‘When he cut me from Arathan, he saved both of us. I know you can’t see it that way. Or you won’t. You want to hurt Draconus, just as you hurt Olar Ethil. It’s just the same, and it’s all down to your need to strike out, to make someone else feel the pain you’re feeling. My wars are over with, Rint.’

‘Mine are not!’

She nodded. ‘I see that.’

‘I expected you to stand with me, Feren.’

She turned on him. ‘Why? Are you so certain that you’re doing all this for me? I’m not. I don’t want it! I just want my brother back!’

Rint seemed to crumple before her eyes, and once more he sank down to the ground, covering his face with his hands.

‘Abyss take us,’ Ville said. ‘Stop this. Both of you. Rint, we will hear your arguments and we will vote on them. Feren, you are with child. No one would expect you to unsheathe your sword. Not now.’

She shook her head. Poor Ville didn’t understand, but she could not blame him for that.

‘We have far to go,’ Galak added in a soft tone. ‘And on the morrow, we shall reach the hills, and find a place for Raskan’s body. A place of gentle regard to embrace his bones. When we return to our homelands I will ride on to House Dracons and inform Captain Ivis of the location. For now, my friends, let us make camp.’

Feren looked out on the plain to the south. There was a path there, distant now and fading, that trekked westward into strange lands. There were patches of ground with soft grasses that had known the pressure of a man and a woman drawn together by unquenchable needs. The same sky that was above her now looked down on those remnants, those faint and vanishing impressions, and the wind that slid across her face, plucking at the tears on her cheeks, whipped and swirled but flowed ever southward, and sometime in the night would brush those grasses.

Life could reach far, into the past where it grasped hold of things and dragged them howling into the present. And distance could breed resentment, when all the promises of the future remained for ever beyond reach. And the child shifting in her womb, as the day died, felt like a thing lost in the wilderness, and as its faint cries reached her from no known place she knelt, eyes closed, hands over her ears.

* * *

Rint dared not look again at his sister; not to see her as she was, on her knees and broken by the words they had flung between them. He left Ville and Galak to make ready the camp, and sat staring into the northeast, trapped in his own desolation.