All the houses danced merrily in flames, as if they’d found their true calling this violent night. One had recently been home for the woman kneeling on the apple-tree hill just outside the village.

  She’d made serious attempts against her bonds, tree roots extending up from the earth and coiled around her sooty arms and legs. She’d bruised her limbs, yet the pale roots showed no signs of releasing their grasp. The only defiant activity left to her was wailing through the gag in her mouth, her desperate song joined by the thin bawling of the cloth bundle carried her captor.

  Her eyes seeked the man’s who held the babe, oblivious to its cries. But his focus was on the charm swaying from her sweaty neck, though for what reason she could not determine—perhaps he was contemplating her bust instead. The cloaks of the silent others billowed like their leader’s in the firewind; together they waited in the smoke-scented night.

  Eventually, the man spoke.

  “… Ungag her.”

  A figure nearby moved to pull the rope out, wary of a potential biting. But only pleading captured the captive’s mind. The saliva still stretched between cracked lips and cord when the woman uttered the first consonant of the word she couldn’t finish, her eagerness tripping over the throat’s after-gag coughing reflex.

  And so the man got to talk first.

  “So, woman, what’s his name?”

  No longer coughing, the female ignored the question and begged, in a voice hoarse from exertion, “Don’t hurt him! Please, don’t hurt him! I’ll—"

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  “I’m afraid,” interrupted the man, “I can’t promise anything of the sort.”

  “No! I’ll do anything! Please, anything you like lord! Just don’t kill him—”

  “What? Ridiculous,” he scoffed. He ran a hand through the crying infant’s hair. “That would be such a waste. No. I’m going to raise him.”

  “Rai—raise him?” she said, clearly taken aback, dangerous hope touching her eyes.

  “Of course. Just imagine how powerful of a mage he could be. Will be.”

  “Mage? —Please, lord, there’s been a mistake! We’re plain folk! Peter—Peter was but a humble carpenter!”

  The man stared at her a moment, then laughed.

  “I don’t believe this! Oz, the great Oz, never told you?”

  He reached down to her neck — she recoiled as much as she could, still bound — grabbed her necklace and tore it off with a wrench.

  “Never told you what this is about?” he said, waving the charm in her bewildered eyes. He stood up and scoffed. “Well, what would a lemen know anyway. If he never told you then I won’t. The wishes of one so great should be respected.

  “Now, I’ve decided on the boy. I can’t keep my men waiting anymore. You understand, it’s a long trip home, and every Everrockian agent within ten leagues felt that battle with Oz. So belay your confusion, bid farewell to your son, and his name—say it now or I give him another.”

  He bent down then and held forth the still-bawling infant to the bound woman. As told, she gazed upon her child. In her eyes was resignation, and some hope. Before she spoke she hushed soothing things until the babe’s tiny throat settled down. (Some of the surrounding figures visibly relaxed with the quieting.) The man looked pointedly at the young mother, whose eyes were roving over her son, engraving his features in them.

  “His name is Able,” she said finally.

  “Able,” repeated the man, nodding to himself as if it was satisfactory.

  He stood, giving the woman a final, apathetic glance before turning his back on her rising, panicked protests and walking to his horse.

  On the way down the hill the boy started crying again, as though he knew he was being parted from his birth parents forever. Never again to be tickled by his mother’s brown hair hanging over him, and sneeze no more at his father’s wood dust scent after a good day’s work.

  But even if then he knew, the chorus of twelve winters passing would have drowned their voices into scant echoes of the soul.