The Host spreads his table then calls with honeyed charm:

A steaming loaf of Ignorance to keep your belly warm,

An unending keg of Fear to turn your wit to froth,

And tender cuts of poisoned Pride to turn your gentle heart.

The poem continued, describing two companions, one who takes the host’s offer and another who refuses. The first one is treated with firmness but kindness and put out, like a steer to pasture, to enjoy the gardens, orchards, and plenitudes of the vale. The second faces privation and a multitude of dangers trying to get his friend to leave. In the end, he fails, and the first one, the one who trusted the smiling host, is brought forth for butchering. The second makes a brave attempt to rescue him from his captors, but fails, barely escaping with his life. Powerless, he watches from afar as the mighty inhabitants of that awful vale kill, roast, and then serve his friend up on platters for a community feast.

It was a long poem, but the story was so fascinating Talen memorized it in less than a day. At first, Talen thought Da made him memorize it because he’d wanted to challenge, and thereby increase, Talen’s mental skills. But after he’d learned it, he began to consider the story and see it was a moral tale, teaching how a man could be self-reliant and wise. For a long time he thought that was Da’s purpose in making him memorize it.

But as he grew older, Talen began to suspect Da had planted that poem in him for another reason altogether. There were six families in that vale that seemed to correspond to the six paths of the Divine. The butchering was performed during the annual Festival of Gifts, which is when the Divines asked for the annual sacrifices. The name of the host meant the same thing as the name of the first Glory of ancient times. As he grew, Talen found many more connections between the inhabitants of that vale and the six paths.

It was as if Da had planted that poem in him so that it might bring forth, in its due time, a suspicion of all things Divine. But why?

He’d once asked Da what it all meant and if it was indeed his purpose to bring forth such a fruit, but Da only shrugged and said it was only an old poem he’d learned as a child. Talen tried to detect prevarication in Da’s answer, but found none. Nevertheless, he knew Da was hiding something.

Talen had known two Divines in his life. Lumen and the Green Beggar. Lumen looked down upon the Koramites. But the Green Beggar went around healing people and teaching them the paths to joy. He refused all authority. Refused pomp, choosing instead to live in a log hut he made himself. He leased land to farm, established a following, and had done nothing but bless goats and vegetable gardens. Three years ago he’d sailed away, waving good-bye to the throngs of his “fellows” standing on the docks. Many still wore the green shoulder patch that marked his followers.

“What about the Green Beggar?” asked Talen. “He would have spoken out against the Sleth woman’s use of the weave.”

“What about him?” asked Ke. “The Goat King, the Witch of Cathay, the Scarlet Tiger, they were all once Glories of great nations. Benefactors. Who can say what the Green Beggar’s real purpose was?”

Talen knew all the stories about Glories who had gone mad and eaten the souls of those they ruled. Divines had all once been men. Men who were raised to wield the powers of life and become almost immortal. But those tales were of Divines who had succumbed to the whisperings of Regret, the Creator who when he had seen what he and the other six Creators had wrought, wanted to destroy it and begin anew. They were stories of Divines who lost the favor of the Six.

“What if Lumen himself ate souls?” asked Da. “Who would have known it? Nobody. Isn’t that a greater horror than some farmer’s wife who uses a little weave to bless her and her family?”

“But the power doesn’t come from the same source,” said Talen. “It’s like comparing an ale brewed using pure water with another made using swamp scum. They may look the same from a distance, but in the mouth they’re night and day.”

Nettle eyed the woods. “Are we sure we want to talk about this out here?”

“I’ll tell you what I think,” said Da. “I don’t think this has anything to do with magic. I think this is nothing more than a bunch of cowards worried about their cattle and land.”

“You don’t believe the reports?”

“I believe that men see what they want to see. And what they saw was a Koramite smith who was richer than any seven of them combined.”

Talen had seen his father’s judgment blinded before by his pride and anger. And even though it grated, the Mokaddians weren’t always in the wrong. “Maybe all you choose to see is the wrongs done to our people. To admit that one of us was evil would spoil your arguments. Wouldn’t it be better to cut out the corrupted part than let it ruin the rest of us?”

“This is why we need a Divine protecting our shores,” said Nettle.

They all looked at him.

Nettle had brought his bowl outside. He stuffed a large spoonful of porridge in his mouth. “A mere human cannot hope to unravel such mysteries.”

“That’s true,” said Ke. “But you don’t need one to know there’s no greater risk now than there was before. Let’s say Talen is right. It is no more dangerous to walk about now than it was yesterday or the day before. If there are Sleth lurking about, they were there before.”

“What kind of logic is that?” asked Talen. “If you find out there are wildcats in the woods, then you take precautions. You don’t assume they pose no danger.”

“Ah,” said Ke, “but if the wildcats always kept to themselves, are they really a danger now? Perhaps a hunt will only corner them and make them fight.”

“Yes,” said Talen. “But wildcats don’t murder whole families and devour their souls.”

“Maybe Talen’s right,” said Da. “We should take precautions. But this all leaves a bad taste in my mouth. The Fir-Noy had no authority to organize a hunt in the village of Plum. That band of armsmen today had no authority to hunt here. So even if there are Sleth, there are far more Fir-Noy eager to run a Koramite through.”

“We need to post a watch,” said Talen.

“Aye,” said Da. “There’s bound to be more than one group of idiots in the woods.”

There were more than idiots in the woods, and Talen knew it. He was going to catch whoever had been lurking about. Normally, you only masked your scent when trapping animals, but it was possible that the hatchlings had eaten the souls of some beast in an attempt to obtain its finer sense of smell. He did not have days to let the snare weather, nor did he have any urine or gall from the last deer he’d killed to mask his and Nettle’s scent, so Talen led Nettle into the fading light, down to a swampy bend in the river. He found a spot where there was plenty of rotting vegetation and dug out a pail full of mud.

By the time they hiked back up the bank and to the run between the barn and the garden, it was dark. Da had shuttered up the windows against the evening insects, and so they only had starlight and a half-moon to guide them. Talen had wanted to wait until dark so the hatchlings wouldn’t be able to see much of what they were doing. Now he wondered if he had enough light to set the snare properly.

First, they pushed the wheelbarrow and eight empty barley sacks out to the cross-post fence of the mule pasture. A long mound of stones, taken from the field, stretched along the base of the fence. They doubled the sacks and then filled them with enough stones to equal the weight of a large man. Then they pushed the sacks back and into the barn underneath the pulley that allowed them to lift loads up to the barn loft and bound all four sacks together.

Next, they pushed the empty wheelbarrow out to the run between the garden and the barn. They set it next to the side of the barn and angled it out into the path in such a way that it would direct someone walking here to step right into the trap.