"I'll meet you in Corvane, then," she said, and turned to go.
Tracking the bandits took less effort than it should have, since whoever they were, they hadn't bothered covering their trail at all: cart ruts pressed deep into soft mud, a torn strip of gold and red cloth snagged on a bramble, a trail of dropped grain sacks leading straight up into the foothills like a line of breadcrumbs left by someone who'd never once needed to survive being hunted. Their hideout sat inside a cave mouth on the flank of a low mountain, two guards posted at the entrance, arguing loudly over a card game neither of them seemed to be winning, a lantern between them throwing long, restless shadows against the rock.
I took the first one down clean before the second even registered the sound, and the second followed a breath later.
Deeper in, an old man's voice called out through the dark.
"Dion?
That you? Boss said you'd try sneaking back in early.
Get back outside before I tell on you."
He said it staring directly at me, and it took a beat too long for me to understand he was blind.
"Just need a drink of water," I said, matching his casual tone.
"I'll be right back outside."
"Fine.
Be quick about it," he said.
The moment I passed him, a dagger was at my throat before I'd even seen his hand move.
"You think I don't know my own people by sound and smell?"
he said, chuckling low.
"You've got an eastern accent, you grew up on a farm, and you smell like innocence instead of rum, which is more than I can say for Dion on his best day."
Several arrows found his back before he finished the sentence, courtesy of my afterimage, and he was grasping at empty air by the time he actually fell.
"Should've known you didn't come alone, you brat," he managed, and then he didn't say anything else at all.
The fall knocked a table over, and a bell clattered off it and rang loud enough to bring two more figures out of the dark, a man and a woman, both unaware yet of what had happened.
"What the hell do you want, old man," the man snapped, before he'd even fully rounded the corner and seen it wasn't the old man waiting for him anymore.
I put an arrow at his head, and he dodged it barely.
"You bastard.
You're dead," he said, taking cover behind a jut of rock while the woman behind him loosed arrows of her own at me in a steady, angry rhythm.
Savage materialized behind me, shield raised, catching every one of those arrows on its face without so much as a stagger.
"Thought you didn't want any distractions," I said.
"Shut up," Savage said.
Between an afterimage drawing the woman's eye and Savage bulling straight through the man's guard, we had both of them down inside a few tense minutes. A set of stairs at the back of the cave led up to a fully armored knight waiting at the top, and we were squaring up to it when a dark-haired woman in gold and red stepped bodily between us and the blade.
"Please, stop.
Don't hurt him," she pleaded.
Her name was Inari. She told us, in a rush that spilled out faster than either of us could interrupt, that her husband Adachi beat her, that she'd staged the whole robbery to get free of him and be with her lover, the knight standing behind her with his sword already lowering. Savage listened to all of it in a silence that got tighter and more dangerous with every word, until it finally snapped clean in half.
"I'm going to kill that fucker," Savage said, already turning for the exit.
I didn't fully understand, in the moment, why it hit her that specific and that hard, only that it clearly did, some old wound of hers flaring under the new one, and I followed her without asking any of the questions crowding up behind my teeth.
She found Adachi at his camp and hauled him up off the ground by his own tunic before he'd even finished registering that we'd come back.
"So you like beating on girls half your size, do you," Savage said, and there was nothing performed about the fury on her face at all.
She landed three solid blows before I got both arms around her and hauled her back, and Adachi staggered upright, bloodied, breathing hard.
"Deceived," he said, wiping at his mouth.
"You've been lied to.
She's a skilled liar. A silver tongue.
A question for you both: what exactly did she tell you about me?"
"That you're abusive," I said.
"Lies," he said, seething, though something in the specific way he said it left me with more doubt than certainty either way.
"Another question.
Where are the goods you were meant to recover?"
"We forgot," I admitted.
"In the moment, we just forgot."
He limped back toward his carriage without another word and returned carrying a finely carved bow, unusual in the hand, light but sturdy.
"A gift," he said.
"You're an archer.
Take it. I trust you to be fair about this, whatever you decide once you've heard her side properly. Her location: you won't find her back at that hideout anymore.
She means to sell my goods at the clothing market in Corvane. Find her.
If I've told you the truth, bring back my goods, and my wife, unharmed."