She shook her head, her smile so sadly sweet it was like a knife in his chest. “You do not have to explain, dear Matthias. It was selfish of me. I had only hoped…”

“You will never know the depth of my feelings, Elan. Please. Let’s not speak of it anymore. It is too hard.” He squinted, wiped fiercely at his eyes. “Just…let me hold your head. Here, lie against me.” As she nestled against him, her back against his belly, her head against his shoulder, he could feel every place she touched him, through both her clothes and his, like a hot nail through a blacksmith’s glove. “Lean back,” he whispered, feeling as though he were a monster worse even than Hendon Tolly. “Lean back. Close your eyes and open your mouth.”

She shut her eyes. He marveled at her long lashes, which cast shadows on her cheeks in the candlelight. “Oh, but first I must pray!” she said in a small voice. “It is never too late for that, surely? Zoria will hear me, even if she decides to spurn my request. I must try.”

“Of course,” he said.

Her lips moved silently for a while. Tinwright stared. “I am done,” she said quietly, her eyes still tight shut.

He leaned forward then, letting her breath swirl gently against his face, then kissed her. She flinched, expecting something else, then her lips softened and for a moment that seemed like an hour he let himself vanish into the astonishing truth of what he had dreamed so often. At last he pulled back, but not before one of his tears splashed on her cheek. So sweet, so trusting, so sad!

“Oh, Elan,” he whispered, “forgive me for this—for all of this.”

She did not speak again, but lay with her mouth open like a child who waited, fearful but bravely patient, for some terrifying physic. He used his sleeve to pull the stopper from the flask, then used the needle ever so carefully to lift a single drop and let it fall into her mouth.

Elan M’Cory gave a little gasp of surprise, then swallowed. “It does not taste like so much,” she said. “Bitter, but not painfully so.”

Tinwright could not speak.

“I could have loved you well,” she said, and a smile played around her lips. “Ah, what a strange sensation! I cannot feel my tongue. I think…”

She fell silent. Her breath slowed until he could not perceive it any longer.

One moment Ferras Vansen was there and the next moment the guard captain was gone, tumbled into nothingness without even crying out, torn away so quickly that, like a man whose leg had been blasted off by a cannonball, Barrick Eddon had only perceived the shock but not the loss itself.

The demigod Jikuyin was bellowing with both his voice and his thoughts, making the air of the cavern shudder and Barrick’s bones throb inside his flesh. “OH! OH, THEY ARE FREE, THE CURSED LITTLE TRICKSTERS!” The giant swung his shaggy head toward Barrick, who crouched panting at the base of the massive doorway, dropped by his guards as they fought Vansen. The demigod’s great eye narrowed and he turned to his lieutenant, the gray man; even the Dreamless seemed to have been caught by surprise. “Ueni’ssoh!” Although he spoke less harshly, the demigod’s words still rattled Barrick’s skull. “Carry on, you bloodless fool!” For the first time, Barrick could hear the actual words Jikuyin spoke, a rumbling, spiky tongue that bore no relation to what he heard in his head. “The gate is still open! Finish the invocation!”