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“Please,” Rhyder was begging before we had even reached where they waited for us.

Although he had carried me so far, he barely seemed winded.

“She was bitten,” he said. “Can you help her?Please. I’ll do anything. Blind me. Enslave me. Only heal my sister.”

I felt Rhyder look up at Ronan and then the Prophet was moving, calling for his Helpmeet.

There was a ringing in my ears and my arm still burned. It was up past my elbow now, pouring into my shoulder.

Soon it would reach my heart. . .

My eyelids fluttered and I lost consciousness.

When I came back it was to pain.

“Hold her down!” Obedience ordered sharply, and I felt my brother’s iron grip tighten around my wrist, his other like a bar across my chest.

“If you love her, do not let her move,” she said.

Her knife seemed to be coated in something, a paste of some sort, forest-green and thick. Then she put it at the tip of my shoulder and drew the blade down my arm. It was white-hot burning agony and I screamed aloud and tried to thrash, my head whipping back and forth, the screams torn from my throat.

But Rhyder held me tightly against his chest, and Bee continued to break through my flesh.

“More,” she said, and then I saw Ronan move, his deft fingers bringing a little stone bowl forward, and covering the knife with the strange paste again.

Then she continued down, hitting my elbow as the tears streamed down my cheeks.

“I’m so sorry,” Rhyder said, his breath jagged and rough in my ear. “I’m so sorry.”

“Later,” Bee said, and she moved to my forearm as I gritted my teeth, and then finally to my wrist.

She pulled up the knife and looked at the wet blood that covered the blade, her own soft pink gown covered with bright, angry drops of it.

Then she reached over for the pot and carefully drew her fingers down the wound, and we waited, the settlement so quiet that I heard a distant flutter of birds, a disturbance somewhere.

“Clean,” she said, “The poison is out.”

“Good girl,” Ronan told her, his hard voice warm with praise for her, and Rhyder leaned his forehead on mine and cried.

*

“I’M SO SORRY,” RHYDERsaid, his hard fingers stroking my cheek, and I was astonished as the world began to return and stop spinning, to hear his voice crack, his hand tighten on mine. “I’m so sorry I took you back there. You could have been killed, Temperance. And it would have been all my fault.”

“It’s all right,” I said, as Bee bent to give me a cup of what tasted like nettle tea.

“It’s not all right,” he said.

I looked over at him, the strange nakedness of his bare tanned throat, the leather strap now streaked with my blood instead of his relic.

“I am—so sorry about your Holy Relic,” I said.

“My relic isyou, Temperance. You are the one who sustains me, blesses me.”

He rubbed his rough beard against my cheek and turned to Ronan and Bee.

“Thank you for saving her. My undying loyalty is to those who are good to my sister. So for you. . . Prophet, you have a traitor in your camp. Someone who is going to turn off the electric fence and bring an army on you unawares.”

“Elder Cenhelm is manning the gatehouse today,” Ronan said, his hand already on his hip, reaching for his weapon.