The feeling came upon Storm that he’d been at this too long. That his extended absence from sight had to be looking suspicious.

Quickly, he untied the latest of his acquisitions and led her back a couple of hundred meters, careful to keep the ruined stable between himself and the rest of the battlefield. Once he’d gotten what he figured was far enough away, he shooed her back toward the fallen sod building where he’d found the boy. He slumped his shoulders and plodded after her, his skin crawling as he passed into the open.

The mounted soldier —and, oh goody, he was an officer— was already halfway to the stable. He spied the loose mare and the plodding wrangler and cursed venomously, altering his course to intercept. Storm’s sword arm actually twitched at the epithet and course correction, but he forced his head down and continued his plodding. He was a tired wrangler, no more. Nothing special. Nobody worth noticing. Just another trooper like any other.

The angry rider swirled his quirt and turned the confused mare back toward her pursuer, glaring over her back at him.

“What in the seven hells are you doing afoot, you gods cursed lazy poltroon?” the rider demanded. “Think you we’ve the month long to gather these mounts? They’ll be needing them at the front, godsdamn your eyes! Sling your sagging arse into that saddle and get about it or I’ll have you flogged!”

“Aye, sor,” Storm mumbled, voice shaking. He dared to look up, but the rider was already on his way back to the graves detail, trailing a cloud of inventive profanity.

“S’okay, heart,” Storm told his hollow chest quietly, “the mean man is gone. You can start beating again any time now.” He had to hang from the saddle for a minute or two before he could gather the strength to mount.

The mare accepted his weight easily, dancing a bit just to show him she was awake. He reined her back toward the stable, wondering what his next move was.

There were still fifteen or twenty horses scattered around the field, on both sides of the river. Did the officer expect him to gather them all and herd them single-handed? He couldn’t possibly. Was he supposed to corral them somehow and wait for help? Not friggin’ likely! And he wasn’t crossing that river or giving that rider another good look at his incomplete uniform either one.

Looking around, he could see a couple of the abandoned mounts within a minute’s canter, so what the hell. Show them what they expected to see and they wouldn’t look too hard, right? He turned the mare and gave her a taste of his heels. She moved into an easy canter and he had three more horses in no time at all, and right under the watchful eye of the officer who looked on smiling, convinced he’d put the fear of the gods into the reluctant trooper.

Nine horses was a handful, even tied short together, and especially with his two extra bits of illicit cargo. More of a handful than he’d really wanted to deal with truth to tell. But he had them now, so he’d have to deal with it.

He should take them to the river and let them drink before heading out; that’s what a normal wrangler would do. But it wasn’t a serious option for him. He was already pressing his luck into new and metaphysically unlikely patterns just by still being here with the sun climbing towards noon. Too late to get while the getting was good, he’d settle for getting while it was still possible.

The front, the officer had commanded. Easy enough. Thousands of troops and a whole mess of heavy carts or wagons didn’t exactly require a special tracking merit badge. The unidentified wrangler would get gigged for improper care of his charges if anybody ever saw him again, but Storm didn’t really fancy his career opportunities in the Turaleean army in any case.

He was well along the trampled swath left by the southward moving force when he heard, far behind, an angry shout. He didn’t let his shoulders hunch– didn’t let on in any way that he’d heard. The call wasn’t repeated. He rode on, the skin of his back crawling, sweating away what felt like half his body weight as he listened for the pound of approaching hooves.

The last thing he wanted was to have to fight his way clear. He wasn’t at all sure he could fight without calling the magic, and calling the magic could well herald another encounter with the dragon. He wasn’t ready for that just now.

He had two rises behind him before he dared look back. There was no trace of the fortress nor of the river. Dismounting hurriedly, he ran back along the trail, peeking cautiously over the crest. Nothing. He’d made it.

A quick glance at the boy showed he’d faded out again, but had lashed himself to the saddle first. This kid he could learn to like. The crone looked exactly as she had when he’d tied her in, and, wonder of wonders, still seemed to be alive.

Storm tied the mare to the tail end of the string, separating out a longer limbed blue roan. Another mare, she was deep-chested and long necked, with wide-set intelligent eyes. With a last look back, he heaved his weary carcass into the saddle and leaned over to grab the reins of the officer’s black. He clucked the blue roan into motion and turned her westward, tugging the others along in her wake.

Skirting very wide around the battlefield, he headed for the river, hoping to cut it west of where he’d spent the early part of the night. There was a cut bank he remembered that might be back above the waterline by now.

