It was almost sunset when he found himself approaching Declan Reach once more. He slowed automatically, coming up on the pass and its killing field soundlessly, a shadowy figure in the growing darkness. He searched for signs of Arik Siq’s presence and found nothing. He tested the air with his senses—listening, tasting, smelling, and watching.

Still nothing.

He had gotten there first.

He stopped where he was, just in view of the sprawled forms of the dead, high up on the slopes but to the right of the pass, out of view. His breath clouded the air before him, the cold bone-chilling. He had to choose a place to wait for the other man. He had to find a way to catch him off guard. Arik Siq would be cautious of a trap, wary of being tricked in the same way he had tried to trick Pan. He was no fool. Any chance of capturing him alive would require some thought.

He felt an odd calm settle over him; everything became slow and easy. Nothing was beyond him now.

Odd, he thought suddenly, that he had abandoned so readily his intention of killing Arik Siq to avenge Sider. Arik’s death had been the driving force behind his choosing to take the black staff, enraged and bitter beyond words. But now all that was gone, bled out of him during his pursuit, left behind in the wake of his determination that the man would not escape him and replaced by his need to save Prue. Sider would not mind, he thought. Sider would not only understand, but also approve. It was the right thing to do.

He studied the dead men where they lay before the defensive wall, the positioning of the single ladder that remained upright against the ramparts and the way the uneven terrain rolled and shifted beneath all of it. Finally, he walked over to where Trow Ravenlock lay sprawled in death, propped him upright so that he was facing back the way Arik Siq would come, calculated the way things would work when the Drouj made his cautious way toward freedom, and nodded in satisfaction when he was certain of what would happen.

Then he took up a position at the base of the wall, stretching out on the ground close by where he had left Trow, his body partially obscured by that of a dead Troll, and began his vigil.