"Those reeves out of Horn Hall, they don't come around no more. You from Horn Hall?"

"We're not."

"Didn't think so." She shrugged again, as though ridding herself of a weight. "We none of us know why-that they stopped coming round, I mean. It just is that way now, and were that way from before."

"From before what?"

"Before we come to Horn."

"Where did you come from?"

The Snake moved off upwind, wrinkling his nose against the stink, but Joss held his position despite the strength of their sickly sweet-sour smell.

She looked away from him, blinking rapidly. "Dunesk Valley, up in the Ossu. We come from there. Can't live there now."

"What happened?"

She shrugged.

"Where do you live now?"

"Horn. At least, the folk mostly leave us alone if we bide in the alleys and bother no one. If we find something or other, maybe we can sell it."

"Found a ring," piped Littlest proudly. "I did!"

"Hush," said Broken Hand, pinching Littlest's skin until it whimpered.

"That was last month," said Eldest hastily. "Lest you're thinking it was just now."

Which, by the nervous set of their chins and the way her gaze flicked toward Earless, made him understand that in fact they had found something just now. In fact, they believed that two reeves might likely steal what they had. That's what they thought of reeves. It made him want to shout in frustration.

"You need to tell me what happened in Dunesk Valley," he said instead, because understanding a thing was often the only way to solve it. "I need to know, because I'm a reeve. You know it's our job to set things right."

"That's what we used to think, but them at Horn Hall just stopped coming."

"When was that?"

For a long while she was silent. Earless let go her hand and edged a few steps away, crouched down at the bank, and ladled some water into his mouth. The Snake had backed up and was staring toward the distant boulders. Peddo was nowhere in sight.

Then she started talking in a voice as flat as her gaze, as if all emotion had long since been crushed out of her. "Dunesk's about a day's walk, by the trail, and one time we come down to Horn a few years back-"

"Snake year it was," said Broken Hand.

"-that's right, just after that one made his second year." She pointed to the littlest. "Four years ago," Joss said.

She nodded. "We came down because Dad and Uncle had hides to trade. But then the raiders came. There was all kinds of things they were doing, so our dad he sent us into town because it isn't safe up there no more. We sleep on the street. Mostly folk leave us alone, not always."

That not always made him wince. She was old enough, if a man had a fancy for veal, which he did not, and anyway any child was old enough for those who had a taste for that manner of cruelty.

He asked, "What of your dad? Or your uncle? Are they still living?"

She choked. "I hope so."

"It sounds awful, living in Horn as you do. You ever thought of going back home?"

She would not meet his eye. "Awful is what they do in the villages, if they catch you."

"What do they do?"

She shuddered and would not speak, and when finally he offered some dry flat-bread out of his pouch, she pointed at Littlest, who lifted his left arm out from behind his back to display a scarred and seamed stump. For a moment Joss couldn't figure why he was doing it.

Volias said, with real revulsion, "Lady's Tit! They cut off the little wight's hand!"

Earless scrambled back from the stream's edge, and Eldest broke the bread into four pieces. They inhaled it, so it seemed, because it vanished in a blink.

"Look there!" said Volias, pointing to a spot behind Joss's back.

On occasion Joss found himself confused by the way the ground changed when you were standing on it as opposed to when you were flying above it. Angles of sight shifted; blind in one place, you found you could see in the other; unexpected vistas revealed themselves because of the curve and elevation of the ground or when mist hid from the sky what, with feet on the earth, you could see perfectly well.

The woodland scrub had seemed, from the air, to separate the rocky ground from the stream, but in fact the land sloped down into a hollow where the densest growth took advantage of damper ground to flourish, and rose again to the stony ground. Seen from the ground, the rock formations were taller than they had seemed from the air, with a hundred hiding places and defensive posts. Seemingly oblivious of the reeves, their eagles, and the four children, a person bent, rose, walked the ground, bent and rose again. The figure was dressed in some manner of loose, black robe. From this distance, Joss thought it must be a woman, but he couldn't be sure.

"That's another like us," said Eldest, seeing how they were looking that way.

"You've seen that person before?"

"Yes, ver. So we have."

"She's a scavenger, like you?"

"So she must be, ver. We come out here all the time. We saw her first time a few month back-"

"It was Fox Month," said Broken Hand. "It was so cold at night, beginning of Shiver Sky. That's the first time we saw her out here."

"That's right," said Eldest. "We see her now and again. Not all the time."

"You ever talk to her? Have any trouble with her?"

