Beyond them was another collection of similar scum sprawled at fireside, sharing the contents of a wineskin, and squabbling over a heap of loot from the Keep. Then came the fire—badly built, part of it smoking, part roaring —and beyond the fire—
Dierna.
Her bright scarlet dress made a brilliant splash of color that attracted Kero’s eyes immediately. She lay half on her side, her pretty face a frozen mask of fear, tumbled at the feet of a tall, thin man in long red robes, the skirt of his robes split fore and aft for riding. He sat on a boulder, sharpening a knife, paying no attention to the antics of his men. Nor, strangely enough, to Dierna, although her legs were exposed to the thigh by the way her dress had torn and fallen open when she’d collapsed (or been flung) at his feet.
He reached down, as Dierna shrank away from him, and grabbed a lock of her long, unbound dark hair. He yanked her back toward him with it tangled cruelly in his fingers—Kero watched her clench her teeth and wince— and cut the lock off with a single stroke of his knife.
Kero bit her lip with sudden speculation. That was
As she watched, he rose from his impromptu seat, kicking Dierna out of the way impatiently, and took the lock of hair to a flat rock just inside the ring of firelight.
But the bandits ignored the robed man; ignored Dierna, which was even odder. Even if this strange man—
—even if this strange mage had given orders about leaving Dierna alone, scum like this would
Kero turned her startled attention back to the mage. That flat rock—he had some kind of paraphernalia laid out on it, as if it were an altar. He set the lock of hair on a brazier in the middle of the rock, picked up something Kero couldn’t make out, and began making passes over the burning hair.
A moment later the hair on the back of her neck was rising, as a circular boundary around the rock began to glow, as if he had piled up a circle of dark red embers. The strange light pulsed at first, then settled down to a steady, sullen glow. There was one small gap in the circle, and the mage put his instrument down as soon as the glow of the boundary settled, and strode through it.
He returned to his boulder, his steps hurried and betraying a certain impatience; he shot out his hand, and pulled Dierna to her feet by her bound wrists. She yelped, a sound that carried above the rest of the noise in the camp—and not one of the bandits looked up.
The mage dragged the young girl stumbling along behind him, then pushed her through the gap in the boundary. He cleared the flat rock of encumbrances with a single sweep of his free hand, then kicked her feet out from under her and forced her down beside it. He waved his hand again, and the gap in the boundary closed as fire burned from each end of the arc and met in the middle. Then he pulled a knife from the sleeve of his robe, seized Dierna’s head by the hair, and before Kero could take a breath, slashed Dierna’s cheek from eye to chin.
For one moment, Kero was paralyzed, with herself and the sword warring to take over her body and act. And in that moment of indecision, someone—or
Outside the circle of firelight, a wild clamor went up. It was a heartbeat later that Kero recognized the sounds for the voices of half a dozen horses screaming with fear. The thunder of hooves was all the warning the bandits got before an entire herd of them, blind with panic, stampeded through the camp. Then the campfire went up in a shower of colored ball-lightning and huge sparks and explosions just as they hammered past, and they panicked further, scattering in all directions.
And as if that wasn’t chaos enough, one of the revelers fell into the fire with a bubbling shriek of pain, clutching his throat.
And the bandits panicked as badly as the horses.
