nearly flat, the biscuit crushed to powder, but perhaps the cup could be reshaped and the dirt brushed from the dried beef.
She dug her fingers into the mud and pulled herself forward. It hurt. Ulili, it hurt. But she moved. Focused wholly on the bag, she crept toward it bit by painful bit.
“Where do you think you’re going, witch?” The farmer’s harsh voice made her cry out.
But she couldn’t stop, couldn’t give up. Not until she had no breath left with which to whisper a prayer, no mind left with which to hope.
The farmer snatched her up by the hair and dragged her over the fence, the rough boards scraping her battered body mercilessly. “If you got life enough to move, you got life enough to feel this.” He raised his fist, but before he let it fly, screams echoed through the camp. Screams coming from masculine throats.
He dropped Aisse in the dirt, spinning to face the noise, his face going pale. “What—”
She didn’t care what caused the screams. He’d let her go. She stretched her arm out and forced her pain-racked fingers to close around the leather of her bag.
“Achz preserve us,” the farmer whispered, and took off at a run toward the battlefront. Though what he thought he could do, Aisse didn’t know. He was Farmer caste, not Warrior. But he’d left her blessedly alone.
Aisse dragged the bag close and clutched it to her chest as she crawled the few feet to her cup. It took her several minutes to fumble it into the bag, then she worked her way to the discarded beef. She didn’t try to clean it. She didn’t know whether she still had teeth strong enough to chew it. But she pushed as much of it as she could gather into the bag. Once that was done, she began to crawl the long, endless distance toward the cover of the trees outside camp.
The sun climbed higher in the sky while she crawled. At first, she flinched at every noise, tried to hide from the sound of running footsteps. But she couldn’t move fast enough to hide, and the footsteps always ran past, toward the city. Voices shouted one to the other about witches and evil and death magic. She didn’t care. As long as no one tried to stop her, they could blather about anything they liked. She was getting away.
Finally, she felt the cool shade fall across her head. Then her shoulders, her back, her legs. She kept going. She needed to find a place to hide. With so many dead—she’d understood that much, that thousands had died—they surely wouldn’t try to find her. They had more important things to do. But she didn’t want anyone stumbling across her accidentally and finishing the job the farmer had started.
Aisse crept off the path already formed by people walking to the nearby branch of the river. The trees were short compared to the high forests of her home, and most of the fallen wood had been collected and burned in fires over the last week. But down near the rivulet, she found a tree whose roots had been undermined by seasonal floods. The brown tangle had left a gap big enough to hide her.
She filled her bent cup with water and drank. Then she crawled into the tangle of roots. Her passage left marks in the sandy grit of the bank, but if she tried to erase them, she’d only leave more. Aisse curled into a ball and prayed that no one would find her. And if they did, she prayed for a quick death. She wouldn’t go back.
“Are you hurt?” Kallista whispered, searching Torchay for signs of injury.
He shook his head. After a moment, he stood. They huddled together on the city wall, staring out at what Kallista had wrought.
Nothing moved on the walls of Ukiny. After a time, a crow fluttered up and landed with caution. No arm waved it away. It cawed and pecked at the body where it stood.
Nothing moved on the plain west of the city, as far as the beginning of the white tents in the Tibran camp. The misty wave seemed to have lost power just there, for Kallista thought she could see wounded attempting to crawl back to safety.
On the waters of Ukiny Bay, Tibran ships sat at crazy angles, their masts snapped and splintered. They’d all been anchored closer to the city than the camp had been. Some ships had already sunk, the rest sinking or so damaged they’d never sail before next spring.
Within the city, Kallista could hear shouting, some of it joyous, some frightened. The mist hadn’t harmed Torchay. Could it have been so selective as to kill only Tibrans, leaving Adarans untouched?
“My gloves, Torchay. I need my gloves.”
“Yes, Captain.” He pulled them from his belt and helped her put them on, both of them fumbling at the task with shaking hands.
“Don’t be afraid of me, Torchay.” She fought to keep the quaver from her voice. “Please don’t be afraid of me now.”
“I am afraid for you. That’s a different sort of thing. Blessed One, Kallista, what happened?”
“I don’t know. I don’t—You heard what I said. And then there was power. So much—” She shivered and Torchay wrapped his arms around her, sharing his warmth as he had before. Her shivers weren’t due to cold this time, but still his presence stopped them.
“It sounds almost as if…” His voice came hesitant, fearful. “Could you have been…marked?”
Terrified, Kallista stared at him. “That’s just legend. Children’s stories. It isn’t real.”
“Isn’t it?” Torchay looked over her head at the devastation on the plains below.
Kallista shivered again. Or perhaps it was more of a shudder. “Isn’t it supposed to leave an actual mark? Something you can see? Or feel?”
Torchay’s hand that had been absently stroking the nape of her neck came down to claim her hand. He carried it back up to where he’d been touching her. “What do you feel?”
There, beneath her untidy queue, she felt a faint raised ridge on her skin. Her fingertips followed it down to a sort of knot, where another ridge intersected the first. Cold gripped her heart.
“Can you see it?” She held her hair up, out of the way, while Torchay bent to look.
“Yes,” he said. Nothing more.
“Well? What does it look like?”
“A scar. A red, raised scar.” He paused and his fingers touched. He traced along her spine, then perpendicular to it. “North. South. East. West.” He touched the point where the lines crossed, where Kallista had felt the knot. “And a rose in the center. It’s a perfect Compass Rose.”
She dropped her hair, pressed it down over the mark, over Torchay’s hand. “Maybe it was there already.”
“No. It wasn’t.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Kallista, I’ve braided your hair almost every day for nine years. It wasn’t there.”
CHAPTER FOUR
“Oh, sweet heaven, Torchay.” Kallista had reached the end of her strength. She’d poured it all out and had nothing left for her precious control. A tear trickled down her cheek. “I’m a soldier. Nothing more. I don’t want this.”
All
