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She blinked at me like I’d slapped her.

“What did you say?”

“At least, not that I could find. The book was hiding it all from me. Maybe I could have broken it in time, but maybe I couldn’t. And even if I found it written there, in big bright Murder Alphabet letters, WE KILLED THE HORSES, TOOK ALL THE MONEY, OWN ALL YOUR CITIES AND, WHILE WE’RE AT IT, FUCK YOU, what would we do about it?”

“We would … we would go to the kings of the Crownlands. Like your King Conmar.”

“He’s not my fucking king, he just rules the land that conquered mine. But what would we do if we got an audience with him?’

She moved her mouth but then held it still.

“You were about to say, ‘Show him,’ weren’t you, you great, thick…?”

“What? I am a great, thick what?” she said, and it felt almost as though she hoped I would say something about her family so she had to spill blood about it.

“Diddler!” I said.

And the word, while I meant it angry, was so ridiculous that she cooled off a bit. She didn’t laugh, she didn’t even smile, but she sort of sniffed out a bit with her nose, and that would do.

She nodded, listening now in a way she hadn’t been before.

“And when the Murder Alphabet killed him dead, and we were tortured to death for regicide, that book would slink off and find its masters.”

It was a long moment before she spoke.

“Deadlegs wanted us to take the book west. So did my queen. They are … they are wiser than we are, smarter. There was a reason for it. I will believe that.”

The rage might have gone from her face, but the sadness that replaced it was so great that I missed the anger.

“What is this you said of a girl?” she said, wiping her face with her hands. She was moving beyond the despair now, I could see, banishing it to the darkness where she had long ago learned to keep feelings that threatened her duty.

“The Full Shadows and their magickers trapped a human soul in the book. That was how it became a living thing. Her soul was bound into it, to make it smart, clever. But she wasn’t there alone. The book itself had a spirit, and it was monstrous, and it used and enslaved her. There were others there, too. Souls that got themselves trapped. But also, and I don’t know if this is right … possibly the old Full Shadows of Oustrim. I think maybe they made themselves a little afterlife to hide in and avoid whatever hell awaited them. Again, that’s just a feeling I have. There was some group of shades watching, apart from the book and the girl. Like the wealthy watching the poor from high windows. If I sound confused about it, I am. All I know for certain is that the book wasn’t going to help us. It’s been trying to kill us from the first hour. And it would have found a way.”

Galva nodded.

“Maybe. But what about the third book? The one that went through the wall?”

“Good question,” I said. “Maybe that’s the one I figure out. Back in that cave, or wherever we—they—were sent.”

“Or maybe that one goes back to your Guild when they find us there and kill us.”

“Yah,” I said. “Maybe. Good chat. I feel better.”

She didn’t say anything else for a moment. She just finished putting her pack back together, as did I. We started walking away from the temple and from the endless mountains behind it in silence. Then she filled her nostrils and took a deep breath.

“By the Bride, what is that smell?”

“Flowers,” I said and pointed at the trumpet-shaped blooms that ornamented the sandstone walls, clusters of them white, others purple.

She stopped and stood swaying now, enjoying it.

“It is beautiful,” she said.

I breathed in deeply as well, and a curious thing happened. The smell changed in my nose. Now it wasn’t merely the sweet perfume of a flower; it was home and hearth. It was the hollow behind Norrigal’s ear, and it was hot lamb pies cooling in the window of a bakery in Pigdenay. It was Elayne of Pigdenay covered in fresh sweat after dancing in the Gather, looking at me and wanting a kiss. It was the scent of my young mother’s thick hair draping me as she cradled me in her arms, tapping her finger playfully on my nose and cheeks and speaking to me in Galtish. It was a spring storm coming in off the Tattered Sea, bringing warmer air behind it.

I had stopped walking as well.

“Maybe we shouldn’t march on just yet,” I said.