For Everything There is a Season (Lavinet, Ayla, Blade's Story)

[Content warning: fairly intense horror, canon-typical violence, some gore, adult language.]

Part I: The Song Remains the Same 

Part II: The Rest is Silence 

Part III: For Everything There is a Season

Stressful situations, Lavinet had come to realize, were essentially every Shepherd’s bread and butter.

She had expected as much when she joined up: the situation with the Elementals back home had been dealt with remarkable aplomb by Tallys, Briony, Ayla, and their captain, despite the extraordinary context of an entire extinct race dropping back into the world out of nowhere. And from the stories and reverent whispers, it hadn’t even been half as strenuous as, say, facing down a Faceless Lord in the guise of a Hierophant, or being trapped in an alternate world made of nightmares and dreams. Compared to those experiences, the Elementals had been a few dinners and a tense conversation. It seemed a Shepherd had to be prepared for anything: it even said so in the confused handbook she’d been given on the first day she’d arrived at the Order.

She had once thought that she kept a cool head under fire, had once prided herself on her ability to think quickly in crisis. Foolish, foolish. ‘Crisis’ to her had meant social fires, scandals—the ability to turn arguments in her favor, to deflect negative attention to more vulnerable targets, without anyone ever realizing she had done it. She hadn’t deluded herself into thinking that the Shepherds were going to be anything like that—she knew the danger, though she avoided looking at the death statistics—but she had thought her skills in that arena would at least translate.

Well. She had adjusted—she thought admirably—to her new circumstances with a sense of grace and composure. She was careful to never complain, at least not in earshot of any of the recruits—many of whom seemed to resent her for her higher station in life, her privilege. (She couldn’t blame them: looking at it from their perspectives, she would loathe her, too.) She worked and trained tirelessly, threw herself into situations that she could easily pass off to Mage or Ket or Hunter betters who could tackle them with far less risk and effort. She refused to let her inexperience, her sheltered life, define her. She would be put through her paces, the same as any other raw green recruit. So far, she thought, she seemed to be doing well.

She’d even faced down her first few demons admirably, to the point where even Blade had commended her—in his tight, unreadable way, as if too overt of a kindness would unravel him, like a doll with a stray thread you were afraid to pull. Combat, so far, hadn’t seemed to be an issue for her, though she was under no delusions that she could ever match the likes of Ayla or Briony (or, infuriatingly, Trouble and Chase, Norm like her but in an entirely different league of their own). She had even out-jousted Red and his inane warhammer during practice, though someone had teased her about it afterwards and likened it to kicking a good-natured dog—it was meant to be a joking slight at Red’s expense, part of the honest, soldierly banter she was still trying to understand, perhaps participate in. But afterwards she had wept in frustration in her room, because it stung, how easily they had punctured her sense of accomplishment. Red was a Mage: he could summon fire from thin air, slip through the fabric of the world as easily as a needle through the pleats of a skirt. She was a girl on a horse with a blunted lance, and she had beathim—but few of the others could understand. Not even Riel could: he, at least, had his superior intellect to stand shoulder to shoulder with the others. She had nothing more to contribute, aside from money and some tenuous connections. With the Shepherds, she was just another face in the crowd.

Still, she bore it up, and over time, she began to hear murmurs of approval from strangers and once-embittered recruits as she walked past. Hands reached to help her up whenever she toppled into the dust during training. She had impressed them with her uncomplaining nature, she could tell—at least she had that going for her. Father had always called her another Jizania Tiger, the second Lady of Steel; he’d always said she had nerves of iron.

But this? This situation with Heloise? It was testing her, fraying her nerves in a way that she hadn’t anticipated.

Why? She had spent most of the night puzzling over the answer while she waited for the physicker to finish treating their charge. Maybe it was because Heloise reminded her too much of other women she knew. With just wrong one turn in the road, this poor girl with her unborn child could have been anyone: Clara, one of her sisters, perhaps even Lavinet herself. She knew the terror, tightly-clamped, that lingered in the noblewoman’s eyes. The helplessness, the near-mania that came with having no control over one’s fate. She was too close to the situation, as Blade would put it: so she tried to distance herself, tried not to look too closely.

But it was wearing on her. Lavinet felt the press of exhaustion, numbing at first, and then slowly simmering to frustration and anxiety. There were too many variables at play: the young woman’s health, her reticence, the perils of her situation—both immediate and long-term. Lavinet was finding that her thoughts were becoming scattered; she hated thinking about what was going to happen when they reached their destination. She didn’t know what to do.

She didn’t know what to do.

“—bandages. Now, Lavinet. Lavinet Naveen.”

She snapped back into herself, then hissed in a breath: God, had she lost focus now? Blade was staring at her with his dark, impatient eyes, his usually stoic expression lively with fury now. Whether that anger was directed at her incompetence or at their enemies, Lavinet couldn’t say. She shook herself a little. “I’m sorry,” she said faintly. “What did you say?”

Blade made a clicking sound with his jaw at her, some Ket demand for obedience, not intended to be rude—then pointed to one of the packs in the corner of the cave. He was cradling Ayla’s head between his hands, carefully, like he was trying to hold together a cracked egg. Lavinet’s stomach churned.

She went to the packs and pulled out bandages, helped Blade examine the mess at the back of Ayla’s skull. It wasn’t as bad as it looked, she thought—scalp wounds bled a lot, but there wasn’t damage to her head so much as a shallow cut that dripped profusely. She’d have a goose egg there in the morning, but Lavinet didn’t think there would be permanent injury. Then again, what did she know? She wasn’t a medical expert, no matter how much they looked to her to determine what was going on with Heloise.

God, Heloise. That poor girl was out there, in the rain, with those demon spawn and God knew what else. Ayla let out a kind of rattling breath and began to stir.

