Meek

The spear stabbed into the axe-wound on the bear's back.

Eli threw his weight behind the thrust and the spear pierced rotting organs and drove toward the warm bright blister of blood beneath the beast's shattered ribcage.

The sparks guided him but the tip of the spear missed by a finger's width.

Well, blessdamn. That wasn't good.

The bear shook in rage and Eli felt a jolt of fear and jammed the spear to his left, using the wound as a pivot point.

The tip jerked rightward toward the blood blister, but not far enough.

A mountain of fur and teeth and fury loomed above Eli. He screamed and pounded the spear deeper while Riadn, still on the ground, threw another black needle at the bear.

Eli only saw a flash of motion before the needle embedded the bear's muzzle. It didn't do any damage, but the bear hesitated for a fraction of a second. And in that fraction of a second, the spear tip pricked the blood blister.

Just barely.

Not enough to stop a bloated rampaging monster with--

The blister popped and the bear collapsed into a moldering corpse. In an instant, the beast changed from a roaring embodiment of bestial mindlessness into a pile of rotting fur and viscera.

So apparently, that was enough.

Eli withdrew his sparks from the revolting mess--and a full heartbeat later, he stopped screaming. Then he toppled to the ground, his wounded hip finally giving way.

Apparently he'd missed Lara charging the bear with Riadn's sword, but she slowed to a trot and dropped the blade and knelt beside him. She didn't say anything. She just wiped filth from his face with the cuff of her shirt

He opened his mouth, but she answered in dryn before he could speak. "I'm fine. Only a little tresholinin."

"Tresholinin?"

She glanced at a scrape on her arm. "Treshol." She touched her shoulder. "Shelonin. Together, if you fall down? You get both. That's tresholinin."

So it meant 'scraped and bruised?' Or 'shaken up?' He didn't understand why he was getting a language lesson right then, but he nodded anyway. He almost spoke again, but didn't. He needed a moment to recover. Not from the injury so much as from the intensity.

And from sending his sparks inside a living corpse. He felt like he'd been swimming in sewage. Except he felt that way on the inside. So he took a moment to settle his core, to forget the taste and smell and touch.

A seep of time passed.

Eli's hip throbbed numbly.

Payde shoved herbs into his mouth then shuffled across the rooftop for Riadn. His eyes were bloodshot and his boots dragged. He was slow and silent, unlike the blaze of noise and motion he'd been earlier.

"Only speak in dryn," Lara said, in that language. "They're listening."

"Yes," he said in dryn.

A spark showed him as Payde reached Riadn, who was lying on her stomach beside the reeking remains of the bear.

"How badly hurt are you?" Lara asked.

"Not bad. You true hurt good?" He frowned, hearing how that sounded. "Are you really okay?"

She said something he didn't quite catch, about dryn children learning to fall from branches.

"Sounds tresholinin," he said.

She smiled down at him. "Very."

"A little help over here?" Payde called, his voice rasping. "If you'd be so kind."

Lara lifted her head and thickened her accent. "What do you need?"

"Not you, him." Payde looked at Eli. "He's already healing, is he not?"

Eli kept his gaze on Lara, so he wouldn't show any surprise, but damn. The guy had eyes. Without the aid of sparks, too.

"He's of the Palm?" Payde continued.

"Yes, but I'm sorry, he can't help your friend." She told her lie about dryn mages only healing themselves. "If there's anything else we can do, though. We owe you our lives."

"And we owe you ours," Riadn said, sounding stronger than Payde.

"Don't move, Ri," Payde told her. "Not til I check you."

"I'm fine." She clasped his arm and pulled herself into a seated position. "Between your shield and my steelsilk, I'm fine."

A spark drifted closer to her without Eli's conscious intent. He'd read about 'steelsilk,' a thin fabric of mysterious manufacture. He'd heard that single layer of steelsilk offered as much protection as brigandine armor. Apparently his curiosity was enough to send a spark investigating, but Riadn's blouse and leggings looked exactly like regular silk beneath her cloak and skirted vest.

Payde unhitched a flask from his belt. "This calls for a toast."

When he lifted the stopper, the spark detected a medicinal scent.

Riadn took a sip and winced. "Horrible."

"Two more swallows."

She grumbled, but did as he said. Then they checked each other's injuries with a thorough, clinical competence that was so flatly unembarrassed that it somehow struck Eli as even more intimate than fumbling and blushing would've been.

So he left them to it and sent the nearer spark higher, to survey the countryside.

Lara wrinkled her nose at the reeking corpse, then helped Eli to his feet. He draped an arm around her shoulder to help keep the weight off his wounded hip while they put a little space between themselves and the bear.

"What're dryn doing in Erhat province?" Riadn asked.

"Looking for trees," Eli told her. "Instead, we found ... this."

"We might ask the same of you," Lara said. "This isn't a well-travelled road."

