Havec paused, turning to look at him while he thought it over. “Two. No more.”

“Counting me or not?”

Some color finally returned to his cheeks. “I was including you in my party.” He turned his eyes away hastily as the man made for the door, as if he didn’t wish to be caught watching him. “And you?”

The sorcerer was a few steps down from him on the stairs, Arandgwail in human form on his heels. As he pushed past, he said wryly, “Unless you mean to leave Siva Qanath behind, I feel as though I’ve already made my priorities clear.”

When the two of them had moved on, she joined Havec on the stair, and they made their way up to their room. While he went to the stand by the mirror to pick up his toothbrush and razor, he said, “I’ve been telling you to go away from the first, however insincerely, and you’ve been ignoring me for just as long. So I just assumed you’d want to come. You don’t have to, though, it’s not your fight.”

“I feel like I ought to see this through.”

While Qanath gathered her scattered clothing off the furniture and floor, she said, “I talked to your mother, you know. After you left.”

“Oh?”

“She went on about how hard life is in your country and how a ruler has to make the difficult choices for her people. If you’re right about this…”

“She’s even more of a monster than we thought?”

“Yeah.”

He straightened suddenly and turned to her. “On an unrelated note, I suppose you were waiting for the right time to tell your own problematic mother about your plan to train with Xar?”

“I sent her a letter right before we left. So backing down or failing were things I couldn’t do.”

He looked at her, eyes troubled, and she thought he meant to speak. Then he shook his head and crouched again over his pack. It was another minute before they had all their things assembled and were making their way downstairs. They descended into a world where panicked whispers had been replaced by quiet industry; one step out the door, they found horses already waiting, the staff from the inn burdening them with food and supplies. The soldier-priest hadn’t spoken idly.

He was out there already, dressed for winter travel, marshaling the servants and soldiers making ready. Qanath paused on the stoop to watch him, wondering how much she liked the man. He had attached himself to their party without ever being issued an invitation so far as she had noticed, and now he seemed to think he was in charge. She glanced at Havec, but he was already moving forward toward the horse awaiting him, the animal he stole from the mountain house. He didn’t appear to be equally annoyed, and with Havec, it was easy to tell when he was mad, because someone would have a bloody nose.

Amril emerged from the inn, almost bumping into her where she lingered on the stoop. Someone had found him a coat in the intervening minutes, a huge padded affair with fur around the hood. His familiar followed him as usual, still in human form, looking more overtly supernatural than he usually did because he wasn’t bundled up against the cold. Muttering a hasty apology, Qanath cleared the way.

The gray horse with black hair waited amongst the others, and she made for it, hoping it was the right thing to do. Havec caught sight of her and seemed to read her unease, because he stopped what he was doing and came over. She tensed in anticipation, but this time he didn’t pick her up and throw her at the horse: he took it by the bridle and explained how she could get up there herself. She did as instructed, although it took her several tries to make it onto its back. The gray was small in comparison to the others, but the animal was still massive.

The soldiers who would be accompanying them showed up at this point, and Qanath had to fight to hide her dismay; she had been counting on the skill and savvy of experienced warriors to help them see this through. What was left of the garrison, though, wasn’t much. The two companions Havec had stipulated were a woman so old she ought to be in retirement and a boy so young he must have needed his parents’ permission to enlist. The one had dentures; the others’ face was covered in spots. She sighed inside, wondering just how much of a hindrance their ‘assistance’ was going to be.

All was in readiness and there was no more sense in worrying: it was time to leave. Quite a lot of the town had spilled back into the square for the second time that day in order to see them off. The mood was decidedly subdued among the people who had turned out to wish them luck, and Qanath had the suspicion they would have forbidden them to leave if they believed it was their place. If his own mother was responsible for this barbarous act of war, it was easy to see why Havec would feel implicated, but hunting her down and bringing her to justice was a task that frankly anyone could do.

