“The trees. How many are there?”

She shook her head, staring at the dark ranks of fir and pine. Even as she watched, the Urghul were slipping into the shadows between those trunks. Retreating, she realized. They were pulling back.

“I’ve no idea,” she said. “Why does it even—”

“Two thousand six hundred and eight, between the mouth of the river and the stone point.”

Adare stared.

“You’ve been counting trees this whole battle?”

He turned the empty pits of his eyes on her. “I don’t need to count them, Adare. That is what I have tried to tell you. This thing you call thought, call reason, this plodding, deliberative mental process—it is . . . unnecessary to my kind.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” she said. “Thought and reason were the essence of the Csestriim. All the histories agree.”

He bent his face into a smile. “Ah. The histories.” He raised a hand, held up two fingers. “How many?”

Adare stared. “What?”

“How many fingers am I holding up?”

She shook her head. “Two.”

“How do you know?”

“I just—”

“Did you count?”

“Of course not. I just . . . see them.”

The kenarang nodded. “In the same way, I just see”—he waved a hand at the slaughter taking place behind him—“all this.”

For a while all she could do was watch dumbly as the men screamed and the blood flowed. Il Tornja’s claim was too big, like being told there was another sky behind the sky.

“So we won?” she asked at last.

In an instant, the kenarang slipped back into his habitual wry smile. The horrifying emptiness drained from his eyes. “We?” he asked, amusement in his voice. “Yes, Your Radiance. We won.”

The words should have been a relief, but when she thought a moment about what they meant, about what this general of hers could do, about how tenuously Adare herself understood the kenning that bound him to her will, his victory seemed suddenly sharp and cold, a knife in the dead of winter pressed against her ribs.

48

The armies arrived too late.

Not too late to fight the Urghul—there was fighting aplenty when the legions and the Sons of Flame finally caught the horsemen between them, streets washed in blood, men and women locked in furious battle just about everywhere Valyn looked—but too late to make a difference for Gwenna and Talal.