The gap in the palisade was wider than it had appeared from the ridge line, a ragged wound torn through timbers that had stood for generations. I rode through it without slowing, the light blazing around me, and entered a nightmare.
The village square was a charnel house.
Buildings that had been homes were now pyres, their thatched roofs collapsed, their timber frames blackened and smoking. The forge at the far end of the square was a heap of rubble, its chimney toppled, its fires extinguished. The inn, the largest building in the village, was a skeleton of blackened beams; its sign—an oak leaf, once green—was now nothing but ash.
The bodies lay where they had fallen. Farmers in their work clothes, their hands still clutching the tools they had used as weapons. Herders with their crooks, their faces frozen in expressions of desperate courage. A woman in a bloodstained apron, her arm still reaching toward the well, toward the water that might have saved her.
