“What does it feel like?” Kaden asked finally. “The grief, I mean.”

Valyn tried to make sense of the question. “For Father?”

“For anyone.”

Valyn shook his head. “You tell me. You just saw your entire monastery destroyed.”

“I did,” Kaden replied, not taking his eyes from the darkness. “I did. There was a little boy, Pater . . . I watched as Ut stabbed him through the chest.”

“So why are you asking me about grief? Seems like there’s plenty to go around.”

“I’m asking because the monks train it out of you. I felt it when Pater died, felt like my legs might just give way beneath me, but now . . .” He shook his head slowly. “You learn to set it aside, to move past it.”

“Sounds like a ’Kent-kissing blessing to me,” Valyn replied, more bitterly than he’d intended. Just the memory of Ha Lin’s limp body as he carried her from the Hole, of the wounds running down her arms, of her hair brushing his skin, made his breath stick in his chest. “Sometimes, when I think about it too much, I feel like my muscles have torn clean off the bones, like someone snapped all the tendons and ligaments holding me together. I wish I could move past it.”

“Maybe,” Kaden replied. “And maybe it’s not real if you can toss it aside like a cracked cup.”

“Fuck real,” Valyn spat. Blood throbbed at his temples. His knuckles ached. Memories flooded over him: of Balendin laughing as he recounted Lin’s torment on the West Bluffs, of blood gushing from the knife in Salia’s neck, of Yurl groveling in front of him in the darkness, hands lopped from his arms. He would have yanked the bastard back from death, out of Ananshael’s iron grip, just so he could stab him again and again, a thousand times over, so he could split his skull open. . . .

Breath rasped in his lungs. Sweat streamed down his back, cold in the cold night air. Kaden was staring at him, he realized, eyes wide with confusion or concern.

“Are you all right?” he asked. “Valyn?”

Valyn focused on his brother’s eyes, on his voice, vision and sound braided into a cord that was drawing him up, up from the bottom of a deep well where he had been drowning.

“I’m all right,” he said finally, voice ragged, wiping his brow with a sleeve.

“You don’t look it.”

Valyn chuckled grimly. “ ‘All right’ is relative.”

He started to say something more, a few more words to ease the tension, when something, the faintest sound at the very edge of hearing, brought him up short. Kaden stared at him.

“What is—”