Kael looked up. He did not turn his head. He simply stopped, in the middle of a sentence to Dax, as if a wire had pulled taut inside him, and his gaze found her in the dark at the corner of the stable.
“I told you to sleep.”
It should have been a reprimand. It came out like a prayer.
Ariana opened her mouth to answer and discovered she was shaking, from her teeth to her toes, a fine, fierce, uncontrollable tremor, and that eleven dead men were looking at nothing with gray, ordinary faces.
“Dax,” said Kael, without taking his eyes from her. “Guard the dead. Tell no one.”
Kael crossed the yard. He did not ask. He only stopped in front of her, and whatever he saw in her face made his own go still and soft and terribly careful. Then he gathered her up in his arms and lifted her against hi
