Astrid felt the silence too. She had been kneeling at Fleya’s side, cradling the woman in her arms as the last breath left her body. Now she lifted her head and saw Lann stagger and fall.

Reluctant to leave her charge, she gently placed Fleya back down on the earth and went to him. Lann was on his hands and knees, surrounded by the bodies of his victims. Astrid’s first thought was that he must be mortally wounded. He was a thing of red in a sea of the same colour; a sea made up of limbs and wings, heads and corpses. It was only his eyes that weren’t the colour of the death about him, and they now stared sightlessly out from a gruesome crimson mask.

‘Lann? Lann, it’s me … Astrid.’ Dropping down beside him, she frowned when he didn’t respond. ‘Lann. Let me help you up. Please.’ She reached out a hand to him, and when he eventually put his own in hers, she gently pulled him to his feet. Somehow the sword still remained grasped in his other hand, and she gingerly reached out and took it, returning it to the scabbard by his side.

‘Are you hurt?’ she asked.

Staring out into nothingness, he answered her question with a small, almost imperceptible shake of his head.

‘Fleya?’ he said, looking at her for the first time. He waited, then nodded when he saw the answer in her eyes. When he spoke again, his voice was little more than a whisper. ‘She knew. She knew she would not leave this place. And yet she still came.’

‘She thought she could stop Kelewulf. She had to try.’

At the mention of the necromancer, Lann turned to look in the direction of where he’d last seen the young man. But the circle was empty.

‘He’s gone,’ Astrid said.

‘I couldn’t reach that creature in time. I tried, but I couldn’t. And then –’ he stifled a sob – ‘then … I left her to die alone.’

Astrid shook her head and let out a shuddering sigh. ‘She was not alone. I was with her and spoke to her before she died. She somehow managed to hold on long enough for me to do that. She knew you could not be with her, Lann. She told me she had seen what would happen here today in a vision.’ Astrid paused and gathered herself. ‘She told me to tell you that she loved you, and that she was proud to have been a part of your life in this world.’

He looked down at his bloody hands, slowly turning them as if trying to grasp how they could have come to look like this. ‘I let myself be taken over by anger, and by the needs of the blade. I should have been at her side—’