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“Yeh the captain of the fuckin’ guard, ain’t yeh?”

“I wouldneverorder the burning of one’s home,” Ruby implores.

“But yeh did nothin’ to stop it!” Salem shouts, lips trembling.

Ryon comes between them. He puts a hand to his shoulder. “She couldn’t have known, Salem. She abandoned the guardianship, her title along with it, when she helped me escape. It is not she who did this to you, my friend.”

“Just the army she raised then!” Salem says darkly, piercing Ruby with an accusatory stare. “Just the comrades she trained. Did yeh teach ’em to torch homes by night, Captain? While the unwitting slept in their beds?”

Ruby looks to her feet as she answers, true shame entrenched in her words. “I… I cannot imagine your suffering–”

“Ain’t no need for imaginin’s,” Salem sneers. “I got plenty of sufferin’ to impart.”

“Enough!” Ryon says, moving his hand to the man’s chest, staying him. “Salem. You have every cause in the world to be angry, but Ruby is not your target. She would not be standing here alive if I thought she was to blame.”

“She’s one of them, Ry!” Salem says, incensed. “She still bears their emblem.”

“She is with us, Salem. I assure you.”

Salem trembles with ill-suppressed rage for a moment. Then, turning, he curses loudly. He stomps in the direction of the flattened inn, but not before turning back to point a meaty finger in Ruby’s direction. “Keep her the fuck away from me!” he rasps.

They watch him go.

Ruby sighs tiredly. “I apologise,” she tells Ryon. “I should not have interrupted the way I did. I thought he had already noticed me amongst the rest.”

“Evidently not,” Ryon intones. “But you have nothing to apologise for,” he assures her, laying a hand briefly on her shoulder.

She dips her chin down, letting the dark fringe of her eyelashes conceal her feelings. “Someone should,” she says, then turns away.

They cannot go to the Mecca. To be sure, Queen Alvira will have them stoned, hung, maybe even beheaded, should she feel inspired. Certainly, they cannot remain beside the blackened ruins of Salem’s Inn, where its owner picks over its fragments, searching for the salvageable. His big hands come up empty. He stoops to turn over part of a tapestry, a brass knocker, a shard of stained glass, and a noise escapes him. A sob that he strangles before it can give him away. He finds the sows covered in ash lying trapped in their pens, and he wipes his face, turning away from the rest, scrubbing grief from his eyes.

Ryon watches his friend’s face contort and slacken over and over in a useless attempt to appear like a man without feeling until he can stand it no longer. He goes to him, places a hand on the older man’s shoulder, and grips tighter when Salem tries to shrug him off.

“Only a heap o’ rubbish,” Salem mutters, his words unsteady. “Not worth more’n a few coins.”

But it was a place that was his own. A place he pieced away and let others own too.

Ryon says nothing. There is no peace for Salem to find in his words, and Ryon often has very few. Instead, he stands with his friend in the pain. In the loss. He waits as long as he must for the gentle shudder of the older man’s frame to ease. He waits for Salem to drop the fragment of stained glass back onto the ground, and then guides him away.

They cannot stay, so they go.

Esra must be carried by Rivdan. Though miraculously alive, he is not wholly healed. One side of his face remains scorched, the flesh a dreadful shade of red. His right eye, once big and round, appears ruined. Wounds glisten along his legs, and their odour makes Ryon think of his time in the Kyph, where the brutes were so fond of the way his skin melted under burning iron.

Esra whimpers as Rivdan lifts him, and then falls back into his pain-addled slumber, trembling, and smaller than Ryon has ever seen him.

Baltisse is grey with fatigue, but she slaps Ryon away when she tries to aid her, and Dawsyn is… Ryon does not know what Dawsyn is.

Withdrawn. Spooked, perhaps.

As an assemblage, they are all battered, fractured. Still, they must make haste, lest the guards who burnt Salem’s inn to the ground come back to admire their work. No one speaks. They do what they must.

They journey for a time with rudimentary aim and no target, other than to steer away from the mountain, and away from the Mecca. They walk the tenuous line between the two.

“We could take them to my cabin,” Baltisse says eventually, her feet dragging. Ryon is surprised she walks at all. “The surrounds are protected by my enchantments. We won’t be found.”

He nods, and they begin to steer their party in the direction of the river. But moments later, Baltisse is stumbling, her legs give way. Esra is crying out with pain more frequently, and the rest are weary. The heat in the forest is oppressive, and it has been an age since they all slept. Ryon knows they must stop.

He can hear the river in the distance, not so far that they can’t retrieve fresh water. The tree cover is dense, the ground dry, and they have come as far as they ought to.