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drops spatter from the trees. Then, all of a piece, as a sliding boulder moves, he turned and looked at me.
    I had taken a step back. But it was not me he saw. Those eyes looked past me, laughter all blown out. Dark and deep as a sunless forest pool. And blind, as if they had been stunned.
    Then they shortened focus. That time, all of us stepped back.
    â€œCould I not?” He barely whispered, but it cut like a whip. “Not knock the sword out of his hand? Stun him? Throw him a sarissa-length away? Stop him in his tracks . . . But no. I had to use A’sparre.” Suddenly he buried his face in his hand. “ ‘A brick-maker stitching silk.’ . . . Oh, Four. Any brick-maker could have bettered that.”
    With a degree of wounded dignity I said, “You did save my life. Or perhaps you’d rather have saved his?”
    He just shook his head to and fro. Then, muffled in his arm, he said, “Fengthira was right.”
    â€œAbout what?”
    He ignored that. But something in the bow of his shoulders made me burst out, “Don’t tell me you’re scared of your poxy witch!”
    In another moment he looked up. His eyes were still stunned, but the shock was changing. Now he looked nearer to despair. And oddly forlorn, as if I had deserted him.
    â€œYou don’t understand,” he said. And it was not blame, but grief.
    I stared. He looked back to the corpse.
    â€œThat . . . he . . . was unique.” He said it very softly. The grief remained, as if he were speaking some great hero’s eulogy.
    â€œThere never was, there never will be another of him. It took all time, and everything that ever was, to put him here. And I destroyed him. Blew him out, Phut! Not because I had to.” His head went back in his arm. “From sheer . . . blind . . . criminal . . . incompetence.”
    I could not fathom the technical terms, I was uncomfortable at the depth of his remorse, baffled by this extravagant metaphysical breast-beating over a scurvy back-stabber who had got his deserts, and it gave me an odd sense of falling short, of lacking some value I could not even define. That, like all awareness of deficiency, made me angrier.
    â€œHe’s still dead,” I said brutally. “And that’s all there is to it.”
    There was a long pause. Then he took his hand down and stood up, and when I saw his face I knew there would never be words I would wish so bitterly to have left unsaid.
    â€œYes,” he said.
    * * * * *

    I beat a thankful retreat to the practical. The other curs were well to heel. They saddled up with speed, and I had just ordered, “Dakis, Krem, tie that crowbait on with his stirrup leathers,” when a voice behind me said, “Alkir, wait.”
    He seemed to have recovered a little or, at least, to have begun to think. “This was my fault,” he said. “All of it.” An echo of that grief ran across his face and I wanted to look away. But he went on at once, “There’d have been no trouble if you weren’t escorting me.”
    That I could not agree made me no more amiable.
    â€œSo . . . he could have drowned yesterday. We could bury him here. And”—he swept a glance round the ten of us—“finish it.”
    Was I to clap or swear? Conspiring with your men to falsify a death and conceal an aborted mutiny, entrusting your career to a pack of toy-shop heroes’ malice or drunkenness—if they did not read his mercy as weakness and kill us both. Nothing is so rancorous as pardoned crime. Before taking the chance he did I would have struck the mare. But perhaps such gambles, or an insight that makes a surety of them, are the mark of high command.
    Before anyone produced a word or, I daresay, a thought, he said in open relief, “Thank the Four.” Then he looked surprised and, almost under his breath, amended it to an equally fervent, if more cryptic “Imsar Math.”
    * * * *