As always, he could hear a thousand sounds, could feel the ten thousand strands of the air itself eddy around his scrabbling fingers, but there was more. His mind remained dark, but there were . . . layers to the darkness, shapes that were not shapes, form etched into the formless void left by his stolen sight.

Hemlock boughs?

Rotted pine?

The swift flick of a bat’s wing in passage?

He didn’t see them—there was nothing to see in the unending dark—he knew them.

Bruised and baffled, he tested the wound at his side. It continued to weep blood. It should have killed him, but he was not dead.

“How?” he demanded of the darkness.

No reply, just the slap of chop on the rock, the leaves shifting in the breeze, and beneath, the distant sobbing and cries left behind by the battle.

“How?” he demanded again, forcing himself to his feet.

As if in reply, threaded on the wind: the long, low cry of the owl.

Valyn closed his eyes and breathed. The wound at his side stretched, then tore, but he kept breathing in, hauling the cold night air into his lungs until he felt that he would burst, tasting it as it passed his tongue, drawing it through his nose, in and in, sifting the smells.

Moss and rotted leaves, balsam and wet rock, dead fish farther off, and smoke and steel and thousands of gallons of blood slicked on the lake. Deeper. Horseflesh, dead and alive, vomit and piss, festering wounds . . . Deeper. A thousand thousand hair-thin strands shifting and tangling until . . .

There.

Leather and sweat. Whisper of nitre. Anger.

Gwenna.

Copper and steel, wet wool and wariness.

Talal.

Blood and cold, resin and steel.

Annick.

Alive. All three. Though how he knew he could not say.

Lungs burning, he blew out the great breath, sagging into a pine’s jagged limbs.

When he had the strength, he tried a step, another, then tripped on an unseen snag and pitched forward. Pain like lightning up his arm. He stood again, stumbled a few steps, knew too late a tree stood in his way even as the broken branch bit into his shoulder, tossing him to the uneven ground.

It was pointless. The whole fucking thing was pointless. He couldn’t smell anyone, not at this distance. Certainly couldn’t sort his own Wing from the scents scribbled across his mind. He couldn’t see. His eyes were gone.

“You’re losing your mind,” he screamed, heedless of who might hear. “You don’t even know how to die.” His eyes wept hot blood. “Quit with the fucking bullshit. Just quit! Just lie down!”

Again, the owl’s cry.

He listened to it fade, then shook his head.

“I’m done,” he said dully, the rage gone, snuffed out. Everything hurt. Everything wanted to quit. His hands hung wooden and useless at his sides. “I’m through getting up. I’m done.”