The lad looked in the direction the cloak had ridden away. They saw a light rising above the trees: The horse had flown. “He doesn’t touch us. He just wanks off in his hand.”

The words were a lie, and Shai knew it, and Dena knew it, and the lad knew it. Their silence was their pact. If they must say so to endure it, then let them say so.

“You’ll survive this,” Shai said softly.

The lad caught Shai’s other arm and both children leaned on him as they headed back to camp, guards walking before and behind. They blundered along the stream’s edge in the darkness. Foot slipping, Shai careered into the water, and yelped as cold bit his skin. In the moment of surprised pain, his gaze lifted to the thicket of pipe-brush on the far shore.

Merciful God!

Memory is a ghost that haunts you. He saw within the pipe-brush Cornflower’s face, her pale skin and light hair. She was staring at him.

“Get moving, you clumsy ewe-tupping oaf!” The man slammed him across the back with the haft of his spear.

Shai went down to his knees on the hard stones. Vali gulped down a sob and Dena yelped out a protest, then stifled the cry as the guards cursed at her.

“Here, now,” said Shai quietly. He rose, joints popping. His knees smarted and his back ached. “We’re just moving on, like you said.” To the children, he spoke in a lower voice. “We’ll survive this. Don’t despair.”

When he looked back into the pipe-brush, now behind them, it was too dark to see anything. Anyway, it had only been a trick of his mind.

41

It rained half the night, and twice Avisha woke, sure she heard Mai crying in the adjacent chamber and, in response, Priya’s soothing whisper. Every slightest noise carried within the captain’s house: the raised plank floor, the stout wood pillars, and the strong roof were of highest quality, but until more of the settlement in the Barrens was serviceable, Mai had insisted they make do with canvas walls.

The children slept soundly, crowded close. After the rains died, the air grew close and stifling, so Avisha tied up the entrance to let in air. Standing in a light cotton shift, she sighed in a blissfully cooling breeze. A pair of figures paced the lower porch that wrapped the structure. A face looked up at her.

“Early yet, Avisha,” said Chief Tuvi in a voice hoarsened, perhaps, by the early hour.

She hurriedly shrank back into the shadows of the sleeping chamber as the two men—she hadn’t recognized the other one—chuckled, their footfalls soft on the porch as they continued their circuit. Did the man never sleep? He was the captain’s most trusted officer, which explained why he had been sent to the Barrens with the captain’s beloved wife.

Who had woken again.

“I just can’t sleep,” Mai was saying in a low voice. “My back hurts. Every time I close my eyes I think of Shai.”