. . . worked. He stacked damp birch bark sheets, he stripped to his braes and swam into the lake with a tin bucket and rescued peas, and he hauled canvas out of the shallow water below their peninsula, he broke his nails and hardened his already calloused hands digging graves.

At first he just worked, silently, endlessly, banishing the daemons in his head with toil; Richard’s death, Irene, Looks-at-Clouds. More work. Death, and corruption; bury it. He sent Ricard Lantorn into the woods with a patrol; sent Tas-a-gao south to look at their back trail, sent the wyverns spiraling west. Gave orders, and didn’t think.

He worked.

Evening was falling, the red sun beautiful over the crisp blue lake, and Irene put her arm through his.

He started.

“You need to talk to them,” she said. “Now.”

His first reaction was anger, and he turned on her, his hand going to his dagger hilt.

“If I needed your advice, Majesty, I’d be sure to ask you,” he hissed.

Irene had changed in just a couple of weeks. She was dirty; her nails were broken, and she wore a curious mixture of men’s and women’s attire. Her hair was back in a tight braid like the ones the irks wore. She stood her ground and met his eye. “I’m not attacking you,” she said. “If you don’t start cheering them up, I suppose I’ll have to, but they prefer you, Aneas Muriens.”

A dozen angry replies leapt into his brain.

He bit his lip, turned away. Stared over the beautiful lake a moment. “Very well,” he said, his voice cold.

Then he regretted his tone and the language of his body, but when he turned back, she was gone.

Still, he took her words as law. When the grave he was digging was done, and he and Tessen had piled dirt and stones on a dead Jack, he bowed to the irk and wandered, first out to the wall of hordles that guarded the peninsula, where he made sure the guard was changed, and then sat with the new quarter-guard and smoked a pipe. He handed his pipe axe from man to man. He didn’t say much; neither did they.

“We need a guard,” he said finally. “I know you’d rather be burying the folk who fell. We’ll get that done as well.”

“Then what, Cap’n?” asked a ranger. “Then we’ll strike at Orley’s throat,” Aneas said.

There was no cheer; just a growl.

“What of the dragon, then?” asked another.

Aneas looked at his hands in the dying light. “We will get him,” he said. “He thinks he is God, and we are nothing.” He looked up. “But we are not nothing. We, together, have the power to bring Ash down.”