Zanja had flopped down with the others by the side of the road, too stupefied with exhaustion to even consider the enormous labor that yet had to be accomplished that day. When the bridgekeeper submissively started his way back up the hill, Zanja somehow got her legs under her and tackled him, and almost immediately regretted it. The man uttered a harridan’s screech and swung his fist wildly, narrowly missing her nose. Still screaming, he fought her like a crazy man, slamming a foot into her shin and getting a good punch to her ribs before she managed to get him to the ground, with a dagger at his throat and a fist in his hair for good measure. “Check the cottage!” she shouted to her companions. “Stop fighting!” she yelled at him.

He let his muscles go limp, but then, wild‑eyed, turned his head and sank his teeth into her forearm. Zanja cut him then, and though it apparently took a moment for his pain to register, the man released his teeth from her flesh to shout in outrage, “You’ve killed me!”

“Dead men don’t argue,” said one of Zanja’s companions dryly, having come over, somewhat puzzled, to help restrain him.

Emil came down from the man’s cottage. “That little house is built like a fortress and is crammed with guns. With the clear shot he’s got of the bridge he could have held us off all day.”

They trussed the bridgekeeper to a tree, where he screamed curses until they plugged his mouth with a kerchief. Besides the cut in his neck, he had broken his hand punching it into the pistol that came between his fist and Zanja’s ribs. Anger seemed to be keeping him from feeling it, but he certainly would regret losing his temper soon enough. Zanja went up to the cottage to have the bite in her arm washed with soap. She and her companion returned to the bridge, lugging baskets of food ransacked from the cottage: preserved meats, bottled pickles, dried fruit, tins of crackers. Emil and the others had finished inspecting the bridge by then, and, standing in a group, they fished pickles from the jars with their fingers, chomped the dried fruit, and smeared preserved meat on crackers and ate them in a single mouthful. The luxury was wasted: they would have eaten raw horsemeat with just as much enjoyment.

“A good team of dray horses is what we need,” said one. “But that little horse on the hill won’t be worth the effort it will take to catch him.”

“What we need is Annis and a couple of bags of explosives.”

There was a murmur of agreement.

“What we have, however, is a couple of axes and our bare hands,” said Emil.

They glumly studied the sturdy bridge, jaws working, passing the pickle jars. “I guess we’d better get busy,” someone finally said.

They chopped through the massive timbers one by one, and pulled apart the rubble pilings, stone by stone. By sunset, the bridge had begun to groan. The river joined the game, pushing and pulling at the teetering structure, until the bridge collapsed into the water, and the river broke it up as though it were no more substantial than a sugar cake. Not one member of the company was unbloodied by then, but no one had been carried away in the collapse of the bridge, so they found the energy to utter a ragged cheer that was more relief than jubilation. Then Perry looked around at the battered company and said wryly, “Well, we’re in slightly better shape than the bridge, though not by much. Good thing there’s been no sign of the Sainnites. Rather than fight or escape, I’d beg them to put me out of my misery.”

The sun was setting. They dragged themselves a little way into the woods and lay down on the ground like wounded animals.

Zanja awoke with rocks embedded in her cheek and big black ants crawling through her hair. The members of her company were strewn like corpses across the hillside. Others moved among them in the mist, shaking them awake, offering to fill their porringers with porridge spooned from the kettle that two people carried between them. She turned and saw Willis squat down beside Emil to shake him vigorously by the shoulder.

“What were you thinking? You left the bridgekeeper tied to the tree, and he told us exactly where you had gone. If the Sainnites hadn’t turned around in their tracks–”

“What?” said Emil in a voice blurry with exhaustion. “When did they turn around?”

“We met them on the road before dark.”

“That was before the bridge fell.” Emil sat up, rubbing his face. “Shaftal’s Name! Were they just a decoy? What are the Sainnites up to in the flatlands, while all of South Hill Company is out of the way?”

Zanja felt a peculiar, urgent impulse to be alone. She got to her feet with difficulty, and limped into the woods, where night had not yet given way to dawn. With the awakening voices of her company sounding far away behind her, she sat upon a fallen tree cushioned with damp moss. She felt only half awake: some part of her still dreamed of the ringing ax and the scraping away of her skin on the heavy stones. Her wandering thoughts vaguely considered a young man, a Sainnite, cleverer and further‑seeing than she, who knew before she did what she was going to do next, and danced her on strings like a puppet at a fair. She noticed that in her bloody hand she clasped one of the bridgekeeper’s crackers, and she gazed at it in some bewilderment.

“What am I doing here?” she asked. Then, the storm‑battered doors of her mind creaked slowly open, and she broke the cracker to pieces and lay them on the log beside her. Like a shadow untouched by daylight, Karis’s raven appeared from the shadows and landed softly beside her.

These seven months of her reclaimed life had largely been filled with hectic and dangerous effort. In the peace of the wood, Zanja felt how illusory was all this activity, how empty her life truly was.

In a voice as racked as any smoke addict’s, she said, “Good raven, I brought you this bit of bread.”

The raven ate. Zanja said, “Your help has been vital these last few days. Even though the Sainnites may have tricked us, I am sure that if we had not destroyed the bridge, the Sainnites would have crossed it.”

The raven, his cracker eaten, turned on Zanja an intelligent gaze. “Zanja, at dawn for just a little while, my soul inhabits the raven.”

“Karis!” Zanja saw her hand reach out under its own power, as though to grasp the muscled arm of her friend and not the raven’s rasping feathers. “Karis!” she cried, but said no more, for the words that crowded forward were dangerous and filled with longing.

Karis said through the raven, in a voice as hoarse and frayed as her own would be at this hour, “I also am surprised. The raven is not supposed to be in South Hill.”

“I understand that. But I think he is watching over you. He intervened to help prevent the Sainnites from crossing into Darton.”

The raven–Karis–was silent. Whether her silence meant confusion or displeasure was impossible to know.

Zanja said cautiously, “Surely you did not think it would be too difficult for me to realize you live in Meartown.”

“Well, you aren’t supposed to know.”

“Like everyone in South Hill Company, I have good reason to protect the forges and furnace that provide our weapons. My reason is just more personal than most.” Zanja added, “And thank you for my dagger. It is such a fine blade that I sometimes think it could fight on its own. I often wonder why you have not made more of them.”

“Every time you bloody the blade, I know it, and I feel my responsibility. Therefore, I make carpenter’s tools, mainly. They are rarely used for killing.”

Zanja said, “Dear gods–and Norina allowed you to forge me a blade?”

“I never told her. I have the same problem with her blade, but she rarely has to use it. Listen, we haven’t got much time to talk.”

Zanja said hastily, “There’s a danger here that you should know about. The Sainnites have a seer, who is now in South Hill, using his vision to direct the actions of the soldiers. Do you know what happened in Rees?”