A long pause ensued.
“Thank you,” said the elf. “For saving Bucket.” Her gaze remained carefully fixed on her horse, instead of Fern.
“Oh,” mumbled Fern, bemused. “Um. Sure.”
“Little squire,” added Astryx, with a faint smile. “Maybe you missed your calling?”
“I’m not sure I like the ‘little’ part,” said Fern. “Makes me sound cute.”
“Mm.”
“Tullah’s not going to give up, is she?” asked Fern.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“I didn’t get a chance to tell you, what with all the”—Fern gestured broadly—“everything. I’ve seen Tullah before, I’m sure of it. Hells, she nearly knocked me down in Bycross, and I swear I saw her in Turnbuckle. She’s been following us for a long time now.”
Astryx shifted, searching for comfort she wouldn’t find. “Then I’m certain I’ll see her again.”
Fern glanced at the elf out of the corner of her eye. “How do you think that will go?” she asked, carefully.
“I didn’t live this long on accident, you know.”
Reaching out, Fern tapped the wire bracelet on Astryx’s wrist. Even as she did it, she was mildly shocked at the familiarity of her own gesture. “So, you can feel that Zyll is close with this thing?”
Pointing in the direction of the abbey, the elf adjusted her aim while squinting as though sighting down a bow. “There. Like little tugs on a piece of thread tied between us. It gets tighter the farther away she gets, and past a certain point, there’s a pain that keeps increasing.”
“Are you surprised she’s still here? I know I am.”
Astryx thought about that. “I suppose I should be. But I think I’ve given up expecting anything rational from Zyll.”
Fern worried at her lip. “What if you just let her go?”
The elf turned to look at her, brow creased. “I—”
But the bookseller hurriedly continued, “She saved all of us back at the bridge. We’d be dead now without her, right? Okay, none of this would havehappenedwithout her, either, but that’s beside the point. Is it really worth it to keep on? If she goes her own way, Tullah has no reason to find you.Us.”
“Setting aside everything else,” said Astryx, “you were worried Zyll would wander into a hazferou’s belly on her own. Tullah’s agreatdeal more dangerous. I think it’s clear that orc means to end her.”
Fern considered the bracelet falling from Astryx’s wrist back at the waystation, its reappearance the following morning, and who exactly might have replaced it.
Ignoring that for the time being, she forged onward. “Maybe. But I’d bet anything she’s a lot harder to find by herself. What’s to say that whoever’s paying to have you haul her in doesn’t have the same fate in mind? What if they’re no better than Tullah?”
Astryx chewed her lip, but then shook her head. “What happens after is always unknowable. Good or ill, you’ll go mad trying to anticipate it. There was a time when I tried . . . But I learned to forego such things long ago. I can’t turn away.”
“Why not?” cried Fern. “What do you get out of it? You keep going on and on, but for what? For who? You saved me back in that swamp, and I wasverygrateful, but to you it was probably not even worth remembering. You didn’t even stick around to be appreciated, already off to the next thing.”
“Because that’s part of it. Part of being who I am. I see things to their end. I keep my covenants. I do what must be done.”
To Fern, those sounded like old words repeated so often they’d lost all meaning, and she felt her ire rise. But she remembered their argument outside Turnbuckle and was determined not to repeat it. The abbess’s words from the library echoed back to her.
“Penance to your hungry god,” she muttered to herself.
“What’s that?”
“You’re worried about what will fall apart if you don’t keep doing what you’re doing,” said Fern.
Astryx tried to link thoughts to words she’d probably never articulated before, not in a thousand years. It took her several long moments. “I . . . It’s like walking a straight road when night falls. You know it goes on and on, even though it’s too dark to see. You don’t stray in the night, you keep moving straight, so that when the sun rises, you’ll still be on the path.”
