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The devils had come to Nandre first.

For generations, the tiny mountain village had scraped a meager living from the hillsides of the Berlawe Mountains, sowing the few crops that would consent to grow in the stony soil.

Poverty made an unlikely shield, but an effective one; whenever Valleth came, the villagers had only to retreat to the nearby mines until they went away.

Nothing in Nandre was worth a siege.

We are made of sterner stuff than stone, they said to each other, a mantra that held true from one generation to the next.

Over a century of occupation, as so many other villages and towns were sacrificed to the Lord of Tales, many converted to his worship, hoping to be spared.

But Nandre never lost their faith in the stars.

For a hundred years, they watched smoke rise from the valley and listened for the thunder of hooves, the terrifying buzz of the Eagle Knights, swarming like wasps up the hills.

They came to rape and plunder and left behind babies with ice-blond hair and blue eyes.

But by spring of 822, Nandre knew that another war had begun, and this time, Valleth was losing.

Smoke rose from Vallethi fortresses and magicians were often on the road, passing deeper into the mountains.

By June of that year, the horses riding up the pass to the village were carrying the black and silver banners of Sir Remin, Knight-General of the Imperial Army.

Valleth must have suffered many defeats, for him to have come so far.

It would be some time before anyone connected those defeats with the arrival of the goat-stealers.

That was one of the problems, in the beginning.

Everyone had a different name for the things that had appeared in the night, and often it seemed they were not even describing the same thing.

In Meinhem, the great wolves came first, the swiftest of the devils, howling outside their stout log houses, smashing against the walls as if they were mad with foaming sickness.

On the high, precarious cliffs of Raida, they called them the slinkers and thought they were some new Vallethi scout, killing the night watchmen in advance of a raid.

And in Nandre, where the mountain scrub would not support any animal larger than goats, it was the disappearance of the livestock that first indicated something was out there, in the dark.

Was it dogs stealing them? Wolves? They began to hear the noises of both in the night, snarling, rasping growls, and distant howls that froze the blood.

“I’ll see to the beasties myself,”

said Fridolin Creit, who had been one of the richest men in the village until four of his goats went missing.

And that was how he became the first human casualty of the devils.

For at sunrise, the pen with the goat he had staked out as bait was empty, and so was his perch in a nearby tree.

The people of Nandre began to catch glimpses of…something, at dawn and twilight.

Furtive shapes in the trees, scrabbling away from the sunlight.

Nandre was high enough in the mountains that the trees were fairly sparse, especially near the village itself, where the land had long been denuded to feed the hearth fires.

It likely saved some of the village children.

In Raida, Selgin, and three times in the old forest of Meinhem, it was children that went missing, rather than livestock.

The first clear sighting of a devil was on August 12, 822, when a sleepy Nelle Vittelich went out early to milk the goats.

Only a few months earlier, Nelle had given birth to one of those ice-blond babies, and that was why she rose early, to spare her husband the chores.

Donatin swore he didn’t blame her for what had happened by the stream, but Nelle felt herself shamed and disgraced forever.

It was her fault she had gone alone, her fault she had not heard the Vallethi warband coming, and her fault that she had not been quick enough to escape.

That was why she was star-cursed with a bastard babe, a child she could barely stand to look at.

When she arrived at the stable, there was more misfortune waiting.

The door was already ajar, and one of the new baby goats was lying dead just inside.

Nelle clicked her tongue.

This would upset her daughter Amalie, who had been hand-raising the kids after an unusual triple birth.

It was rare for all three to survive in such case, but it had looked as if the runt might just pull through.

Now all of them were dead, lying sightless in the straw.

At the back of the stable, there was a noise.

An uncanny chuckling, rasping and breathy, and Nelle’s head lifted.

For the first time, she found herself looking into the huge, lambent eyes of the creature everyone would soon call strangler.

“Monster,”

she breathed, taking a wobbling step backward.

It was skinny, bony, bald, but close enough to human that she hesitated, wondering whether it might not be some feral, motherless thing.

But then its lipless mouth peeled back from rotten teeth and she stumbled toward the door, tripping over the dead goats.

“Monster! Monster!”

It was so fast, she only had time for one good scream before it was on her, its breath rasping in her ear.

