The Gold Falcon by Katharine Kerr

through the last of the pines. No one spoke; everyone kept one hand on his sword hilt and the reins of his horse in the other. Cut stumps appeared among the grasses and weeds of second growth. One last bend in the trail brought them to the long broad valley, green with ripening wheat and meadowland. A couple of miles off to the west the Melyn ran, a thin sparkling line at their distance. Gerran could just make out a patch of black beside it—Neb’s farm, he assumed.
    “I don’t see any Horsekin,” Cadryc remarked. “Don’t see much of anything but grass.”
    “True spoken, Your Grace,” Gerran said. “Most likely the bastards are long gone.”
    “We’ve got to get more fighting men down here. All there is to it!”
    “Or else stop these cursed raids once and for all, Your Grace,” Gerran said. “If the king would lend us an army—”
    “That’s in the laps of the gods,” Cadryc said. “We’ll worry about the grand schemes later. We’ve got a hard job to do right now.”
    With a wave of his arm the tieryn led them forward. They rode on down to the smoking tangle of wood and ashes that had once been Brwn’s farm. The fire had leaped to the apple tree outside the earthen wall and left it as black and gaunt as a dead sentry, but the damp grass still grew green beyond. Nearby lay the corpse of a tall, burly man, his head torn half off his shoulders. In the hot sun he lay swollen and stinking. Birds and foxes had eaten a good bit of him. Salamander rode up to join Gerran and the noble-born.
    “Neb’s uncle,” Salamander said. “What’s left fits the description anyway.”
    “Let’s get him buried,” Cadryc said. “There’s naught else to do for him.”
    “We might as well wait and dig one long ditch,” Pedrys said. “I’ll wager there’s more dead men ahead of us.”
    Unfortunately, Pedrys had spoken the truth. When they rode up to the ruins of the village, they found the first corpses about three hundred yards from the bridge. Four men lay in a straggling line, cut down as they tried to flee. Another twelve lay in the village square, either rotting and spongy or half-burned. The latter had most likely been killed in their houses, then caught under burning beams and walls.
    “But who pulled them free?” Pedrys said. “What is this? Did the raiders want to count their kills?”
    “Most likely they just wanted to make sure they’d slaughtered the lot,” Gerran said.
    “If so, they did a bad job of it,” Salamander said. “Neb told me how many men and lads were in the village, you see. The women and children are long gone by now, of course, prize booty, all of them. So there should be twenty dead, not counting Neb’s uncle.”
    “Then that leaves four men missing,” Pedrys said. “Maybe they got away in time.”
    But three of the men turned up lying dead, clustered together by the village well where, apparently, they’d tried to make a stand. One corpse still clutched a hay rake.
    “Why didn’t the raiders put these men with the others?” Salamander said. “I wonder if someone interrupted them?” He looked up as if he were studying the sky.
    “I doubt me if the gods came down to help,” Gerran said. “Come along. There’s one villager still missing.”
    Although the men searched the village thoroughly, they never found that last corpse. By the time they’d finished, the younger men in the warband had turned white-faced and shaky; a few had rushed off to vomit. It was the pity of it more than the stench and rot that troubled Gerran: peaceful farmers, slaughtered like their own hogs as they tried to defend themselves and their women with sticks and axes against swords and spears.
    Yet even though they’d lost the fight in the end, the farmers had gained one small victory. Pinned under a half-burned roof beam lay the charred corpse of a Horsekin warrior. Gerran found him as he searched the ruins of the village smithy. At his shout Daumyr strode over with Warryc trotting after.