CHAPTER SEVEN: HOMECOMING

We spirits are accursed to roam
these dusty plains. We have no home,
this world is our catacomb,
our sentence set in bonded stone.
-Oleidas, from 'Anazitesthes'

Matthias wanted to head to Rouentz as soon as possible, and it took some doing to convince him that he wasn't fit for travel - which he most certainly wasn't. Assuming his dream had been sent by some beneficent entity, be it a god, an angel, or any of the mixed bag of occasionally-friendly folk spirits to choose from... assuming the dream was true and sent in good faith... that meant good might come from Matthias's actions. It meant that, properly enacted, he had a reasonable chance to save his daughter. Riding toward Rouentz and dying half-way there from an abdominal hemorrhage was not a good way for that to play out. Even Matthias was willing to admit that.

"I'm riding as soon as I can," he said. "The rest of you can come or not - I understand if you don't, but I'm not going to wait for Cano to get better. They're my horses, it's my daughter, it's my right."

"Our families, whatever's left of them, are all there, too," Larian said quietly. "Our whole reason for going to Nortsair - and, frankly, probably the only reason you escaped that charnel house at the Heron estate alive - is because we fled there to enlist help. And... I'm sorry to say it, Matthias Mendic, but you are the help. I would hate for you to throw your life away - all that much harder for us crude rustics - but, yes. They're your horses to do with as you please and your life to waste as you will."

Matthias couldn't bring himself to meet her gaze. "Do... do you think we can ride out tomorrow?"

"You can ride out tomorrow... as for Cano, we'll have to see."

There was no way that Cano should have survived his wounds - frankly, it was audacious that he'd even survived the night. He'd caught about twelve arrow wounds, some of them quite severe. And yet he was improving. With Thea attending to Matthias's lesser (though still serious) injuries, Larian dedicated herself to Cano's health, going so far as to compile a list of rare and exotic reagents for Heath to find... and he'd found about half of them. One of them, the pixie froth-toad, was only found in jungle swamps a thousand miles to the north. And yet, Heath had managed to find a lone, wayward exemplar of that species in Astorfall Forest, happily chirping by its lonesome next to a murky little spring. After Larian carefully extracted one of its venom sacs (it would be a travesty to destroy so rare a creature, she said), it would be free to chirp its little song next to the pool in the hollow. Heath found half the ingredients, but it was enough. What he'd managed, she said, would be sufficient for a decoction - though not necessarily the one she'd have most preferred.

"With a little ogre's balm, this would have been safer. If I don't get this exactly right, it'll kill him," Larian said.

"Shouldn't we err on the side of caution?" Heath asked.

"No. Because I'm going to get this exactly right."

Thea watched it all with rapt interest, marveling over Larian's precision: boil-cool-pour... boil-decant... mix-boil-pour-cool-mix. However precise Heath was with his archery, he could never match the precision with which Larian mixed her medicines. It took perhaps twenty steps in all to complete the murky blue mixture. Larian was done mid-afternoon - as it so happened, right around the time Cano started to stir from his convalescence. Larian crouched down, kissed his forehead, made sure he was awake, and then poured the stuff - only a few thimblefuls, really - down his throat.

"Did we escape?" Cano groaned - his first words since his act of epic heroism/foolishness.

"We escaped and we're safe. Relatively speaking," she told him, and poured the decoction into his mouth.

"Good God, that tastes awful."

"That's because it's strong," Larian said. "Swallow."

Cano did so and drifted back into sleep soon after that. And, as they waited for him to recover, there wasn't a whole lot to do. Thea counted the birds - forty-nine birds of six different species in the trees and underbrush nearby. She tried to count the insects, but there were far too many, even for an inveterate counter like herself. There were fifty-three water striders at their side of the pool, though.

