Three days of riding south. Three days of following something that wasn’t her nose or her head, wasn’t her heart or her gut. Three days of being tugged onwards by the gods-only-knew-what ability she’d been born with; seeing a faceless man’s silhouette burning in front of her waking vision, every twitch of her split reins keeping him centred and growing closer.

The road was rough and desolate and just the way Fia liked it. It cut through the high valleys, skirting lakes that sat flat as puddled iron, protected from the raking winds that scoured the high fells and gnawed at exposed flesh.

Fia’s sable brumby trotted along, quite unperturbed by the sometimes brutal conditions. It was a hardy breed; broken and tamed, maybe, but still able to recall that it’d been born wild, or so Fia believed.

At dusk, on the second day out from Last Hallow, Fia saw a small party of Painted Kyn moving a mob of wild horses down the gravelly shallows of a mostly dry river bed. Their course was set to converge with hers and so, out of deference for the herdsmen, she sat her horse and waited for them to pass her by. While she waited, she removed her hat and tied up her short hair so that the shaved sides were revealed and the Kynish tattoos that swirled across the sides of her scalp and disappeared into her coat collar were unveiled.

Wild horses were skittish beasts, and could have vicious streaks in them a mile wide, so they were always walked from place to place by anyone who knew their business. Spook and get a mob of wild horses on the run, and nothing short of a cliff would stop them until they blew themselves out.

It took an hour for the herd to pick their way down the river and the Painted Kyn to draw abreast with Fia. They were clothed in simple skins and furs that were nevertheless expertly cured and sewn. Their waving red hair, plaited and adorned with bones and stones, glinted in the setting sun. Tattoos ran down the sides of their faces, over their ears, across their brows. They had deceptively shy eyes that bit into Fia whenever she came across them; dark as coal, diamond hard. Bows and spears were fastened to their saddles. Knives hung on their belts. Fia even thought she saw one of the new flintlock rifles tucked carefully into a bedroll secured to the beautifully crafted trail saddle of one of the Painted Kyn as they rode past her.

“What do you call her, wanderer?” the leader asked in his own fluting language, pulling up his own horse and gesturing at Fia’s brumby.

“If she’s got a name she’s yet to tell it to me,” Fia replied in the Kynish tongue.

The leader gave her a small smile and nodded thoughtfully.

“There is importance in names. A store of strength and power,” he replied.

“I don’t doubt it.”

“Yet your mare has none.”

“Like I say, she’s yet to divulge it to me. I’m certain she’s a name, but it ain’t one picked from any dialect or based on any image we invented. Names might hold power, but so do secrets. What power might a secret name might hold, eh? Anyhow, a lady’s allowed her secrets, wouldn’t you agree?”

The Kynish leader smiled his knowing smile and made a small hand gesture at Fia’s mount. The horse pricked up her ears and whinnied low in her throat.

“I doubt very much that this Northern beauty is much of a lady,” he said.

Fia patted the neck of the black horse. “I surely hope not,” she said. “She’d a reputation as a spine-wrinkler and a widow-maker when I took her on.”

The leader of the painted Kyn looked at her, running his eyes along the visible tattoos that decorated her skin.

“What brings you out here?” the man asked. “Hunting. Running?”

“I’ve not decided just yet,” Fia said. “I keep changing my mind.”

The man nodded.

“You will camp with us tonight, little sister,” he said.

It had been over ten years since someone had called her that.

They camped on a mossy plain that bordered the banks of the same river Fia had met the horse herders by. There was little speech but the meal was good, what with the supplies Fia had brought from Last Hallow and the game that the Painted Kyn had on them; rabbits rubbed and stuffed with fresh thyme and wild garlic.

Fia arranged her belongings carefully by her side when she wrapped herself in her blankets by the fireside after the meal. Her broadsword she lay by her right side, her brace of loaded pistols above her head where she could reach up, draw and sight them quick. Her powder horn, which she usually wore on a leather bandolier across her chest under her coat, rested next to the pistols. Both the dirk that she wore openly on her sword belt and her secreted black knife stayed where they were.

“There are words in the tongue of Frekifold written across that powder horn,” the leader of the herdsmen said in Kynish.

Fia ran a thumb across the letters stamped into the worn leather. “That’s right.”

“What is it that they say?”

“‘Oftentimes a man’s mind will set, Upon a thing he cannot get’,” Fia recited quietly.

