Oh, and yes, she had got into another spat with Harathes, hadn’t she? That had gone badly in the past, mostly because he had been able to get her to apologize, or consent to things in lieu of apology, after sufficient application of beer and guilt. Never again, she decided. Once they had somehow pulled off the feat of defeating the Dark Lord, she would give the man the slip and never have to worry about his leering and his ogling and his occasional attempts to trick her into bed or marriage.

There was a nagging feeling that she might have given in, though. It was being communicated by the presence of a warm body beside her, over which one of her arms was draped.

Oh sod it, did I? No doubt she had. Bloody Harathes and his whining and his One Hundred Righteous Reasons that all seemed to end up with him trying to talk her into bed. And apparently he had…

Actually, she wasn’t sure it was Harathes. The figure lacked his broadness of body. More telling still, it wasn’t snoring. Beer and Harathes’s sinuses never did make good bedfellows, as everyone in the company was painfully aware.

Dion would hardly approve, but a liaison with one of the many soldiers of Cad Nereg, no looking back and no baggage, was surely preferable. Except that there was always baggage, somehow. One poke and they thought they’d bought a controlling interest in you.

Time to face the music. Please, please don’t be Harathes. She opened her eyes.

The thing she always forgot, most especially when these sorts of situations were concerned, was that all too often there were no good outcomes, just different bad ones. She stared at the back, at the shoulders she was curled into. They were gray as a Ghantishman’s, ridged with muscle in a way that seemed slightly awry—awry for human, anyway. His breathing was very soft, and she wondered if, in fact, he was asleep at all, or whether he had slept all night, or ever slept. Certainly he never closed his eyes.

She was frozen, horrified, trapped in the morning after as shards of the night before clicked into place, her memories trailing in late and disheveled.

I didn’t. I—we—didn’t, surely. It was just…

Each memory, like a little knife.

We did.

She sat bolt upright, all of it coming back to her in a convulsive heave. She felt ill, sweaty, hungover, and all the blissful blurring of alcohol was banished.

How could I—? But she knew. No plea of ignorance for her. Oh this is it. This is when I go too far.