The old man sat at the edge of the well and fed crumbs to seven gold canaries while the village burned behind him. No one paid him any attention. In the mathematics of disaster, a frail traveler with birds ranks below collapsed rooftops and screaming livestock, and so he sat undisturbed, his pale eyes cataloguing every detail with a patience that had outlasted civilizations. The raiders had come from the north. Twenty-two mounted soldiers bearing no banner, which meant mercenaries or worse. They had taken the grain stores and the smith's iron and one girl who had not run fast enough, and they had left in the direction of the mountain pass as if the terrain itself would shield them from consequence. The old man finished feeding the canaries. He set his staff against the stone and stood with a slowness that suggested bones far older than his frame. Then he turned north, and the canaries rose from his shoulders in a formation that, to anyone watching closely enough, bore an uncomfortable resemblance to a war column. No one watched closely enough. They never did...