The Search For Magic

A twist of the knife

The snow came at her in a blur-icy shards stinging her face and hands, turning her skin a hurtful pink and chasing her farther into the folds of a tattered woolen cloak. She had no hood or hat, and her long hair whipped about, spun silver dancing madly with the keening wind.

She didn’t have to be out in this weather. She could have stayed in the goatherds’ village, claiming a spot by a cozy hearth and eating her fill of something warm and reasonably tasty. But she was driven this night, like the snow was driven, and so she struggled to pick up the pace along a narrow path where the drifts were a foot deep in places.

It was the onset of winter in Neraka’s Broken Chain Mountains. In the foothills and in the rest of the country there was likely only a dusting of snow-and perhaps no snow at all in the southern parts of the Dark Knight-held land.

But this brutal storm is not so bad, certainly not as bad as others face, she told herself, as if her thoughts might somehow soften the wind’s vicious bite. People she knew in Southern Ergoth, where the white dragon Frost held sway, faced weather like this-or worse- every day of the year. Word was they had blizzards so fierce that no man could last outside for more than a few minutes, and she was lasting-and walking- making headway toward the next village.

She didn’t see the man against the rocky outcropping. He held his breath and listened, hearing the wind. To him it sounded like a chorus of mournful ghosts. Her boots crunched on the snow as she passed by his hiding spot. He waited, silently counting, then stepped out, an inky shadow against the stark whiteness that stretched in all directions.

Shiv was taller than the woman, but only by a few inches, putting him a bit above six feet. His back was straight, his shoulders broad, and the rest of him was oddly narrow, a gaunt man whose silhouette resembled a dagger stuck into the drift growing at his feet.

He was dressed in a smoke-gray jacket and trousers made from the hide of a worg and lined for winter use. A knit cap hugged his hawkish face. Unlike the woman, Shiv did not wear a cloak; he knew it could lash about in the wind, entangling his arms and flapping noisily and perhaps giving him away. He had a pack on his back, padded so it would not rustle, and a purse at his belt-nearly empty, as it had taken practically every coin he owned to find this woman. But his purse and his pockets would be splitting at the seams soon enough, filled with steel and gems. Before the month was out he would be happily doling out some of his riches to the most exotic, perfumed ladies for hire he could find in Jelek’s colorful foreign quarter.

Shiv held thin-bladed knives in each gloved hand, smeared with an oily black substance so they would not reflect any gleam off the snow. He’d bought them two years ago from an expert weaponsmith in Bloodspring. Their metal was as hard as the set of his jaw, the edges so keen he hadn’t yet needed to resharpen them. Worth every coin, these tools of his trade.

He intended to kill the woman with them.

He would do it quickly, effortlessly, stepping close and slipping the right blade across her throat while plunging the left into the center of her heart. He’d done it so many times before. Afterward, he would drag her off the trail, take her body a little higher into the mountains where the wolves would catch the scent and devour the evidence.

But he wouldn’t do it here. It was too close to the village she’d just left, too risky that someone following after a stray goat might-despite this damnable storm-glimpse the deed.

And he wouldn’t do it tonight.

It was too soon.

He’d only just managed to find her, late this afternoon. He didn’t know her yet, didn’t have her walk down, hadn’t looked into her eyes. He didn’t know how strong she was, and, most importantly, he had no clue about her contacts in these mountain villages. This last crucial bit could take a few days to ferret out, perhaps longer.

So he followed several yards behind her, gloved hands reflexively closing on the handles of his weapons before sheathing them, dark eyes squinting against the frenetic snow as they trained on her back.

It was work to keep her in sight, his chest burning from the exertion, his legs aching from slogging through mounds of snow. Twice he dived into a drift when she turned to check her bearings. Were it not for the whirling snow she might have spied him or his tracks. His teeth chattered, and he muttered a silent curse that perhaps he’d been a fool to take on this job at this time. Couldn’t her assassination have waited until spring?

