“You really don’t look like him at all,” the doctor’s assistant said. She loomed over him, arms crossed and blocking the light.

Sieg bit off another piece of dried meat and shrugged. He sat against the back wall of the building, between unmarked barrels where the stone stayed cool despite the day’s blaze. “People see what they expect to see. So, I showed them an injured Vassish man of the right age and the right clothes. I don’t even know his name. Nobody’s used his name this entire time. They didn’t really know him.”

“It was Liam. Were you the one to kill him?”

“No, my friend did. Do you expect me to cry on his behalf or something?”

“You’re trampling on his reputation to kill people.”

Sieg shook his head. “This camp is nothing but thieves and murderers and the women they’ve brought.”

The woman hung her head. “They’re good to us…”

“But?”

“But, they are killers, yes, and so are you, man who is not Liam.”

“Call me Sieg.”

The woman huffed and moved her hands to her hips. She glanced back at the light. There were other men at the front of the shop. The doctor was occupying them and keeping them from investigating his storehouse. “I’m amazed you can eat that. We could have poisoned it.”

Sieg swallowed and nodded. “You certainly have the tools to do so, but if you did, I’d kill both of you.”

“We could be stalling you to gather all of the men around this building and torch it, burn you alive.”

Sieg laughed. “If you did that, you’d all die. It wouldn’t be pretty, and it would hurt a lot, but I’d get the job done. All you’d do by that is earn me a scolding.”

“You have so much faith in your stigmata?”

Sieg put the last of the jerky in his mouth and chewed it. His gaze grew distant and he stared more at the shadows than at the woman. “I don’t think faith is the right word. I know exactly what it can do, and I know what I can do. I’ve already taken the measure of these bandits and yeah, if forty of them came at me at once, I might be in trouble… but they won’t. I’ve already killed too many of them. You can see it. If you don’t believe me, go out there and look at their eyes. Not in the faces of the men in charge, but in the ones they’re ordering around. These aren’t trained men, they’re vigilantes at the most kind interpretation. Just normal men who have maybe killed once before. Probably they’ve only seen other people do the killing and they did the plundering.”

“Don’t you think killing their friends would have enraged them? Embittered them?”

“Some, like Muharib. Not just any man can make a blood oath like that, on the spur of the moment no less. But that’s why he’s in charge: he’s unusual. Right now? The rest of them? They’re realizing their choice is between fighting me who they know has killed ten already, and even if they do kill me they’ll now be working for a man-eating angel, or running away.”

The woman clicked her tongue and scowled. “The men of Giordana are not cowards.”

“So you say, but if the blood starts flowing, do you really think they’ll fight to the last man? Against an enemy they can’t kill no matter how many times they stab?”

She opened her mouth, words half formed. She hesitated. The more the question turned in her head, the more she scowled at the boy because she slowly realized he was right. The men would be scattered. They would break and flee. It would shame them but they would be alive to feel that shame. Eventually, she swallowed her rebuke and straightened up. “A disgusting use of power.”

“Don’t like it? There are plenty of small villages that never see a day of violence. Go find one,” Sieg said, and he watched her fail to answer him. She couldn’t find the words because she wasn’t free to leave and she knew it. For all that he had seen in Ennia’s Crossing, she was one of the few women able to walk freely, with her head up and dressed how she pleased. She had privileges, but they only went so far.

She eyed him as he uncorked his stolen wineskin again and squeezed the last drops into his mouth. She asked, “What are you going to do if the angel comes with him?”

“Vita? She won’t. And even if she does, I have options.”

“You speak as though you know a centuries lost god child.”

“Don’t put them on pedestals like that. The emissaries are just like any human, they just have magic and no sense of meekness.”

“So they’re like you.”

“You could say that. Mostly, you just have to remember that they don’t bow to laws. They don’t have cultural expectations on them. They are free in ways you and I never can be.”

“You sound like you admire them.”

“I respect them.”

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“But you don’t fear them.”

“Not like you do, no.”

“And you’d kill her self-appointed priest right in front of her?”

Sieg grinned and spread out his arms. “And then I’d offer her his corpse.” She shook her head and turned to leave. Sieg jumped up. “Now, hold on,” he said, reaching for the back of her dress. “Where are you going? You’re the collateral for the deal, aren’t you?”

She stopped, her posture stiff. “No, I’m the one that will make it happen. I’m the bait.”

The door to the front room, where the doctor worked his more normal trade as a barber, opened up. The old man stuck his head through and gestured at the back door. “Go, go now.”

The woman spun on her heels and Sieg followed as they slipped out the back. Rather than follow the alleys, she led him to one of the buildings still half-buried by the sandstone. The place had become a refuse heap of discarded and rotten furniture, likely cleaned from the town by the bandits as they settled in. But there was a slim path to the back. She guided him to it, and then up a ladder made from pockets carved into the stone. The path was tight as a chimney and went straight up to the outer buttresses of stone.