The sunlight had made the pool warm, and so she decided to bathe. Two baths in two days was a personal record, but she'd been through a lot in the intervening time. Thea disrobed, carefully setting her only outfit aside. The knee-length boots took up more shoreside real estate than the whole rest of the outfit: a black and silver bustier with an increasingly demanding job to fulfill; a gauzy little cape with laced and ruffled sleeves that ended mid-arm; a belted skirt with a sash running most of the way up; a frilly, satiny underskirt (short enough that Thea was unclear whether it had any actual function); and filmy stockings that came just past mid-thigh, black and smoke-gray, intricately-patterned and made of material so sheer that she couldn't see the weave. If Thea had seen a woman wearing that daring, dark, and exceedingly fine getup, she'd have thought her a lord's wife attending his funeral and not particularly caring who knew she was ready for a second marriage.

Nude, she waded out into the pool, time-worn rock and a few smooth stones underfoot. The water only reached just past her waist in the deepest part of the pool, but when she submerged herself below the surface, she imagined that there might be water for miles and miles around. Her whole world became the cool, gentle flow of the current and the sound of the stream dribbling and trickling down from twenty feet above. Thea slowly rose from the water, her hair clinging in a single mass that hung heavily to mid-back, and then yelped when Matthias spoke from the water's edge not two yards behind her.

"Mind if I join you?" he said.

"Only if you take your poultice off," she said, and she turned to face him.

She blushed at the way his eyes were immediately drawn to her breasts, now far larger than they'd been when they bathed the morning before, large enough that very few women so lean of waist could possibly boast them. But Thea didn't cover her shame - what did she have to be ashamed of? She watched with some interest as he stripped, first the poultice and then the rest, tenderly and with some wincing. He had bruising on his thigh, forearm, and back, but it was already fading. If Larian's medicinal skills weren't magical, they weren't far off, either.

"You're healing nicely," she said.

"Is that a fact?" He eased into the water beside her.

Suddenly, the water felt far warmer than it had just a few moments before. Matthias was very close and very nude, only a little taller than Thea but far broader. He ran a hand along her side, taking her body's shape in with a hunger bordering on ravenous, ran his hand between her legs. Thea grasped his wrist instinctively, but made no move to stop him as he rubbed down there, firm fingers massaging the smooth skin.

"Does that feel good?" he asked.

"A bit," Thea said, biting her lip. "Just a bit, though."

Matthias sighed and started to withdraw. "That's sad. I'd hate to think you'll never feel pleasure again."

Thea gazed into his eyes... dark, but glinting gold as the evening sunlight hit them. "I can still feel pleasure," she stated. She brought his hand up to the side of her breast, her breath thrilling at the gentle pressure. The way he ran his wet thumb around her reddish-tan nipple made her gasp. "Mmmm... that feels good... and... this feels good..." she pressed her lips to Matthias's, feeling their softness, their warmth, and nibbling at his lip with a giggle as she pulled back. "And it feels good when I make you feel good."

"Sweet Avalon, this is hot," Larian muttered.

Thea shrieked and stared daggers at the girl, pulling away from Matthias and blushing furiously. "I thought you were looking after Cano!"

Larian flapped the fabric of her skirt. "Phew. I was... and he needed water... but, hey, ten minutes without isn't going to kill him."

"Oh my gods," Thea sighed, lowering her forehead to Matthias's chest. "I'm so embarrassed."

Matthias kissed the crown of her head. "To be continued," he whispered.

+++++

They stayed at the hollow a second night and ate well - all of them but Cano, who was still drifting in and out of consciousness. The whole time, Matthias seemed to alternate between warmth and aloofness, between desire for Thea and a barely-concealed annoyance with her. Having never developed much guile, she asked him outright.

"Why am I what?" Matthias asked.

"Why are you angry with me?" she said as she changed his poultice. The wound was very nearly sealed, and this would likely be the last treatment required. "It seems like you're either going starry over me or one word away from stomping off in anger, and not much in between."

He shrugged and looked away, clearly not wanting to talk about it, but Thea wasn't about to let it slide. She pulled her old Theo trick of sitting in silence, her expression attentive but with no expectation of getting a response. Most people would do anything to fill such silence and Matthias was no exception. He sighed and turned his gaze back to her, his guarded expression softening.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I don't know... it's... it's stupid."

"It's not stupid," she said. "I promise it's not."

"It's just how I feel when I look at you... something inside me feels like it's going to burst..."

