Valyn raised his head from the mud, then let it fall. How he had washed up on the shore of the lake he couldn’t say. He remembered swimming, his body going through the dumb bestial motions that had been trained into the fibers of his muscle, remembered floating when he was too tired to swim, then swimming some more. Why, he had no idea. Habit. Stubbornness. Cowardice.

He raised a trembling hand toward his eyes, desperate for the truth and terrified of it. The pain burned so bright he could almost see by it. He could endure the pain, but at the thought of a life lived in darkness—constant, unrelieved darkness blacker than the deepest pit of Hull’s Hole—his heart quailed.

He slid the tips of his fingers over his eyes, yanked back at the stabbing pain, then forced his hand to the wound once more. The gash started at his temple and sliced clean across both eyes and the bridge of his nose. The skin wept blood and, when he steeled himself enough to test the eyeballs, he found that they were cut cleanly as half-sliced eggs. He jerked his hand away once more, rolled onto his side, vomited into the mud, and lay still.

Fir needles sifted the wind.

Smoke, thick and sickening.

A twist in his innards where Adare had planted the knife.

Though she had torn the blade free, he could feel the queasy shift of his own slick viscera.

“Might as well know the worst,” he muttered. His own words felt lighter than ash in his ears, sounded like something already dead.

Fingers slick with blood, he probed the wound, driving his hand in past the second knuckle, pushing through skin and muscle, hunting the worst until he passed out, darkness in his mind rising up to meet the great, encircling dark beyond.

When he came to, he knew he was going to die.

The contours of his wound were wrong. There was too much blood. The steel had sliced thin walls that were not to be sliced. He drew the knowledge around him like a warm cloak, closed bloody lids over the ruin of his eyes, and slept.

Cold.

Low call of an owl.

Dark beyond dark.

“Come on, ’Shael,” he muttered, teeth chattering. “Come on.”

Ananshael’s absence.

His whole body shaking, Valyn hauled himself from the frigid mud.

“There’s got to be a warmer place to die,” he groaned, crawling forward on hands and knees, groping blindly for some pile of leaves and needles, some swath of moss where he could lie down, finally, and quit.

No, he realized with a sudden shock. Not blindly.