When they reached the house, Beq led her upstairs to a second-floor bedroom. It clearly belonged to a young girl—there were hand-carved toys scattered across the floor, mostly swords and horses, and enthusiastic if incompetent paintings pinned to the walls—but a bedroll had already been rolled out beside the small bed, with Beq’s large pack and Maya’s smaller one sitting beside it.

“There’s no inn in town, so Kaiura offered to put us up,” Beq said in answer to Maya’s questioning look. “Her girls are sleeping in her room.”

Maya had every confidence that Kaiura had “volunteered” the lodgings as easily as she’d given up her home to Tanax’s investigation. Might as well be generous, since we have the legal authority to take what we want, not to mention enough power to reduce the town to ash. Another coal of anger, added to the already-smoldering fire. It’s not right. She and Jaedia had stayed with villagers plenty of times, of course, but they’d always paid for their beds, either in money or in chores.

“You can have the bed,” Beq went on. “Go ahead, lie down. I’ll get you some water.”

Maya nodded, suddenly feeling the weight of her exhaustion. She sat down on the bed, yawned, and blinked sleepily.

When she next opened her eyes, the sky outside was dark. The pain in her arm and leg had subsided to a dull ache. She lay in the bed, under a thin summer sheet, stripped of her boots and outer clothes. On the floor, Beq lay sprawled across her bedroll, her own sheet kicked to the side.

The moon was high, and its soft light silvered everything. Maya stared at the childish drawings on the walls without really seeing them.

I won. She glanced down at Beq and found herself smiling. We won, I suppose. I would have died if she hadn’t gotten there when she did. The memory of that moment of realization brought a twist to her stomach. But she did get there, and we beat the dhakim and rescued the children.

So why do I feel so bad?

She probed her emotions cautiously, like she was poking a rotten tooth with her tongue. Her mind replayed the fight, the first smuggler going down with a smoking wound carved across him, the second burning alive in her flames even as he blasted her. Is that it? Killing those men?

There was a twinge, but it was less than she expected. They were trying to kill me. And they were keeping children in cages. Sometimes centarchs might have to make hard choices, but this hadn’t been one of them.