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of figures fallen around him. Someone groaned nearby. He turned his head to see, and pain lanced from his shoulder down into his chest. It took the breath he needed to scream with, and his sight went dark.
    He woke to the sound of a horse nickering in the night, but no accompanying human voices. This would be no helpful ally searching for survivors, for the sound was moving away as the animal wandered among the bodies.
    The moon was high. Its light silvered the curved surface of a breastplate on a still form a yard from his right hand. He knew the design engraved on that armor as well as he knew the crest on his own shield, but the name of that friend and comrade, survivor of a hundred skirmishes and pursuits, eluded him.
    He could not recall the names of his uncle, his two nephews, and his younger brother, all of whose hacked-off heads he could make out jammed onto the spikes on the wall by the gateway in to the forecourt. His father must have been taken captive—he would never retreat from his castle.
    Best not to think about what might have happened, or might still be happening, to him. Or to his mother, the sister who had never married and who ran the estate better than any man, or . . .others . . . .
    Magda, who was to have been his wife, ravished away, a prize not of war but of treachery. Her name was seared into his heart with a blazing iron. It stung and burned like the spit of the Devil bubbling on the flesh of the damned.
    His people were dead or gone, his home tumbled stone from stone and consumed in flames, and all the treasures of his lineage robbed away by strangers. He would soon join all that was lost here. He’d seen enough battlefields to know that his wound was fatal, so he should have been praying for the salvation of his immortal soul while he still could.
    Instead he cursed his luck in a weak whisper. He pictured the enemy and cursed them: mercenaries in foreign gear, ruthless men who had lain in ambush for him in his own home, hacked him down, and thrown his bleeding body out here with the rest.
    Ivopold Hugo Dedrick von Craggen, who had spent two years fighting for his Church against unbelievers and heretics of all sorts, now called not on his God but upon the legions of Hell, begging them to follow and strike down his family’s murderers.
    Time drifted; his curses floated impotently away.
    Someone was coming. He turned to look, scarcely feeling his injury now. A sturdy white warhorse, stripped of its trappings, walked placidly among the tumbled bodies. On it rode a woman, seated sideways on the horse’s broad back. She was a stranger to him, a white-faced woman in dark garments with long, black hair swirling from her head as she turned to look out over the dead, this way and that.
    The wife or daughter or leman of a man of the castle, seeking her butchered lover or father to pray over? She passed nearby, a dark shadow in the moonlight. He tried to call out to her, but could only groan.
    Yet she must have heard; she turned to ride closer, and she slid down from the horse’s back. Her dark skirts rustling, she knelt beside his good companion in battle, poor Pero ( that was the name of that lifeless hulk ), handling him somehow, but without sobs or prayers. Handling him—raising him up a little—to rob the corpse? Was it some peasant woman, come here on a strayed or stolen war mount to find enrichment among the corpses of her betters?
    He uttered a croak of protest, and she looked at him.
    Her face shone pale, with a stillness like the moon’s own face. Ebony hair floated about her pallor like windtorn storm clouds, and the white column of her throat drove down in a gleaming arrow into the sable stuff of her gown.
    This was no peasant.
    “Lady,” he whispered, “who are you?”
    He felt a chill in her gaze, from eyes invisible in their shadowed sockets. Her lips were black. Blood shows black in the moonlight, but she was clearly unwounded.
    You know me , came her voice straight as a