Isidore was nodding as she listened. “Though it was the beginning of the war, before we had learned how truly brutal Emperor Sulachan and his forces were, the commander I was with harbored no delusions. He said that any army that would come in and torture and murder innocent people like that would not care about burying them. And then his men, as they searched, found evidence that the bodies had been taken.”

“Taken? What do you mean, taken?” Magda asked. The whole thing was not making any sense to her.

“The soldiers said that there were a lot of tracks showing that an army had come back through and crossed over the road, headed south. There were drag marks on the ground where it looked like the bodies had been collected into piles. The ground there was covered with even more of the gore. The drag marks ended at wagon tracks. Lots of wagon tracks.”

Magda frowned. “You’re saying that Kuno’s army came back though and . . . took them?”

“They came back and harvested the dead,” Isidore confirmed in an icy tone.

Magda’s hand paused on the cat’s back. “Harvested the dead?” She tilted her head toward the woman. “For what purpose?”

Isidore shrugged one shoulder. “The officer was only able to say that it appeared that they had taken the dead with them, south, back to the Old World.”

Magda pressed her fingertips to her forehead as she tried to make sense of it. “But why would they do such a thing? What would they want with the bodies?”

Isidore’s hands opened a little in a vague, noncommittal gesture.

Magda could only imagine the grisly state the bodies would have been in. Collecting hundreds and hundreds of days-dead corpses and taking them away in wagons would have been a sickening task. No one would have done such a thing without a powerful reason.

Isidore offered no immediate insight into the mystery of what that reason might be. Magda thought that maybe it was simply such an outrage that the woman didn’t want to think about it, much less discuss it. By Isidore’s guarded response, though, Magda suspected that she knew more than she was revealing.

Rather than press, Magda thought it best to try to soothe the woman’s terrible memories and let her tell the story at her own pace.

“That certainly is gruesome. I can see what you mean about the nightmare just beginning.”

Isidore’s head was hanging. She didn’t lift it.

“No. That is not what I meant when I spoke before of the nightmare only beginning.”

Surprised, Magda stared at the woman for a moment. “Then what exactly did you mean?”

Chapter 28