Captain Cameron Gray squatted low on the edge of the shallow rise and looked out over the swaying meadow grass. To the south of him, only a few leagues distant, the northern border of the Foldwood cut a dark green line across the landscape. From his slight elevation, Gray was afforded a view of the top of the forest. Could see it stretching away from him into the hazy horizon.

“You’re on your way, aren’t you, Fia,” he muttered to himself. “You’re on your way. I can feel it. You’re strong. Clever. I saw the truth of that in your eyes when we last met.”

Gray’s own cold, blue eyes moved patiently downwards, to the break in the forest that marked where the single road that ran through it emerged. From where he sat on his heels, making sure his dark blue and grey uniform was most likely blended into the slope behind him, the exit to the wood looked like the entrance to some dark green tunnel.

No one knew why there was just one road, the Holtway, through the entire belt of the Foldwood. No one knew who had cut it. No one knew how it stayed so clear, without any attention from foresters from either Arifold or Frekifold. Witches and thaumaturgy were what most believed, but because the Holtway was so important for the economic health between Frekifold and the tribelands south of it, that shared belief was rarely discussed.

To admit that witches had once been useful would be to admit that they still might be, and that would mean allowing that, perhaps, the decades of persecution of thaumaturgists might have been misguided.

Still, no matter who had carved the road in ages long past, the fact remained that opening others had always proved too great an undertaking. It was the one and only road.

Gray smiled thinly to himself. The failure of the tribelands to tame this feature of the natural world would only go to make his job a hell of a lot easier. Had the Foldwood been less tangled or easier to navigate, he might have had to try and patrol the entire breadth of it in his mission to waylay Fia and whatever company she had managed to pull together with the money he’d left her. As it was, she would most likely be riding hard to evade Gunn’s retribution-seeking gang, meaning she’d be taking the swiftest route through the forest.

That meant that Gray needed only to concentrate on this one spot.

Gray crabbed his way carefully backwards and slipped quickly over the ridge. On the other side of the low hill a company of Frekirie outriders sat around, tending their horses and waiting; twenty-five hardy men and women who excelled at hunting and fighting any enemies that strayed into Frekifold lands with plundering, stock-rustling or murder in mind.

“Captain Gray,” a man said, striding straight up to Gray and saluting.

“What is it?” Gray asked, walking towards where his small tent had been erected.

“I sent Ancrum and young Haggan to sit and watch either side of the Holtway, half a mile into the woods, as you instructed, sir,” the man said. “Haggan is nursing a gash from some panic grass that he rode through earlier. His leg’s a mess, but it should heal. I thought scouting duty might be a better use of him.”

“Excellent. They know not to engage, but to send up an arrow with a red ribbon attached, or a lit one if it’s after dark, to signal when our quarry has passed them?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Splendid,” Gray said, running a finger around his immaculate silver goatee. “Then all we need to do now is wait in readiness. Make sure there’s someone watching the forest at all times.”

“We should make short work of these common outlaws, do you think, Captain Gray?” the man asked. His voice was full of the kind of brash soldier’s swagger that Gray had heard leave the lips of many troopers in his time. Troopers that he’d then gone on to dig graves for.

He had been a fighting man nearly all his life. First for the Countess Vanora and then, now that she was dying by inches, for her son, Redmond. He could visualise what was likely to come. He had taken part in enough ambushes and enough slaughters in his time soldiering to develop a nose for how they were likely to play out. The air in his nostrils was thick with the smell of the Foldwood––mouldering wood, wet leaves, fragrant beard lichen––and approaching death. It was a wonder the buzzards, foxes and wedge-tailed eagles had not started congregating already.

“I would be cautious in your appraisal, lad,” he said in a steely voice.

“My appraisal, sir?” the soldier said.

“About our foe,” Gray said. “I doubt there’s anything common about the outlaws we’re about to face.”

* * *

They rode swiftly along the Holtway, which ran as straight as an arrow through the Foldwood, for two days and two nights. They met nothing on the way. No sign or travellers, soldiers or merchant convoys, nor forest sprites or eldritch creatures of any kind.

Fergus Allaway seemed slightly put out about that.

“Don’t drop your guards, brothers,” Fia would hear him telling the twins, Lenix and Gil. “Drop your guard for just a second and that’s when the dark things––the dryads and such––will emerge from the gloom and take you.”

“I took a shit in the woods earlier,” Gil replied innocently. “I dropped my guard along with a few other things and I’m still here. You reckon those dryads are good enough not to slay a man when he’s got his breeches down?”

Every few hours, Fia would tell the others to ride on. She would wait until they were out of earshot, sitting her great sable brumby while Gunn sat his stolen horse, manacled, and the two of them would listen for any sound of pursuing hoof beats.

But there had been nothing. Not for two days. Admittedly, they had been riding hard, though it was somewhat difficult to tell in the ever-green twilight of the Foldwood just how much ground they were covering.

After Gunn had killed Faith, none of Fia’s other hired riders had attempted to converse with him. They didn’t give him a wider berth as such, but they were careful to have as little to do with him as possible. Fia thought that wise. She was convinced that Gunn held secrets of his own––a part of him that perhaps no one else knew about. She’d been expecting, more and more as they drew ever closer to the edge of the Foldwood and the beginning of the grasslands of Frekifold, for him to give her grief, to try and slip her. He was in a fairly powerful position: knowing that Fia and her crew, obliged to see him alive to Castle Dreymark, couldn’t kill him if he tried to escape.

Yet on they rode, and Gunn never showed signs of trying to escape. Almost, it seemed to Fia, he looked like he had resigned himself to his fate. And he was relieved somehow.

Fia was not the only one to note this unlooked for docility in their prisoner.

“He ain’t tried his luck one bit since we slipped his gang back in them passes,” Hunter said, at noon on the third day, while they were resting the horses, taking pisses and stretching limbs. “Not once.”

“I guess havin’ a heart as cold as a fuckin’ well digger’s knee don’t matter if you can’t jump down from your fuckin’ horse, does it?” Gill Allaway observed.

“I must freely admit, Miss McCrae,” said Darach Lees, who Fia was finding increasingly insufferable, complacent, and self-regarding the closer they got to their destination, “that there is a mighty fine rig you have devised. A mighty fine rig.”

