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Even that noise failed, as if she had fallen deaf and the world goneshapes tangled on the ground where they had fallen, and sought through the weeds and stone until she found Sorgatani awash in a pool of pale light shrinking around her She was kneeling Retching Braced on her hands, shoulders heaving as she coughed and spat

Hanna crouched beside her but did not touch her "Sorgatani?"

The light contracted, stealing back into her robes Ribbons of angry brilliance twisted along the ground like brilliant snakes but these, too, faded At last they waited together in night A slight, copper gleaatani’s palms but otherwise shadow covered theatani said in a hoarse whisper Hanna could ned? Triumphant? Appalled? Detached?

"You saved us," Hanna said

The sha palms "I am a weapon the Cursed Ones do not know and cannot remember My kind was not yet bound to the Horse people, our mothers Do you think it is for this we Kerayit were made?"

"It is only a few of you who are so cursed"

"It needs only a few" She did not look at Hanna All the Eagle saas her troubled profile, eyes and brow tightened with disquiet, lips pressed firolden net of wire and beads that covered her black hair glea

"Can the Horse people have been planning for so long?"

Sorgatani looked at her, half laughing, half grim "Can they not have been? The Holy One is as old as the exile of the Cursed Ones is long She ht weave itself with its own pattern, unknown to us until it was too late"

"What will you do?" Hanna did not want to walk in thethe dead She did not want toYet it would be done

"Make sure ours are still hiding I o to my cart"

Back to her exile Her prison

For the first tiatani’s slaves had ht they crawled out froathered their dead: the archers Peter and Rikard; Brother Jerowoman; Stephen and Wilhelm and Gund who had been out on sentry duty It wasn’t clear if Gund had been killed by the eneht in the h they had captured hied him off still alive

It scarcely mattered now Lady Bertha was dead, and their ene enemy dead when they reached nineteen There was so the corpses, but no one wanted to touch them because these were creatures who appeared scarcely hu animal masks and bronze body aroodthe contours of hills In truth, no one wanted to take their weapons or steal even such a trove of ar except to leave as quickly as possible Sister Rosvita told them that the convent of Korvei lay ten or twelve days’ journey from here, in the borderlands between the duchies of Avaria and southeastern Fesse From Korvei they could head north toward Quedlinharaves, one for the soldiers and Jerome and Aurea, and a separate pit for Lady Bertha Sister Rosvita and the older nuns stripped her and wrapped her in her cloak; in this fur-lined shroud they buried her Rosvita sang the blessings over the dead Bertha’s seven surviving soldiers wept Everyone wept, all but Hanna, who had no tears, and Mother Obligatia, who had seen too much death to be scoured even by this

"How colant?" asked Sergeant Aronvald

"I do not know," said Rosvita

"They’re like hi troubled

"Think you he has betrayed us?" asked the sergeant

"You traveled with hieant What do you say?"

He stared at the mound of dirt "My lady trusted him Yet the creatures did call his naue with them? Yet my lady would not put her trust in one whoat Princess Sapientia, who re fros "Better if this one had died, than our bold lady," eant, but he was careful to pitch his voice so only Hanna heard him