Even before he saw the first footprint, Fergus knew there were twelve. Kiri had known sooner. The fox stood in the center of the game trail with one forepaw lifted and her muzzle canted into the wind, each ear attending to a different silence.
He stopped behind her. “What?”
She glanced back, then lowered her nose to the damp earth.
Fergus crouched beside her. The first print was broad and deep, the heel driven hard into black mud. Another crossed it, and another after that, their edges still sharp beneath beads of rainwater.“Three hours?”
Kiri sneezed.
“Two?”
Her tail moved once.
The trail descended through fir and alder toward the valley. Morning mist lay in pale strata among the trunks, and somewhere below them unseen water passed over stone. Fergus followed the sign twenty paces and found a fern broken cleanly at the stem, mud scuffed waist-high against bark, a sapling bent and sprung only halfway upright. The party had made no effort to conceal its passage. That much was ordinary.
The rest was not.
The tracks kept formation even where the ground widened. Heavier feet held the center. Lighter prints ranged the margins. Where the trail pinched between boulders the company had narrowed without confusion and opened again beyond them. There was no milling, no straggling, none of the lateral wandering that hunger, temper, or simple inattention usually left behind.
Fergus rose and looked downslope.
“They’ve been taught.”
Kiri watched him.
“Or made to learn.”
They went on. Through apertures in the trees he could see the cultivated country below: barley paling toward harvest, orchards in ordered rows, the smoke of breakfast fires climbing straight in the still air. A road followed the foot of the ridge. There was no keep near enough to matter and no garrison, only scattered homesteads occupied by people who had come this far into the hills because the soil was good and, until now, distance had passed for protection.
Easy country to raid. Too easy to require discipline.
Under a stand of pines he found where the orcs had halted. The ground was stamped flat. Several had rested with their backs against roots. One had sharpened a blade against stone. Another had eaten a rabbit down to the small white architecture of its bones. Yet there had been no fire, no broken drinking vessels, no refuse flung through the needles. Their rest had been brief, controlled, almost decorous in its severity.
Three cuts marked the trunk of one pine, each the length of a finger and laid one above another. Fergus touched the lowest. The exposed wood was still pale.
“Someone marked the halt.”
Kiri sniffed the trunk and looked east.
The nearest farms lay that way.
Fergus increased his pace. He knew orcs as raiders knew wolves: not by affection but by long proximity. They killed, carried what could be carried, burned what could not. He had tracked them since he was young enough to be frightened by the evidence they left behind, and most violence bore some correspondence to the mind that committed it. Appetite scattered. Rage squandered. Fear doubled back on itself.
This trail did none of those things.
The band stopped where it had been meant to stop and moved where it had been meant to move.
By the time they reached the high grass above the valley, Fergus no longer needed prints to tell him the destination. Kiri ranged ahead along the tree line, vanished twice, and each time waited for him farther on with her ears forward and her body taut with impatience.
Then she stopped.
Fergus stopped with her. Her head had turned south. At first he heard only water below the ridge and a thrush moving invisibly in the brush. Then a dog began barking somewhere in the valley. Another answered. Both went silent almost together.
A moment later came the thin iron note of a bell.
Once. Again. Then without rhythm.
Fergus was already running.
He left the trail and cut down the ridge through wet brush. Alder switches struck his cloak. The loam shifted beneath his boots. Kiri went ahead among the trunks, red as a coal blown loose from a fire. The bell continued below them, and behind it came shouting, diminished by distance but unmistakable.
At a rocky shelf Fergus dropped to one knee.
Half a mile away stood a homestead: farmhouse, barn, two cottages, orchard, well, and a low wall enclosing the yard. Smoke rose from one of the outbuildings. Figures moved among the roofs and fences, too many of them, and even at that distance he could distinguish the weight and gait of orcs crossing the yard.
Four in the open. Two near the barn. One on the road. Others passed behind the farmhouse or through the smoke. Some worked. Others watched the approaches.
