The two of us stood there in the darkness, waiting for whatever calamity would head our way. ‘Maybe the other guy just had a heart attack,’ Reichis suggested.
‘Could be.’
I rubbed my fingertips together, trying to work away the numbness caused by using my one spell too many times in a row. If I cast it again now I’d just end up blowing my own hands off. Reichis glanced back at the iron mage lying unconscious on the ground behind us. ‘That guy looks pretty old, Kellen. What if the other guy was old too? Magic’s got to be hard on the body, right? Maybe he just keeled over and died.’
‘Anything’s possible.’ A few yards away, the dying embers of our campfire cast just enough light where Ferius lay for me to see that she was still breathing. Maybe she was okay. Maybe she was going to stand up any second now, dust herself off and say something that sounded clever but made no sense. ‘We have to get lucky some day, right?’
Reichis sniffed the air and then pulled at my trouser leg. ‘Kellen?’
‘Yeah?’
‘It’s not today.’
The sounds of footsteps drifted towards us from down the road. ‘How many?’ I asked, keeping my voice low, still frantically rubbing my fingertips together.
‘Three. One male and two females.’ He sniffed again. ‘The male is old. One of the females is fully grown and the other is a pup like you.’
‘I’m sixteen. I’m not a “pup”.’
‘I call it like I smell it.’
Three figures appeared at the edge of the road, barely more than silhouettes in the dim light shed by the half-moon above. I blinked several times until I could make out a few details. The first was a woman, tall, dressed in loose-fitting white and brown linen tied in place with straps of leather, most of her face covered by the same linen fabric as her garments. She carried a skinny man in a filthy white coat over her shoulders like a sack of wheat. A donkey trudged reluctantly after her, ridden by a girl in the sort of trousers and riding jacket common to the borderlands. A single strip of pale cloth was tied around her head, covering her eyes.
‘You think she’s a prisoner?’ Reichis asked. He has a thing about captivity.
I didn’t reply, figuring we’d likely find out the answer soon enough. ‘Not another step,’ I called out. ‘Not if you want to live to see the sunrise. I’ve already set one of my enemies on fire tonight and I’m happy to do it again if you come any closer.’
It had sounded like a perfectly serviceable threat to me, but the woman approaching us showed no sign of being intimidated. ‘That would be exceedingly unwise.’
‘Yeah? Why’s that?’ I asked, doing my best to appear faintly amused.
‘Look down at your hands.’
I did, and saw how badly they were shaking. The problem with nearly dying is that, once you haven’t died, you start trembling uncontrollably. It’s hard to get your body to stop after that.
‘Well, I ain’t shaking,’ Reichis growled, hackles up, stalking towards her.
‘Kindly ask the animal not to attack until I’ve rid myself of this rather unpleasant-smelling burden.’ The masked woman came to within a few feet of me and deposited the man she’d been carrying on the ground.
With the silk spells gone, I saw the mage for what he really was: a frail old man with flat, homely features and wrinkled skin that had seen too much sun. Keeping one eye on the new arrivals, I reached down and lifted the sleeves of his coat one at a time. His bony forearms revealed that he’d only ever sparked the silk band and no others. The same was likely true for his partner, who’d been using iron magic against us. These two would have been a running joke among our people; they might even have been outcasts like me, hoping to buy their way back into their clans with the bounty for hunting down a shadowblack.
The woman gazed down at the unconscious man between us. ‘Such fragile things we are, stripped of our illusions.’ Her expression – what little I could see of it beneath the fabric covering her face – was neither derisive nor sympathetic, merely curious. ‘How odd that a mage should go to the trouble of making himself appear youthful and handsome in our minds. Do you suppose that if he’d spent less attention on his appearance he might have noticed me coming up behind him?’
Not a question I needed to be concerned with right now, given that my fingers were numb, my hands were shaking and Ferius was still unconscious. What I really needed to know was whether this woman was a danger to us. People rarely answer the question ‘Are you here to kill me?’ honestly, so instead of asking it I called out to the blindfolded girl on the donkey. ‘Are you being held captive?’
‘She is in my care,’ the woman said.
‘I’d rather hear that from her.’
The girl on the donkey held up her hands to show they weren’t bound and said, ‘Who lets their prisoner ride while they walk, idiot?’ Her accent carried only a faint trace of the drawl I’d come to associate with borderlands folk, and her diction was more precise – a bit like the Daroman envoys I’d seen pass through my homeland. If I had to guess, I’d say this girl was close to my age, wealthy and probably well educated. ‘Is he staring at me?’ she asked the woman.
