Vanderbrecht prised the gun gently out the dead boy's hand. He sat on Mouse's low cot, running his fingers over the blanket of coarse grey wool, remembering how he'd stood over the sleeping child to lift her in his arms, and had then carried her back to the Abbe's private rooms....
watching the snow come sifting down, so thinly and softly that the great drifts among the ruined buildings had an air of permanence, as though they were not the result of this meagre fall, but lay, forever, above the