The granary was between him and the storage building, and he went around it rather than past it, keeping low, keeping the bulk of the stone structure between himself and the road. He could hear shouting from the direction of the manor yard, sharp and commanding. Alwin's household guard, what there was of them, calling to each other across the distance. The voices were trained, but frightened.

  Then a horn, short and flat.

  Then the sound of the manor gate.

  He knew that sound. He had heard it tested in the autumn when the ironwork was checked and oiled. It was heavy oak banded in iron, wide enough for two horses, and it moved on hinges that groaned with the particular low complaint of serious things doing serious work.

  It was closing.

  He stopped in the gap between the granary and the fence and watched it happen. The guards were inside, at least the ones who had heard the horn and run, and the gate was swinging shut behind them with the grinding certainty of something that could not be argued with. A man was running for it from the direction of the well. He was shouting. He didn't make it. The gate closed and the bar dropped and the sound of it carried across the yard like the last word in a conversation.

  The man outside hit the wood with both fists.

  Caleb watched the man turn and look at the village behind him with the expression of someone trying to work out his best means of survival. Then the man ran. Not toward the manor, but away from it. Toward the lower houses, toward whatever he had or whoever he was responsible for.

  The yard was empty now, or at least it looked empty. Caleb understood, in a way that felt new and unpleasant and instinctual, that looking empty was not the same thing as being safe.

  He scanned the open ground between himself and the storage building.

  His mother had taken the cart that way. The storage building sat at the far edge of the orchard, up against the slope where the ground was dry and the stone stayed cool. She would have taken the cart path. The one that cut between the apple rows, the one he had walked beside her a hundred times without thinking about it.

  He couldn't see the cart from here.

  He went along the orchard wall, using the trees for cover, keeping his steps short and his breathing quiet. The sounds of the village had changed completely now. The mill wheel he registered only when he noticed it had stopped. In its absence, fearful voices sounded from somewhere near the market green. There was a crash of something heavy from one of the outbuildings, a sound he couldn't identify and didn't want to.

  He found the cart path and followed it in.

  The apple smell was very strong here, the ripe fruit hanging heavy in the gray morning air. He moved between the rows, hands brushing the low branches, eyes ahead.

  He saw the cart first. One wheel had gone off the path, the whole thing tilted at an angle that meant it wasn't going anywhere without help. Three of the apple crates had tipped. Fruit was scattered across the ground, dark against the soil.

  Then he saw his mother.

  She was backed against the far wall of the storage building with her hands in front of her. They weren’t raised in surrender, but held out in a steady way as if willing whatever was in front of her to stop at once.

  The man in front of her was not stopping.

  He was not particularly large. That was the detail Caleb fixed on first. Medium height, leather armor, a short blade in his right hand, the expression of a man performing a routine task. He was saying something Caleb couldn't hear, low and flat, and he was taking a step toward her as he said it.

  Caleb's eyes went to the ground.

  The pruning axe was where it always was; hanging from a peg on the storage building's outer wall, to the left of the door, where it had been since before Caleb could remember. He had taken it down and put it back more times than he could count. His hand knew the weight of it.

  His mind went blank as he crossed the yard.

  The mercenary heard him at the last moment, turning heel, and Caleb swung.

  It was not like the logs he had split so many times with Tomas. It was not clean. The axe connected with the man's shoulder and he went down sideways, and Caleb hit him again before he could rise. There was a yell and a squelch, and then it was quiet.

  His arms were shaking.

  He stood over the man, breathing hard, the axe still in his hand. The man was not moving. Caleb did not know, precisely, whether he was alive or not. He found he could not make himself care about that yet. He thought maybe he should.

  "Caleb."

  His mother's voice. He turned.

  She was looking at him with an expression he had never seen on her before. She rushed over and hugged him, turning him away from the dead man.

  "Are you hurt?" she asked.

  "No," he said numbly.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” She looked at him with tears in her eyes.

  She turned to look at the man on the ground. Then back to her son. "Come," she said.

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  She took his arm just above the elbow, the grip firm and directing. He let her pull him back onto the path and they quickly moved together toward the manor. The axe was still firm in his hand because his hand refused to put it down and she hadn't told him otherwise.

  Behind them, somewhere in the village, something was burning. He could smell it before he could see it. It was the particular smell of burning thatch, so different from the woodsmoke of a hearth that there was no mistaking one for the other.

  "Don't look," Elin said.

  He looked anyway. A broad brush of smoke was rising from the direction of the market green, leaning east in the wind.

  "Caleb," she said, and her grip tightened.

  He faced forward and kept moving.

  The manor gate was still shut. He could see that from thirty yards out, and his stomach dropped before he could stop it. Then one of the upper guards saw them and there was a shout from above, and a conversation he couldn't hear, and then the gate opened. It was just wide enough, just long enough for them to enter.

  The bar immediately dropped behind them.

  And Caleb stood in the manor yard for the first time in his life, the axe in his hand, the smell of copper on his shirt and smoke in the air, the sounds of Appleford crumbling outside the walls.

  The manor yard was not what he expected.

