Evie kneels in front of him, gently prying apart the dressings she applied that are now both seeped through and filthy from their cross-country hike. Brio hisses in pain as she does. What Evie sees beneath the bandages looks less like flesh of any condition and more like a swamp.

“This leg is going to have to come off,” she informs him quietly, her expression as grim as it has ever been.

Brio tries to smile, but even that effort seems to cause him pain. “I didn’t know you’d become a surgeon in the last hour. That’s impressive.”

“Brio,” she whispers, almost pleading. “Your leg will poison you if it stays on much longer. It’s already started. You’re running a fever. That’s why you’re sweating so much. And you can barely stay awake.”

“What’s to be done out here?” he asks, looking at her with eyes that have abandoned hope.

Evie glances to where the B’ors have chosen to rest and await the decision of their Crachian counterparts concerning the Sicclunan, having offered no counsel in either direction.

“I’m working on it, all right? I promise. I just need you to hold on a while longer. Please. Can you do that?”

“I can try,” he says.

“Then try.”

Yacatek sits against the hill with her legs folded beneath her. She’s unsheathed her stone neck knife and is using a small, jagged sliver of rock to carve upon the blade. Two of the B’ors warriors stand like sentries at the foot of the hill below her, weapons in hand and eyes surveying both the cold camp and the surrounding wasteland.

Evie leaves Brio and walks between them.

“May I sit with you?” she asks Yacatek.

“I do not own the ground,” Yacatek answers without looking up from her etching. “That is a belief held by your people, not mine.”

Evie chooses not to respond to that. Instead she trudges painfully up the hill and lowers herself beside the B’ors woman, groaning as she does. It feels as though every part of her body is angry at every other part.

“What’s the meaning of the marks on that blade?” Evie asks.

“History.”

“Of your people?”

“Of my band, before I was taken, and now the history of this new band we have formed.”

A new thought strikes Evie.

“Is this why the others follow you?” She motions to the two B’ors sentries. “Because you record their history?”

Yacatek nods. “I am a Storyteller. There is no more sacred calling among my people. It is given to Storytellers to keep the words and names and deeds of our bands. We preserve them in stone because it will outlast us all.”

“What do you do when there’s no more room left on the dagger?”

“Begin another.”

“And what happens to that one?”

“I bury it.”

“Where?”