The two of them stepped out of the inn. An hour had passed since they’d arrived, and the weather hadn’t let up, but it was still light enough to travel by. Droplets of rain struck Gideon from above, trickling down his face. He looked up into the sky for a moment, whispering a prayer to his angelic patrons, then pulled his hood up.

Clara had walked a few steps off the side of the road and crouched down. Gideon trod over to her, observing what she was doing. She was using her staff to draw some sort of circle with a design inside it into the mud, and the Paladin assumed it had something to do with her magic.

The woman’s earlier outburst had caught Gideon by surprise at the time, but he’d had a while to think about it. Her reasons for learning the magic resonated with Gideon. Feeling helpless and wanting the power to do something was not unfamiliar to him.

He’d been much the same when the barbarians attacked his village, and Ilbert had been wounded defending him.

Clara’s motivations seemed to be in the right place, at least. Gideon didn’t know how much the infernal magic would subvert her intentions, but he wasn’t going to count the woman out because of that. He was certain that, with some guidance, she could do some good.

She seemed to finish what she was doing and placed the bandit’s sword in the center of the circle, then stood up. Gideon stepped back when she started chanting, and the circle began to glow. The short sword caught fire, and that fire coalesced into a hovering needle of flame that pointed into the dark. The sword remained, scorched by the ritual, and droplets of rain hissed and steamed as they struck its surface.

Gideon’s eyes followed the needle, and he could make out several sets of footprints in the mud. “That’s a good start, but they might not travel in a straight line. Can you use the sword for that again?”

Clara stopped chanting and the flames dispersed. She shrugged. “I’ve only tried this a few times, and the focuses all burned up. This one’s still intact, but I don’t know if the ritual will work again.”

Gideon picked the sword up anyway. “Can’t hurt to try it, at least. Come, let’s get moving before they can get too far ahead of us.” Gideon started walking in the direction Clara’s needle had pointed.

“No light?” she asked from behind him.

He had almost forgotten she wasn’t used to traveling, or hunting monsters and miscreants. “It wouldn’t be a good idea. If we catch up to them and they see a torch burning, they’ll know they’re being followed. Try to stick close to me and you shouldn’t have too much trouble.”

She didn’t respond, so Gideon started off in the direction of the bandits.

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They followed the bandits for several hours. Gideon asked Clara to repeat the tracking ritual once; the burned sword continued to work as a focus, but their quarry hadn’t significantly changed its course. They were still traveling in a straight line, cutting directly across the rolling hills of the Regnael countryside. Gideon followed at a measured pace, unconcerned with losing the bandits, and not wanting to drive Clara along too harshly.

They reached the edge of a forest as the last bit of the sun’s light receded. The rain had ceased by then, and Gideon called for a stop. It would be difficult to navigate through the forest in the dark, even with the tracking ritual.

They found a relatively sheltered location just inside the forest and set up camp. Gideon didn’t want to start a fire and potentially alert the bandits within the woods, so it was little more than unrolling their blankets on the forest floor and eating a cold dinner of bread and dried fruits. When Gideon spoke of keeping watch, Clara proposed that they use her imp as a sentry. The Paladin was wary of the idea, but decided to give it a chance. They fell asleep with the imp watching over them from the boughs above.

Nothing troubled them during the night. When they were both awake they ate a quick breakfast, Clara performed the tracking ritual again and, after packing up their camp, they started walking into the forest. The trees were relatively sparse, and there was little underbrush. It wasn’t difficult for Gideon to lead them in a relatively straight line in the direction the tracking needle pointed.

Gideon couldn’t help feeling that something wasn’t quite right. Every so often he would hear a small sound - a footstep, or a broken branch - or he would see a shadow flit between tress out of the corner of his vision. He couldn’t pinpoint the source of the noises, and never caught more than a glimpse of a shadow, so he couldn’t confirm that they were being followed, but it did put him on guard. He kept his hand on his sword, ready to draw it at a moment’s notice.

The expected attack came after about an hour of walking, though in an unexpected manner. Rather than a sudden crossbow bolt from the trees, or bandits jumping from the shadows, he heard a woman’s voice cut through the forest.

“Stop right there, Paladin. You’re getting a bit close for our tastes.” Gideon couldn’t pinpoint the source of the voice, but as he looked around he saw several armed men and women garbed in shoddy armour step from the trees.

“If you’re with the King of the Forest, I’m afraid I can’t do that,” Gideon said, drawing his sword. “But if you’ve no allegiance to him, you can step aside and I’ll be on my way.”

“Yeah, we thought that was why you were here. Looks like that fool Gill can’t tell when he’s being followed. Well, he’ll get what’s coming to him - and we’ll extend the same offer to you two: turn yourselves around and this won’t have to get bloody.”

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Gideon looked around at the forces arrayed against them. He could see that some of the bandits held crossbows, aimed at him and Clara. He wasn’t personally threatened by them, but he didn’t know what the woman had in the way of defensive magic. The rest of them wielded clubs, short swords, and other simple hand weapons. They didn’t completely encircle Gideon and Clara, so the Paladin moved to put himself in between her and the crossbows. “Try to take out the crossbowmen first,” he told Clara in a low voice without looking back, keeping his eyes on the bandits. “I can protect you from the rest.”

In response, a bolt of fire flew from behind him and caught one of the crossbows, forcing its wielder to drop it. The woman’s imp shot into the sky in a blur of red, landing on the crossbow of another bandit and causing the man to shoot it off into the trees in surprise. The other two crossbows managed to fire, their bolts crashing into Gideon’s armour. They would have torn through normal mail, but Gideon felt them shatter against the metal links instead. The force of them put him slightly off balance, and he knew he would be heavily bruised - but it was better than being skewered.