“Good, she’s rousing,” Blade said, his voice clipped but his relief evident in the minute relaxing of his shoulders. He picked up his sword and went out into the rain again, kneeling to look at the ground, glancing up frequently to check for the approach of any asag.

Lavinet dampened a cloth with some water and held it near Ayla’s lips: she feared she would choke if she tried pouring anything down the Wind-Mage’s throat. Ayla pushed away the rag and said, without opening her eyes: “What happened?” Her voice sounded terrible, as cracked and dry as sandpaper.

“Shh,” Lavinet said softly, trying to push her back down. “Don’t move too much. You hit your head.” Too late, she realized that she’d misspoken: it sounded like Ayla had simply had a bad fall. Someone hit your head. Someone attacked you and now Heloise is gone.

“Ngh,” Ayla said eloquently, and fell silent for a moment. Blade returned, the rain dripping from his hair and into his eyes, and Lavinet thought for the twelfth time—he needs a haircut. The Ket said, “No blood or signs of struggle. I can make out footprints, but we need to hurry, or the rain will wash them away.”

“You go ahead, then,” Lavinet said, her heart fluttering uneasily in her throat. “I’ll stay with Ayla, and then when she recovers, we’ll follow you.” Somehow, in the middle of a storm, with the asag lurking around.But she had to be brave: if someone didn’t pursue Heloise, they would lose her. Then, seeing the look on Blade’s face, she said, “What?”

He was frowning deeply. “Asag don’t leave footprints,” he said quietly. “They’re—like slugs, at best, or insects—or they float, and they don’t leave any trail at all. But I see men’s boot prints.”

They stared at each other for a moment, and Lavinet said, now a little breathless: “The bandits from earlier? You think they would dare?”

He made a low, growling sound in his chest that she didn’t recognize; if anything, he looked more annoyed than worried, as if he couldn’t believe their gall. “They must have followed our trail, or otherwise known we were heading here beforehand—they might know the area well enough to believe this was the only feasible place we could have found shelter.”

“Persistent little pests,” she murmured, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say; her thoughts were awhirl. The bandits probably wouldn’t harm Heloise, if they still meant to use her as ransom… or would they? She’d heard terrible things about what happened to brides who were kidnapped on their way to the altar. And there were still the god damn asag.

Suddenly Ayla sat up; then she howled in pain, her hands flying up to touch the back of her bandaged head.

“Idiot,” Blade hissed, reaching over and hauling her back down by the collar—and none-too-gently. “What are you doing?”

“Heloise is gone?” she asked, heedless. Her voice was thick with pain and the beginnings of panic. She looked around wildly, her hair nearly whipping Lavinet in the face like a length of rope, then blurted, “We heard voices outside—voices I didn’t recognize.”

“The asag,” Lavinet said, but Ayla shook her head.

“I dunno. I heard a bird call, first, and then someone calling Heloise’s name.” She touched her head again, more gingerly, and then hissed her displeasure. Still, the bandages held, and her fingers came away unbloodied. “I remember looking out into the rain… calling out for you two… Someone threw a rock, but it landed short. And then everything went black.”

Beside her, Blade stiffened.

“We need to go after them,” Ayla mumbled, clambering to her feet; Lavinet reached to help her, but the Wind-Mage batted her hands away—she was never good with pain, it made her surly and ill-tempered—and clutched at her quarterstaff instead. “I couldn’t have been out that long. If we hurry—we can catch them—”

“Wait,” Blade said.

“Ayla is right,” Lavinet said, thinking about the fading tracks, “the longer we delay, the higher the chances that something terrible will befall her. Those bandits might harm her—or they might run into the asag—”

“Wait, I said.”

They both looked at him. Blade’s face was drawn, hard to see in the shadows of the cave. A streak of lightning burst through the sky, and in its flash she saw hard, grim realization darkening his eyes.

Lavinet’s heart tightened. “What is it?” she asked, breathless all over again.

Blade didn’t speak for a moment, clearly working it through. When he finally spoke, his voice was overly calm, controlled, as if he were struggling not to shout. “We found Ayla knocked out, facing the opening of the cave,” he said slowly. “And she heard voices coming from outside, in the rain.”

“Right,” Ayla said, impatient. She rubbed at her head again and grimaced.

“And no one got inside the cave itself.”

“No. I was staring right at the entrance when I got knocked out.”

“So that means you were struck from behind. And the only person who could have been behind you…”

Lavinet’s stomach dropped.

“Heloise,” she whispered. She’d waited until they were gone, waited until Ayla was distracted, and then struck her from behind and made her escape…

Shit.

Ayla’s eyes bulged; her hands tightened into fists.

“That bitch,” she breathed. “We’ve been conned.”

#

The trek through the storm was one of the most miserable nights of Lavinet’s life—and she’d had a few bad ones. They had to pack their things in the matchbox and leave it and the horses tethered in the high, dry cave, with the ahfuri to guard them. The water on the ground was rising fast, now, swelling out of the marshes with the rain: Ayla could lift them out of it in a pinch if she had to, but it was too risky riding their mounts. With just one wrong step, they could all be swept away. As it was, she was already struggling in the knee-high water: it wasn’t fast-moving, thank God, and it didn’t have a current, but it was coming through the tops of her boots and sloshing around her feet, and she kept feeling the brush of weeds and slimy green things, and thunder cracked ominously overhead. She kept thinking about something stupid Trouble had told her, about how there were snakes that swam, and how he had seen one slipping through a river in the Bleakmoor with a swamp rat clamped in its mouth, and she kept wondering if there were any in this part of the great marsh.

To make matters worse, Ayla was cursing up her own veritable storm, hurling epithets and insults at Heloise’s name as if the noblewoman herself was there to be stoned by them.

“Kakking, miserable little zib,” she railed. “When I get my hands on her, I’m going to wring her scrawny little sharmooti neck—”

This went on for quite a while. At least she had forgotten all about her head injury, once she’d slapped some healing salve on it. Small mercies, Lavinet told herself.

