Adare hesitated. Oshi’s mind was far more feeble than she had initially realized, but the madness was easy to overlook. It usually manifested quietly, in endless, absorbed silences, or bouts of soft weeping. When he ranted, he ranted gently, muttering over and over again in his scratched voice to the birds or the wagon or his own fingernails. Whenever he grew particularly distressed, Nira was always there with a hand on his shoulder and sip from her crockery jar, the combination of which calmed the lost old man. Evidently something had gone amiss.

“We’ll find him,” Adare said. She squinted, trying to make out the scope of the pilgrims’ camp. It was large, but not impossibly so. Maybe forty or fifty fires and as many wagons spread over a couple of acres. “He can’t have gone far,” she said, gesturing. “We’ll split up. Check the camp—”

“I’ve checked the camp,” Nira snarled. “Twice. He’s gone, and no one saw him go.”

Adare drew back at the woman’s tone. She had grown accustomed to the harsh language, but this was something new, something harder and sharper.

“How long were you away from him?” she asked carefully.

Nira took a deep, shuddering breath. “I left just before dark. Needed to pick up some fish. I told him to stay by the fire, which he generally does.”

Since sunset, then. A fit man could have run a couple of miles, but Oshi was not a fit man. The canal bounded them a few hundred paces to the west, which meant he could go north or south along the road, or east into the fields.

“Has he done this before?” Adare asked.

“Not for a long, long time.”

Before Adare could reply, Lehav stepped around the wagon, a hand on the pommel of his sword. She couldn’t make out his eyes, but there was something alert in his posture, something ready. Two pilgrims flanked him, both obviously fighters, one still carrying a shank of dripping meat.

Lehav glanced from Adare to Nira, then back.

“I heard shouting,” he said.

Adare nodded. She wanted Lehav’s attention even less than she wanted to sit through the nightly sermons, but shying away now would look odd. Besides, if he could assist in finding Oshi, so much the better.

“We need your help,” she said, hesitated, then wrung her hands, hoping the gesture might look suitably pathetic.

One of the men—a short, heavily muscled brute with a frog’s mouth—leered at her, then turned to Lehav.

“Lady needs your help, Captain. Pretty little thing, all flushed and outta breath. Reckon you oughta give her some . . . help.” Adare could see his tongue in the firelight flicking between his lips like a pink, feral creature.

“I’m not a captain, Lodge,” Lehav said absently, glancing over the wagon. “Left the legions a long time ago.”

“Sure thing, Captain,” the frog replied, grinning.