He guessed it took them nearly two hours to reach her destination-a ramshackle assortment of wood and stone buildings wedged into a mountain overhang. He made out on a sign partially buried by a drift: KETH’S CRADLE. More like the Abyss’s Cradle, he thought.

She hurried toward the largest dwelling, a turtleshell-shaped affair that was busily belching smoke into the sky. He watched her for a moment more, then quickly began to circle the tiny community, which by the malodorous aroma that hung in the air, and the pens he barely made out, declared it another village of goatherds.

She rapped firmly on the door.

“I am Risana,” she stated.

Ree-shanna. That was the name Shiv had been given, though his employers had pronounced it differently- Ris-aye-nah.

“Risana,” she repeated, as the door finally opened. “Risana of Crossing.” Her voice was musical and held no trace of the tiredness she most certainly felt. “You sent word that you needed me.”

“Yes!” came the breathless reply. “The Solamnic Knight.”

“I-”

“At last you’re here, dear woman. Please.” Without another word she was ushered inside, and the heavy door slammed shut behind her.

Shiv worked his way behind the turtleshell dwelling, peering through the cracks of a shuttered window that couldn’t close properly because the frame had warped. He could see only the main room from his vantage-point, but it was enough. The merrily burning fireplace made it appear warm, and Shiv pressed himself against the wall in the futile hope of catching some of that heat.

An old, bent man with a mustache and goatee, who Shiv idly thought parroted the village’s cloven-hoofed charges, drew Risana to the center of the room, where four blanket-wrapped forms were stretched out on cots. There were a half-dozen women of various ages sitting in straight wooden chairs, their backs to the fire and sympathetic faces angled toward the forms. Their conversation stopped as Risana moved to the smallest patient. Their eyes trained on her now.

Shiv watched her, too. On initial inspection the firelight revealed nothing untoward about Risana. She was just a tall, young woman wrapped in a tattered cloak, the rosy hue of which suggested the garment had been red at one time. She was a plain-looking woman, really, Shiv thought, a commoner who could have lost herself in the lower- or middle-class quarters of any town, someone most folks wouldn’t stop to give a second look. But then he gave her a second look, a careful one, and saw that she was young, all right, very. Certainly not yet twenty, he decided, and nothing common about her. The woman was singular. One simply had to see past her tattered garments and fatigue.

Her face was well defined, angular without being sharp, the planes of it smooth and unblemished, and it looked as if she was blushing because of the cold and windburn. Her nose turned slightly upward, a hint of aristocracy, and the bearing suited her. While her hair had looked like sparkling silver outside in the snow, here, wet and flat against her head, it seemed an unusual shade of blonde, the color of cooled ashes-an almost whitish-gray that shone like silk. He imagined it must be soft to the touch.

Her eyes were charcoal, dark and large and rimmed with long black lashes. Those eyes seemed to take in everything, and measure-the women by the fire, the bundled-up people on the cots, the old, bent man who was speaking to her, and the windows, where her gaze lingered. Had she seen him? He held his breath, not blinking. Were her eyes locked with his? No, he breathed a sigh of relief. Her eyes were clearly fixed at some point far beyond this room and Neraka.

Shiv turned his face, concentrating to catch fragments of what was being said inside.

“It’s not pneumonia,” the bent man was telling Risana. He wrung his hands nervously. “I know pneumonia. I can treat pneumonia. Someone here gets it every year. It’s something worse, this is-a plague maybe, something that spreads. Emil and his family have it, too. They’re in the house across the way. And the Donners might be getting it.”

“We might be next,” the stoutest of the six women cut in.

“We shouldn’t be sitting so close to the sick,” another whispered in a high-pitched voice.

“I’ll sit where I please,” the stout woman returned.

Risana knelt at the cot nearest the window, tugging the blanket back to reveal a red-faced child with dozens of lesions on his arms and neck. The boy, no more than six or seven, coughed deeply, shoulders bouncing against the pine frame of the cot. The child was overly thin, there was a sheen on his skin, and his clothes were dark with sweat.

