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Then we got closer, and I couldn’t pretend they were anything other than what they were: three horses dead in the road

Olive screamed Bronwyn instinctively went to copie!"--and the soldier riding shotgun fired into the air We dove to the ground and covered our heads

"Do that again and you’ll be lying in the ditch beside theled toward me and breathed the word Gypsies, then nodded at the closest horse I took her nized the s--and realized it was the very horse I’d been clinging to just an hour ago

I felt like I was about to be sick

It all cahts had done this--the saht before The Gypsies had e of town There’d been a skirhts had shot the Gypsies’ horses right out frohts had killed people--killed peculiar children, Miss Avocet had said--but the brutality of shooting these anio they’d been solea heat--and now, thanks to the intervention of a few pieces ofbut heaps of coldanie

I shook with fear, seethed with anger I was sorry, too, that I’d been so unappreciative of theether, I told ether

Where were Bekhir and his hts were going to shoot us I was sure of it now These i but aniast they controlled The wights, at least, had minds that could reason--but they used that creative faculty to diss And for what? So that they ht have a little more power over the world around them, and the creatures in it, for whom they cared so little

Waste Such a stupid waste

And now they were going to waste us Lead us to soated and duh to follow us--if the bee flying up and down our line meant he was nearby--then they’d kill him, too

God help us all

The fallen horses ell behind us when the soldiers ordered us to turn off the main road and down a narrow farm lane It was hardly more than a footpath, just a few feet wide, so the soldiers who’d been riding alongside us had to park their jeep and walk, one in front and two behind On either side of us the fields greild, bursting with flowering weeds and hu with late-summer insects