The town was called Spanhold, and it had been built at the only bridge on forty miles of the Rill, and the bridge was in the river. Genna saw it from the last rise of the descent road: two stone piers standing in brown water like men waiting for an explanation, the deck between them gone, and the Rill itself visibly wrong, running high and hard and the color of turned earth, carrying whole trees past the town at the speed of bad news. On the near bank, backed up along the road and spilling into the fields, sat the crossing that could not cross: carts, herds, families, the eastbound refugee current from her side of the hills meeting a westbound current from beyond the river, both of them piled against the water like leaves against a grate. A thousand people, maybe more. She had stopped being good at counting crowds. It was not a skill her life had previously required. She came down into Spanhold at midday and stood in the well square to fill her skin. A woman drawing water beside her, a local by the apron, made room and asked, in the tone of towns that have recently acquired a thousand strangers, "And who are you, then, when you're at home?" "Genna Busterson." The woman looked at her. Nothing happened. The woman's face performed no ceremony. No weather crossed it. The name went out into the air and lay there, unclaimed, like a coin on open ground, and Genna stood very still, the way you'd stand if a rare bird landed on your arm, and counted. One. Two. Three. Fou... "Busterson?" the woman's husband said, arriving with a second bucket, frowning helpfully. "The ale road?" And then, to his wife, with the mild reproach of a man…