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Though it hurt to mention his brother, it was worth it when Thea looked at him as though he’d grown two heads, before a smile broke across her face and she tipped her head back, laughing.

There wasn’t a more glorious sound.

Except for —

He promptly cut that thought off before it bloomed into something dangerous.

‘Glad you find my misery amusing, Apprentice.’

‘Am I really your apprentice anymore?’ she asked, still smiling.

Gods, he could look at that smile all day.

‘Tal called me his apprentice long after I passed the Great Rite,’ he told her. ‘Mainly just to piss me off.’

‘Isn’t that why you do it to me?’

‘Maybe.’

For a moment it was as it had been before, before everything had gone to shit. A little reprieve, a little reminder of how easy, how comfortable it could be. They hadn’t been alone since he’d brought her to climax with his fingers in the tent. The verythought of it heated his blood even now. But time was not on their side, if it ever had been. They needed to keep moving, to secure a safe entry for Anya and the rest.

‘Who are we meeting, anyway?’ Thea asked, adjusting the straps of her pack and rolling her shoulders beneath its weight.

‘Allies.’

‘There’s the cryptic Warsword I know and…’ She trailed off. ‘Will Cal and Kipp be there?’

‘Yes, this is the meet point I told Torj about. They should be joining us there.’

The surge of relief was obvious on Thea’s face. Wilder knew that while she trusted the Bear Slayer with her friends, a part of her wouldn’t rest easy until she clapped eyes on them again herself. The sooner that happened, the better.

‘Last I heard, Torj was trying to get Esyllt onside, and Audra,’ he continued. ‘I get the feeling she’s been waiting for this for twenty years.’

‘Audra’s coming to… this meet point?’

Wilder shrugged. He didn’t want to get Thea’s hopes up, not about Audra or whoever else might show up. ‘I guess we’ll see.’

He’d asked Torj to put the word out discreetly, and to trusted friends of the guild only. It was time Thezmarr knew how deep its own corruption ran, and it was time for it to play its part in the war to come.

‘No more questions?’ he prompted.

Thea seemed to consider this before she spoke again. ‘I have endless questions,’ she told him slowly. ‘But I feel as though I no longer have the right to ask them…’

He hated the tentativeness in her tone, but he appreciated the raw honesty of her words, because he felt the same.

‘It’s guilt, among other things,’ he said quietly. ‘I feel it too.’

‘I don’t… I don’t know how to move past it.’

‘Little by little,’ he told her. ‘Perhaps we start with a question each, and go from there… What do you think?’

Thea glanced at the seemingly endless tunnel ahead. ‘I guess we have time.’

He huffed a laugh at that. ‘I guess so. You first.’

Thea was quiet for a time, but he didn’t press her.

At last, she looked at him and he saw that same sorrow in her eyes as before, the same regret beneath the surface. ‘Do you think we can go back to how it was?’