“Has anyone, um, turned over in their minds the possibility that Boni Woe and the rest of his gang might have taken another way through the woods?” Lorna Forbes asked timidly. Fia noticed that her hand never strayed far from the butt of one of her pistols, even when she slept.

“Ain’t no other way through the Foldwood,” said Fia.

“Then, has anyone ever pondered on whether or not he might have some of his men waiting for us on the other side?” Forbes asked, the timbre in her voice tightening and rising a little.

She’s one good scare away from bolting, Fia caught herself thinking. Isn’t going to be a barrel of laughs for anyone near her when that happens.

“That why he’s so godsdamned calm, you reckon?” Hunter asked, directing her question at the three Allaway brothers.

“Is that why you’re so calm, Gunn?” Lees said, biting the end of one of his moustaches. He crossed his arms and jutted out his chin in what he probably thought was a commanding pose, but actually accentuated how wet behind the ears he was when it came to this sort of work.

Gunn had been let off his horse so he could take a leak, but was still cuffed wrist to wrist. His ankle manacles were still around his legs, the chain that went under the belly of his horse dragging in the drifts of decaying leaves that carpeted the forest floor and spilled out onto the thaumaturgically cleared road.

“What’s that you’re yappin’ about, man?” the longrider said impassively, as he sat himself down on a fallen log at the roadside.

Lees bristled. “I’m not yappin’,” he said testily. “I was putting Hunter’s pertinent question to you, you damned mongrel.”

Gunn looked up at Lees. Ran his eyes over him in that special way that those men who don’t need to prove their lethality can.

“And what question might that be, friend?” he asked.

Lees cleared his throat and tucked his thumb into his sword belt. “She––we––wanted to know whether you were so calm because you’ve friends waiting for you beyond the northern edge of the Foldwood.”

Gunn smiled and looked around at the gathered company of eight remaining riders. “It’s a good thing you ain’t the brains of this outfit, Darach Lees,” he said. “‘Cause if what you had between your ears was leather, you wouldn’t be able to saddle a fuckin’ flea. Why the hell would I tell you something like that, shit-for-brains?”

Lees began spluttering. Fia had a feeling he wouldn’t get words out even if was given all day to think of them.

Gunn snorted. “Just kiddin’, Lees,” he said. “You should know that Torsten Gunn’s got friends from Skyvolla to Aldinfang. Maybe not any of the Counts, Countesses, or their lackeys, but with those folk they keep their heels on the throats of.”

Lees swallowed and twisted his moustaches. Next to him, Cleric Vass’ eyes were very thoughtful.

“Now, if we’re all thinking about puttin’ on the nosebag, might I ask one of you kind fellows to help me with any cuttin’ that might be required?” Gunn said, holding up his bound hands. “I find myself a little debilitated of late.”

There was a sudden crack out in the woods; the sound of a branch snapping under a heavy foot. Then a quick, fluting, bird-like call went up. Fergus wheeled, hefting his heavy club like a willow switch. Lorna Forbes made to wrench a pistol free of her belt, but Fia grabbed her arm and stopped her.

“Hold!” she hissed. “Don’t worry. It’s just a Kynnish hunting party.”

“How can you be so sure?” Forbes asked.

“I recognise the call,” Fia said.

She let go of Forbes’ tense arm and pointed out to the sun-dappled greenery to their left. Amongst the twisting trunks, a line of horsemen, with red hair that was dark in the gloom, could be seen making their way along.

“The Kynnish are the only ones who navigate the Foldwood,” Fia said. “That branch you heard breaking and the fake bird call, those were considerations for us. In case one of us saw them and presumed we were being stalked.”

“How – how do you know these things?” Forbes asked, watching the Painted Kyn as they were swallowed by the whispering pines.

The tattoos along Fia’s scalp prickled. She clapped Forbes on the back once and said softly into her ear, “I’ve been lost here before. The Kyn found me. I learned something of their ways.”

Fia walked over to Gunn and hauled him to his feet by his chained wrists. The sighting of the Painted Kyn hunters had stirred some uneasy feeling in her. “We eat in the saddle,” she told them all. “Mount up.”

They halted a mile or so from the northern edge of the Foldwood, where the road began to bend gradually to the north-east in a final curve. The Allaway twins were all for hightailing it down the final stretch of the Holtway and getting clear of the oppressive quiet of the forest so that they could see more than just the odd sliver of sky through the thinner branches of the canopy, but Fia quashed that idea.

“What is it?” Lorna Forbes asked sharply.

Fia cocked her head to the side. She closed her eyes. Drew a deep breath through her nose.

The faint, but unmistakably acrid tang of blood tickled at the back of her throat. She snuffed in a slow breath, her mouth slightly open. Sifted the air, trying to figure the direction the cloying metallic smell was coming from.

“I’m going to scout on alone,” Fia said. “I think there might be someone up ahead.”

“How the bloody hell can she know that?” Darach Lees asked dubiously. “How the bloody hell can you know that, McCrae?”

Fia shrugged. “Call it a woman's intuition.”

Lees snorted derisively. “A fine, intangible thing to waste daylight over. Not a reason for reconnaissance I ever heard given when employed in the Keldland brigades.”

“I don’t recall the last time anyone in the Keldland brigades was given any reason for reconnaissance,” Lenix quipped lightly. “That tribeland’s always taken such pride in their neutrality, ain’t they?”

Lees bristled, his eyes narrowing and his moustache quivering with indignation.

Fia cut Lees’ retort off with a glare. “Don’t you worry about reasons,” she told the former soldier. “You just stay here, look after your cleric, and do what I tell you to do like a good mercenary, savvy?”

“What about Gunn?” Cleric Vass asked, appraising the outlaw with an unfriendly eye.

Fia dismounted and handed the rein of Gunn’s mount to Hunter. “He tries to run, you shoot the horse in the arse,” she told the other woman. “He somehow slips his bonds, you hamstring him. Either way he gets dragged the rest of the way. Understand, Gunn?”

Gunn gave Fia a small and inscrutable smile that twisted up her insides uncomfortably.

“Might be a scout of Gunn’s gang, in which case I’ll be right back,” she told the rest of her crew.

