She did not move immediately.
That was the first thing Aldric noticed. Most people, when they become aware of a threat in the dark, do something with their body before they decide what to do with their mind. They shift weight, or their breathing changes, or some small involuntary muscle fires in the neck or the shoulders. It is not weakness. It is simply what living bodies do when the part of the brain older than language sends up a signal.
Kira did none of this.
She sat with her back against the tree and him across her knees and her eyes open in the dark, and she listened the way a stone listens, which is to say completely and without any of the interference that emotion creates. He could feel it through the contact between her hand and his shaft, that absolute stillness that was not calm so much as it was the absence of everything that was not useful.
How many? he asked, keeping the words as small as possible, though he was not certain that whoever was in the trees could hear a demon spear thinking.
"Five," she said, barely moving her lips. "Maybe six. One of them is heavier than the others. Bigger man, or armoured."
He had counted four sets of footsteps and was grudgingly impressed that she had found a fifth and a possible sixth where he had not.
Survivors from the village?
"No. These ones were already on this road before I turned onto it. They were waiting." A pause so brief it was almost not a pause at all. "Someone set this up quickly."
That was not reassuring. Someone who could position six men on an unmarked forest track within hours of an incident in a village either had resources or had anticipated the incident, and neither possibility was comfortable.
What do you want to do? he asked.
He was aware, even as he asked it, that the question was not entirely tactical. He was a weapon. In pure mechanical terms, what she wanted to do with him was the only thing that mattered. But he was also a man who had spent seventeen years making decisions in the dark with incomplete information and insufficient time, and the habit of being consulted died harder than he had expected.
Kira stood up from the root in a single motion, unhurried, the way a person stands when they have decided the sitting is finished. She set her feet on the forest floor and held him at her right side, point down, the grip loose enough to move quickly from.
"I want to ask them a question first," she said quietly.
That is a terrible plan.
"It usually is," she agreed. "But I need to know who sent them."
She walked forward into the dark of the track, toward the sound of the footsteps, which was the opposite direction from the one any reasonable person would choose, and Aldric felt the strange doubling sensation of being both the weapon in the situation and the most alarmed participant in it.
The footsteps stopped.
A light appeared, a torch unshielded, carried by a man who stepped onto the track from the tree line with the deliberate slowness of someone demonstrating that they were in control of how this went. He was broad across the shoulders and wore a leather coat reinforced at the forearms, not a soldier's armour but a working man's practical protection, the kind of gear worn by people for whom violence was a regular professional consideration rather than an emergency.
Behind him, at intervals, four others materialised from the trees. They fanned out across the track in a practised line, spacing themselves with the automatic precision of people who had done this many times. The sixth, if there was a sixth, stayed in the trees. Probably a bowman. Aldric noted the positioning and catalogued it the way he had catalogued everything for seventeen years.
The man with the torch looked at Kira. His expression was the expression of a professional encountering a job that was slightly different from the briefing.
"You're younger than I expected," he said.
"People often say that," Kira replied pleasantly. It was the most pleasant her voice had been since Aldric met her, which made it worse somehow rather than better.
"We're not here to hurt you," the man said. "We just need to talk."
"You brought six people for a conversation."
The man's eyes moved to the spear at her side, and something in his expression made a small recalculation. "We heard you were carrying something interesting."
"Many people carry interesting things."
"Not many people carry the Ashveil Spear." He said the name carefully, like a man quoting a document he had memorised. "Our employer would like to discuss acquiring it. Peacefully, if possible."
Aldric processed the name. The Ashveil Spear. So that was what he was called in whatever stories had grown up around him in the eight years he had been lying in those ruins. He filed it away and focused on the more immediately relevant information.
Ask him who the employer is, he said to Kira.
"Who sent you?" she asked, which he appreciated.
The man smiled in the torchlight with the smile of someone who has been specifically instructed not to answer that question. "Someone with significant resources and a strong preference for discretion."
"That tells me nothing."
"It's meant to."
Kira was quiet for a moment. Aldric felt her weight shift slightly, almost imperceptibly, her centre of gravity dropping just a fraction, the kind of adjustment a body makes automatically when it decides that the talking portion of the evening is approaching its conclusion.
Kira, he said quietly. The one in the trees. Bowman. He's been tracking you since you stepped onto the path. If you move, he moves first.
"I know," she said, barely a breath.
You can't outrun an arrow.
"I'm not going to run."
She looked at the broad-shouldered man with the torch and her expression shifted into something that Aldric had not seen from her yet. It was not anger. He doubted, in some deep and intuitive way, that she experienced anger in the standard configuration. It was something more precise than anger. It was the look of a person closing a door on a conversation they have decided is over.
"Here is the problem," she said to the man, conversationally, as though they were discussing a minor administrative complication. "I need to know who your employer is. You've decided not to tell me. That means I need to find someone who will, which means I need at least one of you to be in a condition to travel and answer questions tomorrow." She tilted her head. "I'm genuinely trying to be considerate about this."
