stjerneklart (adj.) a dark, quiet and clear sky in which the night is filled and illuminated only by stars.

He no longer dreamed of dreaming. His old thoughts felt like a lifetime away; before, it had felt as though he had spent his sleep caged. His mind had been a labyrinth that his conscious mind spent the whole of the night trying to escape; now, it felt like some sort of maze that he was attempting, feverishly, to map without paper or pencil or even a good mental image of its turns and twists. It felt like he spent the whole of his night thus, with one hand on the wall of a catacomb, trying to remember how it spiralled. Zoran Czarnecki had never had enough time to probe too deeply into the machinations of his own mind; now it felt like his mind was no longer his own, and any such attempt to probe into his own thoughts only turned up that memory-that-was-not-a-memory: the blood on the cobblestones, the blighted stars, the thing falling from the sky shedding feathers.

Those golden amber eyes.

He and Ina had agreed to sleep in shifts, but he found he could not force himself into rest for long; even asleep, there clung to his mind that fear, as a burr clings to skin. And so he woke again, suddenly, as though he had heard her screaming, though she was silent. It was only ten or twenty minutes after he had first settled down against one of the immense tree trunks; he woke with that fear twined to his thoughts, waiting for him like a lover in his bed. It was a shapeless fear, for the most part, but now, opening his eyes blearily and catching sight of Ina again, he could for the first time trace the contours of his dread.

When he was asleep, she was alone.

This was not a nice place to be alone. The shadows seemed to creep closer; they had been lucky, insofar as they had glimpsed druj only from afar, but there had been that omnipresent gloom for all of their hike eastwards. It was east, he thought, and hoped; it was hard to tell, without seeing the stars. He and Ina hadn't been sure there would even be night here in these grey forests, but then night had fallen, quick and brutal, amputating the last of the day's light with an overwhelming ferocity. And throughout it all, he had sensed, rather than seen, the sword of Damocles hanging over their head. Its thread must have been faltering; surely, soon, it would fall. Ina must have been thinking something similar; her brows were knotted tightly.

They hadn't spoken much since he had told her about Matthias' notes – since she had pulled that information out of him. He could still feel the little bundle burning hotly in his pocket like a pilfered star. It still weighed heavily upon him, hiding that from the others, but really, when would he have got the chance? They had been separated so quickly… he hadn't wanted to burden them, hadn't wanted to hear the cynicism fly, hadn't wanted the others to look at him like that – like they were looking beneath his thinning mask at the failure that dwelled beneath.

Third ranked? He shouldn't have qualified as a Warrior at all…

Ina looked over at him, hearing him shift his weight; reflexively, he smiled, trying to channel some his usual sunniness. She returned it, slightly shakily; there was still that slightly hollow look in her eyes, like Inanna Nirari had retreated deeply within herself and she was moving, acting, reacting only on learned instinct alone. He could not, would never, blame her for that. But she was smiling. That was a start. He could work with that.

Pekka was gone. He couldn't imagine what that must have felt like; his usually empathy had utterly failed him. He had never lost someone so important to him; he wasn't sure which relationship in his life could come close to approximating the sheer intimacy that Pekka and Ina had displayed.

How would he have felt if Ina had never surfaced from the water? There – surely that was the merest fraction of her grief.

"You should sleep," Ina said softly. Her sweet voice was slightly hoarse from holding back tears, but she said it kindly. Was she ever anything but? "Can't have you falling asleep when your shift comes."

"I'll manage." Zoran pushed himself up, clumsily, resting his forearms against his knees and breathing in deeply. This air was rich and earth-scented; it smelled of wilderness. It reminded him, in its broadest strokes, of their wilderness expeditions in Irij – the long nights and weeks in the mountains outside Opona where they would be set loose among the highest peaks and expected to find their way back to base, come-hell-or-high-water. That had always been the way Commandant had said it: come hell or high water. He'd been fond of that word. He must have known what he was sending them into, head-first. Hell or high water. "What's the worst that can happen?"

