Looked round again: the second archer

face down in the trampled snow,

Iain sprawled beside him.

No farmers standing.

Connol tallied his soldiers. Iain dead.

Tamhas, Dunne, Liam downed by arrows. Dead.

Muiredach with an arrow in his shoulder.

Connol took his axe.

Went to the archer he’d killed,

chopped the archer’s hands off.

Opened the archer’s jaws,

set a severed hand in their bite.

Did the same to the second archer.

Less than Donal would have done,

and he took no satisfaction from it,

but a message for Horse Boy.

Headed back to Innis

with his remaining men.

FAULT

Seventy-eight men—

King Xau lay still,

eyes closed.

Seventy-eight men.

Seventy-six of them farmers

or farmhands. Two soldiers.

Xau lay still,

trying not to disturb Khyert,

once his stableboy,

now valet, aide, groom,

sleeping on a mat by the door.

Seventy-eight men.

Burnt. Stabbed. Mutilated.

To provoke Xau to war.

Seventy-eight deaths to start a war

that might kill tens of thousands.

Xau’s throat dry.

He lay still.

Forced himself to relax his muscles.

No good options.

To go to war in the bitter heart of winter,

try to maintain a supply line

despite snow and ice.

Or to stay put

as if nothing had happened,

perhaps persuade the other farmers to evacuate,

to follow their children to the towns.

Or to retaliate in kind:

to raid Donal’s farms,

order his soldiers to burn Donal’s farmers—

Xau sat up.

Reached for the water. Drank.

Khyert stood, came over.

“Can I get you anything?”

“No. Thank you.

Get some rest if you can.”

No good options,

but he’d chosen anyhow.

Tomorrow he would lead his army

to the Muir river to take out the bridges—

“It’s not your fault.”

Khyert’s voice quiet, diffident,

worried about him,

but all this was, in the end,

Xau’s fault.

Believing he could stop a war

that had continued,

overtly or surreptitiously,

for the past three hundred years—

Khyert still standing there,

watching him.

“Try to rest,” said Xau, again.

But Khyert sat,

cross-legged, by Xau’s bed.

Looked down at the floor.

Sang, very soft,

too quiet for the guards

stationed outside the door to hear,

a shepherd’s song about the greening trees,

the lambing ewes.

Xau closed his eyes.

POLTON

No survivors. Not even a dog.

A handful of stone buildings

jutted out of desolation,

snow falling over ash and bone.

King Donal had thought the reports

exaggerated until he stood there,

stood in the burnt remains

of what had once been a town.

Rourk, chief of his guards,

kicked the snowy ash with his boot.

“I’ll say this for Horse Boy.

He’s thorough.”

“Too thorough,” said Donal.

“I don’t see how he did it.

Unless his fucking horses

breathe fire now.”

That the lesser puzzle,

how Xau had razed Polton.

The greater puzzle,

that Xau had wanted to.

He’d misread Xau, thought him

constrained by moral qualms.

Donal ruthless enough himself,

but this more than he could stomach.

That one skeleton clutching another

so small it must have been newborn.