“The others,” I told him. “The ones you killed.”

A sneer pinched his lip. “We don’t bury the bodies of enemy swine. They’re left to the beasts.”

“Not this time,” I answered.

He looked at Kaden in disbelief. “Who’s this mouthy bitch riding with you?”

Eben jumped in. “She’s our prisoner! Princess Arabella of Morrighan. But we call her Lia.”

Scorn lit the commander’s face and he sat back in his saddle, pushing up the visor of his studded helmet. “So you call her Lia,” he mocked as he glared at me. “As I said, my soldiers do not bury swine.”

“You’re not a good listener, Commander. I didn’t ask for your savages to bury them. I wouldn’t allow unworthy hands to touch noble Morrighan soldiers.”

The commander bolted forward in his saddle, his hand raised to strike me, but Kaden put his arm out to stop him. “She’s grieving, Chievdar. Don’t take her to task for her words. One of them is her brother.”

I prodded my horse forward so I was knee to knee with the commander. “I will say it again, Chievdar. I will bury them.”

“All? You will bury a whole company of men?” He laughed. The men with him laughed too. “Someone bring the princess a shovel,” he said. “Let her dig.”

I knelt in the middle of the field. My first duty was to bless the dead while their bodies were still warm. The tradition I had eschewed was now all that sustained me. I lifted my hands to the gods, but my songs flowed from that which was memorized to something new, utterances of another tongue, one that only the gods and the dead could understand, one wrung from blood and soul, truth and time. My voice rose, tossed, breathed, grieved, cut through the winds and then became part of them, braided with the words of a thousand years, a thousand tears, the valley filling not with my voice alone but with the lamentations of mothers, sisters, and daughters of times past. It was a remembrance that rent distant heaven and bleeding earth, a song of contempt and love, bitterness and mercy, a prayer not woven of sounds alone but of stars and dust and evermore.

“And so shall it be,” I finished, “for evermore.”

I opened my eyes, and all around me soldiers had paused from their duties, watching me. I rose and picked up the shovel and walked toward Walther first. Kaden stopped me before I reached his body. “Lia, death isn’t graceful or forgiving. You don’t want to remember him this way.”

“I’ll remember him exactly this way. I’ll remember them all. I will never forget.” I pulled my arm loose.

“I can’t help you. It’s treason to bury the enemy. It dishonors our own fallen.”

I walked away without answering and stepped around bodies and their severed parts until I found Walther. I dropped to my knees beside him and wiped his hair from his face. I closed his eyes and kissed his cheek, whispering my own prayer to him, wishing him happiness on his journey because now he would hold Greta again, and if the gods be merciful, cradle his unborn child. My lips lingered on his forehead trembling, unwilling to part from him, knowing it would be the last time my flesh touched his.

“Good-bye, sweet prince,” I finally whispered against his skin.

And then I stood and began to dig.

CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

KADEN

The whole camp fell silent watching her. Unlike me, none of them had ever seen nobility before, much less a princess. She wasn’t the delicate fleshy royal of their imaginations. One by one, as the hours went by, even the most hardened were drawn to sit and watch, first because of her chilling chants that had saturated the whole valley and then because of her dogged concentration, shovelful after shovelful.

It took her three hours to dig the first grave. Her brother’s grave. She wrestled his bedroll from his dead horse, tied it around him, and rolled him into the hole. I heard Finch’s throat rattle and Eben sucking on his lip. Though none of us had any sympathy for the fallen, it was hard to watch her kiss her dead brother and then struggle with the weight of his corpse.

Griz, who arrived later with Malich, had to walk away, unable to watch. But I couldn’t go. Most of us couldn’t. After her brother, she went on to the next dead soldier, knelt to bless him, and then dug his grave, chipping away at the hard soil another shovelful at a time. This soldier had lost an arm, and I watched her search for it and pull it from beneath a fallen horse. She placed it on his chest before she wrapped him in a blanket.

How long could she go on? I watched her stumble and fall, and when I thought she couldn’t get up again, she did. Restlessness grew in the soldiers around me, strained whispers passing between them. They squinted their eyes and rubbed their knuckles. The chievdar stood firm, his arms folded across his chest.

She finished the third grave. Seven hours had passed. Her hands bled from holding the shaft of the shovel. She went on to the fourth soldier and knelt.

I stood and walked over to the supply wagon and grabbed another shovel. “I’m going to go dig some holes. If she should roll a body into one, so be it.” The soldiers standing near the wagon looked at me astonished, but made no move to stop me. It wasn’t exactly treason.

“Me too,” Finch said. He walked over and grabbed another shovel.

The squad flanking the chievdar looked from him to us uncertainly, then drew their swords.

The chievdar waved his hand. “Put them away,” he said. “If the Morrighan bitch wants to bleed her fingers to the bone, it will provide fine entertainment for us all, but I don’t want to be here all night. If these fools want to dig some holes, let them dig.”