  He wasn't sure what he had expected. He had seen it from outside the wall often enough, caught glimpses through the gate when it stood open for carts or visitors. In those glimpses it had always seemed peaceful yet orderly. A place where things happened according to a propriety he wasn't privilege to.

  Now it was controlled panic, which was different from chaos but still not comforting.

  Guards moved in pairs along the inner wall, calling positions to each other in clipped shorthand. Two men were rolling a heavy cart across the yard to brace against the gate from the inside. A woman Caleb didn't recognize was shepherding a group of household staff, a few men and women and a boy who couldn't have been older than ten, toward the far end of the yard where the stone outbuildings backed against the manor's main wall. Someone was distributing short spears from a rack near the stables. Someone else was arguing about it.

  Elin took all of this in without breaking stride.

  A guard stepped into their path. He was young and nervous with his spear leveled at chest height. "Who are you? State your–"

  "It doesn’t fucking matter!" his mother yelled before steeling herself. "I’m Elin Gardener, and this is my son. We were let in. Now go be useful and point that at something else."

  The guard blinked. His spear dipped. They went around him.

  Caleb followed her toward the outbuildings and his eyes took in everything without meaning to. The exits pocketing walls, where the guards were grouped and where they were thin, the wide eyes and clenched jaws.

  His mother found a section of the wall near the storage entrance where traffic was low. She stopped there and turned to look at him properly for the first time since the orchard.

  Her hands were steady. Her sleeves were still rolled from the morning's work. There was a smear of soil across her wrist that she hadn't cleaned off, and a small cut on her left hand, below the thumb.

  "You're bleeding," Caleb said.

  She glanced at it. "It's nothing."

  "Let me–"

  "It's nothing. I’ve had worse from cutting roses," she replied, her voice firm. She looked at his hands instead, at the axe he was still carrying. "Put that thing down for a moment."

  He set it against the wall. His shoulder ached from the swing. He hadn't noticed until now.

  Elin took his hands in hers and turned them over, checking, the way she had checked them when he was small and fell badly. No cuts. No breaks. She pressed her thumb briefly into his palm, some obscure test he had never understood but always submitted to, and then she released him.

  "Good," she said.

  Caleb noticed something new. Outside the walls, slowly overtaking the screams, was whooping and bellowing. The quality of it reached him even through stone. The invaders were working, and they were enjoying it.

  "Never in my days did I think a thing like this could happen,” Elin said. “Maybe a few bandits, but this…”

  "I don’t think they were bandits,” Caleb said. “I don’t think they were soldiers either. There were no markings on them. There was a whole group of them coming up toward the orchard."

  She nodded. "Did any follow us?"

  "No."

  She was quiet for a moment. He watched her work through it, moving the pieces into place. Finding the arrangement that made sense.

  "I need you to listen, Caleb. If anything happens I need you to run.”

  “Mom I–”

  “I’m not asking! We’ll stay here where it’s safe for now. But if these walls stop being safe then I need you to run and not stop until you find somewhere safe. Kesselmark would be most able to help, so you run to him.”

  Caleb nodded reluctantly. The look in her eyes was more than enough to let him know he shouldn’t question her.

  As they stayed close to the wall, the courtyard continued its confusion. Several people had managed to get through the gate before it closed. There were a handful of villagers who'd been near enough to run, a farmhand with a cut above his eye that no one had bandaged yet, one of the blacksmith's boys still holding his hammer as if he'd simply picked it up to go to work and forgotten to put it down. They clustered near the outbuildings, either silent or sobbing. The children were quiet in a primal way, the way small animals get when a predator is nearby.

  Caleb noted the wall.

  It was solid; maintained and made of old stone. It was the kind of construction that came from centuries of people understanding that a wall's job was to be worth the cost of attacking it. High enough that a man couldn't simply pull himself over. Topped with fitted stone that would make scaling difficult. It had been built to last.

  He kept thinking about the armored men he had seen earlier, the way they had moved. There had been a purpose there. He was still thinking about it when the first impact came against the gate.

  Were they ramming the door in? They would have to hit much harder if they wanted to break through the strong barrier. The bar held. The guards on the wall above called down. Another impact landed. This one was harder. The cart braced behind the gate shifted half an inch against the stone.

  Elin's hand found his shoulder.

  Not gripping or restraining him. Not trying to direct him. Just there. Like a comfort. The way she might have placed her hand on him when he was a child and they were walking back from the orchard.

  He put his hand over hers and kept watching the gate.

  The third impact was different. He felt it in the ground through his boots.

  The guards on the wall were firing off shots now. He could hear the snapping release of bowstrings above him, the flat crack of a crossbow. Below, the sound of the gate was changing, the wood beginning to speak in a register that stone and iron kept quiet for as long as they could.

  "Back," said a guard near them. "Get everyone back to the main hall."

  Elin was already moving, hand still on Caleb's shoulder, pulling him now. They met with the knot of villagers rushing toward the manor's main door. The farmhand with the cut eye followed. The blacksmith's boy. The kitchen workers. Caleb and Elin moved with them away from the open center of the yard.

  They were halfway across when the gate came in.