That was enough.
Fergus brought the bow from his shoulder. The bell sounded again. A scream followed it, clear and terrible piercing the air above the fields, resounding outward across the whole valley.
He descended quickly but without haste, taking the folds of the ground and the hedges between fields. Kiri stayed close until he reached the drainage ditch above the first of the barley.
“Go.”
She did not move.
He pointed north toward the wooded hills. “Bring help.”
Kiri stared at him.
You stay.
“Yes.”
Bad idea.
“Yes.”
Still, she remained. Fergus looked toward the homestead. A stream of smoke rolled over the roofline.
“Find Dharu if you can. Anyone else if you cannot.” He touched two fingers briefly to her forehead. “Go.”
Her ears went back. Then she turned and vanished uphill. Fergus watched only until the brush closed behind her.
He crossed the ditch and entered the barley.
The grain had been flattened in broad lanes. Here the scheme declared itself plainly. The orcs had divided before reaching the settlement, one body moving east and another west, enclosing the buildings before the alarm could spread. Near the road lay a sheep, killed and left where it fell. An overturned cart had been emptied and its contents sorted into deliberate heaps: food, tools, clothing, blankets.
At the edge of the orchard Fergus lowered himself behind a hedge.
An orc crossed the yard carrying a sack. He was thick through the neck and shoulders, coarse black hair hanging in ropes around a broad, low face. Another crouched beside the well with a short bow across his thighs, yellow eyes narrowed toward the tree line instead of the plunder.
A sentry.
Fergus felt his pulse settle. The world contracted to wind, distance, cover, angle. He drew an arrow and held it against the bow without nocking it.
A horn sounded behind the farmhouse, one low note. Farther away another answered.
Not boasting. Not confusion. Signals.
The marked pine, the measured halt, the divided approach, the sorted plunder. Someone had taken the old violence of the Wild Folk and imposed syntax upon it.
Fergus moved into the orchard.
Smoke thickened above the roofs and spread across the morning. What had begun in rain and mud now led through blood.
He smelled it before he saw the boy.
The body lay beyond a split-rail fence, half in weeds and half in mud, facedown with one arm extended toward the gate. Fourteen, perhaps. An arrow stood from his back at a shallow angle, its fletching trembling in the wind.
Fergus stopped in the lee of the wall.
Nothing moved openly for a moment. Chickens wandered among trampled cabbages and broken baskets. A mottled hen pecked beside an overturned bucket until something crashed inside the farmhouse and sent it running, its wings half spread.
Fergus listened.
Orcish voices. Not the loose cries of men drunk on victory but clipped exchanges, answers returned promptly, commands passed from room to room. The sound was almost worse for its banality. Work being done.
Kiri was gone. Good. Thinking of the distance between them would not shorten it.
A dead man lay beside the well in a wool shirt gone black with blood. A broken spear was pinned beneath him. Three dogs lay near the barn where they had rushed the gate. Another body showed beneath the open barn door, younger than the man at the well and older than the boy in the weeds.
The farm had not been yielded.
A shadow crossed the farmhouse window. An orc leaned out and heaved a sack into the yard. He had one yellow eye visible beneath a shelf of brow and two blunt lower tusks pressing at the lip. He shouted something over his shoulder.
Fergus nocked, drew, and released.
The arrow entered beneath the jaw. The orc disappeared backward into the room.
Silence held for less than a breath.
Then the house exploded with stomps and shouts.
Fergus was already moving along the wall. An orc burst through the door carrying a cleaver. He wore a patchwork hide jerkin dark with rain and grease, and his broken teeth showed between tusks as he ran. A second followed with a short bow, leaner but long-armed and deep in the chest. He loosed at movement he had barely seen. The shaft struck stone and shattered.
Twenty paces farther down, Fergus rose and put an arrow through him.
The cleaver-bearer came on. Fergus dropped behind the wall and listened to the feet coming closer until the stones seemed to carry the cadence of them.
