“Are you hunting down the outlaws?” she asked.

“Yes. We hunt them and we kill them.”

“Good!”

“Perhaps these are the ones who kill your husband?”

Grief caught her unexpectedly. Tears blurred her vision. “Or ones like them.”

Three eagles glided past, and one turned in a great loop that took it out of sight over the trees before it dropped back and came to earth with a thump on the path, just where the eagle that had saved them had first landed. A reeve unfastened from the harness and picked his way down the muddy path. He looked over Nallo, Avisha, and the children, shaking his head as he halted beside the soldier.

“What have you found, Tohon?” he asked.

“Maybe these strong young women will agree to be wives to the Qin soldiers.”

“It seems you saved them from a gruesome fate. That might persuade them, if your charms can’t.” The reeve was a good-looking man, with handsome features and a sympathetic expression as he nodded by way of acknowledging her. “I’m called Joss. I’m a reeve out of Argent Hall. You and your sister and the little ones look like you’ve been traveling for a while. That can’t be good, not in these days.”

“It was an eagle killed most of those soldiers, not these men,” said Nallo irritably. “I’d think that you being a reeve, you’d have seen it at once.”

“Would you? Aui! I am found out as a man with little wit and less observational skills.” But his smile took the sting out of the words, and anyway he seemed at ease laughing at himself. He seemed at ease, despite the brutal nature of his task, scouting for soldiers on the hunt for outlaws so they could kill them. If she hadn’t recognized the men who were on the run as similar in dress and look to those who had overrun the village, she wouldn’t have known who to distrust most. “Listen, verea. We haven’t much time, for as you can see we’ve urgent work at hand hunting down this army of outlaws. We can leave you on the road and let you go your way, or we can direct you to a sheltered spot where you can wait for the Olo’osson militia to escort you to a place of safety.”

“Does that include the offer of marriage?”

He looked at Tohon and laughed again. “Are you making that offer to every woman you meet on the road?”

“No harm in asking,” said the other man. “The young men will want wives. A man isn’t complete without a woman. Nor can he fill his tent with children, and what is a man after all without children?”

“He might be something like me,” said the reeve without heat, “so I think your point is well taken. What will it be, verea?”

Belatedly, Nallo realized that Reeve Joss was surely only a little younger than her husband, only he did not seem old as her husband always did. She said, “I’m called Nallo. This is my husband’s daughter, Avisha, and her brother and sister. My husband’s dead.”