The temperature had to be well into triple digits Fahrenheit, and he’d had to stop several times to see to the southerners. The boy was in and out of consciousness. Sometimes he’d drink on his own, sometimes Storm would be forced to carefully trickle the water into his mouth. The crone never stirred, and he began to worry that he was carting a hopeless vegetable around the prairie.

They struck the river farther west than he’d intended, some time in the late afternoon. It was an hour or so later before he spotted the big, egg-shaped rock and knew that he’d found the cut bank he was looking for.

The cut bank was a hollowed out bowl where the river turned north. The river had worn at the clay-heavy soil of the bank over the years, forming a sort of shallow cave. Better than five meters deep and a sweeping fifty long, it offered shade and a cool breeze off the water. There was no grass, of course —not after yesterday’s flood— but a stick or two of well traveled wood had been left behind when the water had receded. Storm eased the blue roan gingerly along the lip of the riverbank, picking his way down to the floor of the cut. You couldn’t really see it from the plain, and he wouldn’t have known of it at all if he hadn’t seen it from the bottom of the empty channel during last night’s dash for safety.

Leaving his two charges where they were, Storm climbed down and tied the blue roan to an exposed root protruding from the wall of the cut. Several of the horses had bedrolls tied behind, and he gathered these now. Moving to the dimness at the far end of the overhang, he unrolled and spread them out, making a pair of thick sleeping nests. Satisfied, or as satisfied as he was likely to get, he returned to the horses.

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The boy was awake and regarding him levelly, but didn’t initiate conversation while the man untied the straps binding him to the bloody saddle.

Storm lay the boy in one of the nests, held his head so he could drink, and went back for the crone. He moved her gently as he could, depositing her in the remaining nest, noticing for the first time the obvious quality of her clothing. Tattered and disheveled though it was, there was no mistaking the expensive weave or the nearly invisible stitching. Nor the fact that it seemed five or six sizes too large. Shaking his head slowly, he wondered who she was and how she’d gotten into the storm cellar back there.

Glancing over at the boy, he saw that the working eye was closed again. Ah well, it wasn’t like he’d never been forced to work in the dark before.

Before he did anything else, then, the man climbed the cut and looked intently toward the south. You there?

The answer came after a bit, impatient.

Come to the river, he thought at the stud. I’ll meet you.

Climbing back down, he stripped the horses of their gear, one by one, rubbing them down with a spare blanket, checking them over for injuries or bad shoes, and leading them to water. He didn’t bother to go through the gear just yet. After he’d led the last of them back and tied him to the cut, he resaddled the officer’s black. It was about time to meet the stud.

“I’ve got to go get my own horse,” he told the boy, who was momentarily awake. “I’ll be back in an hour or so... uh, around two spans, I think.”

The boy nodded, good eye wavering.

Storm swung into the fine officer’s saddle and brought the prancing black toward the water’s edge. He held the animal back for the first stad or so, to keep the trail as indistinct as possible. But after that, he smacked his heels against the broad ribs and let it have its head. Not as fast as Sandahl, the black nevertheless loved to run.

The hollow beneath the river bank was lost to shadows when the boy opened his eyes again. Only the tiny orange globe surrounding a small fire in the cave’s center gave definition to anything at all. The strange man with the strange mask, who spoke the holy tongue conversationally and wandered with impunity through enemy encampments, squatted beside it, fishing something from the coals. He turned his head and the boy recoiled. The eye beneath the mask glowed pale blue in the darkness!

Seeing his movement, the man lifted something from the fire and brought it over.

“Careful,” the accent was strange, making the words difficult to understand. “The bowl is hot.”

The man held the bowl to the boy’s lips and steaming broth, thick with salted beef washed over his tongue. His stomach spasmed and tried to reject the nourishment, but he struggled and forced it back down. After a moment, he nodded for another sip.

His eyes were growing accustomed to the minimal light and he could see more detail. Looking down at himself, he could see that the man had dressed his wounds with an almost healer-like skill. The bandage swathing his right hand looked odd, though, until he remembered that there weren’t any fingers left to make finger bulges beneath the cloth. His breath caught momentarily, but that panic, too, he fought down.

He allowed the man to pour more of the thick broth down his throat, wishing he’d paid closer attention to the priests in his religious studies. He knew the holy tongue to be a fully functional language, but could only remember the words used for prayer. Despite the miraculous nature of the rescue, he somehow doubted that this stranger was the sort one prayed to.

The bowl was empty and the man put it down. Then he leaned in close to the boy’s face, peering at the head wound. The boy heard a mechanical whirring and several clicks. Then the man took the ruined hand in gentle fingers, examining the bandage for signs of renewed bleeding. Nodding to himself, the man retrieved the bowl and returned to the fire.