Unabated sun beat down, drawing ever longer shadows across the sand. There was a rugged path out to the wastes, and from there one could circle either to the riverbed road or any number of other paths. It was surely a passage that should have been guarded and monitored, for had we known of it the ruse would have been unnecessary. We could have stolen in during the night and slit throats. Of course, such ease of murder would have done little to demonstrate the boy’s independent capabilities. Alas, these wastelanders lacked the manpower to guard such an insignificant passage, relying on the desert itself as their protection. Their concern was of armies, not assassins.

Sieg followed her out to a clearing between some rocks, a hollow that might once have been flush with water, with tough fronds of plant life and carp darting about. They found only stone and sand, not even miserly roots. The depression was just enough that a man atop the roofs of Ennia’s Crossing wouldn’t be able to see in, so Sieg came to a stop.

“You can leave,” he said.

The woman balled her hands to fists and glanced over her shoulder at him. “So you can put an arrow in my back?”

“Why would I do that? I’ll keep my end of the bargain. Just when you leave, you go away. Don’t circle around and bring the other bandits.”

“Muharib will bring men.”

Sieg drew his sword and walked over to one of the rock walls. As he leaned against it, he said, “Let him. It will be more to feed to the snake.”

The woman took a few steps away from him, and saw that he didn’t move to stop her. “You’ll really just let me go? Just like that?”

“Haven’t you ever heard the saying to not look a gift horse in the mouth? If you’re the bait to bring him out here, then I assume you’re with–”

“Where is he?” Muharib roared. The bandit chief came in running and vaulted the edge of the rock valley. He crashed to the sand, landing on his feet with his sword drawn, face red.

The woman bolted, turning and scrambling up the far side of the wall as Sieg stepped forward to meet the man with a bounty on his head. “Just you?” he asked.

“Hostage taking!--” Muharib’s rage stumbled as he watched the woman freely escaping. He stared, processing and considering. In the moment the tension of his body slackened from confusion, Sieg lunged forward. The two of them whipped their arms, twisting blades back and forth in wild slashes. The back and forth clash of steel rang out like the beat of music until blood began to wet the sand.

Both men came to realize that they were being let down by their own weapons. The swords were cheaply made, mass produced by blacksmith apprentices using passed down, secondhand methods. The steel itself had been reforged from earlier steel time and time again, salvaged from battlefields and hammered back into the crude shape of a blade. What they each held were thick and blunt, they swung pendulously with a life of their own, recoiling off one another. Even when they slashed flesh, the weapon bogged down in cloth and fat.

But of the two warriors, Sieg was the more fit and the more trained. His stigmata had already stitched together his pierced heart and closed his stomach. It had transmogrified wine to blood and maintained his youthful vigor. But he had fought nearly a dozen men already.

The bandits Muharib had brought with him were slow to join the fray, loathe to throw themselves into the flurry of blades. The doctor’s lie had been of a hostage, that their chief’s woman would be killed on the spot; but, she was already gone and yet Muharib had not changed his orders. Every moment that passed made them more convinced that orders didn’t matter: that they should jump in to run the Vassish boy through.

So, despite his other advantages, Sieg had to press the fight, press his luck, and he took a chance with an overhead chop. In a sense, it was a sloppy thing, the way Leomund would have fought but without the mass of muscle that northern bear possessed. Sieg could only try to imitate the ferocity and smashed the edge of his blade down.

He landed upon Muharib’s fingerguard, where the steel had been riveted to the handle. Alas, it was his battered blade which erupted. Steel and wood shattered in every direction, shrapnel flying in both of their faces. They reeled, feeling the hot sting of blood.

The bandit chief blinked and grinned a shark’s toothy grin. Up raised his own blade to return the blow.

Training took over. Sieg leapt forward. His hands closed around Muharib’s sword arm. The bandit roared and tried to grab him off, but his other hand was the arm Sieg had run through with the blade only that morning. His grip failed. Sieg pushed himself on, jumping off the ground and swinging. He wrenched the older man’s arm around and pulled him off his feet. Both of them hit the sand. They rolled and grappled. Limbs flailed. Up and down the sword was waved, slapping against the sand. Muharib found himself above Sieg and drove a shoulder into the boy. He hammered his entire weight against the bandages across his gut.

Sieg cried out in pain, but didn’t lose his grip. He had no wound left to split open there. His focus never left the task at hand. He snapped Muharib’s little finger, pried it straight off the handle of the sword until it bent in half and the bandit howled. But, he didn’t try to take the sword. He instead smashed his sandaled foot into Muharib’s face. Something cracked.

The man went slack.

Then, Sieg took the sword from his grasp. The other bandits realized too late who had gotten the better of the grapple. They jumped forward, spears upraised.

“Stop,” Vita ordered, rising up with the sun to her back. She no longer had the form of a mere snake, but that of a woman from the waist up. The beautiful visage of the painting, bare to the skin. She scowled down at him. “Violence disgusts me. I, as an emissary of the gods, command you–”

Sieg stabbed Muharib through the chest. The older man’s sternum cracked. Blood squirted free. He convulsed and choked. He groped at Sieg’s arm, at the sword, at the boy’s neck. In but an instant, he was too feeble to even close his hands.

All stared at him. The bandits looked to Vita for guidance, born servants that they were, but she was at a loss for words.

My crow landed behind Sieg and cawed twice.