You did everything you could.
I hated every one so I gave Wulfric the truth.
“No, it doesn’t.”
His eyes came back to mine.
“We prepare for what we can,” I said. “We make a second plan for when the first one fails. Then we hope for a bit of mercy on the things we never saw coming.”
He was quiet for so long I thought I’d said too much, then Anya shouted from across the lane.
“Darcy!”
We both turned to see that old Gilda had somehow acquired a second spinning wheel.
I closed my eyes.
“No.”
Wulfric’s shoulders moved. He was laughing, the traitor.
“You’re enjoying this.”
“A little.”
“Your people are impossible.”
“They are still yours to save.”
That stopped me as I looked at him. He seemed to realize what he’d said a moment after I did.
“Come on,” I said. “Before she finds a loom.”
By evening, we’d learned more from one practice movement than we had from six hours of talking. The original groups were too large. One of the forest paths became slick where a stream crossed it. Two elderly men needed help walking and refused to admit it. Three children would follow anyone carrying food. The backup signal couldn’t be a horn because too many people mistook it for the warning from the coast.
So we changed it. The council met once more after dark in the meeting house which smelled of onion pottage cooking in a great blackened pot. A round loaf was torn apart and passed from hand to hand. Hard cheese followed, then a crock of butter so precious everyone used it sparingly except Leofric, who took enough to prove some character flaws survived every century.
We sat around the central hearth.
I had stopped feeling quite so much like a zoo animal though one of the old women still watched me every time I drank from the ale cup, perhaps checking whether my lips smoked.
Wulfric went through the revised plan. The fighters would watch the roads, scouts would report movement, livestock and supplies had their routes, the vulnerable would leave in smaller groups, each counted twice, and every group had two people who knew both paths.
Signals were set. A rally place had been chosen if anyone was separated and nobody would turn back alone. That last rule caused the most argument.
“What if my child is missing?” one woman demanded.
“Then someone tells me,” Anya said.
“And you will go?”
“No. The hunters will.”
The woman began to protest as I stepped in.
“If everybody goes back for one missing person, we have twenty missing people.”
The meeting ran late. The ale went around the room until the jug grew suspiciously light. Outside, the air had turned bitterly cold.