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I’m leaving the clan.

I’m sorry.

Tell my ma and Ess.

I’m sorry.

The words were a blow, leveling me until I found myself sitting in the chair, my head in my hands.

She’d packed, and she’d left. Maybe I should have known to expect it, but I was a fool.

Goose came and pressed his head into the crook of my arm.

“She left you, too.”

He thumped his tail pathetically.

“I knew she didn’t want me, but you? Why would she leave you behind?”

It didn’t make sense. The Godless would have had him, and surely that was where she had gone. Yet here the beast was, tucked away in the hut, the only thing she’d left me.

Would she make it there safely on her own? After everything we’d gone through with the bear, and she was still slipping through the forest by herself, no one at her back.

It was more than I could handle. Shaking myself out of my stupor, I packed my sack and set off to get Ess. The two of us would head to the camp where the Godless lived, and we would find her. She would be fine.

Esska needed no prodding. She took one look at my face, glanced at the note, and was pulling her boots on before I could even finish asking her if she’d go with me.

“We’re bringing her back,” she said, no question in her voice. “She belongs here.Damn it. Damn this clan for making her feel otherwise.”

We told no one that we were going. We left in the dark, went for a few hours, then made camp. The next morning, we were up with the sun and cutting our path through the forest without a word. As the sun set again, we came upon the camp of the Godless.

A small group came out to meet us, and I found Tovin’s face among them. Even after all these years, even with how much he had changed, I still looked him in the face and recognized my friend, like all the time between us meant nothing.

“Roan,” he said stepping forward, his voice punctuating his surprise.

We clasped hands and knocked shoulders. I wasted no time asking about Fenli.

But she wasn’t there.

It was a bad sign.

If she hadn’t made it to the camp, then the only explanation was that she’d run into trouble along the way. The thought hollowed me out.

Tovin took us to his hut, and it wasn’t long before food and drink arrived from the kitchens, the small table between us filled with hot bread, a crock of stew, and more mead than we needed.

“The Godless are generous,” I said, but my mind was on Fenli.

Tovin grunted a laugh. “The Godless still, huh? I’d forgotten they called us that.”

I looked up. “That’s not what you call yourselves?”

He shook his head, and I should have known. It had just never dawned on me.

“I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re fine,” he said, ladling the steaming stew into a bowl and handing it to Esska. “Anyway, we refer to our clan as the North Clan or the Star of the North.”

And it made sense because they’d come here to the Hinterlands long before the rest of us.