The dwarf jumped. Mud splashed a mile in every direction around his point of impact. The silhouetted men against the forest advanced.

Eris lowered herself. Coiling. Poising to strike when the figures drew close. She held her hands tightly together, as if rubbing them for friction on a cold day, but between her palms brewed another swell of fire.

Rook did not heed the dwarf’s advice. He reached for his sword—but he used his right hand reflexively. He hissed in pain, doubling over himself in agony as the muscles around the wound in his arm contracted.

“I told ye,” the dwarf said. He wore a skirt of mail and a helmet strapped on his head. “Grab ‘im.”

The shadows from the forest bolted like crossbows shot. One grabbed Rook from behind, materializing behind him in the blink of an eye; another showed himself with an arrow nocked in his bow, leveled at Zyd. Eris heard a footstep behind her, a gust of air against her neck, and—

She turned. A man behind her, encroaching; with no hesitation she let slip the energy prepared in her palms. A strike of lightning shot out and hit his gambeson, scorching it black in an instant and knocking him over.

Another battle began.

She turned back toward their fire. An arrow came hurtling toward her. This time she was too slow; it hit her in the chest, driving straight through her ribcage, except…

Except the head broke as it touched her skin. The force of the impact wasn’t sent to her chest, but her wrist, which jolted against the side of her torso as if struck by a hammer.

Her wrist. The jade ward. A ward against steel, so long as it held. That was its purpose. She looked up at the archer, surprised to be alive, and jumped for cover. Her feet moved—

And hands wrapped around her hair.

“Let go!” she cried.

“The fightin’ is over, witch,” the dwarf said. A tug brought her down to the ground. A waft of foul, mead-tinged breath hit her nose as their eyes met. He hit her, grabbed her arms, and held them bound together. “No more of that, thank ye. Dom, get the rope!”

Dirt in her mouth. In her eyes. She struggled and tried to find the energy for another spell, another burst of mana, but she couldn’t keep concentration. Too much agitation. Too much anger. She elbowed the dwarf and he gave an inch, even as her bone collided with hard steel, and she lifted herself upward to see the rest of the field around her.

Rook was pinned on his stomach by a man in a cloak with a sword. Zyd’s hands were raised, his bow discarded on the ground. Some struggle took place; both were beaten, but now both had surrendered.

Rope was fastened around her wrists. Her ankles.

“She shocked me!” a man behind her said.

“Yer fine,” the dwarf said.

“I coulda died!”

“Are ye dead?”

“No, but I coulda been!”

“You should be,” Eris growled.

“Shut up!” the dwarf said. He hit Eris on the head with the blunt back of his axe. She gasped and fell quiet, the world around her dark. Her ears rang. “Where’s the body?”

“Erkent, here,” one said.

“Aye, that’s him. ‘n his sword. Fine piece of steel, that one. Easy payday, eh? Start goin’ through their things.”

One of the assailants tied up Zyd and went through his backpack.

“Hey!” Zyd said, “you can’t do that! Those are my things! Cut it out!”

“Make me,” the man said.

Zyd rocked back and forth but had no recourse except swearing—until the man picked up the halfling’s lantern. That was a step too far.

“Drop it! You can’t have my lantern! Drop, drop, drop! You can’t have it! Can’t you hear me? I said drop it!”

He sat upright, partially, and inched toward the man.

The man rolled his eyes. He let go of the lantern and took a step toward Zyd, and kicked him hard in the head.

Zyd dropped to the dirt unconscious.

Rook remained silent. He winced. Looked away.

Eris schemed. She refused to be degraded in this way. She refused to die in a ditch in this place—that was not the end to her story. She would not let it be.

They heaved Erkent’s body into a cart. Then every single thing of value was taken from them. Everything but their clothes stolen. The dwarf pulled the lizard chief’s Manastone necklace from Eris’ neck and the jade bracelet from her wrist.

Rook’s sword, taken. Everything valuable they had found. All their supplies save a few scraps of food.

The dwarf took a seat by Erkent’s body at the back of the wagon and looked back at them.

“Now. What are we gonna do with ye?”

“Let us go,” Rook said. Defeat in his voice.

The dwarf laughed. “’Let us go,’ I like that.”

“I say chop ‘em up!” the voice of the man with the scorched gambeson said.

“We caught them fair and square,” their archer chipped in, “why not sell them in Kem-Karwene?”

“We ain’t slavers, now, Dommy-boy.”

“That’s right, adventurers, we,” Gambeson said.

Eris flipped a strand of dirt-crusted hair from her eyes. “I mistook you for kites,” she managed. The bandits spun around her as she spoke.

“Kites?”