The other reprieve—at least for now—was that the asag had disappeared, likely driven off by the ferocious storm. Blade had warned that they might be back, though, and they had decided to use a mixture of code words and flare signals before he’d taken off into the underbrush alone. He did some sort of Ket thing where he traveled by leaping through the trees like some sort of flying squirrel. Ayla and Lavinet were left to pick their way across the ground like drowning ants.

“Here’s what we know,” she said to the Wind-Mage when they decided to stop for a quick break, finding meager shelter into the hollow of a large tree, though rain still dripped on their heads from above. They didn’t need to worry about the footprints, anymore; those had long since been washed away, and it was up to Blade to hunt down their enemy through whatever tricks he’d picked up as an assassin. Lavinet and Ayla were merely following the passing marks he made on the trees. “Heloise is either working with this group of men, or she was coerced into working with them, or she changed her mind after what happened today and decided to throw in her lot with them in the spur of the moment.”

“Which means she’s working with them,” Ayla said impatiently, wiping the water out of her eyes. Her braid hung lankly on her shoulder like a dead thing. “Doesn’t matter when she decided to do it, or why. She’s working with them, and she waited until they distracted me to knock me out and run. Nothing coerced about that.”

“She could have been threatened, or blackmailed, or—”

“Oh, save it,” Ayla hissed. “Don’t take her side just because she’s one of your own. She’s a traitor and a coward, through and through. She had plenty of chances to come clean to us, if she was scared or in trouble, and she never breathed a word. She’s on their side. She’s the enemy.”

That stung: not the part about Heloise being their adversary, but Ayla’s implication that Lavinet would side with her merely because of their shared noble background. Things like that always came out in the heat of the moment, she was noticing: whenever people were angry, her heritage and status got brought up. You bathed in milk as a child; you would never understand.Or: how would you know what I’m going through? Not all of us have a million deucalions to comfort them at the end of a hard day. Her mouth twisted. It was beginning to feel like she was a scapegoat: like she had made some mistake—a mistake of birth, of existing—and was constantly trying to atone for it. Well, to Hael with that. It wasn’t her fault that Heloise was a snake.

Ayla saw her mistake instantly and set her jaw, looking stubborn and muleish, and for a moment Lavinet thought they were going to have a terrific row, right there in the inside of this sodden, flimsy tree. But then the Wind-Mage looked away again.

“Sorry,” she mumbled, clutching her arms tightly and letting out a big, gusty breath. “I didn’t mean… that part. That was shitty of me.”

Oh. Feeling charitable, Lavinet tried to give her a reassuring smile; she was sure it looked ghoulish, since her makeup must be running. “It’s fine.”

“Nah, it’s not.” Ayla’s voice could hardly be heard over the pattering of the rain. “It’s not your fault she ran. If anything, it’s mine. Shouldn’t take it out on you.” She looked out into the rain, the curl of her mouth bitter. “Taken out by a fucking—pregnant unarmed waif. She probably beaned me over the head with a rock. I’ll never live it down.”

“I won’t breathe a word of it to anyone,” Lavinet said, trying to be light about it.

“Good. Though Blade looks like he’s going to fire me, soon as this shitstorm is over.”

“He would never.”

“I dunno. He looks rightly pissed.”

“He’s angry at them, at Heloise for harming you—and maybe a little at himself, for falling for it. He was the one who let her dictate the traveling pace, remember? And now we see that she wanted to hurry so she could rendezvous with her—people. Maybe if he’d kept her at the inn, this wouldn’t have happened.” She wasn’t blaming Blade, only guessing at his thought process. “She fooled us all. He would never be angry at you.” When Ayla shifted, considering her words, Lavinet laid a comforting hand on her arm and made herself laugh a little, easy and light, as if this all was a very silly thing to entertain. She was mainly bluffing, though: she thought she knew Blade, knew how honorable and forthright he was, and she was good at reading people—but sometimes he surprised her. “Is that what’s been bothering you?”

Ayla’s face took on an expression that reminded Lavinet, a little, of a panicked, cornered animal. She’d seen that look on the Wind-Mage before, whenever Ayla realized she was getting a little too comfortable with the Shepherds. She was aware that Ayla had been on her own for all of her life: she thought, sometimes, that Ayla held herself so far apart from everyone else because she was afraid that the pain of attaching herself to them—and then losing them—would take her to the brink of somewhere she adamantly didn’t want to be. Sometimes she got a look like she was aware she was walking on the edge of a precipice; during those times, she always seemed like she was thinking about turning and running for her life.

Finally Ayla rasped out, very reluctant: “If I get dishonorably discharged, I don’t get my annual bonus. And after all I’ve done for these chits, I damn well deserve it.”

Lavinet tittered, nervously. Now was not the time to press the Wind-Mage on whatever emotional mores she was hanging on to. Ayla’s shoulders relaxed a little, though, and she said, sounding tired now: “Mostly I’m just… mad.” She paused for a moment. “Do you think she’s even pregnant?”

“She is,” Lavinet said, and this, she was absolutely sure of. She’d felt the movement of the baby herself. “But as for the rest—I don’t know what to think.”

Ayla grunted, and they fell silent, looking out into the storm and bracing themselves to charge back into it. After another moment, the Wind-Mage said: “And to think we thought this mission would be easy.”

Lavinet didn’t know if she wanted to laugh or cry; it seemed like yesterday that they had been giggling about it together, at some bar in some nameless town, a little punch-drunk and glowing from the success of their last mission, reading over the orders to divert from their trajectory home.

“That’s the funny thing,” she said, thinking of how they’d taken bets on how quickly they could get the whole thing over with—they hadn’t even known that Blade would tag along, then. “I’m starting to realize that nothing comes easy, not when you’re a Shepherd.”

