Mallow woke to the sound of bells, chiming in the space where the wyrm had set up house. For a moment he thought he was still under the Dawn Spire, stone grinding down, his chest too tight to draw air. Then the cold hit his nose, and the ache in his legs, and the smell of smoke and boiled potatoes.

  Ivath. The ruined refectory. The corner of floor he’d commandeered near the wall. Gray dawn leaked in through the windows, turning the dust into a soft, drifting fog. Most of the camp was still asleep in a ragged sprawl of pallets, bundled cloaks, and the occasional Kelthi tail flicking in a dream. Rhalir was up already, of course, bent over the rekindled fire outside, pale steam rising from whatever pot he’d set on.

  Mallow’s new scales itched.

  He rolled onto his side with a muffled curse. The motion made his ribs complain and the scales along his flank pull and prickle like a half-healed burn. He shoved a hand under his shirt and felt the smooth overlapping plates there, cool to the touch but warm from within.

  “Still here,” he murmured to them. “Was hoping you were a concussion.”

  They glowed faintly in answer, just enough that when Sena ducked under the refectory lintel with her arms full, her eyes flicked straight to his chest.

  “Morning, Saint Fire Hazard,” she said, keeping her voice low while others slept on.

  “Saint Trouble, we agreed,” Mallow said, pushing himself upright. The world swayed for a second. He let it. “Or at the very least, Saint of Bad Life Choices.”

  “Don’t confuse the faithful,” Sena said. She set the bundle down beside him. Bread, among other things. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was until he smelled it. “Eat,” she said. “You’ll need your strength.”

  “For walking?” he asked. “Or for being a walking theological incident?”

  Sena smiled. “Both.”

  He took the bread, which was still blessedly warm.

  “I’ve brought you something else,” Sena said. She reached in among the bundles and brought it forward, unwrapping the cloth around a heavy object, about three feet in length: an iron spear.

  He stared at it. “Ah.”

  “You were gripping it in your hand when I found you,” Sena explained.

  “Ah.”

  “I thought if you still had it… maybe the wyrm wanted you to… I dunno.”

  “Right.”

  She kept holding it out, and the moment grew awkward until he took it from her hands. “This is the spear Morgan killed me with.”

  Sena gasped. “You’re serious?”

  He turned it over in his hands, its haft about half the length of the blade itself, a weapon cruelly forged. He tested the weight of it in his hands and it seemed unbalanced, the blade heavier than the haft, but when he moved his hands further down he found the balance was intentional, to lend more weight behind a swing.

  “Aye,” he continued. “Morgan conjured this from nothing like it was a bloodwyrm. His wings too, just… ripped clean from his flesh like they’d been waiting under his skin all along. This blade came out of thin air. He tried to kill Lain with it. He missed.”

  He saw Sena’s face and regretted his honesty. “He got me instead,” he clarified.

  “So he did have wings, then?”

  “Oh, yes,” Mallow said. “I’d assumed they flew out together, when you told me they were both missing.”

  Sena’s ears dropped back. “Do you think… did he take her off to – to finish the job?”

  He frowned. “No, I don’t think so. I have a feeling…” he glanced at Sena, then away again, as if embarrassed to believe anything at all without evidence to back it up, but he carried on anyway, because he saw it was a comfort to her. “I think he’s gone off to regroup, and I think Lain is a part of that somehow. We haven’t seen the last of them.”

  They let the words settle between them, and Mallow set the spear down so he could finish his breakfast.

  “Where’s Hellen?” he asked. “Never see you two apart, it seems.”

  Sena’s cheek mottled red before she jerked her chin toward the far end of the hall. “Confessing.”

  He followed her gaze. At the other end of the refectory, near what used to be the serving counter, Tanel stood with three other Dagorlind. Not the full circle that had once held Ivath in its grip; that ring was broken now, missing links scattered or dead. These were what remained: an Elder who hadn’t guided refugees away, a Brother with a bandaged arm, a Sister on a crutch.

