He tries to simultaneously listen for anyone approaching and examine the wound on the edge of his hand. Then he takes a bite of the partridge, the skin charred, the center raw, and the girl lies panting in the leaves, blood still flowing down her face, and a new thought rises: Does she guess why he is alone? Does she sense what he has done? Why he isn’t rushing into the city with the other victors to claim his rewards?

She squirms away from him. Maybe this creature, too, is alone. Maybe she also has abandoned some post. When he notices that she is crawling toward an object at the base of a tree, he steps in and takes up her sack and she riots. Inside is a little ornamental box and a bundle wrapped in what might be silk—impossible to tell in the dark. She rolls again to her knees, screeching curses in her language, then emits a scream so high and plaintive that it seems more lamb than human.

Terror rockets up his spine. “Please be quiet.” He imagines her scream traveling out through the trees in every direction: across the dark body of water ahead, down the roads leading to the city, directly into the ear of the sultan.

He pushes the sack closer to her and she grabs it with her bound wrists, then staggers again. She is weak. It was hunger that drew her.

Omeir places what’s left of the still-warm bird on the ground near her and she picks it up with her teeth and eats like a dog and in the quiet he tries to gather his thoughts. They are far too close to the city. Any moment men, either beaten or triumphant, will come through here on horses. She will be taken as a slave and he will be hanged for desertion. But, he considers, if they find the two of them together, maybe the girl can serve as a kind of shield: a prize he has won. Maybe, traveling with her, he will draw less suspicion than if he were alone.

Her eyes stay fixed on him as she sucks the partridge bones and a breeze rises and the still-new leaves tremble in the darkness. As he tears a strip from his linen shirt a memory ambushes him: of standing with Grandfather in morning light, their trousers wet to the knees with dew, fitting Moonlight and Tree to their first yoke.

The girl remains still and does not scream as he ties the linen over the wound on her head. Then he hitches Moonlight’s lead to the halter binding her hands. “Come,” he whispers. “We must go.”