Havec would do what he would do, though. As usual, the choices were to help him or get out of his way. The murmuring crowd that had turned out to bid him god speed didn’t cheer as he kicked his mount into motion, but didn’t attempt to call him back. A number of people tossed bushels of dried flowers or herbs in their path to be crushed beneath their horses’ hooves. Mostly in silence, the seven of them passed out through the gates.

They rode without speaking along the last mile of Imperial soil and began to climb. As they approached the ridgeline, Havec said suddenly, “Now, I’m assuming there won’t be an attack here based on this diabolical scheme I dreamed up. If I get shot full of arrows before we reach the shelter of the trees, you’ll know I was wrong.”

It was a joke, but the rest of them were too tense to laugh. Qanath had entirely forgotten there could very well be a barbarian war band lurking just out of sight amongst the trees and watched them draw close with her heart in her throat. In spite of her fears, they crossed the border without event, moving forward over the crest of the hill into a silent world. If you knew to look for it, you could still make out, beneath the freshly-fallen snow, the channel she and Havec plowed on their hectic dash to safety.

The rest of the day passed in uneasy quiet, the members of their party occupied with their thoughts and with watching the woods fearfully. It turned out that their escort hadn’t been chosen because there were no better options: the old woman was the best tracker within fifty miles, the boy an apprentice she had been training since he was old enough to walk. On two separate occasions, Moida made them swing wide around a settlement before they had perceived that it was there. It quickly became apparent they were acquainted with the terrain on the wrong side of the border, as if they crossed into foreign territory frequently to scout or poach. The soldier-priest caught Qanath and Amril exchanging looks over that but made no attempt to justify it. If the Scolate’s leaders along this stretch of border had entertained concerns about their northern neighbors, they had just been vindicated.

Havec paid the rest of them little attention, following their guides obediently with his eyes fixed inward. At one point, Qanath found herself riding alongside the soldier-priest, who looked weirdly martial to her eyes, actually wearing his armor and carrying sword, spear, and bow. She had assumed he was primarily a man of faith, his membership in the army’s ranks honorary, but the way he handled his weapons made her rethink. She had left her slender wooden pole behind in their room, since the only person she was likely to injure with it was herself.

She watched him for a while, and he never felt her gaze. His eyes were fixed unswervingly on Havec, and they were green. After as much as an hour of this, she said softly, careful her voice didn’t carry, “Does he know what you’re doing?”

The man turned to her, startled to be addressed, and when he blinked at her, his eyes returned to their natural brown. “I’m sorry?”

“When you look at him with your goddess’s eyes, does he know what you’re doing? He’s spent years in our country, but he has huge,” she gestured in frustration, “swaths of ignorance, you can’t just assume he knows what’s going on.”

He only looked at her, head cocked, as if he didn’t understand why she’d brought this up.

“You need to explain it to him. If you don’t, I will.”

The soldier-priest frowned at her, then said simply, “As you will.” With a click of his tongue, he moved away from her, pushing forward to fall in at Havec’s side. He began to speak to her friend immediately, canted toward him in the saddle, voice pitched low so that no one else could hear. Qanath watched them, hoping that he was confessing.

He was a servant of Mahudar, she had heard since they arrived, and Mahudar made her skin crawl. The goddess’s disciples liked to say it was a blessing not to be alone with one’s pain, and maybe that was even true; Qanath couldn’t speak for those who felt the need. But what Mahudar did had always sounded more like a violation to her, peering into people’s minds and sharing what she found with her priests. Havec needed to know the man was walking his memories, watching his experiences through his eyes and feeling what he’d felt. If anyone had ever done as much to her without permission, especially a man contemplating asking her out on a date, she would have skinned him alive with a butter knife. Then sent him packing, obviously.

It certainly looked as though the priest was as good as his word, because she saw the moment when Havec understood. His head snapped around to face the man fully and his skin had gone translucent. She didn’t think she had ever seen him look more vulnerable, not even on the night when Xar anKebbal died. The scene held only for a moment, then his cheeks turned pink, and he ducked his head. Qanath was incensed: she had been hoping and expecting he would punch the jerk like he deserved. The other man glanced at her over his shoulder, and if he was satisfied by his victory, he didn’t let it show.

