"I kennit," he said quietly, leaning into her touch a little. Reaching into his pocket for his tinderbox, he lit his cigarette and smoked for a moment in silence, watching the thin little wisps of smoke drift up towards the ceiling. "It isn't that it would have changed anything for me to be there." Although he couldn't shake the feeling that it might have done. He could have killed more of them, even if it was only as one more man in an army; he could have laid traps or set ambushes; surely he could have done something. But she wouldn't believe that, so he didn't say it. "Gilead was born with the line of the Eld. It feels wrong that it didn't die the same way. I should have been there."

And yet, he hadn't been. And he could see that clearly, and see it as ka. It hadn't been his ka to die on Gilead's walls. Anything else was grief talking.