Ayla was silent for a moment, contemplating that. “I guess if it were easy,” she said finally, “the world wouldn’t need us in the first place.”

That heartened Lavinet, impossibly. She drew her hood up over her hair. The thunder overhead reverberated through her breastbone like a gong. “Let’s find Heloise.”

#

It felt like they ran for hours, wading through endless water, which had retreated to about calf height. In the distance, they could still hear low rumblings and sudden drumbeats of thunder, near and far, deadly close and then stupidly distant; the sky screamed with light and fire. It was hard to see Blade’s markings through the dark, but he guided them capably, like some sort of phantom messenger leaving scribblings and prophecies on temple walls.

Lavinet’s eyes weren’t as keen as Ayla’s in the dark, so she let the Wind-Mage pick where to run: all the while, she tried to puzzle out Heloise’s state of mind. All right, so the noblewoman was either actively conspiring with the bandits or was at least cooperating with them. Why? The best that she could come up with was that the woman intended to let herself be ransomed: either her father or her fiancé would pay the bride price for her safe return, and then—what? Would she split the money with the bandits and run? How did she know she could trust them not to take it all for themselves, or cut her throat at the end of it all? How did she even know them?

Did that shadow by that tree move, or was that only the disorientating flicker of lightning?

Ayla grabbed her suddenly. “Fucking Hael—”

She shoved Lavinet down. Lavinet fell into water, and the world went quiet and loud at once: all she could hear was the churning of the marsh and rush of noise around her ears, and screams in the distance and muffled, croaking cackles, and then the dull roar of thunder or gunfire. Ayla’s hand was warm and strong between her shoulder blades, and for a terrifying instant, Lavinet wondered if this was what it was like to be held down and drowned.

And then the weight on her back lifted, abruptly, and Lavinet’s knees touched the soft, soupy ground at the bottom of the rainwater, and she floundered up and broke the surface with a desperate gasp.

She raked the long, tangled tresses out of her eyes—why hadn’t she cut it like Briony when she had the chance—and looked around, calling out despite herself. Rain whipped against her face in furious, painful lashes. The wind screamed.

Nothing. Ayla was nowhere to be seen. But all around her, she suddenly saw movement, each flash of lightning presenting frozen moments like a terrible tableau: she saw people running, saw things dropping down on them from above, immaterial shapes like boiling clouds or swarms of flies. One man had a rifle on his shoulder, and light bloomed from its end in time with the lightning, making his face look like it was set aflame. She saw the open mouths that meant people were shouting, trying to talk to each other—but it was all drowned out by the storm, by the screams of things that didn’t make sense: marsupial screeches, drunk laughter. She saw the crumpled remains of something—a tent—rush past her in the water, and then a flailing goat. God, they’d stumbled right into the middle of the bandit camp, without even realizing it, blind in all of the noise and chaos of the storm. And the asag were in the middle of attacking. Where the Hael was Ayla? She couldn’t see a thing.

Then she felt, rather than spotted, something large moving in the tree above her. For a flicker of time she hoped against hope that it was Blade, but no such luck—the thing was dropping down on her like a bat. Lavinet rolled out of the way and whipped her saber out from her belt, hacking, slashing, almost totally blind; her sword went through the thing like it was made of mist, and it dissipated into curls of black, acrid smoke almost immediately. At least these Tainted things were easy to kill, so long as they didn’t get the jump on you.

Most unnerving of all was how the creature screamed in Ayla’s voice as it died: “Fucking Hael!”

Lavinet’s blood ran cold.

Another man, a bandit, was not too far away from where she was still half-kneeling in the water. As she watched, another asag dropped on him, boiling with movement, and the man was screaming as if it were flaying him alive with a whip. He dropped to his knees, clawing at his face, which was hidden by the smoke-like body, suffocated by the vaporous mass that formed the creature’s essence. And then his screams choked off, and his arms fell to his sides, and he slumped down into the water, bleeding from lesions and lacerations that had appeared all over his flesh. Lavinet watched, sick, as more asag descended from the trees and converged on the twitching corpse, swarming and thrashing with glee. St. Clayr help her. They were tearing him apart like piranhas.

She felt that cool battle-readiness settling over her: the one her master-at-arms had always trained her for, the one that only true crisis could snap you into. She took a moment to scan the battlefield: there were still no signs of Blade or Ayla. She could light a flare, but doing so might attract all of the asag in the area to her position—and there looked to be dozens of them, perhaps drawn to the bandit camp’s numbers like mosquitos to blood. As awful as it sounded, it was more advantageous for her to use these numbers to her advantage. It kept the asag spread out and preoccupied, rather than concentrated all on one place. Or one person. Namely her.

So. What now? She had no hope of finding Heloise in all of this mayhem, and no way to know how to rendezvous with the others. Right now, the best she could do was survive the assault, and hope she could figure things out later.

Another asag leapt at her, and Lavinet cut through it as easily as if someone had lobbed a ball of yarn at her. This one felt a bit more solid than the first: more like cutting through a sheet of water, rather than air. It seemed they gained more substance, solidified somehow, the more people they consumed. That made sense: other Endarkened were like that, only gaining the strength to anchor themselves to this plane without a vessel to shield them once they absorbed enough violence and power. She wiped her mouth, ran another one through and pierced it against a tree as it writhed and screamed. She could see why the asag’s preferred method was luring someone out with stolen voices, to catch them unawares. Less risk to themselves, when they were so easily killed. They were employing those stolen voices liberally even now: all around her was a steady, droning cacophony of sounds, all mimicking human life at its most mundane. She heard a merchant braying to his assistant to mind the horses. She heard the cry of a baby. God, she hoped there wasn’t a baby here in this camp. Or multiple. Oh, Heloise.

She picked a direction—back where they came, because it had a traceable path with Blade’s tree-marks, and she was pretty sure there hadn’t been any asag that way. It seemed others around her had the same idea; there were some people splashing in the same direction, pointing, shouting—but whenever she looked away and then glanced back, they were gone in the next lightning flash. Absolutely eerie.

