Her heart pumped unstoppably, as though held in a great warm hand.

Shivering took her, and she tried to pull up the thin, itchy blanket, then realized that she was naked. Alarmed, she started to sit up, then subsided against the mattress, as though she were a puppet and someone had silently, almost tenderly, snipped all her strings.

“We had to cut off your clothes,” a voice said, gravelly and indifferent.

Adare turned her head to find a man—dark skin, close-cropped hair—seated on a wooden chair in the shadows. Lehav, she thought idly. His name was Lehav.

“They were burned, singed to your skin in places.”

Her skin burned, a bright sensation, clean, not entirely unpleasant.

“What . . .” She trailed off, raising a hand, then letting it drop.

“Lightning,” Lehav replied. “At the Everburning Well.”

The Well. Memory leaked in: faces, light, endless rain. A cool long spear heavy in her hand. Why was the Well on fire? What was she doing there?

“You’re lucky,” Lehav continued. “I saw lightning hit three of my men down in the Waist—storms down there make this look like a clear day—saw it from thirty paces off. One minute they were standing on a small rise, the next . . .” He stared out the window. “Burned them black, all three of them. They were dead before they hit the ground. When I tried to pick them up, to carry them back to camp, the skin just sloughed off.”

Lightning. Adare lifted the blanket to look at her own body. She felt as though she’d been hurled from a great height, as though she were still falling, or else not falling at all, but at the very moment of striking the earth, the terrible impact infinitely extended. Fire laced her flesh. Angry red lines, thin as hairs, graceful as lace, swooped and whorled over the curves of her skin, a delicate, indelible brand left by the lightning. The lines looked like seams, felt like seams, as though she was nothing but heat trapped inside skin, a burning light ready to burst free.

Adare dropped the blanket, and Lehav’s words swam back into focus. The vision of his dead soldiers tugged at her, mixed with her own reluctant fragments of memory. The story seemed impossibly sad, tragic. She wondered how he handled the guilt, then realized there was no guilt. Lightning came from the sky. Lehav couldn’t stop it. It wasn’t as though he’d killed the soldiers himself. Why was she crying? It wasn’t as though she’d served in the Waist. She hadn’t seen her men—

The full memory lashed across her mind like a whip, so vicious that she cried out.

Lehav was out of his chair and across the space in an instant, his cool dry hands on her forehead, then checking her pulse.