“What if there’s more than one?” Gil asked, his dark eyes glittering.

“Then, maybe I won’t,” Fia said.

She took off her hat and hung it on her saddle bow, pulled her hood over head, loosened her broadsword in its sheath, and stepped into the woods.

As she moved silently over the yielding carpet of fir needles, Fia held her sword over her shoulder to stop it snagging on the soft, trailing growths of beard lichen and the older branches that drooped into her path. She rolled her feet from the outside in as she set them down with every step, just as she had been taught long ago in the hills and dales to the north of where she now stood. In a land she’d vowed never to set foot in again.

The scout was hunkered down in the thick shadows of a dying pine. With dark purple bark and ashy grey needles, the tree was slumped within sight of the Holtway. He was a young man with blond hair tied back, a thick bandage around his leg, dirt smeared liberally over his face to hide his pale skin in the gloom, and a longbow in his hand. There was an arrow set to the bowstring, tied with a red ribbon, marking the young man as a signaller. However, it was the colour of the furtive figure’s uniform that ran a cold claw across Fia’s tightly strung nerves.

He was wearing the dark blue and grey of a soldier of Frekifold.

Gods-damn it, what the fuck does that mean? Fia thought, sliding into the leafy cover provided by a mare’s tail fern. Must be something to do with Cameron Gray. Does he have men waiting beyond the wood to escort us all to the castle? If so, why the subterfuge?

The questions were branded across her mind for a few moments before she realised that it was irrelevant. She was taking no risks on this job. That meant that there was only one thing to do next, as distasteful as it might be.

Fia moved unhurriedly through the brush, utilizing every sigh of the branches above to cloak her movements. Her sword was pressed to her leg, the grip of it reassuringly familiar in her hand. Her breathing was steady––steadier than she ever imagined it could be as she approached a man with his murder in mind.

She got within about five feet of him when a redstart trilled out from behind her, took off, and flashed past her face in a whirr of slate grey wings and rust red tail feathers.

The young man turned instinctively at the sound of the bird and saw Fia approaching him. His eyes fastened onto hers, trading those sacred communications that have been exchanged by predator and prey ever since the start of things.

Fia struck out with her sword, bringing it up from where she’d had it concealed by her leg, aiming for the man’s belly. Her adversary parried the thrust aside with his bow, sweeping Fia’s quick lunge away, the bow string snapping as it ran across the blade of the broadsword.

Fia stepped in, following her sword and kneed the man in his injured thigh, even as he grabbed the wrist of her sword arm. With a hiss of pain, the scout fell, but with his other hand he grabbed the back of Fia’s neck and brought her down to the forest floor with him.

Fia dropped her sword as the two of them fell on top of it, not being in the mood to be impaled on her own weapon. In the next breath, their hands were around one another’s throats and the world narrowed into the space that the pair of them occupied.

Whenever Fia thought of the word ‘intimate’, and it was not often, there were two acts that sprung to mind. One involved getting on her back as quickly as she could, while the other involved trying to keep her feet at all costs.

There were few things that Fia could think of that were more intimate than being alone in a forest with a man, trying to kill him while he tried to kill her. With only her heartbeat thudding in her ears and the sound of their breath whooshing in their throats for company, it reminded her bizarrely of lying in a pool with her ears underwater––only with the added excitement of unrealised sudden death.

They tussled this way and that. There was no cursing, no threatening. Both of them knew that each breath carried with it the potential to be their last, or their deliverance. No point using it to tell the other person to go fuck themselves.

Fia kneed the man in the thigh again. And again. His face was taught with pain, and grew paler with every blow she landed. His fingers wrapped lovingly around Fia’s throat, trying desperately to choke her, to win in the most absolute fashion imaginable.

They stared into each other’s faces as they fought in silence; leaves crunching under them, beetles scurrying out of their way as they rolled this way and that, teeth bared like wolves.

The young man, despite his leg, managed to get on top of Fia, used his weight to pin her down, and put his forearm across her throat. He pressed down, crushing her breasts with his other arm so that they hurt awfully. His blonde hair had come loose of the leather thong he had tied it with and fell down to tickle her face.

Fia reached down, even as she felt her constricted blood rushing through the passages of her head. Found her black knife in her coat, with its two inch blade. She pulled it free and pushed it into the man’s wounded thigh.

The young man let out a hoarse moan, his exhalation smelling of camphor and eucalyptus. He pulled back from Fia, instinctively reaching for the blade that was cutting into him.

Fia smashed her forehead into his teeth. Once. Twice. Felt a tooth cut into her head.

The scout rolled off her, allowing Fia to get a breath in. She saw her sword. Grabbed at it, fumbled it, managed to get a hand around it.

The two of them staggered to their feet, sucking air hard. Fia had her sword in her hand. Without thinking, she slashed at the young man’s leg and nicked it. He stumbled. Fia pressed in close with her broadsword.

“No!” the young man cried out, in that infinitesimal moment when he realised he was going to die. “Wait, I––”

Fia slid the point of her broadsword hard into his breastbone and angled it up and to the right. Felt it scrape across and slice through the cartilage that connected the ribs to the sternum, seeking the heart. Finding the heart.

Blood welled out fast. Pumping out and drenching the young man’s uniform, doomed to be soaked up by the forest floor.

“No…” the young man wheezed, sounding like he was denying the world and fate and every choice that had ever led him to that present moment.

Fia pushed him up against the trunk of the very same pine he had been hiding by. His gaze scrabbled across her face, trying desperately to find meaning there, or a reason for why what was happening to him was happening.

Fia felt a crunch through her fingers, through the handle of her sword. The young man’s eyes unfocused and his knees gave way. Fia’s sword slid out of him as he fell to the forest floor, dead face smacking wetly into the leaf mould, a twig sticking an inch into his unseeing eye.

Fia exhaled and stood upright. Spat blood from her mouth, unsure whether it belonged to her or the man she’d just killed.

A sudden crashing of branches broke her from her reverie. The sound of someone spurring on a horse, busting their way through the undergrowth.

Another scout.

Fia pulled her dirk from its sheath and threw it overarm as the rider emerged from the dimness on the opposite side of the road. The knife blurred through the air and buried itself in an ill-placed branch. The rider thundered away up the Holtway.

