He was still miserable the next day, with brilliant stripes of scarlet down his nose, across the center of his brow, above the bones on either cheek. It looked agonizing, but Qanath didn’t argue when he suggested they move on. They set off north again along their lonely stretch of road, and while they walked, she wondered how exactly she meant to achieve her goals. She had been apprenticed to the last Avatethura Master, and now here she was, companion to his heir. Who, whatever protests he might make, very clearly had no problem with her presence.

How was that helping her, though? He had thawed toward her on a personal level but hadn’t changed his position on giving her what she wanted. He could teach her if he chose to; she’d watched him charge into battle half-dressed and half-asleep, outnumbered three to one, and at the end he’d stood there looking startled. Like it should have been more difficult.

She wouldn’t argue against his homecoming. He had a life held in abeyance, questions that needed to be asked and a score to settle. He carried inside him the spirit of primal vengeance, and only a total fool would set herself in its path. But if they walked back into his little kingdom to the cheers of a grateful populace and they handed him the throne, it left her in an odd position. In a children’s tale, they would fall in love along the course of their journey and get married and live happily ever after. If she was looking to get crowned the Queen of Bupkis, though, she was following the wrong man.

They had been walking for several hours when they entered a hillier area. The bones of the planet were frequently exposed along jagged cliff-faces where the land cut was by deep clefts. Where there was soil, the trees grew densely, pressing close to the road. The road itself twisted constantly, twining through the hills as best it could. It felt as if they had wandered into a secret world, all those distant horizons shrunk claustrophobically close.

Only maybe half an hour after they entered this area, what had perhaps been inevitable occurred. Lost in the tiny purple wildflowers climbing the nearly-sheer banks on either side of the road, Qanath didn’t note the sound of hooves. Havec took her sleeve, looking urgent.

His nerves infected her as she understood what was happening. Her companion had already come to a decision and set off trotting down the road with a meaningful nod. Grimacing, she grabbed the straps of her pack and took off after him. At first, she thought they were running without a plan, but then she noticed the percussion of moving water coming from ahead.

The hoof beats were practically upon them, maybe only a single bend behind, when they finally came around a curve in the road to find a steep-sided gulch. About eight or ten feet deep, a stream bounded furiously between its lips, and the road crossed it over a short span of bridge. Dragging Qanath behind him, Havec made for the eastern balustrade. The stone face of the stream bank was reassuringly solid and knobby with handholds, but slick with condensation and covered in a sheet of lichen as smooth and seamless as cloth.

He went over first, but she was only a step behind, moving fast and jittery with nerves. The instant she set her feet on the wet rocks, she slipped. It was sudden, unexpected, and by the time she knew she was falling, she had already landed spread-eagled on her belly on the rocks. As she fell, she kicked Havec in the shins and he fell too, weight slamming onto her. In a pile, the two of them slithered down the rock face, steep enough they were still practically standing up. They didn’t have far to fall, and a moment later, they slid to a stop.

Havec pushed himself off her the second they stopped moving, but took hold of her waist, pulling her up and then steering her back upstream. Qanath was too shocked to protest and in too much pain. She tripped, and one of her feet went into the water, but he didn’t let her fall. Once she was under the bridge, he released her. She sat down at once, hunched around her middle, arms crossed loosely across her chest. She was shaking, crying silently, and absolutely did not care she had an audience.

Her companion ducked beneath the shelter of the bridge right behind her, crouching in the stream’s verge with the low ceiling only just clearing his head. His face was rigid with tension, and he pulled her left arm away from her chest, palpating cautiously along her upper and lower arm as if searching for something. He had passed on to her bloody right hand by the time the riders arrived.

When the drumming of hooves above them dulled, Havec ducked out from under their shelter, one hand gripping the stone abutment as he leaned out, peering north. He held still for only a moment before returning to crouch at her feet. He made a beckoning gesture, whispering, “Leg.”

She extended a leg obediently, but asked, “What are you doing?”

“Checking for broken bones.”

“How?”

“There would be swelling.” He glanced at her face. “Trust me, I may not know much about medicine, but when it comes to broken bones, I could open my own clinic.”

Once he had assured himself that her limbs were sound, he sat back a little and gestured to her chest. “Why are you hunched over like that? Did you hurt your ribs?”

