“Who says this is his quest?” the girl demanded. “The people that thing is threatening are ours.”

“I suppose we can always just carry him,” the man mused. “Kebbal has no control over us.”

There! Did you ever think of that? Havec asked triumphantly. His vision began to sparkle, darkness closing in until he peered at the world through a tunnel that was steadily narrowing. Okay, okay! No carrying, you made your point.

Before he could relate the exchange, Farait was snarling, “We are not carrying him into mortal peril when he can’t so much as lift a hand to defend himself!” He had crouched over Havec, placing a hand on the center of his chest as if Smooth Guy would snatch him up and run off with him.

“I already suggested it to Kebbal,” he told the man above him. “If you do it, it looks like I’ll be unconscious.”

Qanath threw her shoulders back, saying bravely, “Sorcery will just have to be enough.”

“Girl, you can’t.” Smooth Guy opened his mouth to say something snooty, and he raised his voice. “Only a handful of people in my homeland speak your language and you’ve already met most of them. Anyway, my people are hostile, they have no idea their own leaders are to blame for the problems on the border. You won’t be able to get within sight of the actual enemy for defending yourselves from wrongheaded attacks, and neither of you can explain yourselves!”

Gently, the girl told him, “There isn’t an alternative.”

“Well fine, I guess I’ll just lie here while you go kill yourself,” he muttered. “Can I not go along and talk for them? Just talk. I won’t get into any trouble at all, I promise.”

There was a moment of suspense, but he just went on lying there. Unable even to strain against the inertia or be frustrated by it. The girl laughed, and it wasn’t as forced as it might have been. “Kebbal has known you for years. It knows an empty promise when it hears one.”

“We aren’t just going to hang about here anyway,” Farait said grimly. When Havec looked into his face, the man met his eyes. “There may be an army charging headlong up the coast as we speak, straight into a trap. We have to turn them back.”

He had completely forgotten about the Tabbaqeran soldiers marching into the teeth of this supernatural storm. It came as a relief to learn that he could serve some purpose after all, and they could hand his mother over to the authorities in one fell swoop. It would be nice to be free of her company, her accusatory looks and unblinking stares. He thought to look for her, and he saw that her rigid deathlike visage remained fixed on the edge of the forest where what had been her husband disappeared. Unwilling to feel sympathy for her, he turned his eyes away.

Reminder of the army and the coastal road had jogged his mind, and he had them wrest the heavy golden ring off his mother’s right hand. Someone needed to warn his uncle what was happening, and that gave them their translator. If they could get to the man, he could get them through. Through what and to what remained in doubt, and it killed him that he wasn’t going to get to go along.

Hot Priest proposed to ride with him, but they couldn’t even get him in the saddle, he was such a dead weight. Havec hadn’t thought it was a smart idea anyway, although he’d kept his doubts to himself, just in case. They were forced to make a stretcher to carry him, suspending several layers of blankets between his own horse and the one that Arandgwail had been riding while in human form. Hib was coming with them, because it was safer and Farait wanted an extra guard to help him keep an eye on the queen. It would fall to the sorcerers to handle this, and Havec absolutely wouldn’t have been willing to let the girl do it had not the shyin been accompanying her. He called it over before they parted ways.

“The girl is very important to me,” he told The Thing. “Understand? You stop as many hearts as you need to, just bring her back in one piece.”

Hair-On-End’s eyes had gone wide, lips forming a perfect O. “Can I touch the dark thing inside you if I do?”

“The dark—Oh. Kebbal, you mean? The person who lives in me?”

It nodded, and its expression reminded him of a kid who had just seen the northern lights for the first time, torn between glee and dread.

“Yes, you may.” To Kebbal, he added, If you don’t like it, it’s entirely your fault. I wouldn’t need to ask someone else to look after her if you would let me look after her myself.

Then the girl herself came to him, taking his hand and telling him she was finally going to pay him back for jumping off the stairs and saving her. Brave words, but her voice shook. Havec didn’t call her on it, just told her to look out for the other two, who would doubtless panic and get themselves hurt if she didn’t keep an eye on them.

