the rain that only lifted when the battle ended, some had complained aggrievedly when Karyl ordered that each and every fallen horde member's head be crushed, stabbed through, or severed. Until a man whose guts hopelessly entwined his own legs, and had already been trampled into the muck all around him besides, tripped a mailed soldier—and a woman showing bone from a dozen deep cuts tore out the house-shield's throat with a single bite.

Seeing no other prospects awaiting his axe nearby, Rob thrust her spiked head into the mud and leaned against the butt, almost too tired to think.

Something made him look around. Riders filed around the farmhouse's field-stone flank from the west. Melodía Delgao rode in the lead, slumping in the saddle as if barely conscious. Ahero are you?"

"One thinking more about what kind of world might be left for me to bestride," Falk said.

"Faugh." Bergdahl made a gesture like scraping an evil taste from his grey-pink tongue on his upper teeth, which thoroughly revolted Falk. "Some men would whine if they were hung with a golden rope."

* * *

"What's the meaning of this?"

Sitting in the box of the lead wagon of the baggage train, whose drivers had fled when her jinete troop appeared out of the woods to both sides of the road, Melodía took a meditative bite from an apple before answering. The fruit was late-harvest, gold, and piled high in the bed. The nosehorns who had pulled the wagon stood in the ditch, nipping off mouthfuls of hock-high green weeds in