And he would have done the same to you, she thought to him. If it weren’t for your newfound ability to sense arrows as they fly toward you.

He smiled, ever so slightly. Then he squinted at Bitterblue. “You’ve begun to trust me,” he said.

“You tried to kill the king,” Bitterblue said, simply.

“All right,” Katsa said, “enough talking.”

She returned to the fire, and smothered it. They pushed Po up into the saddle again, and again she tied her charges to the horse. And in her mind, over and over, she warned Po, implored Po, to stop announcing aloud every little thing his Grace revealed to him.

IN THE LIGHT of day they moved faster, but the movement was hard on Po. He didn’t complain once about the bouncing of the horse. But his breath was short and his eyes flashed with a kind of wildness, and Katsa could recognize pain as easily as she recognized fear. She saw the pain in his face, and in the tightness of the muscles of his arms and his neck whenever she dressed his shoulder.

“Which hurts more?” she asked him in the early morning. “Your shoulder or your head?”

“My head.”

A person with an aching head shouldn’t be riding an animal whose every step reverberated like an axe to his skull; but walking was out of the question. He had no balance. He was forever dizzy and nauseated. He was forever rubbing his eyes; they bothered him. At least the bleeding of his shoulder had slowed to a dribble. And talking no longer confused him; he seemed to remember, finally, to hide his Grace from his cousin.

“We’re not moving fast enough,” he said several times that day. Katsa, too, chafed at their pace. But until his head improved, she wasn’t going to run the horse over the rocky hills.

Bitterblue was more of a help than Katsa could have hoped. She seemed to consider Po her special charge. Whenever they stopped, she helped him settle onto a rock. She brought him food and water. If Katsa stepped away for a minute to chase a rabbit, when she returned Bitterblue was cleaning Po’s shoulder and wrapping it in clean bandages. Katsa became accustomed to the sight of Po swaying above his little cousin, his hand resting on her shoulder.

By the time the sun began to set, Katsa felt the fatigue of the last few days and the last few sleepless nights. Po and Bitterblue were asleep on the horse’s back. Perhaps if Po rested now, he would be able to stand some sort of watch later and give her some few hours’ sleep. The horse, too, needed rest. They couldn’t stop for the whole night, not when they traveled at this pace. But a few hours. A few hours’ rest might be possible.

When he woke again in the moon’s pale light, he called her back to him. He helped her find a hollow in a ring of rocks that would hide the light of a fire. “We’re not moving fast enough,” he said again, and she shrugged, for there was little to be done about it. She woke Bitterblue, untied her, and slid her down from the horse. Po slid himself down, carefully.