“Bollocks,” Fia said to herself, absently wiping blood from the side of her face. “Bollocks.”

* * *

“Fia McCrae!” Cameron Gray called from where he sat perfectly upright on his piebald horse. “We know you and your party are in there. We know that you have killed one of the Countess of Frekifold’s own scouts. If you yourself will walk out Gunn, as we agreed, then neither you or any in your employ shall be harmed and the rest of Gunn’s bounty will be handed over to you forthwith.”

Fia leaned against a sturdy fir and stared out at the stretch of ground that divided the woodland, in which she and her crew were taking cover, from the advantageous slope that Cameron Gray and his company of Frekifold warriors occupied. She spat thoughtfully into the pine needles at her feet and prodded gingerly at the cut on her forehead that she’d taken from the scout’s tooth. It had stopped bleeding for now but was tender to the touch.

“Somethin’ about this seems off,” Torsten Gunn said from behind Fia. He was leaning against another tree, a scrap of parchment and a stub of charcoal in his chained hands, jotting down some line or other, not even looking out at the men who would take him to hang.

“Of course you’d say that, Gunn,” Darach Lees said, peering out from behind another tree. “It’s your arse on the line.”

“Your arse too, by the looks of it, Lees,” Gunn said, without looking around. “And that’s exactly my point; somethin’ don’t seem right about this. There was no reason for that little motherfucker that McCrae killed to be wearin’ Frekifold colours, unless he was from Frekifold. Just like there was no reason for Gray to have a Frekirie soldier hiding in the woods with a signal arrow.”

“You’re sayin’ it stinks, Gunn?” Hunter said.

“Like a rancid wound,” Gunn replied.

“McCrae!” Gray bellowed. “Come out before I send my men in. You have Gunn, and for that you’ll be rewarded. You have my word.”

Behind her, Gunn snorted. “I’ve seen what words are worth coming out of that man’s mouth.” He finished writing whatever it was he’d been writing and slipped it into a hole in the tree opposite him.

“What was that, your last will and testament?” Gil said dryly.

Gunn stared placidly at Gil. “I kind of like you, kid,” he said. “Part of me hopes you’ll survive this fight.”

“You reckon he wants to fight us?” Fergus rumbled.

“Can’t see why he brought those soldiers with him if that weren’t the case,” Gunn said. “‘Course, you could always make it easier for him and just walk out there with your hands up. Gray loves killing unarmed folk the most. Means he don’t mess up his clothes.”

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

“What’re you on about, Gunn?” Lees said.

Gunn merely shrugged.

“What’s with the company of armed men, Gray?” Fia called out from the trees.

“A precaution for Gunn,” Gray said smoothly. “You're transporting a very dangerous man there, McCrae. And speaking of dangerous men, have you given any thought to Gunn’s gang of savages. You must have slipped them, seeing as you’re still alive, but for how long I wonder.”

“Why not just send a couple of your men down here with the rest of the money and they can take Gunn off our hands?” Fia called back. “We get paid. You get Gunn. Then, me and my crew can head back south and, fingers crossed, we need never meet each other again.”

She studied Gray’s outline with her sharp eyes as she presented this option to him. She saw the man shift in his saddle, turn his head slightly and nod subtly to a soldier standing nearby.

“I’m afraid that’s not going to work, Fia,” Gray said, and something in his tone told Fia that the chances of her walking away from this were rapidly going from slim to nil.

“Can’t see why not,” she replied.

The distance that separated them meant that Fia couldn’t hear Gray sigh, but she could guess that that’s what he was doing.

“No,” the man called back to her, his voice sounding flat and resigned. “No, I don’t suppose you can.”

Gray signalled to his soldiers.

“You can’t run, not with Gunn’s gang hunting for you, and the coin I left you wouldn’t have been adequate to hire too many mercenaries, even if you’d been able to find many desperate enough to escort a man as infamous as Torsten Gunn,” Gray said, his voice devoid of anything that might have even resembled care.

“Arrogant son of a bitch has a point,” Gil said.

“I don’t think we signed up for this, did we, Cleric Vass?” Lees asked nervously. Fia noticed that there was a thin sheen of perspiration beading his brow.

The cleric looked sideways at his self-proclaimed protector.

“I think it would be optimistic to think that the Frekirie soldiery out there is just going to let us walk away from this, Mr Lees,” the god-talker said.

“Don’t make us come in after you, Fia,” Gray said. His voice, floating down the hill, was cold and calm as snow.

A dozen men and women emerged from the press of soldiers with longbows in their hands and formed a couple of short lines. The dull sunlight glinted evilly off the polished wood.

“Looks like you’ve already made up your mind on that score, Gray,” Fia yelled.

“Shit,” said Lees, the lump in his throat bobbing up and down as he swallowed nervously.

“I thought you was a soldier, Lees,” Hunter spat at him contemptuously.

“I don’t suppose that means he’s particularly keen to get shot today,” Lorna Forbes said, her voice taut with stretched nerves.

“No riflemen,” Gil observed. “That’s something.”

“Oh yeah,” Fergus said, “a dozen arrows raining down every three seconds rather than a dozen bullets every two minutes. What a fuckin’ relief.” Even as he spoke, his fat fingers moved with surprising dexterity over his own flintlock rifle, loading it.

Fia pointed to Lorna and Lees. “You two, take the horses back down the road a ways and hide them in the trees. If we’re able to ride out of here afterwards it’ll be a lot easier without horses that aren’t stuck full of arrows or lead,” she said.

Without a word, Lorna and Lees gathered the reins of the horses and marched them hurriedly back the way they had come.

Out on the slope, the first row of bowmen took a step to the left. Each had a handful of arrows stuck into the ground in front of them. Fia could see, in her mind’s eye, the individual barbs of the goose feathers as the archers ran their fingers down the vanes, caressing the slim slithers of whispering death. Could picture the soft glow of the willow shafts as they floated through the air, reached the pinnacle of their arches and started to drop, down towards the helpless sacks of blood and water and easily pierced organs that were her crew.

“Hunter?” she said sharply. “Lenix?”

“What?” Hunter said from behind the pine she was tucked behind.

