If I didn’t know him so well, if I hadn’t trained beside him, watching for every nuance, I would have said his dark eyes were emotionless, his face a mask of calm as we listened.
But I did know him.
I caught the small tick pulling the edge of his mouth. The fine beads of sweat dotted across his brow. The darkening of his deep brown eyes.
Maz was afraid.
“What is it?” I whispered. My tongue was so thick I could barely get the words out.
His voice was low, and he kept his gaze trained on the mountainside. “Raiders.”
I clutched the hilt of my talwar tighter. My father was in the city bringing new swords to the emperor. I was here alone.
I glanced at Maz at my side.Not quite alone.
“This close to the emperor? They must have some gall.” I licked my lips, cracked from the heat. Terror seeped through me, my pulse hammering against my skin. I had trained daily, under the tutelage of a master swordsmith. There shouldn’t be anything I wasn’t prepared for.
And yet, I’d never been in open battle. Never without the safety of the training field.
Blood rushed to the surface of my hands and made them come alive. I raised my talwar up. Another scream rose in the air, tearing my heart in two.
This was my village, and these were my people.
It didn’t matter that Maz and I were alone. It didn’t matter if I was afraid. We could save the village. We could try.
“We have to stop them.”
Maz turned to face me, his lips white. Dread wound tightly in my stomach, like a cobra coiling up.
His expression said we were about to die, but not if I had anything to say about it.
“I was getting bored of beating you anyway.”
The corner of his lips quirked up and dispelled some of the vacant look I’d seen there.
He gave me a terse nod and I exhaled a large breath of relief. My heart drummed in my ears, the erratic beat as loud as a tabla.
We ran to the village, keeping low until we came to an outcropping of houses and small huts. Smoke billowed from one of them, the thick wafts pillowing into the sky.
A child’s cry erupted, and I lurched forward, only to be yanked back by Maz.
“Wait.”
“There’s a child!” I snapped back at him, but I stayed my feet when I saw two large men exit the hut. One held a burlap sack overhis shoulder filled with presumably stolen goods, the other something that made my stomach lurch even more—a bloodied sword.
“They’ve killed people.”
He nodded. “Likely. There will be more men than this, though.”
“How many?”
He tilted his head, his eyes not on the raiders standing in my village, but somewhere else, on a memory he’d rather stay forgotten. “Usually no more than a dozen. Raiders don’t like working in big groups, it’s difficult to stay hidden.”
“How do you know this?”
“Because raiders came to my village. They killed many.”
I couldn’t do anything besides clutch my sword and stare helplessly at him.
