The questions were repetitive but straightforward. Why did they flee the Islands? How many men died in the mountains? What happened to the monks? On and on and on, while the noose around her neck chafed with each breath, each movement. The Flea didn’t do much talking of his own, and his face didn’t give much away. He frowned at the possible implication of Daveen Shaleel in the plot, and again when Gwenna told him what she knew about the connection between Balendin and il Tornja. There were dozens of questions that didn’t seem relevant at all—What color was Adiv’s blindfold? What had the Urghul fed them? Gwenna answered those, too. It was a strange sort of relief, after so many weeks of confusion, not to have to figure anything out, to let someone else do the thinking, to tell what she knew without trying to fit the broken pieces together.

“So,” she said, when the Flea fell silent at last, “you going to kill me?”

He considered her for a while before responding. “I hope not, Gwenna.” He looked tired. “I hope not.”

Evidently, the stories squared. At least, that was how Gwenna interpreted her sudden freedom. After spending the better part of an hour tied to the tree, trying pointlessly to slip out of the Flea’s knots, she had watched helplessly as the Wing leader returned, nodded, then slit the ropes with a few quick cuts. Annick was similarly freed, although things didn’t look as rosy for Pyrre. Gwenna had no love for the woman, but it came as a shock to see her hauled into the small clearing trussed tighter than a pig for the slaughter, Newt’s knife at her throat. The Kettral had treated her more roughly than they had Gwenna or Annick. Bruises purpled her face, her nose looked broken, and her left eye had swollen shut. Despite the injuries, she managed a wink at Gwenna when Newt deposited her on the uneven ground.

Sigrid hacked up something that might have been a laugh or a cough. Even after the fight in the Urghul camp, even after spending the end of the night strapped in to the bird’s talons, the woman looked as though she had stepped directly into the forest from some aristocrat’s ball. Gwenna’s blacks were mud-caked, blood-soaked, and torn ragged. The other Kettral looked just about the same, even the Flea. Sigrid’s clothes, on the other hand, might have come straight from the laundress, cloth so immaculately dark it looked like velvet. Only her arms, crisscrossed with dried blood and scar, suggested the violence she had just seen and wrought. She opened her mouth again in a guttural stutter, then pointed at Pyrre.

Newt nodded thoughtfully as he picked at some scab beneath his scraggly beard.

“What?” the Flea asked.