"Even bleeding? Even with a king coming?"
"Especially then," Kael said. "A life without the chance to be chosen is only a long circling. I circled for years. Your son's hand ended the circle. Pain is a fair rent for that."
Mara's eyes stung. She blamed the wind. "Joren used to say pain was just the body's way of sending an invoice. He thought he was funny."
"Was he?"
"Sometimes." She was quiet. "I think he would have tried to kill you. And I think, if he'd lived long enough to see Elias laugh at your humming, he might have put the axe down. I don't know. I don't get to know. That's the part that still angers me—not that he's gone, but that the conversation is unfinished forever."
Kael nodded, a slow dip of horns. "Keepers understand unfinished conversations. We have been having one with your kind for centuries. Perhaps this—" he gestured, encompassing woman, child, cleft, pursuit "—is how it continues. Not clean. Not safe. Continued."
When dusk came they moved again. The hunters' metal-scent faded west. Ahead, the Ash Ranges lifted their dark shoulders against a sky finally fraying at the edges, hints of pale gold behind the gray, as if the world were rehearsing the color of Bond-light for the day to come.
On the fourth day the hunters came.
Not moth-things. Men. Six of them in the eastern style—boiled leather, short bows, a mage among them with a collar of iron teeth. Reeve Halden would have called them mercenaries. Kael called them hounds.
"Stay behind me," he told Mara. "If I fall, run downhill, not up. The river will hide your scent for a mile."
"You're not falling," she said, and hated how much she meant it.