“Twelve dead, forty-two injured,” the man reported. His voice was heavy with sorrow, echoing the weight of the loss that hung over the battlefield. Fiore’s ears rang as if his words had hit her like a physical blow, but it was the next number that sent a searing pain through her chest.
“What about the Neanders?” Reginald asked, almost casually, as a healer continued dressing the stump where his arm had been severed.
The man hesitated, shifting uneasily under Reginald’s cold gaze. “Eighty-nine… eighty-nine Neanders are counted dead.”
The breath left Fiore’s lungs. She bit her lip, hard enough to taste blood, but the sharp sting was nothing compared to the crushing sorrow that wrapped around her chest like a vice. Eighty-nine of their own.
Her mind conjured images of faces, friends she