Thea's brow knit in worry. "Does it hurt? It could be a herniation..." She'd learned that from Larian.

He laughed, but not in a mocking way. "No, it's a good feeling. Like I'm filling up with a giddy joy I can't quite contain... and then I remember that I've lost a wife, a son, a brother, and a father... I have a daughter enslaved to a barbarian, and I've not taken a step toward Rouentz since I learned of it. What right do I have to feel happy? When I thought I was just enjoying a chance moment with a beautiful eunuch boy, that didn't feel so bad. It felt like my little tinge of shame could mask whatever pleasure I felt, that I could justify that dalliance. But now? I can't feel this way, Thea."

"You don't ever have to justify how you feel," Thea said softly. She ran a hand along his face, feeling the roughness of his stubble. "You've had a hard few days, harder than anybody deserves, and I understand if you put some of the blame for that on me - I haven't always been forthright. But don't push me away if it's just so you can wallow in self-pity, because there's precious little joy in this world, and it's a fool who makes it colder."

"I know. I know that," Matthias said.

He gestured Thea over and she slid onto his lap, taking care not to put much pressure on his side, and they sat like that for a while, arms around one another and looking out into the hollow as the embers of Heath's fire slowly died.

"I don't deserve you," he said.

Thea settled into him. "Let me decide that."

They slept together that night, in the literal sense, curled up in the alcove with Matthias as the big spoon. Thea wiggled into him, enjoying the secure feeling of his hands, one right below her breast and the other upon her flank. She wiggled into him and felt something hard - hard in the literal sense. She wiggled again, reached her hand back, and pulled the thing out of his vest pocket.

"What's this?" she asked.

"Hmm?" Matthias roused himself from near slumber, slid his hand from under her, and held it in his palms - an ornate, gold-capped decanter filled with dark liquid. Whatever color it was, she couldn't tell in the wan moonlight. "I took it from the masquerade... I... during that moment when I felt the overpowering rage, before I got knocked silly, it was the first thing I could find. I was going to shove its little golden point into... you know what, never mind. It's just a little thing of oil."

"It's not," Thea said.

She ran her fingers along the decanter and felt its power. How she hadn't noticed it before, she couldn't guess - it radiated a palpable warmth, and not just from being held between their mutual body heat. It was, she realized, one of the items from Bestel Myrdon's treasure - from their treasure. And Matthias had chosen it as surely as it had chosen him. No wonder he'd had such a portentious dream last night - with such an artifact in his pocket, it seemed inevitable. She could barely make Matthias out in the night, but she could see the glint of moon off his eyes as he took her in.

"I know what you have to do. To save Maddie, I mean."

Matthias's body tensed palpably. "Anything."

"If you let me anoint you with this oil, you'll become like us."

"I'll become a woman?"

Thea rolled her eyes, even though he couldn't possibly see her doing so. "No... I don't think so. But you'll change. If I had to guess, you'll change to be more like the dark man. And that will give you the tools that you need. Or..."

"Or?"

"Or maybe I'm just stupid and it's balm for someone's achy knee."

Matthias was silent for a moment, the shift of his body and the hush of his breathing audible over the distant sounds of crickets and katydids. He pressed the vessel into Thea's hand and unscrewed the golden stopper.

"You're not stupid," he said. "I'll do anything. My wealth, my life, my soul. Anoint me."

Thea did so, dribbling enough of the oil into the cap that a few drops spilled over and onto her fingers. It was vaguely resinous, aromatic in a pleasant way, and tingling with a strange warmth. Thea dipped her forefinger into the stuff, wondering what, exactly, to do... and then it struck her in a gout of inspiration - she imagined that inspiration was a lot like what Larian felt when she dipped into her endless font of knowledge...

Thea knew what to do. She touched the oil against Matthias's forehead and traced out the symbol of a star. In that instant, the space about them grew bright, and it took Thea a moment to realize the light was coming from her, that the stars within her hair, upon her invisible crown, had all ignited and were radiating out into the dark. Matthias gasped - whether from whatever he was feeling or from the sight of Thea, she couldn't say. She felt a warmth, and suddenly she was leaning forward to kiss him, and she felt fire and heat, and she understood the giddy joy that Matthias had felt. As the fiery warmth faded, exhaustion overtook Thea and she fell asleep in Matthias's arms. They both slept until the morning, dead to the world until they awoke after dawn to a horrible sound.