  Tanel’s head was bowed. His posture was pure obedience: shoulders rounded, hands folded. Hellen stood slightly behind and to the side, her braid neat again and face pale with effort.

  The Elder’s voices were low, a murmur under the crackle of the fire. Mallow couldn’t hear the words, but he didn’t need to. He knew the tone. It was the same tone Morgan had used with visiting dignitaries when he wanted to sound reasonable while doing something deeply questionable.

  After a time, the oldest Elder, a gray-haired woman Mallow vaguely recalled seeing preside over Dawn services, lifted a hand and traced a small circle in the air over Tanel’s bowed head. It wasn’t really a blessing, or even a dismissal exactly, but something in between.

  “Quick summary?” Mallow asked when Tanel finally broke away and crossed the hall toward them.

  Tanel looked tired in a way sleep probably wouldn’t touch. “The Order approves an Elder pilgrimage,” he said. “To seek understanding of the Underserpent’s new will. And to… observe you.”

  “Observe,” Mallow repeated.

  Tanel hesitated. “They can’t control you,” he said simply. “They know that much.”

  “Comforting,” Mallow said. “Good to know my terrifying lack of oversight has been officially acknowledged.”

  Hellen joined them, folding her hands in front of her, gloved fingers twisting together. “They’re afraid,” she said quietly. “Of what happens when they try to cage something the Underserpent has clearly chosen. This gives them a story they can live with.”

  “A pilgrimage,” Sena said dryly. “Two men, opposite sides of a war, walking into the mountains to ask a vanished god what it wants.”

  “When you say it like that, it sounds unwise,” Mallow said.

  “It is unwise,” Hellen said.

  “See?” said Mallow. “Either way, I’m upholding tradition.”

  Sena’s hand brushed his shoulder, quick and rough, as if she’d meant to shove him and changed her mind halfway through. “Come back,” she said.

  “Serpent willing,” he replied.

  After a thoughtful moment, he wrapped Morgan’s spear in the fabric again and cinched it at his belt, where it sat as heavy as an accusation.

  They left after breakfast. The air still smelled like winter, but the ground under Mallow’s boots had begun to soften. Thin scabs of ice clung to the edges of puddles and shattered underfoot; he knew they’d be gone by midmorning. The hazy, uncertain sky held the blue of early spring, clouds smeared thin as if the wind hadn’t quite decided what to do with them yet.

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  Ivath fell away behind them.

  From the slope that led to the bridge, Mallow could see the broken Dawn Spire jutting up from the ruins, scaffolding twisted and blackened. Smoke still rose in thin streams from cookfires and collapsed roofs. The bowl chamber lay buried somewhere under all that stone. The Underserpent’s absence felt electrified, like an exposed nerve after losing a tooth. Beside him, Tanel stopped and turned, bells at his wrists chiming softly.

  He made some Dagorlind sign, fingers touching brow, lips, heart. A farewell, perhaps.

  “Second thoughts?” Mallow asked.

  “First ones, mostly,” Tanel said. “I never thought I’d leave Ivath like this.”

  Mallow regarded the ruin for another moment, then hitched his pack higher on his shoulder. “I never thought I’d be leaving at all, once I’d gotten here,” he admitted. “But I couldn’t have said no, really. I was chasing a very pretty saint.”

  Tanel’s mouth flickered – a smile, or a grimace, it was hard to tell. “I remember you at the parley,” he said. “Your people were… difficult.”

  “Thank you,” Mallow said. “I work at it.”

  They walked.

  Mallow’s limp slowed him down, each step a pain shooting from heel to knee, and he relied more and more on his walking staff. By late morning the road had narrowed into the spine of the ridge. The long gray throat of the valley fell away on their right, choked with mist. Ahead, the bridge came into view: a strip of stone thrown across the gorge, slick with old spray.

