The rumour reaches the palace at midday: the heir of Dravengard ran, and was cut down from behind.
Vaira is nine months gone with another child. She tells nobody. She takes her sword and walks out to a river meadow where nine thousand men are lying, and she begins turning them over, one at a time, to see which way the wounds face.
Her husband is already dead at a ford that was sold. Her brother went into the same water. The great houses have done their arithmetic and found her not worth the spears.
She finds her son with the wound on the front of him. What she feels is not grief.
She takes four heads off that field. She threads them on cord cut from a cart. And she gives the boy born days later four names to say every night before he sleeps.
He is ten years old the first time she lets him watch her work.
Book One of the Ash-Born Series — a grimdark fantasy built on the war-ethic of two-thousand-year-old Tamil battlefield poetry: the flowers a man wears to declare what kind of battle he has come for, the king who feeds his whole army by his own hand the night before he spends it.