The bandits armed with melee weapons closed in on Gideon, and he could immediately tell that they were better organized than goblins, or even the average group of human outlaws. They tried to circle around him, force him to split his attention - so he lunged forward before they could outmaneuver him, and the first bandit died with his throat speared through by Gideon’s blade.

Gideon pulled his sword from the dead bandit, trailing blood, in time to deflect the club of another, and responded with a slash that would have maimed the man’s arm - but one of his companions managed to step in and intercept Gideon’s sword with her own blade.

They were locked in a bind for a moment, but Gideon managed to overpower the bandit, and she paid for her altruism with a strike from Gideon’s pommel that sent her reeling back - but before Gideon could follow with a strike to finish her off, her fellow with the club smashed it into Gideon’s chest, forcing him another step back.

Gideon struck at the club-wielding bandit before his partner could recover, savagely chopping through his weapon with a first strike before piercing his chest with a thrust. Two more bandits reached Gideon in this short period of time, and he was forced to defend himself, parrying their blows without seeing an opportunity to attack.

Another bandit slipped past Gideon in the direction of Clara, and he couldn’t disengage to intercept him - but a moment later, the man was writhing on the ground, screaming. That distracted the two Gideon was engaged with for a fraction of a second, and Gideon used that opportunity to kick one of them back, then dispatched the other with a slash that ran the length of his chest.

“Now, that’s quite enough of that,” the voice from before called from the trees, its owner stepping out into the open. The woman was dressed in patchy, faded robes, and she wore some sort of cap that had a small pair of antlers sticking from it. Her hand moved in a series of intricate gestures, and a flash of azure light burst directly in front of Gideon’s eyes, momentarily blinding him. Defenseless, he felt something strike him in the back of the head and dropped to his knees. A boot came down on his hand, forcing him to relinquish his sword.

When his vision cleared, he looked up to see the crossbowmen with their weapons leveled at him.

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Once again, the fight seemed over far quicker than Clara had anticipated. Three men lay dead or dying on the ground before more than a few heartbeats had passed. Clara had cursed one and - with the help of her imp - disarmed two more, but she hadn’t personally slain any. It seemed strange to her that the Paladin could kill so easily while the idea of killing another human still caused her stomach to turn. She didn’t do much more than watch as Gideon went to work.

Then the spellcaster stepped out, and everything took a turn for the worse.

Gideon went down within seconds, but Clara wasn’t paying attention to that. She recognized what the robed woman had done; that was unmistakably arcane magic. Why did some bandit scum hiding out in a forest in the middle of nowhere possess the ability to control the arcane, when Clara had spent years trying without success to learn those secrets?

The magic came to her unbidden, sparked to life in her soul like a roaring flame. It pressed against her skin, wanting to be let out. With barely a thought she pointed at the bandit mage, an incantation of destruction surging from her lips almost of its own accord.

Ignited by her rage the infernal flames cascaded out, greater than any she had conjured before. They caught the spellcaster by surprise and enveloped the woman, utterly consuming her. Her screams echoed out into the forest for a moment, before she was unable to scream anymore.

Clara’s other hand moved to cast waves of fire before her, licking at the bandits and keeping them from advancing on her. She was untouchable.

For only a moment, though, as Clara soon reached her limit. The flames that she issued forth faltered and died down, and she slumped to her knees, feeling completely drained. The bandits moved forward warily, and upon seeing the Clara was no longer any threat, one walked up and struck her on the back of the head. She fell, sprawled out on the ground as the bandits started to talk amongst themselves.

“Well, she bloody scorched Ella. Don’t think there’s anything left of her,” a gruff male voice said.

“I never much liked her anyway. Always lorded her whole ‘magic’ thing over the rest of. Huh, see where it got her. Wonder what the chief’s going to think, though?” questioned one of the women.

“Won’t care too much when he sees what we’re hauling in. A Paladin and a sorceress! Going to be a good show. Come on, let’s get them tied up and moving.”

Clara was vaguely aware of the bandits moving around her. One of them pulled her arms behind her back and tied them together at the wrists. She was too tired to think about resisting; she wasn’t even sure if she could lift her limbs, let along do anything to fight back. A few minutes later she was roughly hauled to her feet. She looked around and saw that Gideon had been similarly tied up, and her imp flitted into vision on the branch of a tree. It seemed that the demon hadn’t been caught and, so far, remained unnoticed.

“Get moving,” one of the bandits said with a shove. It was a struggle, but Clara managed to start putting one foot in front of the other, and she and Gideon were marched through the forest.

The bandits conversed among each other as they walked, but the noise washed over Clara as she heard but barely registered it; understanding it was beyond her at that moment. She was thinking about how the magic had come to her almost beyond her control, and acted unpredictably. It wasn’t the first time it had done so, reacting to her emotions or simply making her want to use it. Was that just one more undesirable aspect of infernal magic?

They passed by the smoking remains of Ella, and though she turned her head away, she couldn’t seem to escape the smell of charred flesh in the air. It was she who had killed that woman, regardless of how much of a role the magic had played in her actions.

A thought struck her. The spellcaster might have had some of her magical notes on her - and if that were true, Clara had assuredly burned those along with the mage. It caused the act to sting just a little bit more.

At least she seemed to be being marched towards some sort of judgment. She only regretted that the Paladin was being marched right alongside her.