We all must make sacrifices, Ringil. It’s the war. If this is all I suffer, you will not hear me complain.

Oh, come on! Ringil, plucking a notice from a carving at random, brandishing it. This shit? “No one in living memory has seen a dwenda.” Fuck’s sake, Shal. No one in living memory’s seen Hoiran walk, but I don’t notice them closing down the fucking temples. What a bunch of fucking hypocrites.

People are frightened, Ringil. There was a livid bruise around Shalak’s left eye. It’s understandable.

People are sheep, Ringil raged. Moronic fucking sheep.

With that, Shalak had made no sign that he disagreed.

He hadn’t changed much, either, in the intervening years. The close-cropped beard was shot through with white now rather than gray, and there was less hair to balance it atop the lined forehead, but otherwise it was the same faintly lugubrious clerk’s face that peered up from the leather-bound tome it was bent over, as Ringil opened the door to the little shop and ducked inside.

“Yes, noble sir? How may I be of service?”

“Well, you can knock off the ornate honorifics, for a start.” Ringil took off his cap. “Then you might want to have a go at recognizing me.”

Shalak blinked. He removed the eyeglasses he’d been using to peruse the book, and stared hard at his new customer. Ringil made a leg.

“Alish? No, wait a minute. Ringil? Ringil Eskiath? Is that really you?” Shalak hopped off his chair, came forward, and seized Ringil by the arms. “Hoiran’s teeth, what are you doing back here?”

“Came to see you, Shal.”

Shalak rolled his eyes and let go. “Oh please. You know Risha’s going to claw your eyes out if she sees you batting your lashes at me like that.” But you could see, despite it all, he was pleased. “Really, why’d you come back?”

“Long story, not very interesting.” Ringil seated himself on the corner of a table laden with odd lumps of stone, semiprecious gems, and obscure metalwork. “Could use some advice, though, Shal.”

“Advice from me?”

“Hard to believe, huh?” Ringil picked up a chunk of tangled iron wire with a glyph worked into its center. “Where’d you get this?”

“A source. What do you want advice about?”

Ringil looked elaborately around the shop. “Take a wild guess.”

“You want Aldrain advice?” Shalak pulled a face, chuckled. “What’s the matter with you, Gil? You come into some money you don’t need all of a sudden? I’d have thought, you know, a man like you, the Kiriath stuff has got to be more your thing.”

“I’ve got all the Kiriath stuff I need.” Ringil gestured with two crooked fingers at the pommel jutting over his shoulder. “Anyway, I’m not buying anything. Just want your opinion on a couple of things.”

“Which are?”

“If you had to kill a dwenda, what’s the best way to go about it?”

Shalak gaped. “What?”

“Come on, you heard me.”

“You want to know how to kill a dwenda?”

“Yeah.” Ringil shifted irritably, picked at a loose thread on his, yeah, new fucking tunic, what kind of fucking workmanship did Ishil think . . . “Yeah, that’s right.”

“Well, I don’t know. First off, you’d need to find one to kill. No one’s seen the Vanishing Folk in—”

“Living memory. I know, like the sign says. But let’s assume, just for the sake of argument, I have found one. Let’s assume he’s in my way. How do I take him down, Shal?” Ringil tipped his head to indicate the pommel of the Ravensfriend. “Could I do it with this?”

Shalak pursed his lips. “It’s doubtful. You’d have to be very fast indeed.”

“Well, that has been said about me on occasion.” He didn’t add that those occasions had receded increasingly into the realm of memory over the past few years. There were always the stories, of course, the war legends, but who—other than himself, in Jhesh’s tavern, increasingly wearily—still told those?

Shalak took a turn about the cluttered space in the shop. He rubbed at his forehead, dodged a hanging wooden assemblage of wind chimes, grimaced.

“Thing is, Gil, we don’t really know much about the dwenda. I mean, this stuff I sell, it’s mostly junk—”

“It is?”

The merchant gave him a sour look. “All right, all right. I make a living from hints and half-truths, and what people desperately want to believe. I don’t need you to remind me of that. But the core of this, all this, is something even the Kiriath couldn’t map. They fought the dwenda for possession of this world once, you know. But if you read their annals, it’s pretty clear they didn’t really know what they were fighting. There are references to ghosts, shape-shifting, possession, stones and forests and rivers coming to life at Aldrain command—”

“Oh come off it, Shal.” Ringil shook his head. “Tell me you’re not that naïve. I’m looking for a considered opinion here, not something I can get out of any gibbering idiot down at Strov.”

“That’s what I’m giving you, Gil. A considered opinion. Outside of oral legend and a few runic scribbles on standing stones along the west coast, we don’t have anything but the Indirath M’nal chronicle to tell us what the Aldrain were really like. It’s the only reputable source. Everything else the Kiriath wrote on the subject draws on it. And the Indirath M’nal says, among other things, that the dwenda could command water and stone and wood to life.”

“Yeah, and I knew Majak herders back in the day who thought the Kiriath were all fire-blackened demons.” Ringil cranked up an arm, made a jabbering mouth with his hand. “Rejected from the Depths of Hell to walk the Earth in Eternal Damnation. Blab-blab-blab. Kind of shit gets made up every day by people too stupid to look for the realities. You should have heard the boatman who brought me up here from the Glades. Fire in the northern sky, lights in the marshes, a black dog heard barking through the night. Doesn’t occur to anyone to wonder how exactly you can tell it’s a black dog just from the fucking bark it makes.”

Shalak cocked his head. He frowned. “What is this, Gil? What are you so angry about?”

It brought him up short. He stared at the neatly swept floor of the little shop and raised an eyebrow at the strain in his own just-silenced voice.

“What’s wrong, Gil?”

He shook his head. Sighed. “Doesn’t matter. It’s nothing. Late night, too much carousing, you know me. I’m sorry. Go on, you were saying.”

“You were saying. That people are too stupid to look for the realities and they hide in superstition instead. And that’s true enough, but you’re missing the point. You’re talking about humans, and ignorant humans at that. The scribes who wrote the Indirath M’nal weren’t either. They were the cream of Kiriath culture, highly educated and already well traveled in places most of us have a hard time imagining. And the dwenda scared those guys, that’s the truth, it’s there in the way the texts are written. Clear as the face on a harbor-end whore.”

Ringil thought back to the Kiriath he’d known; Grashgal, Naranash, Flaradnam, Kalanak, and all the others, names gone blurred with the years. He thought of the impassive aura of command they’d carried into the war with the Scaled Folk, the methodical savagery with which they fought. It was a mask, Archeth insisted to him once, part of the courtly gravitas that informed Kiriath culture from its roots; but if she was right, it was a mask that never came off, not even when Naranash bled out on the beach at Rajal, grinning and leaking blood through his teeth while Ringil crouched uselessly beside him.

Looks like you’ll have to do the rest without me, eh. Are we winning, lad?

Ringil glanced about—the Yhelteth flank, crumpling and tearing like cheap armor under repeated blows as the reptile advance slammed into them, the crisscross panic of fleeing soldiery from the shattered lines and the screams of those broken or burned or ripped apart all along the beach, the landing barges fleeing back across the bight, evacuating those lucky enough to make the shallows . . .