She grabs Brio by the arm and forces him into a half-burned tent that’s been extinguished with water from one of the horse troughs.

“What’re we doing?” he whispers breathlessly at her as she practically stuffs him inside the foul-smelling wreckage and crushes her body atop his on the ground.

“The only thing I can think of that might not end with us watching our own bodies fall from a distance,” she hisses at him. “Now shut up and stay still!”

Evie kicks out with one foot and shatters the burned husk of the nearest tent post. The other posts and what little charred cloth still flaps in the wind collapses atop them. Evie presses herself flat beside Brio, digging into the cold, hard ground beneath them as best she’s able. If the remnants of the tent appear flat enough, they might just get away with it.

She only hopes that, at a glance, they won’t be visible through the wreckage.

“You shouldn’t have come after me,” Brio whispers to her, the guilt beneath his words totally unmasked. “My life isn’t worth yours.”

“That depends on whom you ask,” she assures him. “Now, I told you, be quiet and stay still.”

“For how long?” he asks.

Evie closes her eyes and tries to block out the sounds of clashing steel and bloody screams rising just above their heads.

“As long as it takes,” she says.

THE MATING CALL OF THE CRACHIAN WIND DRAGON

THE BELLS RING THREE TIMES, summoning Dyeawan and her tender to Edger’s office.

It’s the middle of the day, and the hard, wiry muscles of her arms, as strong as many a grown man’s from years of pulling the rest of her along, are feeling unusually strained from cleaning and her deliveries. She wonders if the miraculous ease of the paddles that turn her wheels is actually a double-edged sword; perhaps using less effort has weakened the upper part of her body.

Or perhaps she’s recently become bored and restless with sweeping floors and ferrying hastily inked message scrolls.

She’s never been summoned to Edger’s private office before. As she thinks about it, Dyeawan realizes she’s never before been summoned to his public office, either. She had thought the room in which she first met him was his private space, but it turned out to be just a reception area. Whatever Edger actually does and wherever he actually does it, he has yet to make use of Dyeawan’s spirited heralding services.