Lucas only remembered that he was drowning as a hand grabbed him and dragged him to the surface. Until that moment, he’d forgotten that what he’d seen was just his screwed-up life flashing before his eyes.

Now, though, he remembered. In rapid succession, it all came back to him: the castle, the breakout, the moat, and most urgently, the water in his lungs.

As Lucas was yanked up on shore, he spent the next twenty seconds coughing up so much fetid pond water that he was sure he’d have pneumonia by this time tomorrow. Still, it wasn’t something he could spend too much time worrying about, not when the gates were opening and what sounded like a whole herd of horses was thundering across the drawbridge.

“Stop them! They’re getting away,” someone shouted from the wall, but Lucas ignored them for now.

Instead, he grabbed Lord Parin’s arm and yanked him back down into the reeds by it. “Not yet,” Lucas hissed. “First, they ride, then we run.”

The King’s castle stood on a tall hill overlooking the rest of Lordanin, so the area around the moat was almost like a park sloping down to the rest of the city, but once they got to the streets, it wouldn’t be so hard for the two of them to lose themselves. At least, that was what he thought.

The easy run to that first row of shops and the alleys and stables beyond. At least, that was true until the guards caught sight of the pair and started firing their crossbows at them.

“Almost there!” Lucas yelled, pulling Lord Parin forward.

Everything was going fine until it wasn’t. As they ran across the final stretch of grass between them and the cobblestones, Lucas thought that the two of them were home-free. That was when he heard the nobleman cry out in pain and fall to his knees.

Lucas didn’t check to see where he was hit or how bad. That would just slow them down. Instead, he just helped the man up and hurried both of them across the main street and into the alley beyond it as quickly as he could.

Speed was the only thing that saved them. Even as they moved to safety, he heard another rain of bolts clatter and ricochet off the stone walls and tile roofs of the buildings they sheltered behind. That was when Lucas finally had a chance to see how bad his fellow convict was hit, and the result was not good.

Honestly, it was pretty terrible, and he winced as he examined just how bloodstained the man’s fine clothing already was. Getting wounded anywhere in this backward medieval world was pretty bad, but one of those guards had managed to shoot the Viscount right in his left kidney.

As far as he was concerned, that was pretty much a death sentence without some potions or magic. So, the last thing that Lucas was going to do was try to remove the bolt.

“How bad is it?” Lord Parin asked in a worried tone.

“Pretty bad, man, pretty bad,” Lucas said. “Like nothing a healing potion wouldn’t fix, but I'm fresh out, and I don't got the herbs to do what we need back in my lab.”

“So what do we do?” The Viscount asked.

“Well, what I should do is cut bait and run while I can, but…” Lucas started, trying to find a good excuse to bail. He would have, too, except that the man who was dying had saved Lucas’s life not five minutes ago. That kind of put it all into perspective.

“Do you think your family would have something like that lying around?” he asked impulsively.

He didn’t know where exactly the Viscount laid his head before he’d been arrested, but he was fairly certain that the man was rich as hell. There was no reason that a noble family like that wouldn’t have some of the good shit lying around.

“I… yes, of course,” the noble answered, “but our estate is miles outside the east gate. We’ll never get there without a horse and—”

“Wait here,” Lucas said, running off down the alley, looking for a way to do what he needed to do next.

You’re going to get yourself killed if you aren’t careful, he chided himself, but that still wasn’t enough to stop him from climbing to the roof with the nearest trellis he found.

Part of him, truthfully, most of him, told Lucas that he should run while the getting was good. The one small bit of decency that he’d clung to all these years told him that he needed to do the right thing and save the man who had saved him.

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For some reason, he couldn’t shut it out. Not after all the other people he’d screwed over so far tonight.

Lucas’s plan was a simple one: ambush one of the men on horseback, steal their horse, ride away to safety, and get Lord Parin the help he needed before he bled out. It was a fine plan if he ignored the fact he and horses hadn’t gotten along too well since he’d come to this world. Still, while he debated how else he could possibly help the Viscount before the dude was a deadman, Lucas worked his way into position.

Fortunately, they didn’t have to wait long. Less than a minute after Lucas got where he needed to be, a pair of guards came along the street on horseback. He’d hoped that the sight of the very visible Viscount would lure the men straight to him, but instead, they both dismounted and secured their mounts at the mouth of the alley and unsheathed their swords before heading toward the two of them.

