Adare stood on the docks all morning staring south, staring until her eyes ached with the strain, a stone settling in her stomach every time they pulled another sodden body from the water. She could tell, even half a mile distant, whether the corpse belonged to a logger or to one of the Urghul. The horsemen were stripped of valuables, then tossed unceremoniously into the hold to be burned ashore later—no sense dragging the same corpse out of the water a dozen times. The dead of Andt-Kyl, however, were laid gently on the decking. The living fishermen hovered over them, as though they were spirits slipping clear of the wet flesh. Adare couldn’t hear anything at that distance, but from the angle of the heads, the stillness of the poses, she could imagine them praying.

She had tried to pray herself.

Intarra, she began, over and over, Lady of Light, please . . .

That same invocation, again and again. She never got any further. There was no way to know if the goddess was listening, if she cared, if she was even real, but none of that was the obstacle, not the true obstacle. There was always doubt in matters of faith, doubt that had never before, even at Adare’s most skeptical, stopped her from praying. No, the reason she could not finish her prayer here, now, staring out over the blue-gray waves of the lake, watching the men in the small boats haul up struggling fish and the calm, unstruggling dead, was not a problem of the goddess, but of Adare herself. She couldn’t end the prayer because she didn’t know what to pray for.

Her brother was dead. She had killed him, or helped to. Valyn, she said silently, the name like a nail lodged in her mind. He was her brother, and she had killed him. The truth scalded, but it was the truth, and so, rather than turning away from the lake, rather than burying herself in the thousands of other matters that needed her attention, rather than drinking until she dropped, or talking until she forgot, or working with her hands until exhaustion delivered her into sleep, she stood at the end of the dock, rehearsing what she had done, saying over and over the name of a dead brother, trying and failing to pray.

“Your Radiance.”

Lehav’s voice behind her. The scuff of his boots on the wooden dock. She closed her eyes, measured out the last moments of her solitude in his approaching steps.

“The town?” she asked, when he paused at her shoulder. “Do they know yet how many died?”

“It’s a mess,” he replied grimly. “It’s hard to know anything. Maybe half.”

Half a town killed. Was that a victory, against the might of an Urghul army? A failure?

“What about the Sons?”

“We took a beating. Not as bad as the Army of the North. I heard you were atop the signal tower.”