Talen climbed out of the tree and stood before Da.

“Did you look for the pants in the barn?” Da asked.

Of course he’d looked in the barn. He’d looked everywhere. “I’m not going to ruin my good pair.”

“Then work in a leaf skirt. I’m not buying any material for another pair. Nothing in heaven or earth will make me feed negligence.”

“I wasn’t negligent.”

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” said Da. “Put on your good ones. Get the peppercorns. You’re going to the village to get some hens from old Mol the fowler. I’ve had too many days without eggs.”

“Last night you said you wanted to see us up and in the fields with the barley.”

“Well, I’m saying right now that I want some hens. And you’re going to get them.”

“Shall I go along?” asked Nettle.

“No,” said Da. “You’re getting back on your horse to take a message to the Creek Widow.”

Nettle smirked. “The one who told you not to come around?”

“What other one is there?” asked Da. He held out a sealed letter to Nettle. The Creek Widow was a Mokaddian woman with a tenancy of almost twenty acres. She had been a family friend for years. But this last summer she had ordered Da out of her house and off her land. And try as Talen might, he could not get Da to tell him why. Talen suspected it had something to do with her perennial efforts to marry Da off. Half the time Talen thought she wanted Da herself. But Da was stubborn. And Talen was happy about that. While she cooked food fit for a Divine, she was bossy and a bit odd, talking to vegetables and rocks and always smelling a little like a goat.

Was this letter an indication that Da was making up?

“Paper,” said Nettle, a tease in his eye. “You must be serious.” He held the letter up to the sun as if trying to read it.

“You break that seal,” Da said, “and I’ll have your hide.”

“I wouldn’t dare touch it,” said Nettle.

“Then go,” said Da. He shooed them both away. “Be gone. And hurry back. I don’t want to lose any of that barley.”

Talen pushed the cart and the empty chicken baskets through the three miles of the muggy woods to Stag Home. When he finally broke onto the broad valley, he was so refreshed by the sunlight and breeze, so soothed by the smooth, sun-warmed dirt of the road under his bare feet that he didn’t immediately notice the fields and orchards.

Instead, he basked in the glory of the day and the fact that not only had he escaped being maimed this morning, but he’d also avoided a number of hours sweating in the barley. The peppercorns hung in a pouch around his neck. It had been two years since any merchant had sold peppercorns in the New Lands and the value of pepper had risen.

Talen looked forward to seeing if the alewife’s daughter would be selling her vegetables again. She was a looker, that one, with her dark hair, jade eyes, and the fabulous lines of her long neck. During his last visit, he’d ended up returning to her table thrice, buying a bunch of carrots each time, just so he could fix her features in his mind. And it hadn’t all been one-sided. She had glanced his way when he stood across the road eating some of her wares.

Talen’s reverie of the alewife’s daughter broke when he pushed the cart past an orchard of apple trees bent with clusters of red and yellow fruit. There should have been children climbing with baskets in the tops of those trees. Instead, the apple baskets lay scattered on the ground.

Across from the orchard a yearling calf bawled outside a field. The calf searched along the fence separating it from its mother and a dozen others who stood with their noses down among the ripe white oats mixed with peas. There should have been a harvest master there promising someone a proper beating for letting the cattle in, but there wasn’t even a beggar to chase the greedy guts out.

How could that be? Talen searched the fence lines and long rock walls. He searched the fields-nothing but a small carpet of blackbirds picking through a swath of barley that had been harvested and left to lie where it fell. There wasn’t a body to be seen. It was as if the villagers had fled the fields.

Alarm scuttled like a crab up his neck. This was the fat season for pillaging. Of course, the Bone Faces hadn’t attacked Stag Home or any of the surrounding villages for years. But that’s precisely why Stag Home would be a perfect target. The villagers would have grown overly secure, just as Talen had.

What’s more, the Bone Faces took more than livestock and goods. They took men, women, and children. Lords, he thought, if one of those Bone Faces got him, he will have wished he had fallen out of that tree and broken his back. He scanned the fields again, this time looking for signs of a raiding party.

It was said that when the Bone Faces kidnapped you for their slave ships, they cut off the pinky finger of your right hand. Then, with some black and feral magic, they used your finger to bind you to them. And so perverting was the binding that you never once wanted to even pine after what you’d lost. All your thought was to serve your master every day that blood flowed in your veins.

One of the first things they’d ask you to do, which you would do with joy, was to trick your own kin into their traps. And so it was that whole families disappeared. Some were enslaved, others were sent to the fearsome altars of Ishgar as sacrifices, for the Bone Faces were a bloody people. But Talen figured those who went to the altars met with a better end, for if the rumors were true, the Bone Face bindings were strong enough to compel a slave beyond this life and into the world of the dead.

He imagined the fate of his pinky. The Bone Face slave masters hung the fingers of their most valued slaves about their necks. The rest they locked up in a special room. And when guests came to call, especially if the slave master was wealthy with dozens of formidable slaves listed among his assets, he would take his guests into the finger room and show off his collection of desiccated and rotting digits, just as a good Koramite wife might show off her collection of dishes or lace.

There was no sign of struggle in the fields. The clans sent patrols along the coastlines during the harvest season. Last year there had been battles, but those had been far out on the Finger Islands, not on the mainland settlements. Nothing this year. But it had to be Bone Faces. What else would make the villagers flee the fields on such a fine day for work?

Goh, but how he wished Da and Ke were here with him. If he only had his bow; that would improve his odds. Da, a Koramite bow master, had taught his sons well. Talen could shoot eight arrows a minute, and not to simply fill the sky with a haphazard rain of death. No, Talen could fire at that speed and hit what he was aiming at.

But he didn’t have his bow. All he had was his knife and a pile of chicken baskets, which meant he’d have to slice open his own neck if the blighters got to him, for he wasn’t going to be turned into a villain, nor would he allow himself to be used as feed for their terrible gods.

Talen thought he might be able to lose any pursuers in the thickness of the woods. But who was to say they hadn’t already circled behind him? Besides, the safety of the village with its embankment walls was much closer.

Smoke trailed into the sky from behind the walls of the village. But it was thin, not the thick smoke of burning homes. Upon the timber and earthen wall he saw the glint of three men wearing helmets and carrying spears. The gates stood closed, which only confirmed his assessment of the situation.

Talen looked back at the woods once more. He searched along the tree line following the river that snaked its way through the valley, but saw no shallow-bottomed ship’s mast. Perhaps they had landed farther downriver. Perhaps the village had been forewarned and the raiders had yet to attack.