For if he could not reach the vectors that Raj Ahten had taken, Borenson needed to kill every Dedicate who fed Raj Ahten’s power.

Thus, when he finally unlocked the portcullis to the keep, blood covered Borenson from helm to boot.

He walked into Market Street, dropped his knives to the pavement, then stood for a long time, letting rain wash over his face, letting it wash over his hands. The coldness of it felt good, but during the past hours the blood had clotted in gobbets. A little rainwater would not wash it free.

A fey mood took Borenson. He no longer wanted to be a soldier for Orden, or for any king. His helm felt too constraining, as if it would crush his head, it hurt so. He threw it to the ground so that it rattled and clattered as it rolled along the paving stones, down the street.

Then he walked out of Castle Sylvarresta.

No one stopped him. Only a pitiful guard had been set.

When he reached the city gate, the young fellow on guard took one look at his blood-covered face and fell back, crying, raising his index finger and the thumb as a ward against ghosts.

Borenson shouted a cry that rang from the walls, then ran out into the rain, across the burned fields toward the distant copse where he’d hidden his horse.

In the darkness and rain, a half-dozen nomen with long spears made the mistake of jumping him. They came rushing toward him in a little vale, leaping from the blackened earth like wild things, running forward with their longspears.

Their red eyes nearly glowed in the darkness, and their thick manes made them look somehow wolfish. They snarled and loped forward on short legs, sometimes putting a knuckle to the ground.

For a moment, Borenson considered letting them kill him.

But instantly an image of Myrrima formed in his mind: her silk dress the color of clouds, the mother-of-pearl combs in her dark hair. He recalled the smell of her, the sound of her laugh when he’d kissed her roughly outside her little cottage.

He needed her now, and saw the nomen as mere extensions of Raj Ahten. They were his agents. He’d brought them here to kill, and though Borenson’s men had driven and scattered the nomen through the hills, they would become a scourge on this land for months.

It did not matter to Raj Ahten. The nomen would do his will as they sought to feed on human flesh. They would do all the killing he’d asked, but they’d take the weak first—the children from cradles, the women at their wash.

The first noman rushed Borenson, hurled its spear at close range, so that the stone blade shattered against Borenson’s mail.

Quick as a snake, Borenson drew the battle-axe at his hip, began swinging.