“But, you are not a man,” the Kynish leader said.

“Well spotted,” Fia said, with a ghost of a smile.

“These words then, they are not meant for you?”

Fia rubbed at her eyes. Felt the familiar weight of the flask of rotgut tucked into her inner coat pocket.

“The horn was meant for my brother––the words too, I suppose,” she said. “He… He passed it onto me. Said that when he’d carried the horn the words had been a warning for him about men in general. Said that when I carried it they turned into a general warning about me for men.”

When all was readied to her satisfaction, Fia lay down and pulled the leather flask of red-eye from her coat pocket. Above her the stars, visible through the rents of the wispy cloud, were spread like a quilt. Her mother had always told her that no matter what, even if she felt like she had achieved nothing in a day, she always had the reward of the stars, the same as every other person that called the Five Isles home.

“There is so much, and so little up there,” one of the Painted Kyn said suddenly.

Fia took a long pull on her flask. Felt the harsh liquor burn its resentful way down to her guts.

“You got that right,” she said. “Really ain’t that much about, is there?”

She took another big drink. Felt the first one work its way up to her head. Felt herself relax, the knot of grief that she always carried loosen a little. The wind stirred the flames of the campfire, carrying in the smell of mountain daisies with it.

“All this emptiness around and below us down here, all that gods-damned infinite nothingness up there, really ain’t much of a shocker that such places are where deities and beliefs are born, don’t you think?” she continued.

“Do those that live in the hills and vales of Frekifold believe that the gods prop up the sky and the stars?” the leader of the Painted Kyn asked.

Fia snorted, took one last hearty swig and stoppered the flask.

“Fucked if I recall,” she said. “But it could be so. Someone’s got to be holding back all that emptiness, mustn't they?”

In the morning, the Painted Kyn shared breakfast with Fia and then mounted up. Fia did the same, wolfing down a hunk of hard cheese and some dried fruit and then climbing up into the saddle.

“My thanks for the safe camp,” she said to the leader of the herdsmen in Kynish.

The dark-eyed man, who was adjusting the breastplate across his horse’s chest, bowed his head. Then, he tipped his chiselled, weathered face to one side, regarding Fia gravely.

“There is a town a day and a half further down the trail, little sister,” he said. “You mentioned last night that you were looking for a particular man. If I was seeking someone, someone not wishing to be found, I would start there.”

“This town got a name?” Fia asked.

“Yellowbend you would call it,” the leader said. “You pass through a gorge, following the river, and come down to a place by the water where a curving beach of sand spreads like the crescent moon laid down.”

“Sounds pretty,” Fia said.

“It is. It was,” the chief herdsman said. “It lies in Keldland, just over the border. A fat land. But, let me warn you, little sister. Don’t be fooled by the warmth of the sun there. The further south you head, the darker the threat that lays upon the land becomes. I feel that there is some... lesser evil drawing a net about all of us on Fallaros, no matter what tribeland we call our own.”

“A lesser evil?” Fia said, surprised that she was getting so many words out of a member of the most notoriously reticent tribespeople on Fallaros. “I face those kinds of evils most days, I reckon.”

“Maybe. But it’s the lesser evils that we abide that lay the path for the greater ones to slink in behind them,” the Painted Kyn said. “My folk feel that there is a monster drawing near, little sister. A monster the likes of which this land has never seen.”

Fia recalled the rumours she had heard about the encroaching armies of Vansgrima. She wondered what all this meant. She hitched a mirthless smile onto her face. It was irrelevant just then. She’d more pressing and immediate business to attend to.

“We’re all of us monsters, friend, haven’t you heard?” she said.

“Perhaps you are right,” the leader said evenly. “Perhaps we are all monsters of the same kind, but I fear that, step by step and day by day, some monsters attain appetites that eclipse those of all others.”

Fia spat on the ground and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. Hadn’t even hit the trail yet and she could’ve already used a drink. “That’s more than I can speak to,” she said.

The leader of herdsmen bent down and picked up a charred stick from the dead campfire.

“With the good grace of your widow-maker here,” he said. “Allow me to give you both a parting gift.”

