She let the scouts go on with their own mission, blessing them with a touch of the Light, and Nth felt a spark of pain in him every time she did it. It raised in him all his scrabbling, resentful fear of her—of all of them, their entire kind and their vaunted Armes, too. And yet, it hurt him more now. Because it was another wall just like all the walls that Penthos had placed about him. It was a boundary he could not cross. It marked him out as unclean, filthy vermin, and nothing he could ever do would rub that out. He was starting to see himself through their eyes. He wished, he devoutly wished, that he could unlearn everything they had ever taught him. It had been simpler when he had just been their prisoner.

And yet: drinking, discovering what a joke was, the company of Lief, Cyrene. Surely he would give these things over as well, in a heartbeat, to be cleansed and returned to his former self. He would give them all up. He would turn on them in a moment. He was not like them.

They were making him weak. Not their hate, but all their other welter of emotions and thoughts and ideas. They were making him weak and they were making him want to be weak.

He realized that Dion had spoken to him twice since the scouts left, and his head jerked up hurriedly. The memories had thawed now, all the annals of a long life spent in predatory darkness, the inner ways of the mountains. The path that even Darvezian did not know.

“Yes,” and he stood. I will do their bidding. I can do nothing else. These bonds they put on me are a blessing. Otherwise I would have to choose, and what would I choose? And these were human thoughts, and he hated them, but they were his; they were him. Give him the keenest blade in the world, he could not have cut them out of himself. And since when did I need blades?

In his mind was a path, but it was harder to follow than he had anticipated: a path for a creeping thing for which a sheer wall was no obstacle, not a path for this fumbling near-human form. Still, he could climb better than the rest, a coil of rope slung over his shoulder. He scaled and he scrambled, hauled and scuffed, knowing only that, in ages past, his Mother had passed this way, had left this place to seek a new home. Why? The why was not within his mind yet. Only that the path still existed.