The river was a frozen black serpent in the moonlight, its current the only thing moving them forward. Their raft—a lash-up of deadfall and fraying rope—creaked with every shift in weight. Richard sat at the stern, a crude pole in his hands, his knuckles white. Lys lay between them, wrapped in every spare scrap of cloth, his breathing a shallow rasp against the water's murmur. The cold was a living thing, seeping through wool and leather, settling in the bones.
Zena’s thigh was pressed against Richard’s, a line of solid heat. She hadn’t moved it since they shoved off. Her eyes were on the passing bank, watchful, but her hand rested on Lys’s forehead. “He’s burning up,” she said, her voice low. “The magic… it eats from the inside.”
“We stop at first light,” Hilda grunted from the front, not turning. She had a fishing line in the water, her movements economical even now. “Need food. Need to get off this damn river before we’re spotted. Cold as a witch’s tit, but sound carries over water.”
Richard felt Zena’s head come to rest against his shoulder. A simple, exhausted weight. He didn’t shrug it off. The scent of her—sweat and river damp and something uniquely her—cut through the cold. His hand, still gripping the pole, ached to let go, to slide around her, to feel the curve of her waist under his palm. He kept it where it was. The raft drifted around a bend, and the moon vanished behind towering pines. In the sudden dark, her lips brushed the side of his neck. Not a kiss. An accident of motion. He stopped breathing.
“They’ll hunt us to the coast,” Lillian said from the darkness, her voice like cut crystal. She was a silhouette against the lesser black of the sky. “The Black Ear don’t lose property. And we are property now. Him especially.” She meant Richard. “Five hundred gold pieces alive. Half that for his head. That buys a lot of persistence.”
Zena’s mouth was still close to his skin. He could feel her breath. “So we don’t go to the coast,” she whispered, the words for him alone. Her hand left Lys’s brow and found Richard’s thigh, her fingers pressing into the hard muscle there. A claim. A question. In the dark, her eyes found his, and for a suspended moment, the river, the cold, the hunters—none of it existed. There was only the heat of her against him and the terrifying freedom of being truly, completely fucked. Then a fish splashed, and Hilda began reeling in her line, breaking the spell.
He didn't think. The pole was a dead weight in his frozen hands, but he let go with one, the rough wood scraping his palm. He turned his head into the darkness where her breath was and found her mouth. It wasn't gentle. It was a collision—cold lips, the shock of warmth beneath, the taste of the river and shared fear. He kissed her like he was stealing rations, fast and desperate, his free hand still gripping the pole that kept them from spinning into the night.
She made a sound—a low, swallowed hum against his mouth. Her fingers dug harder into his thigh. She kissed him back, just as fierce, just as brief. Her tongue touched his, a hot, wet promise in the freezing dark, and then she pulled away, resting her forehead against his temple. Her breath came in a ragged puff against his cheek. Neither of them looked at the others.
“The coast is a death sentence,” Lillian continued, as if nothing had happened. Her silhouette was unmoving. “But the river feeds every port from here to the Salted Sea. Their eyes will be on the water.”
Richard’s lips burned. The pole was real in his hand again, the raft’s creak a warning. Zena’s heat was a brand against his side. He had just marked them, in front of everyone, in the middle of their running. It was stupid. It was necessary. Hilda grunted, hauling a wriggling, silver-scaled fish onto the raft. It flopped once, twice, then lay still. “Plan’s simple,” she said, whacking its head with the handle of her knife. “We get off the river. We get the pointy-eared princeling conscious. Then we find a hole so deep even gold can’t shine a light down it.”
“There is no such hole,” Lillian murmured.
Zena’s hand slid from his thigh, up his side, to rest over his heart. She could feel it hammering. Her mouth was so close to his ear he felt the shape of her words before she whispered them. “Then we don’t hide,” she breathed, a secret for him alone. “We make them not want to look.”
The raft drifted into a shallow, reedy bank just as the first grey light seeped into the sky. Hilda was over the side before the logs ground to a halt, the cold water up to her waist. She didn’t flinch. “You,” she said, pointing a thick finger at Richard. “Gather wood. Dry wood. Under the pines, not this river rot.” Her eyes cut to Zena, who hadn’t moved from Richard’s side. “You. Help me gut these.” She held up the two silvery fish she’d caught in the night.
Richard stood, his muscles stiff and protesting. The place where Zena’s lips had been on his neck felt exposed, a target. He waded after Hilda, the river mud sucking at his boots. On the bank, under the shelter of a sprawling pine, he began snapping dead branches from the lower trunk. Each snap was too loud. He worked quickly, his eyes scanning the mist curling off the water. This was what he knew: the simple, physical task. The scent of pine sap was cleaner than the river’s damp breath. He made a pile, methodical, ensuring the pieces were small enough to catch, dry enough to burn without smoke.
Back at the raft, Zena knelt beside Hilda, a slender knife in her hand. She slit the belly of a fish with a precise, practiced flick. Her fingers, delicate and sure, scooped out the entrails and tossed them into the river. The contrast held Richard still for a beat—the vicious curve of her smile in the dark, now this domestic competence. Hilda watched her, then grunted, a sound of approval. “You’ve done this before.”
“Goblin streams,” Zena said, not looking up. “The fish are uglier. Taste better.” She rinsed her hands in the river, the water reddening briefly around them. When she stood, her eyes found Richard’s. She wiped her palms on her trousers, leaving damp streaks on the worn fabric. The movement pulled her shirt taut across her chest. He looked away, back to his woodpile, his throat tight.
Lillian stood sentinel at the raft’s edge, her braids a intricate crown in the dawn light. She hadn’t helped. She watched the tree line. “They use birds,” she said, her voice cutting the morning quiet. “Crows, mostly. Trained to follow the scent of fear, or blood, or magic.” She glanced at Lys, still unconscious on the raft, his brow furrowed in some fevered dream. “The spill of his power last night… it will have painted the sky for them. We are not hidden. We are waiting.”
Richard dumped the wood onto a flat stone. “So we move faster.” He knelt, arranging the sticks with the focus he used to mend a fence. “We get off the river, like Hilda said. Find a town, lose ourselves.”
“There is no town within five days’ walk that does not pay tribute to the Black Ear, or fear them enough to sell us for a smile,” Lillian replied. She finally turned from the trees, her elven face unreadable as carved marble. “You bought our chains, farmer. Not with gold. With a good heart. It is the most expensive currency there is.” She stepped gracefully onto the bank, her boots leaving perfect prints in the mud. “The plan is not to hide. The plan is to become too costly to chase.”
Richard kept his hands busy, feeding a thin stick into the nascent flame. The fire caught, eating the dry pine with a hungry crackle. "Costly how?" he asked, his voice flat. He didn't look at Lillian. He watched the fire. "We don't have gold. We have two fish and a unconscious fae."
