Reaching into her pouch, she found the painted message sticks Thero insisted she always carry. Taking one out, she snapped it in two and waited expectantly for the little sphere of light to appear. It didn’t. Wondering if the stick had been damaged somehow in the fall, she took out another one and broke it. Again, nothing happened. That left her with just two. After a moment’s consideration, she broke a third. Still nothing. Whatever had happened to the first one seemed to have happened to them all. Saving the last one just in case, she set about gathering what supplies she had.

It took some effort to pull the saddlebags out from under Moonshine, but she managed it and gave her faithful mount a last pat on the neck. “You carried me through so much, my friend. I can’t believe Bilairy took you in such a horrible way.” Her vision suddenly blurred with stinging tears. She’d found Moonshine at the Cirna horse market the day she’d met Alec. The stallion had carried her through peace and war and peace again, never flinching.

Wiping her eyes, she studied the sky, trying to guess east from west. There was no point in remaining here among the dead. Choosing what she hoped was the way back to camp, she set out across the dry, uneven plain. It was rough walking and before long she was tired and thirsty. She stopped to drink and eat an apple, then continued on.

It was impossible to tell the hour here. She rested when she was tired, drank sparingly when she was thirsty, and ate small portions to make the food last. Night was falling when she came across a deeply rutted road fringed with dry grass. In the distance she thought she could hear the river, though it was getting too dark to see that far. With only the distant rushing sound to guide her, she set off along the road. She was thirsty and hungry again, but was down to her last apple and a bit of the pasty. Resisting the urge to finish them off, she sipped from her slack waterskin and kept going.

She hadn’t gone far when she saw a tiny point of light ahead of her, bobbing like a firefly. Hurrying toward it, she soon made out that it was a lantern.

“Hello?” she called out, breaking into a run. “Please, I need help!”

The light stopped moving and Klia soon gained on it, at last making out the form of a woman carrying a basket under one arm, with her lantern swinging from a short link pole over her shoulder.

“Who’s that?” the woman called out in heavily accented Plenimaran, raising her light.

“I mean you no harm,” Klia called breathlessly in the same tongue, stopping a few yards away so as not to scare the woman. “I’m lost. Please, can you help me?”