“Kites. You sit idle in the air on warm days while others hunt for you.”

“What’s kites and hunting do together?”

“She means vultures, you idiot,” the dwarf said. “Aye, it’s true, we’re kites, but like the buzzards we do a valuable service, sweeping up the refuse, cleaning up corpses and the like. Not so different from yerselves.” He glanced to Erkent. “We ain’t murderers, though, even if murderin’ ‘s a fair part o’ the game.”

“I don’t mind murderin’,” Gambeson said.

“Now, now, ye don’t want to be ungrateful, they did do the work for us, and on a stroke o’ good luck on our part, them coming out just as we were about to go in. What do you say, Dom?”

“I still say we sell ‘em,” Dom, the archer, said.

“Matt?”

“They’re just kids. Leave them here, let Fate figure it out.”

“If they make it back to town,” Dom said, “they’re gonna tell their story. Who knows what might happen.”

“Aye and we’ll be long gone by then, won’t we? We got what we came here for, plus some extra. It’s our right as adventurers, they’d do the same to us, and they’d let us go, I’d trust. But killin’ two kids—who knows who might be comin’ after them lookin’ for revenge. Load it up, boys. Leave ‘em be. But if we ever see all yer faces again—make sure we don’t, aye?”

Gambeson sneered. Eris was concentrating on her bindings, trying to burn through them, and she hardly noticed as two of the men pulled the wagon—the wagon which was left outside the mine—away.

Eris singed the rope around her arms. Once, then again, and by the third attempt she was so spent she could do nothing but collapsed onto her back and stare up at the stars. Her bones were transmuted to lead. Her ears still rang and the world still spun. She felt humiliated, and yet she knew that, with some certainty, this was still not as low the Life could go.

She was also mystified. Completely dumbfounded. Why were they alive? Why hadn’t the vultures killed them?

It was their mistake. She would not forget this day. She would track them down and have her vengeance. So as she laid there, with no possessions to her name but a shirt, a skirt, sandals, and her cloak, bound and wounded and too tired to move, she gave herself hope by imagining the sight of the merciful dwarf ‘adventurer’ gone up in a puff of green fire.

In her imagination, burnt dwarf smelled just like charcoal.

The whole fantasy was a pleasant one, and she was only disrupted from it when she heard a dog’s bark.

A mutt’s bark.

She rolled onto her side.

Across from the now burnt-out ruins of their campfire was Rook on his stomach; and behind him, Pyraz. He held one paw on Rook’s arm, another on the small of his back, and with his mouth he attacked the knot of the rope keeping his master tied. Not in the manner of a beast, but like a human would…without thumbs.

It was a slow process. Grabbing one strand, pulling, slowly, readjusting, but finally the rope went slack, and Rook pulled both his arms free.

He didn’t say anything, but he kissed Pyraz. Freeing himself of the bindings around his ankles was easy in time; Eris was next, then Zyd, who was still unconscious but breathing.

She dared to scratch the dog’s ears, but only for a second.

The bandits had left their backpacks, satchels, and a few worthless camping supplies. Nothing else. Eris grabbed her pack to check and looked it over again and again.

Except…

There was a lantern lodged in the earth near Zyd’s feet. A small, but perfectly good, lantern. The archer hadn’t bothered picking it back up. So be it, Eris thought. It was hers now. It would be worth something to someone in Kaimas.

She grabbed it while Rook wasn’t looking and slid it into her backpack. Then she tied it shut, and collapsed down.

“Zyd,” Rook said. He leaned over the halfling and shook him by the shoulder. “Please. Wake up.”

Stirring him took a committed effort. Eventually it paid off.

“Where are we? What happened?” he said. He was covered in bruises. His pants were still shredded and his legs bandaged.

“They left,” Eris said.

“They took everything,” Rook said.

“No! My bow! My lantern! Where’s my lantern!? Is it here?”

“They took that, too. Your bow is in the dirt; that they left,” Eris said.

Zyd was furious. His quiver was nearby, with all its arrows spilled out, and he picked one up and snapped it in half. “I had all my money in my backpack! They took everything!”

“Yes,” Eris said.

“And my lantern! They took my lantern?”

“What part of ‘everything’ is unclear?”

“I can’t believe it…what are we gonna do?”

Rook had been tight-lipped for hours. His arm clearly brought tremendous pain. But he said then, “We have no choice but go back.”

“To Vandens?” Eris said.

“It’s too far. To Kaimas.”

“They have a temple there with charity, there are priests and everything,” Zyd said, “maybe we can get food…”

“No,” Eris said. “I will not stoop to—that.”

“I need to see a healer,” Rook said.

