Somehow all the fear and grief was behind her now, now that she was confronting her own life—or death. It was easier to think; the pain was far away and nothing was important but the next moment, and the strange excitement that sharpened all her senses.

If I slip past them, they’ll still be at my back, and dangerous. I could forget that they’re there, and one of them could get me from behind. I can’t just slip past them. I’ll have to get rid of one.

No sooner had she made the decision than she was crawling forward after the sentry that had just passed her. She had no real plan, it was just that this particular man seemed the most careless. She followed him with the sword still in her hand, able to move with relative silence through brush that she could see and he could not.

Maybe if I can come up on him from behind, I can hit him in the back of the head with the pommel like Dent showed me—

She was within a length of him; half a length. He started to turn—

And suddenly she was no longer in control of her body.

As if she was a passenger behind her own eyes, a puppet in the hands of an unseen manipulator, she felt her muscles tense as the man started to peer through the dark toward her. She found herself ducking down and crouching behind the cover of a bush. She hadn’t even noticed the bush beside her, much less that it was big enough to hide behind. He even moved a couple of steps in her direction, but couldn’t see anything, and she stayed as still as the disembodied puppeteer could hold her. Then, when he turned away, she sprang up, sword-hilt clasped in both hands; and as a wild excitement filled her, drove the blade through his body, between his ribs, using all the momentum of her leap. The edges of the blade scraped against his ribs; he arced, and made a kind of strangled gasp, dropping his own blade. She seized him around the neck with her free arm, and shoved the blade completely through him, up to the quillons.

They stayed that way for a moment, then he fell; she braced herself and pulled at the same time, and the blade came free of his falling body. He never even made another sound.

Then, just as suddenly as she had lost control, she regained it. She was the one who staggered two trembling steps away from the carcass, mouth open with shock, heart thudding against her ribs. She was the one who very nearly turned and ran, ran all the way back to the copse where she’d left Verenna to take her and ride home at a gallop—

Only the knowledge that if she did, they would probably hear her and kill her, kept her from doing just that.

I’ve killed a man, she thought, legs shaking, sour taste of bile in the back of her throat. Her gorge rose. I’ve killed a man, myself—