“Any chance you can knock any of this lot over whilst they're fannying about getting ready?”

Hunter eyed the soldiers up on the hillside speculatively, but it was Lenix who answered.

“Nah, they’re too far out for my bow,” the twin said. “And definitely too far for that piece of shit,” he added, nodding at Hunter’s old hunting bow.

“Shit,” Fia said.

“My thoughts too,” Lenix replied. “No doubt my brother could hit one with that rifle of his, though.”

Fergus nodded his big bald head and grinned through his beard. “Aye, I can do that,” he said. “Get one, maybe two, before they start legging it down here. Otherwise, we’ll have to wait for them to come to us.”

Fia watched Gray give another signal and the thirteen remaining Frekirie warriors started jogging down the slope. A few had shields bearing the colours and wolf’s head of Frekifold, but most wore only leather shirts topped with coats of mail, their tabards overall and, on their heads, sturdy caps of leather and iron.

“McCrae?”

It was Gunn.

“What?” Fia asked.

She was watching the archers. They’d knocked shafts to their bows, but hadn’t drawn yet.

“McCrae, if things go tits up, as they sure as shit look like they’re gonna, I’d appreciate it if you could kill me rather than let Gray take me in. I ain’t afraid of dyin’, but I’d rather not give that fucker the satisfaction of finishing what he started a few years back.”

“Finished what he started?” Fia asked.

Gunn gave her a tired, wolfish grin. It was then that Fia perceived that there might be a deep reservoir of sadness under the confident, icy exterior of the man.

“Maybe, if you make it through this next scrape, I’ll tell you the tale,” he said.

Fia’s eyes snapped back to the archers.

“Sure, Gunn,” she said. “If it looks like Gray’s men are going to fuck the rest of us up, I’ll kill you. Doesn’t seem like Gray’s going to stick with the bargain he struck with me anyways.”

Gunn nodded. “Much obliged.”

Distantly, Fia thought she heard Gray say, “Draw.”

On the hill, arms strained to make the one-hundred-pound draw.

“Ready yourselves!” Fia said loudly to her crew. “They’ll probably mostly hit the trees seeing as they’re going to have to fire arrows in under the canopy, but don’t stick your head out unless you want a hole in it all the same!”

There was a soft click from the other side of the road, in the trees where the three Allaway brothers had taken up their position. A moment later there was the rolling crack of a rifle shot. One of the archers on the hill fell screaming in a mist of blood.

“One less!” roared Lenix, drawing his bowstring to his ear. “Not bad for a fat bastard, brother!”

The soldiers had broken into a full run now and were screaming as they pounded determinedly towards the trees. Feet thundering. Arms heavy with swords, axes, pistols and maces. Running. Running.

“Why are they doing this?” Lorna Forbes said from behind a tree to Fia’s left

A dozen men and women. Didn’t sound like many, Fia thought. When they were charging right at you though; screaming like daemons, pelting into a narrow strip of woodland in which she and a few mercenaries she barely knew were trying to take cover in, twelve warriors was plenty to be going on with.

Lenix and Hunter ducked out of the cover of their respective trees and tried arrows at the approaching warriors. Lenix had his shaft blocked by a shield-bearer, while Hunter’s went over the top of the line of soldiers.

As if in answer, over the keening wails of the troopers charging towards them, Fia heard the ominous thrum of arrows being loosed.

“Here they come!” Fia bellowed.

And the arrows arrived. They whistled and whispered down like an unforgiving and hellish rain, like the life-ending secrets of the gods. Fia pressed herself into the cover of her pine. Peering cautiously out from behind the trunk, she watched the first volley land, her own skin tingling and itching in expectation.

The bowmen knew their business. Even shooting from distance and from an elevated position their arrow trajectory was expertly judged so that their shafts flickered under the lowest branches of the pines on the edge of the wood. They thudded into the boles of the trees, but none struck home.

But that wasn’t really the point. They were meant more to keep Fia’s crew from firing at the soldiers running towards the edge of the Foldwood, more to keep Gray’s bunch of professional killers alive, than kill Fia’s company.

In the space of two breaths it was over.

Fia knew, despite what Fergus had said a moment before, that the archers out there, if they were worth their salt, could probably fire an arrow every four seconds, which meant—

The next volley thudded down, clipping branches, thwacking into the mud, ratcheting up the hysteria.

How many more? Fia asked herself. How many more before the infantry arrives?

One more, as it turned out, and then the foot soldiers crashed into the edge of the forest like a pack of rabid wolverines.

There was a crackle of pistol fire as some of the soldiers discharged their weapons. Gun smoke bloomed under the trees. Fia saw that the archers on the slope had ditched their bows and were now running down the slope, Gray leading them with a drawn broadsword. Before she could note much else, a pistol boomed nearby. Fia cursed and ducked as a chunk was blown from the trunk she was taking cover behind, the lead slug whining past her face.

The sound of fighting––shouted oaths, the clash of metal on metal, screams––was beginning to rise now. Gray and his men had the numbers. It wouldn’t take them long to get the upper hand by the expedient method of swamping Fia and her crew. Time wasn’t on their side, but then there was precious little about the current situation that was.

Fia took a couple of breaths and then popped around the other side of the tree, one of her pistols in one hand, sword in the other. As she stepped out into view, an enemy happened to run past her, eyes fixed on the manacled Gunn, who was standing off to one side. She lashed out with her broadsword and lay open the back of the man’s neck, revealing the gleaming white spine beneath. The man dropped with a shrieking squeal. She turned in time to see another soldier running towards her through the brush, his sword held low for a stabbing thrust. Fia raised her pistol and fired. The bullet caught the man in midair as he hurdled a fallen tree, the lead slug punching into his shin bone in a spray of blood and sending him flipping forward. The soldier screamed and fell flat on his face in a mess of mud and leaves.

Before he could regain his feet, before Fia could even step forward and run her blade through him, Gunn was on top of him. With his knee in the middle of the man’s back, the outlaw looped his manacled hands over his foe’s head and pulled back savagely. The soldier’s head was yanked back and his screaming turned into a muffled groan. Gunn gritted his teeth and heaved as hard as he could. The man’s groan changed pitch. Then, his neck broke with a wet popping sound.

