DUMUZI HIKES UP THE GHOST OF A MOUNTAIN, ITS SLOPES MISTY AND INDISTINCT, scattered with ruins that seem less destroyed and more forgotten. Shadows slip in and out of the corners of his vision, alive but only just, and the air is cold and dry against his skin. It isn’t until he crests the peak that he can see the stars and Enlil surveying everything beyond.
“What is this place?” Dumuzi asks.
What remains of Zigguraxus, Enlil said. I have this much power now, to find it again. But not yet to pull it back. He looks up at the sky, clear and endless. Once this was a kingdom unto itself. The resting place of all my children. The seat of every god who followed me to this world. He points to the edges of the world, like the points of a many-armed compass. Inanna. Ki. Gurru. Nanna-Sin. Marduk. Nergal. Ramman. Tiamat. Utu. Assuran. Ishtar. Gilgeam.
“Gilgeam was your ally?” Dumuzi asks, surprised. Enlil looks down at him, puzzlement in his golden eyes.
Gilgeam was my son, Enlil said.
An heir, a scion, a tyrant—somehow Dumuzi has never drawn the lines back to what that must mean. Why would he? he supposes. Gods are not like mortals. “And Tiamat?”
A point of balance in the beginning, Enlil said. If there is order, then, too, must there be chaos. But this plane fed her worst nature, merged her with something too great to be balanced by us alone. Enlil looks to the stars again, his black scales nearly the shade of the night sky. We are constant and we are changeable. It is difficult to explain.
Dumuzi considers Enlil, once a great bearded human, now a Vayemniri warrior. “You are what we need you to be. Is this Gilgeam the same? Is he your son too?”
Enlil shakes his head. I don’t know. If he is, he is weakened, he is reshaped by death and exile. If he is not … he has some measure of my son’s power and more than a little of his pride.
“Will he come here too?” Dumuzi asks, nodding at the ghostly slopes.
That depends, Enlil says, on which of us gains the necessary strength first. He snaps his teeth—a gesture Dumuzi’s never seen him make, but one that looks wholly natural. The souls of the Vayemniri have no plane?
“I don’t know,” Dumuzi says. “I’ve never died.”
But you care for your dead, Enlil said. You shelter their bones from the threats of dark magic. You remember the tale of Hazor and the Jet-Boned Tyrant.
Once we laid our dead upon the stones, Dumuzi thinks, the music of the ancestor story singing through him. Once we gave them back to the wilds. Then came Daelfyrthimachian, the Jet-Boned Tyrant, a dracolich of ponderous horror, who made the dead to rise against their loved ones, and everything had to change.
“In death we are freed,” Dumuzi said. “Better oblivion than apart from our clans. Better an end than perpetuity in bondage.” Enlil only nods, as if he’s still considering all the pieces, as if he’s still trying to find who he’s agreed to become. Dumuzi considers the plains below. “What happened to the others? The gods you named?”
Dead, Enlil says. He waves a hand, and a battle sprouts out of the ground, gods battling among armies of their followers, brown-skinned humans and gray orcs. He watches as a woman in a chariot drawn by seven lions is cut down by an enormous orc man, even as her axe shatters his armor. A man wreathed in flames falls to the terrible claws of an orc woman who seethes darkness. A man seething that same sort of darkness, hollow-eyed as a skeleton, bashing the orcs aside with a midnight shield, even as an orc general plowed toward him with his long sword swinging.
The silver-skinned man with the black axe, driving his boat down into the battle, dying at the reaching hands of an undead-looking orc man, his eyes seeping eerie light.
The battle fades. Dumuzi fingers the axe at his belt. “Who was the warrior with the black axe?”
Nanna-Sin. The Night’s Light. Dumuzi recalls the dream wherein Enlil first changed into a Vayemniri. Where the boat that held the moon dipped low, and a silver-skinned man gave him the axe he wears on his belt now. He thinks of the tomb, deep in the catacombs. “Here Lies a Great Warrior of this World.”
“Is he the one sleeping in the catacombs?”
Enlil frowns. All were buried in the god’s tombs. The ziggurats.
The ziggurats, Dumuzi thinks, that crumbled in the Spellplague. “Djerad Thymar’s bones are the bones of the ziggurat. The body of the warrior whose tomb this was is in the catacombs.”
Suddenly, Enlil’s eyes blaze like fires, and Dumuzi’s heart nearly explodes with the hope pouring from the god.
