Her mare’s hooves pelted down the path, the day’s sun and heat turning the packed road into a hard track between the lingering puddles. Catrin kept off her back, focus honed on the path ahead. Twenty strides in, the mare’s surging pace ebbed, the fatigue of the day’s ride—and yesterday’s—dogging the horse’s muscles.

A trot would have been fine. If they’d walked and trotted the rest of the way, like she’d planned, they’d have reached Levine well cooled and well before dark.

Battle changed things. They’d have to camp, perhaps. Or stay an extra day in Levine. Let the horses rest.

It’d be dumb to take tired horses into a marsh.

She thought about these things as they ran. Her mind filling the lull with small, idle thoughts. The road curved ahead, slipping into the fringe where a stand of wood, thicker and deeper than the others, hid the section from view.

It abutted the riparian crest about a quarter of a mile on. She caught the smell of water. Mud. Living things, soggy with spring. New growth. The smell of horse. Sweat. Terror.

Sulfur.

Demons.

Another scream cast out, and the idle thoughts washed away. The world quieted, a hush blanketing like fog. Her skin prickled, feeling the wind. Behind her, the others trailed in a loose gallop. Her woodcraft slipped in and out, active now, feeding her senses, pushing itself under her control like a second set of reins under her fingers.

Her mare sped into the curve, hooves drumming along the track.

Up ahead, a small caravan came into sight. Figures darted around it, half of them small, half of them running.

Children.

And chasing them—

Hell hounds.

Small ones, like their prey, but deadly. And too large to be a normal dog.

Five targets, four victims. Three running, one pinned.

She whistled, high-pitched, piercing, and her second spell pushed the wind from them. She threw it ahead, made it rush toward the hounds—made it take their scent and the thundering sound of their hooves ahead, distracting them from their prey, alerting them to the incoming threat. Then, she cut her horse to left and charged toward the lone man—the only adult—holding off three larger hounds with the desperate swings of his broadsword.

“Go wide!” she shouted, pointing the others to the right, where the smaller hounds were chasing the children into the long grass of a field. “Save the kids!”

She didn’t wait to see if they’d obey—they would, she knew it. Instead, she slipped her stirrups, and moved into a crouch on the saddle. Then she jerked the mare to the left, leaped from her back, and sailed through the air.

All three demon-hounds had turned their gaze to her. The human had turned, too, surprise dosing the fear and panic in his eyes. One realized her trajectory and made to turn and face her with a vicious snarl—

Too late.

She landed behind the three, rolled to her feet, and lunged into a spin of rnari blade forms.

The world narrowed to a dance of instincts and slashing. Honed muscle memory. Training patterns, repeated a thousand thousand times. Blood flowed. Ichor. Blood slicked her skin and blades, splattered her armor. The smell of it soaked the atmosphere until she could taste nothing but sulfur, sweat, and rust. Chunks of flesh and fur slapped to the dirt. Dull pain hammered her once, but she pushed it down, slicing, stabbing.

Her blade turned one growl into a gurgle, the hound collapsing with the burn of its own blood gushing over its matted, wiry coat.

The next one fell a handful of seconds later. Alive and snarling in her face one moment, dead and thumping to the ground the next, half its skull and brain splattered by a flash of light into the back of its skull.

Matteo and his strange gun, raining death like a well-placed arrow.

She leaped over its twitching corpse and confronted the last of the three—and realized the rest of the demons were dead. Either sniped by Matteo’s sharp-shooting or dispatched by Nales and Doneil’s blades.

The two of them had come back around to help her, their blades dark with blood. Together, the five of them faced the last remaining demon.

Alone, it had changed tact. It backed up the side of the caravan, gaze darting in flinching, fearful wariness between every one of them.

She shot a sharp look to Doneil, eyebrow lifted in question, and he nodded.

The children were okay.

One of them came into sight just then, taller than she expected. Walking briskly to where Catrin’s mare had stopped, a hand out to catch the horse’s headstall.

The others were in the field behind the caravan. Slowly, the bloodlust waned from her mind, and her sense of the area widened.

