Dies the Fire

The foragers stopped, and the shouting chorus grumbled away into a buzz of voices. That sank into near-silence as a man walked forward waving a white flag on the end of a pole. He wore a policeman's uniform, much the worse for hard use; a mousey-looking woman accompanied him, with a clipboard in her hands. He carried a much more practical hunting crossbow, with a knife and hatchet at his belt, and wore an army-style helmet.

"Listen!" he called, when he'd come close. "We're here by order of Acting Governor Johnson to requisition a quota of supplies for emergency redistribution-"

Juniper gripped her bow and bared her teeth; that was the second Acting Governor since the Change, which made an average of one about every two weeks and a bit, and nobody knew what had happened to the incumbent. In practice, what was left of the state government had no power more than two days from Salem by bicycle.

Which unfortunately includes our land, just.

The chorus of NO! erupted again; she could see Reverend Dixon of Sutterdown a ways to her left, leading the beat. Odd to be chanting at his direction; the man had ignored her friendly clergy-to-clergy letter before the Change, and been openly hostile since-evidently he thought Jehovah had sent the disaster as a punishment for tolerating the wrong people, of which Juniper and her friends were most certainly an example.

"Suffer not a witch to live" was a favorite of his.

The chorus died down again, and unexpectedly the mousy-looking woman shouted into the quiet: "How can you be so selfish? Half the people in Portland are sitting in camps around Salem and Albany now-gangsters have taken over Portland and driven them out-people are dying! Dying of hunger, hunger and disease-little children are starving to death!"

Sweet Goddess gentle and strong, aid me now. Her hand traced the Invoking sign. Great Ogma, Lord of Eloquence, lend me your golden tongue to calm these troubled waters.

Dixon was about to speak. Juniper opened her mouth to forestall him-the minister was definitely of the tribe who saw all problems as nails and themselves as a hammer. Or the Fist of God, in his case.

"No!" she said, and held up her bow to stop the chant when it threatened to start again. She continued into the ringing silence: "No, we will not give you our food. Not because we grudge help, but because we have little ones of our own to think of. If we gave you all that we have, you'd be starving again in a week-and so would we! Starving to death, before the crops came in! And we need our stock to pull plows and carts, and breed more for the years to come. You've already taken more than we can spare."

"You're as bad as those people in Corvallis," the woman said bitterly.

Juniper's ears pricked up at that, but she made her voice stern: "If you want to do something for those poor city people, get them moving," she went on, pointing over her shoulder at the distant snowpeaks of the Cascades floating against heaven. "East of the mountains, to where there's more. Or set them to work planting, find them seeds and tools. Or both. We'll help all we can with either. Don't keep them sitting until they die!"

Something's wrong, Juniper thought suddenly, as the woman opened her mouth again-most likely to plead for anything they could spare.

A harsh voice spoke from the ranks of the local folk; not one of her clan, probably a farmer: "Not as easy as beating people up when you outnumber them, or robbing us one by one, is it, you useless thieving bastards?"

"Wrong, wrong, wrong," Juniper said under her breath, her eyes flickering over the foragers as they bristled with anger, feeling the future shifting like tumbling rocks. "Watch out-"

Sam Aylward's thick-muscled arm brushed her aside. She staggered back, turning and waving her arms to recover balance. That let her see the crossbow bolt hit his shoulder with a flat hard smack sound, and a ringing under it, and to know it would have hit her if she hadn't moved- or been moved.

The short thick bolt hit glancingly and bounced away, because the Englishman was wearing the first of De

Everything moved very slowly after that. She let the stagger turn her back westward. The Salem folk were looking at one of their own; he stood by their cart and frantically spa

Somehow she could hear the whirr of the crank as the man who'd shot at her spun it; even louder was the creak of Aylward's great yellow bow as he drew to the ear.

Snap-wuffft! String against bracer; whistle of cloven air.

The distance was only thirty feet; the arrow was traveling two hundred feet a second when it left the string, and to the human eye it was nothing but a bright blur in the sunlight. Then tock as it struck bone, smashing into the cross-bowman's face and slamming him brutally back against the cart.

Snap-wuffft! Snap-wuffft!

Two more of the cloth-yard shafts hit the man, bare inches apart in his chest, the gray-goose fletching bobbing as he slumped, held up by the deep-driven heads punched through him and into the boards. Aylward had a fourth shaft on his string, half-drawn, the point shifting back and forth in deadly menace.

"Don't try it!" he roared as blood poured down the dying man's body, trickled down his own side. "Don't you bloody try it!"

Juniper felt the crystalline balance of the moment that followed, silent enough that she could hear the wind that cuffed at her hair and the scrabble of the dead man's heels as they drummed on the asphalt. She slung her bow and stepped forward into that quiet, between the two forces. The thought of hands clenching on ax hafts, fingers trembling on bowstrings and crossbow triggers was distant, remote.

"Stop!" she shouted, filling her lungs and pitching it to carry. "Stop right now!"

The moment sighed away, and people were looking at her. The trained singer's voice let her reach them all.

"There's been enough blood shed today." She spread her arms wide and up, palms towards the west. "Go back. There's nothing for you here. We don't want to hurt you, but we'll fight for our homes and our children if we must. Go! Get out!"

"Out!" Other voices took it up. "OUT! OUT!"

Aylward's eyes were gray and bleak and level as he waited. One by one the foragers turned and mounted their bicycles and left; Juniper let out a sigh.

"You felt it too, then?" Aylward said, as she passed a shaky hand over her face.

"Felt what?" she asked.

"The flux. We might have pulled it off without killing, if that loudmouth bugger hadn't up and told them to sod off. Nice work, Lady, the way you turned it around after that. I wasn't looking forward to a massacre."

She nodded absently, swallowing against a quick nausea-He went on: "It's a gift, feeling the flux-situational awareness, the officers call it. Maybe you've the makings of a soldier."

"And maybe you've the makings of a Witch," she answered.

Then her giddy relief drained away, remembering the savage maul-on-wood sound of the arrowhead striking bone.

"I know you saved my life, Sam, but… Goddess Mother-of-All, can't we stop killing each other even now?"

Aylward shrugged. "Never," he said with conviction. "And especially not now. You said it-there just isn't enough to go 'round, not if it were shared ever so fair."