Show me?
Dumuzi woke with a start to someone shaking him and found Mehen standing over him, looking worried. He was sitting on a bench near to Kepeshkmolik’s enclave entrance, waiting for Namshita and her seconds. The market beyond the stone balustrade echoed with shouted orders, directing clan armies through the shuttered stalls.
The god’s last words echoed through his thoughts—show me?
“What are you doing out here?” Mehen demanded. “Did Narghon turn you out? Where’s your mother?”
“Ninth Linxakasendalor, form at the west gate!” a bellowed voice echoed through the pyramid.
Dumuzi blinked hard, trying to clear his eyes. “I just fell asleep. He had to show me something.”
“Who, Narghon?”
Show me?
“West gate! West gate!”
“Enlil.” He stood, his vision still muddled as if he were half dreaming. “I have to go.”
“Where are you going?” Mehen demanded.
Show me? “I have to go,” Dumuzi said again, setting eyes on the stairs that led down to the market.
Halfway down the stairs, he ran into Namshita, and three others—Utu, Amurri, and a woman he hadn’t yet met. The gods on the field of battle bled through his thoughts, as though the Untherans marched up out of that war.
“Good morning,” Namshita said in Common, with a stiff manner that said she was refusing to look around her, refusing to acknowledge the sidelong stares or whispers. “This is Kirgal,” she said, gesturing toward the woman. “You remember Utu and Amurri.”
Utu—the god’s voice, the name of the dead god echoed around her voice. The mortal Utu nodded at Dumuzi, no sign of the distrust he’d shown before. Dumuzi hoped Namshita had talked to him. Mehen came to stand beside Dumuzi. Voices raised in alarm in the market beyond. “Karshoj, you four, watch where you’re swinging that ballista!”
Show me?
“Good morning,” Dumuzi said, in Untheric, with the slight but proper bow they favored. The languages all jostled around in his head for primacy. “You have to excuse me, I need to see to something urgently.”
Namshita’s expression tightened. “I see.”
Karshoj—stopped himself. “Unless of course you wish to see the catacombs first?”
“The catacombs?”
“Of course,” Dumuzi said, remembering too late that maunthreki found the catacombs unsettling—or at least Havilar had. Panic for the missing tiefling clutched briefly at his throat, as if it were trying to make up for all the worrying he hadn’t done, and his gaze darted back to Mehen. The older man gave Dumuzi a dark look that said there was no way at all he was going to leave Dumuzi alone with Namshita and the Untherans. Especially not down in the catacombs.
Show me?
“I’d like to see it,” Utu said.
“It is a part of our city and our past,” Dumuzi said quickly, quoting a rather pompous uncle. “To leave it out would be to ignore our history. If you follow me?”
He walked quickly through the crowded market toward the catacombs entrance—he could show them this part later, once he’d found the tomb in the very deepest parts of the pyramid, once he’d quieted Enlil’s panicked voice. It wouldn’t take long, he told himself, as he came to the bottom of the first set of stairs. It wouldn’t—
He stopped. They’d entered Shestandeliath’s section of the catacombs, and here where the corridor bent was the room in which Shestandeliath Ravar had fallen to the maurezhi. Dumuzi’s stomach clenched at the memory—the wizard’s last twitching movements, the smell of blood and ash and lightning—and wondered when it would stop doing that.
Mehen caught up to him. “What’s going on?” He peered down at Dumuzi in the dim light. “Are you all right?”
“No,” he said quickly. “I said I’d show them the city. Because they might live here—they ought to live here. They took our place in the other world. They could be allies. Enlil belongs to them as much as to us. Maybe more. I don’t know. But I know I have to do it before word gets back to Narghon, and now he needs to see something, and it’s down in the catacombs, and you all don’t like the catacombs, but he keeps asking—”
Mehen grabbed hold of his arm. “Take a breath. What does Enlil want to see?”
“A dead god,” Dumuzi said. “Nanna-Sin, the warrior of Thymara’s Black Axe.” Dumuzi glanced back at Utu, who had a vague sort of smile on his face as they approached. That one is dangerous.
“The warrior of the moon is a dead god?” Mehen whispered.
“I think so,” Dumuzi said. “I’m going to find out.”
Namshita came to a stop beside him. “All of this,” she asked, “for your dead.” She turned to the wall where hundreds of names had been etched. “What does it say?”
