Tool motioned and then they were up and sneaking past, moving through the smoke, Mahlia praying that she wouldn’t cough and give herself away, and then they were past the ambush and Tool was motioning her onward, urging her faster. She hurried after the hobbling monster.

She was moving so fast she almost stepped on them before she realized what was happening. Bodies lay everywhere. Dozens and dozens of dead. Mahlia jerked up short, on the verge of crying out. She was surrounded by a carpet of bodies. Her breath came out in a low, trembling exhalation. She took another breath, fighting for calm.

It’s just the dead. You’ve seen plenty of them. Just keep going.

She started picking her way over the bodies, trying hard not to tread on them, trying hard not to look at their faces, at the blood, how torn and broken they were. Trying hard not to see Bobby Cross where he lay.

But even as she tried to ignore the carpet of death, a part of her was seeing the wounds and trying to fix them in her mind. All her doctor training, plucking at her conscience, telling her how to fix up something that couldn’t be fixed. Doctor Mahfouz instructing her in that calm voice of his that first she should stabilize the patient, make sure that breathing and circulation weren’t compromised. First fix that. Close the hemorrhaging wounds. Then onto the splints and sewing and…

Had she really brought this down on them? Was this all her fault? Was this an army’s revenge for the coywolv?

Mahlia started to retch, and suddenly it came out, all of it. The doctor was right. Everything you did just made it worse. One thing spinning into the next, into the next until a whole village was dead—

Tool clamped his hand over her mouth. “Be silent!” he growled. And though she struggled, he didn’t let her go. He buried her face against his body so that even her screams were barely sounds at all, and then her sobs poured out and he stifled those as well with his huge body.

“Lock it away,” the half-man whispered. “You feel, after. Not now. Now you are a soldier. Now you do your duty for your pack. If you break, your Mouse will die, and you with him. Feel, after. Not now.”

Mahlia wiped at her watery eyes and snotty face, nodding, and they went on.

The smoked lessened. They came to the edge of the blackened fields, with fires guttering all around. Ravens picked at the burned remains of the place. Across the fields, she saw the soldiers. Lieutenant Sayle and his pack, all together, standing around a cluster of people kneeling, and in the center of that knot, under cover of weapons—

“Fates.”

21