“Halt,” she called, and they halted.

She then opened her senses, feeling the tingle at her back, casting out.

Nothing.

She turned her head right, toward Lucinda.

“Take a team, go,” she murmured.

Lucinda nodded and rounded her steed, gathering her team.

She turned her head left, toward Agnes.

“Ride the perimeter.”

Agnes lifted her chin and turned her mount, calling quietly to her squadron.

With her eyes, her senses still opened, Ophelia scanned the ramparts of the wall surrounding the city, and then the pinnacle of the keep.

She had not felt the tremor of the veil. She had not felt Fern’s loss.

She must be alive, somewhere.

But they had to have moved her from this barren place for she was not here.

She watched Lucinda ride cautiously forward with her team as Agnes’s warriors struck out, side to side.

There was something not right here.

She did not sense it as wrong.

But it was not right.

She felt worry dog her mind as her lieutenant, her friend, Lucinda, and the twenty-five Nadirii who went with her disappeared behind the open gate, and she did as she’d trained herself to do over the years.

She set aside that worry.

And she waited.

But as she did, something else that she had trained herself to keep close about her over the years escaped her.

Patience.

“Keep bows up and stay alert,” she called and clicked her teeth for her mount, Midsummer, to move forward.

“My queen,” a warrior said in warning behind her.

She put her heels to her steed and the mare went from a walk to a canter.

“Remain behind,” she ordered as she trotted toward the gate.

She’d barely cleared it before the pall settled on her.

This was a place of death.

She swallowed the saliva that filled her mouth and met the eyes of two warriors who exited a dwelling to her right that they were working as a team to clear.

“Aught?” she asked.

Both shook their heads and moved swiftly to the next dwelling, easily breaching it, for its door was ajar.

She turned her head left and watched another crew of Nadirii creep down an alley.

Slowly, she walked Midsummer forward toward the small castle in the middle of the town.

She stopped when she saw two of her women come out of an abode.

One nodded to the other, the other remained where she was as the first strode toward Ophelia.

The Nadirii queen looked down at her warrior when she stopped beside Midsummer.

“There is blood, my queen, everywhere. A good amount of it,” she reported.

Ophelia felt her lips tighten.

And the nagging fatigue that the draughts she had been taking had held at bay, as it had these last few days they had rode through Airen, threatened to overwhelm her.

She set that aside as well.

“Bodies?” she asked.

“None so far,” the Nadirii answered.

Ophelia nodded. “Keep clearing.”

After issuing her order, she turned her mount and trotted back to the gate, where she stopped and whistled, lifting a hand with one finger extended.