“And pay him with what?” Eris said. “Even once you heal, you cannot fight without a sword. You are neutered.”

“I will think of something,” he said. “We shouldn’t stay here.”

With that Eris agreed. For once she longed to be within a town’s walls and not without of them. The encounter with these brigands shook her not only for its outcome, which was terrible enough, but for their completely inept resistance. Three humans and a dwarf, no one of remark, and she and her companions put up no fight. They were robbed, battered, beaten. They were humiliated.

Eris was a talented mage. Rook was a good swordsman. Even Zyd was, in action, not terrible with his bow. But it was hard to forget now that, for the time being, they were children in a world far greater than themselves. Brigands were only the beginning.

They moved their camp for the night into the woods. Come morning they ate, then started down the road to Kaimas. It wasn’t a hard journey; the way was paved with bricks and only a handful of miles, and soon they reached its humble, rustic embrace.

Kaimas was only one of a few towns in all the world dominated by halflings. Dwarfs often came down from Kem-Karwene to trade and humans, sometimes, made their way up from Vandens and Erimos to the south. Along the western coast, it was quiet, unpretentious, and small, in every sense of the word. Surrounded by farmland. Cows and pigs everywhere. The sort of place Eris never intended to visit.

The battered, impoverished trio of adventurers looked very out of place as they walked down its central street. They attracted evil glances from everyone save children.

They refilled their canteens at a public watering trough for mules. While Eris maintained that charity was beneath her, this, incidentally, she had no qualm with.

Zydnus whined.

“What should we do? Do we go tell Erkent’s wife what happened? Maybe she’ll cut us in on the bounty?”

There was mud and grime in Rook’s wounded arm and he washed it out with water. “There’s no point,” he said. Flinching in pain, he checked beneath the bandages Eris applied before their camp was attacked the previous night. The stab did not go all the way through his arm, but there were few other positives. It was not a pleasant sight.

“You don’t know that!”

“No. I don’t.”

“I’m going to try! I’ll tell her everything! Do you have a better plan?”

“I intend to recover our things,” Eris said.

“Great idea, why didn’t you do that before they were taken, huh?”

“I did a better job than you.”

“You didn’t do anything!”

“You ‘didn’t do anything;’ you sat and allowed yourself to be captured. I nearly killed one of them, and had Rook been able to engage the dwarf I would have finished him and another—"

“I need a surgeon,” Rook said, interrupting. The words were distant. He stared into his bicep.

Eris agreed. Better him than her, and she wouldn’t pay the bill, but he needed treatment soon. She turned to Zyd. “Do you know of anyone here?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I do. Come on.”

For the next three hours he led Rook across town in search of anyone who could treat their injuries on credit. It seemed Zyd’s reputation in Kaimas was not sterling.

“You’ve got balls coming to see me after what you did to your pa, you miserable bastard,” the surgeon near the docks said. “I wouldn’t treat you and your friends if you had a thousand gold coins to your name. Get lost!”

They received similar welcomes from the physician, the alchemist, the healer, and the nurse on their tour, and it was only the midwife at the town’s outer ring who agreed to do anything to tend their wounds. She doused Rook’s arm, Eris’ head, and Zyd’s legs with herbs and salves, bandaged them in cheap linens, and instructed them to rest as much as possible, for as long as possible. Rook’s injury was the worst and would need the longest to heal; for him she built a crude sling for his arm and told him to limit movements in his shoulder. Her prognosis on removal was six weeks, if no infection came and he survived the next few days.

Six weeks. Six weeks of rest, and they had nothing.

For the next two days they slept on the streets. The hours passed in a daze. They ate what little remained of their rations. Rook and Eris both swelled with bruises. Soon their food was gone.

Zyd went to his father and begged for a place to stay. They did not see him again for a month.

Rook went to the temple on a hill just outside town. “Please come with me,” he said, “you have to. You’ll starve here.”

“No,” she said.

“What other plan do you have?”

“Casting ourselves at the feet of priests is not a plan.”

“Living like street cats is not a plan.”

“I will not abdicate all my agency to halflings in robes who worship trees.”

“Think how stupid they’ll look when they waste their charity on a proud, vain, ungrateful human like you. You could hardly have a better way to take advantage of own naivety.”

“Insult me all you wish, I will not change my mind. If you wish to go, go. I will not come.”

He stared at her. Then, wordlessly, he left, up the hill and down the road, and Eris was left alone. She watched as he went, until she couldn’t see him any longer. She knew nothing about the religion of the people of this village, but she did know something with certainty: charity was submission. All religion was about submission. Before the Old Kingdom man submitted to gods and the spirits of nature; after, to the power of magic and the supremacy of the men who wielded it; and now, to some mixture of all the previous, a stew of subordinacy, everyone desperately in search of someone else to place above himself.