Ina smiled softly. "Kinga used to hallucinate, remember?"

He did. It had been a part of their training – they'd all taken it for granted, learning how to withstand fatigue and exhaustion, seeking how long they could go without sleep. He had left the mess hall one evening, just before sunset, and found the youngest Szymańska standing on the porch, swaying gently. She had been awake for ninety hours; she was seeing black dogs that no one else could see. Pekka had put her to bed an hour later, when he had found her asleep in the sparring field. "What was her record – did she reach a hundred? I think we'll be okay for one night."

Ina said, "I never did very well at all of those challenges. I don't think I ever made it past seventy hours."

"You had more sense," Zoran said softly, "than to try."

She moved, very gently, across the forest floor to prop herself up against the same trunk as Zoran. The night air was warm and mild; she had removed a thick winter coat from her pack, but she opted now to bundle it behind their heads so that they could lean back against the bark. They had not lit a fire; he wasn't sure whether they were afraid of being seen, or afraid of what they would see. But it was nice; it was not so dark that he could not see Ina's delicate features. And those eyes – it would have to be very dark indeed not to perceive that gold. They were close enough that he could see himself reflected in her iris; it was a tiny, distorted image of Zoran Czarnecki – a tiny Zoran, scarred and staring and scared.

Blood on his mouth.

Startled, he looked away again. If Ina had noticed, she said nothing. She was good at that; she would not have wanted to make him any more uncomfortable than he already was. She just relaxed back, minutely, and examined her w wrist like there was something written there. After a long moment of silence, she said, "they're okay, right? The others."

He would not – he would never – lie to her. "I'm surprised we haven't run into them yet."

"It's a big island."

"Not that big."

The expression on her face could have cracked a heart of stone. "Well," she said, finally. "All the more reason we'll see them sooner. You know, I think some of their curses should have activated by now."

"Any bets?"

Ina tilted her head. "I think Ghjuvan deserves something gentle," she said softly. "Like… the tenth Death of Kur." Zoran couldn't remember which one that had been – only three nights ago, they had still been studying their predecessors and now he would have been hard-pressed to name one of Matthias' peers. His whole mind seemed utterly steeped in a fog. "And Khalore..."

"It's almost a shame Arsen Grigoryan's manifested like it did," Zoran said ruefully. "I think it would have suited Khalore just fine."

"Oh, god," Ina said. She looked like she had just pictured it. "We'd be back in Irij by lunchtime."

"Maybe we'll get lucky," Zoran said, very softly. "Maybe she'll be even stronger."

The words he had not said hung silently in the air between them: more deadly. He didn't need to say it. They understood one another better than that.

"Don't jinx us, now," Ina said, "you know the l-word doesn't agree with us."

"No," Zoran said. He yawned. "It's almost predictable at this point." Not even a Wheel to turn things in their favour. For a brief moment, he wondered where Myghal was. In a sense, hadn't that been a fine turn of fortune? No, he thought – because they had signed up for this. They were Warriors. They were here to stop a war before it started. This was their duty, and it was a good one.

It was a good one.

"You should sleep, Zor," Ina said again. "I'll keep watch."

He thought of what she had said – it's a good thing we have you, isn't it? More than anything, he wanted to live up to the faith she seemed to have in him. "Nah," he said, "it's okay. I can take the first watch. I don't think I can sleep right now."

She glanced at him. "Are you sure?"

Of course she would ask, but Ina didn't seem inclined to fight him on this. She had barely slept the night before, or the night before that in the sacellum. And before that – screams. Yes, he was sure. He would make sure nothing happened to her.

And yet, in that moment, as she looked at him, he could not see her. For a brief moment, even the gold of her eyes was gone; her hair was bone-white. For a split second, Avrova Vovk stared at him from Ina's face, looking accusing. And then, just as quickly, it was gone.

A hallucination, he thought, just a hallucination. Just like Kinga.

"Yes," he said, slightly hoarsely. "I'm sure."

If Ghjuvan had got his way, they would have amputated there and then.

