To his horror, a pair of ghosts drifted into view, wisps with still enough self-identity that one could identify them as farmers by their misty garb. They were so busy talking to each other, as if intent on escape, that they did not notice Shai’s attention.

“Eiya! I thought we’d escaped the calamity! Now they come down on us, when they missed us last time! Did you hide the feast bread and the nai cakes?”

“Eh, I did. Under the boards on the weaving house porch. Good thing the children are still hidden at the refuge. Think you we bought time for the women to get away?”

“I heard them running out here—”

A living cry roused their guards. “Heya! Heya! Bring in the prisoners! We’ll have roofs over our heads tonight, lads!”

As they marched in, Shai walked beside Yudit. “Listen,” he whispered, “I’ll create some manner of diversion. There might be loose boards on the porch of the weaving house, and food hidden beneath it. Be quick, if you can find it. Don’t let the soldiers see. Everyone gets a share.”

She looked startled, but nodded. The woods opened up into a small settlement, a village of three longhouses and a number of outbuildings, including a weaving shed. One of the longhouses and half of the outbuildings had been burned recently and left in disrepair, but the soldiers ripped through the intact ones, looting anything they could carry and smashing cupboards and walls as they laughed and howled. A trio ripped the roof off a thatched altar, while others trampled on prayer banners. Three farmers lay dead on the dirt, and two had faces Shai recognized: They’d been the ghosts on the path. Soldiers hooted as the sergeant opened the gate to the byre and was bowled over by a pair of nervous ewes rushing to escape.

Shai had spent much of his youth herding sheep up on Dezara Mountain, a good way to stay out of family quarrels. He knew every kind of story about shepherds, single men too poor to avail themselves of brothel fare, lads working the upper pastures for months at a time. Sometimes they did for each other, no shame in that up in the highlands among lads. But one time—hu!—he’d come across a man working at a ewe. Never would he forget that sight.

“Heya! Twist!” he shouted in a louder voice than he’d known he possessed. “I fancy those ones!”

He galloped after the ewes, grabbed clumsily at them and missed, purposefully tripped over his own feet in a mud-slopped puddle, and generally made such a horse’s ass of himself that the soldiers, roaring with laughter, all rushed to watch, cheering him on. He was soon winded and aching, but he kept on until Yudit made a show of getting in his way, and then he collapsed, heaving on hands and knees while the soldiers caught the ewes and, just like that, killed both to make a feast. The prisoners, rounded in to haul wood and set up camp, were all surreptitiously licking their fingers and wiping their mouths on their arms.