Lavinet ran, tearing blindly through the rain, banging her calves on floating logs and treacherous, upturned tree roots trying to snag her ankles from under the water. Once she nearly fell and twisted her ankle, and she felt the cold, phantom touch of death then, almost closing over her heart before she forced herself up.

Then she heard a voice, to the left of her, just a kind of whimper, and it sent such a blaze up her nerves that she nearly gasped with the force of it. Still, she didn’t want to look at the voice, not at first—she didn’t want to fall for the asag’s tricks again.

“Lady!”

Lavinet looked. For a moment, she saw and heard nothing, and she wondered if it had been a trick of the mind—but then there was another soft cry, sharply cut off, and she saw it. There, in the hollow of a tree very similar to the one she’d rested in with Ayla, was Heloise. She was pressed almost out of sight by the larger bulk of the bandit leader they had captured earlier, the man who had been wearing the fox mask: Rikash the Terrible. He had one hand covering Heloise’s mouth, and one hand holding his dagger ready for attack. His eyes met Lavinet’s through the storm, and his mouth tightened dangerously for a moment.

But Lavinet thought, Oh, to Hael with it, and she splashed over, one arm over her head as if that could shield her from any asag lurking in the trees.

“Have you seen my people?” she hissed, hoping they could hear her over the rain.

Rikash the Terrible beckoned angrily with the dagger. It wasn’t an aggressive gesture, necessarily; it was almost as if he’d forgotten he was holding it. “Get away,” he hissed back. “You’ll give away our position!”

Some leader he was, she thought with a flare of anger—hiding away while his people died all around him. Hadn’t he said there were children in his camp?

“Some position,” Lavinet retorted, ice and acid all at once. “If I could see you, you know damn well they will, too. They’re only too preoccupied with feasting on the flesh of your men to take any notice of you, but that will change.” She glanced behind her; no sign of them yet, but then, they were hard to see unless you were quite close.

Rikash bared his teeth, and Lavinet readied her saber—she’d knock it out of his hand or even cut the whole limb off if she had to—before Heloise said, her voice startlingly clear: “Captain Bronwyn is at the vanguard of the camp, where the majority of the lookouts and barricades were. He’s holding off dozens, maybe hundreds, of those monsters. Some of our people were helping him while the mothers and children tried to get away. But it was—a battlefield, we couldn’t tell what was happening. They closed in, and we couldn’t see him anymore.”

“He might not be there,” Rikash allowed reluctantly. “Or he might be dead.”

Never. “And Ayla? The woman?” She cut a look at Heloise, who flinched as if she’d struck her.

Rikash shook his head. “She did something—with her staff, made the wind blow some of the creatures away. But then two of them caught her, and the bigger ones—the one who have fed—have a trick of picking you up and disappearing with you into the canopy. She leapt up into the air with them and flew out of sight.”

Lavinet scanned her surroundings again, but all she could make out were black-and-white shadows, the distant sounds of people whimpering. Maybe the sound of someone laughing, whispering to themselves? Oh, God. “Why are you here?” She looked to Rikash. “Why didn’t you stay to help your people?”

He made a face, gestured to Heloise’s stomach. “I had to protect her and the baby.”

She bared her teeth a little. “You shouldn’t have brought them into a massacre, then.” She was safe with us.

It was cruel, but she could tell by the sullen, surly way his shoulders curled that he knew she was right. Still, that didn’t matter now. Lavinet said, “You have to follow me. If we work together, maybe we can find shelter, a defensible position—”

The whispering was growing louder. Heloise’s face paled, and Rikash said, his eyes sharp: “Let’s go.”

They turned and ran together, tracing her steps with the tree-marks. Lavinet thought, stupidly, that she wished the rain would stop, because it was getting damned annoying. She did not stop to wonder at this reversal of fortunes. Chase always said that demons—and demon-blooded things—always had a curious way of bringing people together, even enemies. It made the Autarchy work with the Diminished, nobles work with peasants, soldiers work with bandits.

“People want another hand to hold, when they’re looking into the face of hell,” he’d joked.

“I thought you always said that hell is other people,” she’d said, citing a favorite phrase of his.

He’d gone quiet. This was after the nightmare demon, after whatever he’d seen in the heart of the swamp. “I was wrong,” he’d said, very simply.

Well. A Shepherd always had to be prepared for the unexpected.

#

They didn’t find a defensible position, or even any other people who could join them, but eventually the sounds of the fighting and dying faded, and they slowed their bumbling crash through the underbrush to skid under some bushes, planted high enough on a slate-grey little ridge that they were above the waterline, and they only had to worry about not losing their grip on the slick rock. Lavinet made sure to maneuver to keep Heloise between herself and Rikash: she was not about to let him run off with her again, and—she felt a little guilty for thinking this of a pregnant woman—he would have to scrabble over her in order to get to Lavinet, which made an attack from his quarter unlikely. She could not forget that Heloise was a threat, too—she had brained Ayla unconscious, after all—but Lavinet kept her hand on her saber hilt and watched them both.

After a few minutes of shivering together under the shrubbery—the thunder and rain had eased slightly, though water still dripped on them miserably from the leaves above—Lavinet put her face close to Heloise’s and whispered, “How are you feeling?”

Heloise didn’t answer for a moment, and when she did, her voice was thick and raw with guilt. “I… do you still care?”

Lavinet felt a familiar lash of impatience, the kind she always got when other people were being stupid. It was bracing, like a draught of hot chocolate or even whiskey; it made shock or lethargy impossible. “Of course I am,” she snapped. “For one thing, you are still our client—we are duty-bound to protect you. For another, I’m a human being: of course I care.” She thought of Ayla, laid out flat like a dead, broken bird, and the impatience soured instantaneously to a darker anger. “I’m not sure I could say the same thing to you.”

