“Perhaps better so.” Morgot nodded. “We bait them, Joshua. And we pray you’ve seen rightly that there are no more than six.”
They drove the donkeys into a thick grove of trees, and Stavia watched in amazement as Joshua opened a panel in the side of the wagon and removed several lengths of chain. With these, he chained the donkeys to the wagon and the wagon to several of the trees, making the fastenings tight with many tight turns of tough wire.
“They might try to cut the animals loose in the dark,” he said. “Or make off with the wagon. They can’t. They won’t be able to get any part of it loose and go running off with it.”
Then Morgot moved around the wagon, laying fires. She laid five of them, getting Stavia to bring sticks, and piling them thickly above thin, shaved kindling. When this was done, she sprinkled each pile of sticks with powder and laid a trail of the powder to a point close to the wagon. It had the sharp, interesting smell of fireworks.
“Now, we eat,” said Joshua, building a small fire at some distance from this arrangement. “We’ll have tea, and munch our supper, and lay our blankets out over there, where we’re in plain sight, and then, as soon as it’s dark, we’ll go back in there where the wagon is. Got that?”
“Stavia goes up a tree,” Morgot remarked. “I’ve got it all picked out.”
Stavia opened her mouth to protest, then shut it again. There was no point in protesting. She had no idea what she was protesting against. There were a number of things going on that she could not understand.
Nor did she have any better idea when the star-pricked dark came down like a heavy curtain and she found herself tied to a thick branch twenty feet above the wagon, a folded blanket cushioning her from the ragged bark.
“Not a word,” Morgot had said. “Not a sound. If you are in pain, suffer silently and not a squeak.”
The only sound from beneath her was small talk, the mumbled exchange of people readying themselves for sleep. Nothing at all interesting. Darkness. Discomfort. A sky full of glaring stars. Somewhere something moving in the underbrush.
Stavia tensed.
A birdcall, like a signal. Not Joshua, not Morgot. Then people, moving.
A cry. A flare of light, darting off in different directions like a starfish of fire, then leaping flames from the fires Morgot had laid. Stavia saw people beneath her, scurrying figures near the donkeys, near the wagon, several other strangers staring around themselves, taken by surprise, one starting to turn his head when his head came off and bounced away down the hill. A silver wheel was turning where his head had been. The wheel whipped away. Stavia opened her mouth to scream, then decided to bite down hard on her tongue instead.
Someone else screamed and then stood there, staring at the place where his arm had been. He had been leaning over Morgot’s blankets with a knife raised in the hand which was no longer there. Other cries, shrieks, something silver whirling like a great platter, around and around. Stavia couldn’t help it. She gasped.
Beneath her, someone looked up, saw her, grimaced through discolored teeth, and started up the tree. The silver platter came out of the fire-lit shadows and plucked him away, in halves.
There was a great quiet. Only the firesounds. A light wind. Joshua was beside the wagon, putting something beneath the wagon floor. A short handle and a chain with a curved knife at its end. Morgot handed him another, then took a pair of wood-handled pliers and began unwiring the chain that tied the donkeys.
“Alas,” said Morgot. “Alas, such is the fate of warriors’ sons.” Her voice was soft, flat, unemotional, and yet there was an undercurrent of exhaustion in it, as it sometimes sounded when she came home from a long Council meeting or when Stavia came upon her in the middle of the night, in the kitchen, brooding silently over a cup of cooling tea. “Stavia. You can come down now.”
“I’m coming.”
“Step directly into the wagon, daughter. There’s a good deal of gore around.”
“How… how many of them were there?”
“Joshua?”
“I counted seven. I felt one going away.” His voice was weary and depressed.
“I’ll get our blankets.” Morgot was gone, stepping over and around misshapen objects which littered her way. In a moment she returned. “These will have to be laundered. Josh, look at the shoulder on that body over there.”
He went to lean over it. “Melissaville tattoo,” he said. “The one down in the hollow had a Mollyburg label on him.”
“I saw one Annville and one Tabithatown. I think the other two were Gypsies.”
“Almost as though they’d been detailed here, wasn’t it?” Joshua asked. “Picked out, one from here, one from there.”
“What do you think?”
“I think the one that got away would have had a Marthatown tattoo. Aside from that, there’s nothing much. Fuzzy. Confused. No real intentions yet.”
“Someone may come looking for them.”
Joshua sighed. “I remember there being a ravine about two miles back.”
Morgot sighed as well. “Stavia, go over beside that rock, spread out your blankets, and stay there until I call you.”
“Mother, what does…?”
“Your oath, Stavia.”
“Was not to say anything about it afterward.”
“It is now afterward. Not a word.”
Stavia bit her already somewhat mangled tongue. They weren’t going to tell her. They weren’t going to explain. They were going to leave it just as it was. She stepped down into the wagon. One of the boards of the wagon bed was not quite flat. She kicked it and it dropped into place. There was something under it. Obviously. Some kind of weapon. Weapons. But Joshua was not a warrior. And Morgot…
And she had given her oath not to ask.
She looked up to find Joshua’s eyes upon her, his head cocked warningly.
She took her blankets to the rock Morgot had
