Naamah's Blessing

sick at heart.
    “Moirin!” Septimus Rousse appeared beside me, pointing across the plain. Beyond the outskirts of the battle, a pair of dark figures were racing for our picket-line. “They’re after the horses!”
    “Ah, no!” Giving the battlefield a wide berth, I ran to intercept them, my heart beating in my throat. I loosed my first arrow at a dead run, and it went wide. Skidding to a halt, I nocked another. The nearest fellow was trying to grab a frightened pack-horse’s halter and had his back to me.
    Swallowing hard, I loosed my bow and shot him from behind. He toppled forward and lay still. The pack-horse squealed and tossed its head, tugging at the picket-rope.
    The second fellow blinked in consternation, then came at me with a roar, raising a stone-headed war-club high overhead.
    Reaching into my quiver, I nocked another arrow and shot him, too.
    With a look of profound surprise, he sat down hard, glanced once at his chest, then slumped sideways.
    Septimus caught up with me, breathing hard. “Nice work, my lady.”
    “My thanks, lord captain.” All along the picket-line, horses whickered and stamped in protest. I caught sight of a third figure, stooped and lurking beyond the horses’ shifting bodies. Nocking and drawing another arrow, I moved around the end of the line to get a clean shot at him.
    The figure straightened, an obsidian dagger in one hand.
    I stared at Pochotl.
“You?”
    He permitted himself a tight grimace and said nothing.
    “Lazy, greedy, stupid, good for nothing sister-son!” Eyahue emergedfrom the moonlit darkness, ranting with fury. Gnarled hands extended, he flung himself on his nephew, clamping his fingers around Pochotl’s throat and attempting to throttle him. “You did this, didn’t you? No-good, cowardly, idiot excuse for a
pochteca
! You disgrace us!”
    With an effort, Septimus Rousse pried Eyahue loose and subdued him in a firm grip. Rivulets of tears ran down the old fellow’s creased cheeks, but his expression had turned to one of traditional Nahuatl stoicism, cold and hard.
    “You disgrace us,” he repeated with dignity.
    “You are a fool, old man,” Pochotl muttered. “Shall we both suffer for the Emperor’s whims?”
    I moved between them, keeping an arrow trained on the traitor.
    Behind us, the sounds of battle were beginning to fade. A cry in an unknown tongue was raised and repeated.
    “The Cloud People are retreating,” Eyahue said in a flat tone. “Tonight, we are victorious.”
    I wondered at what price.

FORTY-FOUR

    S ix dead, several others wounded.
    That was the price of our victory.
    Sensing through the bond of our shared
diadh-anam
that I was alive and well, Bao turned toward tending the wounded. As a result, the spotted warrior Temilotzin was the first to seek me out and discover the prisoner I guarded.
    “What passes here, little warrior?” he asked in an ominous tone rendered all the more ominous by the fact that he was splashed with blood from head to foot. “What has this one done?”
    I gestured with the point of my arrow. “Betrayed us.”
    With a guttural roar, Temilotzin hoisted his obsidian-studded club. “Then he will die!”
    “No, please!” Lowering my bow, I caught at his arm. It felt like tugging on an oak log. “We need to question him.”
    Reluctantly, Temilotzin relented. The expression on his blood-spattered face was implacable in the moonlight. If I’d had any doubt that a stone face and a stone heart lay beneath his easygoing manner, it vanished then and there. He jerked his chin at Eyahue. “And him? Did he betray us, too?”
    “Never!” the old man said with fierce indignation.
    “I believe he speaks the truth,” I said. “But we need to know more. Can you guard them without killing anyone?”
    He grunted. “I will try.”
    Accompanied by Septimus Rousse, I went to help take stock of the situation. Brice de Bretel and another level-headed L’Agnacite fellow named Jean Grenville were working to stoke the campfire and give us more light by which to assess the damage to the wounded. Balthasar Shahrizai, who looked pale but otherwise unharmed, was directing other uninjured men to set up sentry posts farther afield where their night vision wouldn’t be compromised by the blazing fire.
    It didn’t surprise me that Balthasar had maintained the presence of mind to fully arm himself. For all his insouciance, there was steel in him.
    Aside from poor Clemente DuBois, the dead were those who
hadn’t
kept