  Mallow felt a prickle along his scarred side. His steps slowed.

  Tanel didn’t notice at first. He was looking up, cataloguing weather, the slope of the mountains, anything but the ground ahead. Then the wind shifted and brought the smell.

  Mallow had never thought of a smell taking on weight, but this one seemed to pinch his nose and throat shut with the brutality of it: rot and rust and a horrid sweetness, cloying notes of things that had once been alive and very afraid.

  Tanel stopped dead. “Oh,” he said softly. “Oh.”

  The far bank was gone.

  Where neat rows and gathered ranks had once stood was now a broken bite in the land, a wide crescent of collapsed earth. The river had carved itself a new bowl there when it rose, a deep, still pool the color of an old bruise, edged in foam where the current pushed through. The rest was debris: shattered stone, snapped cart wheels, bent spear shafts, torn banners knotted around drowned branches.

  And everywhere lay the scattered remains of what the bloodwyrms and the river hadn’t finished.

  A horse lay on its side near the waterline, half-submerged, ribs open like a broken crate. Crows worked at it in jerks and hops, black against the pale flank. Farther down, a mass that had been a man was caught in a tangle of roots, armor twisted, helm gone. His skull was half exposed, jaw cocked as if still mid-command, and the thick purple bloat that filled his mouth could only be his tongue.

  Mallow remembered the moment the water went up – the roar, the way the ground jumped under his boots, Lain’s voice turning into something that didn’t belong to her. He remembered trying not to look as the wyrms slid across this same bridge, manes high, delighted. He’d had to look away eventually, because Lain had been sick with what the killing did to her, and she’d needed him. But now, only days later, the field was quieter, and worse for it. The river had eaten what it could; the wyrms had gorged themselves on what was left. What remained was the part no one bothered to tidy: scraps caught on rock, a boot with a foot still in it, a tangle of reins around a flap of skin and hunk of bone.

  A fox slunk away as they approached, muzzle dark. Its tracks stitched the mud between one heap of armor and another. Some white and fleshy thing lay in pieces where the fox had been. A hand. Scattered finger bones.

  He leaned against his crutch and watched Tanel take it in.

  The Elder’s face changed in slow stages from simple shock, to recognition, to the kind of haunted calculation Mallow had seen on battlefield captains who finally understood the cost of their own orders. Tanel’s hand rose, as if to make the sign of the bell, then fell to his cowl, to pull it over his nose.

  “This was…” Tanel’s voice frayed, muffled behind his makeshift mask. “This was all Brighthand.”

  “Mostly,” Mallow said. “Some of ours, too. The river wasn’t choosy.”

  Tanel’s gaze tracked the jagged line where the bank had sheared away. “The reports said the bridge held.”

  “It did,” Mallow said. “The far side didn’t.”

  He could almost hear Rhalir again, arguing for another plan; Lain at the water’s edge, hooves in the cold, eyes too wide. Morgan’s hand on her shoulder, gentle as a knife.

  “I knew men in the first vanguard,” Tanel whispered. His eyes had gone to a twisted banner half-buried in the mud, the white bell dulled to a gray smear. “They weren’t… they were soldiers. Farm boys. Second sons. Not monsters.”

  “Funny thing, that,” Mallow said. “Sometimes they look a lot like farm boys. Other times they look like powerful men with noble goals. Depends on which bank you’re on, I suppose.”

  Tanel flinched. His gaze snagged on another shape: the collapsed remains of a campfire, ring of stones still blackened, nearby a line of stakes where someone had once tried to lay out the dead in order.

  Mallow remembered that too: Rhalir and the Kelthi trying to do something like honoring the bodies while Morgan walked among them feeding his horrible flock. Sena binding wounds by torchlight. Lain vomiting behind a cart, her whole body shaking as if she could expel the bond through her teeth.

  “You were here,” Tanel said hoarsely. “When it happened.”

  Mallow shrugged. “Front row seat.”

