“They had a cart.”

The magus snorted. His fingers left my face, and I felt them lightly touching the front of my shirt where it was stiff with dried blood. “Don’t,” I said. My voice was wispy and thin. I tried to pull myself together and started again. “Just leave me alone. I’m fine. Go away.”

“Gen, I think the bleeding has stopped. I’ve still got my cloak. I’m going to see if I can wrap you in it.”

“No,” I said, “no, no, no.” I didn’t dare shake my head, but I desperately didn’t want the magus to try to wrap me in his cloak. I didn’t want his cloak. I didn’t want him to put his hand beneath my head and lift it to slide Sophos’s fancy folded cloak underneath, which is what he did first. When he didn’t notice the bump under my hair at the base of my skull, I gave up protesting. The pain washed back over me, and I sank into it. The last thing I heard was the magus arguing with a guard about clean water and bandages.

When I woke again, there was a gloomy light coming through the cell’s barred window, and I could see Sophos hovering. My shirt had been opened, and I was wrapped in white bandages. The magus must have won his argument.

Sophos saw me looking cross-eyed down at my chest and said, “He told the guard that you could always be killed later, but if you were dead, you couldn’t be questioned by anyone but the gods.”

That was comforting. “Where is everyone?” I asked.

He came to sit cross-legged beside me. I was lying on his cloak and wrapped in the magus’s. “They came an hour ago and took the magus away,” he said. “Pol and Ambiades are dead. The queen’s soldiers were waiting for us at the top of the cliff. Ambiades had told them about the trail.”

He waited, and when I couldn’t think of anything to say, he told me, “We saw everything from the top of the cliff.”

Hence the magus’s apology.

The captain of the Queen’s Guard and his men had been waiting on the mountainside. No doubt they had had more men stationed at the entrance to the Seperchia Pass, but the captain had gambled on the magus’s leaving Attolia the way he had come in. When Pol and the magus boosted Sophos over the lip, he’d seen their boots, but he’d been dragged onto the clifftop before he could shout a warning. There had been nothing the magus and Pol could do but follow with Ambiades. When the captain of the guard had asked where I was, the magus, still angry at me, had said, “Saving his own skin.” Stretched flat on top of the boulder, I was easy to see from above.

“He’s planning an ambush,” said one of the soldiers, and raised a crossbow.

“The queen wanted them all alive,” the captain reminded him.

“Then don’t bother to shoot him,” the magus said bitterly. “He’ll hide there until you climb down to arrest him.”

“He’s armed,” said the captain, and he cupped his hands to his mouth to shout a warning to his men but lowered them when the magus fluttered one hand in dismissal. “The only thing he can do with a sword is steal it or sell it.”

So they stood and watched me turn an orderly hunt into a knot of fallen horses and wounded men. The captain swung toward the magus, who was clearly stunned, and then changed his mind about what he was going to say. “Not what you expected?” he asked in wry tones.

The magus shook his head, watching me as I ran for cover.

“My men will cut him off,” the captain assured him as I disappeared under the olives.

“He’s done for,” said Ambiades when I was chased back into the open by the horsemen. “Good riddance,” he added as they bore down on me.

“Shut up, Ambiades,” the magus said.

“They’ll have to dismount to get him,” said the captain.

“They won’t have any trouble,” the magus had said sadly, not knowing how strongly my father had desired me to become a soldier and not a thief.

“I’ve never seen someone win against that many men,” said Sophos, sitting on the cold stone floor beside me.

“You still haven’t,” I pointed out. “Tell me about Ambiades.” I didn’t want to talk about the fight at the base of the mountains. Something unpleasant had happened. I couldn’t remember exactly what it was. I didn’t want to.

But Sophos wouldn’t be distracted. “No, I suppose not. But you wounded two of them, and I think you killed the last one.”

My eyes closed. That was what I hadn’t wanted to think about. I hadn’t intended to kill anyone, but I’d panicked when I’d seen swords on every side.

“We saw you run back into the open,” Sophos went on mercilessly. “Why didn’t they ride you down?”

“Too many rocks,” I whispered. I was tired. “And they were riding farm horses. They only step on people by accident.”

Only four of the soldiers had dismounted at first. I’d chopped one of them on the forearm, then disarmed another and gotten my sword tangled in his hilt. I wouldn’t have been able to free a longer sword, but I managed to pull Sophos’s clear in time to stop a thrust from someone on my left. Training that I thought I’d forgotten turned the block into a lunge, and I’d sunk the sword into my opponent, certainly killing him. It had felt no different from stabbing a practice dummy. I was so horrified that as he fell away from me, I’d let the sword slip out of my hand. I hadn’t wanted to be a soldier. I’d become a thief instead, to avoid the killing. See where that had gotten me.

A light push from behind had forced me forward a half step. When I looked down, my shirt was lifted away from my chest like a tent, with a half inch of sword poking through a tear in the cloth. The point must have entered somewhere around the middle of my back but had slanted to come out near my armpit. I remembered very clearly that there was only a smear of blood on the steel.

“We thought you were dead,” Sophos told me.

So had I. My knees had folded. Things were muddled and awful for a long time, and when I opened my eyes again, I was lying on my back and the sky over me was perfectly blue. The blue was all I could see. I must have been on a cart, but its sides were out of my sight. There was no sign of olive trees or the mountains. If it hadn’t been for the jolting as the cartwheels turned, I could have been lying on a cloud. People still seemed to be shouting, but they were very far away. They were important people, shouting about me. I heard the king of Sounis and the queen of Eddis and other voices I couldn’t identify. I thought that they might be gods. I wanted to tell them not to fuss. I wanted to explain that I would be dead soon, and there would be nothing left to fuss over, but the cart must have hit a particularly severe bump. The blue sky above me turned to red and then to black.

Sophos dragged me out of the memory, asking, “Who taught you to fight like that?”

“My father.”

“Was he very angry when you turned out to be a thief?”

I thought of the fight when I’d torn up my enrollment papers for the army. “Yes.” Still, we’d gotten much closer once the matter was settled and done with. “But he’s used to it now.”

“You should have been a soldier,” Sophos said. “You were better than Ambiades ever was. I think that’s why he said, ‘Good riddance,’ again, and that’s when Pol—” Sophos stopped.