“A plague,” the bent man continued. “It has to be. The runner said Graespeck and Tornhollow have sick folks, too. Just like this. Some of ‘em dying. That’s why we sent for you. The runner said you were fixing folks in the villages to the south of here. Said that you maybe knew how to cure this kind of illness. We’re desperate.”

She replaced the covers and smoothed the boy’s hair. He started to offer her a smile, but began coughing again, which was echoed by one of the other blanketed forms. The stout woman loudly sucked in her breath.

“That’s why our message said this was an emergency, ma’am. We’re a small village. Don’t want more people catching this disease, and we don’t want no one dying. Our Jamie-the little one here-he’s real bad.”

Softer, the bent man added, “He’s my youngest grandson.”

Risana nodded and ran her fingers across the child’s forehead.

“A very strong fever,” she said. She twisted to her right so she could reach to another cot, feeling the forehead of an elderly woman.

“My wife,” the bent man said.

“Mother,” one of the six women added, choking back a sob. “She’s not been conscious for two days.”

Shiv noted that there was some resemblance between the women by the fire. Sisters. The other two patients no doubt were relatives also. The sisters had started talking again, filling the room with the sound of their buzzing. They asked Risana what she could do to help the ill. The thickset one, practically begging, made it clear Jamie was her son and should be tended to first. None argued with her.

The oldest sister politely asked what had brought Risana into Neraka, and why she was healing folks in the mountain villages when Solamnic Knights were considered the enemy around here. “Not that we take you for an enemy,” she added, “but if the Dark Knights catch you, they’ll kill you.”

Risana didn’t reply. She stood, taking off her voluminous cloak, which was quickly gathered by the bent man. She stretched, rolled her head to work a kink out of her neck.

A Solamnic Knight with no armor, Shiv thought, knowing his mark was now an easier one.

The firelight from the hearth played across her tall form. Her sword seemed well maintained, the pommel highly polished silver that was fashioned in the shape of a griffon’s claw. The scabbard was worn and ripped in places, and the blade showed through, catching the light and reflecting motes that danced across the walls.

Risana unbuckled her sword belt, and the bent man took this too, shuffling away and hanging it and her cloak on a hook near the door. She had a big pouch tied to her waist, and she was fumbling with this now, pulling smaller pouches from it, a few tiny vials, softly issuing instructions that Shiv could not hear. He got the gist of it though, as the bent man and two of the sisters hurried to heat some water over the fire. The remaining four women resumed their buzzing talk, the thickset one casting frequent concerned glances at the coughing boy.

Risana did not pause in tending to the ill until dawn threatened to take over the sky. She constantly moved between the turtleshell home and the one called “Emil’s place.” She had diagnosed the malady as Redlant Fever, adding that a few of the eldest Knights in the Solamnic unit she’d been assigned to were struck with it shortly after coming to Neraka well more than a year ago. A potentially deadly threat that seemed to strike the young and the old the hardest, she demonstrated that with the right medicines it was not terribly difficult to treat. She gave them details about the mixtures she was using so they could duplicate it with their own herbs, then she sat by the bed of the old woman.

Just as the small community began to wake up, Shiv stepped away from the shadows and moved around to the front of the building. He was dressed differently now, in well-worn clothes he had retrieved from his pack. He no longer stood straight. He adopted a list to his right, rounded his shoulders and turned his left foot so he appeared clubfooted. He shuffled forward and knocked on the door. Several moments later it was answered by the bent man, whose eyes were rimmed by dark circles from lack of sleep.

“Snow’s filled the trail t’ Graespeck,” Shiv said, sounding half out of breath, his voice all craggy. “Too tough t’ walk it right now. Lookin’ for a place f stay until it stops snowin’.” He looked up at the sky for effect, the snow still coming down hard, though the wind had dwindled to almost nothing. He shivered, something easy to do as he was indeed cold, and he thrust his hands into his pockets. “I was wonderin’ if I could…”

“Thanks for your hospitality. Name’s Safford,” Shiv lied as he slipped past.

