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“Hanna,” said Breschius. “Don’t ask this of her.”
“She must go, or we’ll all die.”
Sorgatani crossed the threshold and descended the stairs, shaking the slave’s bells like an amulet in front of herself. There was power in her. Her robes captured the fading light of the coals and shone with a dull gleam whose trail left a ghastly miasma along the ground, almost a living, breathing, crawling mist of shimmering copper intertwined with mottled patches of blood-red vapor.
“This is a terrible thing,” murmured Breschius. “I cannot watch.” He hid his eyes against a forearm.
Hanna went to the door. One of the horses had fallen, and in its screaming and thrashing had driven the other horses out beyond the aisle, where they milled about in the open chapel. Jerome’s body lay trampled under their hooves. Of the groom and Sister Ruoda, Hanna saw no sign, nor of anyone, not one except a half dozen pairs of feet and two rumps peeping out from beneath the canvas awning, pulled down on top of them, and shapes huddled under the wagons and the shields. Sorgatani whistled softly, and every horse quieted. The dogs fell silent. Even the goats ceased their complaining.
Movement flashed by the narrow gap where the cargo wagon met wall. At first, Hanna thought it was their enemy, come to fight at close quarters. Then, horribly, she saw otherwise.
Lady Bertha staggered into view, leaning against the wall, struggling although there was no sign of a wound on her. Her grin was lopsided, as though half of her face had already lost mobility and feeling.
“Ah! Ah!” she said, in gasps of pain as she tried to speak words to the golden presence approaching her. “Too late for me. Too late. Blooded. But I had to see. I always wondered what you looked like. So beautiful!”
She sagged, slipped down onto her knees, and slumped against the wall, eyes still open but staring sightlessly.
Sorgatani walked past without faltering, through the gap. Hanna ran to the sheltering line of wagons. Sorgatani walked into the darkness. She was her own lantern. The mist boiled out from under her robes, streaming down the slopes in a flood that insinuated itself into every fold of ground, every crevice and gap of the ruins.
Their cries changed at first into those of unknown animals heard at a distance in a trackless forest: faint, clipped, despairing. A few arrows flew. None touched the Kerayit woman. Figures darted among the low walls, but they dropped in their tracks as Hanna watched in astonishment. They could not outrun the sorcery that stalked them. Where it touched them, they died, until that light washed the ruined palace and the slopes of its hill, everything Hanna could see, like the moonlight she had not seen for months but turned here into a curse not a blessing. The color was wrong, a haze of corruption.
Hanna stood at the breach. The wind had died. In all that world she heard each footstep as Sorgatani circled back and circumnavigated the chapel to flush out anyone hiding behind.
Even that noise failed, as if she had fallen deaf and the world gone mute.
She stumbled out, cautious of her feet, seeing shapes tangled on the ground where they had fallen, and sought through the weeds and stone until she found Sorgatani awash in a pool of pale light shrinking around her. She was kneeling. Retching. Braced on her hands, shoulders heaving as she coughed and spat.
Hanna crouched beside her but did not touch her. “Sorgatani?”
The light contracted, stealing back into her robes. Ribbons of angry brilliance twisted along the ground like brilliant snakes but these, too, faded. At last they waited together in night. A slight, copper gleam still shone from Sorgatani’s palms but otherwise shadow covered them.
“The curse is real,” Sorgatani said in a hoarse whisper. Hanna could make no sense of her expression. Was she resigned? Triumphant? Appalled? Detached?
“You saved us,” Hanna said.
The shaman rose, staring at her shining palms. “I am a weapon the Cursed Ones do not know and cannot remember. My kind was not yet bound to the Horse people, our mothers. Do you think it is for this we Kerayit were made?”
“It is only a few of you who are so cursed.”
“It needs only a few.” She did not look at Hanna. All the Eagle saw was her troubled profile, eyes and brow tightened with disquiet, lips pressed firm, and the golden net of wire and beads that covered her black hair gleaming uneasily where the light gilded its webbing.
“Can the Horse people have been planning for so long?”
Sorgatani looked at her, half laughing, half grim. “Can they not have been? The Holy One is as old as the exile of the Cursed Ones is long. She must have wondered if they would return, if the spell might weave itself with its own pattern, unknown to us until it was too late.”
“What will you do?” Hanna did not want to walk in the morning out among the dead. She did not want to make an accounting. Yet it would be done.
“Make sure ours are still hiding. I must go to my cart.”
Back to her exile. Her prison.
For the first time, Hanna really understood what it meant. Even Sorgatani’s slaves had more freedom than she did.
2
AT first light they crawled out from under the wagons and gathered their dead: the archers Peter and Rikard; Brother Jerome; Aurea, Rosvita’s beloved servingwoman; Stephen and Wilhelm and Gund who had been out on sentry duty. It wasn’t clear if Gund had been killed by the enemy or by the curse, because he was quite a ways away, caught in the midst of a group of warriors as though they had captured him and dragged him off still alive.
It scarcely mattered now. Lady Bertha was dead, and their enemy wiped out. They gave up counting enemy dead when they reached nineteen. There was some talk of burning the corpses, but no one wanted to touch them because these were creatures who appeared scarcely human. They had bronze-colored complexions and frightening animal masks and bronze body armor, molded to fit the slopes of their bodies as good masons built cunningly along the contours of hills. In truth, no one wanted to take their weapons or steal even such a trove of armor. No one wanted anything except to leave as quickly as possible. Sister Rosvita told them that the convent of Korvei lay ten or twelve days’ journey from here, in the borderlands between the duchies of Avaria and southeastern Fesse. From Korvei they could head north toward Quedlinhame and Gent, or west to Autun.