A few minutes later, the stranger moved to Shadra, who hadn’t yet stirred within her own nest of blankets. Sitting cross-legged, the stranger pulled the unresponsive woman into his lap, resting her head against his chest. Holding the bowl carefully in the same hand he used to steady her, he dipped a reed straw into he broth. Drawing the straw full, he maneuvered the far end between her lips, allowing the life-giving fluid to trickle down her throat.

The process with the straw took most of a span before the broth was gone. The stranger lay Shadra gently back within her blankets and turned to the fire.

“Why?” the boy asked quietly.

“Eh?” the stranger turned back.

“Why?” the boy waved his good hand between Shadra’s nest and his own.

The question seemed to take the man aback. As though it hadn’t until just now occurred to him that he’d done anything. “I couldn’t leave you behind in that camp. They’d have killed you.”

It was no good; the boy’s grasp of the holy tongue was insufficient to the task at hand. Then he brightened, remembering the first words he’d heard the stranger speak. “Could we use this, perhaps?”

“Ah,” the stranger understood. “I said,” he continued in astonishingly awful Turaleean, “that I couldn’t leave you behind. Those soldiers would have killed you.”

A very puzzling answer. “And why should that concern you?”

Again that surprised reaction. “I don’t really know,” the man finally admitted. “Apart from the fact that we share a common enemy.”

Hah!” the boy snorted weakly. “The whole of the second world shares the Turaleean enemy. Some of us just get more than our share, more’s the pity. Surely you had more reason than that?”

“God’s honest truth, boy,” the stranger admitted, “I couldn’t even tell you with certainty what I was doing there to begin with. I had no good reason to risk my life among those soldiers and plenty of excellent reasons to be days away.

“Hell, until I heard you groan, it never occurred to me that any of you people might still be alive at all.” He paused. “Which reminds me, who are you people anyhow?”

The boy blinked. Then he blinked again. Surely the man was joking? But he wasn’t. It was there on his face. “We are,” he started, then faltered. “Were...the remnants of the Grand Expedition,” his ruined hand didn’t make much of the flourish. “The entire combined strength of the Iskan Republics, under the stalwart command of the glorious and all powerful Governor General Corwyn Tedrikkson, the miserable twit.”

“What happened?”

It was the boy’s turn to show surprise. “We got bloody well killed!”

Silence. A waiting silence.

“We arrived at the border six thousand strong,” the boy relented. “It was open field before us, forested bluffs at our backs. The generals wanted to move clear of the trees, for there had been rumors —obscene rumors— of unnatural pacts made with lesser races and monsters. But his sodding nibs decided it wouldn’t be honorable to invade Turalee outright. Had to wait for Shelador to violate the border first, don’t you know.

“Well, the rumors were true,” he snarled. “Turalee had somehow gained control of the ogres, and they’d infested the wood long before the Grand Expedition was anywhere near. They had the trees running with blood even as our front bore the charge of Shelador’s legions.”

He fell silent, wiping at flowing tears with the back of his bandaged hand. “It was horrible,” he choked at last. “We were outnumbered three to one without the monsters, nor were the ogres the only of those about, for Shelador’s mages were powerful and numerous. We lost two thousand in as many span, along with the whole of our artillery and half of our own mages.

“We fought what I pray might be considered an organized retreat. Of those alive when we reentered the forest, fewer than half survived to see the sun again. Of the magic wielders, only Shadra, Pythias, and Mendoto survived, and Mendoto had survived in body only.”

The man turned his gaze to the still form within the blankets. “She was a mage?”

“The greatest of them all,” the boy affirmed.

“She looks hardly able to stand.”

“True,” the boy nodded. “But yesterday morn, she stood tall and unwrinkled, hair the color of banked coals, eyes to pierce marble.”

The man looked closer, stifling a grin at the overt signs of a childhood crush in the boy’s litany. “Something went wrong then?”

A shrug. “The war went wrong. Shelador went wrong.” He scowled, “his grace, the governor general went wrong. Shadra of the purest light did precisely what she set out to do. She alone among us all did not go wrong.”

The stranger nodded quietly. The boy was growing weary, his eye blinking closed more than open, his head resting ever more firmly against his chest as he struggled to convey the story.

When next the boy’s eye opened, the stranger had gone. The fire remained, dull coals now, and a strange palomino horse with an ugly burn along his rump stood guard on the river side of the cave. He held his right hand —his sword hand— between his face and the fire, turning it this way and that, trying to understand the new shape. What a glorious end, he thought bitterly, for the grand expedition.