“You leave her alone,” Rikash hissed from Heloise’s other side, his face and body almost completely concealed by the rest of the bush. And in that moment, everything fell into place with a startling, alarming clarity. Lavinet rocked back slightly, hissed in a breath. Oh, oh. She knew that tone of voice. She’d heard it in other men’s timbres, sometimes even about her: she’d heard it in the heat of impassioned arguments or challenges to duels—and in Pendric’s voice about Clara, only once. A mix of challenge, and outrage, and protectiveness, and—

“You rat bastard,” she gasped, her voice nearly shaking. Ayla and Trouble and the others were rubbing off on her, in more ways than she could count. “You absolute bastard. How could you get her with your child, and then run off to become a bandit?”

Heloise stiffened beside her, and Lavinet didn’t even need to look at her to know that she was right. She had never felt love before—not beyond schoolgirl infatuations or the excitement of flirtation—but she knew it when she heard it. This ruffian Rikash and Heloise were lovers.

Her mind flew to fit the pieces together. They must have known each other, before he became a bandit. Of course, of course. Perhaps he was a servant, or a commoner who visited the Harthwaite mansion frequently, like a greengrocer. Heloise was probably already engaged. Then she would have fallen pregnant, and he would have realized that he couldn’t offer her and the baby the life they deserved, not on a—whatever’s salary, stableboy, maybe, and so he’d struck out and become a bandit and robbed whatever shipments and caravans he could, to save up enough to eventually spirit her away. Such a campaign would have had the double effect of controlling the roads, delaying Heloise from journeying off to her real husband-to-be.

But then, when such a journey became imminent—when her father had hired the Shepherds to escort her past enemy lines—they’d become desperate. She could not be delivered into the hands of her fiancé, not when her infidelity was so clear. They must have arranged for his bandits to take her away before she could reach her destination, hence the raid on the roadside, though they hadn’t been expecting such fierce resistance from her escort. Their mistake. And when that had failed, and it looked as if her lover would be slain by Blade, Heloise had feigned sickness and pains to get them to take her away in a panic, averting the bloodshed. Later, the bandits had followed her, and she waited for the right moment before taking down Ayla in one fell swoop…

“So you would have taken her away,” Lavinet said, realizing. “And made fools of us, but our lost time and money was a small price to pay if you got to have your happy family at last. Only it didn’t work out that way; of course. The asag intervened, and now your camp is destroyed, and you are alone. After so many disasters, did you not consider that perhaps the One-God disapproves of your sins? That this is your punishment for trying to get away with it all without paying some kind of price? You selfish bastards.”

Cruel, cruel, cruel, but she could never claim to be kind when she was upset. In any other circumstance, this sort of human drama might have delighted her: it was just like the novels she’d read as a girl, full of lickerish descriptions and simpering, honeyed declarations of ever-lasting true love.

But the reality was so much messier. And her people were out there, and she had to think of something to fix this mess. “Is your name even Rikash?” she demanded.

He had the decency to cough and look ashamed. “It’s Bray.”

A charlatan through and through, then. She huffed. “How many people were in your camp, Bray?”

“Sixty-two,” he said. “Well—fifty-eight, after the ambush earlier today.”

“How many do you think have survived?”

He shuddered. “I don’t know. When we ran, there were maybe… thirty? Thirty-five? That I could see. That doesn’t count the young ones. Hopefully their parents have gotten them away.”

She did not even want to ask him how on earth he had gathered such a number under his banner: was he a good bandit, or an exceptional fraud? She said instead, “How did the asag first attack?”

Heloise spoke up, shivering in the cold but otherwise steady. “It was sudden. The storm kicked up, and we were focused on getting the horses calmed down—they were wanting to bolt. Then we heard voices, like soldiers barking orders, or something; and Bray tightened everyone into a circle, thinking we were being attacked, with the children at the center of the group. But then there were those things—yanking, pulling people off into the darkness. Picking them off… the way lions do to oxen. And then Bray said we had to run, and oh…” She clamped a hand over her mouth, but after a moment of violent trembling, whatever sob she might have been biting back died, and she calmed down again.

Lavinet forged on. “Do you have any weapons in your camp? Cannons, guns, anything?”

Bray shook his head, his reddish-brown hair plastered to his face. It looked worn and drawn, that face, though she could see how normally it would be wry and rueful and likeable. He said, “No, nothing like that. What weapons we had, we carried on our persons. Mostly the shipments we robbed were food stores, oil shipments, some ore and minerals. We didn’t stockpile arms.”

Well, there went her ideas. She said, because she had to keep her mind working, “Am I right, then? You are lovers, and you orchestrated this entire affair in order to elope together?”

Bray was silent, but Heloise said softly, “Yes.” Lavinet could swear she heard a note of tremulous pride in the other woman’s voice. “We love each other. Bray left the estate, gave up everything, so we could be together. I was always going to do the same.”

Something nipped at Lavinet, and she pushed it away like an unruly dog. She did not want to say it was envy, or even the prick of self-awareness: for after all, hadn’t she abandoned everything for her own selfish purposes? Hadn’t she dropped all responsibility, all sense of duty, in the pursuit of love? And she didn’t even have anything to show for it—not yet, anyway. But God, Heloise could have at least told her.

Why would she? the low, growling thing in her chest whispered. Lavinet hadn’t told anyone she was going to join the Shepherds: not even the people who deserved to know. She hadn’t wanted anyone to stop her.

Oh, God damn it, she thought, but Bray was saying, “You can judge us later, should we all survive this. I’ll happily account for my many crimes if Heloise and the baby are safe.”

His lover stirred and began, “No—”

“Let us cut the dramatics, shall we,” Lavinet said tartly, “for I have absolutely no patience for them at the moment.”

