The young knight looked away in confusion and dismay at what he'd just heard. Moriana swayed, suddenly weary to the point of collapse. Almost by instinct, a hand went to clutch the Amulet within her bodice.

She felt a fierce impulse to tear the Amulet off and throw it into the clear, cold waters of the creek. Its mystically changing mixture of dark and light in the central stone had brought nothing but doom and death. Then she recalled the impossibly high price she had paid for the talisman bestowing eternal life. She took her hand away.

'We must go,' she said, casting an uneasy look at the sky. Leaden and sullen in the dusk, the clouds hung close overhead. But not close enough to keep the Sky City bird riders from quartering the countryside around the battlefield looking for survivors.

A knight gave her a spare riding dog he'd caught fleeing across the ridge. He had already fastened in place small bags containing provisions and the earthenware jug which housed the spirit of her long-dead companion Ziore. Moriana mounted the huge animal, hiking up the skirt of her gown. To please Darl, she had worn this finery rather than the tunic and breeches and boots that were her accustomed garb. Now the delicate lacebird silk was ruined, stained with mud and blood and sweat, and she had hacked it off at the knees so that it wouldn't bind her legs. The Northern knights blushed and looked away as she settled unchastely astride the black and white dog.

They didn't understand she was a Princess of the City in the Sky, a warrior of great skill, not like the pampered hothouse flowers that were the Northern ladies. Moriana had no time for their affronted mores. Defeat knew no dignity; nor did death.

The party had just set out following the creek as it curved gently northward toward its eventual rendezvous with the River Marchant when the bird rider squad swept over them like a glowing cloud from the guts of Omizantrim. The boy knight who had guided Darl to safety fell with an arrow in his back. Others cried in surprise and pain as feathered messengers of death winged downward from above. Only Darl and Moriana survived, saved by thickening twilight and the almost naked branches overhead that screened them from the eagle riders.