As Fia rode away southward, with the sun clumsily fingering her left cheek, no one would have been able to make out the markings that the chief of the Painted Kyn had left along the flanks of her sable mare in charcoal. No one would have been able to see the arrows drawn behind the beast’s knees making it fleet of foot, the thunderbolt across its chest that gave it the strength to ride down any person fool enough to try and assail it, or the rough hawk that adorned its head and which was meant to bring both horse and rider home safe.

Fia knew it was there though, and so did the horse.

“Reckon that we could use all the help we could get, girl,” Fia said.

She dug her heels into the mare’s flanks and headed for Yellowbend.

* * *

As soon as Fia pushed the heavy door of the inn open, she was greeted by the sound of a couple of guitars being played alongside a violin, and a hand-painted sign that read:

NOBODY INN

‘NO WEAPONS – EDGED, FLINTLOCK, OR OTHERWISE.’

It was nailed to the wall beside a booth fronted with metal bars, manned by a bored-looking woman with greasy blonde hair pinned up on the top of her head.

“You read?” the woman asked.

Fia nodded.

The woman had one hand resting on the counter. The other was below it, no doubt clutching something that’d leave a hole the size of an apple in Fia’s innards should she make a wrong move.

“You best do as directed, then,” the blonde said.

Slowly, Fia handed over her broadsword, her dirk and a pistol, and received a token from the slightly surprised looking woman in return.

“Not a new girl of the line, then?” the blonde asked.

Fia raised a questioning eyebrow.

“I mean, you don’t make your living lyin’ on your back,” the blonde said.

“No.”

“Pity. Might’ve been nice to have another female around this little dram shop. What d’you do for coin then, honey?”

Fia glanced towards the doors that she presumed led into the taproom. “I find things for people,” she said, then gave the blonde a rare smile. “Sometimes that does involve putting someone on their back, now you mention it.”

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The blonde fluttered eyelashes that were liberally caked with burnt cork and gave a little pout. She might have been flirting with Fia, but Fia thought it more likely that it was just part of her routine.

“Well, I hope you find what you’re lookin’ for, miss,” she said. “But, if you don’t, you just come back and see me. You look sweet, but I reckon you’re the kind of girl the boys are afraid of. I ain’t.”

Fia gave the blonde another small smile. Slid a couple of coppers across the counter. “I’ll keep that in mind. If you could keep my effects handy I’d be grateful,” she said, and pulled open the taproom door. “Might be I’ll be in a bit of a rush on the way out.”

A quick, carefully uninterested look around the taproom while she removed her hat and ran her fingers through her hair told her that she’d picked the right watering hole. The Nobody Inn was fairly busy, what with the weather plotting mischief outside and the gathering evening, but she was still able to discern her mark sitting with another bloke at a table in a secluded corner.

Fia purchased a shot of red-eye and a tankard of mead from a skinny man behind the worn bar, who’d carried on industriously polishing a glass until he’d seen the coins in Fia’s hand. Fia knocked back the shot while she waited for the barkeep to pour the mead.

The brutal liquor, as it always did, reminded her sharply of the months she had spent trying to drown herself at the bottom of a bottle after Arlen’s death. Seventeen years old, sitting on her own on the deck of her isolated riverside cabin, drinking until she blacked out. Waking up covered in stale vomit, or with her face stuck to the boards with dried blood from where she’d passed out and fallen, or having pissed herself. Only ever being disappointed that she’d woken up at all.

The barkeep set Fia’s tankard down with a dull thud.

“Wait,” she said in her calm, even voice. “Another shot of your rotgut.”

“I’ll have you know we serve fine, unadulterated liquor in the Nobody Inn, miss,” the skinny man said peevishly. “And are you sure one as slight as yourself should be indulging in the strong stuff? It don’t do a lady’s complexion any good, they say.”

Fia looked up into the skinny man’s watery eyes. Noted the webs of broken blood vessels across his cheeks.

“If I was in the market for the pros and cons of drinking,” she said, “I don’t think a man who looks like he wasn’t so much born as squeezed out of a bartender’s rag would be my first port of call. Now, pour the bloody drink, please.”

The man swallowed and poured the drink. Fia knocked back the red-eye and then walked over towards her chosen corner with her tankard in hand.

As she made her way around the tables of card players and dice rollers, past dribbling drunks that swiped at her arse as she passed, she heard more chat about the rumours of unrest heading south from over the seas.

“I’m tellin’ you what I heard, Leigh honey,” a woman wearing a faded green dress and wrapped in a grey shawl said to a rotund man gnawing at a pork chop, “and what I heard was that it was them heathens from Toropuku that moved on the Pearl Islands and fucked them up good.”