“Oh, un-fucking-believable,” Lucas whispered to himself as he realized his plan was now completely unworkable.

He’d wanted one guy he could jump down on and ambush, and now he had two assholes that decided to do things the smart way instead.

So, instead, he went with plan B: make it up as you go along. He got up and skulked to the two horses, leaving the nobleman at the mercy of the guards unless he did this really quick. Lucas scampered across the roof as quietly as he could, worried that the crossbows might light up again at any moment.

“What do we got here?” he heard one of the guards ask the other. “Looks like we got ourselves an escapee, Ralph. He don’t look too good, neither.”

Lucas couldn’t make out what Lord Parin said. Instead, he ignored the whole exchange. There was nothing he could do from here. He needed a better weapon than guilt or sympathy.

Once he reached the front of the shop he was on top of, he hung from the roof’s edge and then dropped the last couple of feet to the cobblestone street below as quietly as he could. That part was easy.

Up until now, he’d merely risked getting shot and breaking his neck. Now, he was going to have to get on one of these big bastards.

“Easy boy,” he whispered, approaching them with more than a little fear, and he undid the loose knots in their reins that tied them to the wall.

The horses didn’t move much, and though the nearest one looked at him with one of its eyes, it didn’t move away, at least as Lucas tried to get his foot in the stirrup. After that, it still took a couple of tries before he was in the saddle. Once he was finally on top of the horse, though, and he could look down the alley, he saw that they still hadn’t noticed him.

That was almost enough to make Lucas laugh out loud. After all the noise he’d just made, fumbling and squirming to steal one of their horses, they were still entirely fixated on the man who was bleeding out.

I just hope that means they haven’t killed the poor bastard, Lucas thought to himself as he cleared his voice and shouted. “Hey, assholes! Maybe pay less attention to him and more attention to me!”

Both men whirled at once after that, but anything they might have shouted at him was lost in the noise as he swatted the ass of the horse he wasn’t riding. The reaction was instantaneous. The other horse reared up, whinnying loudly before it took off in one direction, even as he dug his heels into the ribs of this one, sending him rocketing in the other direction.

After that, it was a struggle for Lucas to hang on for dear life as his mount galloped hard down the street. He was worse at riding than he’d ever been at driving, and it was all he could do not to pull hard on the reins to make the thing slow down or stop.

He couldn’t. Right now, he needed the speed.

Even as the guards chased him, they fell behind, and he rode down the street at a bone-jarring pace. He took his first right and, then, as soon as he could, his first right again. It was a frantic two minutes as he barely managed to stay on the giant beast, but once he was close, he slowed down and looked for the alley entrance that would lead him back to the Viscount.

Fortunately, it only took Lucas another ten seconds to find the man, and he rode the horse as close to him as he dared without stepping on the poor guy. “Come on, man, get up; we’ve got to bounce,” Lucas hissed, trying not to be too loud. “I mean, like, right now, man.”

“I'm not sure I can ride,” the Viscount moaned, rising unsteadily to his feet by leaning on the nearest brick wall. “But I definitely can’t get on that thing. It’s sixteen hands tall!”

“Listen, man, I don’t care if the thing has eight god-damned hands like Vishnu,” Lucas said as he grabbed the noble’s arm and started hauling him up as hard as he could. “You stay, you die, and I’m not putting that shit on my conscience, alright?”

“I can’t… I— God’s!!!” Lord Parin cried out in pain repeatedly as the two of them wrestled him over the top of the saddle like he was nothing more than a bag of leaky potatoes.

By the time they got him up there, Lucas could already hear the guards yelling as they homed in on the noble's cries of pain and came for them again, but Lucas wasn’t about to be trapped like that. He kicked his mount into gear and ran down the first guy to start down the alley toward them. Then, once they were in the street, he made a hard left and headed toward the east gate.

Lord Parin’s screams started immediately, but Lucas couldn’t afford to slow down and be gentle with the man. Instead, he simply waited for the noble to pass out. He didn’t know if it was pain or blood loss that ultimately silenced the man, but as they galloped through the lonely streets at night, Lucas did the unthinkable and offered a prayer to any of the mysterious Gods of this world that might be listening to take pity on the man.

“I already got everyone else killed,” he sighed. “And this guy might be a prick, but at least he was sticking up for his sister. That’s gotta count for something, right?”

There was no sign or divine intervention, though. Instead, there was just him, the hoofbeats of his stolen horse, and the distant sounds of alarm because of everything he’d done tonight.