Soldiers rolled up blankets. Sentries called out a challenge to men trudging into camp with full buckets drawn from a nearby stream, while grooms led the horses to water in groups of twenty. As ragged and weary as his men looked, he knew the horses managed worst of all. The army was almost out of grain, a meager ration to begin with, and the grazing was poor. At least, here on the northern slopes of the mountains, the water was clear, unclouded by particles and ash. Yet it still hadn’t rained, despite the clouds, and both villages they had passed as they came down out of the mountains had been deserted, houses and huts blown down by the great storm.

“I can’t stop seeing them,” she whispered. “The way they burned. I can’t stop hearing them scream.”

He knew better than to touch her when she was in this mood. “They were your enemies.” He’d said the same thing a hundred times in the last fifteen days. “They would have killed you.”

“I know. But I still feel unclean, as though I’m stained with the Enemy’s handiwork.”

He waited. As the light rose, the world came into view: hills, forest, wilting trees. Drought and lack of sun, unseasonable heat followed by this sudden cold winter blast, had taken their toll on the vegetation. To the north the land was too hilly to see far. The road twisted away past a ridgeline, lost to sight. To the south, on a clear day, they would have been able to see the mountain peaks, but there was yet a haze dusting the air, ever present. Even at midday the light lacked strength. It was uncanny. Indeed, it scared him more than anything else. He was no farmer, but he knew what farmers needed: rain, sun, and seasonable weather. After years of civil strife, invasion, drought, famine, and plague, he could not imagine that any Wendish noble or biscop held plentiful stores in reserve. They had already suffered hard times. How long would these clouds linger?

“Death in battle is not the worst we may see,” he said at last. “Those deaths may be the most merciful ones, in the end.”

She had shed a few tears, but she wiped them away. She examined him as she might study a manuscript, that look that devoured, so rarely turned on him! He did not understand her yet. He wasn’t even sure what she thought of him. That she was willing to love him passionately he knew. Of the rest, of what lay beyond lust, he had to unfold piece by piece.

“I’ll keep trying,” she said, and it took him a moment to realize she meant that she would keep trying to find her Eagle’s Sight. “The crowns, too. If they’re all fallen, then we have no advantage over our enemies. But no disadvantage either as they have nothing we do not also possess. Unless there are those still who can see with Eagle’s Sight while denying it to us.”