But then the war came and many died. The oldest voices remember how the People took the side of the children of Breeze, even though they died like ants before the anger of Thunder and his brothers. And ever after the firstborn children of Moisture hated the People for opposing them, and persecuted them. But in later days those who took Thunder’s side would prosper because of their fealty to Moisture’s brood.

—from One Hundred Considerations
out of the Qar’s Book of Regret

AT FIRST VANSEN COULD NOT even muster the will to sit up. The memory of the corpse-pit was like a weight on his chest.

I will say it again. Rise, Ferras Vansen.

It was not his own name that resounded in his head so much as an image of himself, although it seemed a distorted view, the skin too dark, the features coarse as those of the inbred families of the upper dales he used to see in the market at Greater Stell when he was a child. It was the Storm Lantern’s view of him, perhaps.

What do you want? Let me sleep.

We must try to make sense of what we have seen, sunlander—and there is something else, too.

Vansen groaned and opened his eyes, then forced himself into a sitting position, scraping his back and elbows on the cell’s rough wall. Barrick was still asleep, but he twitched and moaned quietly, as if trapped in a nightmare.

Let him be for the moment. I have words to share with you.

The memory of the pit would not go away. Gods protect us, what are they doing down there to work all those creatures to death?

Gyir nodded. So you too noticed that most of them showed no sign of what killed them. Yes, perhaps they were worked to death. The fairy touched the palm of one hand to the back of the other. Whatever the tale behind it, it is certainly a new page for the Book of Regret. The thought that accompanied the words was not so much of a real book as of a sort of frozen storm of ideas and pictures and feelings too complex, too alien for Vansen to grasp.

What else could it be? They looked like they’d just fallen down dead. No marks on most of them. Vansen was more familiar with corpses than he wished to be, especially those found on a battlefield, each one its own little Book of Regret, the ending written in cruel wounds for all to read.

We must not make the mistake of supposing that which we do not know for certain, Gyir said. The waters in these deep places are sometimes poisonous. Or it could be that they were felled by a plague. Or it might be something else…

Even while his skin crawled at the thought of being locked in a massive prison with plague raging through it, Vansen could not help being struck by the quality of the Storm Lantern’s thinking. The creature he had considered little more than a beast, a bloodlusting wolf, was proving instead as careful as an Eastmarch scholar. Something else? What?