“We’ve reached an accommodation.” And she clapped a hand to Enth’s shoulder. For a moment they were all very still, save that she felt the hard firmness of muscle move under her fingers. But then something happened to Enth’s mouth, a weird tugging at its corners. Not really a smile, not honestly, but he obviously knew what was expected of him and was trying very sincerely to fake it. The tide of the beer rose in her, and brought in the pallid, bobbing forms of a lot of memories: the wood of the spiders, cutting a swathe through the hairy mass of the creatures; that first horrifying look at the remade Enth; in the taproom at Ening’s Garth where she had wanted to hurt the creature, to make it grovel and crawl. Like the monster he is, she had thought. And of course there was that horribly prolonged moment of enforced stillness in Visler’s inn, when Enth had been weighing the possibilities of his briefly acquired freedom.

“He’s no hero. He’s no champion of the Light,” she clarified.

“Who is, seriously?” the thief pointed out. “ ’Cept Dion, of course.”

“He’s not like us at all,” she explained, “except that, being yoked to us, we’re rubbing off on him. But he’s no servant of the Dark, either. He’s just him.”

“Not an it, then?” Lief inquired.

“We made him a him. We made him a lot of things. And we have to see him unmade, turned back, if that’s what he wants. Penthos has to do it.”

“Well, good luck with that,” was Lief’s opinion. “But yeah, we can try.” He grinned at Enth, who had been following the conversation intently. “And if not, I can find a place for you, a purpose, something to keep you busy. Make the best of it, eh? Fellow that can climb up the side of a house like you needn’t go hungry.” He lifted his mug, and Enth completed the motion with his own, with a dull clunk of wood.

Cyrene laughed at that. “Oh, the two of you’ll be stealing the Potentate’s back teeth together.”

“Only if they’re gold.” And Lief lurched to his feet, on a valiant quest in the name of more beer. And Cyrene squeezed Enth’s shoulder and shook her head.

“You shouldn’t let yourself be led into wickedness,” she told those wide, dark eyes, seeing her own face sunk deep within them.