The rain started just after dark. It would have been nice to set up the api or build a fire, but fires meant light and smoke, and the api would do nothing but trap half the Wing and limit its visibility. Better to be cold and ready than warm and dead, and so they wrapped themselves in their bison cloaks, the wet hides chilly and reeking, checked weapons, then sat down to gnaw through strips of dried meat and chunks of hard Urghul cheese before falling asleep.

Valyn took the first watch. The wound in his shoulder was healing, but still stabbed at him whenever he moved wrong. The others had settled into a rough circle, as though around the memory of a campfire. Asleep, wrapped in the huge cloaks, they looked younger than they were, more innocent, almost like children. Even Pyrre, with her graying hair, might have been a fishmonger or a merchant rather than a vicious death-priest with her hands steeped in blood. It seemed like weeks since Valyn had had the space and time to really think about his Wing, about what they’d given up when they fled the Eyrie, about what they faced in the weeks ahead. The responsibility clamped down on him like a hard fall frost. Then the rain began in earnest.

The heavy drops soaked his hair in a few heartbeats, chilling his face, seeping down the back of his cloak even as they churned the ground to mud, turned the night air to a black, sheeting murk. Valyn sat up straighter, ignoring the cold settling into his bones, a hand on his belt knife. He didn’t realize how accustomed he’d grown to his heightened hearing, but now, with the quiet roar of a million raindrops spattering against the earth, he felt deaf, disoriented, vulnerable.

He rose to his feet, slipping a blade from beneath the cloak, and walked to the top of a small rise. Whatever he might have seen beneath a full moon or stars was scrubbed out utterly by the downpour. There was the rain and the earth at his feet, nothing more. After a long pause, he turned back to the camp, unease tickling at his neck, sickening his gut. Gwenna was cursing, trying to get comfortable, and Talal and Pyrre kept shifting, searching for a position that might keep off the worst of the rain.

To ’Shael with it, Valyn thought. No one’s sleeping anyway.

They could be miserable on the horses just as well as on the ground. They could rest again when the weather cleared. For all that they needed a break, they were Kettral. A long night on horseback wasn’t going to kill any of them. Besides, he didn’t like sitting still when there was no way to mount an effective guard. They might stumble over someone on horseback, but at least they’d be mounted. At least they’d be ready.