Olan found Yan by the water trough before the first cooking fires were lit.
He had slept in his clothes and carried his tools in a sack. The strap had cut a red line across his shoulder. He set the sack down and flexed his fingers as if he had spent the night gripping the handles.
“Do you think we made the right choice?” he asked.
Yan looked past him toward the lower town. From the river camp, the burned quarter appeared as a black band between the ridge and the pale morning. “We stopped the furnace from consuming people who had not agreed to be used.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
“No,” Yan said. “I can tell you why I stopped it. I can’t tell you that it was right for you to lose the orchard.”
Olan sat on the trough’s low stone rim. He rubbed his thumb over a nick in one tool handle. “I told the council we should stay. The trees were my father’s before they were mine. I thought if we left, there would be nothing to come back to.”
“And now?”