They rolled together into the shadowy yard and those long limbs wound around her, legs clamping tight, bony hands seeking her throat.

Its hands were almost like a human’s, but long and thin, with an extra joint on each finger.

Unable to break free, Nelle threw herself sideways, rolling over, fighting for every inch toward the house.

The fight saved her life.

The first rays of sunlight struck the mountain peaks and tipped over them, and the thing gave a grating scream.

“Nelle? Nelle!”

Donatin burst from the house, cursing and grabbing for a spade.

His arms swung up and slammed the hard edge against the devil’s head until it let go, and Nelle scrambled free, coughing and gagging.

The thing burst into flames.

It was impossible to say whether the spade killed it, but the sickly green devil’s fire certainly finished it off.

All over the valley, others were having similar encounters.

On the Talfel Plateau, Sir Huber Adaman lost five horses to a pack of ghouls one night, when they got into the corral and tore the horses’ legs off, then couldn’t escape the slippery abattoir by sunrise.

In Selgin, a blacksmith named Herdegen had a nasty shock one morning when he encountered a wolf demon out by the woodpile, only to be saved by the sunlight as he was fighting it off with a hammer.

It was this common trait that named all of them devils, in the end.

Crooked, wicked creatures, unquestionably evil, who could not bear the touch of the sun.

But as disturbing as the devils were, the Andelin had been under Vallethi occupation for a hundred years.

The horrors of the Lord of Tales were supplemented by the more prosaic dangers of the Andelin wildlife.

There were bears.

Timber wolves, shaggy and cunning, which made off with sheep and occasionally small children.

Foxes.

Maned bobcats with tufted ears. On the plateau, there were the coursing cats, leggy felines with pale gold stripes, fast enough to run down a horse at full gallop. Fortunately, they weren’t big enough to attempt anything larger than a Talfel antelope.

Thus, after the initial shock of the devils, they became just another hazard, in time.

To be sure, it was strange and frightening; it would give anyone a start to suddenly see the huge eyes of a strangler in the dark, and the deafening howl of a wolf demon caused more than a few sleepless nights.

But until the spring of 826, everyone just took care to be indoors by nightfall, and barred their doors with iron.

“It’s not going to hold.”

“It will hold.”

In one of Meinhem’s sturdy timber cottages, a woodsman named Girnot Briouse moved between his wife and the door with a hatchet in his hand, the largest weapon available.

The peasants of the Andelin Valley could rarely spare the iron for something so impractical as a sword.

“Get the children up into the rafters,”

he said, on sudden inspiration, and boosted up his son himself, the eight-year old boy weeping as he clutched at the rough timbers, only nine feet overhead.

His wife Liberie was too big to fit between the close rafters, and their three year-old was too young to hold on.

She huddled into her mother, hiccoughing with terror.

Another slam into the door, wood shredding as things gnawed and clawed at it.

“Stars, stars, guard us,”

said Girnot.

The hand gripping his axe was shaking.

“Stars, witness your children and have mercy, stars, stars…”

The door exploded open.

This was happening in Raida.

It was happening in Selgin.

It was happening at every fort on the Vallethi border.

That same night, it was happening in the small fishing village of Isigne.

The devils had come in howling, rushing down the Medlenne River like the spring floods.

They were not like wolves, which would hunt and eat and then be satisfied.

The same wolf demon that would burst through one door would slay and slay and then go straight onto the next, shouldering its way through the tide of slavering, gabbling ghouls.

They went for the doors and windows, biting and tearing at them, maddening each other with their blood lust.

“We’ll go for the boat,”

breathed a young man named Siyoun Arpelle, five years a husband and barely that many a man.

“The river should be deep enough, if we coast out for a bit.

I’ll drop anchor in the middle, and we’ll be safe until morning.

But we’ll have to run. Can you?”

“Yes,”

whispered Oranie Arpelle, binding their fourteen month-old son more tightly to her body in a sling.

It was understood that Siyoun would have to carry their daughter.

The fishermen of Isigne lived in rows of cottages fronting the docks of the Medlenne, a tributary of the mighty Brede.

Those docks were high and narrow, raised to withstand the spring floods, and it was the thought of those narrow walkways that gave him hope.

