Unver only stared back at him as though the thane hadn’t said anything worth hearing.

For long, tense moments the Crane-men sat and waited, motionless as stones. Then, along the far edge of the settlement, a great fire blossomed on the palisade. Suddenly the night was full of cries, both the shouts of Bordelm’s clansmen and the cries of startled sentries at the tall wooden gates. Torches bounced along the top of the gate as the other guards rushed back and forth, trying to make out what was happening on the far end of the settlement.

Odrig now lifted his horn to his lips and blew three short blasts, then dug in his spurs and set off down the hillside at a gallop with Drojan and Unver just behind him. Fremur clapped heels into his horse’s ribcage and followed them. A larger force of mounted men were sweeping down from one of the other hillsides—their cousin Tunzdan and his own sprawling family-clan, more than a dozen Cranes with a taste for plunder and violence.

At Unver’s suggestion, Bordelm and the others had brought buckets of pitch to smear along the palisade logs before setting the fire, and the scheme had clearly worked: as Fremur and the others neared the settlement, the moonlight was outshone by the unsteady orange glare of the burning wall. Fremur heard shouts and screams from inside the settlement as the stonedwellers woke to discover that something terrible was happening. Every now and then an arrow would fly from inside the walls, gleaming red for a moment in the firelight, but the Crane clansmen had arrows of their own, wrapped in pitchy rags; within moments, dozens of flaming missiles were being shot back over the wall, starting fires in roof thatch all over the settlement.

The clansmen quickly reached the gate in the high wall. The guards had deserted it to run toward the fire on the far side of the settlement. Unver climbed on top of his saddle, balancing with his arms spread. The moment his horse was close enough, he leaped up and caught the top of the gate, curling his fingers around two of the sharpened posts, then pulled himself over. A moment later the bolt slid back and the gate opened.

Odrig laughed. “See, they are inviting us in, my blood-drinkers! Let us not shame their hospitality by refusing!”

Fremur caught at the reins of Unver’s black horse and led it through the gate. The tall man took it back without a word and vaulted back into his saddle, then spurred forward. Fremur stayed close behind him.

Inside, the settlement was ablaze. People were running all directions in disorganized terror, but it was easy enough to tell the mounted Thrithings-men from the Nabbanai settlers, who wore flapping night-shirts or were barely half-dressed. Some of the guards had never made it across to the burning wall on the far side of the settlement, and turned now to stand against Odrig and his raiders. As the smoke swirled and the shrieks of women and children and the death cries of men rose into the night sky, these guards became the center of knots of resistance.

The Cranes did not care—they did not intend to wipe out a settlement of many hundreds, not with less than half a hundred men of their own. Their goal was the fenced paddock at the center of the village where the animals were kept.

Fremur had been on raids before, but never against such a large target. Before tonight the men of the Crane Clan had confined their attacks to isolated farmsteads or the lands of absent Nabbanai lords who seldom had enough men to protect their holdings from determined assaults. But this was a very different kind of strike, and Fremur could not help wondering how Odrig would deal with the obvious success of Unver’s idea. Odrig already disliked the tall, quiet man, who alone among the Cranes did not treat Fremur’s brother as his lord and master.

Most of the clansmen were already headed toward the paddocks at the center of the settlement, but Odrig stopped to take on a Nabbanai settler who was intent on defending his village with a billhook. The settler had no armor and wore only a long shirt, but Odrig seemed to be enjoying the sport, slashing at the man’s hands where he held his makeshift weapon and blocking the man’s return swipes, laughing all the while.

His brother laughed frequently, but Fremur had learned early in his life that when Odrig was laughing, someone else was usually bleeding.

Odrig now began inflicting cuts on the settler, slashing his face and arms so that the man’s nightshirt was ribboned with blood. Fires had started in many other places throughout the settlement now and smoke was spreading everywhere.

“Come, Mouse!” Odrig shouted to Fremur. “Take an ear or his nose for your own—a trophy!”

Fremur had always hated the name his brother gave him, little more than another way of calling him a weakling and coward, and he did not want to watch Odrig toying with the settler, who was now weeping and stumbling in the mud as Odrig inflicted cut after cut on him. Instead he spurred away toward the center of the village.

Much of the palisade was aflame now, and scores of roofs had caught as well. Fremur could hear the awful cries of those trapped in the burning houses, men, women, and children, but he felt no pity.

This is our land—our fathers’ and their fathers’. The Nabban-men should go back to their stone houses or die.

As he neared the center of the village, where the chaos of animal noises and human screams was at its loudest, Fremur saw that a handful of his Crane clansmen had blundered down a passage between houses and now were trapped against the inner wall of the palisade by a dozen or so settlers wielding billhooks and hayforks, as well as two or three armored settlement guards with long spears. It was impossible to make out the clansmen’s faces in the smoky, inconstant light, but by the ribbons wrapping their horses’ tails he guessed they might be some of Tunzdan’s men. The Cranes were fighting desperately but they were hemmed in, and the long spears of the guards were forcing them farther and farther back toward the wall.

Fremur hesitated for a moment. He owed nothing to Tunzdan, one of Odrig’s chief allies, but these were still his clansmen: how could he hold his head up as a man if he abandoned them to these land-stealing farmers? He spurred toward the angry mob. Before he could reach them, though, a great shadow swept past him like the Grass Thunderer himself.

It was Unver on his black horse Deofol, the curve of his sword a red crescent against the sky. The tall man crashed into the rear of the settlers and several of them collapsed immediately, shoulders or necks fountaining blood. Others shouted in terrified surprise as their hunt of the clansmen fell into fatal disorder. It all happened so quickly that Fremur slowed to watch as the cornered Cranes, heartened by their enemies’ confusion, now plunged forward into the mass of settlers. The first to fall were the armored guards, and moments later the rest of the settlers were fleeing for their lives while the Thrithings-men, changed from quarry back to hunters in mere moments, shouted and sang with joy at their rescue and rode the stragglers down.

Unver stood in his stirrups and pointed with his sword toward the center of the town. “There!” he shouted at the clansmen. “Find your brothers there!”

And in that moment, with the leaping red blaze silhouetting him against the night sky, illuminating Unver’s sharp features and flapping cloak so that he seemed half-man, half raven, Fremur felt something squeeze at his heart, a strange mix of admiration and terror. Surely this wasn’t Unver any longer, but Tasdar the Anvil Smasher himself, one of the powerful spirits worshipped by all the grassland clans.

“What are you staring at, you fool?” the godlike figure shouted at him. “It is almost time to ride home.”

Fremur realized with a start that Unver was right—even Odrig would not wait much longer before retreating, not when they were so greatly outnumbered by the settlers. After all, this was not a killing mission but a plundering mission. He also realized with a sinking heart that he was going to be returning from the raid empty-handed. He knew what Odrig and his cronies would say about that, and it would not be kind.