+++++

Thea awoke to a slavering, cracking, slurping noise. At first, she thought some monstrous forest animal had wandered into the alcove at night and was busily devouring one of her friends. But the source of the noise became clear soon enough: it was Cano. He'd devoured the remains of Heath's several dinner catches from the night before, devoured them down to the bones, and now he was cracking the bones apart and slurping out the marrow. The sight and the sound made Thea's stomach turn and she wondered whether he'd gone completely mad.

"Cano! Are you completely mad?"

"I'm fucking starving," he said, looking up from the brown-marrowed bone. His eyes had a gaunt and harrowed look and his body, while mostly-healed, had lost is sleek and casually muscular look. He looked absolutely shredded, every last ounce of fat burned away, veins, tendons and ridges of muscle taut against his skin.

Larian pushed his shoulder. "Go. Drink," she said. She nudged Heath awake with her foot - he'd somehow stayed asleep through the whole thing. "Hunt something for Cano and be quick about it... I think I underestimated just how much energy my healing decoction would burn through."

"What happened to 'exactly right'?" Thea asked.

"It may be the case," Larian allowed, "that alchemy is an art and not a science."

Heath returned five minutes later with a small hedge-boar. Thea had already started a fire, and so they got to cooking right away, with Heath handing off char-tinged, cooked-ish cuts of boar meat for a good ten minutes before Cano burped loud enough that they probably heard it over in Nortsair. Then he sat heavily against a log, happily clutching at his distended belly. Then the rest of them ate: properly-cooked boar, pheasant eggs, and forest greens. It was probably the best that Thea had eaten in her life - better than pheasant-upon-leeks at the masquerade, better than poisoned stew, and far better than the stale bread and family leftovers that Theo had usually managed in Rouentz. Good company, too. Though, she considered, beer would have made it better yet.

"If I'm not mistaken," Matthias said, "we no longer have an excuse not to ride?"

"Cano will probably want to eat again in an hour," Larian said. "Why don't we ride after that?"

Matthias grumbled and sulked but he didn't ride off without them. When they did head out, he insisted upon handling the horse he shared with Thea and upon leading the way, even though Heath knew the backwoods far better, even without his preternatural sense of direction. Thea wished Matthias would just make up his mind and be either cool and brooding or warm and charming so she could decide how much she liked him.

So the two of them rode in the front, and Thea sat behind Matthias, legs pitched forward and holding onto the back of the saddle. Her instinct was to wrap her arms around Matthias, to anchor herself to his taut torso, but she'd glimpsed how Heath, seated behind Larian, rode double to and figured he probably knew exactly what he was doing. Thea watched and managed to copy him perfectly. Heath didn't ride double to for long, though - at one point, he cocked his head and dashed off into the woods with Larian calling after him. He returned perhaps two minutes later atop a huge buck elk that didn't appear at all concerned to have a human riding it.

"Easier on the horses if we don't double up," he explained.

Thea gauged the thing warily - its body was the size of big mountain blue that Cano rode and its antlers were shedding velvet and looked perfect for goring. "Have you ever ridden one of those before?"

He laughed and ran his hand along its neck. "I don't think they ever let people ride them," he said, as if that explained anything.

Soon after that, the forest grew sparse and the ruins of the dead city beneath them became more visible, ancient marble edifices jutting out at strange angles, the eroded limbs of forgotten heroes covered in moss and dirt. The wood then opened into the gentle hillsides of the farmlands, orchards, fields, and grazing meadows for the hundred or so homestead farms surrounding Rouentz. The road broadened, becoming occasionally well-tended, and soon enough they were riding through terrain well-known to Thea.