Lillian knelt across from him, the dawn light catching the edges of her braids like a halo of wire. She placed her twin scimitars on the moss between them, the curved blades reflecting the small fire. It was a deliberate movement, an opening of the board. "The Black Ear chieftain, Grishnak, holds his position because he delivers profit. Slaves. Bounties. Tribute. He is a merchant of flesh. To make us costly is to damage his merchandise." Her cool eyes lifted to Richard's. "We stop running from his hunters. We let them find us. And we break them. Publicly. Expensively. Until the cost of retrieving four slaves and a farm boy exceeds our value."
Hilda barked a laugh, sharp as the crack of her fish's spine. "So your great plan is to stand and fight an entire tribe? Brilliant. I'll carve ‘costly’ on your tombstone." She skewered a gutted fish on a sharpened stick and thrust it toward the flames.
"Not the tribe," Lillian corrected, her voice serene. "The hunters he sends. One band at a time. We leave survivors. Broken survivors, who must be carried home. Who consume resources instead of generating them. We make a legend of ourselves not as prey, but as a poison. Eventually, Grishnak will calculate the ledger. He will decide the red on the loss column is not worth the red of our blood." She picked up one scimitar, her thumb testing the edge. "It is a theory."
Zena had moved. She was suddenly behind Richard, her knees in the moss on either side of his hips, her front not quite touching his back. Her breath warmed the shell of his ear. "I like it," she whispered, but the words were for everyone. Her hands came to rest on his shoulders, her thumbs pressing into the tight muscle at the base of his neck. "It's not hiding. It's hunting back." One hand slid down, over the front of his shirt, her palm flat against his stomach. She felt him tense, then consciously breathe out. Her fingers hooked into his belt. "But plans for later. Right now, we have fish. And a river that sounds empty."
Her meaning hung in the humid air, thicker than the smell of cooking fish. Richard’s pulse jumped under her hand. Lillian watched them, her expression unchanging. Hilda snorted, turning her fish. "Do what you want. Just be quiet about it. And be ready to move when the princeling wakes or the crows circle." She ripped a piece of hot, white flesh from the fish with her teeth, her gaze daring anyone to comment. The shift was complete. The running was over. The waiting had begun, and it had teeth.
Richard stood up so fast the moss tore under his boots. Zena’s hands fell from his shoulders. “No,” he said, the word loud in the clearing. He wasn’t looking at Lillian. He was staring at the river, at the slow, brown water carrying them toward nothing. “We don’t just break his hunters. We take down the whole gang.”
Hilda stopped chewing. She looked at him like he’d just declared he could fly. Lillian’s brow arched, a single, elegant fracture in her marble composure. “Explain,” she said, her voice a cool blade.
Richard ran a hand through his hair, his fingers catching in the sweat-damp tangles. “Grishnak’s a merchant. You said it. What happens if another merchant… a bigger one… wants his territory? His operation?” He turned from the river, his eyes landing on the bounty notice tucked into Hilda’s belt, the parchment stained with orc blood. “That bounty on me. It’s not just money. It’s a message. He can’t look weak. So we make him look weak. Not just to his own tribe. To every other slaver, bounty hunter, and corrupt official in the Twelve Lands.” He knelt, grabbing a stick and scoring a rough circle in the mud. “We don’t wait for his hunters. We find his supply lines. We raid his outposts. We free every slave we find and tell them who sent us. We make the Black Ear tribe a bad investment.”
Zena let out a slow, appreciative breath. She rose and circled to face him, her dark eyes gleaming. She reached out and plucked the stick from his hand, her fingers brushing his. “A farm boy who thinks like a pirate king,” she murmured. She drew a line through his circle, splitting it in two. “My father’s kingdom borders these lands. The peace is… thin. A human destabilizing the Black Ears would be a very interesting gift for the Goblin King. It might buy more than our freedom.” Her gaze held Richard’s, and the heat in it had nothing to do with the fire. “It might buy an army.”
Lillian was silent for a long moment, her fingers tracing the hilt of her scimitar. “Suicide,” she stated, but it was a calculation, not a refusal. “It requires information we do not have. A base we do not possess. Allies who do not exist.”
“We have a base,” Hilda grunted, jabbing her fish skewer toward the raft and the unconscious Lys. “The walking liability knows every noble’s son and crooked merchant from here to the coast. He charmed his way into their beds and their vaults. He can get us names. Places.” She ripped another chunk of fish. “And I know a few disgruntled mercenaries who’d love to smash a slaver ring for the fun of it, if the split’s right.” She looked at Richard, a grudging respect in her stone-cut features. “It’s the dumbest plan I’ve ever heard. But it’s not hiding. I’m in.”
The fire crackled. On the raft, Lys moaned in his fever-sleep, a sound of profound weariness. Richard looked at the faces around the fire—the elf, the dwarf, the half-goblin, the sleeping fae—and the enormity of it, the sheer impossible scale, should have crushed him. Instead, it felt like the first full breath he’d taken since the Red Fern Forest. He wasn’t running for his life anymore. He was choosing a war. And by the fierce, hungry light in Zena’s eyes, she was already choosing how to celebrate the declaration.
The declaration hung between them, solid as a stone dropped in still water. Richard felt Zena’s gaze on him like a physical touch, tracing the line of his jaw, the set of his shoulders. Her earlier heat had banked into something slower, more deliberate. She took a half-step closer, the back of her hand brushing his. The contact was fleeting, electric. “A pirate king needs a map,” she said, her voice a low hum meant only for him. “And a harbor.”
Hilda wiped fish grease from her mouth with the back of her hand, her eyes narrowed. “The river’s our map for now. It leads to Baylis Port. A piss-hole, but a big one. Every rumor in the south washes up there with the tide.” She pointed her skewer at the unconscious form of Lys on the raft. “He comes from that world of whispers and secrets. When he wakes, he’ll have pieces. Until then, we move. We listen.” She stood, her joints cracking like gunshots in the quiet. “But we ain’t floating into port on a bundle of logs. We need a real boat. Which means we need coin.”
Lillian rose with silent grace, sheathing her scimitars in a single, fluid motion. “The hunt, then. Not for survival. For capital.” She looked at Richard, her silver eyes assessing. “You declared the war, farmer. How do you wish to fund your first campaign?” The question wasn’t a challenge. It was a transfer of authority, seamless and absolute. The fire popped, sending a spiral of embers into the heavy air.
Richard’s mind, used to the rhythms of planting and harvest, began calculating a different yield. He looked at the surrounding woods, listening past the river’s gurgle. “We take game we can carry and sell. Pelts. Nothing that will slow us down. We hunt as we float at night. Sleep in shifts during the day, hidden.” He nodded toward the raft. “We need to make him more comfortable. A shelter, maybe. He’s our best weapon, once he’s back on his feet.” He was thinking aloud, the plan forming in real time, and he felt Zena watching him build it, her approval a warm pressure in his chest.
