Marsh came up fast for a man who'd just been thrown, sword already swinging in a low arc meant to open Savage across the thigh, and she caught it on her shield with a grunt I felt more than heard, the impact ringing loud enough off the stone to make the last standing guards flinch where they stood.
I loosed twice in the same breath the fight properly started, not at Marsh, whose armor sat too heavy and too well fitted for an arrow to do more than announce itself uselessly against it, but at the strap holding the wagon's rear panel shut, splitting it clean and letting the door swing loose on its hinge.
"Milo," Josef shouted, already scrambling down the loose scree toward the wagon bed, and the shape inside flinched hard at the sound of his own name before some deeper recognition caught up and he half fell, half climbed out into his father's arms, wrists still bound, shaking, alive.
I split into three and closed the last of the distance to Marsh's flank while he was still fully occupied with Savage's shield, putting a real blade, not an arrow, along the gap in his armor at the shoulder where the plate joined the arm, a strike I'd never have found the angle for without every ounce of his attention already pinned somewhere else. He roared, more fury than pain, and staggered back a step, sword arm dropping half a degree lower than it had been holding it, and Savage didn't waste the opening he'd just handed her, driving her own blade in low and hard beneath his guard and putting him down flat on the road with a final, decisive strike that ended it clean.
The silence after landed heavier than the fighting had. Two of the three standing guards had already dropped their weapons entirely, hands raised, and the third, Tomas, was on his knees beside the fallen sergeant checking, with visible relief, that the man was breathing rather than dead.
"He's alive," Tomas said, looking up at Savage. "You didn't have to leave him that. Most wouldn't have."
"Wasn't for his sake," Savage said, breathing hard, wiping her blade clean on her own sleeve. "Was for yours. Man like that doesn't get to become the reason four more of you die today too."
It was only once the immediate danger had properly passed, Josef still holding his son against his chest like letting go might undo the whole rescue, that I noticed the driver was gone.
"Where's the fourth man," I said, and the words had barely left my mouth before Tomas's face went grey with the same recognition.
"He bolted," Tomas said. "Soon as your friend dropped from the ridge and the fighting started proper, I saw him slip off the far side of the wagon and head back west on foot. Wasn't paying him any mind at the time, figured he was just as scared as the rest of us. Should've figured he'd run for the mine instead of running from it."
Namey's face did something complicated and unhappy. "How far a walk back to Highhollow, from here."
"Two hours, maybe less if he pushes it," Josef said, and something in his voice had gone hollow. "He'll reach the gatehouse by midday. And once he does, it won't take a clever man long to work out who tipped off which strangers about which convoy route, because I'm the only foreman on that mountain who's ever run that road with a full escort and come back short a wagon."
"They'll know it was you," Savage said, quiet.
"They'll know it was me," Josef agreed. "Which means Ilse too, eventually, if anyone up there thinks to ask who I've been quietly friendly with over the years, and I have been, more than I should've let myself be, because she's the only person in that whole valley who ever looked at what this company does and refused to pretend it wasn't happening."
It was a real cost, and I understood, standing in that cut with the sergeant's blood drying dark on the road and a boy shaking against his father's chest, that we'd won the fight in front of us and lost something we hadn't fully weighed the price of before we started, a woman's whole life in a town she'd never once left, gone the same way my own father's had gone, traded for someone else's safety without ever getting a real vote in the trading.
"We warn her," I said. "Now. Before that driver's even halfway back."
It was Savage who moved first toward the horses the guards had left tied further down the road, and it was only in the moving that I saw the dark stain spreading along her side where Marsh's first swing had caught more of her than the shield had managed to turn, a shallow cut but a long one, already soaking through her shirt.
"You're hurt," I said, and heard my own voice crack on it in a way I didn't try to hide.
"It's shallow," she said, waving me off, though the wince that crossed her face when she reached for the saddle told a slightly different story than the words did.
"Let me look at it."
"Jon, we don't have time for you to fuss over a scratch when there's a woman two hours from losing her whole life if we don't move faster than that driver can."
"Then I'll fuss over it while we ride," I said, already tearing a strip from my own shirt without waiting for her to argue further, and something in her face, exhausted and bleeding and still fully braced to keep arguing, softened all at once into something I hadn't seen turned on me before, not quite like this, not with this much unguarded weight behind it.
"You're not going to let this go, are you," she said.
"No," I said, binding the strip tight around her side while she held still and let me, which from Savage was its own kind of surrender. "I watched that blade catch you and my whole chest did something I don't have a good word for yet. So no. I'm not letting it go."