Kira stared at the body.
It did not move.
Then it did.
A groan tore from its throat, wet and wrong, a sound that had no business leaving a man whose insides were spilling out through the blackened crater in his chest. His body jerked, his eyes snapped open, and he rose.
Her hand flew to her dagger. She moved.
She sprinted at him.
He saw her coming and saw the blade. His hand fumbled for his sword, but one arm was still clamped against his torso, holding his guts in, pressing against that ruin. His limbs would not cooperate. He abandoned the sword, clutched the hole with one hand, and charged low, his feet slipping in the churned mud. His eyes blazed with something that could have been terror or madness or simply the certainty of his own death and the desperate wish to drag her down with him.
They crashed together.
The impact drove the breath from both their lungs. They tumbled into a snarled heap of limbs and filth and blood, mostly his, but soon to be hers if she did not move fast enough. She stabbed, her arm pistoned up and down, up and down. Hot blood sprayed her face, copper on her lips. He made sounds, thick gurgling noises from deep in his throat. Then he stopped. His body went slack beneath her.
For a moment, she did not realize he was gone. Her arm kept moving, kept driving the blade down, like it had forgotten how to stop. Her mind drifted elsewhere, watching from a distance, cataloging useless details. The pattern of mud on his sleeve, the way his empty hand had curled into a loose fist. She kept going until she could not anymore, until her arm simply refused to rise.
She stopped and looked down.
He was dead. Properly dead this time.
Her stomach lurched, and she doubled over, heaving into the mud. Nothing came out but bile, scorching her throat raw. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and tasted blood, not hers, still his, and her gut seized all over again.
She stumbled backward and hit a wagon wheel. The wood was solid against her spine. She slid down it, not caring about the mud soaking through her clothes, just needing to sit before her legs gave out. She dragged her knees up, pressed her back against the wheel, and stared at nothing while her lungs slowly remembered how to work.
The convoy lay silent.
Bodies everywhere. Sprawled on the road, slumped against wagons, crumpled where they had fallen trying to run. The ones who ran never came back. The ones who stayed never made it. Except her. She had made it, and that fact sat wrong in her chest like a splinter she could not dig out.
She looked at her hands.
Red to the wrist, still dripping, warm and sticky against the cold air. She stared, watching how the red settled into the lines of her palms, nested under her nails, filled the cracks from work and weather. She needed to clean them. The thought cut through everything else. She had to get this off before it dried, before it became part of her, before she had to look at it one more second.
Water. I need water.
A puddle sat nearby, muddy runoff in a wagon rut, brown and filthy but wet. She crawled to it on shaky legs, dropped to her knees, and shoved her hands in. She rubbed them together hard. The water bloomed pink, then brown. She kept rubbing long after the blood was gone, scrubbing until her skin burned, until the friction was the only thing she could feel, until her hands started to look like they might belong to her again.
She sat back on her heels and examined them.
Clean. Mostly. Red still clung under one thumbnail. A shadow of pink lingered in her knuckles, but mostly clean.
I need to move.
The thought rattled around her skull like a loose tooth, insistent and sharp. She knew she should move. The bandits could come back, other survivors could find her, someone could come. But her legs would not work. Her body simply refused to obey.
Her gaze drifted back to the bandit's body. Thirty feet away, maybe less. She had crawled away but not far enough. She could still see his face.
His sword. He had a sword. Good steel from the look of it, better than her dagger by a mile. He might have coins. Bandits always looted. He probably had coins tucked away somewhere.
She did not want to go back there. Every fiber of her being rebelled at the thought of touching him again, of getting that close to what she had done. But she was alive, and being alive meant eating. It meant supplies. It meant not leaving anything useful on a dead man who had tried to kill her, no matter how much her stomach churned at the prospect.
She forced herself up. Her legs felt like someone else's, wooden and unreliable, as she walked to the body. She did not look at his face. She knelt and took the sword. It had decent weight, balanced, a bit rusted in some spots, but good enough. She checked his pockets and found a few copper coins. She took those too.
She stood and walked away. She did not look back.
The map was still in her pack. She pulled it out with shaking hands, the parchment rustling loud in the silence, and forced herself to look at it.
A village sat two days east, a tiny mark near the fold. A big city sprawled weeks south, too far to even think about. The Border Watch outpost lay behind her, a day and a half back the way she had come, and just the thought of it made her throat tighten.
She did not want to go back.
Back meant questions. Back meant explaining things she did not have words for. Back meant seeing Therin's face and talking about what had happened, about what she had done, about the man whose sword was now strapped to her belt.
