Kosar raised his eyebrows.

“Why should they?” she repeated. “They know nothing of Rafe.”

“I know what I saw last night,” Trey said. “And I know what seeing that did to Alishia. I owe her a lot. She saved me . . .”

“You’ll put yourself in danger if you come with us,” Hope said. “There are Red Monks chasing us, do you know what a Red Monk can do? Do you have any idea what they are?” And besides, she thought, why should we share the boy with you? Why share him with anyone?

“I’ve seen worse,” the fledge miner said.

Hope scoffed, but Kosar spoke up.

“If he really has second sight with fledge, then he can help us, Hope. And if he’s willing to help, I’m more than willing to let him come along. I’m just a damn thief, I don’t know what’s going on here. We need all the help we can get.”

“Help us get caught,” Hope muttered.

Kosar stood, gently laying A’Meer’s head on a bundle of blankets. He approached Hope, wiping the Shantasi’s blood from his hands. “Where would you go?” he asked. “Which way, come daybreak? South, toward Kang Kang? Northwest to Long Marrakash, hoping that the Duke might be there, might be able to protect us from the Monks?”

“I don’t know,” Hope admitted. “But now we have him! He can protect us.”

Rafe looked back at the raised voices. He hugged his blanket closer around him and stared out at the rain once again.

“He’s more scared than all of us,” Kosar whispered. “We all know what we think we saw last night—”

“Magic!”

“That’s what we thought we saw, yes. But even Rafe is scared of that, and everything else happening around him. He may have driven the poison from A’Meer’s veins, but I don’t think he can help us yet. I think we still need to be helping him. If he has a gift, access to magic, whatever, it’s something that’s breaking him up. His parents were slaughtered before his eyes. You know that, Hope.”

“They weren’t even his real parents,” she said. She grimaced and glanced at the fledger. “Can you do it now?”

“Yes.” He reached across to his shoulder bag without letting Alishia slip from his lap. “Care to join me?” he asked.

“I think not.” Hope sat down opposite Trey and watched him draw a chunk of fledge from his bag. “I’ll just sit and watch.”

THE NAX WOULD be waiting. He would take fledge, drift out from himself and the cave, search across the hillsides and through the shallow valleys for the Red Monks . . . and he would find the Nax. Touch their minds. Discover the truth: that it was him they sought, always him.