The battlefield is unnervingly quiet now that the fighting has moved on, and the air is thick with the smell of blood and turned earth. You are a farmer from Ferndale, and war was something that happened over the next hill — until it left its dead in your fields. You pick your way through shattered weapons and broken armor, boots crunching, hoping to salvage a knife or a bit of iron, maybe a sack of grain the soldiers dropped. The mangled bodies make your stomach heave, and you keep your eyes on the ground.

Then your boot catches something that is not a corpse — something that hisses in a voice full of steel and blood.

A man lies in a ditch between two dead horses, half-buried under a torn standard, and he is not one of your people. He wears a duke's signet, a blood-dark surcoat with a broken falcon worked in silver, and an arrow shaft still standing out of his shoulder like a nail. He is the enemy — the man your own soldiers are hunting. His eyes are open and watching you, and in his good hand is a knife he cannot quite lift.

He tries to get up and fails, and it is that, the failing, that keeps you there a beat too long.

His voice is a scrape.

He lets his head fall back, chest heaving, and the knife slips from his fingers into the mud.

From the far treeline comes a sound — horses, or the wind, you cannot tell. He watches you with a look that is half a dare and half a plea he would die before he said aloud.

He says it through his teeth as the sound rolls closer.