“She is still breathing,”
Ravik said.
Tibault had spent the whole of the bond learning exactly what his wife's face did when she decided to be cruel, and he had learned it the way he learned everything, by counting.
So he counted the slavers: four along the ridge, six working the wagons. He counted the links between her wrist and the iron ring, twelve of them, and the enchantment in the metal that made a man's fingers go numb. And he counted the heirlooms that had left his house and the gifts that had gone out the back door to a hawk shifter with a good smile, and somewhere in the counting the numbers stopped meaning anything, which was how he knew it was finished.
He killed his share of them quickly and without ceremony and took no pleasure in it. When the last of the camp stopped moving he stood in the ash of the Thornwilde and looked at her alive on the ground, and the bond in his chest let go the way a knot lets go when the rope is cut.
Ravik said the bond was paid. Isen said nothing.
“He will not come for you,”
Tibault said, meaning the hawk, and it was the last useful thing he had left to give her.
“Whatever he told you, it was about the four of us. Ask yourself why he never came himself.”
Then he put his back to her and walked, and he did not turn his head for the house, or the road, or anything he still wanted.