The dwenda looked pained. “Do you really require an answer to this tirade?”

“Hey, we’re fucking talking, aren’t we?”

Another shrug. “Well, then. It’s less a question of gods than of mechanisms, of the way things are bound up and acted upon. Of ritual, if you like. You may as well ask why humans bury their dead, when eating them would make more sense. There are powers, entities with sway in these matters, though the Aldrain do not consider themselves bound by them in any meaningful way. But there is also an etiquette, an observance of hallowed rules, and for this, blood has always been the channel. You might think of it as the signature on the treaties your people make with each other—though we at least honor our agreements once they are made. If there must be blood, we will offer it. The blood of birth, the blood of death, the blood of animals when a minor shift in fate is required, of one’s own people when something greater is desired. In our history, those chosen for this honor have always gone willingly to their end, as a warrior goes willingly to battle, knowing what their sacrifice is worth.”

“I don’t think that’s going to be the case with your distant cousins here.”

“No,” Seethlaw agreed. “It’s not ideal. But it will have to serve. In the end, the fact that we are willing to spill blood we know is our own, well, that will have to be sacrifice enough.”

“Oh, good. Glad you’ve got it all worked out.”

The dwenda sighed. “You know, Gil, I had thought you of all people might be able to understand. From what I know of you—”

“You know nothing of me.” Through clenched teeth. “Nothing. You’ve fucked me, that’s all. Well, that’s a crowded hole you’re in, darling. And us humans, we’re a lying, dissembling bunch, remember. Doesn’t pay to trust us between the sheets any more than anywhere else.”

“You’re wrong, Gil. I know you better than you know yourself.”

“Oh, lizardshit!”

“I’ve seen you in the marches, Gil. I see how you handled yourself there.” Seethlaw leaned across and seized him by the shoulders. “I see what the akyia saw, Gil. I see what you could become, if you’d only let yourself.”

Ringil raised his arms, sharp empty-hand technique, broke the dwenda’s hold, shook him off. He felt an odd calm settling over him.

“I’ve done all the becoming I’m going to in this life. I’ve seen enough to know where it all goes. Now you made me a fucking promise. Are you going to keep it? Or do you want to give me back my sword and we’ll finish this thing the way we started it?”

They stared at each other. Ringil felt himself falling into the dwenda’s empty eyes. He locked up the feeling, kept the stare.

“Well?”

“I keep my promises,” said Seethlaw.

“Good. Then let’s get on with it.”

Ringil turned brusquely and shouldered his way past, into the corral. Seethlaw stared after him for a long moment, face unreadable, and then he followed.

CHAPTER 29

Sherin didn’t know him.

You couldn’t blame her, Ringil supposed. It had been a long time, and there probably wasn’t a lot left in him of the little boy who refused to play with her in the gardens at Lanatray. Certainly there wasn’t much of the wan little girl he remembered in the woman slumped before him. He’d very likely have walked right past her in the Glades without recognition if he hadn’t been staring a hole in Ishil’s charcoal sketch of her for the last couple of weeks. In fact, even the sketch wasn’t such a great match now. Sherin’s privations seemed to have melted the flesh from her face, turned her eyes hollow and inward, and added a brutal burden of years she hadn’t yet lived. There were streaks of tangled gray in her hair and gathered lines of pain around mouth and eyes that wouldn’t have looked amiss on a harbor-end tavern drudge twice her age.

Looking at her, he wondered briefly what marks his time with the dwenda had left on his own face. He hadn’t seen a mirror since the night he left the Glades for Etterkal, and now, suddenly, the thought of facing one filled him with unease.

“Sherin?” he said, very gently. He knelt to her level. “It’s your cousin Ringil. I’ve come to take you home.”

She didn’t look at him. Her eyes were fixed past his shoulder on Seethlaw, and she cowered into the corner of the stall as if the mother-of-pearl weave of the walls would absorb her. When Ringil reached out to touch her arm, she flinched violently away and her hands crept up to clutch and cover her neck. She rocked back and forth minutely in the corner and began a high single-note keening, a sound so divorced from human voice that at first he could not be sure it came from her throat.

Ringil twisted on his haunches, looked up at Seethlaw’s pale, Aldrain features.

“You want to get the fuck out?” he snapped. “Give me a minute with her?”

The dwenda’s gaze went from his face to Sherin and back again. His shoulders lifted minimally. He turned and slipped out through the half-open door like smoke.

“Listen, Sherin, he isn’t going to hurt you. He’s . . .” Ringil weighed it up. “A friend. He’s going to let me take you home. Really. There’s no trick here, no sorcery. I really am your cousin. Your mother and Ishil asked me to come. Been looking for you for . . . for a while. Don’t you remember me from Lanatray? I never wanted to play with you in the gardens, remember, even when Ishil made me.”

That seemed to do it. Inch by inch, her face came around. The keening broke up, caught on shards of breath, then soaked away into the quiet like water into parched earth. She looked at him out of one eye, shivering, both hands still clasped at her neck. Her voice creaked like a rusty hinge.

“Ri-ringil?”

He put together something resembling a smile. “Yeah.”

“It’s really you?”

“Yeah. Ishil sent me.” He tried the smile again. “You know what that means. Ishil. What she’s like. I fucking had to find you, didn’t I?”

“Ringil. Ringil.”

And then she threw herself onto him, collapsed over his neck and shoulders, weeping and clutching and screaming as if a thousand possessing demons were trapped inside her and had decided now, finally, that they’d been there too long, they wanted out, and it was time to let go.

He held her while it lasted, rocking her gently, murmuring platitudes and stroking her rat’s-nest hair. The screams ran down to sobbing, then to shuddering breaths and quiet. He peered at her face, cleaned it of tears as best he could with his shirtsleeve, and then he picked her up and carried her out, bits of straw from the stall’s floor still clinging to the simple swamp-stained shift she wore.

Happy now, Mother? Have I done enough?

Outside, the sky was moving, thick cloud boiling past overhead at menacing speed. The light had changed, thickening and staining toward a day’s-end dimness, and the air reeked of a coming storm. There were no sounds from the other stables or the other stalls in this one; if their occupants were awake, terror or apathy was keeping them quiet. Ringil found himself glad—it was easier to pretend there was no one else kept prisoner here but the woman he now held in his arms.

Seethlaw stood with his back to the wall of the stable and his arms folded, looking at nothing at all. Ringil walked past him without a word, stopped a couple of steps past with Sherin in his arms. She buried her face in his neck and moaned.

“So,” the dwenda said at his back. “Satisfied? You have everything you want now?”

Ringil did not look around. “You put us both on a good horse, you point me to the Trelayne road, and you let me get a full day’s ride away from this shit-hole. Then we can maybe talk about promises kept.”