Jared lifted a shoulder. “Kit wouldn’t bring you here if she thought you were any real danger to me or to Berip. Like I said, you and I have no bad blood. I don’t care what it is you did or didn’t do. To be quite honest with you, my life would be the same whether you were guilty or not—whether you lived or died. I don’t see the point being rude to someone like that.”

If there was an insult in his words, Anji had a hard time finding it.

“Besides,” Jared went on, “you’re tiny, you’re manacled, and one of your hands will be out of use for some time. I think I like my odds. And Kit’s.”

Anji opened her mouth, then closed it again.

“She isn’t doing it out of hate or rage,” he said, “though that might be the way it seems. She believes she has to do this, just as you believed you had to kill Rolandrian. We’re all just doing what we think is right, till the bitter end.”

“Do you give this little talk to everyone she brings out here?”

Jared laughed. “You’re the first she’s brought, actually,” he said, motioning for her to follow him back into the house. “Maybe she sees something in you she wanted the rest of us to look at.”

Jared led Anji upstairs and into the corner room where Kit lay sleeping, still but for the slight rise and fall of her chest. Anji slipped off her coat and set it on the back of the room’s only chair before turning to Jared to thank him for the food and the room.

But he was already swinging the door closed on its oiled hinges, mouthing a silent “goodnight” over the single taper he carried. The door shut with a muted click, and Anji sank onto the bed opposite Kit.

Wind rattled the latticed window, the crowd filtering into the common room below a rising confusion of shouts and laughter. A lute began to play, then a fiddle followed by a chorus of drunken voices. She liked the noise. Absolute silence had always made it difficult for her to drift off. She slipped off her trousers, her mangled shirt, and crawled in among the scratchy linens, favoring her left hand, the pain only a mild throb now. The thin mattress eased her muscles like a feather bed after so long sleeping on the ground.