Not quite, my king. I reined my mind back from thinking of Kettricken safely on her way to the Mountains. Instead, I repeated, There is still Will. And Burl and Carrod. We must be circumspect, my. prince.
A shade of warmth. l shall. But you know the depths of my thanks. Perhaps we paid highly, but what we bought was worth it. To me, at least.
To me, also. I sensed the weariness in him, and the resignation. Are you giving up?
Not yet. But like yours, my future does not seem promising. The others are all dead or fled I will go on. But I don’t know how much farther I must go. Or what I must do when I get there. And I am so very tired. To give in would be so easy.
Verity read me with ease, I knew. But I had to reach for him and for all he was not conveying to me. I sensed the great cold that surrounded him, and an injury that made it painful to breathe. His aloneness, and the pain of knowing that those who had died had died so far from home, and for him. Hod, I thought, my own grief echoing his. Charim. Gone forever. And something else, something he could not quite convey. A temptation, a teetering at the brink. A pressure, a plucking, very similar to the Skillish plucking I had felt from Serene and Justin. I tried to push past him, to look at it more closely, but he held me back.
Some dangers become more dangerous when confronted, he warned me. This is one of them. But I am sure it is the path I must follow, if I am to find the Elderlings.
“Prisoner!”
I jolted out of my trance. A key turned in the lock of my door and it swung open. A girl stood in the doorway. Regal was beside her, one hand comfortingly on her shoulder. Two guards, Inlanders both by the cut of their clothes, flanked them. One leaned forward to thrust a torch into my cell. I cowered back inadvertently, then sat blinking in the unaccustomed light. “Is that him?” Regal asked the girl gently. She peered at me fearfully. I peered back, trying to decide why she looked familiar.