could only recognize him by his braided blond locks and the tears streaming from
his blackened sockets unheeded, would live to fight another day: he’d been
innermost, protecting Illyra-the S’danzo seeress who should have forseen all
this-with his own big body. But of the other three soldiers, one’s gullet was
split the way a fisherman cleans his catch, one’s neck was hanging by a thread,
and the third was hacked apart, limb from limb, his trunk still twitching
weakly.
It was not the soldiers, however, who drew Tempus’s attention, but the woman
they’d tried to shield, who in turn had been protecting her child. Illyra,
S’danzo skirts heavy with blood, cradled a young girl’s body in her arms, and
wept so silently that it was Walegrin’s grief, not her own, that let Tempus know
that the child was surely dead.
“Lillis,” Walegrin sobbed, manliness forgotten because an innocent, his kin, was
slain; “Lillis, dear gods, no… she’s alive, ‘Lyra, alive, I tell you.”
But all the desperate wishes in the world would not make it so, and the S’danzo
woman, whose eyes were wise and whose face was tired beyond her years and whose
own belly bled profusely where the axe that had hewn her daughter had gone
through child and into mother, met Tempus’s eyes before she turned to the field
commander who could no longer command so much as his grief.
“Tempus, isn’t it? And your marvelous horse?” Illyra’s voice had the sough of
the seawind in it and her eyes were bleak and full of the witch-dust settling
all about. “Shall I foretell your future, lord of blood, or would you rather not