Her hand settled on the small of his back, a proprietary gesture that made the muscles of his stomach tighten. “The hunting part I like,” she murmured, her lips close to his ear. Her other hand came up, her fingers toying with the damp hair at the nape of his neck. “But the sleeping in shifts? Such a waste of daylight.” Her meaning was a clear, warm current in the humid space between their bodies. She was not asking. She was presenting the first test of his new command—the tension between the tactician and the man, the plan and the pulse hammering in his throat.
Richard held Zena’s gaze, the command he’d just asserted warring with the heat her touch kindled. The plan was sound. Necessary. But her fingers on his neck, the warm puff of her breath against his ear, were a different kind of strategy. He saw Hilda watching them, a knowing grunt in her throat as she turned to check on Lys. Lillian was already a ghost in the trees, scouting for game. The decision was his alone.
He caught Zena’s wandering wrist, his grip firm but not harsh. “The hunt first,” he said, his voice lower than he intended. “You’re with me. We take the west bank. Quiet and quick.” He released her, turning to gather his bow and a skin of water, his movements efficient. He was giving an order, but the subtext hung between them, thick as the river mist. They would hunt. And then they would have the daylight.
The forest swallowed them, the damp heat pressing close. Richard moved with a farmer’s quiet grace, eyes scanning for broken twigs, disturbed leaf litter. Zena moved like shadow given form, her steps silent, her dark eyes missing nothing. They found a game trail, fresh droppings still moist. He nocked an arrow, the familiar tension of the bowstring a comfort. He felt her watching him, not the trail.
“You look like you belong here,” she whispered, so close her breast brushed his arm as she leaned in. “All coiled focus. Is this how you looked, watching the orcs from the ferns? Deciding to be a hero?” Her hand slid down his back, over the lean muscle of his flank, coming to rest just above his belt. Her touch was a brand. “Or is this the part you like? The stalking. The control.”
A twig snapped ahead. A young stag stepped into a shaft of sunlight, head lowered to a patch of clover. Richard’s world narrowed to the breath, the aim, the release. The arrow flew true, a clean kill. The stag dropped. In the sudden, ringing silence, Zena’s hand pressed flat against his stomach, feeling the rapid pulse there. Not from the kill. From her. “Good shot, pirate king,” she breathed, turning him to face her. The dappled light caught the keen edge of her smile. “Now. About my share of the spoils.”
Richard’s back hit the rough bark of an oak. Zena’s body pinned him there, her mouth hot and demanding on his. This wasn't a kiss from the scared, frantic girl in the hollow. This was a claim. Her tongue swept into his mouth, tasting of wild mint and iron resolve, and his hands came up to grip her hips, the curve of her ass solid and real under his palms. She broke the kiss, her dark eyes glinting. “My share,” she repeated, her voice a rasp. Her fingers went to the laces of his trousers, working them with a deft, impatient speed that left him breathless.
The forest air was cool on his exposed skin. Then her hand was on him, her grip firm, and his head thudded back against the tree. He was already hard, aching, and her touch was a rough mercy. She watched his face as she stroked him, studying the way his jaw clenched, the flutter of his pulse in his throat. “You lead,” she whispered, her own breath coming faster. “But here, you follow.” She sank to her knees in the soft loam, never breaking eye contact, and took him into her mouth.
The heat was shocking, exquisite. Her mouth was slick and hungry, her tongue working him with a rhythm that was neither gentle nor cruel, but ruthlessly efficient. His fingers tangled in her glossy black hair, not guiding, just holding on. He watched, dazed, as her head moved, her lips stretched around him, a faint glisten of saliva at the corner of her mouth. The sounds were obscene, wet, and utterly captivating. This was no perfumed courtesan’s trick; this was a hunt of a different kind, and she was devouring her prize.
He was close too fast, a tight coil in his gut. “Zena,” he gasped, a warning. She pulled off with a soft pop, her lips swollen and dark. She rose, shoving her own simple trousers down over those generous hips. She didn’t guide him. She took him, her hand positioning him at her entrance, and then she sank down, sheathing him in a single, slow, devastating slide. She was soaking wet, so tight he saw stars. A ragged moan tore from her throat, her head falling back, the elegant line of her neck exposed.
For a moment, they were still, fused together, breathing the same thick air. He could feel every internal flutter, the incredible heat of her. Then she began to move, riding him with a steady, grinding rhythm that rubbed her clit against him with each descent. Her eyes opened, locked on his. Her hands braced on his shoulders, her short nails biting into his skin. He met her thrust for thrust, his hips driving up into her, the slap of their joining a sharp counterbeat to the river’s distant murmur. The coil wound tighter, tighter. Her moans became sharp cries, her body clenching around him like a fist. He felt her come, a series of violent, pulsing shudders that ripped a guttural sound from his own chest and tore his climax from him, emptying into her with a helpless, shuddering intensity.
They slumped together against the tree, spent, still joined. Sweat slicked their skin. Her forehead rested on his collarbone, her breath hot on his neck. In the quiet aftermath, the forest sounds returned: a birdcall, the rustle of leaves. The stag lay ten feet away, forgotten. Something had shifted. The frantic energy of their first joining was gone, replaced by this raw, settled knowledge. He was hers. She was his. It was a fact as simple and dangerous as the bounty on his head.
Her whisper was a raw, hot thing against the damp shell of his ear, the Goblin-tongue words harsh and guttural. “Mok’tar dra’esh.” My found treasure. The possessive claim sent a fresh shiver through him, different from the pleasure, a primal acknowledgement that sunk straight into his bones. She bit his earlobe, not hard, a punctuation mark.
He turned his head, catching her mouth in a slower, deeper kiss. This one tasted of sweat and salt and something like ownership. His hands slid from her hips up the smooth plane of her back, holding her close as she softened around him, still intimately joined. The heat between them was a living thing, even as their breathing slowed.
The practical part of his mind, the farmer who calculated seasons and harvests, reasserted itself. The stag was cooling. The sun was moving. They were exposed. He gently guided her off him, his hands steadying her as she wobbled on unsteady legs. They dressed in silence, the acts familiar now—her handing him his trousers, him tying the laces at the side of her simple breeches. His fingers brushed the warm skin of her stomach, and she caught his wrist, holding it there for a three-count of heartbeats before releasing him.
He field-dressed the stag with efficient, bloody strokes, his mind clearing with the rote task. Zena gathered dry wood, her movements languid, her eyes constantly drifting back to him. They worked without speaking, but the silence was no longer tense. It was full. He slung the haunches over his shoulders, the weight a grounding anchor. She shouldered the rest of the kit, falling into step beside him, her shoulder brushing his as they moved back toward the riverbank.
Lillian’s sharp elven eyes noted their return, her gaze flickering from the blood on Richard’s forearms to the loosely braided state of Zena’s hair, to the specific, softened set of Zena’s mouth. A faint, unreadable smile touched the elf’s lips before she turned back to sharpening a stick with her dagger. Hilda merely grunted, hefting the stag haunches from Richard to begin butchering them into strips for smoking. “Took your time,” the dwarf rumbled, not looking up from her work. “River’s dropped another inch. Good for floating, bad for hiding.”
