“The killing is aimed at you right now, but it won’t stop with you. Let me tell you something I know: men are animals. Look anywhere you want: Anthera or the Blood Cities, the jungle tribes of the Waist, look at the fucking Urghul, for ’Shael’s sake. People kill to get power, they kill to keep power, and they kill if they think they might lose it, which is pretty much always. Even if you and I both stay out of it, even if we both die, whoever came after us will keep coming. They’ll find the next threat, the next worrisome voice, the next person with the wrong name or the wrong skin. Maybe they’ll go after the rich for their coin or the peasants for their rice, the Bascans because they’re too dark or the Breatans because they’re too pale—it doesn’t matter. People who will murder monks will murder anyone. I trained with bastards like this. They won’t back off because you give up. They’ll come on harder. Do you get that?”

Valyn fell silent, the words drying up as suddenly as they had come. He was panting, he realized. Blood slammed in his temples and his fingers had curled into fists so tight they hurt. Kaden was watching him, watching him the way you might watch a wild animal, wary and uncertain of its intent.

“We’ll find him,” Kaden said finally.

“Find who?”

“The Kettral leach. Balendin. The one who killed your friend. We’ll find him, and we’ll kill him.”

Valyn stared. “This isn’t about me,” he protested. “That’s my point.”

“I know,” Kaden replied. Somehow, the uncertainty had sloughed off of him. There was a distance in those burning eyes again, as though Valyn was seeing them from miles away. “I know it isn’t.”

They sat awhile, listening to a rockfall farther down the ridgeline. It sounded like a series of explosions, like Kettral munitions, only louder, boulders the size of houses loosened by winter ice losing their hold, shattering to pieces on the rocky slopes below.

“So,” Valyn said warily, “no more bullshit about sitting the fight out on a piece of rock in the middle of the mountains.”

Kaden shook his head.

“Good. Now what’s the plan?”

Valyn had heard it once already, the outlines at least, but he hoped to Hull that a day and a night had been enough for Kaden to change his mind. That hope shattered after a glance at his brother.

“The way I told you,” Kaden replied. “We split up. Tan and I go to the Ishien—”

“The Ishien,” Valyn said, shaking his head. “A group of monastics even more secretive and strange than your Shin monks. A cadre of fanatics that you’ve never even met.”