Then he came over the wall almost beneath the orc.
The creature had expected an archer retreating. Instead, Fergus caught the descending wrist, drove his shoulder into the chest, turned with the momentum, and let the cleaver bury itself in earth. His knife went in beneath the ribs.
The orc stiffened against him. Fergus felt the body's heat through leather and linen. He lowered it rather than let it fall.
A horn sounded behind the farmhouse.
He left the knife where it was and ran.
Three orcs rounded the corner. One had a shaved scalp traversed by old white scars. Another wore plaited black hair bound with wire. The third carried a horn at his belt. They advanced, their discipline marked by the heavy economy of their movement.
They saw him.
Fergus cleared the fence and entered the orchard at a sprint. An arrow passed near his ear. He heard it pass, then saw it strike an apple tree, penetrating to the fletching. Another buried itself where he had stood a heartbeat earlier.
They were good. That mattered more than their number.
At the upper terrace he climbed the low stonework, dropped, and rolled behind a fallen trunk. The first pursuer appeared below with two others close behind.
Fergus shot the leader in the thigh.
The orc went down hard. The two behind checked themselves rather than trample him. Fergus put his next arrow into the side of the second. The third vanished behind a tree and did not reappear.
No curse followed. No wild answer came splintering through the branches.
The survivor stayed under cover.
Fergus moved uphill.
More were coming from the farm. Five, perhaps six. He went into the bracken keeping the rise between himself and the buildings. Exposed roots braided the ground. Shelves of gray stone broke the slope. Good country for one man who knew it. Bad country for a line of pursuers.
Yet they did not rush him.
Behind an oak he stopped and listened. Wind in leaves. Water somewhere downslope.
A whistle.
Another answered from below.
They were spreading out.
Fergus climbed another twenty feet and doubled back. The first orc passed below with a hide-covered shield raised and his sword drawn close to the body. Bare forearms showed ridges of old cuts. A second followed at measured distance, broader in the jaw, iron rings braided into his hair.
Neither spoke.
Fergus let the first pass and shot the second behind the ear.
The body struck the ferns. The one ahead turned.
Fergus was gone.
Shouts rose from below, answered now from several directions. The ground was closing around him.
He reached a ravine cut by winter water, slid into the mud at its bottom, crossed, and climbed the opposite bank.
An orc stood ten paces away.
The creature was taller than Fergus by half a head and nearly twice his breadth, bow-legged beneath a coat of pieced leather. One ear had been torn to a ragged nub. His nose had been broken repeatedly and lay broad across a face made heavier by two blunt lower tusks.
For a moment neither moved.
The orc smiled.
Fergus threw the bow aside when it charged.
The sword came horizontally at his neck. Fergus dropped beneath it and drove forward, catching the orc at the waist. They struck the ground together. The creature smelled of smoke, rancid fat, and sweat. A fist landed behind Fergus's ear and white light crossed his sight.
He reached for the knife that was no longer there.
The orc seized his throat.
Fergus drove his thumb into its eye.
The grip slackened. He rolled clear and came to one knee while the orc lurched after him half blind, sword forgotten, hands reaching.
The brush behind it erupted.
Dharu came through like a piece of the hillside dislodged.
The orc had time to turn. The bear rose and struck once. Brown fur, mud, and the orc’s body went down together.
Fergus remained on one knee until the light ceased breaking across his vision.
“Good timing.”
Dharu answered with a deep coughing grunt.
Kiri shot from the brush and crossed the ravine in three bounds. She stopped beside Fergus with her tail high and her tongue showing.
Found him.
“Yes.”
He was eating.
“Sorry to have inconvenienced.”
Dharu lifted his head and regarded Fergus with the patience of something accustomed to the lesser judgment of men. He was immense, silver showing at the muzzle and a pale seam of scar tissue running across one shoulder. On all fours his back came nearly to Fergus's chest. Standing, he would have reached close to ten feet. Burrs clung to the long fur beneath his belly. One ear bore a notch from some older quarrel.
