He drew her to him. “What is it?” he murmured. Her heart beat against his palm.

“It just means that you shouldn’t borrow tomorrow’s problems. Deal with today’s.”

“But why does it upset you?”

“It was something my father would say.” She grew smaller in Arin’s arms. “I can’t face him.”

“You won’t have to,” he promised. This, he could do. Arin sensed his god listening. He felt the god’s assent fall on him, light and warm, like ash.

Give him to me, said death.

As Kestrel neared sleep, it occurred to Arin that the emotion that spread through him—delicate, and unable to be named at first, because so unfamiliar—was peace.

He held the feeling close before it could be lost.

Chapter 39

The rain began the next morning and showed no signs of letting up. Mud sucked at Arin’s boots as he helped Kestrel ready her horse. The rain intensified, dropping down like little stones.

Arin squinted up at it. “Terrible day to ride.” He hated to see her go.

She wiped water from her face, glancing over at Risha, whose head was tipped back under the rain, eyes closed. “Not for every one,” Kestrel said, “and the rain will make it less likely a Valorian scout will notice that a small band is riding from camp.”

True. The middle distance was a gray fog. Arin raked dripping hair off his brow. He tried to be all right. His nerves sparked the way a blade does against the grinder.

Kestrel touched his cheek. “The rain is good for us.”

“Come here.”

She tasted like the rain: cool and fresh and sweet. Her mouth warmed as he kissed her. He felt the way her clothes stuck to her skin. He forgot himself.

She murmured, “I have something for you.”

“You needn’t give me anything.”

“It’s not a gift. It’s for you to keep safe until I return.” She placed a speckled yellow feather on his palm.

The rain fell in a veil behind her.

The ground oozed. Mud splattered Arin’s trousers as he helped load a supply wagon. He was worried, he kept thinking about the Bite and Sting set in Kestrel’s saddlebag, and the mud made his work sluggish. He grew frustrated.

Oh, I don’t know, said death, slightly smug. I like the mud.

Arin stopped what he was doing. You do?

There was no reply other than the rain.

Arin considered his army. He considered the general’s. A strategy slowly formed, one that released an emotion close to plea sure. It was, he realized, the promise of revenge: right at the tips of his fingers.

In the prince’s tent, the rain loudly percussive against the canvas, Roshar studied the map marked by Arin.

“Your people will fight better in the rain,” Arin said.

“The rain might end by the time our army is in position.”

“But the mud will remain. Think of that heavy Valorian armor the higher ranks wear. We wear leather. Most of them will flounder.”

“Not on a paved road.” Roshar wasn’t challenging Arin’s strategy, just prodding it to test its solidity. “Their cavalry is superior. The general will take into account the soggy terrain on either side of the road. Armed infantry fares worse than horses in mud. They’ll try to flank us with cavalry.”

“Yes.” Arin tapped the map where he’d made notches on the even ground that bordered the road and ran open and smooth to the forest on either side. “Exactly.”

“What is it like,” Kestrel asked Risha as they rode, “to be gifted with weapons?”

Coolly, the princess said, “You’ve no proof that I am.”

But Kestrel remembered an archery contest on the palace lawn, and how Risha aimed arrows with studied mediocrity until one final arrow punched so hard into the target’s center that it drove through the canvas halfway up its shaft. “I used to wish I were talented that way. Then I didn’t. Now I do again.”

Risha shrugged. “It’s gained me little.”

“Roshar was even younger than we are when he brought you into Valorian territory. When you were captured.”

“Betrayed.”

“You didn’t agree to go with him?”

The princess shifted in her saddle. “I was a mere child, and eager to prove myself. Children seek to please. They try so hard. My brother and sister used that against me.”

“Roshar has suffered for it.”

“And so?” Risha twisted in the saddle to meet Kestrel’s gaze. The princess’s eyes burned, her brown skin was sleek with rain, her full mouth pinched.