She gave him a look so frank and without masks that he flinched back from it. “To bring you back from the jaws of death, Lief? Perhaps ten years of my life. And more: when I look on the world, now, something is gone from it, some joy in its colors and wonders that was burned from me when I caught your life and hauled it from the brink. I will not savor tastes as much as I once did. Some sounds or sights or thoughts that once made me smile will cease to connect with my soul in the same way, and leave me cold. If I had it in me to love, to truly love, then perhaps that is blunted too. In every way, in some small measure, I am lessened.” She almost finished with, “Add that to your score,” but she was enough herself to know how that would hurt him, and to hold the words back.

Lief opened his mouth a few times, no doubt trying to find a flippant answer to all that, but even his powers of invention failed him, and he let his horse drop back behind.

Enth stared at the dagger in his hands. Everyone else stared at Enth.

His gray lips moved. “And you will take me from here.”

Feyn grinned. “Oh, Uncle Darvezian is going to be all over you like a fungal infection, never you mind,” he confirmed. “You’re going to be the favorite son of the Dark Tower. He’ll never have seen anything like you before.”

“I am sure,” Enth agreed. Those round, dark eyes seemed to Cyrene to be fixed on her, but as always it was impossible to tell where he was really focusing.

“Come on, candle’s burning,” the Doomsayer prompted. “We need to be gone from here before anyone turns up looking for the pair of you, eh?”

Visler the Vintner shifted uncomfortably. “Feyn, you need to do something about that. Yes, yes. I need protecting—”

“Don’t get me started on what you need, you shit,” Feyn snarled. “But mostly, you need to face the music when we’re gone. I’m done with you.”

It came to Cyrene in that split instant that Enth didn’t really know what to do with a dagger. He had never needed weapons to kill before. The finesse of using them was alien to him. When he moved, it was the sort of awkward, amateurish stroke that she would have laughed to scorn if she had not been too paralyzed to either laugh or defend herself. And, of course, had it not been delivered with Enth’s formidable speed and strength.