Wistan, and he didn’t have a carrier to hold the child on his back. A coarse hemp feed bag, hanging among the tack on the wall, caught his gaze. Brys took it down, let the straps out as far as they would go and stuffed Wistan inside. The straps wouldn’t fit over his shoulders, so he knotted both ends of a quirt to the feed bag and used that as a strap instead. He fitted the makeshift carrier across his body, settling the baby against his chest, and fastened his cloak over the whole thing to hide the child and secure him more firmly.
Shouts, muffled and dim, still came from the chapel. Brys was grimly relieved to hear them. As long as there was killing to be done, the killers would be distracted.
He led the horses toward the village’s western gate and the forest that stretched beyond. A dead man, dressed in a farmer’s undyed wool, lay in the road. A goose-feathered arrow pinned him facedown to the earth. The shaft was well made, the fletchings unpainted; it was as deadly, and anonymous, as the killers by the chapel.
Across the way he saw another pair of arrow-struck corpses, these smaller. Children, a boy and a girl, both with the flaxen hair of the very young. They might have been the innkeeper’s get. The boy had been carrying a basket of grain when he died. Bright kernels spilled around his body like a shattered halo.
He passed more of the dead on his way to the gate. Probably some living, too, though they had the sense to stay hidden without knowing whether he was friend or foe. Of the archers there was no sign, though their handiwork littered the streets, and that troubled Brys in a way he could not quite grasp.
If the villagers had helped in the ambush, why had the archers killed them? If they meant to slaughter the village, why had they left the job half-done? There weren’t nearly enough bodies to account for all the people here. The answer tickled at his memory, but refused to come.
As he reached the end of the village road, he saw a knot of armed men by the gate. One wore a cuirass and sat astride a magnificent red stallion. His armor was as plain as the others’, and a full helm masked his face, but something about the cant of his head and the way that he sat his horse was familiar. The other men were on foot, and though no helms covered their faces, he did not know them.
Several had bows. Brys swore inwardly on seeing them, irritated but not surprised. Archers made it impossible for him to charge at them or flee past them. They’d have him quilled like a hedgehog before he closed half the distance. His own bow was cased for traveling and would have been useless even if it wasn’t. He was a swordsman, not an archer, and trying to outshoot four or five trained bowmen at once was a fool’s dream.
He crouched behind the cover of a low-roofed house, keeping the horses as quiet as he could. Wistan was making little noise, and for that Brys was grateful; the last thing he needed was the distraction of a baby crying under his chin.
The men hadn’t seen him yet, or didn’t seem to care if they had. That perplexed him. They didn’t appear to be watching the streets for stragglers at all. Instead their eyes were trained upward, toward the roofs of the village, as if they expected some sign to come down from the sky.
Brys risked a glance backwards and up. The smoke above the village had thickened enough to sting his eyes and dim the sun. Flickers of sooty-edged flame licked up from the thatched roofs nearest the chapel. Two ravens circled through the haze, signaling a bounty to come for their kind. He could see nothing to warrant the archers’ interest.
Then a scream shivered through the smoky stillness behind him. It was a high, unearthly sound, one that hardly seemed to come from any human throat. The men at the gate stirred and sighed, as if something long dreaded had finally come to pass; the red stallion danced uneasily beneath its rider. The archers fitted arrows to their bows, but kept them down.
More screams pierced the air. The raw terror in them made Brys bite his tongue to keep still. He suddenly wondered if he was being very stupid by remaining where he