“The one with the Chorae,” Mimara whispered, referring to Lord Kosoter. “Who is he?”

Achamian found himself glancing down the line of warlike faces. “Shush,” was all he said.

At first it seemed the Captain had simply reached out and seized Moraubon’s chin—so casual was his movement. Achamian squinted, trying to understand the wrongness of the image: Lord Kosoter holding the man mere inches from his face, not so much looking into his eyes as watching … Achamian only glimpsed the knife jammed beneath the scalper’s mandible when Lord Kosoter withdrew his hand.

Moraubon crumpled as if the Captain had ripped out his bones. Blood sheeted the boulder.

“Can anybody,” Sarl cried out over the river’s white thunder, “tell me what the rule is for peaches on the slog?”

“The Captain always gets the first bite,” Galian called solemnly.

“And what is it that has made us legends of the Wilds? What allows us to eat so much skin?”

“The Rules of the Slog!” a number of them shouted against the roar.

Not in reluctance, Achamian realized, but with dark affirmation. Even the Bitten, even those who had broken bread with the dead man on the boulder.

They’re all mad.

Sarl reddened about his mock smile. His eyes became two more wrinkles creasing his face.

Without a glance at his sergeant, the Captain crouched in his ragged Ainoni finery, wiped his blade clean on Moraubon’s sleeve. Then he fixed his gaze on Achamian and Mimara. He leapt from the boulder, his balance and bearing shockingly limber. Until that moment, he had seemed carved of living granite.

He strode up to the two of them.

“Who is she?”

“My daughter,” Achamian heard himself say.

There was no chance the murderous brown eyes could stare him down—not this time. She felt too much like her mother pressed in the brace of his arm, too much like Esmenet. The Captain glanced to the ground for a meditative moment, seemed to nod, though it could have been a trick of the breeze through his squared beard. After a hooded glance, he turned to make his way back to the head of the trail.

“Either she carries her weight like a man,” he shouted as he walked away. “Or she carries our weight like a woman!”

Catcalls and whistles from the Skin Eaters. Each of them, it seemed, glanced at Achamian and Mimara as they drifted back to resume the march. Their expressions ran the gamut from accusation to jeering lechery. But it was the blank faces that troubled Achamian the most, the eyes that seemed to commit Mimara’s torn leggings to memory.

No one bothered with Moraubon’s body, which continued to drain against a backdrop of booming water and towering debris. A white corpse on a red-painted stone.

“Who is he?” Mimara whispered. While Achamian had eyed the others, she had continued gazing at the Captain’s receding back.