Fear flickered in her lungs. Her mind felt sore. Though it was dizzying to not know so much, a shrinking thing inside her warned that it’d be much worse to remember. “Leave me alone.”

“Don’t you want to know what happened? Why you were there?”

She saw his naked misery. She suspected that any explanation he could provide was more for his sake than hers.

She wanted to shove him off his horse. Make him feel how it was to fall. She was falling, she was plunging through the black nothingness of why and how, she was terrified of what she had forgotten. She blamed him for not seeing her fear even as she was determined to hide it. “All right,” she said. “Go ahead. Tell me why.”

For all his earlier persistence, he now didn’t seem to know where to begin. “You were a spy. You were caught.”

“Your spy?”

“Not exactly.”

“Close enough. So that’s why you came for me. That’s why you want me to remember. That’s what you want from me: information.”

“No. Kestrel, we—”

“If we’re friends, how did we meet?”

His mare tossed her head. He was drawing the reins too tight. “In the market.”

“That’s where, not how.”

He swallowed. “You—”

But she glimpsed the market, the dusty heat of it. She heard a crowd roar and remembered seeing his unscarred face looking at her, his features taut with hatred.

“Where are you taking me?” she whispered.

Now he saw the fear. She saw him see it. He stopped his horse. Her horse stopped, too. He reached to touch her. She flinched away. “Kestrel.” There it was again: his inexplicable hurt. “I’m taking you home.”

“You know what I think? I think that you could be taking me anywhere. I think that you do want something from me. I think that you are a liar.”

She spurred Javelin ahead.

He let her go. He knew that she needed him to survive on the tundra. She couldn’t go far.

She glanced down at the horse moving beneath her. Javelin. This horse was hers. His name felt right. Little else did.

The pink sun lowered in the sky. Mosquitoes rose from the mud. As she rode alongside him, her horse seemed to grow larger and higher. She wasn’t doing well.

He asked if she was hurt. After she said that she wasn’t, he asked again. “Maybe your memory . . .” he trailed off, and she couldn’t stand how hopeful he looked, as if some head injury was the desired cause of every thing. His searching gaze made her want to snarl like an animal.

By sunset, her body had become almost uncontrollable. The need had been building all day, shuddering inside her. Her stomach cramped. She had the faint certainty that she must have been trained to ride well or she would have already dropped off her horse.

He saw it. He kept slowing the pace even though she could tell that he wanted to push farther. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

She didn’t want to admit that she craved a drug that she’d been forced to take. He guessed it anyway. He nodded, and said, “They gave it to me, too, yesterday.” Then she really hated him, for guessing, and for thinking he understood the clawing desire for something he’d only tasted once.

She kept going until she couldn’t see straight and her stomach was wobbling, heaving. Finally, he grabbed her horse’s bridle and dragged them both to a stop.

She was sick all over the tundra’s moss and bracken. He held her hair away from her face. Some part of her that apparently cared didn’t know how he could stand to touch her. He wasn’t clean, but she was beyond filthy.

He gave her water. She swished it, spat it out, drank, then eyed the canteen in her shaking fingers. She appreciated that he’d come well supplied—for three people, even—but he kept producing things she needed, and packing them away when she didn’t, and building fires and leading the way and doing every thing, that she almost wished he wouldn’t.

“Why don’t you hold on to that.” He nodded at the canteen.

Her fingers tightened around it. “Don’t condescend to me.”

He touched his scar. “I didn’t mean to.”

She got back on her horse. “Let’s go,” she told him.

Nightfall presented a new set of issues.

“There’s only one tent.” He cleared his throat. “But there are three bedrolls.” He waited—to see, she thought, if she’d insist that he sleep outside, but she felt that that would be admitting too much, even as she refused to consider exactly what she would be admitting. So she gave him a curt nod.