“The Roll of the Lost,” Dumuzi said. “The names of those who were not brought to this world in the Blue Fire, whose bones we couldn’t bury.” He stood quiet beside her a moment. “You said before you were slaves in the other world. Was it the dragons as well?”
She shook her head. “Humans. The Mulhorandi were our enemies in this world, and in that world they quickly made themselves the favorites of the genasi. So we became the slaves of slaves, until the Son of Victory rose up.”
Enlil pressed upon Dumuzi, images of another time, grief for another Roll of the Lost. “You were slaves before too,” he said, parsing out the images that flooded his mind, repeating his dreams. “Pulled from another world by powerful wizards, cut off from your gods. They helped you rise up then.”
“And this time we did it on our own,” Namshita said in a way that closed off any further discussion.
They were more alike—Vayemniri and Untheran—than either realized. If only Dumuzi could make the elders understand, could quash rumors of secret alliances with the Son of Victory. They wound deeper and deeper down into the catacombs, and with every level, Dumuzi’s gut knotted more tightly around the fear that he shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t be showing them these things. He pointed out clan names, well-known ancestors, the art that depicted those come before. When Namshita paused to consider a frieze of four warriors attacking a strange creature Dumuzi had no name at all for—something sinuous and leggy and spitting green fluids—Mehen murmured to him, “Does your mother or your patriarch know you’re doing this?”
“No,” Dumuzi said. “And neither does Arjhani, come to that.” He looked up at Mehen. “I know already, they wouldn’t approve.”
Mehen’s nostrils flared. “Be that as it may, they cannot say you don’t observe the ways of omin’iejirsjighen. A host to would-be allies, and all of that. Point that out. Just don’t be a fool and give your guests a tour of the barracks.”
“Just because I talk to a god in my head doesn’t mean I’ve become a madman,” Dumuzi said irritably. But to his surprise, Mehen laughed, startling the Untherans—all except Utu, who studied the strange creatures of Abeir carved into the walls.
Down, down, down—the same path that had led them to Verthisathurgiesh Arjhani, imprisoned by the maurezhi in the very deepest part of the catacombs.
“These are newer?” Kirgal asked, tracing a finger along the wall. “Or older?”
“Older,” Dumuzi said. He glanced back at her. “We dug to make space for every generation.”
“Do you worry you’ll fill them all?” Utu asked.
“Utu,” Namshita snapped. She turned back to Dumuzi. “Continue your … tour, please,” she said.
Dumuzi turned back to the path, tapping the roof of his mouth as he walked. He didn’t point anything else out, until they reached the door he was looking for.
The resting place of the Warrior of the Moon lay in the very oldest, deepest part of the catacombs. Flaking red and blue paint decorated the tomb door, an old style that later generations had covered over in other cases. The shape of a crescent moon spanned the width of the doorway. Beneath it, the epitaph that echoed in Dumuzi’s dream: Here lies a great warrior of this world. Claimed as clan-kin by Kepeshkmolik and all the Vayemniri of Djerad Thymar, now and forevermore under our protection.
“What does it say?” Namshita asked. “Who lies here?”
Dumuzi laid a scaly hand against the tomb door, feeling the faint buzz of far-off lightning in the air. How many Vayemniri had come down to this place? How many had read the epitaph and thought of the warrior? How many times had the story of Thymara and the Gift of the Moon been repeated? A pulse, as if the door were living, thudded through his palm. A kind of worship, he thought. Maybe enough.
“Is he still alive?” Dumuzi whispered.
No, Enlil said, sounding intrigued. But neither is he entirely gone.
“A hero,” Mehen supplied, answering Namshita’s hanging question. “Among those who died in the passage from Abeir to Toril.” Dumuzi looked back, the truth between his teeth—the image of the battle that killed Nanna-Sin burned into his thoughts. It did none of them any good, any honor, to diminish him—especially if the tomb had somehow kept him alive.
Mehen’s gaze wasn’t on Namshita, but on Utu, who was studying the inscription with interest. “We should go back up,” Dumuzi said. “See the rest of the city—the living parts.”
The Untherans said little as they wound their way up to the market floor. Enlil too kept his thoughts to himself, and between the two silences, an anxious electricity built in Dumuzi’s gut. What did it mean that Nanna-Sin wasn’t “entirely gone”? What did it mean that Namshita said nothing? Where did Utu learn to read Draconic, and should that worry him?
