“It was. . . right. . . here.” He probed with a boot, and lifted his foot a hand’s width with a curved bone caught over the arch. “I found it under this fellow.”

If a tree had hit him square in the back, Shai could not have dropped harder to his knees. A jumble of shapes and colors pulsed before him: green grass blowing; the white cradle of bare ribs; red-clay-colored cloth pressed into the loam, becoming part of the weave of earth. Nearby, a skull was lodged upside down between rocks in the stream, water flowing through the eye sockets. White flowers bobbed on a nearby bush. From deep in the branches, a bird peeped at him, black eyes gleaming.

“I need to get on.” An object thudded to the ground by Shai’s knees. The man walked away as Shai stared at the buckle; the wolf’s head stared back at him, black on silver. He sucked in an inhalation as he grasped it.

Hari!

Dead. Dead. Dead.

With a trembling hand Shai touched the shattered rib cage. Closing his eyes, he tried to snare the lingering whispers of a spirit from the sun-warmed bones.

These were not Hari’s bones.

A man shouted.

Shai started back, his hands cold and his chest heavy. He scrambled on hands and knees through the scatter of bones, touching leg bones, arms, fingers, a mandible. So many dead men, carved by death out of life and sent fleeing through the Spirit Gate. But none of them were Hari.

Yet Hari had been dead when he had last been wearing the belt buckle. Hari’s wolf sigil ring had come to the family through convoluted channels, more by accident and chance than purpose, so Shai believed. Hari’s ring, too, had whispered of its owner’s death. But Hari’s bones were nowhere to be found, or at least, not here where he had left his ring and his buckle. Weeping, Shai sank onto his heels, head cupped in his hands. The obvious answer sang in his ears: Hari had died elsewhere, and another man had robbed his corpse and worn his fine ring and buckle until he himself was caught by the death that attends those who march to war.

Enough.

An eagle rose out of the outcropping, whose bare stone shouldered above dirt in rough surfaces and ragged spills of rock like massive frozen waterfalls. Men flowed out of the rock, spurting from between ridges, cascading down the slope.

They had seen him.

They were armed.

He tied Hari’s belt buckle into his sleeve and leaped the stream, landing up to his knees in the rushing cold water. He splashed through and scrambled up the far side as shouts were loosed at his back. He sprinted up the slope to the shelter of the low-lying scrub. Thin straggler vines whipped his face; branches caught in his clothes as he tore through. His cap came off. The racket he made as he thrashed through the brush was trail enough for his pursuers.