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He grunted but made no other answer, and after a bit picked up their pace so that they fell in with the others. Since the others feared speaking to her, and would not look at her, she might as well have been walking alone.

The sun had risen halfway to noon by the time they reached Four Houses, a scatter of a dozen sheds, huts, pit houses, and four respectable compounds, each one boasting a round house at each corner with a thatched roof and a rock wall built into storage sheds between. A half-dozen adults labored at a ditch, digging with antlers and hauling away the dirt in bark buckets.Advertisement

The war captain of Four Houses was a stout woman with two scars who went by the name Ulfrega and who wore the string skirt that marked her as a woman old enough to choose a marriage partner. By the evidence of the pale birth threads that decorated Ulfrega’s belly above the band of her low-slung skirt, she had survived several pregnancies.

Ulfrega led them down past the river, through woodland rife with pigs, and along a deer trail that led to the Red Deer settlement. Two round houses and six storage pits lay quiet under the summer sun. Strangely, one of the round houses was entirely burned down to the stone half wall while the other stood as fresh and whole as if it had been built a month ago and lived in only yesterday. There was also a stone corral and a hayrick and a very neatly laid out vegetable garden, lush with ripening vegetables. Flies buzzed. A crow flapped lazily away as they approached. Even the village dogs had fled the carnage. The village lay empty except for a single abandoned corpse.

The Red Deer settlers had begun digging a ditch, too, and had gotten a rampart and ditch halfway around the settlement.

“Too little, too late,” said Ulfrega, gesturing toward the half-dug ditch and the fallen and partially burned rampart. Debris from the fight lay everywhere: arrowheads; a shattered spear shaft; and one of the Cursed Ones’ swords, a flat length of wood edged with obsidian, although most of that obsidian was broken or fallen off. Ulfrega picked up an arrow shaft and fingered the obsidian point quickly before tucking it away into the leather satchel she wore slung over one shoulder.

“You’re late to build a ditch as well,” said Beor.

She shrugged, looking irritated. “The other raids always came over by Three Oaks and Spring Water.”

“It’s not so far to travel between them, not for the Cursed Ones.”

“Hei!” She spat in the direction of the corpse. “In open country they may move quickly, but they’re slower when they bring their horses into the woodland. There’s a lot of dense growth between Three Oaks and here.”

“That didn’t save these people.”

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The rest of Beor’s people fanned out to scavenge for obsidian points and whatever was ripening in the garden. They avoided the corpse.

“I’ll chase the spirit away,” said Adica. No doubt the Four Houses people had been waiting for her to settle the matter. Both Beor and Ulfrega made the gesture to avert evil spirits and delicately stepped away from her. She rummaged in her basket and got out the precious copper bowl, just large enough to fit in her cupped hands, that she used for such workings. At the outdoor hearth she struck sparks with flint and touched it to a dried scrap of mushroom to raise a fire, then poured blessing water from her waterskin into the bowl and set it on a makeshift tripod over the flames to heat. The others vanished into the woodland to seek out the trail of their enemy or to hide while she worked magic.

While the water heated, she stared in silence at the corpse.

His fall had torn his wooden lynx’s mask from his face. He had proud features and a complexion the color of copper. His black hair had been coiled into a topknot, as was customary for his kind, and all down his arms various magical symbols had been painted with blue woad and red ocher, one twined into the next. Yet truly his sex mattered little: it was an adult, and therefore dangerous, because it could breed and it could fight.

No animal scavengers had touched the body. The Cursed Ones protected their spirits with powerful spells, so she would have to be cautious. Luckily, none of the Four Houses people had tried to strip the corpse, although he wore riches. A sheet of molded bronze protected his chest, so beautifully incised with figures of animals that she could not help but admire the artistry. Across the breastplate a vulture-headed woman paced majestically toward a burnished sun while two dragons faced each other, dueling with fire. It was hard to reconcile the creatures who stalked and terrorized humankind with ones who could fashion so many beautiful things. His bronze helmet, crested with horsehair, had rolled just slightly off his head, lying askew in the dirt. Someone had trampled the crest during the fight, the crease still stamped into the ground. pqdm.com