Richard knelt by the water to scrub the blood from his arms, the coolness a shock. He felt Zena’s gaze on his back like a physical touch. Mok’tar dra’esh. The words were a brand and a promise. He had freed a slave, and in doing so, had bound himself to something else entirely. He splashed water on his face, and when he looked up, the reflection staring back was not just a farmer on the run. It was a man marked.
The raft was a patchwork of deadfall and lashed vines, and it moved with the river’s brown, languid will. Lys lay in the center, pale and still under a draped cloak, his breathing the only sign he hadn’t crossed over. The heat was a physical weight, pressing the smell of wet rot and hot stone into their skin. They floated by day, the sun a brutal eye, and hid in the tangled roots of the riverbank by night, the darkness alive with insect song and the distant, echoing calls of hunting reptiles.
“He’s not healing,” Lillian said on the third evening, her voice flat. She didn’t look up from the whetstone moving along her scimitar’s edge. “The magic he used… it burned the fuel and then started on the vessel.” Her eyes, when they finally lifted to Richard’s, were the color of a winter sky. “We need a real healer. Or a safe place for him to not move for a month. We have neither.”
Hilda spit into the fire, the spittle sizzling on a hot stone. She turned a strip of stag meat on a green-wood spit. “Safe place. Right. Let’s review the ledger. The Black Ears want their property back, plus the head of the fool who took it. Every guardsman in twelve lands sees a payday when they look at your pretty face, farm boy. And every river rat on this muddy ditch would sell us for the copper in our pockets.” She took a savage bite of the half-raw meat. “Safe is a fairy tale. Our plan is not dying today.”
Zena’s hand found Richard’s thigh under the cover of dusk, her touch possessive, grounding. “The bounty notice,” she said, her common tongue still thick with the guttural edges of Goblin-speak. “It said ‘alive preferred.’ Why?”
Lillian’s sharpening paused. The silence stretched, filled only by the river’s sigh. “A message,” the elf said quietly. “Killing a Black Ear slaver is a death sentence. Capturing one, making a spectacle of the execution… that’s a policy. They don’t just want you dead, Richard. They want to show what happens to mercy.”
The truth of it landed in Richard’s gut, colder than the river. He wasn’t just a fugitive. He was a lesson. The heat of the fire, the weight of Zena’s hand, the smell of roasting meat—it all sharpened into a terrible, crystalline focus. His reflection in the water that morning hadn’t just been marked. It had been priced, measured, and slated for a public end. The farm was ashes. The future was this: the next bend in the river, the next hidden knife, the next day he kept them all alive. He met Lillian’s gaze across the flames and gave a single, slow nod. The lesson, he decided, was not yet written.
“How much do you think the boat we need would cost?” Richard asked starring into the fire
Richard’s question hung in the thick air. Lillian stopped sharpening her blade, the whetstone poised. “A coastal sloop? One capable of crossing the Serpent’s Strait?” She calculated, her eyes losing focus as she tallied figures in her head. “Fifty gold sovereigns. At least. For a leaky tub with a dishonest captain.”
“Fifty sovereigns,” Richard repeated, the number a physical weight. He looked at his hands, calloused from hoe and axe, not coin. “The bounty notice said one hundred for me, alive.”
Hilda barked a laugh that was mostly a cough. “Perfect. We just walk into the next river town, collect the reward on your head, and use the profit to buy our way out. Brilliant plan, farm boy. I’m surprised the Black Ears haven’t hired you for your strategic genius.” She tamped a wad of bitter-smelling riverweed into a small clay pipe she’d produced from her pack, lighting it with a twig from the fire. The smoke smelled like burning mud.
“He is not suggesting we surrender,” Zena snapped, her fingers tightening on Richard’s leg. Her gaze, however, was on Lillian. “He is stating a fact. His life has a price. A ship has a price. We find the difference.”
Lillian nodded slowly, her expression unreadable. “The difference is fifty sovereigns. Which we do not have. The weapons we took from the orcs are crude, worth pennies. The stag meat feeds us, but it doesn’t buy passage.” She sheathed her scimitar with a soft click. “There are other markets. Information. Specific services. My skills, or Hilda’s, could fetch something in a port city. But it requires walking into the lion’s den to do it.”
Richard stared into the low flames, seeing not fire but the ledger Hilda had mentioned. On one side, a hundred gold coins stacked neat and deadly. On the other, a ship, and freedom. In the middle, four people depending on him, and one dying. He felt Zena’s heat through his trousers, a brand of loyalty he hadn’t earned. “Then we don’t go to a port,” he said, his voice low. “We find a different lion.”
Richard’s voice was flat, stripped of any inflection that might betray the madness of the words. "You three turn me in, collect the reward, then I break free." The fire popped, sending a shower of embers toward the dark river.
Zena’s hand on his thigh became a vise. Her other hand came up, gripping his jaw, forcing him to look at her. The firelight danced in her dark eyes. “No,” she said, the word a guttural, final thing. Her nostrils flared. “You think their cage will be wood? It will be iron. You think their watch will be orcs? It will be mages with silence-spells and manacles that drink your strength. There is no ‘break free.’ There is only the block, and the crowd, and your head in the dirt.” Her thumb stroked the stubble on his cheek, a tender counterpoint to her crushing grip.
Lillian had gone preternaturally still, a statue of elf-kind assessing a doomed chessboard. “The logistics are… not impossible,” she murmured, her gaze fixed on some middle distance. “The bounty notice would need to be presented to a garrison commander, not a street-corner snitch. The hand-off would be in a secured compound. Your escape would need to be staged before the transfer to the capital.” She finally blinked, looking at Richard. “It requires a second party on the outside. We have none. It requires precise timing. We have no way to coordinate it. It requires you to survive interrogation until the moment of exchange. You would not.”
Hilda sucked on her pipe, the riverweed glowing cherry-red in the bowl. She blew a slow, contemptuous plume of smoke. “So. The farm boy’s grand plan is to be the cheese in the trap. Tell me, Hale. You ever seen a rat-gnawed corpse in a grain silo? The cheese is always gone. The rat is always fat. The corpse is always just a corpse.” She tapped the dregs from her pipe onto a flat stone. “You want to buy our freedom? Don’t sell us the only fighter we’ve got. Find us a job that pays fifty gold. Even if it’s ugly. Especially if it’s ugly.”
Richard listened, the heat of Zena’s touch and the cold logic of the others warring in his blood. He looked at his hands again, the calluses black with grit and soot. They were tools for breaking earth, for holding an axe, for gripping a woman’s hip in the dark. Not for counting coins. A desperate, reckless clarity settled over him. The plan was suicide. But it was a shape. A direction. “Then we find the ugly,” he said, his voice quieter now, but with a new, terrible certainty. He didn’t pull away from Zena’s grip. He leaned into it, his eyes holding hers. “But if the ugly finds us first… remember the price on my head. Use it.”
