The morning came in gray and stayed that way.

  The sun was trying to peak out from behind the canopy of clouds, making it seem like the sky couldn’t make up its mind on what it wanted to do. The light was flat and even in the sort of way that made distances hard to judge and colors run together. The orchard looked the same from fifty yards away as it did from five. The fields beyond them disappeared into a soft, undifferentiated green.

  Caleb didn't mind it. Gray days were good working days. No squinting. No heat building in the back of the neck before midmorning. Just the cool and the quiet and the work in front of you.

  He was in the eastern field, the one that ran along the low stone wall dividing Bramblewick’s fields from one of his pastures. The soil here was darker than in the orchards, and it clung to his boots when he lifted his feet. He was pulling weeds from between the rows, the stubborn kind that waited until everything else was done and then pushed through anyway, as if they'd been biding their time. They were the bane of his existence. He methodically worked along the furrow with a short handled hoe, not hurrying.

  The village moved around him at its usual pace.

  He could hear it without seeing most of it. The mill wheel turning, steady as a pulse. Somewhere near the granary, the thud and scrape of sacks being shifted. A dog barked twice, then went quiet. Voices sounded from the direction of the lower road, too distant to make out. The sounds of a place that expected to go on being itself.

  His mother had left before him that morning with the cart. Three days of picked apples needed to go into storage before the next rain softened the skins. She had waved him off toward the field without ceremony, the way she always did when there was more work than hours.

  He'd watched her go. He wasn't sure why. He often didn't watch. That morning, he had.

  He turned his attention back to the furrow.

  The weeds came up in clumps where the soil was wet, roots trailing pale and reluctant. In the drier sections they snapped off at the base and would likely come back in a week’s time. He'd learned early that some work was permanent and some was only maintenance, and most of it was the second kind. It still needed to be done.

  A crow landed on the wall to his left and watched him work with the flat, judgmental attention that crows gave everything. He ignored it. It stayed anyway.

  Somewhere down the slope, Tomas would be at the mill by now, unless he had slept in. Of course, his father wouldn’t have allowed something like that. He'd be complaining about something. The cold, the sacks, his father's accounting, some perceived injustice that had befallen him between waking and arriving. Caleb could hear the particular cadence of it in his head without trying.

  Of course, the festival was coming up in three days.

  The harvest festival was one of his favorites. The bonfire. The smell of roasting meat. The mulled cider. The small town square swept clean of its usual business and turned, briefly, into somewhere people went to be glad rather than useful. Three days wasn't long. Three days was also enough time to find your courage to ask a certain someone to dance. Or change your mind about it.

  He pulled another weed. Then another.

  Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

  The crow shifted on the wall, turned its head, and left without announcement. He watched it go. The black shape flew against the gray sky, its wings working with that particular unhurried certainty that birds had when they'd decided somewhere else was better.

  He went back to work.

  The hoe found the next clump, bit in, pulled free. The soil smelled of wet grass and roots. His breath made no fog, today hadn’t been cold enough for that. The morning sat around him, gray and even, same as it had been for the last hour.

  The mill wheel turned.

  The dog did not bark again.

  He was at the end of the row, straightening to move his basket, when he noticed the silence. There was still noise; the wheel, the wind in the upper branches of the orchard. But the quality of it was odd. Off.

  No voices from the granary.

  He stood with the hoe in his hand and listened.

  The mill wheel turned.

  That was all.

  He waited in the way his mother had taught him to wait when something felt wrong. He didn’t move. He just opened himself up to what the air was trying to tell him. Just as she had taught him, someone had taught her when she was young. It was like trying to know what weather would come before the sky revealed it.

  ‘Attention has consequences,’ she had said once.

  He wasn't sure what he was paying attention to.

  Then, from the direction of the lower road, the one that came in from the east, the one that traders used and patrols walked in the early morning, he heard something that didn't belong.

  A voice piped up over the noise only to be cut short.

  Caleb set the hoe down against the wall.

  He did not run yet. But his body had already decided something his mind was still catching up to, and his feet were moving before he'd even thought about moving them.

  The lower road came into view between the orchard rows, and Caleb stopped.

  There were men on it he had never seen before.

  These weren’t travelers or a patrol. They moved with the particular economy of men who had done this before and expected to do it again. There was no urgency or anger. There was only purpose, the way water moved through a channel someone had dug for it.

  He saw six. Then more behind them. A dozen, maybe more, coming up from the eastern approach in loose formation. They wore mismatched armor: leather and mail, a plate vambrace here, a gorget there. No colors. No banner. Their weapons were already drawn, which was the thing that settled it.

  One of Bramblewick's patrol guards was on the ground near the crossing stone.

  He wasn't moving.

  Caleb pressed himself back against the orchard wall, the stone cold through his shirt. His heart drummed in his ears. He made himself breathe through it.

  A second guard appeared. He knew this one by sight, a heavyset man named Corvin who walked the eastern road every morning without fail. He came around the bend at a run and pulled up short when he saw them. There was a moment, just a breath of one, where Corvin's hand went to his sword and the nearest mercenary watched him do it with something like patience.

  Then two of them moved at once and it was over before Caleb could look away.

  Corvin was on the ground and the mercenaries were moving again, the same pace, the same direction, as if nothing had interrupted them. As if Corvin had been an odd stone in the road they'd simply stepped around.

  Caleb stayed where he was. His hands were flat against the wall behind him.

  More of them were coming up the lower road now. He couldn't see the far end of it from here, couldn't see where they'd come from or how many there were in total. But the ones he could see weren't stopping. They were moving toward the manor with the intention of men who knew exactly where they were going.

  Someone had told them the layout.

  The thought arrived without drama, clean and cold. Someone had told them where the guards walked and when.

  He pushed off the wall.

  He needed to find his mother.