Death sat slumped nearby, his coat torn, blood running from a cut at his brow. One glove gone. His eyes met hers, hollow with shame.
“You,” he began, voice hoarse, “you should not have done that.”
She turned to him, furious. “And you,” she accused, voice low, “should be a god.”
He looked away. The field did not answer. The dead did not rise.
She wiped her blade on the grass, then walked to him and held out her hand.
He took it, her grip iron.
Without a word, Ilys mounted Spire, though her ribs protested with each breath and her left arm throbbed from shoulder to wrist. Blood caked her fingers where she hadn’t noticed a cut, and her cloak was heavy with it, both hers and others. She didn’t bother wiping her face. She’d take the discarded, muddied veil and hide. Hide from the bodies. Hide from Death. Hide from herself.
They did not speak as they crested to where the trees gave way again, and the forest spilled them into a second field, wider and infinitely worse. The battlefield opened before them like a hollowed body, gutted and laid bare.
Ilys rode ahead, her fingers white-knuckled around Spire’s reins, the bones in her side shifting with every jolt. Her breath came shallow, each inhale scraping the inside of her chest. Crows had already descended, their black wings flickering like scattered ink across the field, tearing into whatever flesh had been left unclaimed, starved and greedy.
The mud had been churned into foul sludge with the rain that had fallen and the blood that had spilled. It sucked at the hooves of her steed, clinging to Spire’s legs as they moved forward. Men lay where they had fallen, their armor dented, their bodies twisted in unnatural angles. Some still clutched their weapons, fingers locked around hilts. Others had been stripped, theirbodies left bare and crumpled, uniforms stolen by the desperate or the victorious.
A man lay on his back, his throat cut so deeply that his head had nearly separated from his body, the gash yawning dark against his pale flesh. His uniform soaked through with blood, the crest of Tyl barely visible beneath the gore. A soldier of Annon knelt beside him, his body slumped forward, dying in prayer, a spearhead still buried in his side.
She passed another body, a boy—too young, her mind supplied distantly—whose helm had fallen from his head to reveal hair matted with blood. His eyes were open, glassy, fixed on the sky that no longer cared for him. His ribs had been caved in, his breastplate crushed beneath a fallen horse that had died on top of him, its legs twisted, its mouth still stretched open in a frozen scream. Ilys pet Spire, instinctually, reassuring, and begging the horse not to see. Death revealed its full spectacle, all the malice and gore laid bare.
Ilys did not stop. She did not look away.
Another body, another ruin. A woman lay bound, her throat cut clean from ear to ear, blood dried black against her tunic. She hadn’t died in battle; this was no act of war, just a slower kind of violence. A cruelty left behind after the fighting had stopped.
Ilys’s stomach twisted, but she swallowed it down.
The battlefield stretched on, a mass grave in the making. More bodies. Some alone, some tangled together, limbs entwined; even in death they clung to one another. Some were headless, their skulls taken as trophies while their bodies were left faceless in the mud. Some had been left to rot where they fell, others dragged into piles and set aflame. Smoke still curled from the embers, the charred remnants barely distinguishable as human.
She guided Spire around a heap of corpses, stacked like logs, ribs bending beneath the crush. Some still wore theirexpressions of terror, mouths frozen in screams, eyes bulging from sockets that had begun to sink.
Rain leached the color from their uniforms, reduced their banners to rags, and scoured their flesh to what remained: blood, sinew, bone.
Death followed behind her, silent. He did not speak. He did not command nor call her to hurry. He let her see.
She could feel him watching. She rode on.
Ahead, more crows had gathered, their black wings glistening in the dull light, their beaks slick with the remnants of the feast they had been granted. One tore at the flesh of a fallen man, pulling away a strip of skin, the sound wet, viscous. Another hopped between the ribs of an exposed chest cavity, pecking at whatever soft parts remained.
She turned to Death, her voice sharp. “Where shall you collect?”
He sat atop his horse, still wrapped in his mortal body, his dark coat speckled with mud, his hair wind-tossed, his face a study in control.
His gaze swept the field before him. “It will come.”
Ilys swung down from Spire and her boots sank into the clinging mud. The battlefield smelled of blood, earth, iron, and rot. She threaded through the bodies without looking too long at any one of them.
Then she heard him.
Not all the bodies were still.
Further ahead, a man still lived, choking on wet breath. Small mews of pain guided the pair to him. He clutched at his stomach, intestines spilling through his fingers, dark and glistening, steam rising faintly from them in the cold. He blinked at her as she passed, lips trembling, as if forming words took more effort than dying. Each breath gurgled, blood rising in hischest. He lifted a shaking hand toward her, fingers spread in a plea.
“Please,” he rasped. He would not last long.
Ilys knelt beside him, unsheathing her blade and from behind her, Death shifted in his saddle. “Ilys.”