She rode in silence, observing the countryside, and occasionally turning her attention to Matthias now that they were in full daylight. They'd hardly spoken on the ride, and she could tell he had things on his mind - understandably so. He was anxious and tense, but when she ran a hand down his arm and gave his elbow a reassuring squeeze, he relaxed, if only slightly. He kept looking around, his gaze darting up and down the landscape as if expecting a sneak attack.

"Thinking about your daughter?" she asked.

"I see dead people," he said, pointing toward a not-so-distant farmhouse. "Do you see them?"

Thea turned to look and, sure enough, saw three people - a man, a woman, and a toddler in the woman's arms - standing by the house. She might have taken them to be strangely unsettling homesteaders, but their complete lack of any coloration and the unnatural stillness with which they stood made it seem unlikely. "I see them," she said.

"I'm trying to see if any of them are Maddie."

So... that was a new development. Matthias could see the dead, and so (apparently) could Thea, at least if they were pointed out to her. Were it not for those silent shades, she wouldn't have known that anything was wrong. Usually, on particularly bad raids, the marauders would burn the several farms that wouldn't or couldn't give them whatever they wanted, their charred ruins streaming wisps of dark smoke for days afterwards. She didn't see any damage to the farms, though, nor any conspicuously missing livestock. She realized with a little gasp that this wasn't a good thing: the invaders intended to stay.

Thea turned her attention back to Matthias. She'd annointed him last night, whatever that meant. It seemed like a dream, a memory as gauzy and surreal as if it had never happened... but it hadn't been a dream, had it? Matthias was changed, if subtly, his olive-tan skin shifting closer to Larian's burnished bronze, and his hair... Thea touched it and gasped. Right before her eyes, a single coal-dark hair coiled its way out from his head, gradually lightening from its dark roots as it extended, fading to ash gray before terminating in a cherry ember glow.

"She can't be dead," Thea said eventually. "If you think there was any truth to your dream, then she has to be alive. And there has to be truth to your dream because you took a token of that god and had me anoint you with his oil."

Matthias touched his forehead and rubbed his fingers together. "I thought that was a dream..."

"It was real - you're seeing dead people now," she said.

"Good point."

+++++

True to Matthias's dream, the invaders were repairing the palisade but hadn't yet bridged the gulf of destroyed earthen works and burnt timber. Of the original breach, perhaps twenty yards wide, about half had been rebuilt and the other half was carefully guarded. It was close to evening, so they were able to ride within scouting distance, but there would be no going through unnoticed. Not all five of them. Heath might pull it off, though, and he said as much.

"I've got a plan," he said. "I can get close - especially in the dark, but I reckon I'll be fine in evening, too."

"On your elk?" Cano asked.

"Well, no... he'll have to go back home first. But I can sneak in range and take care of the guards, and before you know it, we can walk right into town."

"You're going to 'take care' of the guards?" Larian snorted. "You mean kill them?"

Heath shrugged. "Well... it's got to be, right? I do them in and there's no one to stop us."

"You don't think a guard will raise the alarm when the man next to him is suddenly dead and sporting a brand new arrow piercing?"

"I never said it was a perfect plan," Heath said.

"Can you get inside and cause a distraction?" Thea asked eventually. "It doesn't have to be big. You don't have to shoot anybody. Just enough to get us through. I mean... ring the church bell and that's sure to distract them, right?"

"And then I get to shoot them?"

"You'd better."

Before anybody could come up with a better idea, Heath slid off his elk, patted the side of its neck, and slipped off into the darkening evening. The elk stood there for a bewildered moment, eyed the humans warily, and trotted back toward the forest with no particular sense of urgency. The other four dismounted, too, and posted their horses at the nearby farm - the Miller homestead, if Thea wasn't mistaken. As the horses drank, Matthias rummaged through his pouch, finally producing a few bronze coins to place by the post - a good-faith payment, Thea inferred. But she was much less interested in payment for their horses than she was in the palisade.

They drew as close as they dared, sixty yards out by the nearest bushes. Everything for a hundred yards around had been cleared (as, frankly, it should have been for ages, but the townspeople had been lax in keeping it up), and the few bushes that remained could barely hide their number.

"It's taking too long... something's gone wrong," Cano said, his good arm fidgeting at his sword's pommel. "I should go in."