Khalore was in agony; her skin was grey, her jaw set. She had bared her teeth to hiss out a strained gasp of pain when he let her down onto the ground. She clutched her ruined arm against her chest, tears streaking from her eyes, though she allowed no cry to escape her mouth. They could not risk that – they were still in enemy territory. Enemy territory, Ghjuvan thought, but their enemy did not hunger, did not tire, and demanded no concession but flesh. It was not truly something you could fight; it was only something you could hope to escape.

And her arm was ruined – bone through flesh, skin torn back, blood everywhere. It seemed as though the druj had bitten almost directly through her joint, splintering bone and cartilage into an awful mess of viscera and gore. Ghjuvan could not understand how Khalore was suffering this in silence; he thought he might have torn his own vocal cords if it had been him. But Khalore had always been one of their strongest.

This would not heal cleanly, not with the few supplies they had. He had done his best, but that still was not good enough. And unclean healing meant infection, or gangrene. And infection or gangrene meant more suffering for Khalore. And suffering for Khalore meant they would have to slow down, almost to a crawl. At this rate… how long would it take them to reach civilisation? The palace, a town, whatever approximated society in this place?

At their usual marching speed, they had approximated about twenty eight miles in six hours; with their last desperate sprint, maybe they had covered another two or three. Thirty miles into this island and it was all trees and rocks and druj.

Ghjuvan was not a fan of Illéa, and Khalore was not a fan of Ghjuvan's idea.

"Come near me with that," she rasped out through what sounded like broken glass in her vocal chords. "And I'll make you wish I'd left you to the druj."

Ghjuvan did not stop heating his knife. He and Ilja were making a habit of fighting about fires now; once again, Ilja had won the argument. "There will be druj out to get us no matter what," Ilja had said, rather dourly. "Don't you think it would be more helpful to see them coming?"

Ghjuvan, in response, had shredded one of Ilja's shirt for binding to make torches. Animals didn't like fire – that was a very basic survival point. Druj weren't animals, but… well, Ghjuvan thought, he was happy to find out if they could burn. There was something long and sinuous creeping through the undergrowth; he kept one of the torches close to hand, just in case.

And then he had put his knife in the fire, and Khalore had started hissing. "Don't you fucking dare, Mannazzu."

Ghjuvan said, tersely, "would you rather wait for it to fall off?"

"It'll be fine," Khalore said desperately; all three of them could tell that she did not truly believe it. Her arm hung from her torso, utterly useless. She was sweating from the pain of it; her face was a grey and clammy grimace of agony. "It'll be fine. We can just splint it. I can still use my knife, I can still walk, I can still… Ghjuvan, I'm serious, don't."

"He's not wrong." The fire made the forest around them seem all the darker by comparison; Ilja was gazing out into the shadows, with an expression that suggested he expected another attack at any moment. They had found one of the rare clearings that seemed to pockmark the entirety of the dark forest; there were no animal prints, as one might have imagined to find in any clearing of a similar size in a normal woods. "It's textbook."

"None of this," Khalore said, "is textbook."

She wasn't wrong about that. Ghjuvan gingerly wrapped his hand in one of the strips of fabric he had made for the torches, and lifted his knife from the fire. Its keen edge was glowing yellow-red; it was probably sterilised by now, but he returned it to the flames again. He would want it white-hot, if only for cauterisation. There was no point in doing this if Khalore was just going to keel over from a blood infection three days later.

She was angry – Khalore always was, but now, more than usual, it leaked from her like so much blood. She said, her teeth gritted tightly, "I'll fight you."

Ghjuvan said, "we're a team, Lore. I'm not suggesting this to hurt you."

She was slumped where she lay against a boulder; if she could have slumped again, he imagined she might have. She knew he was right, and she didn't want to admit it. He almost didn't want her to admit it either – he wanted her to fight back, to convince him not to. Was he really going to sit her and mutilate one of his best friends? It would be sparing her pain, he thought, she would be glad for it in the long run, and yet when he raised his knife again, his hand shook, very slightly.

