We left at dawn.
Three people, two horses, and Aldrich, who traveled in a way I'd stopped trying to categorize and simply accepted as characteristic.
Kael and I had said the relevant things to the relevant people the night before.
Theron had command of the military. Helena had the medical situation and the civilian population.
Martin had the day-to-day logistics in his one remaining hand, which — as Kael had observed quietly to me the night before — was more competent than most people with two.
Giga's unit was maintaining the northern perimeter.
The agreement with Darius was holding, for whatever that was worth.
The kingdom would function without me.
I'd spent months being terrified of that sentence and had arrived, somewhere in the past weeks, recognizing that the terror had be
