The guardsman took her arm to help her—she had no doubt that if he wanted to, he could have picked her up like a loaf of bread and carried her off, but he limited his aid to only what was necessary. They stopped at the room at the end of the long, stone corridor, and he took her weapons from the guard stationed inside and gave them to her with his own hands. As she buckled Need back on, she felt a hundred times better. The remaining pain vanished. That Healer had been good—but Need was better.

She was still numb with surprise, though, as the guardsman led her up the stairs to the wooden building above the jail cells and opened the door, for her to walk out. Rudi spoke for me—and the stableboy—and the Guild? Is this more of Need’s magic, or is it something I’ve done? And if it’s me, what on earth did I do to make them speak for me?

But that surprise was nothing to the one waiting for her outside the prison gates.

There was a crowd waiting there; a crowd wearing the silver and gray tabards she used to sport, with a device of crossed lighting-bolts on the sleeve. A crowd that cheered the moment she came stumbling out into the sunlight, squinting against the sudden glare.

“What?” she stuttered. “Wh-what?”

Someone took her arm; she turned at a flash of familiar golden hair. Shallan stood right at her elbow, grinning like a fool.

“You sure do get yourself in messes, don’t you, Captain?” she said.

Several hours later, she finally had a glimmer of the story, but only after putting together all the bits and pieces of it that had been flung at her during the long ride back to the Skybolts’ winter quarters.

And it took a good meal, a sleep from dawn to dawn, and another good meal before she was ready to try to make sense of it all.

She called a half-dozen of her old friends together in the outer room of the Captain’s quarters. That, she still had trouble with. She didn’t feel like a Captain. And no matter how often someone called her that, she kept looking over her shoulder to see who they were talking to.

She ordered hot tea all around from the orderly, feeling very uneasy about doing so, even though the one-armed twenty-year veteran who had served Lerryn seemed equally content to serve her. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight,” she said, as the others nursed their mugs in hands that looked fully as thin as hers. “When I walked, you lot kept Ardana from sending her hounds after me. Then you called a vote?”