“Nah, that can’t be right, love,” the fat man said, failing to suppress a belch. “I’ve never been so far myself, but it’s said that the Toropukunese keep to themselves. Don’t go out gallivanting and invading and killing folk. They’re fishermen and boat builders. More likely it’d be Liathland. Those buggers––”

“Would you shut the fuck up and flip the cards, Eugene?” a loud female voice said, diverting Fia’s attention to a table of men and women playing Kill the Varlet.

“I thought you’d be interested, that’s all,” the man called Eugene said.

“Why the fuck would I give a shit what some bunch of foreigners are doin’ to some other bunch of foreigners hundreds o’ miles away, man?” the snaggle-toothed woman who’d caught Fia’s attention said. “‘Specially when there’s a pile of coins that require my attention right ‘ere, eh?”

“Might not be hundreds of miles away before long, if you believe the gossip coming in from the ports in south Keldland,” Eugene said.

The woman with the protruding teeth sneered. “Keldlanders couldn’t fight themselves out of a wet paper bag, everyone knows that, eh? They’re farmers not fighters, so I wouldn’t go setting too much store by whatever fearful tittle-tattle is coming from that quarter.”

“Raiders from Vansgrima, from the far Southern Ocean, not something to be worried about you don’t reckon, Grizela?” Eugene asked.

Grizela scoffed again. “Maybe if there was any fuckin’ truth to it, there might be,” she said.

“A seaman, all scarred up and shaking like a bloody leaf in a gale, told me he was on a whaler that docked in a Pearl Island village after some Vansgriman ships passed through,” Eugene went on in a low voice, as another man dealt up the cards. “Said the Vansgriman soldiers castrated all the men they didn’t slaughter. Said the streets were awash in blood––and this coming from a lad whose job is was to butcher fucking whales.”

“A seaman told you, Eugene? When the hell was the last time you went further south than Yellowbend?” the woman, Grizela, said.

“Well, it wasn’t me obviously, was it?” Eugene replied defensively. “It was a bloke I went and ran into in a ginhouse downriver in Crookstone, but it was him that talked to the sailor.”

“Sure it wasn’t this bloke’s barber’s dog as had the conversation with this seaman?” a blue-eyed man with his hat tipped back on his head and cards in hand cut in, to general laughter.

“This fellow said this sailor was the sort of rough son of a bitch who the gods might love but that’s about it––not one to exaggerate a thing. Told him that Vansgrima is looking to move on all the other Isles, that they was being driven hard by some lord, you know.”

“No, I don’t know, Eugene," Grizela said scornfully. "I don't know sweet fuck-all, same as you. All that horse-shit—even if it was true—what's it mean to the likes of us? Just that we might get conscripted and get a chance to participate in some good, honest lootin' somewhere that ain't here."

“Or maybe,” said Blue-Eyes, who was now flicking out the cards to the gamblers sitting around the table, “you might get a lethal case of lead poisoning by way of a flintlock.”

Suddenly, the man, Eugene, caught Fia looking their way.

“Hey there, green-eyes, you fancy playing a hand with us?” he said, dropping her a wink that she reckoned might be about as close to charm as the excrescence came.

Fia shook her head. “I’ve not the finesse for the game,” she said, making to move on. “Ear just got caught by your tales of war, that’s all. Pardon me.”

“What’s finesse now?” the man said.

“Technique.”

“Shit, I ain’t got the finesse needed for a good fighter. Just throw mud in the other motherfucker’s eyes and punch him till he falls down,” Eugene replied affably. “Don’t stop me from locking horns with men every now and again, though. Come play a hand.”

Fia shook her head.

“Then how about I play you with my hand?" the man said with a leer. "I could get us a room upstairs and—what the hell are you laughin' at, Cookman?"

“Just the idea of you shelling out money, Eugene,” the dealer said. “You’re tighter than a crab’s arsehole.”

“Fuck you!” Eugene replied heatedly.

“You’ve more chance fuckin’ me than you do that fine filly, Eugene––she ain’t a lady of the line, look at her! She’d probably rather tie her tits to a running horse than take a tumble with you.”

Eugene threw his cards at Cookman and the two gamblers scrambled to their feet and squared off rooster-style.

