Galerinos obeyed, striding uphill to join the being that everyone in the migration of the Devetii assumed was a god. Together they moved a few paces off. As Rhodorix got up to keep a watch downhill, he felt the air turn cool around him. He glanced up and saw a mist forming in the sky, a strange opalescent cloud shot through with pale lavender gleams and glints. The hairs on the back of his neck rose.

“Ye gods!” Gerontos said abruptly. “They’re gone!”

Rhodorix spun around to look where his brother pointed. Sure enough, Evandar and Galerinos both had vanished. As he watched, the cloud of peculiar mist began to shrink into a swirl of gray and lavender. In a heartbeat, it had disappeared as well.Rhodorix tried to speak, then merely shook his head in bafflement.

“Do you think Gallo will bring us back some aid?” Gerontos said.

“I hope so,” Rhodorix said. “I’d think so.” Yet he felt that he lied. Why would the clan care about two shamed men such as themselves? Especially me, he thought, I’m the one who led us right into the trap.

With a curse and a groan of pain, Gerontos let himself slide down against the boulder until he sat upon the ground. Rhodorix sat down next to him and prayed that the gods would allow his clan to take mercy on his brother.

To Galerinos, it seemed as if he and Evandar had walked but a few feet away. The god, or so he thought of the being next to him, paused and turned to face him.

“Your master worried when you lads didn’t come back,” Evandar said. “He and some of the other men found that battlefield, if you can call it that. A slaughter yard, more like.”

“So it was,” Galerinos said. “I’m surprised that any of us got away.”

“They assumed you’d been taken prisoner, so I said I’d fetch you back.”

“You have my humble thanks.” Galerinos glanced around and saw nothing but mist all around them. “Where are the other two?”

“Back where I left them. I told Casso that I’d bring you back. He said naught about your friends.”

“I can’t desert them!”

“You already have.” Evandar grinned with the wide-eyed innocence of a small child and pointed off in the distance.

Galerinos spun around to look downhill. The mist was lifting, revealing a clear view of the camp, only some five hundred yards away. Horses, wagons, people—they spread out in a dusty spiral on the plain, desolate except for grass, crisping in the autumn heat, and a few straggly trees. A faint umbrella of brown dust hung in the air above the conjoint tribes of the Devetii, refugees from the Rhwmani wars.