He opened his mouth, paused, and shut it. They shared an easy grin.

He was such a good boy. She loved him so ferociously, for himself, first of all, and also for everything her beloved Aoving had gone through without losing the brilliance of a loving if fragile heart.

The moon hung fat and bright, a sliver away from being full, and appearing as a gauzy pearl suspended low in the east in the darkening heavens. No clouds marred the sky’s depths. The first stars hadn’t yet appeared. Rock pigeons crooned, although she couldn’t see them.

They picked their way up the slope toward the point of the promontory. The rocky ground was spotted with fragrant clumps of creeping juniper and straggling clusters of woolly speedwell. Partway across, the vegetation ended as if a line had been drawn. The promontory narrowed until it was barely more than an arm’s span wide, a dangerous ridge path. Kem didn’t falter as he followed her.

The perilous path led between an aisle of stone guardians who faced each other, in pairs. In most old tales, the statues were said to be all that remained of the dread armies of the wicked sorcerer-kings, petrified at the instant of a vast blasting spell that had wiped the sorcerer-kings from the world forever. Joef’s aunt favored the old poems, mostly fragments, that called these statues “the Shorn,” selfless volunteers who had offered to stand guard for eternity to make sure the sorcerer-kings never returned. Or maybe they were just decorative statues of incomparable appearance. Certainly the sculptors had lavishly depicted people of striking power, heroic warriors. Some were carved with armor or tabards and some with bared torsos, the better to display their musculature. But it was their heads that grabbed attention, because most bore the heads of beasts.

The beast heads were not fully animal but something blended, as if magic had fused the intelligence and beauty and power inherent in each animal to make each soldier stronger with the attributes of their guardian beast. A ram-headed man in lamellar armor. A tigerish woman wearing a headdress woven of stylized wheat and barley. A fierce rat soldier, eager to attack. A proud eagle-faced person whose seeming cape was really its folded wings.

Kem’s breathing tightened. It wasn’t only the lifelike nature of the guardians that troubled him, as if they might open their eyes at any moment and move to block the path.