The village was called Ironlight, and its seven-year-old most dedicated spy was named Nala.
Ragnar noticed her before she'd fully committed to following him — the footsteps were too heavy for her size and too unpatterned for an adult, and the shadow she cast around the corner of the granary was a small, round-headed shadow doing its best not to be a shadow at all. He paused by the village well, made a show of looking in another direction, and waited.
He heard a very careful intake of breath. Then silence. Then tiny footsteps getting closer.
"You know," he said, to the empty air in front of him, "I can hear you."
A strangled noise from behind the granary. Then, after a long pause, a small face appeared around the corner, regarding him with enormous brown eyes over the top of a nervous lower lip.
"Are you—" He crouched down so they were approximately eye-level. "Are you lost?"
The girl took two extremely cautious steps out from behind the granary. She was wearing a dress that had been mended several times, her hair in two uneven plaits, her feet bare and dirty. She studied him with the frank appraisal of a child who has not yet learned that adults find direct scrutiny rude.
"Are you a bad guy?" she asked. Her voice was very small but very clear.
Ragnar blinked. He hadn't expected that particular opener. "No. I'm Ragnar. Who are you?"
"Nala." She thought about this for a moment. "The bad guys who came before didn't say they were bad guys either."
"That's — that's actually a fair point." He considered. "I came out of the Grandia Forest this morning. I was in there all night. Does that sound like something a bad guy would do?"
Nala thought about it with genuine seriousness. "Maybe if they were very brave bad guys."
"Or very stupid ones."
This produced something in her face that might have been the beginning of a smile. She took another step closer. "Did you see monsters?"
"Several." He kept his voice easy. "I fought a wolf with a fire mane."
Her eyes went very wide. "A fire wolf? Really?"
"In a cave. It was enormous." He let a beat pass. "I won."
The smile broke through completely then — wide and sudden, the kind of smile that didn't know yet that there were situations where it wasn't appropriate. For a moment she looked like what she was: a seven-year-old girl who had found a story to hold onto.
"Big bro is awesome," she announced, with great certainty.
Something moved in his chest. He wasn't sure what to do with it. "You can be awesome too," he said. "When you're bigger. Listen to your nanny, eat your vegetables, that kind of thing."
The smile faded then, just slightly, the edges going soft. "I don't have a mom or dad." She said it with the specific flatness of a fact that has been repeated enough times that the sharp edges have worn smooth — but underneath the flatness, he could hear the shape of the wound. "My dad went away last week. When the bad men came."
Ragnar was quiet for a moment. He knew what it was to be that sentence. He'd been that sentence, essentially, for his entire life, and he still didn't know what the right response was when someone handed it to you.
He reached out and briefly, gently, rested his hand on her head. "I'm sorry," he said. "He sounds like he was brave."
"He was." She was looking at her feet, but she hadn't moved away.
"Then you have something from him." He stood. "Now go find your nanny. She's probably worried."
Nala looked up at him for another moment — the old, appraising look, but warmer now. Then: "Will you still be here?"
"For a little while."
"Okay." She turned and ran, bare feet raising small puffs of dust, and disappeared around the granary in the same direction she'd come from.
Ragnar watched her go. The thing that had moved in his chest a minute ago had settled into something quieter and more persistent, like a stone dropped into still water, the rings still spreading after the stone has sunk.
He thought about her father. He thought about a man who had picked up a farm tool and stood between his daughter and something that could kill him, knowing it could kill him, doing it anyway. In his old life, he had never had anything worth that equation. Nothing he owned, no one who mattered, no piece of the world he would stand in front of.
He was still thinking about this when the screaming started.
The sound split the morning: a woman's voice, high and sudden, cut off and then resumed at a different register. He was running before his mind caught up, following the sound through the village lanes, past scattered chickens and a cart knocked sideways into a fence.
The square. Five men, armed — proper weapons, not farm tools: short swords, a studded club, a crossbow held loosely at someone's hip like it was barely worth raising. They'd already knocked down the two men who'd tried to resist. One was down and still. The other was on his knees, being held by the collar while a bandit rifled through his house behind him. The bandits were not in a hurry. They'd done this before.
On the far side of the square, Elder Moran stood with a wooden staff between himself and a grinning man with a short sword, holding his ground with a dignity that was visibly all he had left to hold onto.
Ragnar scanned the square in three seconds and looked down to find a machete on the ground, dropped when the man holding it had been knocked down. He picked it up.
He circled wide, keeping behind the row of houses, approaching the grinning man at the elder's back from the angle he couldn't see without turning. The man was enjoying himself. He was talking. He wasn't watching the spaces around him.
Ragnar stepped in.
He hit the grinning man across the back of the skull with the machete's flat first — dropping him clean, no noise — and turned instantly to the man holding the kneeling villager by the collar. Two strides. The villager felt the grip release and scrambled aside; Ragnar's elbow found the bandit's jaw on the way down, and then it was finished.
[+17 Soul Points]
He didn't stop. He was moving to the next one.
The crossbow man saw him and raised it. Ragnar was already inside the arc — close enough that the man couldn't aim without hitting himself. He took the man's wrist, redirected, and the bolt went into the dirt. Then Ragnar brought the machete down, handle-first, onto the base of the man's neck.
[+17 Soul Points]
Two left. They'd seen what happened to the first three and had recovered from the first shock of surprise. They came at him together, which was the right instinct. Ragnar felt something happen in his perception — a sharpening, a slowing of the way events registered — and understood it was the same thing that had helped him in the forest, the same instinct that had moved him out of the flame wolf's path. He didn't analyze it. He just used it.
The one on the left swung first. He stepped inside the swing, felt the arm brush his shoulder as it missed, and used the rotation of his own body to send his elbow into the man's throat. The second one was overcommitted on his approach. Ragnar caught his sword arm, turned, and put him into the ground.
[+34 Soul Points]
He stood in the center of the square, breathing through his nose, and looked around at the aftermath. The villagers who'd been watching from doorways and corners were very still. Elder Moran was watching him with an expression he couldn't read.
Then, from across the square, a voice said: "Interesting." It was calm and unhurried, and it belonged to the man Ragnar had not yet seen.