torn. The dog picked its way carefully through the carnage, between the piles of broken corpses, past the smoldering fires. It panted, its tongue hanging from its mouth.
“Is there any water?” someone asked hoarsely, behind him.
Petrus was abruptly thirsty. His throat burned with thirst, hurt with it.
Tomas pushed to his feet with a groan. “We’ll drink and eat,” he said. “And then we’ll bury the dead. And find the horses.”
Petrus closed his eyes for a moment. All those tasks required more energy than he possessed. He touched the Grooten disc beneath his shirt—Give me strength, All-Mother—and opened his eyes and stood.
“Justen...” Someone spoke in a low voice, barely audible above the sound of soldiers clambering to their feet.
He looked around. Dareus beckoned, a tiny gesture.
Petrus walked across to him.
“Ah, Justen,” Dareus said more loudly, as if he’d only just noticed him. “Would you be so kind as to help me to stand?”
“Of course.” He held out his hand.
Dareus gripped it. “How are you?” he asked in a low voice. “Can you continue as Justen? I need Innis for something else.”
Petrus nodded. “The prince has noticed I’m missing,” he said in a whisper. “I said I’d seen a hawk flying.”
Dareus nodded. “Thank you for your assistance,” he said loudly.
INNIS COULDN’T FIND the clothes she’d been wearing; they lay somewhere beneath a smoking pile of corpses. She wrapped a blanket around herself instead. Right now, she didn’t care what the soldiers or Prince Harkeld thought of her. In fact—she glanced at the filthy, weary faces—she doubted they noticed, let alone cared, that she wasn’t clothed.
They ate in silence. Everything tasted of soot, of death.
When they’d finished, no one made a move to stand. Innis touched her ripped ear. Blood caked it. She should wash it, heal it; instead she ran a fingertip along the edges, sealing them. Small magic. The rest could wait. Exhaustion dragged at her, weighing down her limbs. She looked across the canyon. The red sand was hidden beneath a carpet of brown, gray-white, and black. Brown limbs lay strewn, graying ribcages gaped upward to the sky, charred bodies lay where they’d fallen. And buried beneath those things were eleven of Lundegaard’s soldiers.
A breeze stirred along the canyon, bending the sluggish columns of smoke, coaxing a faint wail from the sandstone cliffs.
Prince Tomas stood. “We need to find our men. Bury them.” His mouth tightened. “They died well. It was a terrible battle.”
“It’s a battle we’ll have to fight again tonight,” Dareus said.
Tomas’s face blanched beneath the soot. “What?”
“This—” Dareus gestured to the carnage, “is the result of Ivek’s curse, something he’s done to guard the anchor stone.”
“But I’ve been up here before,” Tomas objected. “We’ve never encountered—”
“You haven’t been here since the curse came into its power,” Dareus said. “This is why the curse shadows became darker yesterday: we crossed a boundary. From now on, we’ll face this each night.”
“Is there another route?” Prince Harkeld asked. “Do we have to stay in the canyon?”
“We’d never get the horses out.” Tomas gestured at the sheer cliffs. “And the only water’s here.”
“How many days is it to Ner?”
“Four, maybe five.”
“We can do it,” Dareus said. “Innis, are you up to another shift? I want you to fly ahead. Find somewhere we can camp tonight. Something we can fortify.”
Another shift. So soon. Her weariness was bone-deep—but of all of them, she was the one most able to do it. She nodded.
“No more than six or seven leagues,” Dareus said.
Innis nodded again.
“The first oliphant—that was you, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“You did well, Innis.”
A flush heated her cheeks. She was aware of others looking at her—Prince Tomas, Prince Harkeld, Justen.
“Yes,” Tomas said, his face sooty and sincere. “Thank you.”
Beside him, Prince Harkeld nodded.
Dareus turned away from her. “Ebril, are you up to a shift? We need to find the horses. Petrus is already looking for them. See if you can find him.”
Innis fingered her ear again, checking the wound. Then she gathered her magic and shifted. The blanket slid from her back, pooling around her. Prince Harkeld was still watching her. His expression was indecipherable.
Innis stepped free of the blanket. She extended her wings, allowing a sense of her new form to fill her for a few seconds—the clarity of her vision, the lightness of her bones—then she launched herself up into the sky. Even tired, the pleasure of flying caught her, as her wings caught the breeze.
PETRUS WORKED ALONGSIDE Prince Harkeld, heaving aside desiccated limbs, hollow heads, crumbling torsos, searching for the fallen soldiers.