Owlflight

troubled thoughts.

Those thoughts weren’t really coherent; too much had happened to him for coherency. He had the vague feeling that perhaps this was the root of what bothered him - events had taken him so completely by surprise that he wasn’t acting anymore, he was reacting.

At least before, when anything happened to me, it was generally because I’d already done something to make those things happen, he thought. And it was usually something that I knew would make trouble. It was true he hadn’t had a lot of control over his own life, but at least he’d had some, and he’d had choices, even if it was only the choice to resist what other people had in mind for him.

But now - fate or chance was hitting him with one hammer blow after another, not even giving him the time to reel back from one blow before slamming him with the next. Being invited to join the Hawkbrothers was the first thing that had happened in days that involved any choice for him.

And now that he’d accepted, he felt strange. There was a creeping sense that he had betrayed the people of Errold’s Grove in some way, and yet at the same time he resented the fact that he felt that way. What right had they to claim his loyalty? Why should he chain his fate to theirs?

There was guilt, too, a great deal of it, and he wasn’t at all sure what to do about it. What had happened to the folk of the village? He hadn’t made any real effort to find out. Surely he ought to at least do that. And no matter what Snowfire said, how could anyone be sure there was nothing that he could have done that would have saved Justyn? Maybe if he’d been beside his master on that bridge, the way any good apprentice would have been, the outcome would have been different. All right, so he didn’t have any real magic yet, but he’d learned a lot at the side of his parents, and maybe he would have been able to do something that would have saved them both. I could have jumped off the bridge when he set it afire, and dragged him along with me. I can swim, even if he couldn‘t. Or - His mind buzzed with a hundred absurd things he might have done, or could have done, or thought he could have done, and all of them just made him feel guiltier.

He became so engrossed in his thoughts that he didn’t realize that the horse had stopped eating and was sneaking through the forest at a fast, if furtive, walk, until he saw a landmark he recognized with a start. He knew then that they were getting far. too close to Errold’s Grove for comfort and made a grab for the reins.

But the horse was an older hand at this game than he was; with a flip of its head, it tossed the reins out of reach, and increased its pace. Darian didn’t have to be able to read its thoughts to know what they were - the beast had scented its herdmates, and it was going to get back to them by whatever means it took. The blacksmith had explained once why all the horses in the village were kept in a single herd; horses weren’t happy alone, and even though the Errold’s Grove “herd” wasn’t a breeding herd, the lack of a stallion was no impediment to the horses’ comfort in each other.

This horse probably felt the same about the rest of the horses he was used to being with, and no dim memory of mistreatment was going to overwhelm the urgent need on his part to get back to the safety of the herd. Darian considered trying to throw himself out of the saddle, but the horse was going faster now, and suddenly the ground seemed very far away to a boy who’d never done more than steal rides on the innkeeper’s old pony. With the horse moving, he didn’t know how to get himself out of the saddle and onto the ground without breaking something. So he just held grimly to the saddle, gritted his teeth against the jolting, and prayed that they wouldn’t run into any enemy sentries.

The trees cleared away up ahead, and Darian felt his heart stop with terror as he thought they were almost at the village. But the horse hesitated as the tree cover thinned, and Darian managed to seize the reins before the recalcitrant beast managed to bolt into the middle of town.

But then, Darian realized that the daylight ahead of them was not the daylight of the cleared fields. Somehow the horse had managed to come out of the forest at the top of the only bluff that overlooked the village. How it had managed that, Darian had no clue, but once he dismounted and led the horse cautiously to the edge of the bluff, he had as good a view of the village as if he’d been sitting in one of the trees.

But what he saw made his skin crawl, and filled him with the desperate feeling he had to do something, along with the knowledge that there was nothing he could do.

In the distant fields were people, people he recognized, toiling like beasts in the heat of midday. Hitched to plows like oxen were the biggest men of the village, sweating beneath the blows of a whip held in the hands of a stranger. Behind them, guiding the plows through the fields meant to be sown with late-ripening crops, were the women, who were also chained in their places. Others worked, chained at the waist in pairs, beneath the watchful eyes of more strangers. These men weren’t wearing the armor that Darian remembered, but he knew they must be the same men who had invaded the village.

As to why men were being used to pull the plows instead of oxen, well, the smell of roasting beef coming up the bluff certainly provided a reasonable explanation. There were no oxen now, and the horses had probably been confiscated to serve the army.

How many of the villagers had been recaptured? Enough, evidently, to provide field-slaves for their conquerors.

Darian found his hands clenched on his bow without any memory of reaching for it. He could sneak in closer, get a position up in one of the trees, and start picking off guards. They weren’t wearing armor; they’d be easy shots -

I could kill all the guards I see and they could escape, I could lead them to the Hawkbrothers -