She smiled at him. “There’s no need for thanks,” she told him. “We both want the same thing, Representative Bondarenko. We want this carnage ended, and we want those we love and care about back safely with us.”

Olena was alive, that much was certain, but it was all they knew. She lay on her back on a low cot in one of the villagers’ humble homes. Sleeping. Marcus sat beside her, his tail coiled and bulky in the small room. The verdict was still out on everything: if Nurassyl’s power had overcome the poison, if she’d wake up, what she’d say if she did, and what the villagers were going to do with him. They let him be alone with her, but only after a lively debate, not a word of which he could follow. As far as he could understand, they were giving him the benefit of the doubt for the time being, waiting for Olena to recover so they could hear what she had to say.

Marcus wore an oversized sweater one of the jokers had given him to replace his tattered, blood- and filth-smeared shirt. Nurassyl had healed Marcus as well, much against his protests. Marcus had refused treatment at first, a sort of punishment to himself. But Nurassyl was insistent, in his quiet, gentle way.

Now, Marcus watched Olena breathe, following each slow rise and fall of her chest. He could almost see the air flowing in and out of her thin lips. She looked marvelously peaceful, but his mind reeled. She looked calm—and Nurassyl’s power had obviously saved her from his poison—but had the boy been able to save her mind? Was she still Olena? If so, would she understand why he’d done what he did? Would she even wake up sane? For all he knew, she might still be that bloody-faced, raging, barely recognizable terror. And if she was all right, what then?

Jyrgal’s wife, Aliya, made Marcus a pot of tea and set it on a table beside him, with some small, sweet-looking cakes. She was a quiet woman, a nat, it seemed like, slim and plain and, Marcus thought, perfectly lovely. Of course she was. Wife to Jyrgal and mother to Nurassyl; how could she not be a lovely person? Marcus was famished, but it was a dull hunger and he didn’t yet want to feed it.