In a few short minutes—less than that—they’d turned the battlefield into a slaughter ground.

The sun was still shining, now shining wetly on the blood and bloodied corpses around her. The breeze blew in through her armor, cooling the sweat on her skin. Over the stench of sulfur and black-blooded ichor, the sweet taste of warm grass and cold water hung in the air. From somewhere close by, the sound of birds started up again.

It was peaceful again.

Almost.

A low, warning growl rattled from the remaining demon’s throat, its eyes shifting back and forth, trapped between them.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

Although… No, it wasn’t.

It had plenty of options. It could go under the wagon. Duck around the back. Try to make a run for the side.

Why didn’t it?

Suspicion stiffened her spine. She halted, studying it.

It stared back, black eyes focused.

Beside her, the human with the broadsword had taken her lead and stopped, too.

Smart.

He stood stiffly, the sword held back over his shoulder, ready to slash down.

Nales and Doneil had also stopped, though their horses skittered and blew nervously.

Matteo and his horse were far to her right, by the border of the road.

“Catrin?” Doneil asked, clearly wanting to know why she delayed.

“I want to know why it’s not running,” she explained.

“Stupidity?” Doneil suggested lightly, but his expression furrowed on the hound in consideration.

They all stared at it for several moments. Beside her, the human she’d saved shifted his stance, clearly having trouble keeping the heavy sword in position.

“Does it matter?” he asked. “It’s a demon. It needs to die.”

He was right. If they didn’t kill the hound now—if they let it get away—it would only live to kill another day. And its next victim might not be so lucky as to have a royal and his escorts ride to the rescue.

“It is usually a good idea to understand one’s enemies,” she said after a beat. She was breathing hard, she realized, and a blunt pain was making itself known, throbbing from her hand.

Had she hit it somewhere?

When she looked down, she saw blood. Red blood. Hers, not the demons’.

A vague recollection came of punching the side of a demon hound’s mouth and breaking off one of its teeth.

She shook it out, returning her gaze to the demon. “Nales? Any thoughts?”

The prince was silent for a moment. Then,

“No. Kill it.”

She nodded, briefly considered the options, then stood a little taller as she relaxed back.

“Matteo?” she called, clear and strong. She pointed a bloodied dagger at the demon. “Kill.”

A shot cracked, hitting the same time—perhaps slightly behind—the flash of light that splattered the demon’s skull.

All the focus left its eyes, and it slumped to the ground.

Quick and clean. Except for the blood spatter on the caravan’s wood.

“That’s all of them?” she confirmed, reaching out to her woodcraft with the same question.

“Yes. We and Matteo got the rest,” Doneil said. “Mostly Matteo.”

He cleaned his sword on a rag, then passed the rag to Nales and dismounted, tucking his reins out of the way on his horse’s neck before he turned a critical eye on the man beside her. An eyebrow lifted. “Any injuries?”

As if waiting for a signal, all the man’s tension left him in a shuddering breath. He sagged in relief, the tip of the broadsword dropping to the ground. “I—No. I don’t know. I—my girls—” He took a big breath and lifted his head. “Girls? You all right?”

“We’re okay,” the one holding Catrin’s mare called over. She looked to the right, to where Catrin could just see the other two shapes huddled in the tall grass of the field. “Tilly might have hurt her ankle.”

“It scratched me!” rose a small, plaintive voice. One of the heads popped up. “My leg’s hurt!”

“Oh, come on!” Another voice—the third sister, she presumed. “It’s not that bad! She can walk!”

“Don’t worry!” Doneil called to them brightly, already heading in their direction, his voice strong with mirth. “Mild injuries are my favorite to heal!”

The hounds had scratched the horse, too. They found it half a mile off, past the stream. Lionel—the father—had tried to get them to ride it away, but the horse had been panicking. The second they’d gotten it loose of the traces, it had bolted, and the girls had sprinted into the field.

One hound had obviously chased it. The harness had protected it some, but it had four bleeding slashes on its flank, which Doneil attended to. While he did that, Lionel, Nales, Matteo, and the eldest girl—Charla—swapped the saddle from Matteo’s horse for their horse’s harness, and went back to pull the wagon forward.

