Evie watches helplessly as Lariat begins pummeling the messenger’s face. The Elder Company’s champion pugilist isn’t wearing the barbed leather straps over his knuckles, so he uses the points of his elbows, alternating between them like pistons. No one speaks and no one intercedes. There is total silence as Lariat brutalizes the man beneath him, chopping away with bone at the man’s rune-stained features until blood and gore overtake them all.

No one stops Lariat, he simply runs out of momentum on his own, like a machine wound to perform a specific task. When his elbows stop falling there’s no distinguishing the messenger’s blood from Lariat’s own juices up and down his arms. His face is passive, almost calm, except for the heavy exertion of his breathing. What’s left of the messenger’s face is no longer recognizable as human, Savage or otherwise.

Lariat slowly rises, his knees creaking loudly in the abject silence of the camp.

The first pair of eyes his meet belong to Evie, who is still watching him with that needless expression.

“Was he the one who deserved that?” she asks him seriously.

When Lariat speaks, again so contrarily soft in tone, he sounds far more sad than angry. “He rode near a hundred miles with that sack in tow. He coulda buried ’em. He coulda told us what happened in private, like. What he didn’t need to do was dump ’em infronta everyone like this. He wanted to join us, but he was no Savage. He was a Skrain with a coin in his guts, whether he knew it or not, no better’n a trained dog.”

“This was an attack,” Yacatek adds, and it’s clear she’s seconding Lariat’s position. “This man made himself culpable in our enemy’s attack. We cannot bear such betrayal among our own band.”

“Not all traitors carry knives in the dark,” Sirach says to Evie.

Evie looks back at Mother Manai, whose expression remains unchanged. Evie realizes why the older woman stopped her. Gazing around at their three separate forces, she sees them all galvanized in that moment, each one, whether they be Sicclunan or Savage or B’ors seeing themselves in Lariat’s actions, and their enemy in the mangled face of the corpse at his feet. Rather than becoming demoralized by the sight of Savage heads rolling across the healthy green grass of the Crachian plains, their rebel army is hardening like a quenched blade forged from several different billets of steel.

Lariat bends down with a quiet groan and retrieves one of the heads from the ground. He holds it aloft by the hair, turning so all three forces can see its face.