“And if you’re killed?” She scowled. “You haven’t seen Eskavord. There are bodies in the streets. She’s made a throne of corpses in the marketplace! You’d already be dead if I hadn’t found you. And now you’d give her a second chance?”

“One life wagered to save hundreds, maybe thousands. I count for little set against that.”

She folded her arms. “Not to me.”

Viktor finally understood some of Malachi’s spousal frustrations. It was no easy thing to argue with someone who sought only to save you from yourself.

“Please don’t make this difficult.”

“On one condition only.”

“And that is?”

“I’m coming with you.”

“Calenne . . .”

She jabbed a finger into his ribs. “Maybe this is your fault and not mine, but this is still my home. And you need a guide.”

That much made sense. “Very well. But only as far as Eskavord.”

“Hah! As if I’d agree to that.” She grinned and kissed him again, this time holding him so tight that Viktor feared there’d be no way to free himself without breaking her arms. “Where you go, I go.”

With no other option to hand, Viktor accepted defeat and gave himself to her embrace.

The rustle of ivy sent Melanna scurrying for cover behind what had once been a stone archway. She set a hand around the arrowhead, muting its glow to a pale white sheen.

Someone was there. Away past the crude altar and its smattering of peasant offerings. Out past the ring of young trees that nestled between the tumbled walls. A towering shape, identifiable as such only when motion split it from impenetrable gloom. The first such shape Melanna had encountered since entering the unnatural dark. She’d seen nothing larger than a fox since leaving the charnel of Cragwatch, and that beast had possessed the good sense to scurry away as soon as noticed. The woods had otherwise been silent, as if birds and beasts held their breath.

The rustle came again. Dark moved against dark. Melanna sank back behind stone.

A lantern’s warm glow spilled across the overgrown temple, the sight of it so sudden, so welcome, that Melanna almost laughed to see it. But only almost. There were plenty of reasons for a Hadari to be afraid with Eskavord’s walls so close.

A grunt. A grinding, jarring rumble of stone moving on stone.

A hushed, basso whisper, couched in dry humour. “Ladies first.”

Melanna knew that voice. The man-of-shadow.

She craned back about the arch. It was Lord Akadra, if a goodly bit more bruised than when she’d last seen him. But there was no mistaking the coils of dancing shadow. Of his companion, she saw nothing. The empty void beneath the altar, now revealed in the lantern-light, explained why. Another wolf’s-head tunnel. She’d used many herself.