Catrin busied herself with washing the blood out of her armor.

She was doing that a lot these days.

It was quiet for a time.

After a few minutes, she found herself staring into the water. It slipped by, merry and bright. Babbling. Cool to the touch. Cleansing the air, as well as her skin and armor.

Her thoughts wandered.

Why hadn’t that demon run?

Faced with them, it should have at least tried. So, why hadn’t it?

A light touch on her shoulder distracted her. She looked up and met Doneil’s unsmiling gaze.

“Don’t think I haven’t noticed that hand of yours, dangerous rnari warrior.”

She glanced down, only then noticing the pain. Her knuckles had swollen, a scab crusting pieces of split skin.

Without a word, she held it up. He took it gently, and a part of her relaxed as his familiar magic spread through her hand—then grimaced when the prickling sensation started.

Oh well. At least he didn’t have to knit bone this time.

She rubbed the area when he gave it back, flexing the joints.

He lingered a moment. “You’re getting better.”

She frowned up at him in confusion. “At killing?”

“At not flinching when a man touches you,” he said. “I’m glad. I’d worried Tarris’ wound couldn’t heal.”

She didn’t flinch at that, but a piece inside her chest went hard. He saw the change and nodded, patting her shoulder once more before he moved back to rejoin the two girls fussing over their horse.

The creak of wood and clop of hoofbeats, along with the murmur of conversation, announced the caravan’s approach.

“I can never thank you enough,” Lionel was saying—saying again, rather. He seemed rather stuck on it, which was understandable. The man was in battle shock, his strong, loud voice noticeably shaken and hollow at its core. He held himself as if stunned, talking as if stuck in a loop, going through the motions, half in disbelief of what had happened—and what had almost happened. “If you hadn’t come along when you had—if you hadn’t been as strong—”

The shake tripped up his vocal cords then. Nales cut in smoothly before the falter became obvious. “It was good luck we were so close. The gods helped us today.”

Lionel smiled weakly at that. “They did at that. But—”

Catrin half-listened to them, turning back to her task. The armor lay half-wiped. She picked it back up and tried to rub the blood out of where it stuck in the stitching.

Every demon kill left the leather more streaked than before, the rot and acids in the blood like soaking it in dirty bleach. It looked terrible—like she’d left it in a rainstorm for thirty years. Her mother’s old armor, nearly fifty years past its service and full of holes, looked better than this.

Maybe Nales would buy her new armor. Preferably before they reached the Light Elves at Mount Sinya. She was his guard, wasn’t she? He’d given her a stipend, but nothing for armor yet.

Granted, she wouldn’t want to take new armor into a swamp.

After a few minutes of rubbing and washing, Matteo sank into a spot next to her. Wordlessly, he dipped his hands into the water, then picked up the rag she’d rinsed out and started on the blood-covered bracers she hadn’t yet wiped.

“Any news brain machine?” she asked.

It felt awkward to cut out parts of speech when speaking to him, but she was getting used to it—and he was learning fast.

“No,” he replied. “Brain machine still broken.”

Still broken, but that had changed recently, however briefly. He’d explained the communications aspect of the machine had a five-mile range—which was both deeply useful and deeply unsettling. If it could talk to others five miles away without connecting to its Sky God magic that he insisted was not magic—and if it could fire deadly light into their enemies—

What else could it do?

“Friend too far away?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Maybe friend too far, maybe friend doesn’t want to talk.”

She hesitated. “Maybe friend… not friend?”

Another shrug. “Maybe.”

Yes. Definitely unsettling.

She chewed her tongue, thinking. If there was another person like Matteo out there, running around with a similar weapon and a similar skill set… how would she deal with that?

She couldn’t. Not easily.

She had to either hope the person was friendly, or she and Matteo would have to ambush them before they could draw their gun.

She was really hoping they were friendly.

“If they come back,” she said, emphasizing the conditional. “Tell me. Understand?”

He paused his cleaning to lift a hand to his brow in a casual salute. “Yes. Understand.”

He was their ally. She was sure of it.

Hopefully, his friend would be, too.