Damaged?

Now the regret felt more like shame. Barrick did not need to see Gyir’s face (which obviously never revealed much anyway) to understand the fairy’s grim mood. The Followers, when they attacked me—I fell. They struck my head several times and then I hit it again on a stone. I am…blind.

The word didn’t seem right, somehow, but Barrick still reacted with astonishment. What do you mean, blind? You can see!

Only with my eyes.

While Barrick puzzled over this, Ferras Vansen rode up beside them again—as close as Vansen’s mortal horse would come, anyway: even after a tennight traveling together, the animal always stayed at the stretched end of his tether when the company made camp, keeping as distant from the fairy-horse as he could. “Your Highness, are you ill?” the soldier asked. “You almost fell out of your saddle…”

“There is nothing wrong with me. Let me be.” He wanted to talk to Gyir again, not swap braying mortal speech with this…peasant.

A peasant who came with you when he didn’t have to, an inner voice reminded him, and for once he was hearing himself, not Gyir. A peasant who came to this wretched place with full knowledge of what it was like.

Barrick took a breath. “I do not mean to be…I am well enough, Captain Vansen.” He could not bring himself to apologize. “You and I will talk later.”

The soldier nodded and reined up a little, letting Barrick’s horse take the lead again. As they fell back, the scruffy black bird crouching on Vansen’s saddle watched the prince with disconcertingly shrewd eyes, like Chaven the physician seeing through one of Barrick’s tantrums to the real matter beneath. For a moment the prince was painfully lonely again for Southmarch, for familiar faces and familiar things.

You said blind. Why? he asked. Your eyes work, don’t they?

Gyir would not speak for long moments. I am the Storm Lantern, he said finally. It is given to me to see in darkness, to see what is behind the light, to see things that are far away. I have an eye inside me, inside my head. Never before would three Longskulls have crept so close to me. Never before would I have to learn of it from a mere raven! But now I am blind.

There was so much misery in this thought, so much fury, that for a moment, as the sensations buffeted him, Barrick felt as though he would vomit. He put one hand on the saddle to steady himself—he did not want Vansen riding up again, prying at him with questions.

Because of the wound to your head?

Yes. Yes, and now I am all but helpless—forced to hide and skulk in terror in my own country, like a forest elemental caught out by Whitefire in the naked sunlands!

Barrick didn’t know what Gyir meant, but he knew that sort of rage and despair when he heard it—knew it all too well. Will you get better?