Kest glanced away, embarrassment twisting his mouth. His proud profile was silhouetted in the sun. “Well… when I was laying there dying – and I’m pretty sure I was – I, uh, bonded with Spikkt.” He turned red. “I mean, he told me to, he begged me! Maybe I shouldn’t have; we haven’t known each other anywhere near long enough. But we’d already talked about it some, and it was sort of urgent, so…” He shrugged. “You know that the Bonded take on each other’s traits, right? Salamanders can heal from just about anything, and he helped me to slow the bleeding. It’s nothing like what we’ll be able to do later. He says that I’ll be able to grow my real eye back. He exaggerates sometimes, but still!” The little beast scampered up onto his shoulder, and he gave the salamander a warm glance. “We’ll figure it out.”
She laughed weakly and touched his face with her good hand. “Oh, Kest. I knew you’d be free of it.”
“Is this what you saw when you looked for my future?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “I didn’t see anything about that. I just knew because I know you, and that thing didn’t fit.”
He touched his eye patch. “Not the way I would have chosen to go about it.”
She groped for his hand. “Help me up.” He levered her to her feet, and they leaned on each other as she surveyed the area. Her arm was bandaged and strapped to her chest, and the bone no longer jutted from it. “Did you do this?” she wondered.
“Renna helped,” he replied.
“Is she all right?”
He frowned. “No. I don’t know. She was very quiet. Wandered off a bit ago.” He pointed toward the Great Scar, and her breath caught in her throat.
The massive cave mouth had collapsed. Great boulders and chunks of rocks were strewn about the wall of rubble like badly thrown alley pins. Corpses of animals and demons lay helter-skelter amid the wreckage, some pinned under great rocks, others in pieces from the force of the blast. “How am I not dead?” she wondered. “I was in there.”
“I found you just beyond the cave-in,” Kest said, helping her walk toward the ruin. “You must have bounced clear of the cave-in. There was a boulder twice as tall as me right next to your head. Right over there, see? You got lucky.” He pondered that for a second, then asked, “Can the Pure Light change your luck?”
“Who knows?” she said. “It wouldn’t be the most surprising thing I heard today.”
They limped up to the blocked-off mouth of the Great Scar and found Renna sitting on a small boulder, a scrap of black fabric in her hand. It was one of the fringes of Gamarron’s demonsilk robe.
“Is he dead?” the old woman asked without looking up. “Did you see?”
Nira sighed. “He was dying even before the explosion; you saw that. But he made it count. He stabbed the Shard through Guyrin and into the… into the Devourer. It was Chaos discord that caused the blast.”
The tall woman fingered the scrap of fabric, tears in her eyes. Then she threw it into the dirt. “Damned fool!” She hiccupped out a sob, dashed her hand across her eyes, and stood up. “Your visions aren’t worth shit,” she accused.
Nira couldn’t feel anything but sorrow for the former priestess. “We saw possibilities, and we thought they were facts.”
“Maybe you did,” Renna snarled. She paced in front of them, agitated. “He was supposed to unite the nations. Will that simply not happen now? Just because of chance?”
“Looks like it,” Nira said. “Not very fair, if you ask me.”
“I didn’t ask you,” Renna said. “Unacceptable! He was the unifier!” She clutched at the throat of her dress. “I was the Counselor! It was my destiny!” She was on the verge of tears again.
“Renna,” Nira said, risking her good hand on the woman’s shoulder. “He’s dead. It can’t happen.”
The bony woman knocked her hand away in a violent spasm. Nira felt Kest move forward, ready to step between them. “It will happen,” Renna grated. “Gamarron the King will unite the nations.” She stooped and snatched up the scrap of demonsilk fabric. “Death cannot stop it.”
“Please, Renna,” Kest said.
“You’ll see!” she shouted, walking away from them, away from the Great Scar. “They’ll all see!” She strode off toward the setting sun, determined, angry, and unbowed.
They watched her go, but she never paused or looked back. “Should we follow her?” Kest wondered.
“I don’t think she wants us to,” Nira replied. “But Coward’s Landing is the only way off the Black Isle, right? We’ll catch up to her there.”
“Unless we want to dig our way into the tunnels,” Kest said, turning back to the blocked cavern. “We could try to find our way through those Passages that Tychus talked about and take them back to the Mainland.”
“That is not the best idea you’ve ever had,” Nira said. “I think I’d rather take a boat, thanks.”
They stared at the fallen entrance for a while longer, saying their silent goodbyes to Gamarron and Guyrin. “He was a good chief, in the end,” Kest offered as the last rays of the sun glinted on the rubble before them.
“He was a good chief from the start,” Nira said. “He just wasn’t always in charge.”
“I wish I’d known Guyrin longer.”
“Loony bastard,” Nira said with sad fondness. “He deserved better.”
After a long pause, Kest whispered, “Do you think it’s dead?”
The question that had been plaguing her since she awoke. “Do you think a thing like that can die?”
Once said, Nira wished she had kept the thought to herself. She took Kest by the hand and pulled him away from the collapsed entrance. “Come on, let’s get moving. Maybe we can get back to the abandoned holdfast and sleep there tonight.” They set their backs to the Great Scar and walked away. They didn’t move fast as they leaned into