She pressed her lips together and shook her head. She lifted up enough of her dark blue shirt to expose an inch of her belly, scraped raw and bleeding. “It goes all the way up.”

He made no comment but took his pack off and dug out a spare shirt. It was only when he wet it in the stream and began dabbing carefully at her face that she realized it was bleeding too. It was on fire, but she hadn’t even noticed; the pain was as nothing to that of the flesh on her belly and breasts. The rock had scraped the length of her left cheek and deep into her chin. Once he had the blood cleaned off, he took her by the jaw and turned her head side-to-side, peering intently into her eyes. No longer bothering to whisper, he asked, “It looks like you hit your head, how does it feel? Are you dizzy?”

“How do you tell the difference between a head injury and being scared death?”

He only shook his head. Dunking the shirt again in the water, he wrung it out. Then he passed it over with the words, “I’ll let you deal with the rest.”

Moving a few feet down the stream, he rinsed his hands off carefully before sitting down and yanking up one leg of his pants. Qanath watched him splashing water on his abraded knee, thinking, You are very glad I’m here, aren’t you? She had looked right into his face just now as he checked her injuries, and he had been afraid.

It was, she decided, a start. Setting the wet shirt aside, she unbuttoned her shirt. Her torso almost looked as if she had been mauled, marred by multiple parallel gouges from breastbone to waist. Her bra had been torn in one place but was still good enough to serve. Thankfully: she didn’t have a spare.

As she cleaned the scrapes off, in order to distract herself from how much she hurt, she asked, “Who were they?”

“They looked like soldiers.”

His tone was incredulous, as if this were beyond belief. “Yeah?”

“A pair of men wearing shirts of overlapping bronze disks. High-crested helms with short visors to shield their eyes. Their clothing was bird’s-egg blue and rusty red. Same for the equipage. I saw no weapons, but I only got a look at them in profile for a second before they went around the bend.”

“Those do sound like soldiers.”

He didn’t look at her but turned his chin to the side so she could see his puzzled frown. “Real soldiers, from the army.”

She had no idea what else they might have been, riding this isolated route in matching armor, flying the Empire’s colors. “…yes?”

“Is it ordinary to have them riding around out here?”

“Well yeah.”

He cast another frown over his shoulder.

“What’s the point of civilization if people aren’t safe to use the roads? Barbarian.”

Havec didn’t rise. “It’s normal for them to patrol, even in outlying areas.”

“Yes. Obviously. Why are you so worried? It’s a good thing.”

He didn’t answer immediately, and she assumed this was because there was no answer. “I didn’t want to worry you…”

“But…?”

He was silent for another moment. “I thought I saw those guys again the other night.”

“Guys?”

“The ones we met by the stream.”

This was an alarming revelation. “When did you see them?”

“The first night we spent at the tower. I woke up around sunset and saw two riders on the road. The light wasn’t great, and I wasn’t about to get closer, but it looked like them. Whoever they were, they were riding slowly, definitely looking for something.” He cast his head back and forth, miming, craning his neck.

“You think that something was us.”

He let out a breath. “I can’t be sure and I have no idea why.”

Moving gingerly, she shrugged back into her shirt and buttoned it. She should probably be swathed neck to hips in bandages, but they didn’t have bandages, so she would just have to bleed. “You can turn around.”

Havec returned to the bridge, where he reached for his pack. As he knelt beside her, he asked, “What is that noise?”

“Noise?” She heard nothing but rushing water and the distant chirping of birds.

“It sounds almost like… singing?”

Qanath still didn’t hear anything, but she saw movement over his shoulder. When her eyes went that way, her heart stopped. Downstream from them, where the cataract went around a bend, the shoulders of the ravine sank enough to let the trees grow right down to the water. A creature had emerged from amidst their boles, a thing so horrifying it was hard to accept it could stand beneath the light of the sun without evaporating. It stood on two legs like a person, its scabrous flesh a mildewed green, its pate bald, its big ears bat-like. A stripe of wiry brown fur ran from its chin uninterrupted to its groin, which didn’t have obvious genitalia.

Havec had seen the expression on her face and stood, turning around to find out what she was looking at. “Can we help you?”