“I went back. I looked for him.” For hours, with the leg that they had insisted should be amputated burning like hellfire, surrounded by the groans of dying men and the bewildered torment of dying horses, most of the corpses already stripped of clothes, valuables, even their teeth. Rendered interchangeable: dirty skin and broken limbs, and Marleigh—that wicked boy, his laughing friend—unbearably among them. That was when he’d understood. All those bodies were someone’s friend. Someone’s brother. Someone’s Marleigh. He’d not only lost, he’d taken. And ever since, when the dead clustered close
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