“Breathe,” Mehen reminded him in low tones.
“I’ve ruined this,” Dumuzi whispered back. “I should have waited for Uadjit.”
“You haven’t ruined anything,” Mehen said dismissively. “If a boring tour of the catacombs was going to undercut your mother’s diplomatic gestures, then they were never going to succeed.”
Dumuzi showed them the market floor, the dwellings that filled the lower walls—avoiding the signs of impending war. He explained the light that poured down the middle of the pyramid and brought the Untherans to his cousin Yehenna’s teahouse, the Horn of Shasphur. Near the middle of explaining the story of Shasphur and the Elders of Raurokh, Uadjit hurried up to their tables. Dumuzi could smell the chill of frost coming off her, and stood reflexively, even as she slowed and greeted his guests with all possible decorum.
“Would you excuse us for a moment?” she asked, gesturing sharply to Dumuzi and Mehen. When they were out of earshot, she whispered, “Where have you been? We have two very big problems.”
Mehen’s nostrils flared. “Karshoj. Kallan ran.”
“I could fix that. Shestandeliath Mazarka has brought her tale of secret Gilgeam worshipers to Arjhani’s ear last night. Now he’s talking up the danger of the Untheran refugees to anyone who will listen, and hammering Fenkenkabradon’s skill defeating the ash giants.”
“But he can’t win,” Dumuzi said. “They’ll elect Kallan, surely.”
Uadjit’s dark eyes stayed on Mehen. “My father has withdrawn my nomination. He’s already nominated Mehen in my place, and as you can guess, that’s thrown a great number of votes into the wind.”
Dumuzi glanced up at Mehen, expecting the other man to sneer and rage and spit lightning. But instead Mehen looked like a man who’d just been given a solution, and the expression chilled Dumuzi down to his core.
THE GIANTS LEFT them to walk once the encampment came into site, the snowy peaks of the Smoking Mountains looming over the Thousand-Dreaming Stone Giants, making them seem small and manageable. Beside Dahl, Farideh stopped as she saw the mountains. Home, Dahl thought. The home that wouldn’t welcome her back. He wanted to tell her it didn’t matter, that whatever her former neighbors said, it didn’t change the truth. That she had homes enough that knew her worth. That he loved her and that she’d saved him down in the Underdark.
But he could say none of it.
He couldn’t say why she shouldn’t trust Lorcan, and he couldn’t say he was worried at the distant, flat way she stared at the campfire, at the way she didn’t seem to want to go to sleep. He couldn’t say he thought that bringing Ilstan was a terrible idea—or that bringing Lorcan was worse, or that bringing Adastreia made no sense to him at all.
“This,” Bodhar said, riding up alongside Dahl and blocking his view of Farideh, “is far wilder than being a secretary. I’m just saying.” He shot an uneasy glance Lorcan’s way. The cambion rode undisguised but for a heavy cloak against the cold, incapable of using those powers. “That devil fellow giving you any trouble?” Bodhar asked.
“Once again,” Dahl said, trying not to let his irritation show. “Not right now.”
“Curse works like a flipped copper, heads or tails, I know,” Bodhar said. So long as Lorcan was weakened like this, the unearthly rage that Graz’zt’s gift filled Dahl with only simmered along the edges of his natural temper.
I still want to punch him, Dahl had written out, not caring that it made Farideh’s mouth tighten. If she knew, if he could just tell her what Lorcan had done …
“You don’t have to be friends,” she said. “But I can’t leave him—I literally cannot walk more than twenty-six steps from him—and unless you learned to make portals in the Underdark, he’s got a use.”
Maybe I should stay.
Farideh fell silent. “If that’s what you want,” she’d said. “But I need you too.”
And Dahl’s temper shattered. You can’t abandon her again, he thought.
And you shouldn’t, a dark part of him murmured. Even if Graz’zt’s “blessing” had stripped out Lorcan’s more impressive powers, it left him more vulnerable, less silver-tongued. More trustworthy, it seemed, in Farideh’s eyes. More than once, Dahl had caught her regarding Lorcan with blank concern, and the darkness curled around his heart saw only the path that led from there to something warmer.
“Your dove there is nice enough,” Bodhar said. “I mean, she’s a mite …” He trailed off as if searching for the right word. The word that wasn’t going to get him socked in the mouth again. “Well, distracted maybe, isn’t she?”