"Are you even healthy enough to go in?" Thea asked. She plucked a blackberry from the bush and popped it into her mouth.

His other arm had been crushed two days before, crushed so badly that, had Cano survived it (which, obviously, he had), he could never expect to regain normal function. That arm was still mottled with black and red bruising, but when he wiggled his fingers, Thea could see the muscles and tendons moving normally beneath the skin. Larian was a skilled healer and Cano was a skilled patient. He might not be fully recovered, but he was recovered enough.

Thea put a hand on his wrist. "We should wait for Heath's..."

Then the church bells started ringing: gong ga-gong… ga-gong ga-gong…. The instant the second chime rang, Cano took off, leaping to his feet and, sword in hand, sprinting for the gap in the palisade.

"Shit!" Larian hissed.

"I'm going, too," Matthias said, and sprinted after him, though not quite so inhumanly fast.

"Wait!" Before she was quite sure what she was doing, Thea was on her feet and sprinting after him, with Larian right beside her.

She and Larian exchanged a look, as if to ask: are we really doing this? And, yes, apparently they were.

Larian was a fast and agile sprinter and Thea had all kinds of wobbling parts that she wasn't quite used to. No bustier, no matter how admirable, was quite up to that task. It was a bit surprising, then, that she seemed to keep up well, her boots pattering across the grassy field with an agility she wouldn't have thought herself capable of. She was even closing in on Matthias.

Thea focused her attention on the palisade, now twenty yards distant and rapidly closing. Cano was already there, leaping atop the little earth embankment and striking two men down in a near-instantaneous flourish. The remaining man there screamed for a split second before collapsing with an arrow through the throat. Theirs was not going to be, Thea realized, a particularly sneaky sneak attack.

Cano was already in the commons yard when Thea leapt the palisade ditch and scrambled up the remaining earthen embankment. Cano charged right toward three marauders, two of them diving in terror and the third man frozen in place. The man had the presence of mind to raise his buckler, only to have it cleaved in half by Cano's sword, a considerable chunk of arm cleaving with it. Matthias charged into the yard, too, and missed catching an arrow through the eye by about three inches. Thea grabbed him by the belt and, with all her might, hauled him back behind the breach.

"You're not a golden demigod," Thea said. "You're no good to your daughter dead."

"We have to do something," Matthias said.

Three shielded spearmen charged into the gap in the palisade, long-bearded men with leather armor and the steely look of inveterate soldiers. Soldiers who hadn't spotted them yet. Matthias grabbed the nearest man's spear and yanked, hauling the man into the palisade ditch. The next man over brought his spear back, readying it to throw like a javelin, but Larian got to him first. She tossed some sort of powder into his eyes that had the man screaming and clawing at his face, and then rushed at him, taking the man's spear before it could hit the ground and smashing his face with the haft. Thea watched the whole thing with a kind of fascinated horror, feeling helpless and having no idea what to do. These were her friends?

The third spearman, she realized, hadn't done anything yet. He'd just noticed Thea, taking her in with a confused, glassy-eyed stare. He mumbled something in a language she didn't understand, reaching out with one hand and wobbling at the knees. Then Matthias's blood-slicked hand reached up from the ditch below and yanked the man down. Thea didn't care to watch what ensued, but it didn't sound pleasant. Matthias climbed back up to the palisade, his breath coming out in snorts.

"I'd say that counts as doing something," Thea said - but, frankly, she felt shaken. Murder did not sit well with her, not even of these brutish invaders.

In the meanwhile, things had quickly gotten out-of-hand in the commons yard. Half a dozen men lay dead at Cano's feet and another seven or eight lay skewered with arrows, killed before they could reinforce the palisade. A booming voice shouted an order in Soetic, the marauder's tongue, and the remaining men pulled back into a defensive formation, Heath's arrows thunking against their wall of shields.

"You face Igna Battle-Blessed!" the thickly-accented voice continued.

"That's him," Matthias whispered.

