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Alaak’s defence. I have done my utmost. It is my only fit end. But you, soldier – I feel sorry for you. You are going to escape, and live. Have you done your utmost?’
    ‘It wasn’t long before he died,’ Medrian told the Lady. ‘Then I had no more reason to stay in the ditch… but no real reason to leave either.’
    She had remained with his body for a long time, staring through the spiky black branches of the trees at the white sky as if seeing a reflection of her own blank detachment.
    She waited, hoping to die.
    She felt numb, as if what had happened to Alaak meant nothing to her. Her throat ached with numbness. She ached for oblivion.
    ‘Have you done your utmost?’ The words echoed like an accusation. If he were me, Medrian thought, he would go down and seek out stray Gorethrian soldiers and kill and kill until at last they slew him. Then he would have done his utmost. But I cannot. I don’t have enough hatred in me.
    She shivered and pulled the black jerkin back on. She stood up, her legs nearly buckling with their cramped weakness. The sword-wound in her side pained her, but it was rapidly healing. There was little honour she could give her dead officer, except to compose his body and cover him with fallen leaves. Then she scrambled up the side of the ditch and emerged on top, a dirty, battle-weary figure.
    She stood up boldly, as if hoping a nearby Gorethrian would see her and fell her. But all was deserted. The acres of shimmering grass that swept across to the feet of stone hills were blasted by fire and battle. There were bodies everywhere, tragic scars on Alaak’s stark beauty.
    Medrian moved among the bodies like an expressionless puppet, seeing person after person that she knew. Why me, she thought, why did I survive? Did I not do my utmost?
    Then she found her horse.
    It was a crow-black, sinister beast that had seemed to choose her as its rider, and although she had felt repelled by it, she had been unable to drive it away. Now it lay dead, a great splash of blood congealing on its side. She had been riding it when she was struck, she did not remember it being injured. Its wound was in exactly the same place as her own.
    Oh, ye gods.
    It died in my place.
    Bastard! She screamed inside her head. She fell to her knees, pounding uselessly at the horse’s body as if to make it suffer for depriving her of death. It only stared back with a glazed, cornflower-blue eye.
    She recoiled, agony bursting across her chest. Her stomach knotted, her limbs turned to fast-flowing, dark floodwater. The wound in her side opened in a flower of pain. Her iron self-control broke; her numbness burst into thrashing life and all the ice of her soul was crushed, melted and borne away by the flood of her grief.
    Oh, my family, she thought. My mother and father and brother, down there in the village with the Gorethrians marching upon them. I can do nothing to save them. I will never know if they live or die. If only I could have loved them, and they me.
    Oh, Alaak! Oh, Gorethria! Why couldn’t you leave us alone? Was it too much, that even one small crumb of meat should fall from your mouth?
    You have done this, you mocking, hating Worm.
    Medrian raged in fury and grief until her throat was a raw, bloody cavern and her guts were curdled with pain. She struck the ground until her nails were ripped and her hands bleeding. Yet, all the time, she was inflicting physical pain upon herself to deaden the dreadful agony in her head that always came when she dared to feel emotion.
    All gone, gone; my family and home and land, before you gave me the chance to love them. And now I will never have that chance, ever. Great, racking sobs ravaged her body, shook her as if they would break her apart. She clawed at the ground and then rolled over, wrapping her arms around her head.
    Never, never. All gone.
    When she struggled to her knees again, she was screaming. As the nightmare sensation in her head grew worse, her cries weakened to