Brio bites gratefully into the scorched skin of the mystery meat.

“How did you get all this?” he asks as he chews.

Evie shrugs. “The Savage who had them was otherwise occupied.”

“With what?”

“His arm. It broke.”

Brio looks away from her, grinning ruefully. “I see.”

“I need to clean this out and burn it,” Evie tells him, sounding dubious. “Even then, it’ll be by the grace of the outlawed gods that we don’t have to take your leg off.”

Evie bunches a length of cloth in her hand and dips the end of it into the water, soaking it through.

Brio watches her, his shoulders stiffening. “I should be frightened, I suppose, but I’m mostly amused you’re still invoking the God Stars at your age.”

“I like the stars. I can see them. They’re always up there.”

“The trouble you got us into as children, refusing to let go of those old symbols even when my father—”

“Let’s not visit the past right now,” she says.

Brio’s face drops. “All right.”

“Everything I’m about to do is going to hurt,” she warns him.

“I’m becoming used to it.”

Evie begins cleaning his wound, wetting the dried flecks covering the gash with her cloth and wiping them away as gently as possible.

Brio tenses, sucking air through his lips sharply, but he neither protests nor shrinks away.

“How have you survived?” she asks, both to distract him and because every bit of information is useful to her in their current state. “How many other battles have you seen?”

“Two. Both were further north from here. The first was little more than a skirmish, an outpost, a few dozen soldiers at most. We barely lost a Savage to the battle. The Skrain just watched. The second was a siege, what I take was the last Sicclunan stronghold halting our advancement. They sent the Savages over the wall first.”

Evie is already on her second strip of doused cloth and there’s still muck to dig from his wound. She pauses and looks up at him, genuinely taken aback.

“You? Scaled a castle wall?”

Brio tries to laugh, but what he comes out with is more like a sigh. “I tried. I made it about halfway up when I felt something slash through my leg. It was an ax blade. I don’t know if it was Sicclunan or Savage, but someone dropped it. I lost my grip on the rungs and fell. Fortunately the ground was mostly mud. I decided I much preferred wallowing there. Again, I got lucky. We took the castle in the first attack.”