“Wilcher,” came the reply. “Erl Wilcher. Take care, Mister Safford. We’ve sick folks here, though we’ve got someone busy healing them.”

Shiv shuffled into the main room, heading straight to the fireplace and waving his hands in front of the flames. The heat felt good to his sixty-year-old frame, and he let himself bask in the sensation for several moments before he turned to study Risana.

Her shoulders were slumped. Still, she kept her vigil at the old woman’s side.

The daughters moved between the other three patients-all who were remarkably improved and sitting up on the cots. There were only a few lesions remaining on the boy called Jamie. He no longer coughed, and his mother was clucking her thanks to the young healer.

“Here. Drink up!” One of the sisters thrust a bowl of soup at Risana. “It’s spiced chicken broth.”

Risana declined, until the three improving patients, the sisters, Wilcher, and even the newcomer had some first. Then she took a chipped bowl between her hands, closed her eyes as if in prayer, and drank.

The soft light that streamed in through the windows gave silver highlights to her hair and revealed cuts to her garments that only could have been made by a sword.

“You’re a Knight,” Shiv stated, trying to draw her out into conversation. “A Solamnic.” She didn’t answer. “That charm a pokin’ out from your shirt,” he continued, gesturing with a finger. “That says you’re a Knight of the Rose.”

Risana fingers fluttered to her neck, finding a gold chain and charm that had worked itself free. She was quick to stuff it under her shirt and tabard.

“A wilted rose,” he said wryly, noting that the sisters were upset at his prying. “And one without any armor. Where’s the rest of your unit?” Any information about other Solamnic Knights in Neraka would be worth something to his employers.

“Dead.”

He raised an eyebrow and clamped his teeth together to stifle a yawn. Shiv desperately needed some sleep.

“All of them dead. Dead and buried.”

Shiv cocked his head to the side, a gesture that encouraged her to continue.

“We were directed to Neraka about a year and a half ago, twenty of us ordered to the foothills just north of the Lords of Doom. We were to meet a Dark Knight commander there, escort him safely out of the country.”

“But…?”

“But we learned too late that the commander didn’t intend to defect. He meant merely to lure Solamnic Knights into Neraka. He must have been disappointed that the council sent only twenty. I guess he expected a small army. Still, he had some measure of triumph, as two of our number were from the council itself.”

“What happened?” This came from the child Jamie. “Were you ambushed?”

A nod.

“But you escaped,” Shiv said. “Obviously.”

“I was the only survivor.” She let out a deep breath, the sound like sand being blown by a hot breeze.

One sister came forward and poured her more broth. “Then don’t mind my asking, and don’t believe we’re not grateful-we are-but why are you here?”

She didn’t answer, and so Shiv pressed, “Why didn’t you join another Solamnic outfit? Why aren’t you…?”

Her doe eyes regarded the disguised assassin, cutting off his words. She ran her thumbs around the lip of the bowl and finally replied. “Elsewhere? I’m not needed elsewhere. I’m needed here.”

Shiv really saw her then-selfless, driven, filled with a determination he had never seen before, and perhaps touched by madness. He finished his broth, his eyes never leaving hers.

“You’re tired.” This came from Wilcher, who hovered at Risana’s shoulder.

“A bit” She smiled slightly. It was die first time Shiv had seen her smile-a smile that melted the coldness in her face.

“Rest here, in my home. As long as you like. Please.”

“I will stay with your wife until…”

“I thank you for helping my grandchildren. I know you can’t help her.” There was a deep sadness in the old man’s eyes. “Ill tend to her alone. You don’t have to sit with her.”

“Yes, I do.”

Two hours later, their vigil was over, and Risana allowed herself an all-too-brief rest before getting up. “I am sorry for you loss, Erl Wilcher,” she said, as she reached for her cloak.

