Hours had passed and after Ares and Shade settled, Noah realized there was no more immediate threat.
The pass was quiet the way that places went quiet after they had been used for something serious, the silence having a different texture from ordinary silence, heavier, carrying the memory of what had filled it recently. The wounded had been moved to the medical section. The dead had been moved somewhere else. The knights who could still stand were standing and the ones who could not were sitting and nobody was talking very much because talking required energy that most of them had already spent.
Noah stood at the field's edge and thought about the hammer in his hand.
Then he thought about the armor.
He thought it away.
