The climb back up felt shorter than the descent had, though nothing about it felt easier.

  My limbs ached with the kind of exhaustion that lived in the joints rather than the muscles, a deep used-up heaviness that made every movement feel borrowed. The overflow passage was still narrow, the stone still slick, the dark water still close enough below to promise a bad end to any mistake. The route demanded the same awkward turns, the same careful footholds, the same ducking beneath jagged overhangs and bracing against wet walls.

  But now there was no uncertainty in us.

  No pauses to wonder whether this side fissure led anywhere. No whispered debate over tracks or smells or old watermarks on stone. Everything had sharpened into a single purpose.

  Halbrecht had called the others to the Forge. Lumiere had gone to meet him. That alone was enough to turn retreat into urgency.

  Rocher carried me.

  I had objected once, and only once.

  'We're both equally exhausted,' I had said, low enough that the others would not hear the strain in my voice. 'This isn't efficient.'

  Rocher had looked back at me over his shoulder with an expression I had difficulty meeting head-on. Mud still clung in a drying crust to his hairline and jaw. His face looked scraped raw by fear, grief, and relief in roughly equal measure.

  'Cire,' he had said, 'you were alone down here. In the dark. In the water. With those monsters.'

  I had opened my mouth to answer that I wasn't, but he had shifted me higher in his arms before I could.

  'You don't seem to realize how incredible that is,' he had said. 'If you think our burdens are equal in any way...'

  I had not, in fact, known how to answer that either.

  And then, because he was Rocher and because sincerity sat on him as naturally as steel, he had added, 'Besides, I had plenty of practice carrying Miss Francine down here. I know what I'm doing.'

  Francine, who was picking her way behind Seraphine with her light lifted carefully over the wet stone, had made a small offended noise at that.

  'Gd to be of use,' she had said.

  I kept one arm looped around his shoulders and tried not to think too hard about it. The shirt he had given me hung loose on my frame, still warm from his body, sleeves too long, hem brushing my thighs beneath the soaked chemise. Every time the fabric shifted against my skin I caught traces of him under the damp stone smell and the clotted mineral stink of the aquifer—clean soap long faded, iron and smoke, and that stubborn clove note that had lingered from the massage oil.

  Absurdly, it helped.

  The warmth helped too.

  My thoughts had been trying, since the moment Phymera went silent, to turn inward in the most ruinous possible direction. Rocher gave them something external to catch on. The roughness against my wrists. The weight of his arm where he steadied me. The strength in him that did not ask permission before making itself useful.

  Unfortunately, being carried also left me with little to do except think.

  As we came up through the st snted stretch of wet stone and into a broader corridor leading toward the cistern access, I found my gaze drifting past Rocher's shoulder to Francine.

  It was not an unfamiliar thought, but proximity made it harder to ignore.

  Francine was an apothecary. A real one. Assistant to a master of some actual standing, which was more than I had ever been. Like me, she had had convent training. Formal discipline. Legitimate instruction. She was gentle by temperament, diligent by habit, and though she wore spectacles, she was also not very different from me physically.

  Roughly my size. Roughly my build. A little softer in the shoulders, perhaps. Less accustomed to sleeping on stone or getting concussed by colpsing architecture. But the silhouette was simir enough that if one were inclined toward unkind thoughts, one could line us up and begin making ruthless substitutions.

  I was utterly repceable, I realized.

  I shut that thought down with force.

  Not because it was untrue. Because it was currently dangerous.

  I looked down at the stiletto in my hand.

  I had not sheathed it. I didn't know if it could be sheathed safely, or if keeping it too close to my body was wise, or if any of the old rules that governed living weapons applied cleanly to circumstances such as ours. The bde y against my palm with a disquieting naturalness, its weight so perfect it barely seemed to exist. If I loosened my grip, it adjusted subtly, finding center again as if it knew better than I did where it ought to rest.

  That fact wasn't comforting.

  Phymera—or what remained of her—had attached herself to me.

  That could prove to be a blessing, or just as easily a curse.

  I knew enough of the lore to understand the danger. Living weapons were never meant for ordinary people. The warriors of the First Men had been cultivated for them since childhood. Fed stories that built absolute conviction. Trained in command, brutality, and righteousness with equal care. Taught, above all, that they stood at the center of an order they were born to uphold.

  A person who believed he could do no wrong could wield a living weapon without hesitation.

  And a living weapon, denied the friction of doubt, could answer him with terrifying generosity.

  That was how the feats of legend became possible. Impossible strength. Impossible speed. Bdes that cut through pted stone. Spears that crossed battlefields in a blink. Men who strode through sughter as if certainty itself were armor.

  No self-doubt. No hesitation. No interior resistance.

  I looked again at the bck bde in my hand.

  Then, because I had to be honest with myself even when it was humiliating, I looked inward instead.

  What exactly had Phymera chosen to bind herself to?

  Not strength. Not conviction.

  A frightened woman in borrowed clothing who had pretended composure for the sake of someone even more frightened.

  Phymera had judged me under false conditions. She had mistaken my performance for worthiness.

  The thought made something cold tighten behind my ribs. If the old accounts were correct, then a living weapon did not simply amplify force. It echoed its bearer. Reinforced tendencies. Deepened grooves already worn into the mind.

  Which meant that if I was not careful, Phymera would not make me stronger.

  She would make me more myself.

  More doubtful. More self-correcting. More eager to remove myself from any equation in which I seemed inconvenient.

  I exhaled slowly.

