"I hear so little news," Grete said, "and half of it is contradictory."
Thalia nodded, sighing. "Sometimes our scouts don't come back," she said, "and sometimes they're in no condition to make any report when they do." Something turned in her stomach at the thought of Halmig, who had rejoined the march yesterday morning...changed. She had been forced to kill him, or whatever he had become—more squirming thing than man. She could only guess what he had encountered on his scouting mission, and what had happened to the soldiers under his command.
"Is it true that Hanweir is destroyed?" Grete asked.
"The truth is far worse." Thalia ran her fingers through her mount's shining coat, pretending not to see Grete's arched eyebrow, and Grete didn't press the question.
They rode in silence for a little while, lost in their own thoughts. The last time an army had marched on Thraben, Thalia recalled, it had been a horde of ghouls and skaabs created by the Cecani siblings. Now she was part of the marching horde—if so few soldiers could be called a horde. They were as ragged and bedraggled as zombies, perhaps, worn down from the constant battles of the last few weeks. The world seemed to be swallowed up in madness. But as long as they drew breath, as long as they could cling to the merest shred of hope, they would fight.
Or most of them would. Odric had remained behind, his spirit broken after he turned against the Lunarch Council and freed Thalia from their prison. Thalia grieved for him, but she couldn't spend any of her faith trying to bolster his.
"I heard that Seeta and her inquisitors are continuing their work," Grete said after a time.
Thalia snorted. "Let her find us now," she said. After Thalia had confronted the Lunarch Council and fled Thraben with Odric and Grete, a zealous inquisitor named Seeta had led the hunt for them. Seeta's battle cry was "Purge the damned!" and she traveled at the head of a procession of rolling guillotines. The ox-drawn instruments of execution had so far slowed her down enough that she hadn't located the Order of Saint Traft, and now the order had grown large enough that Thalia figured they had little to fear from whatever was left of the inquisition.
Grete shook her head. "They call themselves the Sinpurged now," she said. "They claim the transformation is the result of the sin being purged from their bodies."
Thalia's lip curled in disgust. "They're trying to make a virtue out of...that?"
Grete nodded, staring at the rough path ahead.
"How far we have fallen," Thalia said, half to herself.
"What is it, then?" Grete asked. "I mean, given that it's not a virtue. What's causing it?"
"If there's an answer to be found, Thraben is where we'll find it."
She wondered what would they find—in the city, in the cathedral. Her heart quickened and her stomach lurched more violently as she thought of Thraben, her home for so many years. What if it had become like Hanweir, people and village fused into a single entity? What if there was nothing left to save? What if Avacyn really was...
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A lone figure stood beside a horse on the pathway ahead. Thalia nodded at Grete, who spurred her horse and bolted forward. She leaned toward her own mount's head, and the gryff spread its wings and gracefully drifted into the air, soaring past Grete's charging horse and settling down beside Rem Karolus without even stirring the dust on the ground.
