I did not care to dignify this with an answer. “There’s a tunnel in the well that leads out. Best you make haste to block it so no raiders can come through.”

He backed away.

Through the open doors of the half-burned barn, I glimpsed a figure I knew. “Rory!”

I found him doing nurse’s duty among the wounded, moistening faces, offering sips of water. He embraced me with a snarl of relief but pushed me away at once. “I’m very busy. I find I quite like tending the wounded, for I detest the hateful racket of the guns. If you go to the corner, you’ll find some local women sorting through garments they’ve stripped from the dead.”

The local women were a trio of old dames, one toothless, one deaf, and the third the very same old woman who had greeted Rory in his cat body as dominus. She did not recognize bedraggled me, but her weary eye measured me the same as if I had been her own niece.

“Gave a man some trouble to you? Are you harmed, girl?”

I wanted to laugh but the sound would not come. “No. No man harmed me.”

I found a dead Amazon’s uniform that fit me well enough with its sturdy wool jacket and cunningly sewn skirt that could be tied up to different lengths depending on what a woman needed on the march. The cloth was dirty but unbloodied, by which I assumed the woman who had worn it had died from a head wound. My cold steel had returned to a cane. Cupping the locket in my hand, I closed my eyes and breathed down the thread that bound me to Vai.

He was alive.

The barn really stank, not just with ash and blood and piss but with pain, which has a tang as hard as a claw. I found Rory holding the hand of an unconscious soldier. My brother’s sweet smile calmed me, for the groans and whimpers and sobs rubbed like thorns against my heart.

I crouched beside him. “I have to go. Are you coming with me?”

“Shh. I like to hold the hands of the ones whose souls are passing over.”

Curious, I rested a hand on the unconscious man’s cheek. When I closed my eyes and sank my thoughts as into a soundless ocean of smoke, I could first feel and then almost glimpse the delicately wavering glimmer of brightness that sparked through the man’s body: the flickering brain, the subsiding heart. The settling darkness of death’s tide hauled him out to sea. The soldier took in a shallow breath, and then not another. In the dark ocean of death, a shark glided past to snap up the man’s soul and carry it to the other side.