Gwenna’s head throbbed. She’d been up all night fighting, running, flying, feeling, most of the time, half a heartbeat away from a knife in the neck. It was a relief to be free, finally. A relief not to be dead. She was ready to fly some more, or ride some more, or even to fight some more, but the thing she just couldn’t take was talking anymore, especially when all the talk led nowhere, twisting back on itself until she wasn’t even sure which end was up.

“Valyn can kill il Tornja,” she said, sick with frustration, “and someone else can fucking defeat Long Fist. Doesn’t Annur have five ’Kent-kissing generals?”

“Ten,” the Flea replied, “if you include their seconds, but they’re children next to il Tornja. I swear, that bastard is smarter than Hendran and twice as ruthless. If Long Fist breaks past the border, we’ll need il Tornja if we ever hope to bottle him up again. As Newt says, ‘Killing is easier than unkilling.’ ”

“So what’s the play?” Annick asked. She was staring into the trees to the northeast, as though she could see all the way to the approaching mass of Urghul. If her recent captivity bothered her, she didn’t show it. Always the mission, with Annick, and to Hull with normal human things like emotions. “What do we do?”

The Flea spread his hands. “Not a whole great pile of choices that I can see. Long Fist’s already crossed north of the confluence, which means he just needs to get across the Black. There are no garrisons out here because even if he gets across it, he’s still on the wrong side of the Thousand Lakes.”

“So he’s screwed, right?” Gwenna asked. “Even without the garrisons, given the terrain, he’s totally buggered.”

Sigrid made a disgusted sound and walked off across the meadow toward the bird.

Newt watched her for a while, whistling tunelessly between his crooked teeth, then turned back to Gwenna. “A net,” he said, “is not a wall.”

“What he means,” the Flea said, “is that the lakes are just lakes. Lakes and bogs. There’s a lot of them, and it’d be a bitch trying to move an army through, especially an army on horseback, but that’s not to say it can’t be done if you have the right maps and a few dozen good scouts.”

Gwenna stared. “So why aren’t there any garrisons there?”

The Flea shrugged. “Lot of frontier. Not so many soldiers. The Urghul never had a chief like Long Fist, so we never bothered worrying about one.”

“This is edifying,” Pyrre said, “but I can’t help feeling as though we’ve strayed from the original—”