‘He appears to be.’
‘Tell him to stop. It’s impolite.’ She dismounted and fumbled for something attached to the saddle. Once she’d got it loose, I could see it was a thin stick of wood around three feet in length. She held it out in front of her, swinging it back and forth a couple of inches off the ground.
That explained the cloth covering her eyes. ‘You’re blind,’ I said.
‘No, you’re blind. I just can’t see.’ She turned to the woman. ‘What does he look like? He sounds stupid.’
‘Forgive my charge; we have been travelling many days now. These have been trying times for the child and she—’
‘Seneira,’ the girl said. ‘Not “my charge”, not “the child”. Seneira.’ She strode forward only to have her right foot slip on a flat stone in the sand. Fearing she was about to fall, I instinctively reached out to steady her. Unfortunately for both of us, at that precise moment she shifted her weight to catch her balance. Our foreheads collided with a painful thud, and worse – much, much worse – it’s entirely possible that my lips brushed against hers in the process.
‘Did he just try to kiss me?’ she demanded loudly, her head turning left and right as she held the stick out in front of her like a sword.
I backed away quickly. ‘I didn’t! I would never … I mean, you’re blind! I wouldn’t want to …’
‘Wouldn’t want to what?’ she asked, her voice suddenly cold as the night air. ‘Wouldn’t want to kiss a blind girl?’
Ancestors, please just send another bounty hunter to kill me now. I swear I won’t even try to fight back this time.
‘If you could see the boy,’ the woman in the linen garb said, ‘you would realise that he is confused, injured and frightened after fighting the iron mage.’
‘I’m not frightened,’ I said, but no one was paying attention to me.
‘Well, maybe he should keep his hands – and his lips – to himself.’
The woman sighed. ‘Child, you know perfectly well he was only trying to keep you from falling flat on your face. His obviously poor reflexes and clumsiness are cause for pity, not an excuse for you to torment him.’
‘Thanks for sticking up for me,’ I said.
She ignored my sarcasm and looked past me at Reichis. ‘Is the animal unwell? He seems to be …’
‘He’s fine,’ I said. ‘That’s just what it sounds like when he giggles.’
The girl, Seneira, seemed to come to a decision as to my culpability in our unfortunate encounter. ‘Fine,’ she said at last, letting the point of her stick drop and extending a hand towards me. ‘Let’s start over. I’m Seneira.’
I took her hand and shook it for the shortest possible time I could. ‘Kellen.’
‘Nice to meet you.’ She turned to her guide. ‘See? That’s how people greet each other – normal people, anyway. They have names like “Seneira” or “Kellen” or …’
‘Reichis,’ the squirrel cat chittered. Now that he was done laughing at me, he sauntered over to give each of them a sniff followed by a brief growl. ‘I don’t like them.’
‘You don’t like anyone,’ I muttered.
‘What was that?’ Seneira asked. ‘I heard something growl.’
‘That was Reichis,’ I said. ‘He’s my …’ I hesitated. I hate sounding half-witted in front of strangers.
‘Say it,’ the squirrel cat snarled. ‘Say it, unless you figure you can cast spells with only nine fingers.’
‘Fine. Reichis is my business partner.’
Seneira turned her head this way and that. ‘Business partner? I didn’t hear any other people. Who’s there?’
‘He refers to the animal,’ the woman explained. ‘A squirrel cat.’
The blind girl stood there for a while. ‘Perfect,’ she said, then promptly sat down in the dirt. ‘I’m just going to sit here until the world starts making sense, if that’s all right.’
‘You might be waiting a long time,’ I said.
Despite the linen covering most of the woman’s face, I had the distinct sense that she was smiling when she said, ‘At last, words of wisdom. Seven drops of water in an otherwise dry desert.’
Seneira rested her head in her hands. ‘Will you please stop talking like that?’
I felt a touch of sympathy for her. Ferius had used lines like that on me enough times to … ‘Wait a second … Who are you?’ I asked the woman.
‘A traveller with no end to my journey. A guide without destination but never lost. A follower who follows none but the road in front of her. I am the Path of Thorns and Roses.’
I had no idea what any of that meant, but the fact that her reply made no sense told me who she was, or rather, what she was. ‘You’re an Argosi.’
Without bothering to indicate whether or not I was right, she walked over to Ferius and knelt down to examine her. ‘Ah, sister. Why must you always be such a terrible disappointment to us all?’