The Pelmaran forces had been routed to a man. Last to commit, first to flee. Carfax had to dodge them as he rode, his mount’s hooves scrabbling on the loose scree at the base of Beshtanag Mountain. Here and there Beshtanagi wardsmen pursued them. It was hard to tell one from the other, clad alike in leather armor with steel rings, colors obscured by veils of smoke.

No matter. He wasn’t here to fight anyone’s war.

A pall of smoke hung over the battlefield, which reeked of smoke and sulfur, of charred flesh and spilled gore, of the inevitable stench of bowels voided in death. Carfax ignored it, guiding his horse with an expert hand past the dead and the dying, deserters and their pursuers, avoiding them and thinking of other times.

There had been a girl, once, in Staccia. He had brushed her skin with goldenrod pollen, gilding her freckles. And he had thought, oh, he had thought! He had thought to return home a hero, to wipe away the tears his mother had shed when he left, to smile into his girl’s eyes and see her a woman grown, and wipe away the remembered traces of pollen from her soft skin.

Blaise had asked him: Why do you smile, Staccian?

To make a friend of death.

Thickening smoke made his eyes sting. He squinted, and persevered.

Fianna had smiled at him when he brought her pine rosin for her bow. Her Arduan bow, wrought of ordinary wood and mortal sinew. Not this one, that was made of black horn and strung with … strung with what? Hairs from the head of Oronin Last-Born, perhaps, or sinew from the Glad Hunter’s first kill, sounding a Shaper’s battlecry. It had twisted in her hands when she fought against the Were, refusing to slay its maker’s Children.

Not so, here. Oronin’s Bow sang in her hands, uttering its single note, naming its victims one by one. She had smiled at him, and he … he had made a friend of death. Here, at the end, there was a hand extended in friendship, and it was one he could take at last. A traitor, yes. He was that. Carfax of Staccia would die a traitor.

Still, there was honor of a kind in dying for a woman’s smile. If nothing else, there was that.