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Was other–Bully Boy free now, or had he gone with other-me to death?

I didn’t look on my dead arm. If the tattoo was there, wee Bully was gone with me. I didn’t want to know that just yet, if it were so.

And where was…?

But I didn’t dare hope.

I foraged until I found some dried meat bits, made a wee pile of them for Bully, then gave him a small nudge behind his elbow to steer him that way. He bobbed his head a few times, found the pile, licked at it, then got a proper mouthful and chewed with big chews.

I slid down to my arse and sat, watching him. Very little in this world gratifies so much as watching a wee creature eat food you’ve provided. I watched the shadows to see if a second Bully would come out and join the feast, but he never did. It was just the pair of us.

I don’t know when he finished and crawled into my lap for a lie-down, but I stared at the spot where his food had been for a good long while.

Might have been a year.

And then.

And then.

“Jilnaedu?” called a familiar, welcome, oh-so-welcome voice.

My heart tripped in my chest.

I was reluctant to look in case I had dreamed it, for have we not all suffered a mocking dream in which a dear dead one comes back and tells us their passing was a jape, and weren’t we foolish for believing it?

And then we wake and the dream was the jape.

But it was not so now.

I turned my head.

She stood in the entrance to the cave.

She was skinny.

Much skinnier than her other self.

And she bore a fresh wound on her face. She carried a large pack and had a broken spear as a walking-staff. Something rustled in the pack, which was a sort of open frame made of arrow shafts and other scavenged wood. I saw the source of the movement—the Book of the Full Shadow struggled against the bite of the iron bear trap. Galva had been about to leave this place and head east, but she had turned around.

“You bitch,” I said through a sob. “You thoughtless bitch, you died on me.”

“Jaestu lu parreca a mi,” she said, and when I tilted my head doglike at her, she closed her eyes and laughed.

“I said, ‘You did the same to me.’ Now I am going to have to teach you Ispanthian all over again.”

“You taught me Ispanthian?”

“It was not so hard. You are good with language, if little else.”

Her eyes cut to dead Kinch. Then back to me, her face as full of emotion as I had ever seen it. Meaning there was just a bit.

“When did I…?”

“You took a head wound three weeks ago, maybe four, and you woke up once or twice, wrote a letter for yourself, which I see you have found, so I had hope. But the Bride took you two days ago. I suppose you bothered her, as you bother women, until at last she agreed to take you so she could get some peace.”

I laughed and knuckled a tear out of my eye.

“Who killed me?”