Chapter 3: Homeward Bound
A day out from the town, the road climbed into forest.
It was the first real green Ember had walked into in years. She had seen it from the tavern windows — a line of trees on the far side of town she had never had a reason to reach — and now she was inside it, and she kept stopping without meaning to. A shaft of light through the canopy. A bird she did not have a name for. She would catch herself and hurry to close the gap, and then she would stop again.
Jet watched her do it twice before he said anything.
“You ever been out of that town before?”
“Not in a long time.” She caught up. “I talked to people, though. The tavern brought merchants from all over. I know the country by what they told me about it.”
“Sure,” Noel said.
That was all he said.
They walked. After a while Ember made herself say the thing she had been carrying since the door.
“I don’t think I said thank you. For making me leave. I wouldn’t have, on my own.” A breath. “But I’m not sure you understand what you’ve taken on. I was sold to him. The people who sold me have a reputation. The kind you don’t just walk away from. They’ll send someone after me.”
“Oh, they’ll send someone.” Jet kept walking. “Trafficking’s good business in this part of the country. Whole networks. We’ll probably learn a few useful things about them before this is over.” He said it with no more weight than he’d given the weather. “And we’re good at keeping people. You’ll be all right.”
“Why take the risk, though?” It came out smaller than she wanted. “I don’t have a single thing that’s useful to you. I don’t want to seem ungrateful — I’m not — but you’re putting a target on your backs for nothing.”
Jet turned and walked backward a few steps so he could look at her. He was smiling, and the smile was warm, which unsettled her more than a cold one would have.
“For nothing,” he said. “Who told you it was for nothing?”
He faced forward again. Before he did, his eyes went to Noel. Just for a moment.
Noel said nothing. He was watching the trees.
It was not an answer, and Ember turned it over and could not find the catch in it. Whatever Jet wasn’t telling her, there was no cruelty under it. That was as far as she got.
By afternoon the road met the forest proper — older trees, the light gone thick and green between them. Jet stopped at the edge of it and let out a breath.
“Finally.”
“Finally what?”
“Half a day past this and we’re home. Real food.” He tore a piece off the bread he’d been working at since morning and chewed it without joy. “Instead of this.”
* * *
Two hours into the trees, Jet set his hand on Ember’s shoulder. Easy. Friendly. Anyone watching would have thought he was pointing something out.
“Don’t react to this,” he said. “We’re being followed.”
Her breath went shallow. She kept her feet moving.
“It’s been a day,” she whispered. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” Noel said. “Two. Maybe three.”
“I can go back.” The words came fast and low. “It won’t be that bad. The ones they send for runaways are good — better than good. I’m telling you, I’m not worth this.”
Jet didn’t answer at first. They walked. A bird went up off to the left and her heart went up with it.
“Did I ever tell you what we’re called?”
She stared at him. “What?”
“The group. I don’t think I ever said.”
“No, but I don’t see how that—”
“People call us Owls.” He said it without hurry, as if they had the whole afternoon. “You know what an owl’s meant to stand for?”
She was going to get them killed and he was making conversation. She answered because answering was something to do with her mouth that wasn’t screaming.
“Wisdom,” she said. “Intelligence.”
“Good.” His voice had not changed at all. It was the same voice he’d used for the bread and the scenery. “Most mercenaries sell their swords. We don’t, much. We sell what we know. There’s nobody better in the country at finding things out.” He stepped over a root without looking down. “The others fight for the name. For who gets to tell the story after. We don’t much care who tells the story.” A beat. “When we fight, it’s for each other. That’s the only reason worth the trouble.”
“But you just met me.” She could barely get it out. “How am I worth that?”
“Because you said yes.” He looked down at her. The smile again, and under it something warmer. “That’s all it takes. You said yes. Now you’re one of us.” A breath. “We’re Owls. We protect our own.”
He winked.
“Brace yourself.”
Noel had her off her feet before she understood she’d been lifted.
He ran.
The forest came apart around her in green and brown. Behind them she heard the soft, fast sound of arrows finding dirt — a line of them stitching the ground where they had been standing. She twisted in Noel’s arms and got one last look at Jet, the short sword already in his hand and the gold one still sheathed at his hip, and then the trees closed and he was gone.
“Wait.” She grabbed Noel’s shoulder. “We can’t just leave him—”
“Don’t underestimate him.” Noel did not slow. “He won’t lose.”
* * *
Jet stood in the small clearing and waited for them to come down.
They came down. Two of them, dropping out of the canopy and landing soft, knees bent. Good armor — the kind you bought with a reputation already behind you. They straightened and looked him over, two men who had decided how this ended before it started.