Gunn got swiftly to his feet and held out his hands to Fia.

“You need every man,” he said simply. “I ain’t no use to you if you’re dead. In fact, I’m no use to you at all anymore.”

Fia considered this, but she did it fast.

“Come on, McCrae, what have you got to lose?” Gunn said.

It was a good point, and the key to the manacles was in Fia’s hand before Gunn had even finished voicing it. As soon as the cuffs were off his wrists, Gunn snatched up the sword of the man whose neck he’d just broken.

“Gunn,” Fia said.

“What, Miss McCrae?”

“You were right, we need every man,” Fia said in a level voice. “You run before this fight is over and I’ll shoot you myself.”

Gunn grinned, cold fire dancing in his eyes. “I don’t doubt it,” he said.

They began moving through the trees, towards the flashes of colour and noise that signified the hottest fighting.

“Something that’s always stood me in good stead,” Gunn said quickly to Fia as they went, “is rememberin’ that it ain’t all about slaying your opponent in this game. Too many lads go into a scrape with notions of glorious killing blows that knock the other fucker’s head off or skewer them straight through the heart. What really matters though, is gettin’ a man down on the ground. You manage to ground a man in such a way that he can’t get back up, then he’s as good as dead.”

“Don’t you worry about me, just make sure that you don’t wander off before the fighting’s done.”

Gunn smiled grimly. “I’ll not be slinkin’ off. Not ‘til I’ve buried the hatchet with Cameron Gray. Preferably in his fucking head.”

Fia didn’t bother waiting for any other reassurances from Gunn. There was only so much in the man to be trusted. Clearly though, he had a beef with Gray that needed settling, and Fia reckoned that if she could trust in anything it was in Gunn’s willingness to right any wrong he deemed to have been done to him.

Fia dashed off towards the sound of Lorna Forbes’ voice crying out. Her blood thundering in her own ears, and the seismic heaving of her chest as she sucked in lungfuls of sweet forest air, mingled with the din of fighting, became the music to a dance that only she knew the steps to. All around her, or so it seemed, was the incomparable chaos of men and women fighting for their lives. As it always seemed to her during these times when her mortality was threatened, Fia found that everything happening around her was taking place at an accelerated pace whilst, conversely, making her feel as though he was wading through treacle.

Casting about for a sign of Lorna through the confusion of running warriors and tangled undergrowth, Fia spied the sinuous form and red hair of one of the Allaway twins, as he ducked to evade the brutal swing of a Frekirie axe before driving an eighteen-inch dagger right up into the fork of his adversary’s legs and twisting it.

Gil, most likely, Fia thought.

Arterial blood sprayed explosively down the inside of Gil’s enemy’s thigh and she collapsed to the ground, her mouth drawn in a great silent ‘O’ of astonished dread. Slipping another knife smoothly from his bandolier of blades, Gil drove the dagger into the woman’s forehead with a hollow squelching sound. Even as the female warrior fell, Gil was moving, his scowling face looking around for the next foe.

Fia followed Lorna’s increasingly desperate shouting and found her in the middle of a small glade of burned stumps; the result of a recent lightning strike. She had been hemmed in by a trio of Frekirie soldiers. One of her pistols lay spent on the ground nearby. Her shortsword was in one hand and she waved it around in a fashion that told Fia she’d had less practise with it than even Fia had feared. There was another soldier dragging himself away, his face white, his hand clutching his gut where his mail had been rent by Lorna’s slug, the deep black blood of a liver shot spreading across his tabard.

As Fia dashed towards Lorna, a crossbow quarrel twittered just past her own face from her left. Without pause, she adjusted her running, pulled her second pistol from under her coat and sighted at a man kneeling by the side of one of the blackened stumps. She fired, the pistol shot crashing around the glade. Her bullet punched into the stump, spraying splinters across the man’s face so that he fell back with a grunt.

“Fuck!” Fia growled.

Didn’t ever pay to leave an enemy behind you, especially not one with a crossbow. Hoping Lorna could hold her own a little longer, Fia swerved left, heading for the crossbowman.

The man was fumbling with his weapon, spitting curses as blood ran into his eyes from the shrapnel wounds gouged into his forehead. He managed to get the string reset and a fresh quarrel in place just as Fia arrived. He raised the bow, blinking crimson from his vision, as Fia launched herself off a shattered stump and landed with one foot on the weapon, squashing it into the ground along with the soldier’s hand. The man cried out and the firing mechanism released. The wicked steel-tipped bolt shot across the small glade and buried itself in the thigh of one of the three remaining warriors that were closing on Lorna. The woman collapsed to one knee and opened her mouth to scream, her face contorted with pain and shock.

Eyes wide and fearful, Lorna Forbes whipped out her second pistol with a shaking hand and shot the injured woman in the face. The lead ball ripped into the warrior’s mouth and blew out the back of her head in a shower of skull fragments, gobbets of brain, and teeth.

At the same time, Fia slid her sword down into the place where the crossbowman’s shoulder met his neck. In and out, quick as a hen pecking a morsel from the ground. The man crumpled with a bubbling sigh.

Fia spun about and was just in time to see Lorna overwhelmed by the two remaining soldiers working in forbidding tandem.

She might have pleaded for mercy, tried to explain why she oughtn’t have been there, but her words were lost in the general din and confusion. They were made no easier to understand when one man impaled her through the forearm so she dropped her shortsword and screamed, before the other hacked off her scared face with his axe. Blood and spittle sprayed from the ruin of Lorna’s countenance. Twin misting showers of blood ejected from where her nose had been only a moment before. Fia thought that might have been as close to a scream as the woman could manage. Then, the man with the axe hit her again, right in the eyes, taking half her head off and dropping her like a sack of shit.

Fia stood stock-still. Her world slowed. She watched, as the two soldiers swung their heads towards her with glacial speed.

One smiled. The other’s countenance was grim as death.