"We're on duty," Riadn said.

"We were called to investigate a mage," Payde said.

"To investigate a ..." Lara gave a sudden smile. "Oh, you're Shepherds!"

Eli pretended he knew what she was talking about. He remembered her using that word before, but he didn't remember when. Or why. Didn't mean anything to him other than the obvious.

It meant something to Payde, though. He chuckled and said, "We haven't been called that in two hundred years, lass. Shepherds. Well, I suppose the Grove doesn't hear the latest news. But we're of the Order, yes. I'm Payde, this is Riadn."

"I'm Lara," she said. "And he's Meek."

"Doesn't look so meek to me."

Riadn sighed. "Like he hasn't heard that a thousand times."

"It's funny!"

"You're as funny as you are subtle, Payde." She winced as she stood. "I dislocated my shoulder again."

"Oh." He grabbed her upper arm and asked Lara, "So you came to see the olive groves?"

"Yes, and we passed through West Town."

He popped Riadn's shoulder into place. "We didn't stop there."

"Just rode through," Riadn added, without a tremor. "We were asked to ride to the Weep with all haste."

"The Bloodwitch took their children," Eli told them.

"She what now?"

"Stole their children. From town. Her men did. Fourteen kids. Brought them into the Weep."

"We're getting them back," Lara said.

Riadn rotated her shoulder and asked, "Why?"

"What my extremely-subtle partner means," Payde said, the color returning to his voice and the clarity to his eyes, "is that while we cannot gainsay your courage, accepting such a task without training or reward is daunting, no?"

"Yes, but ..." Eli thought of the man who'd lost his son. He thought of his own broken family and he said, "She's going to do to them what she did to the bear."

"Saint of the seas," Riadn muttered.

"You execute lost mages," Lara said, reaching to lay her hand on Eli's forearm, which was draped across her. "That's what Shepherds do. Lady Brazinka sent you a pigeon and told you that the rumors about the Bloodwitch are true?"

"I am tragically unacquainted with her ladyship." Payde paused, and the good humor glinted in his eyes again. "Tragically for her, that is. To know me is a joy devoutly to be wished."

Riadn sighed again. "An old friend asked us to investigate. He said to expect a lost mage, but this is like nothing we've seen."

"Does that matter?" Lara asked. "We dryn haven't forgotten what you do. Mages are powerful, but powerfully vulnerable. If you strike them unaware, they die as easily as anyone else."

Payde gazed merrily Eli. "Well, most of them."

"The stories say that the Shepherds work in pairs," Lara told Eli. "A hound and a knife. The hound herds the mage into position, and the knife slits their throat."

"We find an arrow works just as well," Payde said. "If the mage's shields are focused elsewhere."

"Huh," Eli said, considering them. They were assassins, except they worked for the throne. Which made them ... executioners.

Payde shifted his gaze toward the bear. "But arrows barely hurt that thing."

"How did you kill it?" Riadn asked Eli.

"Practice. We've kill two others."

"Choir!" Payde blurted. "You brought down two bears by yourselves?"

"No, no. A stoat and a kestrel."

"That wasn't a stoat," Lara said. "It was a weasel."

"Same thing," he said in dryn. "Why we talk about animal?"

She rattled off a few words he didn't understand, though he guessed she was trying to control the pace of the conversation or to warn him about a question the Shepherds might ask

"How did you kill them?" Riadn asked.

"There's a blister of witch's blood inside each of her pets," Eli told her. "You burst that, they die."

"How do you find it?"

"With a small animal, you hack away. With the bear--" Oh! Maybe that's what Lara had been jabbering about. "--with the bear, you saw those lumps? I guessed that they moved along with the blood blister. I got lucky."

"'Luck' is just another word for 'singing in the Dreamers' choir,'" Payde said, wiping gore from his axe head against his calf. "And we all got lucky. For a moment there, I was praying the Angel would turn me into a real hound."

"What?" Lara said.

"Don't ask," Riadn said.

"Cause then I could've kissed my arse goodbye," Paye declared.

Riadn sighed. "How many pets does she have?"

"We don't know," Lara told her. "The bandits called them 'risen,' too. Those are her human pets, It hink. That's what she's going to do to the children if we don't stop her."

The humor died in Payde's face. "Let's move."

"Together?" Riadn said. "The four of us?"

"They lost a horse, Ri. They'll double up."

"We always work just the two of us."

"This is no ordinary lost mage."

Riadn frowned. "We don't know them."

"We know enough, captain. Considering we'd be bear food if it weren't for them. Requesting permission to deputize them for the duration."

"Very well," she said, after a moment. "Granted."

"Uh," Eli said. "What does 'deputize' mean?"

"Not a thing, Meek," Payde told him. "Not a single hellblessed thing, except of course for the honor of standing tall beside a splendid warrior."

"Oh."

"And Riadn will be there too."