Torchlight snaked along double-edged blades. She tried one short sword, then another until she found one that had weight yet at the same time felt weightless.This one is mine. I must mark it somehow, so I’ll know if it is exchanged.Erato waited outside the door. The guard who admitted her, whose loyalties were unknown, looked on with a bland expression. She took up two swords at once, feeling the balance of both, feigning indecision. Then she scratched on the bone handle of the sword she chose the runic symbol of Tiwaz, god of the battlefield—one upright line capped with two shorter converging lines. When this was done, she thought she felt a rush of air, as though the god’s swift, invisible blade swept across the room. She sensed the ghosts of all her dead crowding near—Sigwulf, Thrusnelda and Baldemar held out arms that protected—and begged help. Relief rushed in.The spirit of the Ash is in me still. I have powerful, rambling roots underground.Baldemar, answer. Was I not the god of war’s good servant?
