She sat up, opening and closing her hands. She sat in a puddle of slop. Her butt was cold, and her feet were bare. Several horrific rents had been opened in her clothing, and her skin beneath the ripped fabric was scarred. But she was whole. She was breathing. She was alive.

If she could call herself alive.

The eagle had flown.

The rain slackened, quieted, ceased. Wincing, she got to her feet. The eagle’s hood lay on the ground about five strides away, covered with mud and scraps of vegetation but a good cleaning and oiling and a new slip would fix it. Her sandals were gone. She wiped water out of her eyes. Warning folded her wings and flicked her ears as though to say, “Can we go yet?” The two reeve packs remained fixed to the saddle where Marit had tied them to the feed bag. In the clearing, all the flowers were gone.

“Lady’s Tits,” she swore under her breath. She walked back into the forest, marking a forked tollyrake here and a tall pine there as landmarks to make her way back to the campfire.

“The hells!”

Animals and rain and wind had reached them first, but not even animals and the Four Mothers worked this quickly. Two greasy skeletons lay tumbled in the undergrowth, bits of soft tissue and fibrous muscle still attached but most of the flesh gone. One was headless, but she located the skull about five strides away. It was missing teeth, and she backtracked and found them beneath the neck of the remains. Their leather vests and trousers were in remarkably good shape, smeared with dirt and layered with foliage but otherwise intact. The woman’s sturdy reeve boots still had foot bones—and scraps of desiccated flesh—inside them. Cursing, she emptied them and measured the boots against her own bare feet, and when she saw they would be a fair fit, she stumbled off to one side and vomited. The good ale in her drinking gourd had soured. The rice balls in the nai leaves had turned to mold.

“What is happening to me?” she cried, slapping a hand repeatedly against the ground, but her tantrum accomplished nothing except to make her hand hurt.

She rested her head against the bole of a tree, trying to get her breathing under control. The rain cleared off, and as night fell, a cold and bitter wind blew down off the unseen mountains to the southwest.

The season changes. Only late in the year do you feel the chill all the way down to your bones.

Marshal Alard used to say, “If you have to choose between what seems the most reasonable explanation, and what the cold, hard evidence reveals, go with the evidence.”

The reasonable explanation was that she had slept through a day and a night recovering from the shock of what she had seen and from the eagle’s attack.

When she thought it through, she had to believe that the eagle had killed her in its fury. The evidence of the corpses and the weather bore out the unlikely supposition that months had passed.