Bastion

Right now we don’t know which condition is the one we are about to face.” He paced some more. “I’m minded to turn right back around and get the Guard. Except that might make things worse.”
    Mags thought about this very hard. He could see how getting the Guard would make things worse. The whole idea was that villages were to enforce the laws on themselves. But if they brought the Guard into it—there would be even more resentment, if not outright rebellion, and there would be no way to enforce the laws without keeping a detachment of the Guard there. “How about if I sneak down there, get hold of Amily, and find out what they’ve learned?”
    Jakyr stopped pacing. “That seems to be our best option. Meanwhile, I am going to help myself to dinner here, since our thief has provided it.” It was Jakyr’s turn to glare down at the man, who was uncowed. “Perhaps a lecture delivered while I eat might bang some sense into his head.”
    Mags nodded and went outside. Jakyr would probably need his Companion soon, but Jermayan couldn’t be left to stand in the cold, unprotected. He threw a blanket over Jermayan, but did not unsaddle him, and mounted Dallen. A brisk gallop through bleak forest got them to the edge of cultivated land and within sight of the village just about sunset. There was a glare of light on the western horizon, and the sky was a deep and sullen crimson.
    There he dismounted near a hedgerow and used it as cover to get into the village itself without being seen, slipping along the bushes bent over, so as not to show above the top. When the hedgerow ended, he crouched and peeked around the bottom of it, assessing the two or three dozen buildings of the village. He found the inn quickly enough by the wheat sheaf carved into a board above the door and by the fact that it was roughly twice the size of any of the other buildings in the town. Making sure there was no one about to spot him, he ran to the shelter of the nearest house, put his back to the wall and edged toward what passed for a street, ran across to the inn, and slipped in behind it. Still keeping his back to the wall, and moving as quietly as possible, he slid over to the attached stable—an actual stable, this time, a not merely a lean-to shelter. As he expected, the stable held the vanners, who regarded him with benign indifference as he hid himself between them. There were no other horses here, but the fact that this inn actually had a real stable told him that it got a respectable amount of traffic, probably in the warmer part of the year.
    Then he crouched down in the straw between the horses, closed his eyes and sought the familiar sense of Amily’s mind. As he searched for her, he tried to make note of the contents of stray thoughts, and at least he didn’t sense any overt hostility. Although when the villagers discovered how they had treated that interloper, that could change in a heartbeat.
    He found her; the connection seemed a lot stronger between them now, and once again he wondered if she had a Gift that was somehow late in coming, and whether it was slowly awakening now that he was “talking” to her. :Amily. We got problems. I’m in the stable,: he sent to her. He caught her startled assent and the general sense that she was coming to him.
    He waited, crouched in the straw, relatively comfortable in the warmth being radiated from the two vanners. It was hard to tell in the darkness whether the stable was kept up well or not—but it certainly didn’t smell poorly kept. Even an empty stable that hasn’t been mucked out regularly had a stink of ammonia and old droppings to it. From where he crouched, he could see the door and the yard outside it clearly. After what was probably a quarter-candlemark, he spotted someone hurrying to the stable in the thin moonlight. As soon as the girl—he could tell it was a girl by the shape—got close, he heard Amily call, softly, in the direction of the stable.
    “Mags?”
    “Over here, ’tween the vanners,” he called back softly. She waved once and joined him, dropping down into the box stall with him so that no one coming in would see her.
    “What did you mean by problems?” she asked breathlessly. “I hurried as fast as I could. I was helping Bear with the local farrier and a patient. A human patient. The farrier is the closest thing they have to a healer here. Except for the inn, there isn’t much. It’s all herders and farmers. From what I gathered, Lord