“How many?”
Ravik said.
Isen did not answer, because he was already running. He had felt her dying before any of them moved — it came through the bond like water going out of a bowl, thin and steady, and he had stood up from the fire before he decided to.
The serpent does not hurry. He had built a life on that — on waiting a season for one small thing, on taking the long way because the long way is the one nobody watches. That night he broke his own rule and paid for it with a spear through the shoulder, and he did not care, because the thing he was fighting for had been sitting under his own ribs the whole time.
The slavers were done before dawn. He opened the chains himself, twelve links and an enchanted lock, and the iron came apart in his hands the way cheap things do. Then he stood over her, blood from the shoulder running down his arm, and watched her breathe, and the bond pulled smooth again, and he understood that he had saved nothing at all. Only the arithmetic had changed.
“You are alive,”
he said.
“That was the whole of it. It was never more than that.”
He turned away before she could answer, because an answer was the one thing he had no patience left for.