“You’re the one who brought it up,” Bray muttered to himself, but he fell silent and let her think. Lavinet ran a careful hand through her hair, untangling bits of twigs and leaves, and she listened carefully to the howling cacophony swirling all around them. She needed to think of a way to clear the asag away from the bandit camp. If she could do that, the survivors could rally, and she could find Ayla and Blade. But how would she accomplish that? Cutting them down one-by-one, especially as they lurked in the trees above, seemed pointless. She couldn’t blow them away, the way Ayla could. Was there anything that repelled Tainted creatures? She tried to remember what Briony had said about the wyvern, what Halek might have said about the ghasts. Did any of them share a weakness? Light, maybe, for the ghasts, they feared the sun. Sun, fire… wouldn’t creatures of darkness fear heat and flame?

But this damned wet. She’d never get a fire going while the sky was pouring an ocean’s worth of water down on her head.

But then she thought—

Wait.

There’d been a party, once, so long ago that Lavinet felt as if it had taken place in another lifetime, something that had happened to another person entirely, as if she had heard all about it secondhand. There was a lady—Tendal, an old enemy later turned quasi-friend. On her twentieth birthday, she’d served some special drink, dyed a delicate pink with petals at the bottom, and she remembered how the other ladies had cooed and marveled. Lavinet had remembered someone—Pendric, maybe—taking a sip and making a face, for it had only been water. But then the waiters came around, and poured a little oil into the drink, and Lavinet had remembered being delighted and horrified, and whispering to Clara with pleasure that she was damned if she was going to drink dregs from a frying pan. But then they’d set the drink on fire, and everyone at the table had a drink that was half-water, half-flame, and they’d never seen anything like it before, and Lavinet had been so green with envy that she could hardly stand to eat. She remembered poaching Tendal’s event coordinator, pressing him for all of the details—but it had all been very simple. Oil floated on water. Oil combusted when touched with flame. No trick to it at all.

Lavinet sucked in a trembling breath, then released it.

“How much oil do you have at your camp?”

Bray gave her a strange look. “Barrels and barrels of it,” he said. “We couldn’t sell it.”

When Lavinet told them her plan, his look transformed into one of pure disbelief—something caught between awe and utter fear. “You’re mad,” he said admiringly.

Lavinet smiled, so sweet and sharp it almost stung her. Tallys had always said that the Shepherds were a madhouse, and joining their ranks was a kind of proof of insanity. Now was Lavinet’s chance to prove her right.

#

The hard part was getting Heloise to agree to stay behind, and in the end it was so much trouble that Lavinet actually gave up. At first she thought that the woman was too frightened to be left on her own—and who could blame her? Who wanted to stay crouching on her belly in a bush while monsters slaughtered people all around her?—but then she realized that she simply could not stand to be apart from Bray: apparently they had been separated too much, for too long, and they had used up their tolerance for it.

Lavinet expected the bandit leader to be a bit harsher with Heloise, if only for the sake of their child—but he hardly said a word of protest, especially when Heloise said, with sudden ferocity: “I’m a mother, not an invalid.” After that, Bray was meek and quiet as a lamb, and Lavinet could not help but feel vaguely approving. Good for them.

It was much easier to forge into the bandit camp than it had been to stumble out of it: many of the people, the distractions, were gone, and nauseatingly, the asag had become swollen and slow-moving from their glut, easing through the water like slugs now, rather than floating and swarming overhead like bees. It was simpler to avoid the fattest of them, though there were still many who darted at her from the shadows. She cut down at least ten, and there were more moving around in the edges of her periphery, suckling on bones in the trees, lunging out from bushes if she dropped her guard for even an instant. She felt hemmed in by ghosts.

It helped to have Bray watching her back, and Heloise in the center, keeping watch on both sides: it was almost like having Blade and Ayla in formation with her again. But the silence plucked at her. Where were they? What if she found one of them floating in the water, like just another bandit corpse, or so much debris?

She shook herself lightly. No time to think like that.

The rain was still going, though it was more of a steady tempo now rather than the vicious onslaught it had been earlier. Bray pointed her to the stash of oil barrels the bandits had kept lashed under a length of tarp. For a moment, the barrels seemed so wedged in their pile, so heavy and immovable, that she feared she wouldn’t be able to dislodge even one of them. Where was Blade’s Ket strength, Ayla’s wind, when she needed it? She told Bray to help her, and together they heaved and shoved and grunted, their feet struggling to find purchase in all the muck and soft, until finally Lavinet felt something give and leapt back just to find the whole pile tumbling down into the water.

The noise was going to attract more asag, so they had to hurry.

It was only when they were fumbling with the sealed lids of the barrels that it struck Lavinet what a truly terrible idea this could be. The oil was getting everywhere, not just in the water all around the camp, but on her clothes, the hem of Heloise’s skirt. What if they set themselves on fire, doing this? What if lightning struck, and the whole thing set the marshland aflame?

Heloise was making soft, anxious noises: true to form, more of the asag were appearing in her sightline, drawn by the noise. Lavinet saw that they had red, beady little eyes, and that the number of eyes seemed to grow all over their bodies the more they ate.

Good. The better to blind them.

“Shit,” she heard, and Lavinet straightened to find Bray trying to menace an approaching asag not five feet away. They could glide over the water, as soundlessly as pond-skaters: this one laughed and said in a voice she didn’t recognize, “Please, you have to find Bray. He’ll know what to do…”

Bray lunged at it, swiping with his dagger, and the asag laughed and laughed. Then it darted forward and bit him, and Bray gave a yell, and Lavinet was splashing over to run it through with her saber. Hot, ink-like ichor gushed over her hand, burning her, and the asag loosed a scream, a sound that went higher and higher—and then it popped like a burst pustule, showering her with demonic blood. Some of it got into her eyes, and Lavinet screamed.

