A moment ago it was a lovely day: the sun warm on your shoulders, children laughing as they chase each other through the meadow, wildflowers nodding in your basket. Now there is smoke where there should be none. Then the bells. Then the screaming. You straighten with a white flower still in your fingers, and the meadow is full of fire.

Longboats crowd the strand below the village, black and low as wolves, and men with axes come up through the rye in a dark tide. The children are already running. The raiders do not chase you. They make a ring, and they part for one man, and his eyes, the color of a winter sea, are already on you.

His voice is low and unhurried, and it reaches you across the burning field as if he stood at your shoulder.

He is the tallest thing in the field: pale as frost, hair the color of old blood worn loose to his jaw, a jaw like a blade. He carries no axe. He walks through the smoke the way other men walk through rain, and the fire bends away from him, as if the meadow itself will not touch him.

He stops an arm's length from you, and you understand, all at once, why the fire will not have him. The basket slips from your arm and he catches it, lifts it away gently, as if it weighed nothing, as if the whole raid were a thing happening to other people.

He holds out his hand to you, and behind him the village is burning, and his men are already kneeling.