They came at noon, under a sky with nothing in it.
Esteban heard them before he saw them: not hooves this time, but a slow dragging sound, the sound of a great many boots on a dry road. He was on the back step, sharpening the blade of Diego's axe, and the whetstone stopped in his hand. Across the yard, Riko, who had been mending the hen-house door, lifted his head like a dog.
"That's more than eleven," said Riko.
"Twenty," Esteban said. He'd learned to count by sound. "Maybe twenty-two."
Inside the kitchen, a chair scraped on the floor.

Diego stepped out into the sunlight with his sword already in his hand.
He had washed. That was the thing Esteban noticed. He had washed his face and combed his short grey hair with his fingers and put on a clean shirt, the dull blue of a man's good shirt, and he'd bandaged his arm again, tighter, and left the sleeve rolled. He looked like a man about to go to a wedding or a funeral and who had decided not to say which.
"Stay inside," he said.
"I can—"
"I know what you can do." He did not look at him. "Stay inside. Both of you."
He walked down the path between the apple trees with his sword held low and easy at his side, and he walked the way he always walked, as though the ground were a thing he owned and was merely lending out. He didn't hurry. He passed the hen-house, the woodpile, the stone wall. At the pine tree at the end of the orchard he stopped, and the whole of him seemed to go quiet, the way a pond goes quiet when the wind drops.
He put his palm flat against the board that said Lewis.
He held it there for about three breaths.
Then he turned and walked out through the gate.

The raiders had made a ring.
It wasn't an arrangement anyone had planned. It formed the way a crowd forms around a street fight, men drifting out of the column and settling, a loose circle of twenty-odd bodies on the road in front of the farmhouse, swords and axes and cudgels held down by their sides, faces turned inward. At the center of the ring was a man with his shirt off.
Esteban knew him from Riko's description, and found that Riko's description had been accurate and also useless.
Garron was not huge. He stood a little over six feet, broad and heavy-boned, with a close-cropped skull and the thick slow face of a man who had never been in a hurry. His chest and forearms were covered in small round scars, hundreds of them, in tidy rows. He looked like a mason. He looked like someone's uncle.
"Lion," he said, and smiled.
"Garron."
"You look tired."
"I'm old."
"You're old." Garron nodded, as if the point were fair. "I'd like to make you an offer. You know it. You've heard it from my men, and I'd like to say it myself, because I think it's polite. Give me the house. You can take whatever you want from it. You can take the grave, if it matters to you. I'll even pay."
"No."
"Then I'd like to settle it. Just us." He lifted a thick hand and gestured at the ring. "These fellows won't touch you. They won't touch your friends. If you put me down, we go, and we don't come back. If I put you down, the house is mine, and the field, and anything else I find." He tilted his head. "Fair?"
Diego looked at him for a moment.
"Fair," he said.
From the kitchen window, Esteban watched the old man take three steps forward, and set his feet, and begin to breathe.

What followed was not a fight in the sense that Esteban understood fights.
It started slowly. Garron did not rush him. He lifted both hands loosely, palms out, and began to walk in a circle with a heavy, easy gait. He let Diego come to him, and Diego did, with the long deliberate steps of a man crossing a bridge in the dark. Their shadows slid across the road like two hands of a clock.
Diego struck first.
It was a single cut from the right, low, at the ribs. It looked almost lazy. It landed with a flat, dull crack, and Garron's body took it the way a boulder takes a thrown apple.
The old man's sword rang. A shiver ran up its length and into his wrist, and Esteban saw his teeth close.
Garron's skin darkened where the blade had touched, going from pink to grey in the space of a pulse, and his smile widened by a hair.
"Again," he said.
Diego struck again.
And again, and again, the long blade drawing narrow bright lines through the afternoon air, each one at a different angle, a different weight, a different depth of shoulder. It was beautiful. It was the most beautiful thing Esteban had ever watched, and also the most hopeless. Every cut struck stone. Every cut left a small grey patch that took a long, slow minute to fade. Garron barely moved. He rocked with the blows as a tree rocks in wind, and, between them, reached for the iron pin he wore on a chain at his neck and pricked the back of his own hand with it, once, twice, so that the grey spread and stayed.
Diego began to talk.
Not to Garron. Not to anyone. His lips barely moved. Esteban couldn't hear the words through the glass. But he knew what the old man was saying, because he had seen the same movement on his own lips for ten years.
Lewis.

