“Come down!” Genell said in that special mother voice. Blaise reached up to catch Sarney, then held his hand when he reached the ground. His eyes were as wide as Shrugg’s.

  “Ware!” shouted Genell. “Ware! Invaders! We are under attack!” People began to mill about, directionless and confused.

  “Everyone to the warehouse!” shouted the veteran. The warehouse, many times repaired in past years but not of late, stood by the lazy river next to the jetty. A barge floated close by, its equal in dilapidation. Blaise ran, dragging Sarney by the hand. The one-armed man was up in the loft looking out the windows. “We’re surrounded,” said the veteran. “Backs to the river. Archers on the banks so we can’t launch a boat. Damn ‘em.”

  The villagers milled about the warehouse. Blaise tried not to look as scared as Sarney did. Shrugg was still with them. Is he in league with the soldiers? He didn’t look it. He looked scared too.

  Gramma Bickert got up on a low wall and spoke: “Everyone! See here! We know what this is. It’s safe down south so the bandits come here! It won’t stop! They’re coming to take everything from us. Well I say, don’t let ‘em! Arm yourselves! Don’t go down without a fight!”

  People took heart and looked for anything to use as weapons. Downie picked up a rusty pitchfork and looked at it uncertainly. Genell just held her boy.

  Something was wrong here. Blaise knew it. Don’t go down without a fight. She thought hard. The problem is it assumes we’re going down. There wasn’t much holding her here, with her parents gone and the village foundering. Maybe she should try to run, to sneak out, but that would mean abandoning her people and also going out into the world to face it on her own. It’s better than dying, though. She stood in indecision. Such a big decision she had never made.

  Blaise saw Genell tearing up as she tucked a knife into her belt and brandished a cleaver. Genell wasn’t that much older than Blaise. Youth still yearned in her. She wanted to live and she wanted her son to live. Now she was facing the end for both of them. That was her real world. Blaise wasn’t ready for that. She checked that she had her paring knife in its little sheathe, a gift from her father. It had seemed much bigger when she received it. It didn’t look like a weapon at all.

  They all saw the rider carrying a white flag right away. His archers stayed further back, arrows nocked but not pulled, as he advanced at a walk and stopped about fifty feet from the warehouse. He wore brown leather and a black hat and a cloak despite the heat. He sat in his saddle less like a soldier than a dandy on a lark. “Parley!” he shouted. His voice carried easily.

  Gramma Bickert looked around, then hitched herself up and walked forward. She stopped twenty feet out the door. Everyone watched through cracks between the boards.

  “What would you?” She asked,

  “I am Captain Ludwick,” said the rider pleasantly. “We are prepared to spare your lives. Isn’t that good news?” Gramma was silent. “Well I think it’s good news, anyway.” The man’s voice became less pleasant. “Our terms are these: send out anyone of age to work and all your food and grain and we’ll let the rest of you go. You have one hour.” He turned and rode away past his watchful archers. “You’d think people would be grateful and recognize good news where they hear it.” His horse picked its way carefully among the scrub growing in the road while the rider kept talking to himself.

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  Blaise was once again dumbfounded. Two in one day! First the charlatan Shrugg and now this highly affected man dressed as a soldier but acting like a dilettante. Two men completely outside her experience, people she could not have imagined yesterday, were here in her village. One of them put her in mind of a tall squirrel. The other had a lazy, lethal way about him that made her shiver. She followed the others back with her head spinning, or maybe it was the world whirling round her head.

  Back in the warehouse, the veteran and a few others hunched in a circle. People milled around, hoping not to die. Shrugg stood not far away, within earshot but not within their counsel, looking and looking. Blaise stood on the far side from Shrugg, watching him, close enough to hear everything. They all seemed to mostly be deciding who to send and how to give away all their food.

  Shrugg kept looking around, blinking fast. Thinking. Blaise had never seen someone so clearly thinking before. He looked somewhere, stared, blinked, looked somewhere else, like he was adding sums or inventorying.

  Her grandmother came up behind him and gave him a whack with the staff , startling him. “Good omen, are you?” she spat. “Bloody pariah, more like.”

  Shrugg looked beyond her, as he had done with Blaise. Missus Bickert liked it even less than Blaise had, but he ignored her and listened to the barge men. Blaise could hear them arguing about whether they should launch and chance the arrows. One of them had seen a barge hit by flame arrows before. He said there was no hope there. Some of the others were arguing the point. Another one seemed to think they should trade the villagers for their own lives.

  The boy Shrugg frowned, and suddenly he was all lit up again, like a cinder to tinder. He walked straight to the one-armed veteran. “Sieur,” he said. “How are you called?”

  “Stenn. You?”

  “Shrugg.” Downie snickered. The veteran game him a dark look. “Well met. Is this town defensible?” asked Shrugg.

  “What?” asked Stenn. “I don’t know.”

  “The riders seem to be armed and also have bows. I don’t see any weapons here in the village nor anyone who looks like they can wield one. Is there is any defense to be made?”

  “Well I can’t pull a bow anymore, if that’s what you mean,” said Stenn, indicating the stump of his arm. “We don’t have aught to fight with, no weapons but plows, nothing to ride away on, no magic.” He fixed his eye on Shrugg. “Are you a wizard or aren’t you?”

  “Not a wizard,” said Shrugg, reddening a bit. “Maybe someday. I’m surprised they didn’t just ride in here and take what they wanted.”

  “They’re deserters from the knights,” said the veteran. “I think I may recognize some of them. If they took the Scarlet like me they would keep their losses down by not fighting if they could avoid it. It’s a watchword among those knights, on account of always having less soldiers than the enemy.”

  “Can we make a run for it?”

  “Most of us as is here, is here because we can’t even walk out,” said the veteran. “We’ve got about four people of the age they want and maybe one wagon of food, and they won’t be satisfied with anything less that three wagons and twenty slaves.” Blaise paled as she realized who the slaves would be. Genell buried her son’s head in her embrace.

  “What if we could run?” said Shrugg. “Would the people be prepared to leave? Leave the village for good?”

  “Too right we would,” said Missus Bickert.

  “Been thinking of doing that myself,” said a thin fellow with a farmer’s hat.

  “Wish I had already done it,” said Downie.

  Genell just held her son.

  “How many are we?” asked Shrugg.

  “About forty,” said Genell.

  “Forty,” Shrugg murmured.

  “You see?” said Stenn. “We’ve got nothing.”

  Shrugg was staring at the jetty, piled with wares from the barge. The oxen stood beside it, heads in the feed bin. “Not nothing,” he said. Then he nodded as if he had decided something. “All right. I have an idea. There isn’t much time.”