“Hold his tongue,” David said. “Try not to offend people. Be more … normal. We can’t win people over unless we’re more like them.”

“If we are like them, what do we have to offer them? Darkness doesn’t need a little less darkness. It needs light.”

“This wouldn’t have happened if Quon had been more positive, more upbeat,” David said. “If we do what we should, the King promises us health and wealth.” He pulled out of his backpack a very small book and read a few sentences from it.

“You read part of the truth, not the whole,” Shad said. “He promises us health and wealth in Charis, and sometimes he graciously gives them in Thuros. But he also promises persecution and trial and suffering—you didn’t read about those, did you? He didn’t say it would be easy to walk the road. He said it would be hard. Your king is too small, David, for your book is too small. You need all of it.”

Shad pulled a full-sized TravelGuide from his satchel and handed it to David.

“Mine is all I need,” David said, clutching his little book. He walked away, mumbling.

After dinner, I went off by myself. I stared blurry-eyed into the dark silence, held in its stony grip. I looked ahead on the red road gradually raising us from the lowlands toward the mountain, now barely visible in the moonlight pressing through the clouds.

Shad approached me cautiously, Malaiki at his side.

“There’s more that bothers you, isn’t there?” he asked. “It isn’t just about Quon, is it?”

I looked away and felt my chest tighten.

“I wanted to kill the man with the fist face. I almost did. And part of me still wants to.”

Shad nodded. “Fistface is an evil man.”

“He deserves the chasm,” I said.

“Of course he does,” Malaiki said. “And yet the King walked the tree for him just as he did for us. The book says we deserve Charis no more than he.”

“If I’d killed him, he would have gone to the abyss,” I said. “Part of me wanted him to go there. That’s what bothers me—I thought I was beyond the anger and the hate. I thought I’d really changed.”

“You have changed, Nick,” Malaiki said.

“I prayed for Quon. I believed the King would answer my prayer. He didn’t.”

“You prayed for Quon to survive,” Shad said. “So did I. We thought it best for him. The King answered that part of our prayer—he did what was best for him. It’s just that the King knew what we didn’t.”

“Quon whispered something just before he died,” I said. “Did you hear it?”

“Yes,” Shad said. “It was just one word—Home.”

I choked.