“She has a lot on her mind,” Dahl said. What exactly he’d imagined this homecoming to be like, he hadn’t expected to find her in worse straits than he’d left her in. Maybe he should have.
“Didn’t expect the other fella to be a devil.”
“He’s not ‘the other fellow.’ ”
Bodhar gave him a skeptical look, his horse pulling ahead. “So you say.”
Not for the first time, Dahl found himself wishing he’d been able to leave Thost and Bodhar behind. But without them, who would speak to Farideh for him? He wasn’t such a fool as to let it be Lorcan. Gods only knew whether Ilstan could manage. He had no trust at all in Adastreia, and while he’d expected to have to mend fences with Mehen to get the dragonborn’s aid, Farideh’s father wasn’t with them.
Before they’d left, Mehen had returned, distant and battle-shocked. He didn’t argue with Farideh about her intentions, he gave vague reasons for not coming along, about politics and clan. Something had happened, something that gave him another path—one he didn’t want Farideh to know about. Dahl would have laid all his coin on it.
It had shaken Farideh.
But here at least, Ilstan had proven useful. He’d come out of his rooms bearing two stones etched with runes, handing Mehen one, and Farideh the other. “You can make a sending,” he explained. “Once a day, only to the other person holding the stone. But hopefully it should ease the distance.”
Dahl thought of the stiff, distant words Farideh had spoken to the stone the night before, the awkward reply. Gods books, Mehen, he thought. You better have a good reason.
The giant nearest him, a male called Jaari, lifted a strange stone rattle. He snapped it three times, smacking the smooth rock at the head with a smaller hammer. A pealing like a great muffled bell rang out loud enough for the stone giants at the edge of the camp to straighten and take notice. Dahl dismounted along with the others, taking the reins of the enormous chestnut beast Verthisathurgiesh had given him. Farideh looked back from beside her bay, the freezing wind catching the fur-lined cloak she wore, and her expression dimmed.
“A pity, paladin,” came a voice from behind him. Dahl’s fists balled at Lorcan’s words, his pulse picking up. “Not a shadow of privacy to be had. Of course, I don’t suppose you want a translator in the bedroom.”
He could hear the loss of something vital, something otherworldly in Lorcan’s voice, but still the curse Graz’zt had buried in him itched to tear his silver tongue right out. “We’ll manage.”
“Oh, for a time,” Lorcan said. “But how long will this suffice? You made the deal, you knew what it meant, and yet here you are, tormenting yourself and her. The longer you drag this out, the more it hurts her, and then what happens when you slip?”
Dahl looked back at him. “If I slip, that means I’ll be free to tell her every word of the deal.”
“It means,” Lorcan said, “that I have your soul and I have no reason to keep you alive. Think it through.”
“You promised her you wouldn’t harm me. Or don’t you keep your word?”
Lorcan smiled then, and something terrible glittered in his eyes. “Mind your own path, Dahl. You’ve enough stones under your feet to worry about.”
“Lorcan!” Farideh shouted. “Leave him be!”
“She knows you’re a miserable bastard,” Dahl said.
“Does she?” Lorcan tossed back as led his horse past. “I guess she doesn’t mind the company of a miserable bastard then.”
She’s keeping him from picking at you, Dahl told himself, as he watched Lorcan meet Farideh. She’s trying to keep the peace.
A cambion against the full might of Asmodeus. The memory of Graz’zt’s taunts uncoiled in his thoughts. For a clever boy, you’re easily duped.
Adastreia came up beside him, watching Lorcan as well. “If I didn’t know better, I’d guess that cambion had everything to do with your terrible, terrible deal.”
Dahl bristled. “I can’t talk about it.”
She laughed, and the ghost of Farideh’s laugh hid in that sound. “Of course you can’t,” she said. “Word of advice? Don’t kill him. Unless you’re prepared to deal with his inevitable successor.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means, dear boy, Brimstone Angels don’t go unpacted. That she has a fairly shiftless cambion for a pactmaster is a blessing on her head, and probably yours—even if his armor is … distractingly snug.” She smirked. “But the next one might be wilier or wickeder. The next one might know more ways around its promises. The next one might happily kill you to keep her head clear, and could easily make you pine for the days of Lorcan.” She patted his shoulder. “Trust me.”
