Durzo grabbed his blanket and lay down, resting his head on his saddle. “Letting someone die for you can be tough. If anyone should understand that, it’s you.”

61

. . .  get up in three seconds, I’m gonna nail you with a biscuit.” Kylar struggled to open his eyes, and the voice went on without even slowing. “One, two, three.” Kylar’s eyes shot open, and he snatched the hard biscuit out of the air with such force that it exploded into crumb shrapnel.

“Dammit,” he said, combing biscuit pieces out of his hair. “What’d you do that for?”

Durzo was grinning from ear to ear. “Fun,” he said.

Kylar scowled. There was something different about his master. His eyes seemed a little more round, his skin a little lighter, the shirt he was wearing tighter across the chest and shoulders. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“Eating breakfast,” Durzo said, chomping into another biscuit.

“I mean your face!”

“What? Pimple?” Durzo asked, patting his forehead, the word coming out “pimpuh?” around the biscuit.

“Durzo! You went to bed Ymmuri, and you woke up halfbreed.”

“Oh, that. What, you want to hear more? I talked last night more than I’ve talked in a hundred years.” Kylar thought he might not be exaggerating. “You need to learn everything at once?”

“You’re mortal now. And you’re old. You could keel over at any moment.”

“Hm, you have a point,” Durzo said. “You saddle the horses, I’ll talk.”

Kylar rolled his eyes—and began tending to the horses.

“You’ve tried illusory masks. I’ve seen your whole little scary-black-mask thing that the Sa’kagé found so impressive.”

“Thanks,” Kylar griped. It had been impressive, dammit. “Wait, when did you see that?”

“In Caernarvon.”

“You came to Caernarvon? When did you—”

“Too late to save Jarl, but early enough to save Elene. Now stop interrupting,” Durzo said. “You might have noticed there are some drawbacks to making masks of real faces, especially with disguises of people of different height from yours. I made some good masks in my time, but it was horrible work, and if someone touched you or it even started raining, the illusion would break. Then one time I died. Got a leg hacked off and bled to death. When I came back, as always, my body was whole. Look at yourself—dead six times and not a scar. How can that be? How could I regrow an arm?”

“I thought you said it was a leg,” Kylar said, throwing a saddle over Tribe’s back. For once, the brute didn’t try to bite him. “And what’s that about Elene?”