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his last shaft as the great bull-dragon’s claws swept him off his feet. The boy’s mouth was open, but no song now came from it.
    The beast was everywhere, and so, at last, he was in the sights of Jon-Joras’s gun. Aim only at the crux of the X … He remembered Thuemorix’s voice (where was Thuemorix now?) saying the words. But the crux of the X had been obliterated by all the shots poured into it, was a gaping and bloody chasm. Unthinking, automatically, into it he fired his own shot. And fired. And fired. And—
    Someone ran into him full-tilt. His last shot before the gun fell went wild. The man, whoever he was, beat upon him with clenched fists, screaming in terror; at last threw him down and ran. Stunned, scarcely able to breath, Jon-Joras felt the concussion of the great beast’s feet, saw out of the corner of his eye, something vast, something bloodstained go sweeping by. There were screams and screams. A voice cried out, shrill, thickened, ceased.
    The sky darkened, wheeled, became a whirling concentric circle. Jon-Joras felt himself go sick and cold. And all was black.

    Somewhere in between his fainting and his awakening he had heard what he now identified as the sound of the flyer. A sudden tenseness of his muscles warned him just in time to turn his head. He vomited. Then, fearful, lay back for a long moment. But there was nothing to be heard except the drone of flies.
    The sun was out and birds called. How many people had come on the impromptu hunt? Jon-Joras, numbed by the sickening sights that lay all about, did not know. Nor could he guess how many might have made their escape in the flyer (if any but the pilot had) or into the woods. No one answered his calls… at first…
    Only when he held the bloodied head on his knees did he realized that he had never known the boy’s name. Aëlorix’s boy stared blindly right into the sun. “Tell… tell my mother…” he began.
    “I will. I will,” Jon-Joras said. And waited. And waited. But the dead lips spoke no more. Tell his mother! What could he tell her, he wondered, that she had not already guessed and feared!
    Numbly following the custom of his own people, he laid a clot of earth on each closed eye, and straightened the arms at full length, folding the hands together in a loose clasp. “ ‘Ended is this scene and act,’ ” he said. “ ‘May the curtain rise upon a fairer one. …’” He could not remember the rest of it.

    When you have no idea in which direction anything is, it makes as much sense to go in one direction as another. The river and the Lie village were not too far away, but he had no notion where. The sensible thing was obviously to wait right where he was until help came. But this was the one thing he could not do—not at that field of death, over which the dark birds had already begun to circle.
    He made a circle of his own around the clearing, and took the first path he found. The afternoon was late indeed before he dared admit that, wherever the path led, it did not lead to the Lie village. And then he heard the dogs. It should not have come to him as the heart-swelling surprise it did. Where there were Doghunters, there were bound to be dogs. Besides, had he not seen their severed heads? Recalling the mottled teeth in the bloody muzzle, he broke into an awkward, stumbling run.
    Someone was there; he saw the glimmer of cloth off to one side on the slope. Instantly upon his outcry, it vanished, and he left the path to follow, leaping over fallen trees and little rivulets running through the soft, mossy earth. Someone was there ahead of him in the darkening daylight…
    A girl.
    “Please!” he called. “I won’t hurt you! I don’t want—They’re all dead, all the others—the rogue dragon—”
    She stopped at that; stopped and whirled around. The shock of it stopped him, too. For a moment they stood staring at one another. It was the girl he had tried to help on the Court House mall; the girl who had struck at him,