Gwenna took a deep breath, then another, trying to still her rising panic. Long Fist had shattered one of the forts south of the river, one of the forts intended to keep the Urghul out of Annur. He hadn’t just turned on the Kettral; he had turned on the whole ’Kent-kissing empire. So much for his defensive army. . . . Gwenna would have worried about Valyn and the others—they’d left the camp more or less convinced by Long Fist’s promises of allegiance—but whatever miserable shitpile Valyn found himself in, her own predicament was looking quite a bit worse.

The soldier’s jaw was quivering. “They’re gonna hurt us, ain’t they?” His eyes locked on Gwenna’s, then flickered down to her blacks. “You’re not in the legion,” he breathed, comprehension hitting him like a hammer. “You’re Kettral.”

The words were horrible with hope.

“Can you break us free?”

Gwenna shook her head, furious at that hope, powerless to explain that the legends extended only so far.

“But you’ll do somethin’, right? Right? I mean . . . the Kettral!”

“What I’ll do,” Gwenna said, “is keep my eyes open and my mouth shut.”

It came out more harshly than she’d intended, but she couldn’t bear the desperate trust in the young man’s eyes, the irrational faith. She wanted to shout that the Kettral weren’t gods, that they couldn’t work miracles, and even if they could, she herself was a pretty shit Kettral. She didn’t have Annick’s discipline or Talal’s cool or anything, really, other than an ability to blow shit up. If I could save you, she wanted to scream, I’d be saving you.

“Just shut up,” she snapped instead, although she’d just gotten done saying it. “Just be ready.”

Whatever that meant. Half buried in the earth they could neither flee nor fight. It was like being bound to a dock piling waiting for the tide to come in. The Urghul who packed the earth around them had retreated, climbing back up the low stone walls to leave Gwenna and the soldier alone at the bottom of the gully. The sun had slipped behind the hills to the west, and though a smear of red and orange still lit the sky, most of the light came from the enormous fires, a fickle, inconstant illumination that sketched the shards of bone one moment and plunged them into shadow the next. Above them the Urghul had risen to their feet, shaking weapons and jeering something incomprehensible in their strange melodic tongue, an entire bloody nation gathered to watch her suffer, men and women thick as wheat on the surrounding slopes. Gwenna wished she understood the words, then thought better of it.

Just blood, probably, and death, and doom, and blah, blah, blah.