For days now, the weather was changing. Aien could feel the humidity in the air, and the wind that swept the pin they traversed didn’t leave dust behind anymore.

  Cleaning his hands, he fixed his bandana, making sure it was tight enough, then stood up and away from the pond.

  Kaye was on the other side of it, having already filled all of their waterskins. Though her hair was tied in the back, strands of green were still buffeted about by the breeze.

  “You should trim your hair. It’s about to start getting in front of your eyes.”

  “I was thinking that just the other day,” she said, reaching for an unruly strand and wrapping it behind an ear.

  Aien nodded, shaking his hands to dry out the water. As he did so, Kaye stared at him, but if she had something to say she decided against it.

  Walking around the pond, she said, “We should head back.”

  Calm down, Aien told himself.

  His moment of worrying passed, and he followed Kaye back towards their camp. The journey since Tohohon had been, finally, free of trouble. Some sort of unspoken agreement they had arrived at said that they would walk fast and hard, as if they were still being pursued or had some issue with the nd of Sarak itself.

  Perhaps they were already out of Sarak. The deserts had been left behind a couple days ago, giving way to a hilly pin with blotches of grass here and there, and the rocks that sprouted from the ground weren’t red or yellow, but gray how stones were meant to be.

  Back at camp, Uruoro was heating the leftovers of yesterday’s stew. Hogog still wasn’t back from his hunt, and though Aien would never think of catching something on these pins — the low hills were hardly cover enough —, the man was confident when he said he could hit a bird midflight.

  Then there was Gima, sitting on a small rock jutting from the ground, back against the camp, whetting her curved sword.

  “You should move that stone a little faster,” Aien said, “I can sharpen it for you, if you want to.”

  Without turning to acknowledge him, Gima took his advice.

  “Like this?”

  “Yes, that’s better.”

  She gave it a couple more scrapes, then turned the bde to start working on the other side of the edge. He knew she was a warrior once, but Gima herself had said that she hadn’t wielded the sword for years. Falling out of practice was a threat that arrived unseen; Aien often found he was the one reminding others of that.

  What about her? Aien wondered. When Kaye stared at me, she must have been thinking about the bandana, but Gima is sharpening her sword.

  When Aien turned to move away from her, his sword swung on his belt, the hilt touching his arm. His sword, not the curved one he had plucked from a dead man, that one they had sold back in Tohohon for extra coin.

  He spent the next hour or so practicing, shifting from one stance to the other, picking up speed as he went. Everything fell into pce with the correct bde in his hands. He was stronger now, not only because he was growing up, but because of everything that had happened with them in Sarak. They had taught him a lot, he had to admit, Loho more than the others.

  After Hogog came back with two rge birds dangling by their feet, they waited for him to eat his meal and joined the road once again. Another part of their unspoken agreement was to always set up camp out of any traveler’s sight.

  Wagon tracks were clearly visible on the road they followed northward, though they hadn’t seen any wagon yet. In the northeast, dark mountains rose. Aien knew that they ranged far north, essentially making that side safe from any Sarak invasion, which the settlement of Veren Hill had been built to watch out against. He had seen it on the map Kaye bought in Tohohon. A sinuous line joining two small rivers. To Aien, it had looked like a stupidly rge barricade.

  Two vertical lines appeared ahead as the stretch of road they walked upon sloped up. Watchtowers.

  His eyes instinctively went to Kaye, finding her gazing ahead as if in a trance. She was probably trying to burn the imagine of the city being revealed in her mind’s eye, to add it to her diary. Aien understood how it was useful, both as a resource and to occupy her time, but the wonder in her eyes always made him feel odd.

  Aien stared intently ahead, but didn’t find the beauty that she seemed to.

  Then he watched Gima’s back. He didn’t look at her first because she was in front of him, but Aien couldn’t afford to let his guard down around her, not yet. If it was him, this would have been a good moment for a surprise attack. There would be plenty of other moments soon, as they all felt as if they had finally made it out.

  Aien had started to convince himself that they didn’t know, but starting wasn’t enough. There could be another agreement, one he wasn’t a part of. They could just as easily be waiting for him to say something himself.

