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of fighting, of other men shouting, of Arville and Ryu howling, of angry whinnies and hoofbeats.
    :Get back!: Mayar “shouted” in her mind.
    She cleared Laurel and Alma away from the doors; there was a furious kick and a crash and the door burst open.
    Through the now-open doors poured a tangled heap of people and nets, some free and fighting and some not, followed by all five Companions, relentlessly driving them all inside. Arville and Ryu were the most tangled up, but there were some strangers in there too, all of them masked and draped in tattered rags that smelled like mold and rotting wood.
    Masked they might have been, but they were fighters; Elyn slashed Ryu and Arville free with her sword while Alma and Laurel joined in the fight. By now all the noise had brought the villagers out of their homes and up to the barn; several of the bravest grabbed pieces of firewood and waded into the affray while the Companions circled the outside of the mob and kept anyone from escaping—
    —including one masked miscreant, who, alone among all of them, was not armed and not fighting. Mayar was the one who caught him by the scruff of the neck in his teeth as he tried to get away, and kept him dangling off the ground while the rest of the gang was subdued and trussed up.
    With them was an assortment of noisemakers that had produced all the unearthly howls. There were bull-roarers, a set of several predator-calls strapped together so they could all be sounded at the same time, and a contraption with a rough piece of twine that could be pulled through something like a drum-head of rawhide, producing a truly uncanny moan.
    “I told you it was just people!” Rod shouted in triumph, when the last of them—the fellow dangling from Mayar’s teeth—was firmly bound and set with the rest.
    By now all of the village—most tellingly, all of the youngsters, including the ones that Rod had suspected—had crowded into the barn. “Well it might not have been spirits,” Laurel sniffed, examining first her improvised club, which she then cast aside, and then her nails. “But it wasn’t who you thought it was.”
    And hanging in the air was the unspoken so there!
    “Let’s find out who it is, then,” Elyn said evenly, before they could start fighting again. She pulled the mask off the one nearest her, revealing a fellow with a lot of bruises, a black eye, and a surly expression. She looked at the villagers. “Anyone you know?”
    Baffled, they all shook their heads. She continued to pull off masks, to similar bafflement, until she came to the last. Then came the gasps.
    “Old man Hardaker!” shouted someone. The old man snarled, but said nothing. “Why would you do this to us?”
    “I think I know,” Alma said in a hard voice, and came forward with that bit of cloth. “Look.”
    She opened it up, and a small piece of something yellow and shining glimmered in the lamplight.
    They all stared. “Great Havens,” Elyn finally said. “Is that gold?”
    The villagers gasped as Alma nodded. “You know how Herald Bevins always says ‘Find the motive and you find the criminal?’ I went looking for a motive. When we were up at Stony Rill I thought I saw a little bit of gold-sand, so I started gathering up what I thought were likely bits of sand and rock. I panned this out of what I crushed up.” She grinned in triumph. “When Rod told me the story the boys had told him, I was pretty sure I was right, anyway. The old man here was digging for treasure, all right, but it wasn’t in a burial mound. And when Stony Rill turned red, it was just because he’d been washing the gold-rock. Right, old man?”
    Hardaker spat in her direction.
    “I made sure it was real gold by pounding it into a flake and testing it against a touchstone. It’s real, all right.” Alma beamed at the villagers. “You folks have a nice little gold mine here. And before we leave, we’ll draw you up a charter so you can all share alike in the work and the