“Give me a second.”
I give myself two. I look at what’s left of the centaur and I let myself feel the full specific weight of it, not the abstract guilt of a mission failed but the particular concrete fact of a name in a registry I’ll never match to this face. Someone who was alive. Someone who had a post and held it and died holding it and I was not there.
I was not there.
The almost-bond pulses. Warm. Insistent.
I know, I think at it.I know. I’m moving.
I move.
We don’t speak for a while after that. The forest fills the silence with its own sounds, the wrong-birdsong, the creak of trees that aren’t moving in wind, something dripping that isn’t rain. I count the almost-bond pulses the way I used to count the Cauldron’s hum. Steady. Every forty seconds. Like a heartbeat at rest.
Forty-two. Forty-one.
Alive.
The forest shows me two more centaurs before the path curves.
A pair of Wild Court scouts, half-returned to earth, the moss already claiming what the forest considers its own. I recognize the patrol formation, outer ring, eastern quadrant, and I know without checking that these were the ones who should have made contact three months ago and didn’t and the report came backmissing, presumed forest-lostand I read it and filed it and told myself I’d investigate when I had time.
I didn’t have time. I was at the Academy. I was watching a woman argue about a mistranslation and learning to count heartbeats I had no business counting.
The almost-bond pulses. Forty seconds.
I know.
“How many?” Kieran asks quietly.
I look at him. He’s been watching me stop and look and move on. He hasn’t asked until now.
“Three.” I face forward. “My people. Eastern quadrant.” A pause. “I should have?—”
“Yes,” he says. Simple. Not cruel. Just true. “And you couldn’t have.”
Both things true at once. That’s the thing about Kieran. He doesn’t soften it and he doesn’t let you drown in it either. He just states the shape of the thing and lets you figure out what to do with it.
I file that, too. Evidence.
“Thank you,” I say.
He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t need to.
Whispen stops.
His light goes gold and bright.
“Flame lord.”
“I see it.” I don’t see anything. “What am I seeing?”
“The path curves left.” He says it slowly. “There’s water ahead. We go left.”
“Noted.”
We go left.
Except —