There was nothing else to be said, and they parted ways, Havec’s band turning their faces south into the trees and relative safety while the people without weapons continued headlong into danger. Farait rode watchfully alongside the horses carrying him, Hib to the rear as he was wont. His mother sat stiff-backed in her saddle to the fore, hands lashed to the horn. For what good that did them: if she decided to bolt, she didn’t really need her hands, and now they had left the road again, she might have more experience riding in this rough terrain than the soldier did. He wasn’t sure Farait would leave him to chase after her.

The instant they set off, the snow he had feared for more than a day finally began to fall. It was coming down thick and fast, a blizzard such as those Tabbi sorcerers had never seen. Havec was sick with fear for the girl, and he would have been looking back over his shoulder with every step, but he couldn’t move his head.

***

Qanath watched Havec until he vanished amidst the thick branches of the evergreens, and she wasn’t sure which of them she was more worried for. She had had no inkling, until he collapsed, that the ancient supernatural thing inside him had that sort of liberty. She had imagined the relationship to be more one-sided, the host more firmly in control.

“Shall we?”

She turned around to face the two men with her and amended: one man with a mink on his shoulder. She opened her mouth to say something bracing, but what came out was, “I think I’m going to throw up.”

“It happens.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Are you implying something?”

Amril chose to put his back to her, making for his horse. “Quite the opposite. I served, if you’ll remember. On the most troubled border in the Empire. I’ve seen a lot of puke in my life, much of it mine.”

He mounted up, and the mink on his shoulder scrambled about until it was facing her. She couldn’t read the expression on its tiny face, if expression there was, but had the sense that its gaze was eager and inquisitive, begging to know why she wasn’t hurrying to come along. Stifling a sigh between her teeth, she made for her own horse. Easy to fight against the other human, but Arandgwail was something else. It wasn’t so much that he had saved her life, she thought, as the puzzled way he’d looked at her when she tried to thank him for it. The shyin was such an alien creature, and she had always been taught that they had virtually no will of their own. Yet he had leapt into the path of that man who meant to murder her and he had not been told.

The instant she was up, she thought to say, “Are we just going to chase it? It’s afoot, we’re mounted, we’re going to catch it up in a matter of minutes. Should we have a plan?”

The sorcerer watched her through eyes narrowed down to slits, as if he was thinking rather less on her question than on whether he meant to take offense. He turned away abruptly, gesturing down the twin ruts of the trail. “I wasn’t going to suggest we follow it. It went into the woods heading north, and if we’re making for this town on the coast, the road will be the better way.”

Feeling thwarted, she flapped her reins until her horse got the hint and started off down the trail. She couldn’t recall that she had ever used to bait people and pick fights as a means of coping with her own anxieties and wondered if Havec was rubbing off on her. Right now, she felt like she could do with a dose of his brashness and didn’t recoil from the thought. This would have been so much easier to face if he were here, as much for the moral support as the strength of his swords.

“You have a plan of your own?” Amril asked when he caught her up on the trail.

“I was thinking about what you said yesterday,” she admitted. “About how something went wrong. When we found Havec’s dad in that cave, he told us he was after a new body, and it looked like the old one wasn’t working. You saw how he couldn’t really move.”

“And now he’s moving as easily as a living man, except he doesn’t seem to be steering the ship,” the sorcerer supplied, as if he too had wondered at this.

“Hib told us they were sacrificing to this god, trying to win its ear, but you’re the one who pointed out how upset the Queen was when she realized the god was walking the world in the flesh. Like that wasn’t what they meant to do. She blamed Havec for it.”

“You’re thinking, when his father realized his bid for immortality had won him the rest of time trapped in a frozen corpse in a cave, he changed the plan? Cut a different deal?”

“You have to wonder. If he didn’t sell himself to give the god a door into hagila ra’ir.” A thought struck her, and she added, “And why people don’t do it more often, if it’s possible.”

“If only we’d thought to ask the priest more questions while we could,” Amril added, sounding annoyed.

Qanath made a face.

He glanced at her sidelong. “Am I allowed to ask why you dislike the man so much? He seems to be an admirable fellow and he’s captivated with your friend.”

