He kept saying her name. He was begging her to wake up. The same words spilled out of him over and over. He wasn’t even sure what he was saying anymore as he came into her cell and touched her cheek and, when she still didn’t wake, shifted her body up. Her head tipped back. She slept. Some part of Arin warned that he was going to have to slap her, that she must wake up, and then another part recoiled at the thought. He wouldn’t, he never would, he would kill the person who would.

“Kestrel?” He couldn’t even shake her frail shoulders. “Kestrel?”

Her eyes cracked open. He caught his breath. She came awake more fully, and saw him.

He hadn’t allowed himself, before, to consider the possibility that she’d be like the other prisoners, that her mind would be gone, that there’d be no life in her eyes and her face would be drained of every thing that made her who she was.

She wasn’t like that. She wasn’t, and as Arin watched her blink and take him in, and saw the mind behind her gaze, he was grateful. The gratitude came hot and flowing: a prayer of thanks to his gods. He cupped her face between his hands—too rough.

Or he believed he must have been too rough, because she recoiled. He was afraid he’d hurt her. But she narrowed her eyes in the wan light, studying him. He saw her confusion, couldn’t translate it.

She whispered, “Who are you?”

Arin didn’t understand until she asked her question again.

Understanding arrowed into him.

She had no memory of him. She truly had no idea who he was.

Chapter 8

They stumbled over the tundra. He saw how unnaturally drowsy she was. Her ankles sometimes folded beneath her, as if her body was made of stuffed cloth and she was forcing it to move out of sheer will.

“Lean on me,” he said. She did, but he could tell that she didn’t like it.

“Just a bit farther,” he said.

Eventually, he carried her. In the green-cast dark, she slept against his chest.

Arin’s legs were slick with mud when he reached the shores of the lake where he’d left Ilyan and the horses. Arin saw what was left of the camp. His knees nearly buckled. He swore.

Kestrel woke. He set her gently down. Then he crouched, burying his face in his hands.

Ilyan’s half-eaten corpse had been dragged from the tent. The horses were gone.

Wolves. Arin remembered hearing them howl the night before. His palms slid from his face. He tried not to think about the terror and pain of Ilyan’s death, and how this, too, was his fault. He tried not to think about how long it would take without horses to cover the tundra and the mountains that led into Herran. Kestrel’s condition . . .

He glanced at her. The poverty of her frame. The wariness with which she regarded him, the way she was doing so even now.

“They might have survived,” he said, meaning the horses. He was speaking quickly. “They’d have run. They’d stay together.”

She looked like she might ask something, then her face hardened in suspicion and Arin was certain that the only reason she had come with him was because he was a better option than a prison cell.

He turned. There was no high ground from which to see. The tundra night was light enough to see Kestrel’s face, but too murky to spot three horses wandering—how far away?

Much too far.

If they were there at all.

“Javelin!” he called. The horses were good, but only one of them was intelligent enough to come when called—if Javelin could. Arin didn’t know. He’d never heard of a horse doing that, not from out of sight, not without the bribe of a treat.

Arin thought they were far enough from the camp, and he’d left most of the guards unconscious—maybe dead. He hadn’t taken any care with how deeply he’d driven the ring’s stinger. Still, he and Kestrel might have been followed. Shouting wasn’t smart.

Arin looked at her. She was fighting sleep.

He called again. “Javelin!”

He made himself hoarse. He walked as far away from Kestrel as he dared, shouting for the horse. Finally, he came back to her and knelt in the mud where she sat. “Call him,” Arin said. “He’ll come if you call.”

“Who will come?”

He realized that nothing he’d said provided any context to understand who and what Javelin was if someone didn’t already know. He realized that he’d been hoping that she hadn’t meant it, in the prison, when she’d asked who Arin was and looked at him like he was a dangerous stranger. Part of him had believed that she was pretending not to know him in order to wound him, because he deserved it, and it was clear how much she should hate him now.