Another rock opened a gash just below his eye, and he swore.
Blinking through the pain, he saw the third man stride bravely toward the place where they struggled, brandishing a short sword.
Listening to Griff’s faint groans, the direction of which he couldn’t even fully discern in the darkness, he wasn’t sure he had this handled anymore.
But then, finally, with another firm squeeze, the archer went limp in his hold.
He let the man drop into the dirt as he held his hunting knife aloft, fending off that short sword and a barrage of rocks alike as he tried to make a hasty retreat while also figuring out where exactly Griff and the mule were now.
But the men were advancing, and he had to keep his eyes on them. They were forcing him deeper into the brush where he’d hidden earlier, backing him effectively against a wall.
The fourth man, who had evidently abandoned his breakfast to try to chase down the mule and its unlawful new owner, was having a time keeping up with the pace of the nervous beast, even while it was dragging a body.
The man and Mal both stared for a moment as the rose-gold light of day finally began to seep over the edge of the eastern horizon, illuminating the animal’s frantic beeline toward the hill and the man with an arrow in his leg trailing behind it, face concealed by a scarf as red as his bloody pants, hitting every rock along the way.
Mal was so obviously cursed, but he rarely felt it as keenly as he did now.
“Fuck,” he whispered like a lover in the throes of passion.
And he was certainly feeling passionate as he gazed around at the chaos of the camp: the upturned pan, the smoldering remnants of little fires in the grass, the unconscious archer, the cruel shaft of the arrow protruding from his old friend’s leg.
Four weeks wasn’t going to be nearly time enough to get the treasure. Not with a wound like that. Not on top of Griff’s old wound from the attack still clearly bothering him, no matter how he tried to hide it.
Griff was going to be so bad for business.
All the commotion had apparently woken Alys at last.
Relief broke over Mal’s scarf-wrapped features at the sight of her bounding down the hill, rocks flying away from her feet as she skidded to the bottom with her sword already brandished—Rhun’s old sword from the war, a heavy relic, glistening wetly with the reds and golds of the early sun like a warning, or a promise.
By the time she reached the place where Mal was barely holding his ground with the hunting knife, her cheeks were pink with exertion. Still, her eyes were alert, flashing with dislike as she dodged a rock and held her sword above her head, striking a pose for the three men who were still conscious.
“Morning, boys.” She grinned lazily around a yawn. “Who’s ready for the big, bad warg?”
She sprang at the rock thrower first, laughing as she sliced her blade this way and that to force him to dance.
Mal had always loved watching her work. There had been a few years when Theo, the man she almost married, tried to pressure her into domesticity, into things like needlework and brewing a perfect cup of tea for his perfectly boring houseguests. When Alys finally sent him packing, Mal had been almost as relieved as she was to see the back of him.
He had missed having a business partner—a friend—who could truly hold her own, someone he could count on.
With a renewed gleam in his eye, he charged the man brandishing the short sword. No longer backed into the brush like some cowed creature being hunted, he feinted, dodged the man’s blade as it breezed by, then whisked his knife across the man’s throat.
There came a gasp, then a gurgle.
The man took one more swing at Mal as he began to fall, slicing into his ankle before he finally met his fate.
The cook, still seemingly torn between pursuing Griff and the mule and aiding his fellows, took one look at his fallencompanions—one bleeding out into the dirt, one perhaps merely unconscious—and decided, after it all, to run.
Which left only the rock thrower.
Alys’s idea of a dance and her wild smile were ordinarily enough to unsettle most men into fleeing or handing over their purses, whatever was the order of the day, but this one seemed to be made of stronger stuff than most.
As the cook fled, the rock thrower glanced briefly in that direction, giving Alys an opening to drop her sword and try to grab him in a headlock. She was probably hoping to render him unconscious like his friend by the fire, a move Mal knew well from their past experiences on the road together. But as she threw her arm out, a knife flashed from somewhere, a hunter’s blade gripped in the man’s large and steady hand. Angled right toward her ribs.
Mal cried out a warning.
Alys was half a second quicker than the man as she covered his hand with her own, and just a touch stronger as she gritted her teeth and redirected the blade, sinking it deep into the man’s stomach.
He dropped to his knees. Blood began to trickle from his mouth.
