“It won’t take long if you just… hold her… still!” He finally managed to shove his hips inside the angle of the kicks.

Absent gods, was that a child they were pinning to the dirt? Dag’s groundsense threatened to boil over; distracted or no, the mud-man must notice him soon even if the other had his backside turned. The middle figure surged upward briefly, face flushed and black curls flying, dress pulled half-down as well as shoved half-up. A flash of sweet breasts like apples smote Dag’s eyes. Oh. That short rounded form was no child after all. But outweighed like one nonetheless.

Dag quelled his fury and drew. Those heaving moon-colored buttocks had to be the most righteous target ever presented to his aim. And for once in his accursed life, it seemed he was not too late. He considered this marvel for the whole moment it took to adjust his tension to be sure the arrow would not go through and into the girl. Woman. Whatever she was.

Release.

He was reaching for another shaft before the first found its mark. The perfection of the thunk, square in the middle of the left cheek, was even more satisfying than the surprised scream that followed. The bandit bucked and rolled off the girl, howling and trying to reach around himself, twisting from side to side.

Now the danger was not halved, but doubled. The mud-man stood abruptly, seeing Dag at last, and dragged the girl up in front of his torso as a shield. His height and her shortness thwarted his intent; Dag sent his next shaft toward the creature’s calf. It was a glancing hit, but stung. The mud-man leaped.

Did this one have enough wits to threaten his prisoner in order to stop Dag?

Dag didn’t wait to find out. Lips drawn back in a fierce grin, he drew his war knife and pelted forward. Death was in his stride.

The mud-man saw it; fear flashed in that sullen, lumpy face. With a panicked heave, he tossed the crying girl toward Dag, turned, and fled.

Bow still encumbering his left arm, the knife in his right hand, Dag had no way to catch her. The best he could do was fling his arms wide so that she wasn’t stabbed or battered. He lost his skidding balance on her impact, and they both went down in a tangle.

For a moment, she was on top of him, her breath knocked out, her body’s softness squashed onto his. She inhaled, made a strained squeaking noise, yanked herself up, and began clawing at his face. He tried to get out words to calm her, but she wouldn’t let him; finally he was forced to let go of his weapon and just fling her off. With two live enemies still on the ground, he would have to deal with her next. He rolled away, snatched up his knife again, and surged to his feet.

The mud-man had scrambled back up on the bandit’s horse. He yanked the beast’s head around and tried to ride Dag down. Dag dodged, started to flip his knife around for a throw, thought better of it, dropped it again, reached back to his now-twisted-around quiver, and drew one of his few remaining arrows. Nocked, aimed.

No.

Let the creature keep running, back to the lair. Dag could pick up those tracks again if he had to. One wounded prisoner would test the limits of what he could handle right now. A prisoner who was, most definitely, going to be made to talk.

The horse vanished up the faint trail leading out of the clearing that paralleled the course of a nearby creek. Dag lowered the bow and looked around. The human bandit too had disappeared, but for once, tracking was not going to be any trouble. Dag pointed to the girl, now standing up a few yards away and struggling to readjust her torn blue dress. “Stay there.” He followed the blood trail.

Past a screen of saplings and brush lining the clearing, the splashes grew heavier. By the boulders of the creek a figure lay prone and silent in a red puddle, trousers about his knees, Dag’s arrow clutched in his hand.

Too still. Dag set his teeth. The man had evidently tried to drag the maddening shaft out of his flesh by main force, and must have ripped open an artery doing so. That wasn’t a killing shot, blight it! Wasn’t supposed to be. Good intentions, where have we met before? Dag balanced himself and shoved the body over with one foot. The pale unshaven face looked terribly young in death, even shadowed as it was by dirt. No answers now to be squeezed from this one; he had reached the last of all betrayals.

“Absent gods. More children. Is there no end to them?” Dag muttered.

He looked up to see the woman-child standing a few paces back along the blood trail, staring at them both. Her eyes were huge and brown, like a terrified deer’s. At least she wasn’t screaming anymore. She frowned down at her late assailant, and an unvoiced Oh ghosted from her tender, bitten lips. A livid bruise was starting up one side of her face, scored with four parallel red gouges. “He’s dead?”

“Unfortunately. And unnecessarily. If he’d just lain still and waited for help, I’d have taken him prisoner.”

She looked him up, and up, and down, fearfully. The top of her dark head, were they standing closer, would come just about to the middle of his chest, Dag judged. Self-consciously, he tucked his bow-hand down by his side, half out of sight around his thigh, and sheathed his knife.

“I know who you are!” she said suddenly. “You’re that Lakewalker patroller I saw at the well-house!”

Dag blinked, and blinked again, and let his groundsense, shielded from the shock of this death, come up again. She blazed in his perceptions. “Little Spark!

What are you doing so far from your farm?”

Chapter 3

The tall patroller was staring at Fawn as though he recognized her. She wrinkled her nose in confusion, not following his words. From this angle and distance, she could at last see the color of his eyes, which were an unexpected metallic gold. They seemed very bright in his bony face, against weathered skin tanned to a dark coppery sheen on his face and hand. Several sets of scratches scored his cheeks and forehead and jaw, most just red but some bleeding. I did that, oh dear.

Beyond, the body of her would-be ravisher lay on the smoothed stones of the creek bank. Some of his still-wet blood trickled into the creek, to swirl away in the clear water in faint red threads, dissipating to pink and then gone.

He had been so hotly, heavily, frighteningly alive just minutes ago, when she had wished him dead. Now she had her wish, she was not so sure.

“I… it…” she began, waving an uncertain hand at, well, everything, then blurted,

“I’m sorry I scratched you up. I didn’t understand what was coming at me.”

Then added, “You scared me.” I think I’ve lost my wits.

A hesitant smile turned the patroller’s lips, making him look for a moment like someone altogether else. Not so… looming. “I was trying to scare the other fellow.”

“It worked,” she allowed, and the smile firmed briefly before fleeing again.

He felt his face, glanced at the red smears on his fingertips as if surprised, then shrugged and looked back at her. The weight of his attention was startling to her, as though no one in her life had ever looked at her before, really looked; in her present shaky state, it was not a comfortable sensation.

“Are you all right otherwise?” he asked gravely. His right hand made an inquiring jerk. The other he still held down by his side, the short, powerful-looking bow cocked at an angle out of the way by his leg. “Aside from your face.”

“My face?” Her quivering fingertips probed where the simpleton had struck her.

Still a little numb, but starting to ache. “Does it show?”

He nodded.

“Oh.”

“Those gouges don’t look so good. I have some things in my saddlebags to clean them up. Come away, here, come sit down, um… away.”