“Would it have made a difference?” he said.

“Yes.”

“How?” he snapped. He rose to his feet and towered over me. “Either you have what it takes to beat Rodric or you don’t. And I wouldn’t be helping you if I didn’t think you could do it, because believe me, I’m the only person who wants Rodric dead more than you do.”

There was so much fire behind his words. I took a step back. “Why?”

He pushed his hands against his forehead. He kept them cradled there as he spoke. “Because he killed my brother.”

I realized my mouth was hanging open, and I shut it. Hadn’t Rodric said as much when Dimic and I were cornered in the alleyway? I hadn’t known Dimic was Cion’s brother then, and I hadn’t given the conversation much thought afterward. Rodric killed a lot of Desert Boys. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t even know what you’re sorry for.” Cion slowly slid down the wall, the anger gone from his body. He just looked tired. “You don’t even know what he did or how cowardly he did it.”

He buried his face in his hands.

I knelt down on the floor. I didn’t know if I should reach out to him or if that would somehow make things worse.

“Rodric started out like the rest of us,” Cion’s muffled voice sounded from between his hands. He let them fall onto his lap. His eyes were unfocused. “He was a street orphan with no place to go. His parents had both been killed by the plague. We took him in. He showed more skill with a sword than most. He and I were the only ones Cintric gave private lessons to. It drove Rodric crazy that I was better than him though, that I became his trainer when Cintric left me in charge. But he was the best guard any of our caravans ever had.” He paused. “At least until he started stealing from them himself.

“At first, we wrote it off as misplaced goods. Things sometimes get blown away in sandstorms, but more and more items started going missing. I actually enlisted Rodric to help me catch the thief. That’s how much I trusted him.” Cion leaned back, clenching his jaw so the muscles stood out.

“About a month later, my brother Remy saw Rodric stealing from the caravans. When Remy reported it to me, Rodric called him a liar and said I was standing by my brother simply because he was family.

“I saw it then, the anger and jealousy that drove him. I knew Remy had to be right. Rodric had often spoken of how we should keep more goods for ourselves, how we could use the money to build our own army to take down the king. He would say that the desert had chosen us, and it clearly wanted us to rule. None of us loved the king and the poverty he forced on us, but I didn’t want a war that would cost the lives of the rest of the Desert Boys, so I ignored it. Even from the start, the Desert Boys had always been about helping people, not about war.