Yumia presses her lips together. ‘We will find the Conduit on Dimmamar,’ she says. ‘That is what you said.’

‘That is what I said.’

She shakes her head. ‘You said the same of Hellebore,’ Yumia says. ‘But we found no Conduit there, lord. Just blood and darkness. Just death.’

A long moment of silence stretches out between us. First Efrayl challenges me, and now this. I lock Yumia with a stare, just as I did my medicae.

‘Do you doubt me?’ I ask her.

Yumia is still for a moment, her hand still pressed to that old wound.

‘Answer me,’ I say coldly.

Yumia lets her hand fall away slowly. ‘I do not doubt you, inquisitor.’

‘Then why speak at all?’

She isn’t frowning at me now. There’s another kind of expression on her face that I can’t quite place. This time, when she speaks, it’s softer.

‘I think you wish for this as much as you believe in it,’ she says. ‘And I think that kind of desperation is dangerous.’

Silence falls again in the wake of her words. Zoric shakes his head. Yumia holds my gaze with her narrow face uptilted. Unafraid, as always. It is part of the reason I recruited her in the first place.

‘And you?’ I say to Zoric. ‘What do you think?’

He exhales slowly. ‘You didn’t recruit me to think,’ he says. ‘You recruited me to hunt and track and kill, and because you knew I’d jump for the chance to make good on a bad life.’

Yumia scowls and shakes her head at him. She mouths the word coward.

‘But,’ he says, ignoring Yumia with a marksman’s patience, ‘I can tell you what I see.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘Something is eating away at you,’ he says. ‘Whether it’s guilt, like Yumia says, I don’t know. It’s not my business to.’

He looks down at his hands. At the patchwork of old burn scars criss-crossing them that he earned long before he took up service with me. Back when he made his way as a killer for hire, and a gunrunner, and he made powerful enemies. The sort of enemies that don’t kill you to make their point, but kill everyone you care about instead. For Zoric, that was Idoney, the woman he’d sworn himself to.

And their son, Tian.

‘There’s no undoing what’s been done,’ he says. ‘But you can level the scales. Make rights out of wrongs. That’s the best hope to stop whatever has its teeth in you from tearing you to pieces. From swallowing you whole.’

They both speak to me as if they know what’s best. But they haven’t dreamed my dreams, or seen what awaits us.

They aren’t the ones with a vow to keep.

‘This is doing right,’ I tell them. ‘What we do here could change everything, and I will not turn away from that.’