Kaden glanced back through the empty gate, half expecting to see smoke and madness, to hear the shouted orders and cries of dismay from which he had just fled. But there was no darkness. There were no shouts or cries. All he could see beneath the arch of the kenta was a long line of unbroken swells, swift and silent as they rode the ocean’s back. Altogether elsewhere—a thousand miles off . . . two thousand . . . a few steps through the kenta—Valyn was fighting for his life, fighting or captured, dying or dead. It was real, but it didn’t feel real. It might have been a dream, all of it. It might never have happened. The sun, the sea, the sky, all of it seemed too much, too present, and suddenly Kaden felt like he was falling, unmoored from the ground below, the sky above, cut free from his own self, and he turned, searching for something more steady than the gray sea’s sway.

He stood on a grassy sward a few paces from the edge of a large bluff where the ground plunged straight down—a hundred paces or more—into the gnawing surf. Waves battered the rock, flinging spray into the air. The too-high sun cast a crisp, foreshortened shadow of the kenta on the earth before him, and after a moment, Kaden realized he was on an island, the whole thing no more than a quarter mile around, edged with cliff on every side. Beyond, the ocean stretched unbroken to the horizon, where heat blurred the line between heavy air and the heavier water below.

Before he could take in more, a figure stumbled through the gate, lurching into him, knocking him to the grass, shattering the vaniate like crockery. Not Tan. Too small to be Tan. Fear flooded in, knife-bright and sudden. Someone had followed him through the gate. It should have been impossible, but the gate itself was already impossible. Someone was on top of him, fingernails scratching at his eyes, hands groping for his neck, searching for some purchase as he twisted beneath the weight. Confusion and anger followed the fear, and he twisted out from beneath his assailant, struggling to protect his face and throat, to bring his emotion under control once again, to wrest sense from the chaos.

Long hair. Skin like silk. A scream like an animal makes when the jaws of the trap snap shut. The smell of sandalwood.

“Triste!” he shouted, pivoting to bring his weight to bear. During his time with the Shin he had wrestled plenty of panicked goats to stillness beneath the shears, but the girl, lithe though she was, weighed more than a goat, and the strength in her slender limbs surprised him.

“Triste,” he said again, bringing his voice under control, stilling his own emotion and willing a similar stillness upon her. “You’re safe. Safe. You’re through the kenta. They can’t pass . . .”