Something caught at her hair, and at first she thought it was Bray, but his voice was farther away—God, no, it was right in her ear, and some force was dragging her head back, hard enough that she thought her neck would snap, and she reached back and stabbed madly with her blade, shrieking with fury. Her vision was dim and blurry, stinging and throbbing painfully, but she could make out shadows closing in on her, closing in on Bray, who was half-submerged in the water already, gurgling as he struggled to claw something off of his chest.

A cacophony of voices was surrounding her, deafening her in its strange, monotonous drone.

“Where do you think Lavinet is?” Ayla’s rasp.

“We’ll find her.” Blade’s frication.

“I’m scared, Mum, I’m so scared.”

“Sh, sh, I won’t let them hurt you.”

“Please—someone help me—Bray—”

“Don’t look, Sam, it’s not her. Whatever you’re hearing, it’s not her.”

“Get under the water!”

That was Heloise, and Lavinet heard it clearly, even as she felt something bite into her shoulder. She groaned, and stabbed and stabbed again, and she heard it a second time: “Get under the water and stay there! Deep!”

And then she heard the sizzle of torch fire, saw the pinprick of orange light in her fading vision.

Oh.

With the last of her strength, she fumbled over and grabbed Bray’s collar—she could not even see if he was dead—and hauled him with her under the water. The last thing she heard was the sound of her taking a deep breath—she tasted the acrid bitter of oil against her teeth—before she went down, down into the bottom of the marsh, deep enough that she could burrow into the dark earth and then kick powerfully away, dragging Bray with her all the while. All she could see was darkness, gray-green, wine-colored murk shifting to beer-colored, her own hair drifting in front of her like weeds. Bray kicked and struggled in her grip. Above, the light was spreading over the surface of the water like forks of lightning in a fiery sky. She could hear the asag screaming, swelling, popping like balloons under the sudden blistering heat. Heloise had thrown a torch; when Lavinet surfaced again, she saw her standing well away, watching the fire spread with blazing eyes. The asag withered and died like fetid flowers. 

She would have to thank Tendal for serving that stupid, stupid drink.

#

Afterwards, after the storm had abated and the oil fire had waned a little—after the cloud of the dead asag had finally lifted like a curtain, and dawn overhead began to lighten the sky—Lavinet tipped her head back and closed her eyes. She was propped up on a wagon, upon which they were collecting whatever they could salvage: supplies, canned food, little pieces of flint. It wasn’t much, but it would give them the chance to rebuild.

She said to Heloise, feeling impossibly weary: “What will you do now?”

The other noblewoman hesitated. A few of the bandits had staggered back out of the trees, having seen the fire—it was like a signal blaze, letting everyone get their bearings—but so far they had only accounted for one-third of the entire camp. Bray was with them, organizing search parties and tending to the wounded—or the dead. If they resented him for his abandonment, they didn’t give any indication.

Heloise let loose a little sigh. “We’ll rebuild, I suppose,” she said, her eyes downcast. “It will be hard—they were trying to store up for the winter—but it can be done. With so many asag dead, more supply lines will open again, and more shipments will come through.”

“More robberies to conduct, then,” Lavinet said lightly—and then waved away the defiant jut of Heloise’s chin. “You can’t keep it up forever, you know. The bandit raids. Sooner rather than later, someone will send lawmen after you; you can’t survive on stealing forever.”

“We never intended to,” Heloise answered, stiff. “It was only to get us through the first year. We’ll hunt, as a supplement, and build more permanent homes, and eventually we will become self-sustaining. We’ll be our own village, then. It’s why so many people follow Bray. My father…” She fell silent for a moment, then rallied: “He squandered our money. So many people in Harthwaite suffered. This is our chance to start anew, free of his rule, his taxes. We can make our own home, our own family, just as we are.”

Her hand came down to stroke her belly, as if soothing the sudden movement of her baby.

Lavinet was silent for a moment. “I take it that your ‘ransom’ was also going to go towards the founding of this new village?”

Heloise nodded.

Lavinet shook her head. “It was a daring plan.”

Heloise didn’t smile, exactly; she just looked at her feet, but it was close. “You’re not the only one who can come up with them.”

Lavinet didn’t laugh, either, but she came close. In another life, she would have dearly liked to have this Heloise as a friend.

There was a call, and they both looked up to see Blade and Ayla out in the distance, accompanied by a group of children and perhaps ten adults. Bray looked heartened to see them, standing on a cart and waving his hat as if they couldn’t see the circle of fire behind him, still floating on the water like a soap bubble. Ayla looked no worse for the wear, but Blade bled heavily from one shoulder; Lavinet couldn’t imagine she looked much better. When he saw her sitting there among the wreckage with Heloise, his grimace turned into a lighter expression, and he nodded; Ayla scrubbed at her eye with her forearm and pretended not to notice them. Lavinet felt as if they’d run up and kissed her.

“I’ll tell your father that you’re dead,” she said to Heloise.

The noblewoman looked around at her with wide, long-lashed eyes. “What?”

Lavinet sighed and began to work one of her boots loose, upturning its contents into the water around them; she felt distinctly unladylike, filthy and wild, and she couldn’t help but appreciate it in that moment. “You died right in front of me,” she said simply, watching with idle interest as a little frog nosed past them and slipped right under the tiny wall of fire. Had it been in her boot that whole time, carried by her? “Torn apart by the demons. No body to recover. Such a shame.” She paused for a moment, considering. “But perhaps you ought to do something about that birthmark. The physicker recognized it, in Saltshear.”

“But what about you?” Heloise asked, looking anxious. She had not apologized for harming Ayla, and perhaps she would not; perhaps Lavinet wouldn’t, if she’d been driven to that. “Your mission will be a failure, and you won’t be paid… and your reputation, letting a client like me die…” She trailed off. "Won't it hurt the Shepherds?"

Lavinet tutted and wrung out her hair. “Social fire,” she said. “I know exactly what to do.”

This time, Heloise did smile.