A shout came from the ridge.
Three orcs stood above them.
The first cast a spear. Fergus rolled aside and Dharu went uphill before the shaft had finished quivering in the mud.
The orcs' discipline survived arrows and ambush. It did not survive the bear.
Two fled. The third lowered his spear and braced.
Dharu struck him and sent him backward over the ridge.
Fergus found his bow. One of the fleeing orcs had already reached the trees. The other stopped, turned, and raised his own weapon.
Fergus loosed.
The orc clutched at his throat and fell.
The last disappeared into timber.
Fergus nocked another arrow and held it a moment, then lowered the bow. The cover was too thick and the range uncertain.
Dharu stood on the ridge breathing heavily.
“Enough.”
The bear kept watching the trees.
“Kiri.”
The fox trotted up and touched her nose to Dharu's foreleg. He huffed and sat.
Fergus almost smiled.
Then he looked toward the farm.
They returned through the orchard.
The orc Fergus had shot through the thigh was alive. He had dragged himself against an apple tree and bound the wound with torn cloth. When Fergus approached he reached for a knife.
Fergus raised the bow.
The hand stopped.
They regarded one another across a few yards of trampled grass.
The orc was younger than Fergus had first thought. His yellow eyes carried hatred and fear without resolving into either.
“Who leads you?”
The orc stared.
Fergus asked again in the rough trade tongue used beyond the Pillars.
Recognition altered the face.
“Many.”
“Many what?”
The orc smiled.
His hand moved toward the knife.
Fergus shot him.
For a while he stood with the bow lowered. Kiri came up behind him and whined once.
“I know.”
Inside the farmhouse, the pillagers had broken open chests and cupboards. Flour whitened the boards. Blankets, tools, salted meat, crockery, cord, and lamp oil had been separated into piles.
Not taken. Assessed.
Fergus searched the dead.
Most carried what he expected: flint, scraps of dried meat, cord, whetstones, charms polished dark by handling. The leader carried something else.
He lay behind the house beside the smoking shed, broader than the others, a leather baldric across his chest marked with three iron rings. Beneath it Fergus found a pouch and, inside the pouch, a folded piece of hide.
He opened it on the ground.
At first it resembled a hunter's map. Then the river took shape beneath his eye, and the ridge, and the old north road. Small cuts had been scored into the leather. Some were darkened with charcoal. Others had been crossed through.
One mark lay where this farm should be.
Crossed through.
Another lay two days east.
Crossed through.
Farther north stood a third, untouched. Beyond it were others. Six. Perhaps seven.
A route.
On the reverse, simple notches gathered in sets. Fighters, days, supplies. He could not yet tell.
He looked toward the bodies among smoke and broken fences.
A war party did not require a map like this to burn one farm.
Kiri sat beside him. Her ears went back.
Bad?
“Yes.”
Fergus folded the hide and put it inside his tunic.
The fighting was over.
He stood in the yard with the bow hanging loose in his left hand and regarded the aftermath.
Smoke moved low among the buildings. The shed had fallen inward and its roof beams burned without flame, red at the seams beneath blackened skin. A cart lay on its side by the well. Flour from a split sack had become paste in the mud. The dead remained where they had fallen, and morning had begun its indifferent reclamation: flies settling at eyes and mouths, chickens stepping delicately between boots and broken crockery as though this too belonged to the ordinary traffic of the day.
There was nothing left to do for any of them. Fergus knew it and still he stood there.
He had seen villages after raids before. Houses burned for stores that would feed men three days. Families killed because someone had resisted the taking of a horse. Ruin seldom announced itself with grandeur. More often it arrived as appetite armed with opportunity.
This had another character.
The farm had been chosen, approached, divided, measured. Rsiders had been posted to watch. Others had sorted what might be useful. Halts had been marked. Signals had carried over distance. The bodies in the yard were not merely what violence left behind. They lay inside a design.