Torsten Gunn flew into Fia’s field of vision. He was splashed with gore all across his face and he’d a sword in each hand. With a blood-curdling cry, the outlaw cut through the wrist of one soldier as he turned, blood spurting from the lethal cut. The man’s hand, still clutching his sword, tumbled to the ground. Gunn spun away, as the swordsman howled and clutched at his stump, then stomped the axeman’s kneecap so that his leg bent the wrong way and he fell squawking to the forest floor. Gunn, spitting and cursing with savage glee, ran the blade of one of his swords down the inside of the swordsman’s thigh. Cloth and flesh parted like the finest beef steak and dark blood gushed out. The soldier screeched and Gunn gored him through the armpit with his other sword. He let the twitching man fall with the sword still inside of him, whipped around and took the axeman’s head clean off with the other blade. Scarlet fountained into the air as the man's corpse spasmed, looked to almost make it to its feet. then collapsed backwards.

“What was all that bollocks about not going in for elaborate killing blows?” Fia asked.

Gunn hawked blood onto the fir needles at his feet. “Yeah, well, there’s a time and a place, ain’t there?” he said.

The two of them looked down at Lorna.

“She didn’t belong here,” said Gunn matter-of-factly. “And that what doesn’t belong doesn’t survive out here.”

“Come on,” Fia said.

“I’ll catch up with you,” Gunn said. His grey eyes had gone flat and dead. “I’m going to find Gray.”

Then he was off, crashing through the branches towards the forest’s edge. Fia watched him go and then made her own way towards the shriek and clash of metal nearest her.

Fergus and Lenix Allaway were fighting back to back, Fergus’ sheer bear-like size and ferocity acting as a deterrent to all but the keenest of Gray’s men.

Lenix loosed an arrow as Fia exploded out from under a curtain of low-hanging fir branches. It flashed through the air and stamped, with a meaty thud, into the small of a woman’s back, who was advancing on Darach Lees and Cleric Vass. The woman stumbled and Lees stepped forward and ran her clumsily through with his sword. As the dying woman fell away from the former Keldland infantryman, her hand lashed out and she scored Lees’ leather breastplate with a hidden knife.

“Bitch!” Lees roared petulantly. He chopped at the woman’s arm with his sword, snapping the bone just above the elbow with a muffled crack. His next cut took her in the neck and knocked her over sideways in a shower of crimson.

Unexpectedly, Fia, two of the three Allaway brothers, Cleric Vass and Darach Lees found themselves together and bereft of enemies.

“Is that all of ‘em?” panted Lees hopefully.

“I don’t believe that to be the case,” said the cleric. His coffee-coloured skin was streaked with dirt. His usually neat grey hair had been freed of its topknot and fell about his shoulders.

Fia looked around. Unnoticed by her, until that moment, a fog had started to rise. Already it was pooling around the exposed tree roots. She frowned. Dense fogs were not unknown in the Foldwood––on the contrary, they were a common occurrence and had helped cement the place’s eerie reputation––but the conditions weren’t right for one to start rising like this.

“My apologies,” Cleric Vass said, catching Fia’s eye. “I thought it might help, but it seems it might be too little too late.”

“It is for Lorna,” Fia said.

Cleric Vass looked genuinely saddened. “Dead?” he asked.

“Very,” Fia said.

Fergus clicked his tongue and began lumbering off through the rising mist. Sweat beaded his huge bald head and there was blood in his beard.

“Ain’t no time for jawing,” he said roughly. “Me and Lenix have got to find our brother. Come on, Lenix!”

“And Hunter is still out here somewhere,” Cleric Vass said.

“And Gunn,” Darach Lees said. “Watch yourselves. If he hasn’t run for the hills like the dog he is then he might be lurking behind any one of these trees.”

“That dog just helped me out of a tight corner, Lees,” Fia said, finding herself bristling. “Let’s wait until the scrapping’s done before we start jumping to conclusions.”

Fia followed after the retreating forms of the Allaway brothers, with Cleric Vass and Lees trailing her. The fog was growing more and more profuse, climbing and twisting around the tree trunks. The sounds of fighting happening near at hand came distorted out of the thickening air.

“Now you’ve started this,” Fia said, turning to speak to Vass, “how do you stop it? We won’t be able to make out friend from foe soon.”

Vass ducked under a trail of creeping beard lichen.

“The thaumaturgy I have a knack for, it… releases the stored potency of the world around us,” the cleric said. “The fog was already here, in the ground. Now that I have coaxed it forth, it’s beyond my ability to send back. It must run its course.”

They heard the sound of Hunter snarling up ahead, the echoing bang and clash of sword on shield, muffled curses, and the bellows of people fighting defiantly for their lives.

“Brother? Gil?” Lenix called into the murk.

“Gunn, where the hell are you?” Lees shouted, as they stepped into a scar of land, surrounded by the ubiquitous pines but open to the sky above. Fergus stopped in his tracks and Fia almost walked into the back of him. Slowly, Lenix fitted an arrow to his bowstring.

“What is it?” Cleric Vass asked, striding forward. “What do you––”

Half a dozen Frekirie soldiers burst suddenly out of the mist on the other side of the open space. Their swords shone white in the ghostly mist-light. With cries of manic, blood-fuelled delight, they dashed towards Fia and her four companions.

Lenix’s arrow took the lead man through the chest. He stopped, grimaced, but didn’t fall. The other five rushed on.

Fia raised her sword and set her feet.

“Come here, you fuckers,” she heard Fergus growl from just in front of her, as Lenix dropped his bow and reached for the long dirk at his side.

Shrugging off Darach Lees’ clutching hand, Cleric Vass strode forward, slapped his palm to a nearby tree and cried out in a guttural tongue. The words seemed to etch themselves into the fog, twisting it. Standing by his side, Fia was in a perfect position to see the air shimmer, to witness the fog around the cleric’s boot ripple out in a great expanding circle, to feel the world contract around him.

The fir trees surrounding the attacking soldiers, hissed and spat as the sap and water inside them boiled in an instant, rising as foam through knotholes and splits in their trunks. Their bark shrivelled. The soil at their bases cracked.

Then, they burst.

A dozen pines exploded into kindling in the space of a breath. Going from solid wood to a shower of whistling splinters that shredded the oncoming Frekirie soldiers in mid-stride, taking skin and flesh from bone. Finger-sized slivers punched through them like ten-thousand crossbow bolts. Leaves rained down. Bark fell like snow. Blood misted the foggy air as arms and legs were ripped from their sockets. Two of the soldiers running closest to the edge of the clearing had the mail and skin from their right sides completely flayed away. They fell bonelessly, gleaming red muscle and the whites of cheekbones and ribs exposed so fast that the blood didn’t start welling until after they’d hit the floor.

