Willum nodded, and it seemed to Kevin that there

was a glint of balefire in the back of the man’s eyes.

“So I am king now—by right of arms. / have declared that those so-called traders were no such thing at all—and I have eliminated their threat.”

Slowly Kevin began to understand what it was he was saying. “You—good God—that camp was mostly women, children—”

“The spawn of vipers will grow to be vipers.” , “You broke the trade peace! You murdered innocent people, babies in their beds!”

“That hardly sounds like the words of a loyal subject—”

“Loyal my ass! They deserved my loyalty—all you should get is the contempt of every honest man in this town! We’re the ones who’re gonna suffer because of what you just did! You broke your sworn word, you bastard!" Bound hands or not, Kevin lunged for the two of them.

His arms were caught and blows rained down on his head and shoulders. Still he fought, screaming obscenities, and only being clubbed half unconscious kept him from getting to the oathbreakers and tearing their throats out with his teeth.

When he stopped fighting, he was thrown back at Howard’s feet. He lay on the cold stone floor, and through a mist of dancing sparks he could see that Howard was purple again.

“Take him out and make an example of him,” the patricide howled. “Burn him—hang him—tear his guts out!”

“No—” Willum laid a restraining hand on his ruler’s arm. “Not a good idea—you might make him a martyr for those who would doubt you. No, I have a better idea. Did we get the horse barbarians as well? I seem to remember that you ordered them to be taken.”

The new king regained his normal coloring. “Only the boy,” Howard pouted, calming. “The girl managed to get herself killed. Damn! I wanted that little bitch! I thought about having the boy gelded and sold—”

“Good, do that. We’ll put it out that it was the horse barbarians that killed the traders—and that the

smith conspired with them to raid both the traders and the town. We’il have it that the boy confessed. I’ll have my men start passing the word. Then, by afternoon when the story is spreading, we’ll put this fool and his family out of the gates—banish them. The barbarians aren’t likely to let him live long, and they certainly aren’t likely to give an ear to any tales he might tell.”

Howard nodded, slowly. “Yes—yes, indeed! Willum, you are going to go far in my service.”

Willum smiled, his eyes cast humbly down. From his vantage point on the floor, Kevin saw the balefire he thought he’d glimpsed leap into a blaze before being quenched. “I always intended to, my lord.”

Chali crept in to the remains of the camp in the gray light before dawn and collected what she could. The wagons were charred ruins; there were no bodies. She supposed, with a dull ache in her soul, that the murderers had dragged the bodies off to be looted and burned. She hoped that the mule would haunt their killers to the end of their days.

There wasn’t much left, a few bits of foodstuff, of clothing, other oddments—certainly not enough to keep her through the winter—but then, she would let the winter take care of itself. She had something more to concern her.

Scrabbling through the burned wood into the secret compartments built into the floor of every vurdon, she came up with less of use than she had hoped. She had prayed for weapons—what she mostly found was coin, useless to her.

After searching until the top of the sun was a finger’s length above the horizon and dangerously near to betraying her, she gave up the search. She did manage to collect a bow and several quivers’ worth of arrows—which was what she wanted most. Chali had been one of the best shots in the kumpania. Now the Gaje would learn to dread her skill.

She began her one-person reign of terror when the gates opened in late morning.

She stood hidden in the trees, obscured by the foliage, but well within bowshot of the gates, an arrow nocked, a second loose in her fingers, and two more in her teeth. The stallion stood motionless at her side. She had managed to convince the creatures of the woods about her that she was nothing to fear—so a blackbird sang within an arm’s length of her head, and rabbits and squirrels hopped about in the grass at the verge of the forest, unafraid. Everything looked perfectly normal. The two men opening the gates died with shafts in their throats before anyone realized that there was something distinctly out of the ordinary this morning.

When they did realize that there was something wrong, the stupid Gaje did exactly the wrong thing; instead of ducking into cover, they ran to the bodies. Chali dropped two more who trotted out to look.

Then they realized that they were in danger, and scrambled to close the gates again. She managed to get a fifth before the gates closed fully and the bar on the opposite side dropped with a thud that rang across the plain, as they sealed themselves inside.

Now she mounted Bakro and arrowed out of cover. Someone on the walls shouted, but she was out of range before they even had time to realize that she was the source of the attack. She clung to Bakro’s back with knees clenched tightly around his barrel, pulling two more arrows from the quiver slung at her belt. He ran like the wind itself, past the walls and around to the back postern gate before anyone could warn the sleepy townsman guarding it that something was amiss.

She got him, too, before someone slammed the postern shut, and picked off three more injudicious enough to poke their heads over the walls.

Now they were sending arrows of their own after her, but they were poor marksmen, and their shafts fell short. She decided that they were bad enough shots that she dared risk retrieving their arrows to augment her own before sending Bakro back under the cover of the forest. She snatched at least a dozen sticking up out of the grass where they’d landed, leaning down as Bakro ran, and shook them defiantly at her enemies on the walls as they vanished into the underbrush.

Chali’s vengeance had begun.

Kevin was barely conscious; only the support of Pika on one side and Keegan on the other kept him upright. Ehrik was uncharacteristically silent, terribly frightened at the sight of his big, strong father reduced to such a state.

King Howard and his minions had been “generous,” piling as much of the family’s goods on the pony’s back as he could stand before sending the little group out the gates. In cold fact that had been Willum’s work, and it hadn’t been done out of kindness; it had been done to make them a more tempting target for the horse barbarians or whatever strange menace it was that now had them hiding behind their stout wooden walls. That much Kevin could remember; and he waited in dull agony for arrows to come at them from out of the forest'.

But no arrows came; and the pathetic little group, led by a little boy who was doing his best to be brave, slowly made their way up the road and into the grasslands.

Chali mindspoke Pika and ascertained that the smith had had nothing to do with last night’s slaughter—that in fact, he was being cast out for objecting to it. So she let him be. Besides, she had other notions in mind.

She couldn’t keep them besieged forever—but she could make their lives pure hell with a little work.

She found hornets’ nests in the orchard; she smoked the insects into slumberous stupefaction, then took the nests down, carefully. With the help of a scrap of netting and two springy young saplings, she soon had an improvised catapult. It wasn’t very accurate, but it didn’t have to be. All it had to do was get those nests over the palisade.

Which it did.

The howls from within the walls made her smile for the first time that day.