He thought of Lewis as he fought.
He couldn't help it. It happened without his will, the way a limb remembers a break. Behind each cut of the sword came a picture, and each picture was sharper than the one before it: Lewis at thirteen, in a coat too big for him, standing on the road outside a house in the north with a satchel over his shoulder, looking up at him. Are you my brother? Lewis at twenty, making a bad stew. Lewis at thirty, arguing about money. Lewis at thirty-five, sitting by a window.
I wasn't there.
He had told himself, for seven years, that it was not his fault. That a man could not be in two places. That a job was a job. That his brother was a grown man who had said, Go. I'll be fine. He had told himself all of it, in the evenings, on the porch of the house he could not leave, and every evening it had sounded a little more like an excuse and a little less like the truth.
I should have known.
He had known something, hadn't he? He had seen the thinness. The slow lengthening of the silences. The plate that came back to the sink half full. He had told himself it would pass. Everyone's grief had passed, hadn't it? They'd all gone on. The whole world had gone on, with its half-empty houses.
Not him. He didn't go on.
The sword came down again on stone, and the shock of it ran through his bones and rattled his teeth, and for a moment the pain of it was a mercy.

"You're slowing down," said Garron.
He was not out of breath. A dozen small grey patches dotted his chest and arms, but he moved as freely as a man in a dance hall. He was laughing, a low, comfortable sound. He had begun to hit back, now: not hard, not yet, long swinging backhands that Diego rolled under or turned aside with the flat of the sword, each one a little closer than the last.
Diego didn't answer.
He had been fighting for eleven minutes, and the wound in his arm had opened somewhere around the sixth. A dark stain was spreading down the sleeve of his good shirt, past the elbow, past the wrist. It dripped, a single red bead at a time, onto the road.
"I don't want to hurt you," said Garron, and, in a way, it was the cruelest thing he'd said. "You're a good man. I've heard what they say about you. You could have walked away from this a hundred times." New chapters come out on novelping . com first.
"I couldn't."
"Because of that." Garron jerked his chin toward the pine at the end of the orchard. "Because of a pile of dirt."
Diego's face did not change.
But his grip on the sword did, a small tightening, and something in the old man's stance shifted. It was the smallest of motions. The weight came a hair too far forward onto the balls of his feet.
Garron's hand came up out of nowhere.

It struck Diego in the middle of the chest.
It was not a punch. It was something slower and more final, an open palm driven forward with the whole weight of a thick body behind it, and the sound it made was like a sack of grain dropped from a roof. Diego left the ground. He flew back six feet, seven, and landed on his shoulders in the dust, and the sword spun out of his hand and skittered away across the road.
Nobody in the ring made a sound.
He tried to get up. Esteban watched him try. He got one knee beneath him, then a hand, and when he put weight on the hand his arm gave way, and he fell on his face.
Garron walked over to him unhurriedly.
"That's all right," he said. "That's all right. You did well. Better than anyone's done."
He crouched beside the old man and put one thick hand on the back of his neck, almost gently, the way a man holds a dog he has to put down. Diego lifted his head an inch. His face was grey with dust, and blood ran from his mouth.
"I'm sorry," he said.
He did not say it to Garron.
It was barely a sound. A breath with a shape in it. But Esteban, at the window, heard it clearly, because there was nothing else in the world to hear. And he understood that Diego had not been speaking to the man above him, or to the ring, or to anyone in the road. He had been speaking to the tree at the end of the orchard.
I'm sorry. I wasn't there. I'm not there now.
Something went through Esteban then that he did not understand. Something that closed his hand around the edge of the window sill until the wood groaned under his fingers.

Garron stood up and wiped his palm on his trousers.
"Dig," he said.
The men near the back of the ring stirred. Four of them had shovels. They had carried them all the way from Red Mountain, tied across their backs like quivers, and now they unslung them and walked, unhurried, through the gate, into the orchard, between the apple trees, toward the pine.
Diego lifted his head again. He saw where they were going.
"No," he said.
It was not loud. It had no fear in it, no anger. It was the most terrible thing Esteban had ever heard, a word spoken by a man too tired to say anything else.
"Stay down," said Garron, not unkindly. He didn't look back. "You've done enough."
The first shovel went into the earth beside the pine.
And somewhere above the pass, in a sky that had held nothing all afternoon, a single dark cloud had begun to turn.