They buried Hallowmere's dead through the morning and well into the afternoon, six soldiers and Isakk working in grim, wordless rotation, the shovels biting into dirt still cold from the night before.
There were nineteen graves by the time they finished. Nineteen names, where anyone had still been close enough to give one, nineteen small wooden markers hammered into the earth with nothing carved on them but initials and a date, because there hadn't been time for anything finer and none of them had the heart to pretend there would be.
Isakk dug three graves himself. He didn't ask to be spared the work, and nobody offered. That was one more thing he'd come to understand about Doran's camp in the weeks since Aldenmere, nobody here got to stand apart from the ugly parts just because they'd done something difficult the night before. The soul eater was dead. The grief it left behind still needed burying with his own two hands.
He thought, somewhere around the eleventh grave, about the warmth that had flooded into him the night before, the stolen vitality pouring backward through his palm, and how good it had felt in the moment, how right. He thought about that feeling now, shovel in hand, dirt under his nails, and felt something close to shame settle over it instead.
You're allowed to have taken strength from a monster's hoard, Xerile said quietly, the first thing she'd offered all morning. Her voice was thinner than it had been in the cellar, worn down from the night's exertion, barely more than a murmur now. What you took was already stolen from them. You didn't steal it twice. You just finished the theft the right direction.
"Doesn't feel that way."
It never does. That's how you know you're still the kind of thing worth keeping around.
He said nothing to that, only kept digging, until the sun sat low enough that Doran called the work finished and the six of them stood a moment in a ragged, silent line over nineteen fresh graves, nobody quite sure what prayer belonged to people none of them had known.
Camp greeted them with firelight and the smell of something cooking, and Sable was waiting at the gate before Isakk had even swung down off his horse, small and fierce, already reaching for his sleeve before his boots hit the ground.
"Let me see," she said.
"I'm fine."
"You always say that." She tugged his sleeve up without waiting for permission, turning his forearm this way and that in the firelight, checking the skin the way she'd started doing every single time he came back from a job, ever since Aldenmere, ever since she'd learned exactly how much damage a quiet night could hide. "You're bleeding. Your lip."
"It's healed."
"It's scabbed. That's not the same thing." She pulled him down by the collar with more strength than her size had any right to carry, inspecting the cut at his lip with the stern, unimpressed focus of someone twice her age. "Doran told me what you did. The soul eater thing."
"Doran talks too much."
"He said you were brave." Something flickered across her face, half pride, half the old fear that never quite left her eyes anymore. "You have to stop getting hurt."
"I'm trying."
"Try harder." She released his collar, satisfied for now, though her eyes stayed fixed on him a moment longer than necessary, the way they always did, like she was recounting every piece of him just to be sure it was all still there. "I made you something. While you were gone."
She produced, from behind her back, a crude little charm woven out of dried grass and a single blue thread pulled from her own ruined dress, tied into a rough, lopsided shape that might have been meant as a shield, or a star, or possibly just a knot that had gotten away from her.
"It's not magic," she said quickly, before he could ask. "I know you've got the real kind now. I just thought. I don't know. Maybe it'd help anyway."
Isakk took it from her carefully, turning it over in his palm, the ruined blue thread catching the firelight.
"It helps," he said, and meant it more than she could have known.
The messenger arrived an hour after dark, a lean man in imperial grey with a wax seal on his satchel that made every soldier in the yard straighten without being told to.
He found Doran near the cookfires and didn't bother dismounting fully before he spoke.
"Captain Ashfeld. I carry inquiry from the Office of Garrison Oversight, regarding the death of Camp Commander Wideroth and the alchemist attached to his post, three weeks past. Records show your unit was stationed within two days' ride at the time."
Doran didn't flinch, didn't so much as glance toward Isakk, standing twenty feet off near the fire with Sable's charm still in his hand.
"We were," Doran said evenly. "We were also engaged the entire span of that week clearing a bandit encampment along the eastern trade road, a full accounting of which I've already filed with your office twice over. Neither myself nor any man under my command had cause or opportunity to be anywhere near Wideroth's camp."
"The inquiry notes the manner of death as unusually brutal. Beyond what bandits or deserters typically manage."
"I wouldn't know anything about that," Doran said, and there was not a flicker of untruth in his voice, not a single crack a trained ear could have found, the calm, practiced calm of a man who had decided, somewhere in the last few seconds, exactly where his loyalties sat and had no intention of revisiting the decision. "Wideroth kept a reputation. I imagine he made more enemies in that camp than anyone bothered counting. Men he starved. Men he whipped for sport. I'd start there, if I were building a case, rather than riding two days out to question a unit with a verified alibi and better things to do."
The messenger studied him a long moment, the kind of look that weighed a man's words against his face and found nothing worth pressing further.
"The inquiry will note your statement," he said finally, and gathered his reins.
"It should." Doran's voice didn't change, didn't so much as warm. "And you can note for your office that if they'd like to spend their resources chasing down whoever finally gave that man what he'd earned, they're welcome to it. I won't be losing sleep over the search."
The messenger rode out within the hour, and Doran watched him go from the edge of camp, arms crossed, saying nothing until the hoofbeats had faded entirely into the dark.
Then, quietly, without turning, he said, "You heard all that."
Isakk hadn't moved from the fire. "I did."
"Good." Doran finally turned, and there was no warmth in his face, only a flat, steady certainty that had nothing soft about it at all. "Then you understand what I just did, and what it costs me if that man's office ever finds out I lied to his face for your sake."
"Why would you do that."
"Because I've seen what Wideroth's kind does to a camp, Isakk. I don't need an inquiry to tell me who deserved what happened to him." Doran held his gaze, unflinching. "That's the last time I'll say it plain, and the last time I expect you to ask. Go sleep. Tomorrow we ride further out, and I'd rather you rested than guilty."
He walked off toward his tent without waiting for a reply, and Isakk stood by the fire a long while after, Sable's crooked little charm still warm in his closed fist, turning over the sudden, unfamiliar weight of being lied for instead of lied to.