Jet had the short sword out in his right hand. His left rested on the hilt of the scimitar at his hip and stayed there.
“Nobody has to bleed,” he said. “Name a number. I’ll pay it, and you’ll have never found us.”
The taller one smiled. They both drew.
“It isn’t about money, mercenary.” He turned the blade once in the light. “It’s about what gets said if we come back empty.” The smile widened. “Anyway. We can take the money off you after.”
He came in.
Jet caught the first cut and turned it aside. The second man was already behind him, and Jet was already turning, and caught that one too. After that he stopped trying to track where they both were and only kept moving, and the moving was all defense. They were fast. They were good. Better than the captain and his drunks by a long way.
They broke apart, breathing.
“All that gold on your hip.” The shorter one nodded at the scimitar. “And you won’t draw it.”
“I like a challenge,” Jet said.
They came again, harder.
He gave ground. He took a cut across the ribs and another down the forearm and kept his feet, and still neither of them could put the last one in. That was the thing starting to show on their faces — not that he was beating them, but that they could not finish him.
“Why won’t he die?” One of them said it to the other, not to Jet.
Jet’s arm was getting heavy. A cut over his eyebrow had filled the eye with blood, and he dragged it clear with the back of his wrist, and it filled again. His left hand was still on the gold hilt. He looked down at it.
He thought about using it longer than he wanted to.
The arrow came out of the trees.
It took the taller man by surprise — he got an arm up in time and it went into the forearm instead of his skull. He staggered back swearing, cradling it. Jet did not waste the gift. He stepped in and kicked the man off his feet and onto his back.
The other turned, hunting the branches for where it had come from.
A second arrow dropped from a different tree entirely.
He caught it on his sword, barely. “Two of you?” he shouted up at the leaves.
Then they came from everywhere — left, right, above, one after another into the dirt around their boots, faster than two men could read. They could fight Jet or they could dodge. Not both.
The taller one threw his blade down.
“Enough. Enough — we yield.”
Their hands went up.
Jet lifted one of his toward the trees, and the arrows quit.
He walked over to them slowly, the short sword loose in his grip, blood down one side of his face.
“Here’s what happened today.” His voice had gone friendly again, which was worse. “You found the runaway. There was a fight. You killed the two men traveling with her, and the girl died in it. All three, dead. You’ll tell your boss exactly that.” He let them look at the sword. “If it ever comes back to me that you told it any other way, I’ll come and find where you sleep. Understood?”
They understood.
“Then go.”
They went, the hurt one half-dragged between them, crashing back through the brush toward the open ground. Jet watched until the sound of them was gone. Then he slid the short sword home, put his hands on his knees, and breathed.
“That winded? Already?”
The voice came down from the branches above him.
Jet huffed something close to a laugh. A woman dropped out of the high boughs and landed in front of him, light, barely a sound. Black hair pulled back hard off a sharp face, a long bow already slung across her back and a quiver at her hip. About his age. She held his gaze and did not soften it.
“The tree-hopping was a nice touch,” Jet said, still bent over. “Made it feel like two of you. Thanks, Becca.”
Becca tossed him her water skin. “Lucky for you I was out hunting. Saw Noel tearing back toward camp with a kid under his arm. Said you’d gotten into something.”
Jet drank long and gave it back. He went and sat on a fallen log before his legs decided it for him.
“Servant girl. The tavern Noel and I put up in.” He pressed his sleeve to the cut over his eye. “Trafficked there. Knocked around. We told her she could come if she wanted. She wanted.”
“A servant girl.” Becca crouched and dug a pot of ointment and a needle out of her satchel. “And what’s different about this one?”
Jet winced as the needle went in above his eye.
“Couldn’t tell you. Wasn’t my call to make.” He held still for the next stitch. “Hour out of town, Noel went strange on me. Started saying we had to go back for her. Wouldn’t let it go.”
“Strange how?”
“Strange for Noel.” Jet shrugged with the shoulder that didn’t hurt. “I gave him the last of my drink and my word we’d bring her along. That settled him.”
Becca tied off the thread and looked at him a moment, and did not say what she was thinking.
“Could be a hundred things,” Jet said, before she could. “Who knows what goes on in there.”
His stomach made a sound loud enough that Becca glanced at it.
“You carrying any food?”
She pulled a wrapped sandwich out of her pack and put it in his hand, and got him up off the log with the other, and they started back through the trees toward camp.
Neither of them said anything else the whole way.
The Silent Beggar's Anthology 