The bandits had made two mistakes.
The first was choosing the pass at Kharun’s Ridge, where the rock walls narrowed close
enough that a person standing at the center could touch both sides — a place built for
ambush, which meant it was also a place built for being ambushed in return, if you knew to
look up instead of ahead.
The second was assuming the lone woman walking the pass alone, hood low, blade
sheathed, was easy prey.
Ashryn heard them before she saw them. Six, maybe seven, spread along the ridge above
her, breathing too loud for men who thought themselves quiet. She didn’t slow her pace.
She didn’t reach for her blade. She simply kept walking, counting their footsteps against the
stone, until the moment the first one dropped down behind her, already reaching.
She turned before he landed.
It was over in four movements — a redirected wrist, a knee, a fall that wasn’t hers, a blade
that was. The second man came from her left, and she used the first man’s own weight to
meet him, so that by the time the third and fourth arrived, they were already stepping over
their friends.
“Talven said this pass was empty,” one of them muttered, backing away.
“Talven lies for a living,” Ashryn said. “You should have asked someone else.”
That earned her a laugh she hadn’t meant to give away — bitter, quick, gone as fast as it
came, because laughing here, in this pass, over this particular betrayal, felt like something
she owed no one.
The remaining bandits ran. She let them.
She wiped her blade clean on a strip of cloth, sheathed it, and kept walking, because the
sun was already low and she had a fire to build before dark, and because standing still in
this pass, surrounded by men who groaned in the dust behind her, was the kind of stillness
that let old things catch up.
By the time she reached the clearing where she’d make camp, the ache behind her ribs had
returned — not from the fight. The fight had been nothing. It was the ridge itself. Narrow
stone walls, a place built for ambush.
Her village had had walls like that once. Not stone. Wood and mudbrick, low fences meant
to keep goats in and little else out, because no one had imagined they’d need more than
that.
She built the fire without letting herself think further than the kindling in her hands.
It didn’t work. It never fully worked.
Smoke first. Then the screaming. Then silence, which had been worse than the screaming,
because silence meant it was already finished, and finished meant there was nothing left to
run toward.
Ashryn pressed the heel of her hand against her sternum, hard, until the memory receded to
something she could carry instead of something that carried her. It had been three years.
She’d stopped expecting it to hurt less. She’d only learned, slowly, how to keep walking
through it.
Something shifted in the dark past the firelight.
She was on her feet before she’d finished registering the sound, blade already in hand,
every trace of grief folded away behind something sharper.
“Peace,” a voice said, low and even, from the treeline. “I’m not here to fight you.”
A man stepped into the firelight — tall, dark-eyed, a guardian’s mark visible at his collar even
in the low light. He held both hands loosely open at his sides, not raised in surrender, just
visible. Careful. Deliberate.
“Most people announce themselves before they reach a person’s fire,” Ashryn said, not
lowering her blade.
“Most people don’t clear six bandits alone in under a minute.” His gaze flicked, briefly, to the
pass behind her. “I watched the end of it. I wanted to see what you’d do next before I
decided whether to introduce myself.”
“And?”
“And I decided you’d probably let me speak before deciding whether to kill me. Was I
wrong?”
Despite herself, something in her chest loosened, fractionally. Not trust. Not yet. But
curiosity, which she hadn’t felt directed at another person in longer than she wanted to
admit.
“You have until the fire burns that log,” she said, nodding to the piece she’d just set in the
flames, “to tell me why a guardian is following a stranger through Kharun’s Ridge instead of
doing whatever guardians actually do.”
“Fair.” He lowered himself to sit across the fire from her, unhurried, the way a man sits when
he intends to stay exactly as long as he’s welcome and not a moment more. “My name is
Darian. And I think you’re carrying something you don’t know you’re carrying.”
Ashryn’s grip on her blade didn’t loosen.
“Careful,” she said quietly. “People who tell me that tend not to walk away from this fire.”
“Then I suppose,” Darian said, meeting her eyes without flinching, “we’ll find out which kind of night this is.”
