“I don’t understand,” Tanaros told him.

Hopping onto a thorn-branch, Fetch settled and rattled his feathers.

“And why?” he asked the raven.

One bright eye cracked open a slit, showing him his quarters in Darkhaven, customary order giving way to mess and disarray. An injured nestling. A pair of hands, strong and capable, made to grip a sword-hilt, shaping themselves to cup feather and hollow bone with an unaccustomed tenderness.

“For that?” He swallowed. “It was a whim. A small kindness.”

“Kaugh.” The raven closed both eyes and slept.

In the end, he supposed, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that they survived, step by step, day by day. But it opened a chink in his heart, that might have sealed itself like stone against the thought of love. When the somber faces of Ngurra and the Yarru-yami haunted his dreams, it gave him a tiny brand to hold the darkness at bay.

A small kindness, a confluence of compassion, had saved his life. Was that strength, or a weakness?

Tanaros could not say. If there had been compassion in his heart the day he learned Calista and Roscus had betrayed him, perhaps he would have found the strength to walk away. What brought them together? Passion? Compassion? They had lacked the strength to resist desire. And yet that thought, too, was anathema. In their hearts, they had already made a cuckold of him. Had they been stronger, he would have spent his life living an unwitting lie, and the world would be a different place.

He did not know if it would be a better one.

Nothing was simple.

“Lord General?” Another day without shade, another day’s trek. If there were a chink in the wall of his heart, it was Speros who thrust a wedge into it. Recovered from the ravages of dehydration, the Midlander had shown surprising and stubborn resilience, regaining sufficient strength to place one foot in front of the other, day after day, refusing the aid of the Gulnagel. Now he turned a sunburnt face in Tanaros’ direction, his voice wistful. “What’s the Lady of the Ellylon like?”

“Like a woman,” he said shortly. “An Ellyl woman.”

“Oh.” Speros returned his gaze to the desert floor, watching his feet trudge across the sand. It crunched rhythmically under their boots, under the taloned feet of the Gulnagel, who traded glances over their heads. “I’ve never seen an Ellyl,” he said eventually. “I just wondered …”