The arcing lines of Wacagan soldiers glide away from us now, back and forth, and turning from side to side in the air. They vanish over the brow of the hills and up the road.

*

It’s dawn as we finally regroup. A quarter of our number is lost or injured. I attend the wounded I find, and presently a triage is organized. Jil Punkinflake I discover asleep, clutching the scroll I’d made him, still under the cart. His dog managed to crawl in beside him, raises his head and looks sorrily at me, one eye pale blue, the other crimson brown. I shake Jil Punkinflake’s shoulder, and he stirs, smiling woozily.

“Was it a dream?”

The cart is riddled with holes. The scroll I take from him is bare—seems he made use of it.

I am taken by the arm and guided into a tent, where Saskia sits angry and weary on her cot. She pays me no mind as I salve and cover an abrasion on her right shoulder, where a bullet had hammered her armor. Her skin is creamy, and there is a thin, soft layer of flesh over strenuous muscle like a flat sheaf of wire. She is scowling at the ground, living the injury time and again.

“Pig! ... Pig!” she curses softly.

I find Sergeant Kaladze among the wounded. They hit him in the gut, and he is unconscious when I get to him. The wound is bad, and I do not think he will survive it. I do what I can for him, but as I lift him up onto the cart he gives a long sigh and his brown face goes instantly grey. No pulse. I leave him in the cart—let them bury him in a proper cemetery.

Thrushchurl is moving in and out among the dead, peering eagerly this way and that. Now and then he will pick up and drop a flaccid arm, or turn a cheek.

During the fighting, I felt alarm, but no real fear. Now that the fighting is over, I tremble. I tremble with fear. It comes and goes in icy waves. It breaks open an icy cave inside me. When I think about what happened I sss-ss-s-stutt-tu-tut-tut-tut-tt-tt-t-t

*

Eventually we break camp and move out. Makemin, looking drawn, is eager to press on to Port Conget, get out of open country, and hopes to make it there before nightfall. Our line staggers together, passing the bodies of dead Wacagan, many of which still float a few inches off the ground. I ask Silichieh about it, and he points to the thick metal braces they wear clamped to their calves.

“They have some secret way they treat this metal. They make it so light, it won’t stay down. All Wacagan, and some Yeseg too, they train to fight in those. That’s how they move so fast. That’s why we call them blackbirds, didn’t you know? Because they fly.”

*