"Nah, she don't talk, except one time she stopped us and asked us if we saw any strange thing that had an outland look to it. She's looking for some dead person, maybe her lover or her son. I don't know and wasn't thinking to ask."

"Someone she got to missing," said Earless abruptly in the hoarse voice of a boy about to break into manhood. "Someone she want desperately to find."

"How often do you come here?" Joss asked.

"As often as we need to," said Eldest, who was relaxing a little. "Gleaning is all we got, you see. No law against it!" she added hastily, looking at the Snake, but he had a frown on his ugly mug and wasn't looking at the children at all. He was tracking the movements of that other person up among the rocks.

"Then you sell what you've found."

She shrugged. "We pretty much found everything I expect there is to be found. Sometimes a hand got cut off and rolled into a crevice. That's how-" She almost said a name, but bit her tongue. "That's how that one found the ring." She nodded toward Littlest.

"Those dark holes could have snakes and biting things in them," said Joss uneasily.

She rolled her eyes and said nothing. Snakes and biting things, obviously, did not concern her much compared with her other troubles.

"What'll you kids do now?" he asked.

"What you think?" she demanded. "We told you all. Can we go now?"

They were skittish, and Littlest kept wiping away the green snot leaking from his nose.

"Have you nowhere else to go?" asked Volias suddenly.

"You ain't been listening," said Eldest. "Or you would have heard. You going to take us somewhere on those eagles? And then who will take us in? We got to wait here by Horn until Dad come to get us. That's what he said. When it was safe again. That's what he said."

Joss shook his head. "You go on. You've got a long walk back to Horn."

They lit out as if fire had been kindled beneath them.

Volias settled onto his haunches beside the rib cage, studying it without touching. "Is that it?" he demanded, glaring at Joss. "They cut off that kid's hand!"

"What else can we do for them?"

"That's why we keep running from fights? Because we can't do anything else for them? What about those two dead men at that farm? Seems we reeves do a lot of looking, and a lot of squeezing available women, but we don't do any fighting anymore."

"You're right," said Joss.

The words took the Snake so off guard that he rocked back, lost his balance, and sat, kicking out reflexively. His foot jostled the rib cage, ripping it half out of the covering of debris that had begun to bury it. The mat of debris beneath it included decaying hempen cloth dyed a clay-red color that the Snake shied away from touching.

"This must be some manner of outlander," said the Snake. "Wearing death cloth like regular clothes. Look here. His belt's still in good shape." He peeled the strip of leather out of the soil, whipping it away from the rib cage. A heavier object went flying to land on the nearby grass with a thud.

"Best we go talk to that woman," said Joss.

"Why for, if we mean to do nothing about any of it?"

"Listen, Volias. The rot's set in deep. We can get ourselves killed, or we can find the source of the rot and kill it. I don't see any other way. But of ourselves, just us three, out here where we've no allies apparently and no idea who is our enemy and who regards us as enemy, what are we three to do? Or did you want to take on two cadres of armed men?"

The Snake ignored him, most likely because there was no answer. Joss trudged down into the hollow, pushing through brush, noting the way the battle had whirled and eddied into clumps of fighting, marked by collections of disturbed bones, and then streamed out again over open ground as one group fled toward the rocks while the other group, presumably, pursued. Why in the hells had a group of outlanders ridden into the Hundred? Who would have hired them? The other reeves ought to have passed along to Clan Hall news of such an unusual occurrence, but they hadn't. Clan Hall had never heard about any battle fought in the Year of the White Lion near the city of Horn.

And it really was strange that the dead had been left out here, stripped and looted, just because no one could be bothered to carry the corpses to Horn's Sorrowing Tower. Outlanders, bandits, clanless orphans might be abandoned in death. Just like those kids who, if they died in the fields beyond Horn, would no doubt be left lying with no one but that missing dad and uncle to care if their bodies ever received godly treatment. Yet it went against the law, not to mention simple decency.

The kites and vultures and bugs would scour them all to bone in the end, in any case. There were worse fates. In a way, to be left dead upon the earth was to be left on the gods' most ancient Sorrowing Tower, because the rock that was the scaffolding of the earth had been erected long before the gods' towers.

Just as Joss reached the outermost stretch of rock poking up out of a gaggle of thorn-flower bushes, the woman came around the pile of weathered boulders. She stopped, although she did not seem surprised to see him.

"I was just looking for you," he said with his best smile. "I saw you from over there."

