She laughed. “My mother told me about men like you.”

When the fish were all caught and eaten and the sun setting, they gathered around the fire. Tier tuned the lute he’d brought back with him from Taela.

“Play ‘The Marcher’s Retreat,’ please, Papa?” asked Rinnie.

And so began the singing. They were into the second verse before Seraph’s soft alto joined in. She didn’t like to sing in public, he knew, though she sang with him when it was just family. It was a sign of how much she’d taken to Phoran and the boys that she sang at all.

The soft lamenting tones of “The Marcher’s Retreat” gave way to the rollicking “Big Tag’s Dog’s First Hunt.” He liked that one especially because he’d spent a whole month learning the quick-fingering for the tricky runs from his grandfather the summer before he’d left to soldier. It was the last song his grandfather had taught him.

Lehr pulled out his pennywhistle and played the descant, while Rinnie used a pair of sticks for rhythm accents. It was too fast for the boys who didn’t know it, but Toarsen kept up with them until the last chorus, which was sung twice as fast as the rest.

Tier picked a soft ballad next, a common one that everyone would know. There was a duet on the second chorus that Jes and Lehr took. Their voices were almost identical in timbre, and Tier always enjoyed listening to the unusual texture that similarity added to the music.

On the third chorus, Tier’s fingers failed him, and he missed a note.

He continued as if there were nothing wrong, and no one seemed to notice. It wasn’t as if he played the wrong note, after all. His fingers had just hesitated a moment too long.

He’d played it hundreds of times and never missed a note—still, a missed note should have been nothing to worry about. That is what he told himself as he finished the last verse and swept into the chorus again, but he couldn’t put aside that for that bare instant, while his fingers stilled, he’d had no idea who he was or what he was doing.

He finished the song with a flourish and a grin, then sent everyone to bed.

“Morning comes early, and we’ll not wait for the sun,” he told them.

He smiled at Seraph and teased her about something that he forgot a moment later. He hid his fear behind a smile and words as he’d learned to do during his years as a soldier. But this was an enemy that he had no idea how to engage in battle.

When Seraph curled beside him, he held her too tightly. She kissed him, wriggled to loosen his grip, patted his hand, and went to sleep. He held his wife against him and hoped the warmth of her body could relax the knots in his belly.

He’d been so worried about losing her, he hadn’t thought he might lose himself first.

Jes got up from his bedroll and walked to him. He crouched down by Tier’s head. “What’s wrong, Papa?” His tone was soft as the night air.

“I’m fine,” Tier whispered. “Go back and go to sleep.”

Jes shook his head. “You don’t think you’re fine. I can feel it.”

Tier found himself wishing it were the Guardian he was dealing with because Jes was the more stubborn of the two. He wouldn’t leave without an explanation for whatever he’d sensed of Tier’s fears.

“Tonight, while we were singing, I felt the effects of what the Path did to my Order,” he said finally, hoping his voice wouldn’t awaken Seraph. He didn’t want her to worry any more than she already did. “It didn’t last long, and it didn’t hurt. It just frightened me.”

Jes nodded his head, “All right. Don’t worry so much. We won’t let anything happen to you, not if we can help it.”

Tier smiled, feeling absurdly better for talking to Jes. “I know that. Go on back to sleep.”

Two days later, Tier was in the middle of telling the story of a boy who found a phoenix egg when it happened again. One moment they were riding up the trail, Kissel laughing, and the next the horses were stopped and Kissel had his hand on top of Tier’s.

“What’s wrong?” Kissel asked urgently.

Tier shook his head, smiled, and hoped he hadn’t done anything too stupid. “I just forgot the next part of the story. Likely, I’ll remember in a bit and finish it for you tonight after supper, if you’d like.”

Kissel nodded slowly. “That would be fine.”

Toarsen caught up to them. “Why did you stop?”

“Waiting for you,” Kissel said, and started a conversation with Toarsen about the relative merits of two different types of saddles as he urged his horse forward.

Seraph had been just behind Toarsen. She coaxed her gelding until she and Tier were riding shoulder by shoulder. “My mending isn’t holding,” she told him. “I’ll try to fix it later.”

After dinner, she tried to patch it again, but, to her frustration, the tigereye Lark’s ring would not or could not cooperate again, and she could do nothing.

Even so, when he took out the lute and played a few tunes, he had not the slightest bit of difficulty. Seraph didn’t sing, just sat near him and stared out into the darkness.

When it was time to try and sleep, Tier held her and wiped the tears from her eyes. “If I can’t sing, will you still love me?” he quipped.

“I’d love you if you couldn’t talk.” She thumped his chest lightly. “Perhaps more.”

He stifled his laugh so he didn’t wake the whole camp. “I love you, too.”

The next afternoon they came to the beginning of the worst part of the trip, a high pass that lay between them and Shadow’s Fall. The steep climb spread the distance between riders until Tier could look down the face of the mountain and see nearly a half a league between him and Jes, who was walking behind the last rider. Tier stopped Skew at a wide spot in the trail and sent Lehr, who had been with him, riding on ahead while Tier waited to bring up the rear with Jes.

Lehr’s chestnut mare’s coat was dark with sweat, but her breath came easy. It bothered her not at all when Skew stopped and she had to go on alone.

There was a small flat area a couple of leagues ahead, just before the highest and steepest part of the pass, where Lehr could start setting up camp while the stragglers trailed in. Tier was worried about how Phoran’s men’s horses were going to handle the climb. In his experience, the horses felt the height of the mountains worse than the people.

Rinnie’s horse, with its lighter burden, was the first to appear down the trail. She stopped it next to Tier while Gura dropped to rest, panting happily.

“Papa,” she said. “There’s a storm front coming behind us with snow. I’m trying to send it around us, but I need to know which direction we’ll be heading.”

“East,” he told her. “East and a little north for a couple of days yet. If you can hold it off us for the next two days, we’ll be back down, so it’ll come down as rain rather than snow.”

“There’s some snow on the ground that direction already,” she said. “We might have trouble coming back this way.’

“We’ll find that trouble when we come to it,” he told her. “We might have to come back a different way. This is the most direct route, but riding home, a few extra weeks won’t make much difference.”

She nodded. When her horse started on up again, Tier said, “I’m glad we thought to take our Cormorant rather than leave her in Redern, where she’d be useless.”

She gave him a grin and turned her attention to riding the uneven surge of her horse’s uphill scramble. Gura hesitated, gave Tier a long look, then took off after Rinnie.

Seraph appeared before Rinnie was quite out of sight. He kissed her as she passed and told her Rinnie was trying to hold off a storm.

“It’s never quite warmed up today,” she said. “I’ll make certain there’s something hot for you when you come into camp.”

“I’ll look forward to it. See you tonight,” he said.

When she was gone, he dismounted and slipped the bit so Skew could graze on the sparse edible vegetation. The trees so high up were all fir and pine, and grass didn’t grow well under evergreens. All the horses would be a little hungry for a day or two.