Zena’s hand didn’t leave his jaw. Her gaze burned into him, stripping the reckless plan bare and finding only the fear beneath. “You are not cheese,” she said, her voice a low rasp meant only for him. Her other hand slid from his thigh to his chest, palm flat over his heart. “You are a weapon. My weapon. And I do not surrender my weapons to the enemy.”
The fire cracked. Down by the river, something small splashed in the dark. Lillian stood, her movement silent and fluid, and walked to the water’s edge, giving them the illusion of privacy. Hilda merely grunted, turning to rifle through a pack with deliberate, noisy disinterest.
Richard’s breath hitched as Zena’s thumb traced the line of his lips. The calluses on her fingers were different from his—smaller, sharper, from holding tools he couldn’t imagine. Her scent, sweat and river and something wild, filled his senses. “It was just an idea,” he whispered, the words vibrating against her skin.
“It was stupidity,” she corrected, but there was no anger in it. Her dark eyes dropped to his mouth. “Your value is not in gold. It is here.” Her palm pressed harder against his chest, feeling the frantic beat. “In this. This stubborn, stupid heart that charges orcs to save strangers. That is what we buy our freedom with. Not your corpse.”
She leaned in then, closing the last inch between them. Her kiss wasn’t gentle. It was a claiming, a punctuation mark on her argument. Her teeth caught his lower lip, a sharp, sweet pain, and he groaned into her mouth, his hands coming up to grip her hips through the rough-spun fabric of her trousers. The world narrowed to the heat of her tongue, the press of her full breasts against him, the dizzying reality that in the middle of being hunted, he was wanted.
When she pulled back, her breath was ragged. She kept her forehead against his, her eyes closed. “We hunt. We travel. We survive. The plan finds us,” she murmured. Then her eyes opened, and the vulnerability was gone, replaced by a grim resolve. She released him, turning to face the fire, but her shoulder stayed pressed against his. A line of heat. A border drawn. He was hers, and the discussion was over.
Lys’s voice, thin and frayed at the edges, cut through the low crackle of the fire. “I like it.” They all turned. He was propped against his pack, skin pale as birch bark under the grime, dark circles like bruises under his eyes. But his gaze, fixed on Richard, was unnervingly clear. He lifted a trembling hand, fingers tracing a vague, complicated shape in the air. “A performance. The greatest of my life. The doomed hero walks willingly into the villain’s parlor… while the real trick happens somewhere else entirely.” A ghost of his old smile touched his lips. “It’s beautifully, tragically stupid. It might just work.”
Zena’s shoulder, still pressed against Richard’s, went rigid. “The mage is addled from fever,” she muttered, but the claim lacked force. Lys’s eyes held a terrible, lucid madness.
“Think it through,” Lys whispered, his gaze drifting to the canopy above. “They want the prize intact. Valuable. They’ll keep you whole, Hale. No lasting damage. And a prison wagon… it’s a stage. Locked doors, guards in costume, a scripted route.” He coughed, a wet, hollow sound, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “All an illusion needs is a distraction. A moment of bought belief.” His eyes slid to Lillian, then Hilda. “We wouldn’t need to storm the gates. We’d just need to… change the set.”
Hilda snorted, but she was listening, her thick fingers pausing as they oiled a hinge on her warhammer. “Change it to what, boy? A charnel house?”
“To confusion,” Lys breathed, his eyes glowing with faint, sickly light. “To panic. To one guard seeing a dragon where there’s only a dog. To a lock believing it’s already open.” The light faded, and he sagged, exhausted by the vision. “It would cost me. Maybe everything. But it’s a better death than being run down in a river mud.”
Richard felt the plan, a suicidal abstraction moments before, crystallize into something horrifically possible. He saw it not as a farmer’s gamble, but as a performer’s finale. Zena’s hand found his under the cover of her thigh, her fingers lacing with his, gripping so tight his knuckles ached. She wasn’t holding him back now. She was anchoring him. Her silence was a scream. The weapon did not want to be used. It wanted to be wielded.
The heat from Zena’s shoulder bled through his tunic. Richard looked from Lys’s fever-bright eyes to Hilda’s skeptical scowl, to Lillian’s silent, calculating gaze. He stood up. The motion broke his contact with Zena, and the cool river air felt like a slap against his side. He paced two steps to the fire, turning to face them. His shadow stretched long and lean across the moss.
“We do it,” he said. His voice didn’t sound like his own. It was flat. Final. “We find a town with a garrison. I walk in. I collect the bounty on myself.”
Hilda barked a laugh. “Suicide’s a plan, boy. Not a good one.”
“It’s the only one we have that uses what they expect against them.” Richard’s eyes found Lys. “You need to get strong. You need to be able to make a dragon from a dog. Can you?”
Lys’s smile was a gash of white in his grimy face. He gave a weak, theatrical bow from his seated position. “For my heroic fool? I’ll conjure a whole bloody menagerie.” Then he slumped, the bravado draining, and Lillian moved to prop a waterskin against his lips.
Zena hadn’t moved. She watched Richard, her dark eyes tracking him like a hawk. Her fingers, where they’d gripped his hand, now lay open on her thigh. The silence stretched, thick with the river’s murmur and the crackle of their meager fire.
“You’ll need to be convincing,” Lillian said softly, her elven voice cutting the tension like a blade. She wasn’t looking at Richard, but at Zena. “A desperate fugitive, giving up. Not a farmer playing a part. There will be questions. There may be… inspections.”
Richard felt a cold knot form in his gut. He hadn’t thought of that. The fantasy of a clean surrender shattered against the reality of rough hands and probing searches. Zena stood then, smooth and deliberate. She stepped into his space, so close he could see the flecks of gold in her irises, smell the wild, warm scent of her skin over the mud and smoke.
“Then he will be convincing,” she said, her voice low, for him alone. Her hand came up, not to his face, but to the laces of his worn leather vest. Her fingers worked the first knot loose. “He will look hunted. He will feel hunted.” Her other hand pressed flat against his stomach, and he felt his muscles jump under her palm. Her touch burned through the thin linen of his shirt. “Until the moment he is not the prey anymore.”
Zena’s fingers finished with the laces. She pushed the vest from his shoulders, letting it fall to the moss with a soft thud. Her hands slid up his chest, over the linen shirt, and he felt every callus, every ridge of her half-goblin skin. “First, we wash the hunt off you,” she murmured, her voice a vibration in the humid air. Her eyes held his, challenging, promising. “The river is right there.”
She didn’t ask. She turned and walked the few paces to the water’s edge, the sway of her hips an unmistakable command. Richard followed, the eyes of the others on his back. The brown water was warm, sluggish. Zena stepped in, her clothes clinging instantly to the generous curves of her body. She looked back over her shoulder, black hair sticking to her neck. “Well?”
