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before Talen took his beating, Barg, the harvest master and butcher of the village of Plum, stood in the crisp light of early morning with a number of men, waiting to murder the smith, his wife, and their two children.
    Oh, none of them called it murder, but all knew that’s where this would lead. And what choice did they have?
    The villagers had been joined by others in the district and divided into groups positioned around the smith’s. One group hid behind the miller’s. Another, the one lead by Barg, kept itself behind Galson’s barn. The third waited in a small grove on the outskirts of the village.
    The men with Barg stood for an hour, checking the buckles of what armor they had, wrestling with the shock of the matter, and waiting for the signal in silence. At first, a handful of the outsiders had boasted of what they’d do. “Mark me,” a Mokaddian wearing the turquoise of the Vargon clan said. His Vargon accent was plain, rolling his r ’s much too long. “I will land one of the first five strokes.”
    Barg cut off a handful of his hair with a knife to show his mourning. “You’ll be one of the first five he guts.” He grasped another handful of hair and sawed through it.
    “What do you know?” the Vargon said.
    “I know that today I will help kill a man who saved my life.” He cast another clump of shorn hair to the ground. “The smith is a roaring lion. You had best beware.”
    The Vargon said nothing in return, but what could he say? He was only trying to cover his fears. Sparrow the smith was a formidable warrior, and if the accusations against him were true, then it was certain some of those who had gathered today would die.
    The approaching dawn silvered the fields and thatch roofs about the village and set the roosters to crowing. The cattle in the paddocks began to low, a stray dog outside the alewife’s barked at a snake trying to get to the tall grass, and down in the south field a few straggling deer decided it was now time to leave the fields and find cover. The men knew their signal was only minutes away.

    On the side of the village closest to the forest and the Galson’s homes, the smith’s daughter, Sugar, stood in the barn feeding their two horses and heard the jingle of a trap bell in her garden. It was followed by the panicked cry of a hare.
    Nothing ever got away from one of Sugar’s traps. And from the sound of the scuffling and ringing, this creature was big. All that commotion was sure to bring Midnight and Sky, her family’s dogs. She’d trained them to leave her game alone, but these two liked to bend the rules whenever they could. So Sugar put down the hay fork, and told Fancy, their mare, and Sot, their draft horse she’d return later. Then she picked up her smothering sack and stepped out of the barn and into the yard in her bare feet.
    The village homes looked like fat ships floating amidst a sea of grain. But it was not a quiet sea. Da had flung both doors to the smithy open and stood at the forge hammering away at his work. Farmer Galson’s cattle bellowed. They were the noisiest bunch of cattle in the whole district. Sugar saw them bunched up at the far end of their paddock, waiting for one of Galson’s grandsons to open the gate so they could go to the watering pond. But that was odd . . . someone should have led them out long ago.
    Beyond the paddock gate stood the thatch-roofed homes for Farmer Galson, his children, and his adult grandchildren. Almost a village all by itself. The soft yellow light of hearth fires still shone in many of the windows. Outside, one of the wives made her way back from the privy in a pale nightgown. She held a wailing babe on her hip.
    The woman looked up, and Sugar waved across the field at her, but she did not wave back; instead, she dashed for her house. Maybe she hadn’t seen Sugar. But then again, maybe she had. Some of the Galsons thought they rode a lord’s high horse.
    Sugar walked to the garden, opened the gate, and