Katsa added more twigs to her fire and blew on the flames, gently. She piled sticks on top of the twigs.

“You have to leave me behind,” Po said. “You’re risking Bitterblue’s safety otherwise.”

Katsa shot up to her feet, her fists angry and hard, suddenly beyond any pretense of calmness. “And I’m risking yours if I leave you. I’m not going to leave you on this mountain, to find your own food and build your own shelter and defend yourself when Leck comes along, when you . . . you can’t even walk, Po. What are you going to do, crawl away from his soldiers? Your head will feel better soon. You’ll get your balance back and we’ll move faster.”

He squinted up at her then and sighed. He looked into his hands. He turned his rings around on his fingers.

“I won’t get my balance back for some time, I think,” he said, and something strange in his voice stopped her.

“What do you mean?”

“It doesn’t matter, Katsa. Even if I woke up tomorrow completely healed, you’d have to leave me behind. We’ve only one horse. Unless you and Bitterblue ride the horse fast, you’ll be overtaken.”

“I’ll not leave you behind.”

“Katsa. This isn’t about you or me. This is about Bitterblue.”

She sat down suddenly, the strength knocked out of her legs. For it was about Bitterblue. They’d come all this way for Bitterblue, and she was Bitterblue’s only hope. She swallowed. She made her face expressionless, for the child must not know how much it hurt her to rank Bitterblue’s safety above Po’s.

And then she knew suddenly that she was going to cry. She held her breath steady and didn’t look at him. “I’d thought to get a few hours of sleep,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “Sleep for a bit, love.”

She wished that his voice was not so soft and kind. She wrapped herself in a blanket and lay beside the fire with her back to him. She commanded herself to sleep. A tear trickled over the bridge of her nose and down into her ear, but she commanded herself again.

She slept.

WHEN SHE WOKE, Bitterblue slept on the ground beside her. Po sat on a rock before the crackling fire and looked into his hands. Katsa sat with him. The meat was cooked, and she ate it gratefully, for if she ate she did not have to talk, and if she talked she knew she would cry.

“We could get another horse,” she finally managed to say. She stared at the fire, and tried not to look at the lights that glowed in his face.

“Here, at the base of the mountains, Katsa?”

All right then. There was no other horse.

“Even if we could,” he said, “it would be ages before I could ride fast enough. My head won’t heal while I’m rattling around on a horse. It’s best for me, too, Katsa, if you leave me behind. I’ll recover faster.”