“After Behezda, he was gone,” he said, staring off into the horizon. It was still hard to recall those dark months, when he’d dreamed of Anton every night, not knowing if he was even still alive. “I thought I’d lost him for good, but then I got him back and I just thought…”

“You thought the rest of your problems wouldn’t matter anymore.”

He met her soft, wry smile with one of his own and in that moment he felt less alone than he had in days. Months.

She nudged her shoulder against his. “You’re not so bad, you know. For a stodgy swordsman.”

“You’re not so bad, either,” he replied. “Aside from the murder.”

“Hey, look,” she said, brightening and pointing ahead. Jude followed her gaze to the bank of the river, where Hassan and Anton appeared to be deep in conversation. Jude’s heart stuttered in his chest as Anton’s dark eyes met his. Some indecipherable expression crossed his face, and Jude was torn between relief that he was safe and anger that he’d disappeared after their fight.

He ran toward Anton anyway.

“I’m sorry,” Anton said, the moment Jude reached him. “For disappearing. I just needed some time.”

It was Ephyra who answered, not Jude. “We’re just glad you’re all right, kid.”

She eyed Jude, and Jude felt his anger shift, cast in a new light by Ephyra’s words. But he didn’t quite know what to say. He just stared at Anton, trying to divine the answers that Anton refused to give him.

“We should get back to the citadel,” Hassan said.

They bid farewell to the rangers and Lady Iskara before the sun was high in the sky, and set off along a path that took them back to the waterfall and then cut around and climbed higher into the mountains. They passed the quarries around lunchtime and kept moving.

By nightfall, exhaustion struck. Just before dark, Anton scried for the scarred Witness, Lazaros, and deemed it safe enough to make camp without fear that he would happen upon them.

Over the next few days, as they hiked deeper into the mountains, Jude thought about what Lady Iskara had said about Anvari being the edge of civilization. It certainly felt like they’d left the settled world behind. The landscape grew barren as they traversed it, starkly alien and somehow breathtaking. Dramatic cliffs plunged down from jagged black ridges. The Unspoken mountain range had been formed eons ago by volcanic eruptions, and they somehow seemed to carry that legacy with them.

It truly did feel like they were on the edge of the world, without another living soul for hundreds and hundreds of miles.

As they journeyed, the question persisted in Jude’s mind. Why had the Prophets come here? And, perhaps more pressingly, why had they stayed?