“Yes. No.” Dion knuckled at her forehead. “This has gone far enough. Get everyone together. We will talk this out, like the old days.” She meant: before Enth had come. “We need to decide what to do with this creature.”

At that moment Lief wandered in, cockily cheerful from a night spent in the welcome company of strangers. “What’s this? I miss anything?” he remarked, and then took in the tableau, turned around, and would have absented himself entirely had Dion not called him back with an iron voice.

“Now, let’s not be hasty here,” was Lief’s considered opinion. “Obviously some things got said, some things were done, but still…”

“You knew,” Dion told him. The five of them had commandeered a soldiers’ dormitory. Enth was locked in one of the cells of Cad Nereg.

Lief looked shifty. “Look, we were all a bit drunk last night…”

“You knew,” Dion repeated. “You could have stopped this thing before it started.”

“Technically you can’t stop something before—” began Penthos, under the sincere impression that he was being helpful, then wished he hadn’t.

“What do you want me to say?” Lief demanded. “That I should have been the beacon of moral probity, to whom all the wayward souls of the world look for guidance? Because I thought that was you. Where were you, exactly, when all this was going on? Closeted away, being holier than us.”

“How dare you cast aspersions at the Light’s chosen?” thundered Harathes, clashing with Penthos’s grand “Speak not of things of which you know naught!”

“Enough!” Dion shouted them down. “I don’t need defending. But you’re right, Lief. You’re no man’s moral compass. You’ve consorted with this creature from the start, spoken for it, defended it, made it a part of your schemes.”

“I thought ‘making it a part of our schemes’ was what we were all doing!” the thief snapped back.

“You have merely shown,” Dion continued without appearing to hear him, “that your opinion is tainted.” There was a heavy burden in her voice, that reminded them all of what coinage she had spent on Lief’s behalf.

“We have followed a twisted path, since the wood of the spiders,” Dion told them. “I have been too convinced of the rightness of my own judgment. I have led us awry.”

“We have no other plan to defeat Darvezian,” Cyrene pointed out. “Even if you were right about Enth—which you’re not—that hasn’t changed.”

“We could just attack!” Harathes insisted. “We get Penthos all charged up and we go in with a pack of Cad Nereg’s best. We fight, like we’re supposed to, and rightness triumphs, like it’s supposed to.”

“Then we die, and nobody defeats Darvezian,” Lief said flatly.