SAKER HAD DECIDED to get well away from Carlion before he searched for more bones. Yet no matter where he went, people were afraid. They gathered in inns, talking agitatedly, calling each other over to confirm some part of the story, worrying, fretting. Or else they shut themselves up in their houses.
Whenever he passed a black rock altar there were people making sacrifices to the gods, praying hard. Useless, he wanted to tell them. The gods have sent me. Once, there was a Traveler family at the altar, and he wanted to stop and say, “You don’t need to worry. If you stay out of the way, you won’t be hurt.” But of course he couldn’t, without revealing himself.
In each village he passed, men and women were out nailing shutters firmly to the windows, or installing bars for the doors. Carpenters had notices pinned to their workshop doors: Too busy!
Smiths were making weapons instead of horseshoes. The local officers, who held large sections of the land in the warlord’s name, had sent their sergeants out to collect their oath men, and hauled them away, complaining, from barricading their cottages.
All the activity should have made him feel triumphant. He had done this. He, Saker, had scared all these people. Part of him wished his father could be here to witness it. But… he didn’t want it to be like this. The anxiety — oddly, he’d never imagined his actions leading to worry. Terror, yes. Terror in the night, death cleanly delivered a moment afterward, he had been expecting that. The killing was necessary, to retrieve the land from its usurpers. But worry, even this extraordinary worry, he hadn’t expected that, and it felt wrong.
He knew what his father would say: you just didn’t think it through, boy! He’d said it often to Saker in his childhood, when Saker rushed impetuously into some scheme. Like the time he’d wanted to raise snails to eat, as he’d heard the Wind Cities people did, and the box overturned. The snails got into the vegetable garden and ate all his father’s plants. He winced at the memory of that beating, and of his father’s voice saying, “You just didn’t think it through, did you, boy? Well, think this through!” Down came the cane.
When he stopped for the night at an inn where he had been once before in his wanderings, he was besieged for castings. But he shook his head.
“Even the gods do not know the outcome,” he said portentously. The innkeeper’s wife burst into tears and his son paled, but the man himself sniffed.
“Good. You remember that, boy. Our fate is in our own hands.”
Saker disliked him intensely in that moment, and it was only later that he realized the man reminded him of his father. But he didn’t think about that. By that time he was occupied in finding bones.