“Well, I guess I’ve told you everything, right?” Rapskal was standing up again. He was looking down the hillside now to where the other keepers were walking along the shore or exploring the stony, skeletal remains of the town. Hundreds of foundations were scattered along the shore; a few standing structures remained, enough for the keepers to take shelter in by night. Leftrin had climbed up the hill and discovered the intact shepherd’s hut and insisted it was perfect for them. She tended to agree with him. It was the most privacy they had ever had. The first night, he’d built a crackling fire in the old hearth and discovered that, once he removed an old bird’s nest from it, the chimney drew as well as ever. Golden firelight had filled the single room of the cottage. They’d spread their bedding on the floor in front of it and hung a blanket where once a wooden door had swung. She’d felt, for the first time in her life, that she was truly mistress of this tiny home. The very next morning, she’d brought her journals and notes up from the barge. Now she sat on the stone doorstep of the little house and surveyed her domain. From here, she had a wide view of the sweep of the river’s bend and Leftrin’s ship. She had the vista of all of old Kelsingra to tempt and taunt her.

She called her thoughts back to the moment at hand. Her four remaining sheets of good paper rested on her battered lap desk. “You haven’t really told me anything, Rapskal.”

He took a breath that lifted his narrow shoulders. He smiled at her, his white teeth showing strangely in his red-scaled face. “Well. Here’s how it was. I was talking to Tats and he was mad at me for telling Thymara that I’d like to do to her what Jerd had taught me to do with her…Why aren’t you writing?”

“Because, well, that’s not the important part,” Alise replied and heard her Bingtown primness come to the fore as a blush heated her face.

“Well, after that, then. Then that wave hit. And I got washed away by it.”

“Yes.”