The old man nodded, his eyes filled with tears. “Stay for a while,” he said. “Have dinner. Spend the night.”

She shook her head. “I must be on my way. As you said, there are ill folks in Graespeck, and I’d like to get there before nightfall.”

Wilcher clasped her hands and gestured with his head toward the assassin. “This fella here-”

“Safford,” Shiv stated. “He said he’s going to Graespeck, too.”

“Then I shall have company.”

“Her name is Risana,” the Dark Knight commander told Shiv several weeks earlier. The commander and a half-dozen of his esteemed fellows met with the assassin in a closed banquet hall in Telvan.

“She is concentrating her efforts in the Broken Chain Mountains, and has been for much of the past year from what we’ve gleaned. She heals the sick, traveling from village to village, and she touts the glory of the Solamnic Knighthood. She relies on the witless and the grateful to keep her hidden and to feed her. The villagers will not give her up and will not reveal her contacts. Locating her could be difficult.”

“Not for me.”

The commander’s lips edged upward in a sly grin. “That’s why we sought your services.”

Shiv steepled his fingers. “I am, as you’ve acknowledged, your most expert spy and assassin. And the most expensive. But why send me all this way for just one woman?”

The commander let out a laugh, then instantly sobered. “At first we thought her inconsequential,” he said, eyes flitting to Shiv’s, then finding the assassin’s gaze uncomfortable and looking away. “We have done nothing about her for several months-considering her, as you said, just one woman.”

“At first,” Shiv mused.

“At first. But singlehandedly, she appears to be turning the villagers against us.”

“One woman?”

The commander growled. “We’ve had reports of youths in some of the mountain towns leaving Neraka under her direction to join our enemy. Others are talking against us. She is a blight that must be stopped. Her allies and contacts must be found and eliminated.”

“Why not send an army of Dark Knights to deal with this blight?”

“There can be no hint of Dark Knight involvement. The mountain villages embrace this Solamnic, and we cannot afford to make a martyr of her. That would only make matters worse. No clues can point to us.”

Shiv agreed to the job. They offered him more than enough money-despite the weather.

The assassin followed Risana, glancing over his shoulder to see the people of Keth’s Cradle smiling and waving good-bye. In the space of less than twenty-four hours the “blight” had been thoroughly embraced by the village.

“Graespeck isn’t all that far,” he told her after Keth’s Cradle was out of sight, “but all of this snow makes it seem leagues away.”

Shiv had straightened his back and was no longer pretending to have a clubfoot. Walking behind Risana, he didn’t need to keep up the ruse. However, an hour past sunset they neared her new destination, and he adopted his crippled guise again. They plodded into Graespeck, a place only marginally larger than the previous village. Once again, he watched her go to work.

There was a group of young men in this village who were keenly curious about the woman, tales of whom had obviously preceded her arrival. As she moved from home to home, ministering to those who were stricken with the fever and offering kind words to the elderly, the young men followed her, plying her with questions about the Order of the Rose and about life outside of Neraka. A few made it clear they wanted to be Solamnic Knights.

The blight spreads, Shiv mused, noting, however, that she encouraged no one to join her Order. At least not here. Furthermore, it was clear she had no contacts in this village and that she hadn’t known a single soul here before she arrived.

They spent the night in a log home with one family. Following dinner, they helped shore up a shed that was threatening to collapse, then they slept for a few hours and headed out at first light.

For weeks Shiv accompanied Risana, and not once in that time-despite his many questions-did he hear her mention other Solamnic Knights in Neraka or name villagers who might be in league with her. In that time she never asked why, upon reaching Graespeck, he kept going along with her on her healing missions. In truth, he wasn’t quite sure himself.

She simply seemed to accept his company, enjoying it at times between places where they stopped to rest. He regaled her with stories he made up about a boyhood that never happened and a family that never existed.

Gradually, she told him quite a bit about her own youth and, one night, about why she came to Neraka. They were hunkered just inside the entrance to a small cave, watching the snow fall and the evening deepen.

