After a time the trees thinned, the road smoothed, and the wildness of the ride subsided. Soon after that, they turned onto a road with a smooth surface, one made by humans in better times, and they followed its winding stretch through the high desert heading north. The mountain peaks receded behind them, their jagged tips distant and stark in the midday sunlight. Kirisin glanced back and then away, thinking that like those peaks his Elven past was already a long way behind him.

He looked over at the Knight of the Word, studying his still-angry face, hard and intense and filled with hints of thoughts too dark to reveal. He looked more dangerous than ever, a man who might do anything. Logan caught him looking and glanced over. “What is it?”

Kirisin shook his head. “Nothing.” He was silent for a moment, and then suddenly, impulsively, he said,

“You shouldn’t have left Sim behind.”

“I shouldn’t have, huh?”

“You could have said something to her. It looked to me like she was paying an awful lot of attention to you. Why didn’t you tell her she had to come with us?”

The dark gaze shifted away, fixing once more on the road. “Ask yourself this. Does she always do what you tell her to do?”

“No.”

“So what makes you think it would be any different with me?” He sounded really angry now. “I just met her yesterday. I’m not the one who could change her mind, even if I wanted to. Anyway, she’s not my responsibility. You are.”

Kirisin felt a sudden surge of anger. “It probably helps that you’re a Knight of the Word and don’t have to answer to anyone for your decisions!” he snapped.

Logan Tom glared at him. “Is that what you think? That I don’t have to answer to anyone? You don’t know anything.”

“I know that you left my sister behind!” Kirisin was furious. “I know that there wasn’t any good reason she couldn’t have come with us! I know I didn’t see you try to change her mind! You just left her!”

They sat in silence after that, the AV bouncing and sliding along the weather-damaged road, the sounds of their passage cocooning them away with their anger. Kirisin was furious, but he was also afraid. He knew next to nothing about Logan Tom, and now he was in the Knight of the Word’s care. He might have been smarter to keep his thoughts to himself. But he could hardly stand it that they had abandoned Sim.