Narrow and treacherous, yes, but in such a place the devils could not come all at once, and a man might hope to fend them off long enough to make it to the boats.

There was no chance that their door would hold, if this many devils chose to test it.

A few houses down, another door gave way, and at the outburst of screaming, Siyoun shoved outside with an oar in one hand and his daughter in the other, pushing his wife onto the docks.

So many devils.

How were there so many devils?

The riverbanks were boiling with them, gray-skinned ghouls and smoking black wolf demons, savaging the figures fleeing for the water.

Someone on the hill was waving a torch in frantic arcs, trying to draw the attention of the devils to give someone else a chance to run.

So many devils.

Stars, so many devils.

Behind him, Siyoun heard a snarling that sent him bolting forward, and he tried not to see the ghouls scrambling onto the far side of the docks, or feel the wood shaking under the weight of the thing behind him.

The boards were warped and splintered, gray with weathering, and their repair was one of the many chores the fishermen frequently discussed amongst themselves, and never quite got around to doing.

On such small things, destinies were sometimes decided.

Beside him, Oranie tripped and went sprawling.

“Oranie!”

Siyoun whirled to go back for her, his oar swinging out automatically, and so in the light of the moon he saw with perfect, eternal clarity his wife’s face frozen in a scream, her brown eyes wide with terror, and the sawtoothed maw of the wolf demon descending.

“Run, Siyoun, run!”

All those teeth crunched.

His son stopped crying.

Gone.

They were gone.

Just like that.

Siyoun turned and ran.

There were many young men standing before doors in the Andelin Valley.

Many young mothers making desperate last stands for their children.

Many elders sacrificing themselves, so that the next generation might live on.

There were cowards and traitors, opportunists and scoundrels, and heroes whose deeds would only be known to the watching eyes of the stars.

A hundred miles away, in the town of Ferrede, there was one young man whose worth had yet to be measured.

“Someone mind that window,”

said eighteen year-old Rollon of Hollisey, a squire who was hoping he would live to see his knighthood.

As the last light of day faded from the edges of the shutters, the nighttime chorus was rising, and something struck the door a glancing blow, as if to test it.

Rollon and his small party had been chased into Ferrede that morning with the last of the night’s ghouls, after two sleepless weeks on the road.

Most of those nights had been spent in treetops, kicking away stranglers and praying their horses would survive the night in makeshift corrals.

For one single, blissful hour, Rollon had spotted the smoke rising from the chimneys of Ferrede, saw the stout wooden walls of the cottages, and thought: we’re safe.

As it turned out, the entire population of the village looked at him and thought the same thing.

But as Sir Huber said, that was what it meant to be a man at arms.

Rollon had served as page and then as squire to Sir Huber Adaman throughout the Vallethi war, and though Sir Huber was not a loquacious man, it added weight to the words he spoke.

He taught his pages that a sword was a responsibility, and if a man took up a weapon, he had an obligation to use it to defend those who could not defend themselves.

That was the oath a knight swore before his lord.

And though Rollon was not yet a knight, he had knelt and sworn it before Remin, the Duke of Andelin: that he would protect the people of Ferrede, and build them a safe place against the devils.

Duke Andelin had only been seventeen when he saved Lomonde, Rollon told himself.

And he had been a squire, too.

“Put at least two people on each window,”

he said, trying to settle everyone else as well as himself.

“The windows are high off the ground, and too narrow for anything but stranglers.

Even if we lose a shutter, they won’t come flying through all at once.

Not into a lit room with lots of people watching.”

Or so he hoped.

All the villagers were crammed into three rooms just like this one, drying sheds raised on stone foundations, with high, narrow windows to let the wheat breathe as it dried.

It had stout walls to keep out the vermin, and by daylight, it had seemed like a good idea to get everyone together behind those stout walls, with two armed soldiers on each door.

Now it occurred to him that it just meant every devil for fifty miles would be battering at a single structure.

Ghouls snarled at each other, thudding against the door, and behind him, a child started to cry.

“Sir knight,”

said one of the women, her voice quavering.

This did not seem like the time to remind them he wasn’t a knight yet.

“There’s something scratching over here. It sounds like…digging.”