He walked in after her, the mud soft and sucking at his boots. The water reached his thighs. She closed the distance, her hands finding the hem of his shirt. This time, he helped her, pulling it over his head. The air, thick and hot, felt new on his skin. Her gaze traveled over the lean muscle of his torso, the fading bruises, the scar from the river fight. Her touch followed, tracing a line from his collarbone down his sternum. “See?” she said, almost to herself. “A boy playing at being hunted wouldn’t have these.” Her palm flattened over his heart. “This heartbeat. This is real.”
Lillian’s voice cut across the water, practical and clear. “But first, there are things that need to be done. Lys will need to recover and grow stronger. The town will need to be scouted, with carefully placed diversions. And we,” she said, her eyes shifting to the pile of scavenged orc weapons on the bank, “will need better than these rusted cleavers.”
Richard heard her, but Zena’s hands were on his belt. The buckle gave with a click that seemed too loud. Her knuckles brushed the aching hardness beneath his trousers, and he sucked in a breath. She smiled, a slow, wicked thing. “Scouting can wait an hour,” she said, not looking away from him. Her other hand came up to cup his cheek, her thumb rough against his stubble. “Your performance needs rehearsal, farm boy. You need to forget how to be noble.” She leaned in, her lips a breath from his. “Let me teach you.”
Her kiss wasn’t gentle. It was a claiming. Her tongue met his, and the taste of her was wild, like river mint and iron. His hands found her hips under the water, the rough-woven fabric of her trousers slippery against his palms. She pressed her body into his, and he felt the soft, heavy weight of her breasts against his chest, the hard points of her nipples even through both their clothes. The water lapped around them, warm as blood.
“You think too much,” she breathed against his mouth, her hands sliding down his back to grip his ass, pulling him hard against the cradle of her thighs. He could feel the heat of her there, even through the layers. His cock strained against his trousers, a painful, urgent pressure. “A hunted man doesn’t think. He reacts. He takes.” Her teeth grazed his lower lip. “Show me.”
He fumbled with the ties of her trousers, his farmer’s fingers clumsy with need. She laughed, a low, husky sound, and did it herself, pushing the sodden fabric down her thick thighs. He kicked his own boots and trousers aside, the cool air a shock that vanished when her hand wrapped around his cock. Her grip was firm, knowing. She stroked him once, her thumb smearing the bead of moisture at his tip, and his knees nearly buckled. “See?” she murmured, guiding him to her. “No thoughts. Just this.”
He pushed inside her in one slow, drowning inch. She was slick and impossibly hot, her body clasping his in a tight, wet embrace. A ragged groan tore from his throat. Her head fell back, exposing the long line of her neck, and she moaned, the sound swallowed by the river’s murmur. He held there, buried to the hilt, feeling the tremble in her thighs, the frantic beat of her heart where their chests met. This was no frantic coupling in a dirt hollow. This was slow, deliberate drowning.
She began to move, a roll of her hips that made him see stars. He matched her rhythm, his hands gripping her waist, fingers digging into soft flesh. Each thrust was a wet, sliding connection, a slap of skin against the water’s surface. Her breaths came in sharp gasps near his ear, her whispers filthy and perfect. “Yes… just like that… take it.” He was losing himself, the plan, the bounty, the fear, all washed away in the sensation of her tightening around him, in the scent of her sweat and arousal, in the primal truth of her body welcoming his. This was the lesson. This was the only thing that was real.
Her climax hit her silently, a sudden, fierce clenching that pulled his own release from him. He spilled into her with a broken shout, his forehead falling against her shoulder. For a long moment, they stayed locked together, breathing hard, the brown water swirling around their waists. Slowly, gently, she brushed the wet hair from his forehead. His eyes met hers. The hawk-like intensity was gone, replaced by something softer, more satisfied. “Now,” Zena whispered, her voice hoarse. “You look a little less like a noble farm boy.”
He lifted his head from her shoulder, water dripping from his chin. Her question hung between them, mingling with the humid air and the scent of their sweat. He looked at her—the satisfied curve of her mouth, the dark knowledge in her eyes—and felt the last simple piece of him settle into the river mud. “Like a fool,” he breathed, his voice rough. “A fool who finally understands the price.”
Her laugh was a soft huff against his neck. She shifted, and he slipped from her warmth, the river water a sudden chill on his spent cock. She didn’t move away. Her hands stayed on his hips, holding him in the circle of her arms. “The price was always there, farm boy. You just hadn’t read the ledger.” She leaned back, her black hair fanning in the water, and looked past him to the bank. “Our audience is getting bored.”
Richard followed her gaze. Hilda sat with her back to them, meticulously sharpening a scavenged orc blade with a river stone. The rhythmic scrape was the only sign she’d noticed anything at all. Lillian was wringing out her own braids, her expression unreadable, her eyes carefully fixed on the slow current. Only then did Richard feel the heat flood his face, a boyish embarrassment that felt foreign now, a ghost from an hour ago.
Zena released him and turned, giving him the full, stunning view of her back as she waded toward the shore—the water sluicing down the dip of her spine, the powerful curve of her ass, the mud clinging to her strong calves. She moved without shame, a queen returning from her bath. He watched her gather her sodden clothes, the wet fabric useless in her hands. “An hour,” she called to Lillian, not a request. “Then we float.”
Richard retrieved his own clothes, the rough trousers abrasive against his sensitive skin. As he pulled his shirt on, he caught Lillian’s eye. She didn’t look away this time. Her elf-pale face was still, but her gaze held a calculation, a reassessment. She gave a single, slight nod. It wasn’t approval. It was an update to a tactical ledger. He was no longer just a liability they were stuck with. He was something else, something she’d just witnessed being forged in the brown water. He felt the weight of it, heavier than any orc’s blade.
The rhythmic scrape of Hilda’s stone against steel paused. “The fop’s still breathing,” she stated, not turning. Her voice was like two rocks grinding together. “But he’s not eating. He’ll be dead weight in a fight, and dead altogether in three days without a healer’s tent.”
Richard pulled his boots on, the leather stiff and cold. He looked over at Lys, who was propped against a root, pale as the underbelly of a fish. His elegant hands lay limp in the mud. Lillian moved to him, her fingers pressing to the pulse at his neck. “His heart is a hummingbird’s,” she said quietly. “The magic burned his channels clean. He needs rest we cannot give him, and herbs we do not have.”
“So we find them,” Richard said, the words leaving his mouth before he’d fully thought them. Three sets of eyes fixed on him. “We’re floating past forests. We stop. We hunt. We look.”
Zena, now mostly dressed in her damp clothes, gave a slow smile. Hilda finally turned, her bearded face etched with skepticism. “You know feverfew from foxglove, farm boy? Or are you just feeling brave because your balls are empty?”
