“You alone? That one seems to me a bit of a coward and an outlander besides, which might account for it.”

“I can’t stand aside and do nothing.”

He was seated on a log, hands laid loose in his lap and arms slack, everything still too sore and abused to work properly. But he was stronger than he’d been when they’d cut him down.

“I know the back routes. I’ll make my own way to Toskala.”

“We’ll leave you provisions then, if you can carry them.”

He closed and opened his right hand, face scrunched up in pain, but he managed the movement, and then closed and opened his left hand to show it could be done.

“Tie the bag to my back, and help me shove this log into the river. They can’t see me at night, and we’re past the cataracts. It’s smooth water more or less downstream.”

“A reasonable plan, if you can hang on.”

“I’ve hung on this long. I endured worse.” He rose. “No point waiting. The council needs my report.”

She rigged the provision bag around his torso, then dragged the log into the river. “You’re sure?”

He flexed his shoulders, tested his range of motion. “My thanks to you for rescuing me. What’s your name?”

The streaming current rushed, louder than the wind.

She smiled sadly. “Ramit.”

He hooked himself into the fork where a branch had grown out from the bole. “My thanks, Ramit. May the gods honor you.”

His words brought tears. “May you find a safe haven, Miken.”

She shoved the log onto the river and watched until she could no longer see it on the dark waters. Then she walked back and sat by the fire, contemplating the lick and simmer of flames and the occasional spat spark. Was there a pattern to its burning, a truth in the way flames ran merry along a charring log or glowed in a blue-white shimmer where coals burned dense and hot?

If Guardians can be made, then they can be unmade.

If Lord Radas and his ally can kill, then so could she.

A branch snapped. She grabbed her sword.

Hari strolled into the light. “So you didn’t trust him either. Wise of you, my sweet.”

“When did I become your sweet?” She sheathed the sword.

He braced a foot on another drift log and stared at the sky, but it was overcast and thus starless. Ripples of firelight seemed to work through the fabric of his twilight cloak. Her own had a stubborn bone-white gleam, as pure as death.

“Two times I took off my cloak,” she said, “and I couldn’t breathe, and then it wrapped around me, and took me back, like it refused to let me die. So you can’t just remove a cloak and kill them that way. You’d have to bind the cloak as well.”

“You can’t kill what is already dead. Anyway, if a living person touches the clasp which binds a cloak, their skin burns and blisters just as if they were touching fire.”