He pushed my hand away. “I have to go.”

He tried to get up, and I pushed him back against the carcass of the wheelbarrow. “Go where? You can’t go anywhere like—”

He pushed me away roughly, and I fell back. “I have to go!” he yelled. “My platoon. I have to catch up.”

I ran after him, pleading for him to stop. I pulled on him, begging him to wait, to at least let me wash his wounds, feed him something, clean his blood-soaked clothing, but he didn’t seem to hear me. He grabbed the reins of his tobiano and led him out of the barn. I yelled. I held on. I tried to pull the reins from him.

He spun, grabbed both of my arms, shook me, screamed. “I’m a soldier, Lia! I’m not a husband anymore! I’m not a father! I’m a soldier!”

Rage had made him into someone I didn’t know, but then he pulled me to his chest and held me, sobbing into my hair. I thought my ribs would crack under his grip, then he pushed away and said, “I have to go.”

And he did.

And I knew there was nothing I could do to stop him.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

It can take years to mold a dream. It takes only a fraction of a second for it to be shattered. I sat at the kitchen table, holding a piece of Walther’s shattered dream. Gwyneth, Berdi, and Pauline sat with me.

I had already told them everything I knew. They tried to reassure me that Walther would be all right, that he needed time to grieve, that he needed a lot of things I couldn’t even hear them saying anymore. Instead my head throbbed with my brother’s cries. An arrow straight through her throat.

Their voices were soft, tentative, quiet, trying to help me through this. But how could Walther ever be all right? Greta was dead. She fell open-eyed into his lap. Walther didn’t leave here as a soldier, he left as a crazed man. He didn’t leave to go join his platoon—he left to get his revenge.

Gwyneth reached out and touched my hand. “It’s not your fault, Lia,” she said as if she could read my thoughts.

I pulled my hand away and jumped up from the chair. “Of course it’s my fault! Who else’s would it be? Those packs of hyenas are ranging right into Morrighan now because they’re no longer afraid! All because I refused to marry someone I didn’t love.” I spit the last word out with every bit of the revulsion I was feeling.

“No one knows with certainty if an alliance would have done anything to stop them,” Berdi tried to reason.

I looked at her, shaking my head, thinking that certainty didn’t matter in the least anymore. Guarantees weren’t even part of my universe right now. I would have married the devil himself if there had been even the slimmest chance it could have saved Greta and the baby. Who would be next?

“It’s only one rogue band, Lia, not an army. We’ve always had those. And the attack was on a remote border,” Pauline argued.

I walked over to the fireplace and stared at the small flame. She was right on that count. But this time it was something more. I could feel it. It was something gray and grim slithering through me. I remembered the hesitation in Walther’s voice. We’ll drive them out. We always have. But not this time.

It had been brewing all along. I just hadn’t seen it. A crucial alliance, my mother had called it. Was sacrificing a daughter the only way to achieve it? Maybe it was when so much distrust had been banked for centuries. This alliance was meant to be more than a piece of paper that could be burned. It was to be an alliance made of flesh and blood.

I look down at the tiny white lace cap in my hands that I had planned to give to Walther and Greta. I fingered the lace, remembering the joy I had in buying it. Greta was dead. The baby was dead. Walther was a crazed man.

I tossed it into the fire, heard the hushed breaths around me, watched the lace catch, curl, blacken, flame, become ash. As if it was never there.

“I need to go wash up.” My legs were still caked in mud.

“Do you want me to come with you?” Pauline asked.

“No,” I answered, and quietly closed the door behind me.

On the far side of death,

Past the great divide where hunger eats souls,

Their tears will increase.

—Song of Venda

CHAPTER FORTY

Thunk.

Thunk.

Thunk.

Thunk.

I had been standing in the meadow for two hours, throwing my knife over and over again. It was a small stump, and I rarely missed anymore. I had trampled the wild mustard down into a straight neat path from going to retrieve the knife. There were only a few stray throws when I had allowed my mind to wander.

Thunk.

Thunk.

And then the whir, the chink, the swish of it missing its mark and disappearing into the tall grass behind the stump. Walther’s words, Walther’s face, Walther’s anguish wouldn’t leave me. I tried to sort it all into something that made sense, but there was no sense, not when it came to murder. Greta wasn’t a soldier. The baby hadn’t even drawn a first breath. Savages. I went to find my knife, lost somewhere in the grass.

“Lia?”

I turned. It was Kaden. He swung down from his horse. I knew by his manner he had heard something, probably from hushed voices in the tavern.

“How did you find me?”

“It wasn’t hard.”

The meadow bordered the road leading out of town. I supposed I was in full view of anyone passing by.

“Berdi said you and Rafe went out early this morning. Before sunup.” I listened to the flatness of my voice. It sounded like it belonged to someone else.