Instead, she got to her feet and opened the front door. “Gura,” she said. “In.”

The big dog gave her an astonished look—though during the day he sometimes came inside, at night he guarded the farm.

“In,” she said again.

Gura padded past her to the fire. As soon as he saw Jes, he flopped out beside him with a sigh. Jes, unable to bear the distraction of human touch, wrapped his arms around the dog and pressed his face against him.

When Seraph sat back down beside Lehr he said, “Why doesn’t he like to be touched—when…” he hesitated. “This is really confusing. Why didn’t it bother him to be touched when he was being Guardian?”

“Jes is sensitive to the touch of others. Many of the Eagles have the gift of empathy. Because he must always keep the Guardian contained, a third person’s feelings are just too much.”

“You make it sound like he’s two people.”

Seraph nodded. “From what my oldest brother who was also a Guardian told me, it’s very much like that. I don’t know why the Eagle is so different from other Orders, why it is so much more difficult to bear. My teacher believed that the old wizards were trying to make something quite different—a superior warrior perhaps—and they made some mistakes: mistakes that Jes and those like him have to pay for all of their lives.” She paused and glanced at Jes. He wasn’t paying any attention to them, but she lowered her voice before continuing. “Most Eagles die before they reach Jes’s age, so my people are very protective of them; we keep them away from strangers when we can, and don’t speak of them outside of the clan. The Guardian is both the most dangerous and most vulnerable of all the Orders.”

Seraph crossed her arms over her chest, realizing that his survival was up to her alone now. Lehr put an arm around her shoulder and drew her up next to him. “It will be all right, Mother,” he said.

They stayed there until Jes’s tears grew silent and Gura fell into a doze, snoring softly. Seraph wanted to do something, anything—but there was nothing more she could do to help Tier, nothing more she could do to help Jes, Lehr, or Rinnie. Her gaze fell upon the scraps of Tier’s bridle.

She picked it up and left the bench for the better light in front of the fire.

“What are you doing, Mother?” asked Lehr.

“I’m going to see what this bridle has to tell me,” said Seraph, sounding much more confident than she felt. She had failed her Order so badly that it seemed wrong that it hadn’t failed her. “I told you that within each Order, there is still some variation in abilities. One of the things I could do that my teacher could not was read an object’s past.”

“You’re going to see what happened to Papa?”

“I’m going to try,” she said.

She took a deep breath and braced herself, because reading objects closely associated with death was painful. Tentatively she rested her fingers on the browband. Delicacy was more important than power in this kind of magic. She let threads of magic drift through her fingers and touch the leather.

Nothing.

Thinking she’d misjudged the necessary power, she opened herself until the ends of her fingers tingled—still nothing. She pulled her fingers away as if they had been burned.

“Lehr, could you find something…” Seraph’s gaze scanned the room and brushed the corner where Tier’s sword hung under Lehr’s bow. The sword certainly had enough history for her to read. “The sword. Get the sword for me, please.”

“What’s wrong?” asked Lehr as he took the sword down and brought it to her.

Seraph shook her head and took the sword and unsheathed it. “I don’t know.” She set the bridle aside and lay the sword on the floor. She had to push Gura to get him out of the way, disturbing Jes, who sat up.

“Papa’s sword,” he said.

She nodded absently at him and rubbed her fingers together lightly, waiting until she felt the magic ready and eager—just as it had been when she touched the bridle. She opened herself as widely as she could to the traces time left on objects and touched—death and darkness.

She had a moment of fiery pain as gold light gathered under her fingers, then it was gone. She opened her eyes and had the odd feeling that time had jumped without her noticing. Her ears rang, her elbow felt bruised, and she was lying back with her head on Jes’s knee.

Jes patted her cheeks gently, his eyes flickering with the Guardian’s presence. “Did the sparks hurt you, Mother?”

“No, Jes,” she said, sitting up on her own and resting her head on her raised knees while visions from the sword flashed behind her closed lids.

“I’m fine,” she said, seeing Lehr’s anxious look. “Just a bruise or two. I haven’t done this in a long time, and I misjudged. The sword was a poor choice.”

Solsenti warriors used their blades for generations until rust robbed the blade of its strength. They even named them, never dreaming of the pseudo-life imbued by so much death—or the danger in giving such a thing a name. There were stories about swords that held against all odds and others that tended to slip and bite their wielder, but solsenti never seemed to heed the warning. Travelers cleansed their weapons after each life taken and discarded the blades of dead men.

Tier’s sword was old. Newly sensitized, Seraph could feel its hunger for Tier’s hand and battle even though it lay several handspans from her skirts. But the Tier the sword longed for was a version of her husband Seraph had never seen: a cold-faced killer who let his sword drink its fill of blood.

Seraph touched the bridle again, running her fingers over the blue and red beads on the browband, lingering on the bit. After a moment she felt a dullness, the bare touch of Lehr’s grief as he held the bridle, a dusting of time lacking in power. As if the bridle, bit and all, had somehow come into being just a few days ago.

“Nothing,” Seraph growled in frustration. Her hand fisted on a scrap of leather, both hand and leather glowing with power, but there was no flash of vision, only emptiness, as if whatever trap Tier had sprung had wiped the bridle’s history clean.

“What does it mean?” asked Lehr.

She shook her head. “I don’t know. Tier’s death should be emblazoned upon the bridle. I haven’t done this in a very long time, but I didn’t have any trouble reading the sword.”

“It was Shadow Blight,” Lehr reminded her. “Maybe the Shadowed’s magic affected it.”

Seraph frowned. It felt as if the bridle had been wiped clean of its past, not blasted with magic. “Fire or running water can clean something of its past; I suppose Shadow Blight might do the same.”

Weary in spirit more than body, Seraph rubbed her face. “Jes, could you put Papa’s sword in its sheath and then put it away?” She didn’t want to touch it again. Logically she shouldn’t sense anything unless she looked for it, but she could feel it waiting. “We’d better get to sleep. Tomorrow you two will have to start plowing. I will take word of Tier’s death to your aunt and uncle.”

Seraph waited until they were all asleep before sneaking out. She used enough magic to keep from disturbing Jes or Gura, both still curled up before the coals of the fire.

She walked until she was far from the cabin; the ground was uncomfortably cold on her bare feet. When she stopped, she bowed her head against the rough bark of a tree, seeking the peace resident in its stolid, slow-growing, long-lived presence—but all she felt was rage.

It seethed from the soles of her feet and coiled through her body until it was forced into the long strands of her hair. Her hands shook with it as they curled and clawed at the hapless tree. Her breath left her throat in a low, moaning growl.

And with the rage came magic, destructive and hot, and as aimless as her wrath. Because the focus of her anger, of her pain, was dead.

“Tier,” she whispered and then in a voice of power that shook the ground under her feet, she asked, “Why did you leave me?”