was lying where he had fallen, and the kid was still locked in battle with the other raider. He might win, but it would take about five seconds too long.
So, I thought, with sudden clarity, this is it.
I tried not to shut my eyes.
And then there was silence. Real silence. The silence of a shocked, spellbound audience, when you can’t even hear the creak of the stage or the crunching of nuts in the pit because everyone, every living soul in the place, is momentarily still.
Then there was a swish of air, a thud, and the raider above me rocked quietly out of his saddle, the pitchfork embedded in his chest. I rolled and looked for Grath, trying to gasp out my thanks, but Grath was still lying on the road, winded and groaning. Maia’s mother stood in the center of the lane, slender and pale, her eyes streaming, her right hand still raised and open.
The third raider reined his horse to a stuttering halt and turned back to the village. He wasn’t about to take us on alone, and he would return with more, but for a moment, it was over.
As Maia’s mother crumpled to the road, giving way completely to her grief and horror, I realized something. Until now, our mission had been about obligation, a way to make some money and stay alive. The only emotion my duties had instilled in me so far had been fear. Now there was something else: outrage. I didn’t know that I could do anything to stop the raiders, but the party was the only force I had encountered so far that might even come close. I needed to get back to them.
So we kept moving. We took the two horses and the raiders’ weapons. In three more minutes we were off the lane and in the lee of the Iruni Wood. I stayed at the back, watching, but they didn’t come after us. Not this time.
We walked through the woods for about an hour, and then, when exhaustion was starting to get the better of the older villagers and the smallest children, we stopped and slept as best we could in the rain. When we rose at first light we had no food or water, and the villagers had nowhere to go. I wanted to press north towards Verneytha, but if we stayed in the forest, we would eventually get dangerously close to that stone circle, and that was not a chance I was prepared to take. After a couple of hours of walking through the trees, we pulled east and were out of the woods altogether by lunchtime. Not that we had any lunch, of course. But it had stopped raining, and that was something.
As we walked, I tried to make sense of what I had learned in the last day or so. It was odd, but the villagers treated me like a soldier who knew what he was doing, so I started thinking in those terms: Will the specialist, the tactician, the man with secret knowledge about the raiders and their methods.
I thought about the maps we had looked over in Adsine, the ones showing the location of the raider attacks. I now knew how they got from place to place unseen, and I had started to wonder if there was a range limit to the power that moved them, or if they could appear only in certain places. Clearly the pale rock in that underground chamber was the source of their power. A smaller version of the same opalescent crystal had been in the center of the Iruni stone circle, and the fact that the raiders had walked there with their coffins suggested that they couldn’t just vanish and reappear anywhere. But when the raiders had massed to assault the village, I had seen no such stone circle where we had appeared, nor had there been anything similar near the road when they attacked the coal wagons.
That scary raider with the horned helm was also a factor. He had been with them when they assaulted the convoy, and had seemed to move us from the circular cavern to the village, but the raiders at the stone circle had not required his presence to take them to the stables. Unless they could call on him, somehow, from the stone circle. Perhaps he could then bring them to the underground chamber. That made a kind of sense, and would suggest that all the other stones (including the ones in