Fia took the escalating argument as an opportunity to move away, towards the two men she had been bent on joining the moment she’d walked through the door. There were tankards and a selection of glasses set out on the table in front of them, along with the picked carcass of a pheasant on a board and some roasted carrots and onions.

She noted absently that the man she’d been sent to bring in alive by Gray, most probably so that he could die at the correct place and time, wasn’t half bad to look at. He was far from the kind of man that she had been taught to consider as respectable-looking, but he’d a ruggedness about him that she found quite appealing. A wildness. Dark hair and beard shot with grey, the haunted eyes of a predator who’s spent years being hunted himself, and the fidgeting hands of one who’s broken laws and travelled broken ways.

Shame, really, considering his reputation as Fallaros’ pre-eminent murderer and looter.

Still, as Fia reckoned it, any person who’d happily carry a sword or pistol at their belt held murder somewhere in their hearts, and each person in the world of the Five Isles was guilty of stealing something from another, whether it be gold, an idea, or a life.

Fia pulled out a chair, sat, and scooched it forward before either Gunn or his companion could so much as set down their ale mugs and reach reflexively for their empty belts and sheaths.

Fia knew that she wasn’t bad looking, although the last ten years lay as heavy on her face as they did her heart. Knew too that she was probably what her father would have referred to as an iron hand in a velvet glove. Her looks often gave her an extra heartbeat or two, while even the harshest men searched themselves to see if they’d the stomach to smack, stab or shoot a woman. They’d saved her life on a couple of occasions, those moments.

One look into Gunn’s dark eyes, up close, was enough for Fia to be certain that, even with the help of one of those stolen heartbeats, the man across from her could probably have dropped her as easy as licking butter off a knife, had he the inclination to do so.

And had he not been enjoying a mostly liquid luncheon.

“Torsten Gunn,” she said, quiet but clear.

The man next to Gunn, a grizzled old bastard with red hair, who reminded Fia of the drunk she’d stabbed and left bleeding by the river, growled low in his throat.

Gunn raised a single finger. “Peace, Kerr,” he said.

Kerr settled back in his seat, but his eyes never left Fia. He’d a pipe in his hand and he tapped it out against one boot heel onto the floor.

Gunn reached into the pocket of his coat. Pulled out his tobacco pouch.

“You best speak your bit quick, miss,” he said. His voice was phlegmatic. Reasonable. “Can you do that?”

“Be over as quick as a knife-fight in an outhouse,” Fia replied.

“Depends who’s in the outhouse,” Gunn said. “You know who I am, then?”

“I do.”

“You’ll know I’m part of a collective of entrepreneurs of the road, then?”

“I know you lead a gang of cut-throats, if that’s what you mean.”

Gunn cracked a grin and raised his eyebrows at the dour-faced man sitting next to him. “Will you listen to how she speaks of you, Kerr? She hurt your feelings?”

“I ain’t got no feelings,” Kerr said.

“It ain’t the fault of the little ducklings that follow you that you led them to a poor puddle, Gunn,” Fia said placidly. “A fish stinks from the head down, everyone knows that.”

Gunn’s smile faded. “You here to kill me? ‘Cause I’ll tell you, it’ll take more than a hidden blade and a steely determination, woman.”

Fia said nothing. Just took a mouthful of mead and placed her tankard in her lap.

“She ain’t a killer,” Kerr grunted.

“I’m inclined to agree,” Gunn said.

“Didn’t say I wanted you dead,” Fia said lightly. “And how’d you know something like that for certain?”

“You learn to see that sort o’ thing in my trade. You don’t learn that, you don’t have much of a chance of learning anything.”

“Even if that were true,” Fia said, “what’s to stop me starting with you? No one’s born a killer. People change. We’re bad like that.”

“Hm,” Gunn said, adjusting his makings just so. “Ain’t that the truth. There’s an oak tree a few day’s ride from here. Big fucker by a river crossing. Only tree for miles. You know the one I mean?”

“I know it.”

“You ever noticed how something as strong and long-lived as that fucking tree won’t, say, grow chestnuts instead of acorns, even if it means it perishes. Whereas people... hell, they’ll do just about anything––change everything about themselves––not to die. How can we have less courage than a gods-damned tree?”

Gunn sat back in his chair. He finished rolling his smoke, stuck it between his bearded lips. He snapped his fingers and a small blue flame appeared at the end of his thumb. He took a long draw, breathed smoke out through his nostrils.

