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the path. She did not look at him, and it seemed to her, by the way he swung the shaft of his halberd out before him, that he did not look at her. Yet it was still comforting to walk beside another person, companions on the long march. Ahead, the rest of the band set out, keeping a bit of distance between them.
    "The elders spoke to me yesterday." His voice was a little hoarse, the way it got when he was aroused, or irritated.” They said that the reason we never made a child between us was because your magic has leached all the fertility from you. They said that if I don't give up thinking of you that evil spirits will drain me, too, and I'll never be able to make a child with another woman."
    Her feet fell, one step and another and another. She couldn't make any thoughts come clear. The sun was bright. The path wound through woodland where a fresh breeze hissed through leaves.
    "I never wanted any woman like I wanted you. But that has to be done with now. So be it. The elders say that Mother Nahumia's eldest daughter over at Old Fort just last moon set her man's hunting bag outside the door and made him leave. She'll be looking for a new man, then, won't she?"
    "You'd have to go to Old Fort," said Adica, since he seemed to expect her to say something.” You'd have to live there."
    "That's true. But I've a mind to leave. I've even thought of walking farther east, to hunt for a season with my Black Deer cousins."
    "That's a long way," said Adica, and heard her own voice trembling, not able to speak the words without betraying the fear in her own heart.
    "So it is," he agreed, and he waited again, wanting her sympathy or regret, perhaps, or an attempt to talk him out of this rash course of action. But she couldn't give him more. She had already offered her life to her people, and the magic hadn't even left her a child to keep her name alive among them.
    "You're a good war captain, Beor," she said.” The village needs you. Will you at least wait until my work is done before you go? Then maybe it won't matter that they lose you " Here she faltered. It was forbidden to speak aloud of the great weaving, because words were power, not to be carelessly cast to the four winds in case the Cursed Ones overheard them.” At least wait until then."
    He grunted but made no other answer, and after a bit picked up their pace so that they fell in with the others. Since the others feared speaking to her, and would not look at her, she might as well have been walking alone.
    The sun had risen halfway to noon by the time they reached Four Houses, a scatter of a dozen sheds, huts, pit houses, and four respectable compounds, each one boasting a round house at each corner with a thatched roof and a rock wall built into storage sheds between. A half-dozen adults labored at a ditch, digging with antlers and hauling away the dirt in bark buckets.
    The war captain of Four Houses was a stout woman with two scars who went by the name Ulfrega and who wore the string skirt that marked her as a woman old enough to choose a marriage partner. By the evidence of the pale birth threads that decorated Ulfrega's belly above the band of her low-slung skirt, she had survived several pregnancies.
    Ulfrega led them down past the river, through woodland rife with pigs, and along a deer trail that led to the Red Deer settlement. Two round houses and six storage pits lay quiet under the summer sun. Strangely, one of the round houses was entirely burned down to the stone half wall while the other stood as fresh and whole as if it had been built a month ago and lived in only yesterday. There was also a stone corral and a hayrick and a very neatly laid out vegetable garden, lush with ripening vegetables. Flies buzzed. A crow flapped lazily away as they approached. Even the village dogs had fled the carnage. The village lay empty except for a single abandoned corpse.
    The Red Deer settlers had begun digging a ditch, too, and had gotten a rampart and ditch halfway around