She took a couple of deep breaths to make sure the lump wasn’t going to return, and to steady her nerves. Then she waved back, grinning down at him, as if nothing was wrong.

The faint frown left his brow and he grinned in return.

We’ve more important things to worry about, she told herself as she slipped down the tree as carefully as she had climbed it. Right up at the top is staying alive to reach the Border in the first place.

A rock was digging a hole in Kero’s stomach, but just now she didn’t want to move to dislodge it. “Where are they all coming from?” Eldan whispered, as they watched yet another of the Sunlord’s priestesses pause just below the entrance to their current hiding place. She pulled back the cowl of her robe, and stared up at the face of the cliff above her. It looked blank from that angle; the ledge they were lying on obscured the entrance, and Kero had seen it only because she had been up in a sturdy oak spying out the land when she’d spotted it. And it couldn’t be reached from the floor of the valley; they’d had to backtrack and come up over the ridge to get down to it.

Hopefully that meant no one would look for it. Except the priestess, like all the others, seemed to have sensed something.

From up here, they couldn’t make out her features; they could just barely distinguish her face from her blonde hair. The scarlet robe she wore was a sure sign of high rank, though—the only rank above scarlet wore gold, and there were never women in gold robes. Against the green meadow below them, she looked like some kind of exotic flower.

“I have no idea where they’re all coming from,” Kero whispered back. That was at least half a lie; at this point she was fairly sure they were tracking Need somehow. It would make sense, since neither she nor Eldan ever used unshielded Mindspeech. Since magic was forbidden, it followed that the priesthood had some way of detecting its use. And Need was created with magic; even when she wasn’t actually doing something, she must be “visible” to someone capable of detecting magic. And no doubt she could hide herself, but she had to know she was endangering her bearer, and her bearer wouldn’t know that until a priestess actually was in sight.

Kero held her breath, waiting. Surely this time the camouflage would break; they’d be spotted. This red-robe was the highest ranking priestess they’d seen yet; all the rest had been white-, blue-, or black-rank. Surely this time would mark the end.

The woman pulled her hood back up over her head, and rode off across the meadow.

Kero let out the breath she’d been holding.