He sat at the edge of the wood for long hours, while the storm brewed and clouds engulfed the sky. Winds began to send dry leaves skittering from the trees. As evening neared, the clouds hurled bolts of lightning through the heavens. Rain fell thick, unrelenting.

Borenson drew a blanket over his head and wondered about Myrrima, back in Bannisferre. She had three Dedicates—her witless mother and two ugly sisters. They’d given up much to unite the family, to win their fight against poverty. Myrrima had told Borenson, on the trip to her house, how her father had died.

“My mother was raised in a manor, and had endowments of her own,” she said. “And my father was a man of wealth, at one time. He sold fine clothes in the market, made winter coats for ladies. But a fire burned his shop, and his coats burned with him. All the family gold must have burned in that fire, too, for we never found any of it.”

It was a proud way to say that her father had been murdered, killed in a robbery.

“My grandfather is still alive, but he has taken a young wife who spends more than he brings in.”

Borenson had wondered what she was getting at, until she whispered part of an old adage. “Fortune is a boat . . .” on a stormy sea, which rises and falls with each mountainous wave.

Myrrima, he’d realized, had been telling him that she did not trust fortune. Though their arranged marriage might seem fortunate at the moment, it was only because, for the moment, they crested the wave, and she feared that at any second her little boat would crash down deep in some trough, perhaps be submerged forever.

That was how Borenson felt now, submerged, drowning, hoping to keep afloat. The whole notion of sending one man to storm a Dedicates’ Keep was a long shot. In all probability, Borenson would arrive at the keep, find it well guarded, and have to retreat.

But he knew, he knew, that even if he had only a slim chance of breaking into the keep, he’d have to take it.

When the storm passed that evening, he still sat unmoving, listening to the stealthy water dripping from trees, the creaking of branches in the wind. He smelled the leaf mold, the rich soil of the forest, the clean scent of the land. And ashes.

Murdering Dedicates did not sit well with him. Borenson tried to harden his resolve for long hours, imagining how it might be—climbing the walls in the escalade, battling guards.

Borenson imagined riding into the castle, going to the gates of the Dedicates’ Keep, and riding down any defenders, then discharging his duty.

Such an attack would seem heroic, would likely get him killed. He wanted to do it, to finish this horrible task. He would have gladly made a suicide charge, if not for Myrrima.