He caught her arm then as she knelt before him. “Katsa. Sleep for a quarter of an hour. No one is near. You won’t get another chance to sleep tonight.”

She sat on her heels and looked at him. Shirtless, colorless, squinting from pain. Bruises darkening his face. He dropped her arm and sighed. “I’m dizzy,” he said. “I’m sure I look like death, Katsa, but I’m not going to bleed to death and I’m not going to die of dizziness. Sleep, for a few minutes.”

Bitterblue came forward. “He’s right,” she said. “You should sleep. I’ll take care of him.” She picked up his coat and helped him into it, moving his bandaged shoulder gently, carefully. Surely, Katsa thought, they could manage without her, for a few minutes. Surely they would all do better if she got some small sleep.

So she lay down before the fire and instructed herself to sleep for only a quarter of an hour. When she woke, Po and Bitterblue had barely moved. She felt better.

They ate quietly and fast. Po leaned back against the cave wall, eyes closed. He claimed to have little appetite, but Katsa had no sympathy. She sat before him and fed him pieces of fish until she was satisfied that he’d eaten enough.

Katsa was suffocating the fire with her boots, and Bitterblue was binding together the remaining fish, when he spoke.

“It’s good you weren’t there, Katsa,” he said. “For today I listened to Leck prattle on for hours about his love for his kidnapped daughter. About how his heart would be broken until he found her.”

Katsa went to sit before him. Bitterblue shuffled closer so that she could hear his whispered words.

“I got through the outer guard easily,” Po said. “I came within sight of him, finally, in the early afternoon. His inner guard surrounded him so closely that I couldn’t get a shot at him. I waited forever. I followed them. They never once heard me; but they never once moved away from the king.”

“He was expecting you,” Katsa said. “They were there for you.”

He nodded, then winced.

“Tell us later, Po,” Katsa said. “Rest for now.”

“It’s a short story,” he said. “I finally decided my only option was to take out one of his guards. So I shot one. But the instant he fell, of course, the king jumped for cover. I shot again, and my arrow grazed Leck’s neck, but only barely. It was a job meant for you, Katsa. You’d have hit him squarely. I couldn’t do it.”

“Well,” Katsa said. I would never have found him in the first place. And even if I had, I would never have killed him. You know that. It was a job meant for neither of us.

“After that, of course, his inner guard was after me,” Po said, “and then his outer guard, and his soldiers, too, once they’d heard the alarm. It—it was a bloodbath. I must have killed a dozen men. It was all I could do to get away, and then I rode north, to throw them off the track.” He stopped for a moment and closed his eyes, then opened them again. He squinted at Katsa. “Leck has a bowman who’s nearly as good as you, Katsa. You saw what he did to the horse.”