The line at the warning post had thinned by the time Orin came down from the tower. Three bodies still sat in the mud where the guards had turned them away. One was breathing. Orin counted the breaths and found them slow. He wore his black cape and the two cleavers he had shaped himself, one on each hip, and a row of knives crossed his chest. He had not slept. An old man had once fed him when no one had to, and had died alone while Orin was three days out on Titus's work. Since then Orin kept a rule. No one starved inside Hightree while he drew breath. The guard at the post straightened when he saw Orin. He was young. He held a spear he did not need. "Orders," the guard said. "No beggars past the stones. Sickness, thieves. Lord Titus said the town first." Orin looked past him at the road. More were coming. A woman with two children. A man dragging a foot. The guard swallowed. "I only do what I was told." Orin did not answer. He walked past the guard, knelt by the woman breathing in the mud, and lifted her. She weighed nothing. He carried her through the post and up the path toward the stone tower without looking back. Titus met him at the tower door. Rook stood a pace behind, hood up, a blade in each hand out of habit. Titus looked at the woman in Orin's arms, then at the line forming on the road. "You moved them past my guard," Titus said. "I did," Orin said. "The post turns away the weak. The weak die by morning." Titus was quiet a moment. Rook watched the road. "How many?" Titus asked. "Thirty tonight. More tomorrow." Titus nodded once. "Bring them inside the wall. Feed them from my stores. The tower cellar is dry." He turned to Rook. "Tell the post. Anyone breathing gets through. Anyone who argues answers to Orin." Rook's mouth moved under the hood, close to a smile, and he went. By dark Orin had carried nine through the gate himself and walked others in on their own feet. He laid the woman on straw in the cellar and set bread by her hand. She did not wake. Outside, the road kept giving up bodies out of the trees. Word had traveled faster than he thought. He stood in the tower doorway and counted them coming. Sixty, maybe more, and the stores Titus had opened would not hold a week. Orin set his hand on the haft of a cleaver and began to think about who in Hightree still had grain, and who had been hiding it.

By morning the cellar was full and the road was empty. Orin did not trust the emptiness. He climbed to the warning post and counted the stones where refugees should have been sitting. He found three fresh bootprints leading back into the trees and a smear of blood on the post itself. The guard on duty was not the young one from the night before. This one was older, thick in the shoulders, and he stood too straight when Orin came near. Orin asked how many had passed since dawn. The guard said none. Orin looked at the blood on the stone and said nothing. He walked back to the tower and found Rook sharpening a blade by the door. Orin told Rook what he had seen. He told him to ride the tree line and find whoever the post had turned away. Rook pulled his hood up and was gone before Orin finished speaking. Orin went to the barracks and pulled the older guard off the post by his collar. He did not use the cleavers. He put the man in the cell and shut the door and told the other guards what would happen if the post turned away one more breathing body. Then he went to find Titus. Titus listened without moving. When Orin finished, Titus said, "Keep him alive until we know who paid him." Orin nodded. He did not plan to kill the guard yet. He planned to ask him questions in a quiet room. Rook came back at dusk on a lathered horse. He had found four of the turned-away sitting under a fallen pine, two already dead, a mother and a boy still breathing. He had put the living on the horse and walked them to the gate himself. Then he told Orin the rest. Half a mile past the pine he had seen figures on the road. Six of them, moving wrong, armor rusted through, jaws hanging. He knew what they were. He had grown up with Titus and he had seen his own family walk that way after the hordes came through. He said they were coming toward Hightree at a slow steady pace and would reach the post by dawn. Orin went to the cell and looked at the guard through the bars. The guard had turned people away into a road where dead men were walking. Orin did not know yet if the guard had known. He would know before morning. He climbed the tower and told Titus what Rook had seen. Titus set down his cup and said, "Wake the barracks." Orin went down to wake them.