The fire in the hearth was more for light than warmth—that would change as winter approached. One of Atwater’s older daughters sat on a nearby bench sewing, a bucket of water by her feet should a spark fly out and touch either fur or straw. She nodded at me, but turned shyly back to her work. I didn’t know how she could sew in the dim light. Even with the fire so near, I could barely tell there was a person buried in the furs in front of the hearth.

But I could smell the distinctive odor of rotting flesh. I knelt beside the furs and touched the skin on the back of the unconscious woman’s neck, feeling the dry heat.

“She hasn’t moved since I found her, my lord,” said Atwater. “Her weapon’s on the table. After seeing the bodies, I thought I’d better get it out of her reach.”

I got up and looked at the knife on the table. Not a hunting knife—the blade was too short, not even a full finger-length. A skinning knife, I thought, but not a common one at all. The metal was worked like the finest sword, the pattern of its folding visible even in the darkness of the house.

Tosten whistled softly. “She took out three mercenaries with that knife?”

“They underestimated her,” I said, setting the knife back on the table. Stala said that men tended not to take her seriously because she was a woman, and that gave her an advantage that more than made up for the difference in size and strength. “Tosten, would you go hold the horses and send Oreg in to look at her wounds?” I’d done some field surgery, but the smell of flesh-rot told me we’d need more than that here—and Oreg, among other things, was an experienced healer.

Tosten nodded and turned on his heel without comment.

When Oreg appeared in his stead, the atmosphere in the house changed. No one in the house acted like they were afraid of Oreg, but they set him at a distance due the Wizard of Hurog.

Oreg’s dark hair made him stick out among the fair-haired Shavigmen, but his purple-blue eyes, duplicates of Tosten’s, proclaimed him a Hurog born and bred. In the past few years, unbound by the spells that had held him, he’d begun to look more like a man and less a boy, but he, like Tosten was slight of build. He didn’t look like someone to be afraid of. Still less did he look like a man who had arisen from the dead.

I’d told everyone that Oreg had been ensorcelled and that by killing him I’d broken the spell. They seemed to accept it and Oreg—but they gave him space when they could.