  “And you still followed him,” Tanel murmured. It wasn’t an accusation, exactly, but the bewilderment was obvious. “All of this, and you still…”

  “You know, Tanel,” Mallow said, looking out over the ruin, the slow swirl of water in the carved out basin. “Lain told me you saved her, as a baby. From a village that had wyrm rot. ”

  “That’s not…” Tanel almost thought better of it, but carried on: “That’s not the same.”

  “Of course not,” Mallow agreed. “That time your farm boys and your second sons won. Then again, it’s easier when you’re slaughtering families, killing Kelthi while they pray and sing and nurse their babies. Isn’t that so?”

  Tanel looked pained, but Mallow couldn’t help himself, and carried on. “When I was traveling with her, we found her family’s chapel. Way up north. Burnt to the ground.”

  He watched Tanel’s face, watched him flush an embarrassed crimson, and wondered what memory accompanied that color.

  “Funny thing, that,” he continued. “You were there, Elder. Why do you still follow them? Tell me, from where you stand now, who are the monsters and who are just boys?”

  They stood in the wind a while. The crows complained at the interruption, then fluttered a little farther downriver, returning to their work. The wyrm’s presence was quieter, but he could feel it in the deep earth, sleeping. Waiting.

  Finally Mallow hitched his pack higher again. “Come, Elder,” he said gently. “It’s no fun watching you squirm about the truth in air that reeks like this.”

  Tanel tore his gaze from the far bank with visible effort. His eyes were bright, and he looked older than he had the night before, his illusions dragged through the mud.

  He nodded once. “Right,” he said. His voice steadied. “Pilgrimage.”

  Mallow stepped onto the bridge first, limping slowly. The stone still bore faint gouges where horseshoes had slipped, where claws had raked. As he crossed, the scales along his sides itched.

  Behind him, Tanel muttered something that might have been a prayer.

  By midday, the city had dropped behind the hills, and the world narrowed to road and hedgerow and patches of thin, determined green. They passed a farmer with an ox-cart, who eyed Tanel’s bells and Mallow’s captain badge and decided, very sensibly, to pretend they were neither. A pair of children watched them go from a crumbling stone wall, whispering behind their hands. Mallow caught the word serpent more than once.

  Outside Ivath, the rumors had already outrun them.

  By late afternoon, his leg announced it was done cooperating. They crested a rise and saw a village tucked into the hollow of the valley below in a huddle of slate roofs around a small square, smoke curling from chimneys. Fields stretched out behind like a patchwork quilt still mostly brown, only the edges tinged with new growth.

  Mallow’s body immediately began composing a list: inn, fire, chair, something hot that wasn’t fish. He’d gotten a lifetime’s worth at Lethen Bay and could stand to not eat another bite of it again.

  “Do we press on?” Tanel asked. “Or…”

  Mallow didn’t let himself hesitate long enough for pride to make a decision for him. “We find a bed,” he said. “Saints are no good to anyone if they fall over in the road.”

  Tanel gave him an incredulous look at the word saints.

  “I’m joking,” Mallow said. “Come along, Elder.”

  As they approached the village, Mallow tugged his cowl around his throat, trying to make sure his scales were fully covered. They’d managed so far to pass as an Elder and his guard on some dour errand. He’d like to keep that fiction for as long as possible.

  But as he reached the village square and recalled with pained memory the last time he’d been here, he almost couldn’t think straight.

  This village was where he’d met Lain.

  His heart ached as he thought of her, cloaked in the robes of an Unsung Sister and hiding her ears, her violet eyes looking at him with shock and wariness and finally the sharp, hopeful tug of her Heat as her hand brushed his own.

  There were two days that had altered his life with such force that he could never return to the man he was before.

  The first was the day the Dagorlind sent a quake to Lethen Bay.

  The second was the day he met Lain.

  He swallowed the heartache and limped toward the inn, with Tanel two steps behind him.