Cara reclined into the pile of leather sacks at the back of the cave, lowering herself using her arms and her one good leg to let the injured shin lay straight.

She pressed her lips into a tight line to keep a groan from escaping, but beads of sweat welled up at her hairline.

The baby kaprid watched her through slit eyes until Dayton gathered it to him as he assumed a cross-legged position on the other side of the sleeping fire near the cave’s entrance.

“Still in pain?”

Cara waited to make sure that the fire in her shin wouldn’t overwhelm her voice. “Yes, but it’s better after that tea you made.”

Dayton sighed and stroked one finger between the whelpling’s eye ridges. It closed its eyes and thumped its tail against his thigh. Cara suppressed a shudder. “I’m glad it worked. That stuff goes bad quick. Yesterday, it was strong enough to take you from raving madwoman to something that looked like sleep.”

He cocked an eyebrow at her. “Which takes us back to your agreement.”

Cara’s hand dug into the pouch at her belt and found a river stone at random. She kept her hand inside and began to massage the smooth surface, letting her nervous energy out. “Right. Who goes first?”

Dayton’s finger paused at the peak of the kaprid baby’s head, and it stirred slightly. He smiled and continued his petting. It settled back down with a sigh and another tail thwack. “You can, if you want.”

He smiled suddenly, pure and sweet. “I’m an open book. What do you want to know?”

“Hmph. Which divine is your monastery-abbey-place dedicated to?”

“Loyola Monastery worships all of them. How would any Acolyte know which one to dedicate himself to, if he didn’t study all four?”

Dayton spoke matter-of-factly, but she saw him bite his lip.

“Which are you dedicated to?” She spied the leather thong wrapped around the base of his throat and made a guess. “Cern?”

“No, I’m not dedicated to any of the Divine yet.” He rubbed at the skin at his throat with his spare hand, his left still stroking the whelpling.

Cara’s brow furrowed. “But you have to be, what, fourteen? I thought Acolytes got dedicated early.”

“I’m fifteen, and they are. Usually.” Dayton focused his gaze on a spot over Cara’s shoulder. “I just… I’m not, yet. Anyway, I get three questions now,” he said, a bit of mischief perking his tone.

“Drat.” She’d gotten too focused on his answers to remember that she’d have to reciprocate. “Fine, go ahead.”

“What was Ada like?” he promptly asked, surprising her.

“How do you—Oh. The kaprid nest.” She closed her eyes. “Do you mean what she looked like?”

“Sure. And what kind of a girl she was. Was she like you?”

Cara snorted, eyes still closed. “Hardly. She was light and fast and fun. You couldn’t keep her in one place, even if you could nail her feet to the ground. I could never get her to sit still at the loom for more than five rows before she’d be off, fetching water from the well or feeding the beasts. She had a laugh like rain.”

“Poetic,” Dayton murmured. Cara’s eyes snapped open. Dayton had propped his head on one fist, gaze heavy and distant. “What color hair did she have?”

“Yellow. No, red.” Cara started to panic. Surely she hadn’t forgotten the color of her sister’s hair?

“Red,” she said, a bit more decisively. “With lighter streaks in it from the sun.”

“You said a loom. Did your family keep sheep?”

“Rabbits.”

She half-smiled at Dayton’s quirked brow. “We kept them in mud hutches behind the house, to keep them cool in the day and warm at night. Their hair would never stop growing if you didn’t sheer it, and the thread you could spin from it was so soft—softer than any fabric I’ve ever felt, including your silks, Master Pasty Ass,” she added, smirking.

Dayton stuck out his tongue, but didn’t squawk. Cara was almost disappointed at his lack of a response. He sobered, however, too quickly for her peace of mind, and her chest felt like she’d lowered an icicle down her throat.

“Was that where you met your master?”

An easy one, for all it was more than she’d told anyone before. She thought his consideration, his restraint, deserved a full answer—fuller than she would’ve given otherwise. “Yes. Master Chattin had come through, looking for work. We didn’t have any to send him on at first, and then…”

“And then you did.”

“Yes.”

Cara stopped, tilting her head back to look at the ceiling. Grey shadows danced and flickered there from the light of the fire-that-was.

When Cara was sure no tears would fall, she asked, “Why haven’t you dedicated to a god yet?”

She could hear him shifting in place, the small grains of gravel grating against each other. She’d made him uncomfortable. Good. She didn’t want to be the only one risking something tonight.

Even if she did owe him for saving her life, she’d make him work for his reward—at least a little bit.

“None claimed me, and I didn’t claim one of them,” he said at last.

His answer startled her enough to risk lowering her head again. His gaze was locked once more on the fire’s embers, and queer lights played on his high cheekbones. Cara waited for him to continue. When he didn’t, she sighed gustily.

“Fine, I’ll ask and give you another free question. What do you mean, ‘claiming’? It’s not like the gods talk to people.”

“Don’t they? Then why do we pray to them, if we don’t expect an answer?”

Cara shrugged one shoulder. “I guess you’d know better than me, being an Acolyte and all, but I pray for… for luck, I guess. And because it can’t hurt to.”

Dayton shifted the whelpling so it was cradled against his chest. Its talons flexed over his forearm once before relaxing. “They do sometimes. Talk, I mean. Make their will known, if you’re quiet enough and if you’re… you’re special enough.

“They did for my friend. Luarin claimed her on the night of her vigil, came to her in a dream and said she’d be a crafter in the east, creating machines she couldn’t even describe to me.

“And even if the gods don’t talk to you directly, they can direct you in other ways. My cousin, he was always hanging around the forge, doing chores for the blacksmith and the farrier and anyone who’d let him near the fire, even if it was just with a set of bellows. No one was surprised when Abbott Meudell sent him off to the priests of Riana.”

Cara remembered the apprentice at the bellows, the day she’d tried to talk Aaron into letting her hunt the cockatrices, and wondered if he was dedicated to the patroness of fire, healing, and peace.

“That’s the light. Wasn’t anyone at your abbey called by Cern or The Morgana?”

“Yes, but those were… not as public. Would you want people to know to you’d been claimed by the Dark?”

“I’m counting that as a question.”

Dayton opened his mouth to argue before thinking better of it.