“Be quiet!” she hisses in his ear.

With a growl that’s far more Savage than a Gen-raised pleader, Brio wrests himself free of the hold she’s had on him all night and begins clawing through the remnants of the tent cloth camouflaging them from sight. Evie tries in vain to pull him back down to the ground, but Brio persists. She has no choice but to follow him out, if only to protect him, and then only so she can knock some sense into him herself. The sudden light slices into their night-laden eyes, stinging them. Brio and Evie both raise their hands to shield their gaze from the blinding sun.

The atrocity of what they see can’t be blunted by such temporary shadows.

The entire camp has been razed. Every tent is a flattened pile of what look like burned-black leaves fallen from some gargantuan dead tree. The only noticeable movement comes from the wisps of white smoke rising like escaping spirits from the ashes. The bodies of Savages are strewn everywhere, open throats and severed necks feeding scores of carrion flies. There are more heads decorating the field than boulders. The blood fouling what’s left of the grass is already turning yellow, but far worse than the smell of decay is that of bowel and bladder spilled in death.

“We shouldn’t have survived this,” Brio says, the horror overwhelming most of his senses clearly etched on his face. “We shouldn’t have—”

“But we did,” Evie reminds him. “And we’ll keep surviving. Keep all this outside you where it belongs. Don’t take it in. You don’t have room for it. Trust me.”

Evie tries not to see the faces of the dead. She tries not to remember the old, the infirm, and the simple folk of the Bottoms who never belonged on a battlefield and committed no crime meriting this kind of execution. Still pictures of their faces, sullen and accepting of their fate around a table at the Revel, flicker and are banished from her mind. She tries to dismiss these butchered bodies as the condemned, as strangers unremarkable and unrelated to her. Above all, she refuses to remember that most of the night’s victims were just people, like her, with others waiting and weeping and praying silently to the forgotten God Stars for a return that will never come.

“All these people—” Brio begins, only to have Evie shut him down immediately.

“We’re pushing the Sicclunans to the edge of annihilation. They’re desperate, dying. They can’t be blamed for this. Conscribed or not, the Savages are one of the fiercest weapons being used against their people.”

“Such a waste…”

Evie only nods, saying no more.