She was dressed for riding in stiff trousers, light shirt, and sleeveless jacket, with a dark cloak of an almost weightless fabric curling down from her shoulders and wrapped over one arm. In one hand, she held an old spear that she used as a walking staff on the uneven ground. She wore a grave expression on a pleasant face whose years were difficult to count; she was probably his age, or older. Yet she did not look him over the way many women did, with an appreciative eye. She didn't frown either. She wasn't unfriendly. She looked past him, shading her eyes. "You're a reeve."

"So I am, verea. I was wondering what brought a respectable householder like you out to search a battlefield."

That twitch of her lips was not as much a smile as a secret. "I was looking for something."

"Did you find it?"

"As it happens, I just did. Who is that following you?"

He looked back over his shoulder to see the Snake scrambling over the rugged ground to catch up to him. "My comrade."

"There are three of you," she said, tilting her head back to survey the sky.

"These days, it's best to travel in the company of those you trust."

Her gaze slipped to his, and away as quickly, but even so that glance caught him off guard. Funny, when you thought of it, how difficult it could be to know why you trusted some folk and not others. He trusted Peddo. He thought of how much he disliked the Snake, who was a bully, who made suspects cry for the fun of it, who liked to push around locals to see them cringe; who had lied more than once; who had ratted him out when he was trying to woo that merchant's daughter, just because he was jealous. It wasn't his fault that the Snake had no luck with women. The man ought to look to his own behavior to answer for that lack. And yet, Joss knew Volias would cover his back in a tight spot. Aui! He himself was the one who couldn't be trusted. He'd gone wild after Marit's death. He'd been reckless, crazy, defiant, impossible, even dangerous to himself and others. He'd fanned the flames until they got too hot. No wonder Marshal Masar had tossed him out of Copper Hall. He'd been named legate later to keep him away, not from any worthiness on his part, even if people had given him that nickname, calling him incorruptible when really it was only about doing your duty as you had agreed the day the eagle chose you, just trying to make right everything that had gone wrong.

How had the sun gotten so bright all of a sudden? He was staring right into the glare, eyes watering.

"Hey! Look here!" Volias walked panting up the slope and stopped beside him. "It's a belt buckle." He had wiped away some of the dirt encrusted in the wrinkles and crevices of the thing. When he held it up, metal caught sun and winked. "Good quality. A wolf's head, I think. Never seen this manner of pattern before. What were outlanders doing here, do you think?"

"Come to fight, I suppose," said Joss, looking around for the woman.

"Then they got what they come for. Unlike us."

"Where'd she go?"

"Where'd who go?"

"I was talking to that woman, the one we saw."

"You're always talking to women."

"Didn't you see her?"

"I did, but it seems she took fright of your ugly face and crept off while I was coming up from behind those rocks. I lost sight of you for a bit. Serves you right! You're not used to them rejecting you, are you?"

For once, the Snake's taunting did not disturb him. Wind skirled through the rocks and spit dust at them. They tramped through the maze of outcrops and boulders, stuck their heads into shadowed overhangs, and poked their batons into deep crevices. Birds flitted around them, anxious at their presence, and various animals-rats, mice, rabbits, coneys, a veritable feast-scurried in the undergrowth or down into slits and cracks where they could not reach. Once, Joss saw a fox's clever face peering at him out of a thicket, but when he blinked, it was gone. There were bones aplenty; Joss estimated that hundreds of people had died here, but the remains really were stripped out and there was nothing except skeletal remains and bits and pieces of useless scrap.

They found no sign of the woman.

At length, Joss scrambled to the top of the highest boulder, where he stood at a sheer edge about three body's lengths off the ground. Searching the sky, he saw Peddo and Jabi approaching from the south. That was strange, too. Hadn't Peddo been out of sight, too far away to mark as anything except an unidentified bird? How had the woman known he was there?

He set his whistle to his lips and called Scar, and signaled with the flag for Peddo to come down, but instead Peddo flew low overhead and, banking tight, blew the three short blasts on his whistle that made Joss's whole body jolt just as a fire bell would, heard clanging within the city's vulnerable streets.

Emergency.

He and Scar leaped aloft, Volias and Trouble not far behind. There was a slight updraft over the rocks, but the raptors strained, pushing hard, for they recognized the whistle call as well as their reeves did. Jabi flapped past, pushing hard back the way he had come, and Peddo whipped his flag in the up-and-down motion for crime in progress.

By the hells, it would be good to be able to act for a change.

He looked back over the outcrop as they lifted, but he still saw no sign of that woman. She could not have walked away so fast. She must have heard them, and hidden in the rock in some hidey-hole they had not noticed. How had the people of this region come to fear and hate reeves?