Eliot didn’t say anything. For all the years of his life he’d spent with Janet, he’d never really known her, not deep down. Sometimes he looked at her and thought, Gosh, I wonder what’s underneath all that anger, all that hard glossy armor? Maybe there’s just an innocent, wounded little girl in there who wants to come out and play and be loved and get happy. But now he wondered if maybe that little girl was long gone, or if she’d ever been there at all. What was under all that armor, all that anger? More anger, and more armor. Anger and armor, all the way down.

Janet’s face was white, but her voice was still calm.

“When the Foremost was done crying I made him show me everything. All their secrets. I didn’t even care anymore, I just wanted him to know how beaten he was. That rock went deep under the desert—they’d cut shafts down through it—and underground it was all ice caves. That’s where the water came from.

“No metal though. There wasn’t any. Can you believe that? Those weapons were all they had—I think it must have come from a meteorite or something, a long time ago. Forged from star-metal, kinda thing. They just passed them down, father to son, mother to daughter. I locked the Foremost in an ice cave and left him there. I figured his buddies would find him eventually. Maybe he’d die, maybe he’d be OK, I don’t know. What am I, a fucking doctor?”

Eliot urged his horse forward a bit, right up beside Janet’s, and as well as his horsemanship would allow he leaned over, put his arm around Janet, and kissed her on the cheek. He felt her smile.

“Before I left I took his spear away from him. I still had the strength going, so I broke it in half with my bare hands, right in front of him, and I formed an axe-head on the end of each one, out of ice. Not bad, right? I was going to say, ‘Consider yourself annexed, bitch!’ or something like that, but sometimes an exit line just feels de trop, you know?”

“Yeah,” Eliot said quietly. “I know. I really do.”

“So anyway,” Janet said, “that’s how I got my new axes.”

She spurred her horse down the trail toward Barion.

CHAPTER 13

One day, about a week after Quentin got back from Antarctica, Lionel knocked on his door. It was two thirty in the afternoon.

“Ten minutes.” Lionel didn’t wait for him to open it. “In the lobby. Bring your gear.”

By the time Quentin got there Lionel was already down the hall at the other suite.