“I was a chirurgeon,” she said, her voice and eyes soft. “The youngest and the most inexperienced of the Solam-nic Knights sent here. I was brought along as an assistant, really, for the two council members, as I am not the most skilled with a sword. Councilman Crandayl suffered from gout. I was there to aid him.” She paused and turned to stare at Shiv, again her eyes seeing something far beyond him and the darkening cave. “I was charging forward into the battle against the Dark Knights when I fell, slipped on the blood already thick on the ground. I struck my head and lost consciousness. When I awoke hours later I discovered that someone had fallen on top of me-Crandayl. He was dead. Everyone was dead. And the Dark Knights had taken me for dead, too. It took me three days to bury my brethren, nearly another day to bury the Dark Knights who had fallen.”

“And you left your armor there?” Sanford asked.

A nod. “I left my oath there, too.”

Shiv waited.

“I’m not a Solamnic Knight any longer. If I was, I wouldn’t be here.”

“I don’t understand.”

“A Solamnic Knight would have returned to the Order’s nearest outpost. I would have let them assign me to another unit.”

“Then why…?”

“Am I here? I’d rather wander these mountains helping people live than return to the Order and ride off to kill people. I hate fighting. I hate the regime and the mandates and the notion of always following orders. And maybe I hate the Knighthood because it fosters bloodshed.”

“The villagers think you’re a Solamnic Knight.”

She shrugged. “Better, perhaps, they think that than to know the truth-that I’m a deserter.”

“Maybe you’re still a Solamnic at heart. After all, the pendant…” Shiv gestured to where he knew the charm hung on the gold chain beneath her shirt. “You still wear a symbol of the Order of the Rose.”

“I wear a symbol of my guilt,” she corrected him. She paused and resumed studying the snow. “Get some sleep, Safford. Morning will come too soon.”

Morning did come too soon. Shiv knew Risana well enough by now, better than any of his previous targets. He knew she worked alone, that there had never been any contacts or fellow Knights supporting her cause. She had never encouraged a soul to leave the mountains and join the Solamnic Order. He could kill her and complete his assignment. It would be simple.

They were nearing a branch in the trail that led back to Telvan. There were places nearby to hide her body. A journey of seven or eight days and he could tell the Dark Knight commander that the contract was fulfilled. He could finally collect his pay.

“Aren’t you worried?” Shiv asked her, the fingers of his right hand brushing the handle of a knife. “Rish, aren’t you in the least little bit worried?”

“About…?”

“The Dark Knights. This is their land, after all. Aren’t you worried they’ll be hunting you? If you keep this up, healing people and ending plagues, they might try to do something to stop you.”

She shrugged. “Let them send someone, Safford. Let them send their very best assassins. I’ll stay here until my last breath.”

“Till your last breath,” Shiv whispered, staring at the trail ahead. “This way,” he said louder, stepping onto the trail toward Telvan and, for the moment, taking the lead.

Shiv didn’t hear the boots crunch on the snow ahead, or see the shadows stretch out from a spire along the path. If the sun hadn’t been shining so fiercely, he wouldn’t have caught the glint from their swords, which they stupidly hadn’t blackened. The glint was the only thing that alerted him.

“Rish!” he shouted as his hands tugged free the twin blades. He crouched as he heard the swoosh of steel behind him, Risana drawing her long sword.

“Safford, what is it? What-?”

Shiv darted forward just as the first assassin lunged into his path. He was a young man, full of muscle and energy and, fortunately, not terribly skilled. Shiv dropped below the swing of his short sword and drove one of his knives up into his belly. The second knife stabbed higher and punctured a lung. He twisted the blade for good measure.

Shiv stepped back and kicked the man down the mountain path. The young man struggled to stop his descent and managed to grab onto an embedded stone. Shiv turned his attention to the second figure. This one was older, well into middle age, and careful from experience. His eyes narrowed as he caught Shiv’s angry expression.

