“But maybe you know things we should know,” Cadlin said. “If trouble does come here, I mean.”

“Has there been trouble before? Pirates, someone said?”

“Only once in my life. Mostly the villages on the coast. Where our fish comes from.” The salted fish traded up the mountain for fruit and oil and leather.

“You should run away,” Stammel said, setting aside one tool for another. “Up the mountain. Pirates, renegades, they will not want to climb very high.”

“But last time they came, they broke everything—looms, pots, benches, beds—and then set afire what would burn.”

“Did they kill and rape?” Stammel asked. On the blur of his vision memory painted sharp images of one campaign after another, bodies strewn in fields, in cottages, in such workshops as this.

“No, we ran away,” Rort said. “But all had to be built again, and it was a hard winter. It would be better to fight, to have our homes, our tools.”

“It is true,” Stammel said, “that death makes winters easy. There is no hunger or thirst in death, no pain, no anger, and no sorrow. If that is what you want, then stay next time.” His words and the tone of his voice surprised him; he had not known he felt that way.

“I thought a soldier would want to fight,” Rort said. He sounded aggrieved, but then Rort often did.

“I did, when I was a soldier,” Stammel said. “It was my life, and I do not regret it. Now … I am no longer a soldier, and I exercise to keep myself fit for work, not … not killing.”

“The wizard left a gift for you,” Cadlin said. Stammel heard him get up from his stool and walk across the workshop. Something scraped—and as if he could see, he knew what it was that Cadlin had lifted down from a peg overhead. “He told me you were blind but not helpless, that you had used this to save others from harm. You might want it, he said.” Footsteps came nearer. “Here,” Cadlin said from close beside.

Stammel put out his hand and took the crossbow, running his heart-hand down the stock, checking the binding and the string automatically. He heard Rort draw in a sharp breath but did not know what expression of his face or movement of his hand had caused it. Slowly he stood up, careful not to bump the stool on which Cadlin’s tools lay waiting for sharpening, and walked to the back entrance. The men were silent.

“Did the wizard leave bolts?” he asked, even as he wondered why he was doing this. Why not put it down, refuse to hold it, refuse to use it ever again? He had no gods, like Paks, to tell him what to do. Tir had left him, when he could no longer see; Gird had never been his patron.

“Yes,” Cadlin said. “I’ll bring them.”