He met her gaze, the heat in his face cooling into something solid. “I know what keeps a blighted sheep alive until my father could get the proper tincture from town. I know the look of a body fighting a losing battle. And I know we don’t leave him.” He stood, his body aching in new, profound ways. “We’re already dead weight to each other if we start leaving people behind.”
Lillian stood, wiping her hands on her thighs. “The river bends west ahead. The banks are thick with old growth. It is as good a place as any to risk a stop.” She looked from Richard to the unconscious Lys, her assessment clear. The risk was for the fop, but the order had come from the farm boy. The ledger had been updated again.
Hilda’s grunt was the closest thing to approval Richard had heard from her. She stood, the orc blade now gleaming dully in her fist, and began sorting through their meager pile of loot with a dismissive efficiency. She tossed a small, stained pouch to Richard. “For roots. Anything green that doesn’t smell like a goblin’s arsehole.” To Zena, she flung a coil of thin, surprisingly strong rope taken from an orc scout’s pack. “Snare wire. Your kind are good at setting traps.”
Zena caught the rope, her fingers testing its give. “My ‘kind’?” she asked, her voice a low purr.
“Survivors,” Hilda said without looking up, shoving a chipped hand-axe into her belt. She held out a single, carefully fletched arrow to Lillian. “One shot. Make it the last thing some fat river pig ever hears.”
Lillian took the arrow, her slender fingers examining the fletching with a critical eye. She nodded, then moved to the water’s edge, her gaze scanning the opposite bank with the patience of a heron. Richard watched her, then looked down at the pouch in his hand. It smelled of mold and old blood. He emptied it into his palm: a few copper coins, a rotten tooth, and a single, rusted fishhook. He kept the hook, discarded the rest into the mud, and felt the absurd weight of their circumstances. This was their arsenal.
They moved into the trees, the thick canopy swallowing the brutal sun. The air was cooler but close, smelling of damp earth and rotting leaves. Hilda took point, her warhammer held low. Richard followed, his eyes scanning the underbrush not for game, but for the slender, serrated leaves of feverfew, the white clusters of woundwort. He saw Zena vanish into the green to his left, silent as a shadow. The forest held its breath.
The first snap of a twig was deafening. Hilda froze, a statue of granite and leather. A fat, dun-colored boar emerged from a thicket thirty paces ahead, its snout rooting in the soft soil. Lillian’s bowstring drew back beside Richard’s ear, the sound a single, taut musical note. He saw her arm tremble, ever so slightly, from fatigue. She released. The arrow took the boar just behind its shoulder with a wet thump. The creature squealed, a shocking, human sound of rage and pain, and charged.
Richard moved without thought, the same instinct that had sent him crashing through briars after a stray ewe. He cut left, his boots sinking into the soft loam, the world narrowing to the boar's enraged, rolling eye. The creature pivoted, tusks glinting, bloody froth spraying from its snout. Hilda took a single, thundering step forward, her warhammer rising, but she held the blow. Creating the opening. Trusting him to fill it.
He dove under the swinging tusks, the hot, rank breath of the animal washing over him. The ground hit his shoulder, a jarring impact that shot through his wounded side. The boar's momentum carried it past, its haunch slamming into his ribs as it stumbled. He gasped, vision swimming, and rolled onto his knees. The boar was right there, flank heaving, the fletching of Lillian's arrow a violent bloom against its dirty hide.
His knife was in his hand. He didn't remember drawing it. He drove the blade up and in, behind the foreleg, aiming for the heart his father had taught him to find in a hog for slaughter. The resistance was immense, a thick, wet grip around the steel. He leaned his whole weight into it, a desperate, grunting shove. The boar screamed again, a sound that vibrated up the knife and into Richard's bones.
Then it collapsed. The great weight shuddered and went still. Richard stayed there, kneeling in the mud, his hand still locked on the knife handle buried in the animal's side. His own blood mixed with the boar's in the dirt. The forest silence rushed back in, ringing in his ears.
Zena emerged from the ferns to his right, a sharpened stake in her hand, her expression unreadable. She looked from the dead boar to Richard's face. He was breathing in ragged, open-mouthed pulls. This wasn't like dressing a harvest hog behind the barn. This violence was hot and immediate and it clung to him. He had done it to save them, to feed them, but the act itself felt like a door swinging shut behind him. The farm boy was in here somewhere, but he was standing in a different room now.
Hilda lowered her hammer. "Clean kill," she said, the words a flat statement. She walked over, placed a broad boot on the boar's neck, and wrenched Richard's knife free with a wet, sucking sound. She handed it back to him, handle first, the blade dripping. "Now we eat."
Lillian led him away from the kill site, her movements silent and deliberate. She didn't speak. The forest floor was a tapestry of green and brown, and Richard’s eyes, trained for spotting blight on a leaf or a fox in the henhouse, scanned for the plants he needed. He found the feverfew first, its small, daisy-like flowers pale in a shaft of sunlight. He knelt, his knees sinking into the damp earth, and began to pluck the leaves with careful fingers.
“Not those.” Lillian’s voice was close, just above him. She crouched, her shoulder almost touching his. Her scent was different here, away from the mud and blood of the river—like crushed pine needles and something clean, like cold stone. Her hand, long-fingered and smooth, reached past his and gently turned over a broader, velvety leaf nearby. “Woundwort. The silver filaments under the leaf. See?” Her finger brushed the underside, and a fine, glittering dust came away on her skin.
He saw. He also saw the faint tremor in her wrist, the fine sheen of sweat at her temple. The perfect elf was trembling from exhaustion. He reached for the woundwort, his calloused, dirt-caked fingers clumsy next to hers. He harvested a handful, the sticky sap coating his skin. When he looked up, she was watching him, her green eyes unreadable. The canopy dappled light across her face, and for a heartbeat, she wasn’t a warrior or an elf. She was just a woman, tired and far from home.
“Why are you here?” he asked, the question leaving him before he could shape it better.
She didn’t look away. “You freed me.”
“That’s not an answer.” He stuffed the herbs into a pouch. “You move like you could’ve taken those orcs yourself. So why were you in chains?”
A shadow passed over her face. She stood, brushing leaf litter from her trousers. “I was careless. I trusted a smile.” She looked down at him, her expression shifting, the mask of serene competence slipping just enough to show the sharp edge beneath. “Do not make the same mistake, farmer. The bounty on your head will buy more smiles than you can imagine.” She turned to go, then paused. “Look for willow bark. By the water. For the fever.”
He watched her glide back toward the river, her braid a golden rope down her back. His hand closed around the pouch of herbs. Her warning hung in the air, colder than the forest shade. She had answered him. She’d told him she’d been betrayed. And in doing so, she’d handed him a piece of her trust, wrapped in a threat. The shift was quiet, profound. He was no longer just their rescuer. He was their accomplice, and the walls between them were beginning to show their cracks.
