She knew what she had to do.
She touched Ferenc lightly, and he spooked at her touch. He looked at her, his face puffy and his eyes red from crying, and her heart ached at the sight of his suffering. How she wished she could ease it. Using soothing words and a light touch, she talked to him, explaining what had to be done.
They didn’t have the tools to bury the priest’s body, and Father Rodrigo deserved better than to be dragged into the hills by scavengers. His body needed to go back to Rome, and someone needed to go with it. Someone like Ferenc.
Eventually, he nodded, understanding what she wasn’t telling him, and he rose from his kneeling position and set about taking care of the priest’s body. Moving dead weight was much harder than she imagined it could be, but between them they got Father Rodrigo’s body across the saddle of one of the two horses Frederick had given them.
Ferenc helped her to mount her own horse, and once she was in the saddle she put the satchel carefully into one of her saddlebags and made sure the flap was securely tied down. She looked down at Ferenc. “My friend…” Her voice was but a whisper, the bruised muscles of her neck twitching with a new dismay. She didn’t want to say good-bye…
She touched her waist and pointed to his, indicating that he should give her his knife. Blinking back tears, he complied, unsure of what she intended to do. She felt in her tangled hair for the braided piece, the one with the knots he had recognized when they had first met. She separated the strand, and cut it with a quick jerk of his knife.
He accepted her gift, kissing the back of her hand as he did, and he did not try to stop the tears from streaming down his cheeks. He shook his head when she tried to give back the knife, offering her the sheath as well.
“Okay,” she said, pressing the sheathed knife to her lips. “It will keep me safe.”
Ferenc nodded, a brave expression on his face, and then he turned and leaped up onto the third mount with a nimbleness that amazed her. With a final sad smile, he leaned over and gathered the reins of the horse that carried Father Rodrigo. He clicked to the horses and they began a slow walk. Back toward the Emperor’s camp. Back toward Rome.
She watched them for a moment, until the sight of them became too much to bear, and she turned her gaze in the opposite direction. She had absolutely no idea where the road led. That part of her mind that had, in Rome, been an exquisitely detailed, crowded map was now blank parchment. Fresh and unmarked, waiting to reveal itself to her.
And she knew it would.
She pressed her heels against her horse’s side, nudging him forward on the unknown road.
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
The sky above Hunern was alight with purple, gold, red, and orange-the sort of sunset that would cause a bard to spontaneously break out into song. But the beauty of the sun was lost on Hans. He wandered through the ruins of the Mongol camp as if in a dream. The painted sky was as unreal to him as the whimpering cries of the wounded and dying.
The scavengers of Hunern were beginning to converge, the bravest had already crept through the open gate and begun looting the bodies of the dead Mongols. Others would follow, timorous rodents that would strip the tents clean. In the wake of the battle, there would be a period of lawlessness as the people of Hunern came to pillage the Mongol camp. There was no reason to stand in the way of this restitution. The survivors had lost everything, and what wealth they could scavenge from the camp was poor compensation.
He still felt nothing. In the brief instances when he blinked, he saw Tegusgal’s panicked face. The Mongol’s eyes large and round before Hans had driven the dagger into the left one. The sound the man had made as the steel point went through the eye and into his brain. The way his body had bucked and quivered as the life left him.
Hans never wanted to close his eyes again.
The knights of the various orders were collecting the bodies of their fallen comrades, and Hans saw a group of Shield-Brethren gathered around a row of supine figures. He didn’t know where else to go. The Rats, who had come to his aid, pelting the Mongol commander with rocks, had kept their distance after Tegusgal died, their dirty faces pinched and stretched with horrific expressions. Throwing rocks at a hated enemy was a childish act, the defiance of the innocent. Killing a man was something else entirely. Hans was no longer one of them, and they had fled when he had tried to reach out to them.
He was covered in blood, very little of it his, and as he wandered toward the group of Shield-Brethren, he saw how he looked more like the battle-weary knights than like the dirty urchins of Hunern.
The Shield-Brethren dead were laid side by side, arranged as naturally as they could be, their longswords laid across the bodies. Hans counted them slowly-fifteen in all-marking each face in his mind, and when he looked upon the peaceful features of the body at the end of the row, his body shook and he started to cry.
Several of the knights hovered awkwardly nearby, and one finally touched Hans lightly on the shoulder. “He was the best of us,” the man said gruffly. His own face was streaked with dried tears.
The words made little sense to Hans. Had they not said the same of Andreas? Why did the best keep dying? Why were they-the worst, the unworthy, the frightened ones-why were they allowed to live? He drew in a long, shuddering breath and took a few tentative steps closer to Rutger’s body. The quartermaster’s hands, the right wrapped with a filthy cloth, were clasped over the hilt of a longsword, and his brow was slightly creased as if there were unspoken words still trapped inside his skull. Unlike the ones next to him, his body did not have an apparent fatal wound.
“Why are you gone?” Hans whispered as he collapsed next to Rutger’s body.
“It happens,” the gruff one said. “Sometimes she claims them even though they have not suffered grievous wounds.”
Hans looked over his shoulder at the knight. “That isn’t fair,” he said.
“Little is, boy,” the man said. “That is why we grieve. Later, we will celebrate that it wasn’t our turn.” He shrugged as if that was all the explanation anyone would ever require.
Beyond the knight, Hans spotted a group of men approaching. One of the other knights saw the approaching men as well, and his hand fell to his sword for a moment. Of the approaching group, two were wearing the colors of the Shield-Brethren, and Hans recognized them: Styg and Eilif. With them were Kim, Zug, and another freed prisoner.
“There you are,” Styg said as he reached the row of bodies. “When we heard Maks had fallen in battle, we did not know what happened to you. Where have you been?”
Hans shook his head. He did not want to say the Mongol commander’s name out loud.
Kim pushed past the others and rushed to Hans’s side. He knelt and put his hands on the young boy’s shoulders. Kim’s face was dirty and bloody, and Hans flinched as he looked in the Flower Knight’s eyes and saw a flickering reminder of what he had done.
“It’s okay,” Kim said, nodding slowly. “Did you have any choice?”
Hans shook his head.
“Then you did the right thing,” Kim said.
“Te… Tegusgal,” Hans stammered. He started to cry again.
Kim wrapped his arms around the boy and squeezed him tight. “You most certainly did the right thing,” he said. There was a note of pride in his voice, and Hans clung to that sentiment as firmly as he held on to the Flower Knight.
CHAPTER SEVENTY
They reached a rocky spur that sliced through the forest like a ragged cut left by a dull sword. Over the years, a stream had dug a track along the base of the rocky shelf, and it held water now, though it was little more than a trickle. On their right, the forest was dense, filled with grassy hillocks and tightly bunched clumps of alder trees. It wasn’t the easiest terrain for their single horse (weighed down with both Cnan and the Chinese woman, Lian), though the lack of trees made it easier to see and avoid the crevasses and gaps in the rock.