But forward meant the unknown. Forward meant being alone. Forward meant more roads stretching out like veins on this map, more danger lurking around every bend, more chances to die with no one to watch her back.
She stared at the parchment until the lines blurred.
Forward. I need to go forward.
She folded the map with careful, deliberate movements, tucked it back into her pack, and started walking east.
The road stretched empty ahead of her.
No travelers, no patrols. Just mud sucking at her boots and trees pressing in from both sides. An occasional bird called out from the shadows, but she paid it no mind.
She walked until her legs ached, until the sun bled low on the horizon, until the light shifted through gold and orange and settled into red.
She did not think about the bandit.
She thought about her feet, about the next step, about the unfamiliar weight of the sword at her hip swinging with each stride like it was trying to remind her it was there.
The sun set. She kept walking.
The moon rose. She kept walking.
She did not want to stop. Stopping meant thinking. Stopping meant feeling. Stopping meant sitting alone with what she had done, the memory of her arm moving up and down, up and down, long after he had stopped moving beneath her.
A stream cut across the road ahead. Small, maybe knee deep. She heard it before she saw it, water tumbling over rocks, the first clean sound she had heard all day. Something in her chest loosened.
She followed the sound off the road, pushing through ferns and low-hanging branches until the stream revealed itself. Silver and shimmering under the moonlight, cold and moving and clean.
Kira dropped her pack by the edge and knelt. She splashed water on her face. The cold burned, a sharp, clean pain that cut through the fog in her head. She did it again, again, again, until her skin went numb.
She looked at her hands. They were clean. They had been clean for hours. She scrubbed them anyway, rubbing between her fingers, under her nails, across palms that still felt sticky even though nothing remained.
Then she stripped off her outer clothes, the ones with blood, the ones she had worn since the convoy, and waded into the stream in her underclothes. The cold stole her breath, punched into her lungs. She gasped. She scrubbed until her skin was numb, until she could not feel anything but the cold and the rough friction of her own hands.
The water ran dark around her for a moment. Then it cleared. Then it rushed on like she had never been there.
She stood in the stream, shivering violently, and looked up at the moon.
Hard things are yours now.
Her mother's voice. From years ago, from before the fever, from back when hard things meant learning to hunt, learning to cook, learning to be alone in a world that did not care whether you made it or not.
That just means you are strong enough to carry them.
Kira did not feel strong. She felt hollowed out, scraped clean, like something essential had broken inside her and she did not know how to fix it.
She climbed out of the stream, wrung out her underclothes as best she could with her teeth chattering, and pulled on her spare clothes, the ones without blood. She left the bloody ones in a pile.
She would deal with them tomorrow.
Or never.
She found a spot near the stream.
Flat ground, a ring of rocks, trees overhead for cover. Not a cave, not safe, but she could not walk anymore.
She gathered wood. Small branches, as dry as she could find in the dark. She stacked them and sat in front of them.
She had flint and steel in her pack. The slow way, the hard way.
She did not want the hard way.
She reached for her mana. The warmth in her chest. It was there, full, maybe fuller than this morning.
She shaped the thought, pulled the warmth, and thought the flame into existence.
Fire caught, spread, and grew.
Kira stared at it. The flames danced the same way they always did. The spell worked the same way it always did. But nothing else was the same. Nothing else would ever be the same.
She pulled her knees up, wrapped her arms around them, and watched the fire.
The warmth hit her. Real warmth, fire warmth, not the warmth in her chest. It seeped into her skin, into her bones, into the places that had been cold since she woke up in the mud.
Her eyes grew heavy.
She should stay awake, should keep watch, should think about what had happened, process it, figure out what came next.
But the warmth was too much. The exhaustion was too much. The weight of everything was too much.
Kira lay down next to the fire. She did not bother with a blanket. She just curled up on the cold ground and closed her eyes.
She was asleep before the fire finished catching.
She dreamed of nothing.
For once, just darkness and silence and rest. No faces, no blood, no arms moving up and down.
When she woke, the fire had burned down to low embers. The sky was gray with the approaching dawn. Her body was stiff from the ground. Her chest was warm. Her mana felt full again.
She sat up and looked at the stream, at the trees, at her hands.
They were not shaking.
She did not know if that was good or bad.
She rebuilt the fire, heated water, ate cold rations, and packed her things. The bloody clothes were still there, stiff and dark in the morning light. She stared at them for a long moment, then left them.
The bandit's sword was heavier than her dagger. She drew it and tested the weight. Good steel, better than she deserved.
She would keep it.
She looked at the map one more time, then folded it and put it away. She kicked dirt over the fire.
The stream burbled behind her, indifferent to everything that had happened yesterday, indifferent to her.
Kira continued walking.