Fia, Lenix, Fergus and Lees threw up their arms and fell backwards, their breath torn from their lungs, as a hail of pine needles hissed over their heads. One rogue piece of shrapnel punched into Lenix’s thigh, just above his knee, and he let out a curse.

The Frekirie soldiers toppled and spun lifelessly to the ground, blood pouring from a hundred lacerations and punctures. One had had his head torn clean off, the bones of the top of his spine picked clean of flesh and gleaming a pretty white where they poked up from the shredded skin of his neck.

Fia picked herself up. The silence was loud in her ears. Leaves drifted down around her. The fog had been completely blasted away by the power of the know-how that Cleric Vass had just wrought.

“You’re a – you’re a witch!” Lees babbled. His finger was pointing accusingly at Vass.

“No shit, Lees,” Fia hissed.

“I damned well had an inkling, but I never thought you had such – such power at your blasted fingertips!” Lees continued.

Cleric Vass said nothing. He was sagging where he stood, his dark complexion gone an ashen grey. Even his hair seemed to have turned slightly whiter.

“Shut the hell up, Lees” Fia said, her voice dull and stupid in her own ears. “Stay here with the cleric. Tend to Lenix’s wound and try not to shit yourself. Fergus, you’re coming with me.”

“I taste wood,” Fergus said in a muffled voice.

The big man was sitting where he had landed, probing at his face with a tentative finger. Blood drooled from one corner of his mouth and was spilling into his tangled beard.

“Don’t poke at it, man,” Fia said.

She reached down and pulled out a two inch-long sliver of wood that had perforated the big man’s cheek. Fergus let out a low growl of pain as the splinter slid out his face.

“Lucky you’ve got that fuckin’ beard, brother,” Lenix said, through teeth gritted with pain. “No one’ll think you’re any uglier than usual.”

Fia walked dazedly towards the Foldwood’s edge on stumbling feet. She almost tripped on a couple of bodies as she made her way to where they’d last heard the sound of a fracas playing out.

“Brother!” Fergus exclaimed warmly when the lanky form of Gil Allaway detached itself from under a tree on the very edge of the Foldwood. “You look like shit!”

The red-haired twin was very pale, clutching a ragged wound in his arm.

“I might look like shit now,” he replied wearily, “but I’ll heal. You on the other hand are always going to be a hog, Fergus.”

Fergus merely grunted. He pulled a leather thong from the pocket of his coat and began tying it above Gil’s deep-looking gash to try and slow the bleeding.

“McCrae?” called Hunter’s voice from out of the fog.

“I’m here. Have you seen Gunn?”

“He’s coming. Got himself a prisoner too,” Hunter said.

Before Fia could ask whether that meant Gray had been captured, Gil motioned out between the trees.

“We’ve also got us a smart one––a runner,” he cut in, wincing as Fergus tightened the tourniquet.

Fia followed his pointing finger.

There was a single rider, paddling the shit out of her horse’s flanks with the flat of her sword as she strove to get away.

Back to Castle Dreymark.

Back to Redmond Marr.

“Kill her,” Fia said flatly, slapping the back of her hand into Hunter’s chest.

“You know, I always wondered why we felt compelled to name storms after people,” came the cold, calm voice of Gunn from out of the fog. “Seemed kinda conceited. Presumptuous of us mortals, you know.”

The outlaw emerged from out of the swirling mist, pushing a bound and gagged man in front him. Captain Cameron Gray.

“After spendin’ only a little time with you though, Miss McCrae,” Gunn said. “I’m startin’ to wrap my head around the notion.”

He kicked Gray hard in the back of the legs and sent him sprawling. The man’s silver hair was all over his muddy face. The bright blue eyes glittered with an unconcealed hatred as they regarded Gunn, who leaned down and removed the filthy rag from the other man’s mouth.

Hunter spat a gob of phlegm on the chest of the prisoner, reached down and pulled a shaft from the side of a fallen man lying nearby. She turned and sized up the shot.

“You – you can’t just shoot her in the back like a––” Gray started to protest. Gunn booted him hard in the kidney and his sentence faded into a low moan.

“You know what they say about shooting someone in the back, don’t you?” Hunter said, grinning nastily, as she sighted on the galloping figure.

“What’s that, woman?” Fergus asked.

“They won’t see it coming.”

There was the deep thrumming sound as the bowstring was released.

The birch arrow punched into the fleeing soldier’s back. Through tabard and mail, skin and muscle. From their vantage point in the trees, Fia’s crew saw the woman arch in her saddle. Slowly, she sagged forward and then toppled off the side of her horse. The gelding, suddenly bereft of the rider that had been urging it along, slowed to a walk and started to crop the luscious grass.

“That’s all of them?” Fia asked, turning to look at Hunter and Gunn.

Hunter shrugged and spat again.

“So far as I can reckon it,” Gunn said, “though I wasn’t exactly counting.”

Fia dropped onto her haunches and looked into Cameron Gray’s face.

“You and I are going to have a little talk now, Gray,” she said dispassionately. “And you’re going to fill me in on what the fuck is going on.”

“I’ll tell you nothing,” Gray declared boldly.

Fia looked up at Gunn. The longrider was watching Gray with hungry impatience. With a hatred as pure and hot as liquid metal sitting in a smith’s crucible.

“I thought you might say that,” she said. “A man working for Redmond Marr probably learns to keep his mouth shut. But, we’ll see how long you can keep your secrets while you’re talking to the man behind you. I’ve a suspicion that you and he have some laundry as needs airing.”

Gray tried not to show it, but fear danced in the depths of the cool blue eyes.

“Just bloody well kill me and be done with it,” he said softly.

“Oh, you’re goin’ to give up your ghost, Gray,” Gunn hissed into the man’s ear as he pulled him roughly to his feet, “but I’m going to be sure to pry it from you nice and slow. Your last few moments of life are goin’ to be filled with the sort of agony I’ve been livin’ with ever since we last met. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. I mean to savour it.”