“Eagles!” Hari squinted at specks in the sky.

“You seem pleased to see them.”

“I wonder if they see us.” He grinned. “And what they make of us if they do.”

Nothing like sex to cheer up a man, reflected Marit. The edge was still there, but he chattered a lot more about nothing of importance. Good thing she liked his voice.

A wagon with a broken axle had been dragged to one side, its bed stripped bare. Vultures flapped heavenward from a pair of decomposed corpses sprawled at the edge of woods an arrow’s shot off the road. If Hari had seen the bodies, he made no comment, but for a while they rode in silence. The road was wide and smooth, the powerful River Istri a noisy neighbor to their right. Normally in the rich heartland of Haldia a traveler would expect to meet steady traffic, but they encountered no one except for soldiers wearing the eight-pointed star who manned the occasional barricade.

Yet the land was green, and the sky today as much blue as cloud. It was a fine morning for a ride through handsome countryside. What were the eagles doing? What hall did they come from?

“I have to admit,” said Hari with a laugh, “I wasn’t sure I could manage it. It’s a relief to know I still can.”

“Manage—? Aui! Is that all men think of? I ask you.” But it was true that, being dead, one might start to wonder. “Surely you could have . . .”

He had a way of tightening one side of his face, pulled by shameful thoughts he wished to cut loose. “That would be more than I could endure. Either to know her thoughts, and surely to find in them some thing I wished never to have known. Or to know I was forcing her and share every moment of dread and pain. I am not that sort of man. If you’d seen what Lord Radas had it in him to do, you’d feel as I do.”

The day seemed darker. “You’re right, of course. I’m sorry I made a jest of it, if it seemed I did.”

“It makes me wonder about these Guardians your tales sing of. What manner of folk were they?”

“They were the guardians of justice!” But she faltered. “Surely the gods cannot have meant otherwise.”

Yet Atiratu, the Lady of Beasts, had foreseen that one among the Guardians would betray the others. Marit had always thought it part of the tale only because any tale must include trouble and strife, setbacks and struggles, to make a good story. She had never really thought about it as if the goddess had actually seen as with the sight of eagles into what lay far ahead, and done her best to give warning.

Patrolling out of Copper Hall, she had learned the gullies and ridgetops of Haya and the Haya Gap, the skirts of the Wild, the bays and promontories of the North Shore and the deep reaches of Istria Bay as well as the warrens and canals of Nessumara and the broad delta region with its ancient ruins and fisherman’s reed houses. She had flown patrols over Iliyat and into Herelia. But she did not know Haldia well.