  That breath came back to me warm from the hollow of Rocher's throat, where I had apparently drifted close enough to feel it. Before I could stop myself, I let my forehead rest against the side of his neck.

  His skin was hot from exertion.

  My posture was not dignified. At present I found I cared less than usual.

  Rocher shifted slightly beneath me but did not falter. "Cire? What's wrong?"

  Everything, I nearly said.

  Instead I closed my eyes for one heartbeat and opened them again.

  A pale light moved ahead in the corridor. Then another. Steel whispered softly against stone.

  Seraphine, who was a few paces in front of us and better positioned to see around the bend, lifted her head at once. "Someone's there."

  Evelyn moved before the rest of us did, flowing ahead with her usual economy. She vanished into shadow, then reappeared a moment ter with her shoulders easing by a degree.

  "All clear," she said. "It's our people."

  The search party that emerged from the bend looked diminished enough to make my stomach knot.

  Only a ragged handful stood in the corridor: a few weary padins carrying shield-nterns, faces drawn hollow by too little rest and too much failure. Sir Ard stood among them with one hand braced against the wall, silver hair damp with sweat and cave mist, looking every one of his years and still somehow unbent by them. Beside him was Sir Sylvio, one arm cmped across the bandaged wound at his gut, his tabard darkened where fresh blood had begun to seep through despite someone's careful wrappings.

  Both men stared at me for half a second as if confirming I was not a trick of poor light.

  Then Sir Ard let out a breath that was almost a ugh and almost a prayer. "Goddess preserve us," he murmured. "You are alive."

  Sir Sylvio's shoulders visibly loosened. "I told everyone you would be."

  "I appreciate your confidence," I said.

  My voice came out rougher than intended. Rocher lowered me at st, carefully, though he remained close enough that if I swayed he could catch me before I finished the motion. My legs objected to being asked to function again.

  Sir Ard's gaze moved over me briskly, taking in the borrowed shirt, the mud, the exhaustion, the bde in my hand. His eyes sharpened at the st of those, but he was too disciplined to ask the wrong question first.

  "Most of the others went back to answer the Bishop," he said. "A fraught few of us volunteered to stay and continue the search."

  He said it without self-congratution. Which only made the loyalty in it more apparent.

  Sir Sylvio gave a small shrug and immediately grunted. "Couldn't in good conscience just leave you for the vermin."

  "How reassuring," I said.

  That won the faintest flicker of a smile from him. Good. If he could still manage that, he was not yet at the edge of colpse.

  Seraphine stepped into the ntern light, Pulseweaver dimmed but not rexed. "There is no time for a full accounting."

  "No," I said at once.

  My mind was already leaping ahead, slotting what I knew into pce as rapidly as fatigue would allow. Halbrecht had called everyone to the Forge. If he wanted to do something decisive, he would do it with an audience. That was his nature. Ceremony, legitimacy, theater. All the old ecclesiastical instincts sharpened to a weapon point.

  I tightened my grip on the stiletto.

  "We proceed directly to the Forge," I said.

  Sir Ard's expression changed at that—not to resistance, but to a kind of grave readiness. "Would you not benefit from some rest?"

  "No," I said. "I've had enough."

  Evelyn slipped back from the rear of the corridor and gave a single curt nod. "The upper passages are quieter now. Most of the movement has gone."

  "Then we should move now," I said.

  Rocher was already half turning to let me lean on him if I needed to. I hated how immediately I did. His back was to me as I steadied myself with a hand against his shoulder, and only then did I get a clear look at the fresh wound cutting across the skin there where the shirt had been peeled off.

  It was not deep, but it was angry-looking, a narrow red gash across old scars, still tacky at the edges where the damp had kept it from closing cleanly.

  I winced before I could stop myself.

  Rocher gnced back. "What is it?"

  "Your back," I said.

  He looked mildly surprised, as if he had forgotten he possessed one. "Oh."

  I pressed my lips together and reached automatically toward my satchel before remembering with a fsh of irritation that few things had survived the muck.

  "I don't have anything for it right this second," I said. "Sorry."

  Rocher's mouth curved faintly. "That makes two of us."

  Francine had already begun rummaging through her own kit with focused panic. "I have salve," she said. "Not enough for everyone, but enough that we can at least keep it from tearing open further."

  There it was again, the resembnce. The instinct to mend first and colpse ter. The quick efficient hands. The refusal to make a performance of fear.

  I shut the comparison down before it could finish growing teeth.

  Repceable or not, I was still here.

  That mattered for the moment, and the moment was all that I had.

  I rolled my shoulders once, testing the limits of what my body would permit. Pain answered from several useful locations. None of them seemed immediately disabling. Good enough.

  "Patch what you can while we walk," I said.

  Sir Sylvio turned on his feet, the movement brief and pained. Sir Ard bowed his head once in acknowledgment, the old soldier in him accepting the restoration of chain of command without ceremony.

  We moved.

  Back into the narrow throat of the corridor. Up toward the fortress proper. Toward the central stairs, the inner levels, the old stone arteries of Marrud-Vael. Lantern light swayed across damp walls and caught on mail links, on wet hair, on the bck gleam of the bde in my hand. The little remaining band tightened around us without being told.

  Above us, somewhere beyond yers of stone and fortress weight and old buried history, the Forge waited.

  And in it, Halbrecht.

  And in it, Lumiere.

  Whatever else I was—frightened, doubtful, repceable, mistaken for stronger than I had any right to be—I was no longer lost. I was no longer alone. And I refused to be deyed again.