But if she thought about that, about a natural calamity she had no power to undo, she’d curl into a ball and weep herself into oblivion. She considered another puzzle instead.

“I wonder how it is these Olken don’t realise they’re mages?”

“But they aren’t,” Remmie said, surprised. “They have no magework. Not even glimfire.”

“They have an affinity with the land. You must have felt that, too. Doesn’t that make them mages?”

Stifling a yawn, he shook his head. “No more than a fly having wings makes it a falcon.”

And perhaps he was right. But she couldn’t shake the odd feeling that there was something important in this. Something she shouldn’t ignore.

“Go to bed, Remmie. You need sleep.”

He stood, laboriously. Stared down at her, his brows pinched. “So do you.”

He was so thin. So unlike his Doranen self. The Olken had scrounged clothes for him, tatty roughspun and tanned hides. The trousers were too short. These Olken weren’t a tall people. His pale, bare ankles looked so vulnerable. Easy to snap. His face looked vulnerable, too. Months ago he’d hacked his hair short because, in the wilderness, long hair got in the way. A fading pink scar ran in a puckered line from the corner of his left eye down his cheek, where a Feenish warrior had caught him with the tip of his sword. And coming over the mountains he’d missed his footing and nearly plunged to his death. The fall hurt his hip, and now he walked with a limp. And his eyes… they were so sad. Crowded with the things he’d seen, and memories of the people he would never see again.

“Sleep through the day, Rem,” she said, her throat tight. “You might as well. We’ve nowhere to be.”

“I will if you will,” he retorted, and left her.

Since he’d taken his glimfire with her, she conjured her own. Then she rummaged in her satchel for the battered diary she’d kept during their flight from Dorana.

It was a rambling, disjointed thing. Odds and ends of observations as they fought their way south. A scribbling of incants and sigils that she didn’t want to forget and hadn’t been able to carry with her in books or scrolls. Old, obscure warbeast incants she’d found in papers taken from the Hall by one of its archivists. Caught alone, once, she’d used them in Manemli. Dreadful things. Dreadful. With the archivist spitted on a Trindeki spear, she’d copied the incants to the diary then burned that page without compunction. She trusted herself with destructive magework. Nobody else. On other pages she’d scribbled ideas for new incants. Not because she thought she’d have the chance to create them, but because it was one way to stop herself from going mad.