It was a shabby little inn, for certain, on a shabby little path through the forest. Cyrene’s informant from the Heathen’s Quarter seemed to have earned his tip. There wasn’t much footfall on this road to Armesion.

By then she was feeling dead on her feet. Lack of sleep and an impressive collection of bruises and scrapes were ganging up on her and demanding some sort of round-the-table talks about sleep, and soon. Sleep was something she couldn’t afford, though. She had too much to be vigilant against. Perhaps the Brotherhood of the Dawn were already tracking her from Armesion. Perhaps the church itself was involved, with its shining knights galloping hither and yon with her name on their lips—and not, she grimly knew, in a good way. Not that she had any particular ambitions in that direction, having met their good ambassador, Harathes. And then there was Enth.

She did not want to sleep alone, save for Enth. She knew that Penthos had bound the creature with strong magic, and she knew it was compelled to do what she said. And yet the idea of being in a room with the thing—even in a building with the thing—and none of her fellows present to keep watch, it made her skin crawl. Her dislike of the creature had evolved somewhat, she was forced to admit. No longer was it a simple loathing of spiders: she had ceased to think of the thing as a mere arachnid. It was not a horror of Enth’s hybrid appearance, either. Somehow the edge of that had gone, the initial shock slowly dissipating from long familiarity. It had been that moment in Ening’s Garth, in the tavern there, when she had been drunk and angry, and it had spoken for itself. She had looked into that scrambled visage, those eyes, those teeth, and found that, in her mind, it had made the curious transition from abomination to simple monster.

Now it was just that she didn’t trust it not to cut her throat. That was a far more straightforward position, and more morally supportable. It was still her enemy, and the enemy of all humanity. It would be the same if she was forced to travel with a sly Ghantishman or one of Darvezian’s Doomsayers or just a wicked human being. That was what she told herself. It was simple.

There was a nagging little voice inside her that said the situation was still very complex indeed, but she ignored it.

She pushed into the inn, finding an empty taproom long overdue a sweeping, the light gloomy, the ceiling low, and made lower by the massive beams that formed the building’s robust skeleton.