As had human agency: Four figures picked their way along the stream's bank, overturning skulls, using a spade to pry loose rib cages overgrown by grass. They were so intent on their task that they didn't notice the eagles passing overhead.
Peddo stayed aloft. Joss sent Scar down. The eagle fanned his tail and threw his legs forward. They thumped home. Trouble came down right beside him, and both reeves were out of their harness and scrambling as the children-for they were children-gawped up at them with their scavenger's tools hanging forgotten in grubby hands.
The eldest among them, a girl, began to cry without audible weeping, just a smudging trickle on dirty cheeks. She was that scared. The littlest was a scrap of a thing, and it took off only to be grabbed by the Snake and slung roughly back to stand with the other three. There it cowered, hiding its left arm behind its back. Looking them over, Joss saw that one of the middle children was lacking an ear and the other had a twisted hand broken somehow and healed all wrong. The younger two had swollen bellies, and all four had various sores on crusted lips, swollen redrimmed eyes, flies buzzing around pus-ridden blisters on their bare arms and legs, and besides all that an unhealthy stink in addition to the obvious stink of children who haven't been taken to the baths in months.
They stood in the midst of tumbled remains, which were scoured until nothing but bone and scraps of decaying cloth was left. He was surprised that none of the Lady's wandering mendicants had gathered the bones and burned them in order to properly complete the rites to placate the restless dead.
'What you going to do, ver?' asked the eldest. She had a squint that made her look defiant, but in fact it came from a cut at one eye that had scarred and pulled her lid tight. Like the others, she was as thin as if she'd been constructed out of sticks, with a hollow face and deep-set eyes.
'I'm Reeve Joss,' he said gently. 'What are your names?'
She looked at him as if he were crazy, and did not answer.
He tried again. 'Where is your family? Kinfolk? Parents?' But he knew what the answer would be before he heard it.
She shrugged. 'Gone,' she said as her hand dropped down to brush the shoulder of the earless one. With her good hand, Broken Hand took hold of the elbow of Littlest.
'How came that about?'
She shrugged.
'What of other kin? Aunties and uncles? Anyone to take you in?'
She shrugged. The others stood stock-still with well-practiced silence. They had been alone long enough that they knew the routine.
'The temples take in such as these little criminals,' said the Snake.
'We're not going there!' she said fiercely. 'They just make slaves of us, and split us apart. City folk are that way, willing to make slaves of themselves, that's what my dad says. But our people don't do that. We're doing okay. We're doing good enough.'
The Snake chuffed a laugh. 'Doesn't look that way to me.'
'What are you doing out here?' Joss asked before he lost her, for he knew how some clammed right up when faced with scorn.
She indicated the rib cage she'd been trying to pry up. 'There was a battle here, oh I don't know, a year or two ago so they say.'
'White Lion year,' chirped Broken Hand. 'During the Flower Rains.'
'That's right,' said Eldest. 'We got rights just like anyone to come see what we may find, ver.'
'Looters!' said the Snake with his habitual sneer. 'Grave robbers.'
'Shut it!' snapped Joss. He looked back at the girl, who appraised this exchange with a raised eyebrow and a nudge of the foot to Earless. 'Looks like this field is well scavenged already. As it would be, since it's coming on three years since the battle happened. What are you finding?'
'You going to try to take it from us, ver?' she asked, not with any sort of challenge.
'If I was, I wouldn't say so at first, would I?'
He thought to crack a smile from her, but she just looked at him and considered what he had said with the flat stare of a child who has long since hunkered down to the serious business of survival and is doubtful she will make it. She might have gotten on better without the littler ones, but people often made that choice because they could make no other. Sometimes they even made it because it was the just thing to do.
'You're reeves,' she said.
'So we are, as I said.'
'Those reeves out of Horn Hall, they don't come around no more. You from Horn Hall?'
'We're not.'
'Didn't think so.' She shrugged again, as though ridding herself of a weight. 'We none of us know why-that they stopped coming round, I mean. It just is that way now, and were that way from before.'
'From before what?'
'Before we come to Horn.'
'Where did you come from?'
The Snake moved off upwind, wrinkling his nose against the stink, but Joss held his position despite the strength of their sickly sweet-sour smell.
She looked away from him, blinking rapidly. 'Dunesk Valley, up in the Ossu. We come from there. Can't live there now.'
'What happened?'
She shrugged.
'Where do you live now?'
'Horn. At least, the folk mostly leave us alone if we bide in the alleys and bother no one. If we find something or other, maybe we can sell it.'
'Found a ring,' piped Littlest proudly. 'I did!'
'Hush,' said Broken Hand, pinching Littlest's skin until it whimpered.
'That was last month,' said Eldest hastily. 'Lest you're thinking it was just now.'
Which, by the nervous set of their chins and the way her gaze flicked toward Earless, made him understand that in fact they had found something just now. In fact, they believed that two reeves might likely steal what they had. That's what they thought of reeves. It made him want to shout in frustration.
'You need to tell me what happened in Dunesk Valley,' he said instead, because understanding a thing was often the only way to solve it. 'I need to know, because I'm a reeve. You know it's our job to set things right.'
'That's what we used to think, but them at Horn Hall just stopped coming.'
'When was that?'
For a long while she was silent. Earless let go her hand and edged a few steps away, crouched down at the bank, and ladled some water into his mouth. The Snake had backed up and was staring toward the distant boulders. Peddo was nowhere in sight.
Then she started talking in a voice as flat as her gaze, as if all emotion had long since been crushed out of her. 'Dunesk's about a day's walk, by the trail, and one time we come down to Horn a few years back-'
'Snake year it was,' said Broken Hand.
'— that's right, just after that one made his second year.' She pointed to the littlest. 'Four years ago,' Joss said.
She nodded. 'We came down because Dad and Uncle had hides to trade. But then the raiders came. There was all kinds of things they were doing, so our dad he sent us into town because it isn't safe up there no more. We sleep on the street. Mostly folk leave us alone, not always.'
That not always made him wince. She was old enough, if a man had a fancy for veal, which he did not, and anyway any child was old enough for those who had a taste for that manner of cruelty.
He asked, 'What of your dad? Or your uncle? Are they still living?'
She choked. 'I hope so.'
'It sounds awful, living in Horn as you do. You ever thought of going back home?'
She would not meet his eye. 'Awful is what they do in the villages, if they catch you.'
'What do they do?'
She shuddered and would not speak, and when finally he offered some dry flat-bread out of his pouch, she
