We would have missed the stream had it not been for Last, for it was he who guessed that something noted so long ago may have changed. We found the streambed, dry for so long that it looked more a vague furrow in the earth; I had to kneel and ask the soil if it had ever known water, and to sense that memory past the grim sickness that permeated everything I touched required all the concentration honed by years of attempting to work despite a craven and ailing body. But having secured that evidence, we made our way north alongside the streambed, and the first few trees sprouted in the terrain we traversed. We left the plains behind for these rumpled hills, and if the going was harder we at least had more deadwood for our fires at night, and there were occasional animals brought down by Last’s quick arm. We rode longer than we had on the plains, for we covered less ground, but we were at least warmer and better fed.

“Who was the mother in the story? The historical story,” Ivy asked one night over our supper.

“No one knows,” Carrington said. “That I divined because no one agreed on it. Only that her dedication was supernatural. She did not want the kingdom to devolve into civil war on her death.”

“So many stories about that,” Ivy said. “The Red Prince. The Maiden Queen.”

“It’s been a tenuous peace we’ve held since the days of the Vow Empire,” Eyre said. “We had six hundred years of squabbling prior to its formation, then a century of annexation wars, another two hundred years of seething discontent during its tenure culminating in the Revolutionary War, then the Red Prince years—” He nodded to Ivy, “and finally we’re here now. There’s been scarcely a decade where we haven’t been fighting with someone or other. Does it surprise you that so many of our legends involve peace? Peace has been a myth for us for too long.”

“This does not sound unlike us.” Last’s interjection surprised us. “The elves. Also. We fight.”

“Maybe it’s as Chester said. We were never meant to live apart from one another,” Ivy said. “Was there peace when the elves and humans were friends?”

We looked at Amhric and Last, and it was my brother who said, “We were friends. Surely that we remember each other as such says enough.”

“And yet, there was the betrayal,” Chester murmured.

“Maybe that’s no surprise either,” Ivy said. “It’s usually people who love each other best who also hurt one another worst.”

“And it’s hard to maintain love in the face of inequality.” Carrington’s words were slow in her mouth, but she had become a more frequent participant in the discussions. “Where there is power, there is jealousy, no matter how much love there might be as well.”

“Perhaps it’s as simple as ‘where there is choice, there is friction.’” Eyre rubbed the reins in his hands, staring ahead. “If we were all the same, and if we were all in accord, where then the free will? What need then for a God? We would be angels, and live not on earth.”

This provoked a silence I decided not to break. Instead I urged us faster.

That was the theme that drove me through the tale unraveling in my mind: faster. Always faster. The trees were obstacles, the uncertain terrain, the cold that was too moist or too cutting by turns. The urgency that spurred me only mounted the longer the journey took.

And then there was my brother, whose pain I sensed always at the edge of my awareness. Even had he no longer been capable of his quiet sessions with everyone else, I would have known it, as if I had a second set of nerves that responded to his suffering.

“It’s getting worse,” I said at last. I had helped him down from the horse, and he’d allowed it, and having managed the ground he now rested against me with no inclination to pull away. Beneath my hand I could feel the knobs of his spine through the layers of clothing on his back. When at last he straightened, he’d found me a smile, and it broke my heart. “It is.”

“It can’t be helped.” He flinched as I slipped an arm under his and helped him to the fire the others were building. They avoided us, as they always did when I lapsed into the Gift to speak to him, assuming I wanted the privacy. “This land has little to give, and it’s darkening in my sight.”

“Are we too late?” I asked, low.

He shook his head and would say nothing more.

“Won’t he eat?” Ivy asked me later, worried.

“The curse makes it immaterial, that he might starve for lack of food.” I set out our blankets. “What he needs can’t be derived from it.”

“What does he need?” Eyre said.

“For us to succeed.”

That night I slept with my arms around my brother and my nose in his hair. The physical warmth was as meaningless as food, but the emotional… that was nourishment. I felt his almost inaudible sigh, a bare lift of his knife-like ribs beneath my arm, and grieved. I had seen him reduced before and loathed it. Though the sickness that afflicted Troth was not Sedetnet’s fault, I laid it at his doorstep anyway.

At my back, Ivy made no complaint at my shift in attentions; rather she cuddled in against my spine, her cheek against my shoulderblade, and now and then stroked my arm and set a hesitant hand on my brother’s shoulder. Truly she was more than I deserved.