The man stared at her.
Then he looked at his companions on either side of him.
Then he said, "Take her," and everything happened at once.
What Aldric experienced next was unlike anything in his seventeen years of war, because in seventeen years of war he had always experienced violence from the inside of a body with its own weight and momentum and pain receptors. This was different. He was the weapon, not the wielder, and Kira moved through the next forty seconds with him in a way that felt less like a person using a tool and more like an extension of a single continuous intention.
She was already turning when the bowman released. The arrow passed through the space where her head had been and buried itself in the tree behind her. She closed the distance to the nearest man on the left with three steps that covered the ground faster than looked possible from a standing start, and she struck with the shaft rather than the blade, across the side of his knee, and he went down with the specific sound of a joint receiving information it was not designed to process.
The second man came from her right. She stepped into him instead of away from him, which disrupted the swing he had prepared for a target at normal distance, and used the momentum of his own reach to put him face-first into the ground with her knee between his shoulder blades. She did not hit him again after that. He stopped moving without needing it.
The broad-shouldered man with the torch was good. Aldric could see it in the way he moved, balanced, economical, no wasted motion. He came in low and he came in fast and he had clearly been told that the spear was the threat and he was trying to get inside its range where it would be less useful.
Kira let him get close. Aldric felt the calculation in it, the way you feel a decision through the hands of whoever is holding you, and then at the last possible moment she rotated and let the man's own forward drive carry him past her, and she caught the back of his coat and added to his momentum in the wrong direction and introduced him firmly to the same tree the arrow had found.
He slid down it and stayed there.
The remaining two men on the track looked at each other across the three people now on the ground and made the decision that Aldric had seen men make many times, the decision that no employer's coin was worth the specific situation currently in front of them. They backed into the trees and the sound of them decreased rapidly in the direction of away.
The bowman in the trees had not fired again after the first shot. Aldric suspected he was one of the two who had just left.
Kira stood in the middle of the track in the torchlight that the broad-shouldered man had dropped when he met the tree. Her breathing had elevated slightly. Not much. She looked at the man with his knee destroyed, who was conscious and making sounds, and the man face-down who was breathing but not moving, and the broad-shouldered man against the tree who was beginning to return to awareness in the uncertain way of someone with a significant headache.
She went to the broad-shouldered man first, because he was the most likely to have useful information and also the most likely to be lucid enough to provide it. She crouched in front of him and waited with that specific patience of hers while his eyes focused.
"Name," she said. "Your employer's name."
He looked at her from the ground with the recalibrated expression of a professional who has received new data about the assignment. He said nothing.
She waited. She was very good at waiting.
"Davan," he finally said, and his voice had lost the controlled steadiness it had carried before. "Councilman Davan. Out of Vethara. That's all I know. We were hired through a middleman, I never met Davan personally, I don't know what he wants with the spear."
Kira nodded once. She stood up.
She looked at Aldric in the torchlight for a moment, turning him slightly in her grip, the same appraising look she had given him in the ruins.
You knew that name, Aldric said. He had felt it when the man said it, a tiny change in the pressure of her hand, barely anything, but he was learning to read the small things because the small things were all she gave him.
"Yes," she said.
It's on your list.
She did not confirm it. She did not deny it. She picked up the fallen torch and began walking north again, and the injured man's sounds faded behind them as the forest closed back in.
Kira.
"We should cover more ground before we stop again."
How many names are on that list?
She walked three more paces before she answered.
"Enough," she said quietly.
And for the first time since he had known her, which was not long but felt longer for the density of what had happened in it, her voice carried something underneath the flatness. Something old and settled and patient in the way that only things which have been carried for a very long time become patient.
He wanted to ask her more. He had a great many more questions and the night was long and she was the only person he had to talk to.
But before he could form the next question, she stopped walking.
She held the torch out to her left and the light caught something on the track ahead of them that had not been there before. A mark, cut into the bark of a tree at eye level, fresh enough that the pale wood beneath was still bright. A symbol Aldric did not recognise.
Kira recognised it.
Every part of her that ever moved went perfectly still.
"We need to go," she said, and her voice was exactly as flat as it always was, exactly as even, not a fraction of difference from her usual tone.
But she was already moving, and this time she was moving fast.
What is that symbol? Aldric demanded, the trees blurring past them as she broke into a run that was nothing like the unhurried pace of three hours ago.
She did not answer.
Kira. What is that mark?
She ran, and he ran with her in the only way available to him, and the torch fell somewhere behind them because she needed the hand for speed, and the dark forest swallowed them whole.
And somewhere behind them, in the direction they had come from, something that was not the two fleeing men began to move through the trees. He could feel it the way iron feels weather, a pressure change, something vast and unhurried following them through the dark with the specific patience of a thing that does not need to run because it already knows where they are going.