“I went back to have another look while you were sleeping,” the Serian said. “Your voice . . . I didn't like it. It sounded like the words you spoke last night, from those pages you have. So I was pleased to leave you to your nightmares. I turned a couple of the bodies and found arrows crushed beneath them, and there was a spear hidden in undergrowth. Lots of hoofprints too. Marauders usually work on horseback.”

He looked down at himself and brushed more dust away. Some of it felt sharp, and he brought his hand close to examine it. “What's this?” he asked.

Lulah shrugged. “Must have blown in from somewhere.”

Ramus looked around, seeing only heather, grass and undergrowth spotted here and there.

“We should go,” she said. “If you're feeling up to it?”

Ramus nodded, though the pain in his forehead still made him nauseous. He fisted his hand, not sure that he had seen what he thought he'd seen.

They mounted up and Lulah rode thirty steps ahead, and when he was sure she was not looking Ramus opened his hand again. There, amongst the grit shaped like nothing, was a small gray fly. Gray, because it seemed to be made of stone. He crushed it between his fingertips and let it drift away on the breeze.

He wondered what Lulah had seen in the dust while he slept.

Chapter 11

Chapter 11

NOMI WAS DOING her best, but the memory of those parchment pages was vaguer than ever. Her parchment was scored, scratched and scribbled with crossings-out. The more she tried to cast her mind back to her meetings with Ten, the more nebulous the images became.

Worse, she knew that Ramus would be laughing if he knew what she was going through. He was a constant critic of her stubborn refusal to read. If it's written down, he would say, it's written down forever. Her argument had been that a lie written is a lie that endures. She was much more trusting of verbal storytelling, histories passed down from father to son, mother to daughter. It was far more difficult to wipe out a tale in the telling than one in the writing.

Beko had noticed her distraction and commented upon it, but she had been riding alone for most of that day. She let her horse follow the others, stared into the distance, waiting for inspiration to strike but fearing that it was actually bleeding away.

And even if I did remember, she thought—the voice small, vicious and painfully honest—what would I do with that knowledge?

That barely mattered. Her desire to recollect those pages was partly for the voyage, but mainly down to the bare fact that Ramus had stolen them from her.