asked. They would drown in the river if the raiders got this far.
“Away,” the man said, and ran off with them.
I pushed through the oncoming crowds. They split apart for an executioner, and if they did not, I used the bronze-weighted butt of the axe to shove them aside.
Five streets from the river, I had to turn away from my usual route home. Smoke choked the street, black and thick, and it spat people out who coughed and collapsed to the dirt, gasping for air.
“They set fire to the slums! Don’t go down there,” a woman with a flour-covered apron shouted at me.
I ignored her and ran through alleyways. I pushed through the doors of empty houses and climbed through windows to make my way around the burning sections of town, slowly getting closer to home.
I ran past the burning wrecks of the small farms of the Lesser Estates, my boots raising dust with each step. I could see the gnarled trees behind my house writhing in flame, and as I scrambled painfully over the stone wall, I saw the timbers give way and the roof fall in on itself.
The heat forced me back when I tried to run inside. I paced around the house like a confused animal. Stone cracked from the heat, and a screaming wail came from within. I ripped my hood off and shoved it into one of my pockets so I could breathe.
“Duram?” I cried. “Set?”
A blazing figure erupted from the front door, leaping onto the dusty ground and rolling around until the flames were extinguished.
It was Anto. His blackened form lay by my feet, rasping in pain. “Tana?”
I dropped to my knees. “Father?”
“It hurts,” Anto whimpered. “It hurts. Please…” He looked up at me, eyes startlingly white against the blackened face.
The smell of burnt flesh filled my lungs. “You can’t ask me…” I started to say.
“Please…” he groaned.
So I used the axe for the second time that day.
When it was done, I crawled on the ground and sobbed my despair, waiting for the house to finish burning. It was just. I had taken a man’s life. Now mine was being taken from me.
I found Jorda’s body while on my hands and knees. There was an arrow through his neck and a wineskin by his feet.
Drunkard he may have been. A disappointment to Anto, this was true. But the dirt was scuffed with footmarks. Small footmarks. He’d tried to protect my sons.
I kissed the three rings on my hand and prayed to Mara that my sons were alive, and as I did so, saw the scraped dirt of Set’s dragged foot next to the hoofmarks leading off down the dirt road.
With an apology to Anto’s lifeless body, a whisper of thanks to Mara, I got up and began to follow the tracks, axe gripped tight in both hands.
The burnt remains of Lesser Khaim's southern fringe faded away into the rocky hills of sparse grass and clumps of bramble as the day passed. Weariness spread through my knees, and the miles wore at me as I doggedly moved southward.
I plowed on. I knew that the hairy tentacles of bramble along the road brushing me would probably not pierce my canvas leggings. I had to move faster, not pick my way around bramble if I hoped to catch the raiders. I had to hope the leather apron would also help protect me from the bramble’s malevolence.
At the crest of a hill scattered with boulders I looked back at the pyre that was now Lesser Khaim. Tiny figures formed a line by the river, passing along buckets of water to try and douse denser areas of town. The outer sections had become a black mass of skeletal building frames.
I turned from it all, walking down the other side of the hill, the axe weighing heavier and heavier.
At the bottom of the hill, turning onto the old cobblestoned ruins of the Junpavati road, I caught up to the raiding party. The men rode massive, barrel-chested warhorses that looked like they could pull an oxen's plough. The raiders held their long spears in the air, like flagpoles, and their brass helmets glinted as they rode alongside a mass of humanity being herded south like sheep.
Somewhere in that sad, roped-together crowd, were my sons.
I wondered how many other townsmen had tried to fight the raiders? And how many lay dead on the dirt roads of Lesser Khaim with pitchforks or knives in hands.
I stared at the raiders. Only four of them had been left to march their captives along. No doubt the rest had ridden on ahead.
Four trained men.
And me.
I would die, I knew. But what choice did I have? They were ripping my family away. What person would run from their own blood?
I had killed already today, I thought, hefting the executioner’s axe. I was dizzy from exhaustion, and the mild poison of the few bramble needles that had poked through my leggings threatened to drop me into bramble sleep. But I made my decision, and moved toward the raiders.
As I did so, I pulled the executioner’s hood back over my face to protect myself from the taller clumps of bramble drooping off of the rocks.
I used the rocks and boulders of the dead landscape to get close to the raider trailing the column of prisoners. I was stunned by how large the man’s warhorse was. When its hooves slammed into the ground, I could feel them from twenty feet behind.
The hems of my cloak brushed bramble as I ran at the man’s back, and the horse whinnied as it sensed me. The raider spun in his saddle, spear swinging down in an arc as he looked for what had spooked the horse, and he spotted me.
He realized I was inside the spear’s reach, and he leaped off his horse to avoid the first high swing of my axe at his thigh, putting the horse between us. I ran in front of the giant beast to get at him, but before I could even raise the axe again, he attacked.
His red cloak flared out behind him, and the spear lashed out. I was slow, but I dodged the point. In response the man flicked it up and smacked the top of my head with the side of the shaft.
“And what do you think you’re doing?” the raider demanded. He sounded unhurried and calm.
“You stole my family,” I said as my knees buckled from the blow to the head. I fought to stand, and wobbled slightly. Hoofbeats thudded behind me.
The raider used the spear to hit me on the side of my head before I could even raise the axe to try and block the movement. His movements would have been too fast for me even if I hadn’t been tired from chasing them, or my blood filled with bramble poison. The blow dropped me to the ground, blood running down over my eyes inside the hood, blinding me.
“What do we have here?” a second raider voice asked, as feet hit the ground. My hood was ripped clear of my head.
The two raiders bent over me, dark eyes shadowed by their bronze helmets, spears pinning my cloak, and me, to the ground.
I blinked the blood out of my eyes and waited for death.
“It’s a woman,” the raider I’d attacked said.
“That’s quite plain,” said the other. “Should we kill her or take her with us?”
“She’s too old to go to the camps or to sell.”
The other raider nodded. “So we kill her?”
“She doesn’t need to be part of the Culling,” the older-sounding raider said. He shook his head. “No, she’s too old to have children. She’s no threat. Cripple her so she can’t follow us, then leave.”
The older raider remounted his horse and left.
The remaining raider and I stared at each, and then he reversed his spear. “The Way of the Six says that we should…”
I spat at him. The effort dizzied me. “I don’t care about your damned Way of the Six, slaver. Do what you came to do.”
He shrugged and slammed the butt of his spear into my ankle, crushing it.
As I screamed, he smacked my head. I fell back away, down into a patch of bramble the pierced my clothing.
