The numbing properties of the ointment on the cut in her thigh were wearing off. She rubbed at the bandage, studying its interleaving, and tried to swallow her sense of failure, which grew worse to hear Arin defend her.

“I know,” Roshar said, “but our force is small enough as it is. We can’t be in two places at once. He’s going to move on Errilith. I don’t want to fight a defensive battle. We can’t afford it. If conflict happens here, we’d have the height of the hills, but they’ve got the numbers to fan out and flank us. What I liked about the plan of attacking them on the road was the chance to pen them in, to pin them down so that they can’t move.”

“Then trust her.”

Kestrel glanced up at Arin.

Roshar said, “Sending that coded letter was a desperate gamble.”

“It was her desperate gamble,” Arin said. “That’s why I think it will work.”

They were to break camp at dawn. Kestrel watched Arin dis appear among the supply wagons. She went to the river, washed the blood and sweat from her, then changed the shredded trousers, which had been the scout’s, for the pair she’d worn when she’d ridden south. She did not think very much. She watched leaves bend in the wind and show their pale underbellies. There was the rushing water. The cicadas’ metallic rasp.

She walked back to the center of camp.

Arin had set up a wet grinder and was, it seemed, going progressively through the spare arms stored in a wagon, inspecting each blade. He frowned at a sword and held it down at an angle to the grinder, setting its stone in motion. The sound was harsh.

Then his gaze flicked up. He saw her, and the grinder stopped.

She approached. “There are Dacran smiths in this camp. Other people can do this.”

“Not well enough.” He spread oil on the blade to polish it. His fingers glistened. “I like doing it.” Arin held out his oiled hand. “May I?”

For a moment she didn’t understand what he wanted, then she drew the dagger he’d made for her and gave it to him.

Arin looked it over—surprised, pleased. “You take good care of it.”

She took it back. “Of course I do.” Her voice was rough and wrong.

He peered at her. Friendly, he said, “Yes, of course. Is there a saying for it? ‘A Valorian always polishes her blade.’ Something like that.”

“I take care of it,” she said, suddenly both miserable and angry, “because you made it for me.” She hadn’t liked his surprise. She disliked herself for causing it, for the knitted confusion of her feelings, for the way she’d grown smaller to hear Arin defend her to Roshar, not simply because of the force of her sense of failure, but also because she’d asked Arin to trust her and now he did, unwaveringly, yet he’d asked her to love him and she offered nothing. She swung between the solid certainty of attraction and the apprehension of more.

I love you, she’d told her father. A plea, an apology, and also simply itself: eighteen years of love. Was it really nothing? So worthless?

Yes, it had been. She’d seen this when her father had lifted her clutching hands and pushed her away. She’d seen it in the dirt floor of her prison cell. Heard it in the sound of her soiled dress ripped open along its back.

She thought of the hawk, which must have winged its way to her father by now. She imagined it slewing around trees, dropping down. Talons closing around his upraised fist. Her father unrolling the coded message. The trap she’d set for him.

Walk into it, she willed.

You have a mind for strategy, he’d said once.

Come see, then.

See what I can do to you. See what you have done to me.

“Kestrel.” Arin’s voice was hesitant. She realized how she must look. Hand clenched on the dagger’s hilt, a storm in her face. When he started to speak, she cut him off. “Do you have more of that salve?”

“Oh.” He fumbled under the leather apron he wore over his clothes and pulled the small pot from his pocket. “I should have given it to you earlier. I . . . was distracted. I forgot.”

She took it and left.

Usually she enjoyed her tent. It was private, which made her recall that she’d always felt watched, before the prison. In the capital, certainly. Even in Herran, when it had been a colony. Privacy was a relief. The circle of rough canvas cocooned her. It glowed or dimmed with the passage of the sun.

Now, however, as she heard the noises of camp (people talking in two different languages; horses and birds and insects and the brrr of the grinder), she felt as she had on the first day Arin had pitched her tent: lonely.