“Shiv.” The word was a hiss of remembrance. Then, much louder, “Shiv of Telvan!”

Shiv grimaced. He had seen this one in a Dark Knight camp last year, a mercenary who had the favor of the commander who had ordered Risana’s assassination. The man opened his mouth to say something else, but Shiv cut him off, hurling one of his knives and watching as the sharp, slender blade pierced the man’s throat.

So the Dark Knights have sent more assassins, Shiv thought. They are tired of waiting for me to finish her. They are in a great hurry to have this woman die.

There was a sudden clash of steel and Shiv whirled, shaken from his thoughts. Risana was battling her own foe, a third man whose weapon was blackened and whose presence Shiv had not sensed. Perhaps the two Shiv had dispatched had been sacrificial lambs, part of a ruse to distract the woman from the more dangerous killer.

“Who are you?” Risana demanded. She was trading blow for blow with the man. “What do you want with us?”

No answer.

The assassin was a professional, Shiv quickly understood, one who was merely gauging Risana’s strength and skill. The man was dressed like the first two, as a shepherd with ragged clothes, but his unlined and unweathered face made it clear he wasn’t native to the mountains.

“The contract is mine,” Shiv hissed, as he charged up the path, drawing his remaining knife and taking aim.

The man crouched and spun, catching Risana off guard and slicing at her abdomen, then continuing on past her and hurtling toward Shiv. Risana stumbled back as Shiv threw his knife. The blade lodged in his opponent’s shoulder.

“Saf-” Risana cried, as she regained her footing and darted forward.

Shiv’s opponent was quick, stabbing down and catching Shiv in the chest. Before the man could deliver a second blow, however, he was speared in the back. He made a gasping sound, then crumpled.

“Safford?”

Risana pushed the corpse away and knelt at Saf-ford’s side, putting her hands over the growing blossom of red on his chest.

“There might be others,” he managed to gasp. He felt himself growing weak. “Dying,” he said. “Leave me, Rish.”

Instead she stayed at his side all through the night and the following day, using herbs from her pouch, shielding him from the cold with her own body. When she was certain he would live, she carried him to a rocky overhang and wedged him into a crevice, using her cloak for a blanket. She then tended to burying the three assassins. The ground was so hard she had to fashion cairns.

“They were Dark Knights,” Shiv told her when she finally returned.

Risana shook her head. “No. Knights, even Dark Knights, would be wearing armor, something to identify themselves. And they wouldn’t be using short swords.”

“Agents of the Dark Knights then,” Shiv returned.

“I guess you would know.” Risana’s words made him aware of the chance she had taken, healing him and not leaving him for the wolves.

In Brighthollow Risana assisted with the birth of the mayor’s twin daughters. In the next three villages she saw to scattered cases of fever, helped bury individuals she could not heal, mended clothing and fences, and stalked and killed a wolf that had been preying on the local herd. Shiv followed after her, rarely speaking, but intently watching.

“I’ll start toward Telvan tomorrow,” Risana announced one evening.

Shiv growled. “There are Dark Knights there.”

“I guess you would know.” Again the telling words. “But I need some clothes. These can’t stand up to many more washings.”

He knew he could find the Dark Knight commander there, or someone else of authority, and that he could collect his fee simply by marching her into the camp.

“I’ll lead the way,” he said.

It was shortly before sunset, two days later, that the tall buildings in Telvan appeared in the distance and another band of assassins struck.

This time Shiv caught their intake of breath from around a sharp bend in the trail in front of him. The assassins were using the spires and overhangs for cover. He drew his knives and spun around the bend, jamming the blades deep into the stomach of a man he knew well, one he’d trained himself years ago.

“Risana is my contract,” Shiv said, half under his breath.

The man collapsed, his weight taking Shiv down with him. As Shiv struggled in a failed attempt to pull the blades free and to get out from under the corpse, he heard Risana drawing her sword behind him. She stepped around him and his fallen foe, quickly engaging her own target Shiv finally pushed the body off. It rolled down the side of the mountain, with his twin knives protruding from it

“Ah, thank the vanished gods for this!” Shiv retrieved his onetime student’s dropped short sword.