“You know what Mahudar does,” she replied, and her voice with tight because it took effort to keep it level. “He used her powers to go snooping through Havec’s head without his knowledge or consent. If you can’t see why I find that reprehensible, I wish you’d said so before we were alone together.”

He didn’t have a response to that, and for a while they rode and didn’t speak, heading downslope to the east. They’d been traveling for no more than a quarter of an hour when the promised storm began. She glanced up into the sky unhappily, trying not to let her fears overwhelm her. Havec had told them it wasn’t too much further and he wouldn’t lie to her. Just a straight shot down this road and they would be back in the midst of civilization. What they would do when they got there remained in question, but at least they could get out of the cold.

The path they followed was at first a long, slow slope, wooded on either side, the hill it descended gradual enough that any distant view was cut off by the closest trees even directly ahead. It was a matter of minutes before the wind-driven snow had risen to such a fury that they could scarcely see, and their pace slowed to a crawl. Arandgwail climbed down from his master’s shoulder in order to help them keep to the trail, and he was back in the form of a man, shielding his eyes with one hand as he peered ahead. The sight of him walking along atop the snow without a coat was bizarre, but Qanath was too busy struggling forward against the elements to be impressed by anything other than this storm. The wind was so intense, the wailing of it, the way it seemed to press against her from multiple angles simultaneously, the endless whiteness of the snow. All of it contributed to a panicked sensation that she was being buried. The cold became little more than an afterthought to its ferocity.

The world narrowed down to a tiny bubble containing only Qanath and her horse. She willed it step by step to stay strong and steady, not to stumble, not to slip. If it hurt itself now, her companions would force her to abandon it and forge ahead, and probably neither of them would survive. She couldn’t lose her horse, Havec had given it to her. She wasn’t sure why that was meaningful; he had stolen it, and it wasn’t like the horse would have her back the way he did. But somehow, it had come to feel like the only thing that could protect her from being smothered by the storm, and she willed it Don’t slip, don’t slip. Even the man riding alongside her was of less importance. As if he were on the far side of the world, separated by an impossible gulf, she scarcely spared a thought for him.

At one point, an eddy in the ceaseless wind revealed that the trees had fallen back on the left. They were riding single-file, but she wasn’t certain why. The snow had already descended again in an impenetrable curtain and she couldn’t discern whether the land to the left was lacking in trees because it was an open, grass-filled glade, or whether there was no land and they were riding at the verge of a towering cliff. The wind sheered in from that direction, pushing them away from the emptiness rather than toward it, and Qanath paid it little mind. The next time she took her unblinking eyes from the path ahead, the trees had come back.

It didn’t seem to take hours: it took hours. When Ara appeared before her horse unexpectedly, she almost rode him down. The shyin was standing right in front of her, holding her weary horse by its bridle. The wind had dimmed from a wail to a moan, but she couldn’t hear him over it. Once he saw that she had stopped and was watching him, he released the horse and moved around to her knee so he could shout up to her: “We’re here!”

This news was shocking: she had known from the first that their destination wasn’t far, yet the journey had felt as though it would never, could never end. Picking her head up, she squinted through the snow, blowing a little less fiercely here, as she tried to make out details. She couldn’t see much through the skirling white that revealed her surroundings only in hints and winks, but she had the impression that there wasn’t much to see. Buildings loomed to either side, but they were small and unimpressive, fashioned from unpainted wood. She hadn’t felt the surface change beneath her horse’s hoofs, so the streets must not be paved. Havec had been concerned that they might be set upon by his people, but those few they encountered hurried past with heads bowed against the wind and didn’t spare a glance for them.

Havec’s uncle had been left behind to run things while his mother removed herself from what she had meant to become a battlefield; it followed that he would be found in the biggest, grandest building this miniscule hamlet had, it should be immediately apparent even to outsiders. They didn’t know where to look for it, though, and the storm limited visibility. They couldn’t see any of the buildings except the ones they were standing between, and there was no one around to ask. Ara proposed to scout for them, but the instant he turned himself into a bird and took to the wing, a gust sent him cartwheeling. That was that, and he perched as a mink on his master’s saddle while they combed laboriously street by street.