She caught Amril watching her and raised her brows angrily, daring him to comment. He chose to say nothing, turning away. Arandgwail had shifted back into an animal an hour earlier and moved over to his master’s horse. He wasn’t readily visible, but unless Amril had suddenly developed a massive tumor on the back of his neck, the shyin would be responsible for the bulge at the base of his hood.

Annoyed with all the men – the soldier-priest for overstepping, Havec for not standing up to him, Amril for failing to have her back when she tried, and Ara for being asleep – Qanath fell back and rode alone for the rest of the day. Only the boy, whose name was Hib, was behind her. His was the task of ensuring that no one was following their tracks.

As the light waned, a new dusting of snow began to fall. Havec wanted to push on to their destination, but Moida talked him into pitching camp at dusk. It would be some hours after midnight before they finally reached the isolated chalet, she promised, and that was assuming none of their horses broke a leg floundering in the snow in the dark.

The old woman found them a place to stop where a precipitous rock-face would cut the wind. The way they made camp, you would have thought the seven of them had been traveling together for years. She and Amril convened in the center to begin spelling stones for heat; she hadn’t been able to do this properly when it was just her and Havec because you needed two sorcerers working in concert to create a heat-source or heat-sink that would keep working for more than a few hours. Dumping extra energy into an item or drawing it out could only last so long before nature reasserted itself. It needed two sorcerers working on two separate items, one hot, one cold; then they could lock the heat-source and heat-sink against one another like opposite poles. Done properly, both halves of the transaction would remain in that state indefinitely, unless one broke.

While Ara kicked the snow away for them and fetched them rocks to spell, they knelt and joined hands. Havec and the soldier-priest saw to the horses; they passed the party’s baggage over to Moida and Hib, who began preparing food. In a shockingly brief timespan, they gathered in a circle around a pile of bright crystals, each of them sitting on a hot rock or clutching it to their chest, with a warm cup of reconstituted pottage in one hand and a handful of jerky and dried fruit in the other. The silence lingered, both thoughtful and tense.

It was Amril who finally broke it, halfway through the meal. Out of nowhere, as if it had not been six hours since they spoke of this, he said, “Isn’t it obvious?”

Everyone stared at him.

“You said this woman is inviting invasion,” he pointed out, addressing the words to Havec. “You seem to think your people have no delusions about holding out for long. If she already understands she’ll lose, is that not necessarily the point?”

“To what end?”

“If this country falls into our hands, it will lose its independence, but gain many things in exchange. Infrastructure, improved trade, access for its young people to the Empire’s schools.”

Havec considered it, frowning unhappily. “I can accept,” he said at last, “that the woman would like to see the country grow richer. But at the cost of her own power?”

“You said she removed herself from center stage and left your uncle in the path of the coming retribution. Like he was meant to take the fall.”

“In hopes that she would end up governor of the new region once the dust cleared? That’s quite a gamble.”

“Not if she has friends across the border who already promised her a reward if she could hand over a chunk of territory neatly giftwrapped, complete with an excuse. No one’s going to listen to the Pacifi’s protests, not with Petron in their minds.”

That woke them all up, to be sure; everyone sat up straighter, turning to stare at him. What he was suggesting was horrible: that parties unknown in their own country had been willing to sacrifice an entire town to generate casus belli to claim a meager slip of foreign land. Qanath drew in a deep breath and let it out in a sigh, acknowledging miserably that history could bear witness to the fact that her people weren’t above it. There was a faction in the Illiumate that argued for a gentler Empire, the scaling-back of the Scolate, even reparations paid to their neighbors over border-disputes, and they opposed expansion of any sort. How inclined anyone was to listen to them, though, that varied. Having been attacked, very few people were going to agree that they shouldn’t respond. Tabbi blood had been spilled.

Havec remained unconvinced. “My country is poor.”

It was the soldier-priest who responded. “There’s a bigger picture, Avat, it isn’t just about tax revenue. There will always be factions in the Empire that believe expansion is the only way. And there are already coalitions out there fighting to revitalize the north.”

He shook his head.