Ammonite

She smiled. Uaithne was dead, and she had been ready. Everything seemed so clear and simple to her now: the tribes could do nothing while their Levarch treated with the enemy over the body of their dead kin; the Mirrors would not dare attack while their commander was in what appeared to be a hostage situation.

The others were looking at her. “Thenike, how long before the storm?”

“It’s upon us. Any moment.”

“Then we’ll have to hurry. Danner, Aoife, you will walk to the Echraidhe line and bring back both Captain White Moon and her mount, and a mount for each for yourselves—you can ride, can’t you?” she asked Danner.

“Yes.”

“And bring back one of the Briogannon, one of their leaders. Aoife, you will tell your people to follow us. Danner, you will tell your Mirrors to precede us, due south. While you are bringing White Moon and the mounts, Thenike and I will secure Uaithne to her horse.”

Danner and Aoife looked sideways at each other.

“Danner. You have a cling?”

Danner looked puzzled. “Yes.”

“Give it to me.” Danner peeled it loose from her belt and handed it over. “Hold out your arm.”

“What—”

“Hold out your arm. Your left. Aoife, you hold out your right.” She bound the arms together at the biceps. “Just in case. I’ll take it off when you both get back here in one piece. Now go.”

Danner took a hesitant step, which Aoife copied, then another. Marghe watched while they pulled each other warily, one step at a time, toward the mounted line.

When they were about halfway there, Thenike put a hand on Marghe’s shoulder, turned her around gently, and held her face between the palms of her hands. “You told a good story.”

I was ready. “I did, didn’t I?”

They smiled at one another, and Marghe wrapped her arms around Thenike and let her breath go in one long, deep rush.

Getting Uaithne’s body onto her mount was hard; the horse sidled and snorted and laid its ears back at the smell of blood and excretia. But they managed eventually.

It was Ojo who came back with Danner and Aoife, and who held the leading rein of White Moon’s horse. Marghe was tempted to cling all three of them together, but decided to trust them. She directed Thenike to take the lead rein from Ojo, and to walk in front of the three leaders; she herself walked behind them, leading Uaithne’s horse.

Ahead, the Mirrors turned and moved south at the march. Behind, the tribes stirred and started at a walk.

All the time, the wind rose, buffeting them in the saddle, and when Marghe had to give Danner directions to pass on to her Mirrors via comm, she had to shout against a gale that wanted to whip away her words like so much smoke.

Marghe kept them heading for the cave and the gully. Shelter first. Then they would talk.

In the end, the talking was done at Holme Valley.

When the five leaders had emerged from the cave, they found acres of grassland seared black, still smoking, turning dusk into evening. It was stifling.

Danner touched a stud at her collar. Her suit stopped humming, and she took off her helmet in a spill of cold air. “It’s too hot to leave those bodies unburied. We need to get them bagged and cooled immediately.”

After several strained hours in the cave, standing between two hundred women who would find it easier to fight than talk, Marghe was irritated by Danner’s attitude, but it was Thenike who spoke.

“They’re not ‘bodies’!” Marghe had never seen Thenike so angry. “They are what’s left of your captain and Aoife’s soestre. They were real. They had friends, mothers, people here who will pause in the middle of their next meal and miss that unique laugh or the sight of a familiar hand resting on a table. Their deaths helped to buy this.” She gestured at the gathered forces, still standing apart suspiciously, but not fighting. Not fighting. “They should be buried out there, where they died. Together. Their grave should be in the place where so many others came close to killing and being killed, on neutral territory so that women can come and visit it and remember why these two women died, and how. Then maybe this… this idiocy won’t ever happen again.”

Together with the massed tribes and a company of Mirrors as escort, Marghe and Thenike, and Aoife, Danner, and Ojo, leading Uaithne’s horse and White Moon’s and carrying shovels, went back to the place that had nearly become a battlefield.

The olla patch had escaped the fire, and Danner suggested that they bury them under the flowers. They looked at Thenike, but the viajera said nothing; she seemed to have withdrawn inside herself.

“No,” Marghe decided, “we’ll bury them where they died. We’ll put them under the charred grass and the seared soil, and their grave will green when the rest of the plain does.”