“Yet each time we simply stand by with our heads lowered and our hands open while the Wolves take what’s dearer to us than any crop or house or barn, they scoop a little more of the heart’s wood from the tree that is this village!” Tian spoke strongly, now standing still with the feather raised high in one hand. “If we don’t stand and fight soon, we’ll be dead anyway! This is what I say, Tian Jaffords, son of Luke! If we don’t stand and fight soon, we’ll be roont ourselves!”

Loud cries of Hear him! Exuberant stomping of shor’boots. Even some applause.

George Telford, another rancher, whispered briefly to Eisenhart and Overholser. They listened, then nodded. Telford rose. He was silver-haired, tanned, and handsome in the weatherbeaten way women seemed to like.

“Had your say, son?” he asked kindly, as one might ask a child if he had played enough for one afternoon and was ready for his nap.

“Yar, reckon,” Tian said. He suddenly felt dispirited. Telford wasn’t a rancher on a scale with Vaughn Eisenhart, but he had a silver tongue. Tian had an idea he was going to lose this, after all.

“May I have the feather, then?”

Tian thought of holding onto it, but what good would it do? He’d said his best. Had tried. Perhaps he and Zalia should pack up the kids and go out west themselves, back toward the Mids. Moon to moon before the Wolves came, according to Andy. A person could get a hell of a head start on trouble in thirty days.

He passed the feather.

“We all appreciate young sai Jaffords’s passion, and certainly no one doubts his courage,” George Telford said. He spoke with the feather held against the left side of his chest, over his heart. His eyes roved the audience, seeming to make eye contact— friendlyeye contact—with each man. “But we have to think of the kiddies who’d be left as well as those who’d be taken, don’t we? In fact, we have to protect all the kiddies, whether they be twins, triplets, or singletons like sai Jaffords’s Aaron.”

Telford turned to Tian now.

“What will you tell your children as the Wolves shoot their mother and mayhap set their Gran-pere on fire with one of their light-sticks? What can you say to make the sound of those shrieks all right? To sweeten the smell of burning skin and burning crops? That it’s souls we’re a-saving? Or the heart’s wood of some make-believe tree ?”

He paused, giving Tian a chance to reply, but Tian had no reply to make. He’d almost had them…but he’d left Telford out of his reckoning. Smooth-voiced sonofabitch Telford, who was also far past the age when he needed to be concerned about the Wolves calling into his dooryard on their great gray horses.

Telford nodded, as if Tian’s silence was no more than he expected, and turned back to the benches. “When the Wolves come,” he said, “they’ll come with fire-hurling weapons—the light-sticks, ye ken—and guns, and flying metal things. I misremember the name of those—”