“That’s Nardac!” he exclaims. “She was executioner for the whole district!”

He makes a sweeping arc with his finger. He’s almost forgotten to be pale and ashamed now.

The woman is making her way toward Makemin, taking long, back-crooked strides, slightly fragile, pushing her knees down from time to time with her fibrous hands.

“Did she come with us from the asylum?” he wonders aloud.

Thrushchurl shakes his head, “No. I saw her there once, but she was always free to go.”

Makemin is fuming; we are stuck again. There are no boats that will take us to Meqhasset, not for a time and perhaps not at all. The transport he had been assured would be here isn’t, and isn’t expected. Diverted, maybe even. Plus, no additional troops. No additional supplies. Nothing.

Nardac and Makemin retire to his tent, and he waves Nikhinoch up to take her arm. I see her give him something. Then she’s gone.

Jil Punkinflake puts his hand to his lapel, where the death’s head moth had once hung—it must have abandoned him during the fighting. He has his dog now, instead.

I feel his hand in the crook of my elbow.

“Do you think—? ... Listen, I have nothing to give you ... but, couldn’t you make another of those rolls for me, Low?”

“I suppose so, if I could find the right sort of books.”

“Let’s look!”

There’s a wan, sad hopefulness about him.

We move out at random into the town, looking together for more books flowed in together. I feel half-ghostly and not up to the task, but Jil Punkinflake is insistent, electrified by the search.

This is the route those moaning carts of dead bodies take on their way to the Ghuards’ camp, I suppose to be eaten or perhaps simply fondled and torn and toyed with. With which to be toyed. Or perhaps the dogs eat the ones who arrive dead? Jil Punkinflake’s dog sniffs the air here, but he is a contemplative and unruffled animal whose loyalties are by now it seems ineffacibly established. He cranks his head around and I can see the nondescript little brows above his different-colored eyes. Jil Punkinflake squats beside the dog and rubs his knees, and I am standing there a moment confusing myself with my own haste to find the right way to get lost, away from here or any other byway frequented by the Ghuards, when Thrushchurl, who is beside me, lunges a bit and then starts over to the other side of the road, where something sizeable flattens down a bed of weeds whose fringes screens it from view. Thrushchurl carefully takes the body, a woman wearing only a ragged shift and some dust, and sets it by the road, holding her out at arms’ length on the flats of his hands slowly without any visible tremor in his arms.

She must have fallen from one of the carts.