It was a disquieting thought. If she kept her pact with Lorcan, a shadow would always hang over them, and however Dahl was sure of her, it would chip away at his confidence little by little. If she broke it for him, if she put herself in greater peril—
Maybe she wouldn’t, he thought. Maybe there would be another path.
He watched Adastreia walking ahead of him. She spoke from experience. She knew what would happen because it had happened. Was there any future that didn’t conspire to destroy them?
As they reached the encampment, Ilstan threw his head back and his arms wide. “What splendor is this?” he murmured. “What new shape of magic?”
“Peculiar, you ask me,” Thost said, taking the reins of Ilstan’s horse.
“Come on,” Dahl said, to no one in particular. But as he passed, Farideh took his hand in hers. He didn’t look back at Lorcan, for all he wanted to.
The chieftain sat beside a young giant, chisel in her hand, carving pictures directly into his skin and singing softly as she did. The young giant’s eyes were closed, his head drooping, as if he sat sleeping.
Dahl squeezed Farideh’s hand tight, until Somni’s song drifted into stillness. She turned and smiled at him in a beatific way. “So you did come back. And you brought so many more.” She brushed the stone dust from her charge’s arm, flicking rocks from the channels that made the shape of a serpent wreathed in flames.
“Sadly I haven’t come to stay, not yet,” Dahl said. “We have a serious problem, and I think you might be able to help us.” He introduced the others. Somni nodded at each.
“They have interesting markings as well,” she said, her gaze lingering on Farideh. Farideh’s hand twitched in his, and he thought of the raised scars of her warlock brand. He held tight. “What is it you want help with?” Somni asked.
“You mentioned artifacts,” Dahl said, “things from this world that were thrown into yours when the planes last crossed. We’re looking for a powerful artifact that we believe was smuggled into Abeir around the time of the last collision—a staff, belonging to a god.”
Somni considered him. “What will you do with this knowledge, Dahl Peredur?”
Dahl hesitated. Save Havilar—but that was only a fraction of the problem. Return Azuth to his previous strength—but he couldn’t say that was even possible, or that Farideh even meant to do it. Bring the staff into Toril, where Asmodeus might be able to snatch it—that was uncomfortably true, a problem they hadn’t even begun to consider.
Dahl glanced sidelong at Farideh. Had she considered it?
“We need the staff to stop a dangerous spellcaster,” Farideh answered when he didn’t. “She wants it in order to punish a god, to kill him. But doing so will kill my sister.”
Somni frowned. “Do you normally kill your god-things?”
“It’s complicated,” Dahl said. “Do you recall anyone ever seeing a staff?”
For a long moment, Somni didn’t speak. “In the other world, in a cave in the mountains, in the caverns where we mine the crystal for the draumrting, there is something that does not belong. In one of these caves there is no crystal, but the whole place pulses with a magic that would be much more at home in this place. We don’t go there—others have. I have not seen it or sought it out myself, but they say it is only a stick of wood, but that it glows and gives strange and terrible dreams.”
Dahl nearly shouted in triumph. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you. If you could just—”
“How will you get there, Dahl Peredur?”
A complex question. “We have ideas,” he said. “Places to start. There are still places here that bear the scars of the last collision. There’s the possibility the planes are close still. There’s the one who hid the staff in the first place. But if we don’t have a map of where to find the staff, it won’t matter. We don’t have time to search a whole plane.”
“You always talk of not having time.” Somni studied the lot of them—human, tiefling, half-devil—for so long, Dahl began to wonder if she’d even understood the question. But then she nodded once. “I will give you the map,” Somni agreed. “The price is three dreams.”
Dahl frowned. “Forgive me, I don’t understand what you mean. You … want us to give you the power from three dreams?”
“Yes,” Somni said. “As well as the visions in them. In your dreams, I will see that you can be trusted with this—or not. Our bond will strengthen and so will our draumrtings. This is the price.”
Dahl glanced over at Farideh. For as long as he’d known her, she’d suffered from nightmares and she didn’t like talking about them. He thought of the time in the prison camp that they’d both drunk a tainted potion called the wizard’s finest, that hurtled them into a distorted dream of Farideh’s. She didn’t look at him, but her expression looked grim.
“Which of us do you want?” she asked Somni.
Somni regarded her as if she were an anxious child. “It is best if you all sleep,” Somni said. “And I will find the dreams that need to be found.”