupted, taking her hand back. She walked across the rocky ledge, considering the slope above. It was gentler, and the trees were thinner. She could see, high above between the trees, the edge of the mountain’s peak.

“I’ve been told not to,” Brin said bitterly. “She ought to know, so no need to make a scene.” He turned back the way they came, and Havilar followed his gaze out over the thick forest, the setting sun reflecting off low clouds and staining the sky pink and crimson.

“This must be where he meant,” Brin said. “Or at least, it’s a good spot to make camp. Do you want-”

“You should just say you’re not in love with her,” Havilar said. “That’s not something it’s fair to sit on.”

“I know that.”

“You shouldn’t leave her wondering.”

Brin stared at her for an uncomfortable moment. “Are we talking about Arietta?”

Havilar’s cheeks burned and she turned toward the slope again. “Let’s just make the fire.”

He shook his head, still staring. “Havi, you are killing me-”

A shadow crossed the sun, more than a cloud. Wrong, out of place-old instinct made Havilar leap back, out of reach, under the tree branches. Yank her glaive free of its harness and get it between her and whatever shouldn’t be there. Whatever was making the wind shift as it dived.

“Brin! Duck!” she shouted. At the same moment, a ring of teeth flashed across her field of view, a lamprey with a mouth made for sucking the lifeblood out of dragons. Havilar jumped toward it and slashed with the glaive, catching the fine membrane of its wings. She shoved upward, the skin breaking with a pop that shook her weapon. The monster screeched.

Brin had hit the ground flat and rolled back to his feet as the creature, hissing and spitting, swung its eyeless head toward Havilar. Brin shouted her name, but Havilar only had eyes for the monster.

The wing, the wound-she hit it again, tearing the hole larger, knocking the beast to the ground. The mouth-catch it on the blade, the heavy shaft, twist the head down. Black blood poured out through that ring of teeth. Its whole wing slapped her, hard enough to shake her focus a moment. The mouth flexed, grasping at the space near her.

It screamed. Brin’s sword pinned the narrow point of its triangular body to the ground. The creature lashed and squalled, still trying to find Havilar even as it struggled to pull itself free. Its wing slapped Brin and knocked him off his feet.

Havilar brought the end of her glaive up under its head, driving it up, ready for her next strike to plunge up into its throat. It rolled and slammed her into the rocky ground, driving the air out of her and sending a lightning bolt of pain through her ribs.

Brin cursed a steady stream. Havilar gasped, as the creature loomed over her, mouth grasping toward her. But even as it descended, Havilar pulled her weapon up, tearing into the soft underside of the creature and spraying her with blood and slippery viscera. It jerked back, as if to escape, rolling onto its wounded wing. Havilar swept the glaive toward it, across its belly, spilling more blood out on the frozen ground. The thing screamed and flopped like a fish in the bottom of a boat, and died.

The woods were silent but for the sound of Brin and Havilar’s panting breaths.

Havilar eased herself up onto her feet, surveying the monster-well and truly dead. Well and truly dead by her hand. “Gods,” she said. “Gods! That was fantastic!” She thrust her glaive skyward. “Ha! — oof!”

Brin caught her around the middle and squeezed her tight enough that her ribs spasmed. “Never, never do that again!” he shouted. “Watching Gods-you could have been hurt!”

“What? Why?”

“You’re not invincible!”

Havilar didn’t want to push him away, but that was too much. “I killed it. I’m invincible enough for a flying lamprey monster.”

“Veserab,” Brin said. He shook his head. “Don’t. Please. I can’t just stand there and. . I lost you once already, I can’t do it again.”

Havilar felt her face grow hot, unsure of what to say-it was more, so much more, than he’d uttered the entire trip, but none of it was right. “I’m fine,” she said, and tentatively brushed a chunk of veserab off his shoulder. “I know you’re thinking-”

“You don’t know, all right?” he said fiercely. “You don’t know what it’s like. You had your share of horrors, but you didn’t get this one-you didn’t have to face the fact that I was gone and you couldn’t get me back. Maybe you would have dealt with it better, or been braver, or got to a place where you didn’t care, but I didn’t. And if you’re going to start barreling around, throwing yourself into the clutches of monsters. .” He shook his head again, as if he were trying to shake away the sudden emotion that grabbed at his voice. “You can’t ask me to just duck.”

“Well,” Havilar said, “you didn’t just duck. You pinned the tail-that was really quick and clever.”

Brin gave her half a smile. “You hardly needed it, I suppose.”

“I needed it,” Havilar admitted. “But you needed me too.” She smiled-and she felt a little more like herself again. “And I killed it.”

He looked over the creature’s corpse. “We must be near. Only Shadovar ride them. Unless there’s some Shadowfell portal around here, it must belong to the Netherese camp.” He turned to Havilar again. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Wonderful,” she said, unable to suppress her grin. “Except for the rib.”

“Broken?”

She shook her head. “Maybe.” She stretched up and winced as the twang of pain hit her again. “Or just sprained.”

“Bad enough.”

She shut her eyes and smiled. “It was worth it.”

Brin shook his head. “Here.” He set his hands around her battered ribs, one just under her breast and the other in the middle of her back. He murmured the prayer to Torm, but Havilar didn’t hear a word of it. When the sound of a whetstone ringing came and the injury faded, there was still only the feeling of Brin’s hands encircling her. He wouldn’t look at her. But then, he didn’t let her go.

You killed it, she thought. You took the glaive back.

You’re out of excuses.

“Brin, I love you,” she said, feeling as torn open as the veserab. There was no hiding the declaration, no smothering it anymore with “wait until” and “not yet.” It wasn’t something you sat on, after all. “I love you,” she said again. “Still. And that’s. . Maybe that’s not all right, maybe you have all those princesses, and maybe you don’t want me. But you should know. I love you.”

He didn’t say a word, for so long. But he didn’t let her go either.

“There is not a thing in my life,” he finally said, “that I regret like I do not telling you how much I loved you then. I was scared, and I was stupid, and if I’d known she was going to take you from me. .” He swallowed hard. “I loved you, Havi. I should have said it.” He pulled her nearer. “I love you still.”

He kissed her and kissed her and kissed her. And it didn’t matter that her hands were still clumsy or that they were both covered in gore or that the ground was cold and hard: he still loved her.