Fia’s guileless face betrayed nothing.

So, he had the know-how, she thought. Impressive, if you knew nothing about the art. She’d been taught a thing or three in her past life, though. Thaumaturgy required energy, and that little trick had cost Gunn. She had seen him pale, just a touch, under his beard.

“I’m taking you to see a man, Gunn,” Fia said pleasantly.

“What man?”

“Man named Cameron Gray.”

Gunn stiffened in his chair. Just for a moment. His eyes seemed to sink further into his hard face. His mouth became as hard and straight as an axe wound.

Then, he relaxed.

“Did he say what he wanted?” Gunn asked.

“No,” Fia said honestly, “but I’ve a feeling he wanted to teach you a lesson.”

Gunn grinned bitterly. “Cameron Gray teaching lessons!” he said to Kerr, his burning eyes never leaving Fia. “Well, if it’s a lesson in meanness then I hope he remembers he already taught me that one. And I learned it.”

The guitars and the violin played on; a rousing tune that had a few of the drunker patrons slapping their knees and stamping their feet.

“I’ve a feeling it's a hard lesson involving a rope,” Fia said, surprising herself by articulating her speculation aloud.

Gunn poured himself a shot of red-eye from the bottle on the table. Necked it. “Certainly the most well-mannered threat I’ve ever been on the receivin’ end of,” he said.

Fia drained her tankard with long, easy swallows. The mead was good, as she might’ve expected from even a disreputable tavern in Keldland.

“No reason that a girl can’t be polite while she’s planning how to cut your tail,” she said.

The other man, Kerr, started to laugh. Snorting, sucking guffaws full of beer and onions.

“This fucking bitch thinks she can––” he started to say.

Fia hit him so hard in the face with the pewter ale tankard that she knocked his tooth out. It skittered along the splintered tabletop and fell to the floor, but not before the man did.

Gunn was fast, but he was also half-drunk. Fia managed to shove the table into him before he could draw his knife from his sleeve and knocked him out of his tilted chair. She stood quickly and booted her own chair into the bollocks of the big man who’d been coming up behind her. He howled. Fia spun, drawing the pistol she’d had hidden in a fold of her coat and smashed the metal butt into the big bastard’s temple. He dropped through a neighbouring table with a crash and lay still.

Fia’s pistol barrel found Gunn’s temple just as the outlaw found his feet.

“Easy, easy,” he said. His smoke was still in his mouth, bent at a crazy angle.

“Miss?” the skinny man behind the bar who’d been polishing glasses said.

Fia’s head snapped round. The man put up his hands in a rush. The rag, and the glass he had been cleaning with, stayed hanging in the air, the rag continuing to do its polishing. More thaumaturgy. Yellowbend was rife with minor practitioners it seemed.

“Yeah?” Fia said, holding Gunn tight by the scruff of the neck. Nearby, Kerr was making muffled honking noises through an obviously broken nose.

“That man and his fellows are about as welcome here as a fifth ace,” the barkeep said into the silence left by the cessation of the music, “and we aren’t going to stop you taking him, but I’d be getting the hell out of here all the same if I were you.”

“And why’s that, then?” Fia asked.

“Because some more of his longrider friends rode out a few hours back and I don’t know when they’ll be riding back in again,” the barkeep said.

“Longriders?” Fia asked before she could stop herself.

“Folk who spend a lot of time in the saddle, miss,” Gunn said. There was cold amusement in his tone. “For one reason or another.”

“I know what it means,” Fia said icily. “I meant how many?”

“More than enough,” the barkeep clarified. “And I’d not give flea’s pecker for your chances on the run as it is, but if they show up and you’re still here…”

Fia smiled, all frigid calm.

“I’ve always been of the opinion it was smarter to believe a barkeep than a priest,” she said.

Gunn snorted. “This is the only temple I pray at.”

Maintaining her grip on Gunn’s collar, Fia quickly reached into her coat pocket, found the token she’d been given by the woman at the entrance booth and flicked it to the barman.

“Have the blonde ready my effects,” she said. “I think me and my friend will be heading out ourselves now to take the scenic route through Kynwaithe.”

“That’s your smart plan?” Gunn said incredulously.

“I don’t know if there’s much smart about it,” Fia said, “but it’s a plan.”