“How bad?” asked her companion.

“Eh. It’ll bruise, but nothing was cut. Now I understand why the holy ones ordered their spirits buried. Fah!” She spat again, wiped her mouth, and kicked the corpse.

“Here, now!” Joss hadn’t yet sheathed his sword.

“We’ll lay offerings at the Thunderer’s altar so his blood doesn’t corrupt us,” added the woman. “Come on.” She limped back toward the trees. Joss and the other man followed.

The settlers in this region had left the rank of ancient ironwood alone, but the woodland behind it showed all the signs of being second-growth, trees and shrubs sprouting where once a mature stand of forest had stood. His companions hacked a way through. He pushed past bushes whose crests waved above his head. His feet squelched on debris soaked by the rains.

A tiny campsite had been cut out of the middle of a particularly labyrinthine architecture of interlaced tranceberry bushes. It was wider than he expected, although still in shadow from the foliage all around it, and covered with a carpet of recently downed branches and the mulch of last year’s leaf litter. In this small clearing, eleven ordinands lay dead and two militiamen were wounded. Lehit had her back to him; she was hectoring some poor soul. She saw him, and limped over.

“What happened?” he asked. “I thought you wanted to capture them.”

Shock showed in the way she stared at him, as if she could not comprehend words. She shook her head, but was only trying to get strands of hair out of her eyes. She brushed them away with the back of a bloody hand. “Once we suspected they were here, it was easy to track them. We crept in on three sides, and attacked just as we said. They wouldn’t surrender. Once they saw they’d lost and that they couldn’t escape, they fought to make us kill them, or killed themselves rather than be taken prisoner.”

“A frightening sense of purpose. That lad crawled at me with two arrows stuck in his back. He meant to kill me.”

“Yet none of that is the worst you’ll see.” She gestured, and he walked with her over to a sliver of an opening in the pipe-brush.

They had dug a pit into the ground, deep enough that a tall man standing upright could barely touch the rim with outstretched arms. The walls of the pit were slimy with moist soil, worms, and bugs, and the stink of excrement and urine was strong in the depths. Into this pit they had flung children. One was a headless corpse, still dressed in the ragged remains of an everyday short tunic now smeared with dirt and spattered with blood. The rest were alive, staring up fearfully. He counted twelve.

“Are these the missing children?” he asked Lehit, feeling sick. “Do any of you recognize them? Here, let’s get them out of here.”

They were too afraid to reach up their hands to be pulled free. They didn’t know the guardsmen, and it quickly became apparent some had been raped. Coming out of the pit might bring a new round of horrors. One boy began to cry and, after a moment in which they watched the stunned and horrified guardsmen for their reaction and saw that nothing was to happen to the crying boy, the rest began to weep as well.