Owlflight

A monster? Bandits? Surely not war - who would we be fighting? The Hawkbrothers? No, that’s not possible. Surely there is some other explanation -

Derrel Lutter stood beside Nandy, who was still ringing the bell with wide-eyed determination. Her hair had come undone and flew in wild tendrils all about her face. Beside Derrel was a stranger holding the reins of a tired horse, whose clothing showed the effects of a hard ride, and whose face was pinched with terror he was trying not to let loose.

“Don’t try to fight, you fools,” the man shouted over the bell and the shouting, his voice cracking with strain. “Run, I tell you, run! I tried to tell you before, and you didn’t believe me! This isn’t some band of brigands, this is an army, and you haven’t a chance against it!”

Bewildered, Justyn looked around and saw Vere coming back to the square with a determined scowl on his face and a boar-spear in his hands, and seized his arm. “What in the name of heaven is going on?” he shouted.

Vere thrust his chin at the stranger. “That there’s a feller from Riverford Farm, big estate upwater where Derrel does some trading,” he shouted back. “Derrel vouches for him. Came riding in ‘bout mid-dinner. Says a gang of men and monsters came storming in and massacred everybody in sight; says he was out with the herds and managed to get away on his horse and make a run for it. He wasn’t too clear on what he’d seen, not then anyway, so we figured it was bandits, and Tom Kalley rounded up the militia.” The man paused when he saw the look of noncomprehension on Justyn’s face. “He mounted up, and led ‘em out, just like always. Wasn’t nothing to frighten the women about, he thought, so nobody told ‘em except for the ones whose men hadda go; men’d just go out, turn ‘em away from the village, and send a messenger over to Lord Breon. You know we ain’t never had no trouble before. We figgered Riverford just been caught out, that’s all. Too bad for them, but we were ready, see?”

Justyn shook his head, not yet understanding the cause for such a high level of panic. The Errold’s Grove militia never had experienced any trouble discouraging bandits from coming after the town. It didn’t make any sense!

Vere wasn’t through yet. “One of them - just one - came back a short bit ago; his horse was foundering, and it dropped and died right after he tumbled off. The rest - they’re gone.”

Justyn gaped at him. The militia - twenty men in all - were well armed and quite adequately trained, and their ability to fight on horseback had given them a considerable edge over bandits, who were generally afoot and even when horsed did not know how to fight as a group. When the Guard had been forced to leave to go to the front, the Queen had no intention of leaving them defenseless; she had sent spare horses and arms, and someone to train volunteers from the village in fighting. Their Herald had supervised the training, and had seen to it that the trainer left instructions on drilling and practices, which the militia undertook with religious regularity. One of the duties of their Herald was to make sure that they stayed in training, and the occasional bandits only gave them incentive to continue that way. Justyn had watched them, and they weren’t bad - and the level of their expertise was obvious in the fact that they had handled every bandit group that they had come up against. How could they have been wiped out so easily?

The stranger grabbed Nandy and took the bell-rope out of her hands by force, so that the clangor finally stopped. “Listen to me - Listen to me!” he shouted, and the cries and screams stopped as abruptly as the cessation of the bell peals. His words fell into the sudden silence like cold, round stones into a pool.

“You heard the boy - your men are dead,” he said forcefully, and a woman’s hysterical sob pierced the quiet, only to be muffled by her neighbor pulling her head into the shelter of her shoulder. The stranger ignored her. “You can’t do anything for them; you can only save yourselves, and there’s not much time to do that. Send someone downriver to Kelmskeep and Lord Breon, someone on a fast horse or in a swift boat and do it now. The rest of you, grab what you can, and run, as fast and as far as you can. This is no bandit horde, I’m telling you, I know because I saw them. This is an army; it’s men and monsters, and it looks like a demon is leading them. They killed everyone at Riverford that resisted, and they’ll do the same here.”

Now Justyn saw that young Ado Larsh, barely seventeen and the youngest member of the militia, was sitting on the platform beside the stranger; there was a bloody rag acting as a bandage around his head and one eye, and another binding his arm. He looked white, in deep shock, but nodded in confirmation of everything the man said.

“What about those who didn’t resist?” Widow Clay called out sharply. “What happened to them?”

Someone else growled, and a few of her neighbors cast her angry looks, but she gave them back look for look. “There are some of us,” she pointed out, “who can’t run. Myself and Kyle, for two. What happened to those who didn’t resist?”

The stranger shook his head. “I don’t know. I didn’t wait around to see. But I can tell you that from the smoke that rose up behind me, it looked to me like they put every building on the estate to the torch, and I can only hope there wasn’t anyone in those buildings when they went up.”

“Th-th-they’re m-m-moving f-f-fast,” Ado stammered. “C-c-can’t b-be f-far b-b- behind.”

There was silence then, nothing but silence. Clearly, no one knew what to do next, and if no one took charge, in a moment, there would be nothing but blind panic. People would be caught between trying to hide and trying to escape, torn between saving possessions and getting away quickly, and managing only to confuse matters further. If someone didn’t tell them what to do, nothing would be done at all, and they would all die stupidly and uselessly.