Orek had turned on his side in the grass to get on with his sobbing.

The cat, too, had begun to cry, wailing in inhuman spasms over Hwenit’s body.

And I, caught between two griefs, like corn between the millstones.

The sky cleared. The wood soaked in a sallow sunlight, winged over with damson scud, promise of more rain to come.

I had changed ground. Taking up Hwenit’s body, I had carried her into the black tent and set her on her rug bed there. And found she lived. It was the remnant of a pulse. Zrenn’s knife had pierced up through her breast, yet it must have missed the heart. But, though she breathed, it would not be for long. The cat had followed me, meowing and rubbing on my boots, apparently thinking I meant to help her. But she was past help.

A little after, someone came to the doormouth. Orek, knuckling his eyes like a whipped boy, said, “I and the slave will bury my brother out there.”

“It’s free soil,” I said. “Do it.”

I had realized for some while he would not try for my life; his passion was squandered in tears; besides, he had had a surfeit of slaughter.

He turned and went away. They had only knives to dig with, and the slave scrabbling with his hands—it would be a shallow burial, and no gold to lay on the casket.

For Hwenit, she could rest among her own folk, though it would be no comfort to any of them.

Somewhere in my mind, Hwenit and Demizdor were merging. Life snuffed out and beauty turned to cold meat for worms. And Hwenit, my black witch, she had said she would die of her love, the perennial girl’s lament, now proved true. She had never even lain with him, her Qwef, not once. I saw the desert of it, its yearning barrenness. Brother, sister, only words; but this, a reality, the destroyer at the gate. What could it have mattered, after all, to celebrate her hungry youth and his, before the sword fell on her? All the plots and schemes, the moralities and codes of men, seemed dust in the face of death.

The cat came and licked my hand with its rough tongue. I had seen hounds mourn and entreat in this way.

A shadow fell through the doormouth again. I looked; the Dark Man stood there, his arms muddied to the elbow—slave, guide, rower, digger of graves.

He would not speak till I asked him what he wanted. Then he nodded to Hwenit and said, with the first modicum of curiosity I had ever seen one of his race exhibit, “Unwilling, woman?”

This made no sense. I told him to use his own tongue, that I could follow it. Then he said, in a corrupt rattling speech, “The lord cannot make the woman obey? Shall I bring anything to the lord?”.

He supposed that, though she was near-dead, I would restore Hwenit. I had not even considered it. I had healed a horse, a child, half accidentally, but I had not been sure with the horse, and there had been some fight in the child for the healing to work on. Hwenit’s pulse was weak as the flickering of a moth’s wing. Yet when I reached and put my palm on her neck, she was still warm; she had seemed a century cold. Irregularly but continuously, her heart beat. How had she lived this long? Perhaps she clung to her shred of life, waiting for the magician to cure her?