“My turn to ask questions.” The officer kicked the dagger from her hand.

A bird sang. Morning was coming. Kestrel was dimly aware of this, and of the horse she had tethered and now would never untether. She imagined Arin, who wouldn’t be sleeping. He’d be watching the sky and the road. She felt the grass beneath his hand, damp with summer dew.

Half sitting, half crouching, she backed shakily away from the sword.

It followed. An axinax sword. She recognized the shorter blade, favored for fighting in forests. She shrank from it, felt a sharp rock dig into her back, and thought, oddly, of the piano. A whole passage burst into her mind, one that she hadn’t played in years but had loved for its dramatic swings from high to low registers. She had liked to cross her right hand over and drive the sound down into darkness. She didn’t have to stretch hard. Although Kestrel was small, she had long hands. Long arms.

Very good reach.

She groped the forest floor behind her and curled her fingers around the jagged rock that poked into her back. She swung it, smashing the man’s hand where he held the sword’s hilt.

He made a terrible sound. The sword fell. Its tip glanced off her thigh, slicing through her trousers. It struck the earth. Pain seared down her leg.

But she was up. Her fisted rock crunched into the man’s face. His head dented. Her fingers were greasy and warm. Liquid ran under the leather of her forearm guard.

He thudded down. She dropped the rock.

The birds were mad. There was a whole chorus of them now. Her thigh was hot, sticky. There was something meaty on her fingernails. Her hand was a glove of blood.

I don’t want to kill, she had told Arin. She slid into the memory and saw herself sitting in her music room across from Arin. An open window sighed on its hinges. Warm autumn air. Bite and Sting tiles, all faceup.

Her hands were shaking. She was going to come apart.

And if you do?

Her plan was already in near ruins.

Salvage the situation, then.

Look at the body. Go on. Make certain he’s dead.

He was.

Now yourself. Look.

Kestrel peeled back the torn flap of cloth at her thigh. Blood seeped, it hurt, but she thought that maybe it wasn’t too bad. Her leg could bear her weight.

She wiped her bloody hand in the dirt.

The tent, she told herself. Go.

She walked unsteadily to the officer’s small tent and entered.

A pallet. A caged messenger hawk, hooded, sleeping. A stool, set before a table that bore papers, a pen, an inkstand, and a set of counters.

The papers.

She went for them, snatching a page. Then she dropped it, her stomach roiling when she realized that it was a letter the dead man had been writing to his mother.

Keep looking, she told herself. Forget his broken face.

She examined each page in the small pile, searching for any scrap of a coded message between the officer and her father. Since the military used several different codes, she had to find evidence of which one the officer had been using. Maybe she’d recognize it. Remember. Decode it.

But there was no evidence, only the letter to his mother and blank pages.

She limped back outside and saw, in the rising dawn, the man’s crushed brow, the jelly of one eye. She swallowed hard, then searched the man and found his seal.

Relief. The seal could be useful. But there was no coded message. She had hoped to try to fake a report from the officer to her father.

An impossible thought.

A stupid one.

She didn’t know the code, didn’t even know the dead man’s name. She wanted to bury her face in her hands.

She returned to the tent and sank down onto the stool. Blood leaked from the cut on her leg. She should bandage it. She had no bandage.

The hawk flexed its claws around its perch, shifting its weight with a scratchy, rustling sound. She glanced at it, feeling close to frustrated despair. Then her gaze fell to the counters. Beads of wood that slid along skinny steel rods in their wooden frame. Used for accounting.

Kestrel touched a bead. A memory unfolded inside her.

She unscrewed the pot of ink and found a blank sheet of paper. Glancing at the officer’s letter to his mother, Kestrel got a feel for how to imitate the man’s handwriting. She inked her pen and composed the first line of code.

Chapter 26

The horse trudged up the hill to the camp, its head hanging. The sun had climbed; it was near noon, and the day promised to be hot. It squeezed Kestrel’s heart to hear the horse’s breath. She’d ridden him too hard. But her left leg . . .

The wound had stopped bleeding. The flap of her sliced trouser leg stuck to it, hardened with clotted blood. The cut stung and the skin around it felt fiery. She was going to have to peel the fabric away to see what was under neath.