Myghal wasn't even here to hold her down.

She would do the same for him, he knew. If that monster had got him instead, he knew Khalore would have been the first person standing over him, dagger in hand. If he had needed it, she might have killed him to spare him suffering. That was the friendship of a Warrior.

And yet his hand shook.

Truth be told, his hand had been shaking slightly ever since they had seen the druj. He had seen the Moon of Kur that day in Opona, and yet it had not truly sunken into his mind that this was all they would confront on Illéa. He had seen it, its unreal structure, the slavish hunger in its eyes, the length of its fangs; he had seen it again, in the dark dog-like thing that had mauled Khalore; and he had seen it a third time, a fourth time, a fifth time, a tenth and a twentieth time, as they had escaped through the forest. It was starting to feel real – so enormously, awfully real.

In the moment before he had jumped between Khalore and the druj, he had not thought of anything. In the moment afterwards, he had stared into the maw of that great beast and thought, oh.

Oh.

Hours earlier, as he had lit the fire, in the shadows of the forest, he had seen that great lizard-thing again - the one that had been stalking them for miles, the one that had lunged only when it thought its meal was about to be snatched from its jaws. It had seemed badly wounded; it clearly had seen them, and had retreated further back into the encroaching gloom, black blood matting its fur. Ghjuvan had watched it go, and thought again, oh. Oh, it's intelligent.

And that, more than anything else, terrified him.

Was it still out there, somewhere, watching?

"I know," Khalore said, "I know." She shut her eyes as she moved, clearly biting back some sound of agony. In this moment, she sounded like the child she was; it was a little girl, speaking from a bitter woman's mouth. "Can't you just give me the night? I think… I think it might be better, if we leave it until tomorrow. I think it isn't as bad as it seems."

"We shouldn't wait." Ilja shook his head. "We've already lost so much time..."

Ghjuvan's voice was soft. "We have ten years, don't we? We can leave it for one night, Khal. But really, it'll be… it'll be better."

"I know," Khalore said, "I know. I just..."

She was scared. She would never have said so, but Ghjuvan knew her better than that.

He pulled his knife from the fire, and wrapped it carefully in what remained of Ilja's shirt. Better to try and keep it clean, he thought. When morning came – if morning came – yes, it would be better to be ready.

"Do you want some more water?"

Khalore shook her head. Strangely, it was his throat that ached as he looked at her now, looking so small against the enormity of the forest; Ghjuvan had never felt his emotions in his chest. Khalore had only been hurt because she had leapt to Ghjvuan's defence; in some strange sense, that was why he was so determined to help her now, like this. Even if it was painful in the moment. She had saved him; he had to pay her back, somehow.

Wasn't that friendship? Wasn't that camaraderie? They weren't just friends, they were Warriors. Keeping her alive was the largest gesture he could make towards her.

"Food?"

Khalore's voice was very soft. "No. I think… I think I should just sleep."

"Okay." Ghjuvan threw her his coat; she caught it with her good arm. He turned to address Ilja, to ask who should get to sleep first, and found that Ilja had risen to his feet, still staring out into the darkness like a man possessed by a new and very bad idea. "Schovajsa?"

"I'll be back," Ilja said, stepping out from their tight little circle and towards the darkness.

"Are you crazy?"

"No, I just… I want to check something." Ilja smiled. "I'll be right back. Try not to miss me too much."

Ghjuvan was too exhausted to protest; he was too afraid to raise his voice, and he knew better than to try and dissuade the Chariot once he had decided on a particular path. Accompanying Ilja would mean leaving Khalore alone; he could only extend a hand and douse the head of a torch into the flickering fire before him. It lit with a gratifying flash; so all of those nights of practice on the mountains of Old Kur had been good for something. He offered it to Ilja with an expression that made it clear how poorly he thought of the Chariot's idea, whatever it was. "Try to die quietly."

"Not a chance," Ilja replied, accepting the torch with a rueful smile as he stepped out into the inky shadows of the forest. "If I die, I'm making that your problem, Mannazzu."