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clinging to my waist with determination, rising with a wince at every bump, rode Imriel. He’d refused the wagon-Joscelin had been right about that, too. I understood it, understood his folly better than my own.
    He had his mother’s pride, and I could not help but love it in him.
    How not, when I had loved it in her?
    Thus began our long, absurd trek across Drujan, which does not bear telling. Enough to say that we made it, most of us. Betimes we saw soldiers, the wolves of Angra Mainyu, bereft and leaderless. Some of them came to seek the Magi’s blessing, penitent. Some saw the white flags and fled. I do not know who ruled in Daršanga, unless it be the Magus Arshaka.
    Some of the injured died, despite our best efforts. Wounds took septic, or bled internally; one, with a blow to the head, fell asleep and never awakened. We lost seven in all, leaving scarcely fifty survivors from the zenana .
    One was the Hellene girl I’d watched carried out, an islander sold at auction, traded to a Skotophagotis for a handful of coin. Ismene, her name was; I knew them all, by then. A sword-stroke had caught her beneath the armpit, and the gash had festered. I stayed with her the night she died, fever raging. Just before dawn, it broke and she grew lucid.
    “ Lypiphera ,” she said, seeing me and smiling. “I thought it was you.”
    “Shh, lie still.” I removed the damp cloth, feeling her brow as she sought to rise, finding it cool. “Ismene, why do you call me that? I’ve heard it before.”
    “It is a story,” she whispered, watching me wring out the cloth. “A story that slaves tell in Hellas. Sometimes the gods themselves find the pain of existence too much to bear. Because they are gods, they pick a mortal to bear it for them; a lypiphera , a pain-bearer.” Catching my hand, she pressed it to her cheek and closed her eyes, still smiling. “Sometimes they take on mortal pain, too. It is a lucky thing, for slaves.”
    “Ismene.” I swallowed my tears for the untold countless time, laying my palm against her soft skin. “Try to sleep.”
    In the morning, she was dead.
    I’d thought the danger past when her fever broke. I sat on a rock and stared at the dawn, brooding. Joscelin had to come find me when camp was struck.
    “Phèdre.” His voice was cracked with exhaustion; we were all tired, then. “It’s time to go. You did what you could.”
    “If I had studied medicine instead of-”
    “You didn’t.” Something in his tone made me look. Joscelin sighed, dragging his good hand through his tangled, half-braided hair. “Phèdre, let it be. She died in freedom, attended by kindness. It’s a better death than any she would have found in Daršanga. Let it be.”
    Since there was nothing else for it, I did, returning to our campsite. The caravan was waiting. A cairn of stones marked Ismene’s final resting place. Imriel, kneeling behind me, turned in the saddle as we rode away, watching it diminish. “Remember them all,” he said aloud, echoing my words. “Remember them all.”
    In the mornings there was no time, but in the evenings, when the tents were pitched, the horses and mules staked and the cookfires burning, Joscelin sought to practice his Cassiline exercises, one-armed and clumsy. All of that flowing grace, all his long discipline, was centered on symmetry and balance-the weaving patterns of his twin daggers, the crossed vambraces forming a living shield, the pivot of his two-handed sword grip. Bereft of it, his movements were awkward. His bound left arm fouled the sweep of his blows, rendering them ungainly, leaving him exposed. Time and again, he stumbled off-balance, losing his form, unable to complete the complex patterns.
    It pained me to watch him.
    He never complained, not once. And he never ceased trying, pushing himself harder as the bones began to knit. During the first days of our journey, his hand swelled alarmingly. I watched it closely, breathing a prayer of relief when the swelling began to recede. After that, he began to carry a good-sized rock in his left hand as he rode, squeezing it rhythmically for hours on end, trying to keep his muscles from growing slack and useless.
    Ten years old, Joscelin had been when he was exiled from the loving chaos of Verreuil to the grim rigor of the Cassiline Brotherhood. I never saw so clearly how it had molded him as I did on that journey, in his unflagging resolve. So young, I thought, watching Imriel; only a boy, wearing the fragile shape