She flashed them a sarcastic little smile, and it stole the breath from Hassan’s lungs. It was a glimpse of the Khepri that he’d met on the steps of the Temple of Pallas all those months ago. The Khepri who had challenged him to a sparring match. The Khepri who had kissed him with ferocity and fire aboard the Cressida on their way to Nazirah. He felt winded by how much he had missed her, as if he’d been storing it all away, every second they’d been apart.

Faintly, Hassan heard a loud guffaw from his other side, and then Hector’s rueful voice. “What? She’s not wrong.”

“All right, then,” Jude said as Khepri’s gaze found Hassan’s again and she dipped her head in a little nod that he wasn’t sure how to interpret. “The eight of us.”

The next morning, they docked in a flat part of the river and rowed two dinghies to shore. From there, they began their hike toward the Green Ridge Pass, which would lead them into the river valley. The pass was steep and treacherous, but Illya warned them that the true difficulty would begin once they hit the valley.

According to him, Pallas’s forces—a mix of devout Witnesses, the Paladin who had defected to him, and hired mercenaries—were crawling all over the countryside. Any town or large growing area would be rife with them, so they would have to tread carefully and avoid civilization as much as they could.

The others were skeptical that Pallas would dedicate so much of his manpower to a relatively peaceful river valley, but Hassan saw the logic.

“There are tons of prized resources in the valley. Grain. Livestock. Wine. Lumber,” he said, ticking them off on his fingers. “They supply not only Pallas Athos, but most of the other Prophetic Cities. The Hierophant is making sure he controls the valley so he can cut off supplies to the places that try to oppose him.”

“Like he threatened to do to Endarrion,” Beru added.

“The valley is one challenge,” Jude said. “The Unspoken Mountains will be another entirely.”

“Meaning?” Ephyra asked.

“They’re completely uninhabited,” Jude said. “Desolate. We don’t actually know what’s up there, because so few people have ever traveled beyond the Serpentine River. We’ll be completely on our own.”

Hassan felt cold thinking of it. Crossing a barren mountain range, searching for Prophets who had long since abandoned them. Maybe they were fooling themselves to think that any of this could work, let alone that they could make it out alive.

“And we have another problem,” Jude said, nodding to Anton.