Richard followed Lillian’s path to the riverbank. The mud here was thick, sucking at his boots. He found her kneeling at the water’s edge, her hands working at the low-hanging branches of a willow. She had her knife out, shaving thin strips of bark into a folded leaf in her lap. Her movements were efficient, practiced, but her shoulders were slumped. The perfect posture was gone.
He knelt beside her, the damp earth cool through his trousers. He didn’t speak. He just watched her hands. The knife trembled again, a tiny vibration. She stopped, closed her eyes for a second, then forced another strip. The bark came away pale and damp underneath.
“Here,” he said, his voice rough. He reached out, his fingers covering hers on the knife’s hilt. Her skin was cool. She went very still. He didn’t take the blade. He just held her hand steady. “Let me.”
She released the knife. Let him take it. She didn’t move away. Her breath hitched, just once, a sound so soft it was lost under the river’s slow gurgle. Richard took over, his farmer’s hands making quick, steady work. The strips piled up. The silence between them was full of the heat, the mud smell, the sound of his scraping.
“I was a bodyguard,” she said, her gaze fixed on the brown water. “For a merchant’s daughter. The smile belonged to the son of a rival house. He brought her wine. I tasted it first. It was clean.” She picked up a pebble, rolled it between her fingers. “He’d paid the house elf to switch the carafes after. They took me while my muscles were locked, my mind screaming inside a statue of my own flesh.” She dropped the pebble. It plunked into the murk. “The daughter laughed.”
Richard’s hands stilled. He looked at her profile, the elegant line of her nose, the tightness in her jaw. He saw it then—not just the warrior, but the shame. The professional failure etched into her bones. He finished gathering the bark, folded the leaf package, and placed it in her open palm. His thumb brushed her wrist. He felt her pulse, a frantic bird against his skin. “Their mistake,” he said, the words simple and absolute. “Letting you live.”
Her eyes snapped to his, the clear green sharp with surprise, then something softer, more dangerous. She leaned into the touch of his thumb on her wrist, just a fraction. “Right now?” Her voice was a low hum, almost lost in the river’s sound. “I want a bath in water that isn’t brown. I want a bed that isn’t mud. I want to not feel his poison in my veins every time I get tired.” She looked down at their hands, her pulse still racing under his skin. “But mostly, farmer, I want to not be a liability.”
A splash broke the moment. Zena stood waist-deep in the river a few yards downstream, her dark hair slicked back, water sheening over the generous curves of her breasts above her soaked linen wrap. She was scrubbing a blood-stained tunic against a rock, her movements vigorous, unselfconscious. She glanced over, caught them kneeling close together, and a slow, knowing smile spread across her face. “The patient still breathes,” she called, her voice carrying over the water. “His fever broke. Hilda is forcing broth down his throat. He is complaining. It is a good sign.”
Richard pulled his hand back, the cool air a shock where Lillian’s skin had been. He stood, offering her his hand. She took it, her grip firm and brief, and rose with that liquid grace that seemed inherent, even now. The mask was back, but it was thinner. He could see the weariness at the edges. “We need meat,” she said, brushing off her trousers. “And a plan. Floating until we starve is not a strategy.”
Back at the makeshift camp under a sprawling cypress, Lys was propped against a root, pale as the willow bark but awake. Hilda held a wooden cup to his lips. “Drink, you damn hummingbird,” she grumbled, but her hand was steady. Lys sipped, made a face, but obeyed. His eyes, usually bright with mischief, were dark hollows. He looked at Richard, then at Lillian following behind him. “You two look like you’ve been sharing secrets,” he whispered, a ghost of his old smile tugging his mouth. “Do tell. I could use a diverting tragedy.”
“The only tragedy is your whistling lungs,” Hilda barked, setting the cup down. She turned her granite gaze on Richard. “The elf is right. We hunt. You and me. The riverfolk can guard the invalid.” She hefted her warhammer, slinging it over a shoulder as if it were a walking stick. “The forest is quiet. Too quiet. The orcs are not gone. They are calculating. We move at dusk, use the last light. You good with a bow, farm boy, or just with foolish heroics?”
Richard met her stare. He thought of the weight of the orc chieftain’s axe in his hand, the way Lillian’s knife had trembled. He thought of the boundless, stupid silence of the fields at home, and the more complicated quiet of the forest now. “I can hunt,” he said. It wasn’t a boast. It was just a fact, one of the few solid things left in the world. He caught Lillian’s eye across the camp. She gave him a single, slow nod. The professional assessing the tool. The woman, perhaps, trusting it. The shift was complete. They were not fleeing. They were preparing.
Lys’s hand trembled as he tried to push the empty broth cup away. Hilda caught his wrist, her broad fingers swallowing his pale, slender ones whole. She didn’t speak. Just held him still, her eyes scanning his face like she was reading stone. “The calculations,” he whispered, his voice a dry leaf rustle. “They’re… loud. In the quiet.”
Richard crouched beside him, the smell of willow bark and sickly sweat sharp in his nose. He saw what Hilda saw: the sheen of cold sweat on Lys’s temple, the violet bruises under his eyes that spoke of a price paid in blood, not sleep. “What do you need?” Richard asked. It was the same tone he’d use for a colicking horse. Practical. Calm.
A weak, genuine laugh escaped Lys. “A week in a feather bed. A handsome physician with soft hands. The oblivion of very expensive wine.” His gaze drifted past Richard to where Zena was wringing out the tunic, the water sluicing down the valley of her spine. He watched the movement, his eyes focusing with effort. “Failing that. Tell me she’s still real. That I didn’t dream her up just to make dying more interesting.”
“She’s real,” Richard said, and followed his look. Zena straightened, the wet linen clinging to every dip and curve, plastered dark against her skin. She shook out her hair, droplets catching the sun, and met their stares without shame. She smiled, slow and warm, and ran a hand down her own side, squeezing the water from the fabric at her hip. Lys’s breath caught. Not in pain. In want.
Hilda grunted. “His body is empty. His mind is still a gutter.” She released Lys’s wrist and stood. “He’ll live. The hunt won’t wait.” She turned to go, but Lys’s hand darted out, surprisingly fast, and gripped the leather strap of her hammer sling.
“They know his face now, Hilda,” Lys said, all trace of feverish whimsy gone. His voice was thin but clear. “The bounty notice. They’ll have runners to every garrison, every toll bridge. The river takes us south toward the Baylis Junction. It’s a trading post. It will be watched.” He let go of the strap, exhausted by the effort. “You’re not just hunting for meat. You’re hunting for a way through a net.”
He fumbled at his own belt, his fingers clumsy. From a hidden sheath, he drew a narrow bone-handled knife. It wasn’t for fighting. The blade was thin, etched with faint, spiraling runes that seemed to drink the light. He held it out, not to Hilda, but to Richard. “Take it. The world is full of pretty lies. This… cuts through glamour. Shows what’s really there.” His eyes held Richard’s. “Don’t trust the smiling man. Ever.”