The source of the voice was a large man, massively-muscled and covered with tattoos, his hair fiery orange, a braided, crimson-streaked beard dangling to his navel. He wore nothing but heavy boots, a fur and leather skirt, and pale, rippling skin covered with intricate blue tattoos. The three men behind him were similarly-attired and no less intimidating. One of Heath's arrows zipped in from the night, right toward Igna's face, and... the man caught it. He caught it mid-air, mere inches from a pale blue eye.

"Coward!" He snapped the shaft in half. "Fight me like a man!"

Cano, of course, was up to the task, charging at the man with his barely-believable speed. Something akin to joy sparked in Igna's eyes, and an instant later, his tattoos pulsed to life, their swirls illuminating his whole body in the twilight. As Cano reached him, the marauder kicked out, a perfectly-placed kick right on the golden cuirass that sent Cano flying back. Cano tumbled head over heels, smashed through a barrel, and skidded to a stop, crouching and a bit surprised, his sword skittering to the side.

One of the other tattooed men stalked forward, dark-haired and leaner than Igna Battle-Blessed, but a full head taller than the already-tall man. He hoisted his axe and, tattoos glowing, swung at Cano with a series of powerful and expert swings. Cano was still recovering from Igna's kick but managed to dodge twice and staggered back as the third blow struck his cuirass. The man swung around for a fourth strike and Cano blocked it with his good arm, splintering the shaft of the weapon. He caught the axe head mid-air and flung it back, hitting the massive man's chest with a sickening wet thump. Watching this, Igna bellowed - though Thea wasn't sure whether it was anger or ecstasy he was expressing... it seemed to be something in-between.

Igna motioned his men to stand down and stomped toward Cano himself, raising his axe and tossing it to the ground. Cano nodded and stepped out to meet him, and the two men fought, blinding-fast blows and strength matched for strength. When Cano caught Igna in a throw, the warrior tumbled three or four yards through the air, and Thea let herself hope it would be over... but the tattooed man always seemed to recover. He hit the tavern porch with a crunch, breaking through the railings, and stormed forward, a few scrapes and splinters from the tumble and angrier than ever, a wooden chunk of rail clenched in his powerful fist. Thea wasn't sure what rules they were fighting by, but that seemed like poor sportsmanship.

Igna swung the length of rail like a club and Cano ducked and then caught the thing, trying to yank the rail away but unable to do so. The two men fought over it for a moment, their inhuman strength almost evenly-matched. The wooden beam gave up the ghost  and shattered with a crack, upon which Igna took the largest, splinter-prickled shard and stabbed it into Cano's thigh. Cano hardly reacted - he brought his arms up, and the two men were choking one another, strong hands upon one another's throats...

"Weapons down, or you're all dead," came an accented voice behind Thea.

While they'd been transfixed on the fight in the commons, a dozen or so marauders had snuck around and come up behind them, some with bows and some with spears. Matthias dropped his purloined spear and so did Larian. Thea hadn't bothered to arm herself, so there was nothing to drop. At spear-point, they were pushed through the gaping palisade and out into the commons.

In those few moments, Cano had gotten the upper hand in the fight, striking Igna several times in rapid succession and pulling the wooden shard from his own thigh to wield as a terrible weapon. Igna chuckled and gestured toward the three of them held prisoner.

"Surrender... all of you surrender, or I'll have my men kill your women where they stand."

Cano's shoulders sagged and he sank to his knees, defeated. Heath stepped from the shadows, his bow held aloft.

"The strong one bind in heavy chains," Igna said a moment later. "The rest put in shackles. All except the fair one - she comes with me tonight."

All of this was relayed through Larian, who could understand their language. She could, Thea suspected, understand just about any language. There was some confusion among the men as to who constituted the 'fair one'. Larian was beautiful by almost any metric, and who knew how objective Thea's brief glimpse of her own face in the shallow pool had been? But Igna was clear enough about which one he meant. He walked up to Thea and loomed before her, tall and broad and smelling of sweat, looking down upon her with ice-blue eyes and sneering. He grabbed her by the slender arm, and not gently.

Thea was the personal prisoner of Igna Battle-Blessed and he did not, she suspected, have pleasant things in mind for her.