She shrugged. “There was no telling. It was in a border village, and by the time it was over, anybody who might have known was either dead or too frightened to talk. The Magi blew it up into a treacherous attack on one of our patrols, unprovoked of course, and the irony is that they must have been looking for an excuse, too, because their declaration of war was delivered to us about the same time as ours was to them. But it was quite clear from the tone of the scroll that the Chief Healer was certain that if the Magi hadn’t been egging on the Great Ones, it could all have been smoothed over.”

He rubbed his ear thoughtfully. “Are there other reasons?”

“I think there are,” she told him. “But no one will tell me. They hint at it—and it has something to do with something that the Magi are doing either with or for the Great Ones, but they won’t tell me. They act as if—well, partly I think it’s that they aren’t entirely sure that what they think is happening is what is really going on. And partly it’s that if what they think is happening is the truth, it’s so horrifying to them that they don’t want to think about it. If I’m making any sense.”

“Oh, you are,” he said, and paused. Should I tell her?

He stopped, tried to clear his mind of all of his notions of what Aket-ten was, and tried to look at her objectively. It didn’t take more than a moment to come to a resolution; he wasn’t going to help her by protecting her from things he “thought” she shouldn’t know. She had been growing fast in the time he had known her, and that had been accelerated by her recent experiences.

“Toreth and I have been talking about this,” he said, slowly, and outlined the whole nauseating scenario. The war, as an excuse to cut lives short—the stolen years from those who had died—

Aket-ten’s eyes got bigger and bigger as he went along, and her face grew paler and paler. When at last he finished, she was as white as a lily.

“That’s worse than necromancy,” she whispered. “But it makes a horrible kind of sense—”

“And if that is what the Healers suspect?” he persisted.

“It would explain a lot.” She blinked, as though her eyes were stinging, and now he knew she was trying not to cry. “This is really horrible, you know. I don’t think you have any idea how horrible this would be to a Winged One.”