[Belin]

Those who would stack up the bodies side by side and count them would say that the losses of the settlement were greater than the Hillmen’s. This idea was not much comfort to Wolf, who knew that each man who was killed was a heavy loss to the Hillmen, who had always been few. There were few advantages in attacking their enemies this way. Central to the plan had been the hope of frightening these newcomers off with a show of greater force than they were actually able to muster. They had no warriors who had not been present, and any damage the southerners had done to the attackers was damage done to the Hillmen as a whole. It was too much. Wolf had learned much during the battle; he knew the settlers in a way he had not known them before. He had seen their grimaces as they drove his men out of their strange new buildings and the vehemence with which they had hacked away at anyone who came near them. He had drawn his conclusions about them.

They were a people who lived by war. Unlike the Hillmen, who used raids and hunts to get what they needed and were willing to spend the rest of the time quietly minding their own business, these intruders had a regularity about they way they killed people that suggested serious training and considerable practice. Wolf vaguely remembered stories he had been told in his youth, about a king who had helped them to defeat the southerners once and keep this land for themselves. The Hillmen must have been then as their enemies were now, practiced, grim killers whose lives consisted of little else.

But Wolf’s ancestors had had a reason for becoming killers. It had been the grim necessity of those who would defend the land that by rights was their own. He couldn’t fathom what had driven the southerners to become killers, but he imagined it as some event long past from which they had never truly recovered. They were still the killers they no longer needed to be, seeking out places to carry on their wars, and truly he could think of no other reason that they would want this land, which was not their homeland, after all. And that was the other thing that he had learned; they did want it, badly enough to battle past fear and resistance and the anger that faced them…. badly enough that they would not simply flee. He had seen it.

On the other hand, so did they. Bear was badly injured again, and Wolf thought, this time without a trace of irritation, that it was really Bear’s own fault, that he was the most reckless kind of warrior who would endanger himself and do whatever was needed. Certainly they could cure him again.

Certainly they could make a show of their own strength and determination before they were annihilated. Wolf would expect nothing less of his people.

They did seem exhilarated by their victory in this battle. Those who at some point in the battle had been near Bear were a bit more serious, gossiping quietly about their own theories of what had become of him, how Oak claimed to have seen him lying in a building, wounded by the blade of a frenzied southerner, and had found the brothers Fox and Mink to help carry him out, how Oak had been killed beating settlers away from that spot only to find that he had vanished. One young warrior whom a doting mother had optimistically named Star was spinning a tale for the others about how the pain of Bear's wound had come back to him in the battle and how he had helped him along, and much lighter Bear had become at that moment, but none of the others seemed to believe him. Wolf certainly didn't. For such a large man to simply disappear was strange, they all agreed, but none of them had any news of him for long after the fire was set.

Others of the Hillmen, many of them young, lacked even this solemnity. Some were truly impressed with their newfound prowess at war and insisted on recounting, at length, all their exploits to companions who wanted nothing better than a chance to tell their own. Others were all for mimicking the settlers’ errors. “It’s a pity we didn’t pick up some of that wine!” cried an enthusiastic man who, fortunately, Wolf could not identify in the darkness. “I hear it mixes well with what we picked up from those travelers last month!” Wolf snarled something thoroughly discouraging in his direction and there was no more talk of wine, but the voices of his men were neither quiet nor serious on the way back to the village. Wolf did not ask them to be either, not yet.

He also wondered, not for the first time, what had become of Fletch. Certainly he should have returned by now. Wolf was of two minds about the help of the other village. His new certainty that even another such battle would be insufficient to drive out the southerners made him hesitate to ask others to give up their whole village to the same fate as his own. But perhaps if Rook were to join them, others would too. In any case, he would have liked to have heard what Rook had said. Perhaps Fletch was on his way, or perhaps he had been delayed somewhere… Wolf moved to the edges of the group, searching for Knife, who he found in the midst of a detailed description of the inside of the town hall to the men who had killed the guards.

“I need to take care of something,” he said quietly. Knife raised an eyebrow, but Wolf ignored it. “I should be back early in the day, but I want to see if I can learn something. Please don’t let anything disastrous happen. And make sure everyone gets cured, whether they think they want it or not. The hard part of this is still ahead of us. I doubt that they will be able to attack us today, but it is coming. Keep that in mind.”

Knife stared at him. “And you want to leave?…”

“There’s something I need to know. I won’t be gone long. Will you do what I ask?”

With a long, pale glance over at the place on the horizon from where they had come, the village that had killed so many and the place where the earth had apparently devoured their brother, Knife nodded slowly. “Until noon, I will. Come back by then.”

“Yes.”

He had no plans to go farther than the stones where lightning had struck, a walk of one or two hours. Perhaps he would meet Fletch coming home from his journey, or perhaps he would find his bones. If they had allies, they would need them soon.