Always regretted leaving him behind, that broken boy cowering in the pits of the Poison Forests, waiting to die . . . but his leg was broken, and I’d never really wanted him along anyway, just too afraid to say no, didn’t want to hurt his feelings . . . I’d saved his life after all, and he thought he owed me, wanted to repay me for saving him from those tumblers in the Widow’s Peaks . . . so he came along and I slipped and he fell too, and I never should have left him . . . said I was going for help, going to find someone to help me pull him out of there, but I knew he’d be dead by nightfall, no way a boy like that could fight off the poisonous things that live there, those birds those bats those spiders . . . left him to die, and not because I was scared and not because I couldn’t have gone back . . . simply because I didn’t want him with me anymore . . .

It came again and again, the voice of his sickly conscience, the mad mutterings of guilt, the secret shadows of rejected experience admitting culpability for things he had long ago shut away, driven down, buried deep in denial, clothed in ambiguous memory and turned into tales once heard, not created himself.

. . . should have put it back, never should have taken it . . .

“Kosar, breathe, let it come, they’ll lose interest soon.”

. . . meant so much but I never told her, and look what happened, look what happened to her!

“Oh Mage shit,” A’Meer whispered, tortured by whatever guilty secrets plagued her own mind. Her grip on Kosar never eased.

Forgot again, always forget, never found it in myself to remember just that one special day for my mother, always let it slip away and then fooled myself that look in her eyes was a calm acceptance when I apologized, not disappointment, not sadness . . .

Kosar vomited, the sickness and rot of hidden memories and mistakes flooding his mind and purging his body. A’Meer still held him, groaning and cursing, fighting whatever foul thoughts had been dredged in her own mind. He heaved again and bent double, watching vomit speckle the pine-needle carpet, a big beetle scurrying away with its back coated in his stomach juices. All his bad thoughts crowded in and buzzed him like moths to a flame, some of them battering against his skull and knocking themselves away, others remaining there to fly in again and again, reminding him of all those bad things.

The whispering began to fade away at last. It did not vanish completely—it never would—but reduced in volume until it was a hush in his ears, and then a feeling deeper down, and then nothing, not disappearing, simply becoming too quiet and deep for him to want to hear.

“Why didn’t you warn me?” he said, spitting the foul taste from his mouth.

“How could I?”