There was silence for a while, and then Trey spoke up. “You offer a wonderful image.”

Hope shrugged, walked back to Rafe’s horse and checked on him. “Saying what I think,” she said. “This boy here . . . he’s the future. Life and prosperity for Noreela, or death and pain. All or nothing. It’s the end of an era right now, and we straddle the moment of change.”

“So we keep moving,” Kosar said again, glancing at A’Meer for support. The Shantasi was still looking down at the dead man.

“He was only a shepherd.”

“You had to do it,” Kosar said.

“It probably didn’t make a difference. I saw his eyes when he died—he went from arrogant to afraid the second I let the arrow fly—and when he died, he was only a shepherd.”

“The shade had already left?”

A’Meer looked up at Trey. “We may be doing a lot more killing before we get where we’re going,” she said, her voice strong and sad.

Kosar offered her an encouraging smile but she turned away, walked past the body and approached the copse of trees. “I’ll see if he had anything useful,” she said. “Most shepherds carry weapons. We’ll need them.”

They milled around the body for a few minutes, all of them doing their best to avoid looking. The sun fell below the horizon and the corpse became more shadowed, melding in with the dark ground as if already rotting away. A’Meer found a crossbow and several bolts hidden away between the trees, and a skin of fresh water. No food, no clothing, nothing that indicated that this was any more than a temporary resting place for the dead man.

After dragging the body into the trees they headed off again in the dark. Their way was lit by the shared light of the moons; the life moon fading, the death moon full. Kosar and A’Meer walked together.

“You’re quiet,” Kosar said.

A’Meer made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a snort. “I just killed an innocent man, Kosar. I’m a Shantasi warrior, not a murderer.”

“He wasn’t innocent when you killed him. There was some part of him that threatened us. You did what you had to do, that’s all.”

“That’s all?” she said, but her mocking tone was tempered by the dark.

A shower of shooting stars lit up the sky, spearing across the heavens and burning out before they reached the horizon. Trey gasped, Hope muttered some old spell, and Kosar and A’Meer touched hands briefly. Kosar reveled in the contact.

“Once, just before I left Hess, a falling star struck New Shanti and killed thousands,” A’Meer said. “Some claimed it was because magic had gone and was no longer protecting the land; the Mystics said it was our ancestors, angry at us for not doing more to reclaim magic.”