Fergus touched the hide beneath his tunic.
The crossed marks. The marks not yet crossed.
Orcs could be patient. They could be cunning. They could learn. But this was not merely skill accumulated through raiding. It bore the pressure of instruction, many separate tempers bent toward a single intention.
He looked north, though the hills concealed everything beyond the next rise.
There were questions tracks would not answer.
His thoughts went to Magda.
She had always known too much in ways that resisted examination. Sometimes knowledge came to her as image, sometimes as warning, sometimes as an assurance so calm that Fergus distrusted it on principle. He had spent much of his life refusing to confuse foresight with wisdom. Yet refusal was not the same as disbelief.
If something larger than raiding had begun to move through the hills, she might already have felt its approach.
It would be like Magda to know before he arrived and to say nothing of how.
Kiri sat at his boots with her forepaws together and her tail curled around them. The fox had begun to drowse in the warmth rising from the scorched ground. Now and again one ear turned toward some small sound in the wreckage.
Dharu wandered at the far side of the yard. He nosed once at an overturned trough, found nothing worth the effort, and continued toward the orchard. There was no ceremony in his departure. His great back passed between the trees and then only the shaking branches marked him.
Fergus watched the place after him.
A board settled somewhere in the ruin with a soft dry knock.
Kiri's eyes opened.
Fergus turned.
At first there was only the collapsed shed and gray ash banked beneath the timbers. Then something moved in the darkness.
An eye watched him through a narrow interval between two blackened beams.
Fergus did not move.
The face around the eye came gradually into coherence. A child. A girl perhaps ten years old. Soot darkened her forehead and one cheek. Blood had dried in a thin line beside her brow. Her dress was torn at the shoulder. One small hand rested in the ash. In the other she held a wooden horse with one leg broken away.
She made no sound.
He understood that she had been there through all of it.
The bell. The shouting. The fall of timber. The orcs outside. The voices she knew, one by one becoming absent.
Fergus looked toward the body by the kitchen door, then the man at the well, then the younger body near the barn.
He looked back at the girl.
There was nothing to ask.
He set his bow on the ground.
Kiri rose but stayed where she was.
Fergus stepped into the open space before the ruin and stopped where the child could see him entire. He stood upright with his hands empty.
Smoke passed between them and thinned.
He raised one hand, palm upward.
He did not call to her. He did not tell her she was safe.
For a long while she remained beneath the beams.
Then the wooden horse appeared first. Her hand pushed it into the light. One shoulder followed, then her head. She crawled out slowly, never taking her eyes from him. Ash whitened her knees and palms. When she stood, she seemed almost too slight for the devastation surrounding her.
Fergus left his hand where it was.
She looked at it. Then at him.
Whatever fear remained in her had gone quiet. There are expressions children should not know, and hers had already passed beyond appeal.
She came to him.
Her fingers closed around his.
Cold.
Fergus removed his cloak and settled it over her shoulders. The cloth nearly reached her ankles. She accepted the weight without looking down.
Kiri came and sat beside her.
The girl's hand moved once over the fox's red fur, scarcely a touch. Kiri leaned into it.
Fergus picked up his bow.
He did not look again at the bodies.
He turned toward the trees.
The girl took his hand and went with him.
At the edge of the yard she stopped.
Fergus stopped also.
She looked back across the settlement. Smoke rose from broken roofs into a sky gone pale with morning. Nothing moved except the chickens and a strip of cloth stirring from the fence. The dead had become shapes among the mud and ash. No bell sounded now.
The girl held the broken horse against her chest.
Fergus did not hurry her.
At last she turned away.
They crossed the barley and entered the trees with Kiri close at their heels. Dharu was somewhere ahead, invisible among the timber.
Fergus kept the child's hand in his. Beneath his tunic the folded map pressed against his ribs.
Beyond the woods waited the road to Magda.
Behind them the village diminished into smoke beneath the empty morning sky.
To be continued...