Eris refused to submit. She called no one master. Never a husband, never a king, never a god, never a Magister. She did not like Rook, not precisely, but she did respect him, and she enjoyed his company; yet to see him willing to throw himself at another’s boots come crisis made her stomach churn.

She wanted him to be strong. She wanted him to be powerful. She wanted him to be independent and free. Those were the qualities she found beautiful; those were the qualities she strove to embody.

And yet…watching him go…she felt the perverse temptation to run after him. She was revolted to see him submit, yet why was she pained to watch him go? Eris was a woman, a girl really, who was imprisoned entirely within her own mind; thus she noticed acutely when her mind, her intellect, felt different than her heart. And her heart was…not nearly so malicious.

But her mind won every battle.

She returned back to town.

Luckily, she did have some outline of a plan:

Zyd’s lantern.

She pawned it.

Thirty silver pieces was enough for food, if she spent carefully. Her injuries were only mild. In a week she would be able to work—to do something for money. That was her plan.

But she spent the week on the streets.

As far as streets went Kaimas was nicer than most. There were no prostitutes, nor angry guardsmen, nor roving bandits. The days were easy. It was early summer by then but her cloak gave her pale skin enough shade to keep cool and unburnt, and all she did was watch the comings and goings of a normal, northwestern town, filled with normal, northwestern villagers.

It was maddeningly mundane.

Nights were a different matter. She slept for minutes at a time. Shopkeepers drove her from their porches and back alleys; farmers threatened her away from their fields. On the fourth night she finally found rest behind the inn, drifting away into deep sleep—

Only to be awoken by hands on her thighs. Grabbing at her cloak. Fingers on her shirt. She screamed and prepared a spell, and saw two humans looming over her. A gust of wind rushed out from her mouth; the assailants panicked. Their hands tightened around her cloak. She grabbed one by the arm and scalded him with her touch.

“She’s a fookin’ mage!” a man’s voice said.

They tugged her down to the ground. The chain of her cloak snapped as her head collided with the cobblestone beneath her—

The flapping of fabric, a gust of air—

Footsteps in retreat.

Silence.

She rolled onto her back. Headache overcoming her.

The men were gone.

They had taken her cloak.

Blood trickled down onto her already-soiled skirt. She laid there without moving, staring at the sky, until black overhead turned to blue.

At some point near dawn a halfling walked past her:

“Are you all right, miss?” he said. He leaned down over her. He was a gentle-looking, kindly, older man, well-dressed.

“Be gone!” Eris shouted at him. She raised herself suddenly and pushed him over with a hand, before collapsing down once again.

Her head still ached. There was blood in her eyes.

The halfling was off. He stumbled back, then up, and ran away, and she was once again left alone.

She retreated back to her place against the inn with her legs curled against her chest for at least an hour. In some way she hoped, secretly, the man might return to help her, but she never could have admitted it.

Then…

“I hope it’s not too much trouble for ya, but I’m gonna need ya to stand up for me.”

She glanced up.

Then down.

Another halfling. This one with a spear. A gambeson. A helmet.

A guard.

“I hate to do this to ya, but I got to report that you’re under arrest for causin’ a disturbance.”

“Arrest?” she said in disbelief.

“This is a peaceful town, ya see, and we can’t have humans like you causin’ scenes. Bleedin’ all over and such-like, you know.”

Her voice was very low. “I was attacked.”

“That may be the case, miss, but the rules are the rules. You know I was bein’ awfully forgivin’ of ya, I was told that you’d been causin’ some problems early on, but I didn’t do nothin’ about it, I thought—”

“Stop!” she shouted. His accent was driving her mad. But a thought struck her. “How long in jail?”

“Aw, jeeze, I dunno, maybe four or five days, dependin’ on how Sheriff Olmas feels about ya, could be longer, maybe a week. It’s real nice in there, you’ll like it, we got new beds and everything—a donation from Mr. Koljas up on Mittner hill. They got these sheets and pillows and--”

“Beds?”

“Oh yeah, and food, too.”

“Food?”

“Eggs, sausage, I cook it up myself on Saturdays.”

“…you feed prisoners meat?”

“Well that’s just the right thing to do, don’t ya know? Wouldn’t make anyone go a meal without ham, not even the worst convict in all the lands. Now get up, come on in. Let’s go. Don’t make a scene now.”

Living on the streets can change a woman in just a few short days. Perhaps the halflings were not such a terrible people after all.

“Very well. Take me in,” she said.

And thus Eris went to jail, and she was terribly grateful for it.