  It had been a split moment decision to kick Loho down the cliff. Aien had wondered about how to get his sword back, but he was no fool. Confronting the man was suicide, so Aien took to watching out for opportunities, so he could be sure to take it when it arrived.

  When they found him along with Hogog and Uruoro, Aien knew it was nothing but a gamble. There were good chances he wouldn’t find an opportunity and that the Headhunter would deliver them safely to Veren Hill — perhaps leaving where they stood just now — and Aien would never see the sword again.

  Then the other Headhunter, Cozo, put himself between the two in an attempt to run past them after noticing he was being pushed towards the cliff. Aien moved just in time to prevent him from doing so, and Cozo switched grips in one of his bdes, sshing upwards at Loho.

  Who once again caught a bde in his own flesh, throwing himself forward to sm against Cozo, the bde which was aimed at his chin didn’t have enough strength behind it and must have gotten stuck between his ribs. Both men wavered then, Cozo with his left side entirely open for any attack Aien wanted to deliver. It would have been easy to thrust through the man, bde in from one side, out the other, the dying man’s weight pulling his sword down.

  Instead, as the two men grappled, Loho pinning him in pce for Aien to deliver the killing blow and Cozo trying to shove the shortsword in deeper, Aien then gnced over his shoulder, saw that no one was watching, all turned the other way in their fight against the Headhunter with the spear, while the caravan was too far away down the road, not having stopped when the fight started.

  Aien turned, raised a foot, and kicked Loho’s back with all the strength in his body. Both men tumbled over the edge. One of them let out a wordless scream. He wasn’t sure who.

  Gima turned to look a moment after he did so, having heard the scream.

  When the other Headhunter left, Aien was ahead of Gima in climbing down the rocks. He found the sword first, but ran past it. Cozo had fallen hard on his back, sprawled against the ground with his arms to the side and face frozen in terror.

  Loho had rolled forward. Aien found him much farther down, following the trail of spttered blood he left on the rocks. Every limb in Loho’s body was broken, bone jutting here and there where they had torn through flesh.

  Yet somehow the man still had some life in him. Enough to stare up at Aien with a bloody knowing smile.

  Aien had wavered them, but it wasn’t knowing in that sense, it couldn’t be, Loho hadn’t been there to know. The Headhunter knew it had been Aien who pushed both down the cliff, but that was that, and that wasn’t much. No, the smile he had shown was a mocking one, managing one st stab at Aien even as he died.

  Aien had tricked himself — a naivety he had thought long gone in his past life — that it would have been a triumphant moment, only because he wished it to be. Instead, it was enraging.

  Gima was well behind him by that point, and Aien watched as the life left Loho’s eyes.

  Aien blinked, his attention coming back to the present as he heard Uruoro saying something before running ahead. The ck of reaction from the others and the fact Uruoro had spoken kept Aien from thinking something had happened when he wasn’t paying attention.

  Arms to the sky, Uruoro left the road, ughing and running aimlessly.

  “I am a free man!”

  Aien followed the small man with his eyes. Kaye was ughing, and Hogog said something about it being too soon, which Aien agreed with.

  He turned to Gima, who had the thinnest of smiles on her face.

  Stupid, he realized, to still be worrying, since she would have said something back then if she had seen it, instead of giving him the sword.

  Made of fine flexible steel, probably forged in a castle, without any unnecessary decoration, the sword wasn’t worth any treasure, but it was precious to him.

  Aien’s father was a better fighter than his grandfather had been, both of whom were guards. His father for a farm, the grandfather for caravans. It was the only thing he had to remember the first two good men he had met, and Aien had to die once to meet them. Before the sword came into his grandfather’s possession, it had belonged to an Armsmaster, then it was passed all the way down to him.

  Kaye stared at him; her cheeks were still pulled in a smile.

  Aien almost halted at her gaze. A mistake he couldn’t allow ever again.

  He smiled a little, rolling his eyes.

  Plenty of lies, he had. Some more necessary than others.