The only trouble was, he wasn’t where he “should” have been, and he was irrevocably bonded to a White Demon.

He wasn’t in Karse. These people were not his people; their gods were not his God. All right, it wasn’t a White Demon, it was a Companion, but Kantor was still keeping out of his sight, because he still got a reflexive chill whenever he saw the creature unexpectedly. And yet—

And yet—

If Kantor wasn’t the best friend he had never had before, he was certainly the next thing to it. Uncanny, that was—the way they fit together. It was not unnerving, but that was only because Kantor’s personality seemed to fit into his without a single rough edge. Strange, yet completely familiar, and the longer that this day had gone, the less possible it seemed that he could ever properly live without the Companion’s presence in the back of his mind.

He paused, staring blindly out the window. Full dark it was out there, and as a consequence, what he saw was himself, outlined by the fire, reflected in the glass. Outlined in fire—well, that was appropriate. In a sense, he had gone from one fire into another…

As for the life he’d been offered—well. It was all there, virtually everything he could have asked for. Even the fact that he was not being asked to fight anymore. At least, not for the moment, though that could change, and he was too wise in the ways of conflict not to know that.

He hated fighting. Oh, not the physical exercise, that he loved; he loved the feel of a solid hit, the surety of a stroke, the way that his body knew what to do without his head having to tell it. Perhaps it would be better to say that he hated killing, despised hurting people. Even when he was ridding the world of bastards that pillaged and raped helpless villagers left without even the means to defend themselves, he hated it. Intellectually speaking, there had to be a better way of dealing with those mad, two-legged dogs than killing them.

Practically speaking, there wasn’t, of course, not really. It was kill them or face the consequences of not killing them, and know that they would go on doing what they had been at before you caught them—knowing that even if you locked them up, eventually they’d either get loose or kill themselves and probably others trying to escape. Then the deaths of people who absolutely did not deserve it were on your head. So he had long ago resigned himself to that fact, and concentrated on ridding the world of murderers as expediently, dispassionately, and humanely as possible.

But there was a part of him that had uncomfortable questions about that, questions he had tried not to think about until this moment. Brigands were not the only creatures that preyed on his people…