A few yards away, Risana was exchanging blows with a pair of Dark Knights.

“Given up on assassins, have they?”

Shiv watched her for a moment, noting with admiration that she had some skill with a blade, but her two opponents were gradually wearing her down.

“Time to share, Rish!” Shiv called, as he pressed by her and engaged the shorter but bulkier of the two men. The Knight he fought was strong, his swings forcing Shiv back. Shiv spun to his right, the Dark Knight following him, then he pivoted to the left and entangled the Knight’s legs. Pressing the attack, he rained blow after blow on the man, one finally biting into the chainmail gusset of his armor between the shoulder and breastplates. The Knight dropped his sword. Shiv kicked and sent him to his knees, knowing the man was dying.

Shiv whirled to see how Risana was faring. She was parrying her foe’s repeated strikes. Her wide charcoal eyes were unblinking. A corner of her mouth turned up as she shifted her weight and became the aggressor, varying her swings and forcing the Dark Knight to back up.

Shiv watched in admiration as she increased the tempo. Unarmored, she was more agile than the Knight, and within the span of several minutes she had her foe gasping for breath. She made quick work of the man now, wresting his blade from him with one fierce swing, then thrusting her sword into a gap between his plates.

She jumped back as he fell, then leaped forward and over the dead knight, charging along the narrow trail straight toward Shiv.

“Shiv!” she cried. “Move!”

Shiv turned as she raced past, following her movements in horror as he saw the Knight he thought he’d killed back up on his feet, his arm drawn back to hurl a dagger.

The metal caught the sun as the dagger flew deep into Risana’s abdomen.

“No!” Shiv stared in disbelief as she fell, sword clattering on the path.

The Dark Knight was unsteady, blood flowing down his breastplate. Still, he refused to die, drawing another dagger from a band at his waist, taking aim at Shiv this time. The master assassin stood frozen. Then he saw a bloodied dagger fly over the Knight’s head. Risana had tugged the weapon free and sent it back.

The bad throw was enough to distract the Knight. Shiv plunged in, ramming his borrowed short sword into the knight’s chestplate, cracking the armor and lodging it deep in the man’s chest.

“Rish!” Shiv hurried to Risana’s side. For an instant he considered doing nothing, waiting for her death to come and hiding her body, collecting his pay. Instead, he found himself groping for her pouch that held herbs and powders. He’d become knowledgeable at using them just by watching her, but he didn’t know how to treat such a serious wound. “Tell me what to do. What do I use, Rish? Tell me! What can I do?”

She stared at him a moment, doe eyes meeting his worried and confused ones, lips faintly smiling. He bent close, turned his ear so he could hear her.

“Maybe they’ll think I’m dead and stop sending assassins,” she mused.

It was spring, and the snow had started to melt on the slopes. Shiv was walking behind her, listening to her cloak flutter in the breeze and enjoying the scent of the pale purple flowers that were poking through the snow here and there.

“Maybe,” Shiv said after several moments. “Maybe they’ll think I’m dead, too.” We make quite a pair, he thought, a former Solamnic Knight and an old assassin.

“A pair of deserters,” Risana said, as if she’d heard what he’d been thinking.

Shiv looked over his shoulder, studying the spires and overhangs, watching for out-of-place shadows and the glint of steel.

They were heading north, to a string of villages that were being visited by a bothersome pox. There would be herbs to gather along the way, their healing pouches to be refilled, roofs to be repaired, fences to be mended…

Shiv knew an old man’s luck would not last forever. What mattered to him now was how long hers would hold out. He realized now he’d become undone that first night he saw her, when he peered through the crack in the shuttered window and watched the firelight dance across her selfless, determined face. He had a new contract now, one he’d made with himself-he would protect her as long as he could.

“Till my last breath,” he said as he walked.