Chapter Five

The faint scraping of boots on the forest floor awoke Lusya. Though she was not sure how long she had slept, leaning on the tree she had chosen to sit beside, it was still dark. The all-but-full moon and the stars sparkling above gave plenty of light to see in the immediate vicinity, despite the former beginning to sink behind the trees, but the cover of night was well in place for any attackers.

The sounds being those of attackers was not a certainty, but Lusya suspected it was so. Whoever was in the forest was trying not to be heard. She counted seven sets of footsteps. It was difficult to tell for sure, but her senses confirmed the presence of seven mortals. She often looked where she was concentrating her sense for Malice on and visualized the information it provided, but neither of those were requirements. Within its effective range, it worked three-hundred-sixty degrees around her.

She stood and lowered her hood. Though she often kept it on and it was doubtful it would be much of a hindrance, there was little reason not to remove its obstruction of her vision given such ample warning. The child seemed to be in the tent still. She was nowhere to be seen and Lusya had not heard her rouse.

For a moment, the noises stopped. No doubt Lusya’s movement had caught their attention and put them on guard. They would need to decide whether or not to proceed. It was not long before the footsteps resumed, still moving toward her. Lusya moved toward the center of the clearing and faced the approaching mortals to wait.

Under ordinary circumstances, she may have been more proactive, but she did not want to leave the child unattended. It was doubtful the child was their goal, but she would not fare well if they found her.

There was another pause. Again, the unseen aggressors resumed their advance. But no longer did it consist of quiet scuffs against the dirt. With it being obvious their presence was known, those attempts at stealth were replaced by dull thuds and cracking twigs, though the attackers continued their attempts to remain out of sight, offering only momentary glimpses as they skulked between trees and shrubs. Perhaps they feared being attacked at range.

A minute later, they emerged from the growth of the forest. They numbered seven, as she had counted, and appeared to be human. Five men with coarse, dirt-caked beards and two women with close cut hair. They wore ragged, roughspun tunics and trousers, topped by sparse parts of dirty light metal or leather armor.

All were armed. The women and two of the men held spears, while the remaining men wielded one-handed shortswords.

“I assume you are bandits,” Lusya said. They looked very much the part.

One man chuckled. He stood at the front of the formation, so she assumed he was the leader. He was a tall man, close to a full foot taller than Lusya, rippling with muscles. His black hair was long and wild and old scars dotted his face and exposed arms.

“Got it in one. We got a smart one, huh?” he asked with a glance at his companions. They replied with smirks and chortles. Lusya did not think the leader had said anything particularly humorous, though perhaps she was not the best judge. Many found her sense of humor lacking. “That makes things simple, don’t it? Hand over yer coin and anything worth so much as a copper and nobody gets hurt.” He shrugged. “Or ya can fight. Depending on how good ya are, we’ll either kill ya or sell ya afterward.”

“You are not capable of carrying out that threat,” Lusya said. “You may leave at any time, but your numbers will decrease if you attack me.”

One of the woman laughed. “She’s not very good at playing tough.”

“Don’t be cocky ‘cause yer a reltus,” the leader said. “Yer too outnumbered fer it to matter. Look, I’m a nice guy, so I’ll let ya keep the clothes on yer back and a little food. Ya can go back to Riverglade and live on that while ya figure things out.”

“Your numbers are insufficient to offset your weakness,” Lusya said. “You have no chance of harming me.”

She hoped they would listen to reason. Though she would not usually be so concerned, there was the matter of the child. If she awoke during the fight, it could be problematic. Lusya was not sure why mortals so often underestimated her. She knew she did not look strong at a glance. While she kept herself in shape, the fact that, like many demons, her baseline physical strength—even without any enhancement—was beyond any mortal meant she had never had any need for extensive muscle training or the like.

Still, even without accounting for motomancy, she would have thought the ineffectiveness of their threats would have clued them in. However, she would not waste any more effort trying to convince them. It was their lives they were throwing away.

“Enough with the bluster, boss,” another one of the men said. He was blond and a bit scrawnier than the leader, though still well-built. “Let’s just teach her a lesson already.”

The leader nodded to his subordinate and turned his attention back to Lusya. “Don’t say we didn’t warn ya. We don’ accept surrender once the fight’s started.”

“That policy seems needlessly restrictive,” Lusya said. “As I mentioned, those of you who survive are free to flee once you realize you are outmatched.”

Without another word, the four with spears charged forward in a rough line, aiming to skewer her, while the swordsmen moved to the sides in an attempt to flank her. It would not have been an awful formation against an opponent more suited to their capabilities.

Lusya rushed forward, toward the spears, and weaved around the points. The four stopped their charge and hesitated. Keeping pace with her speed would have been a titanic task for the likes of them under the best of circumstances, and it was clear that they had not expected her to move to meet them. She grabbed the closest man’s spear and threw a punch that caved his skull in with a crack and sent him flying across the clearing.

With his spear freed, she hurled it at one of the swordsmen, a brown-haired man, impaling him through the chest and taking him off his feet as he let out a shout. He wore a leather cuirass, but it did nothing to stop the spear from running through him. With a dull thud, he landed on his back, the spear protruding out toward the heavens from his breast.

One of the spearwomen tried to thrust at her, but Lusya dodged with little effort. She grabbed the wooden shaft of the spear near the tip, broke it off, and jammed the blade into the woman’s belly, then swept the woman’s feet out from under her. The woman landed face down on the ground, pushing the spearhead farther into the fissure in her flesh. She tried to push herself up as the snow beneath her was dyed red, but it seemed her strength had left her and she collapsed again with a groan. All she had accomplished was dislodging the weapon and hastening the flow of blood out of her body.

Lusya would have finished the woman—she had no desire to make any of their deaths painful ones—but the remaining spearman thrust at her while one of the swordsmen ran in to attack from behind. Even if she could not have heard his approach or seen him at the edge of her vision, it would have been obvious. Their Malice was as clear to her senses as a forest fire would have been to her vision.

Lusya sidestepped and slapped the spear passing her, driving it into the swordsman’s heart. She drew her dagger and slashed both men’s throats before either could make a sound. That was the sole weapon she carried. If an opponent was a threat, she would use her Soul Blades. If not, they were not worth carrying the bulk of a sword or a spear. She could handle them unarmed, at the cost of some efficiency. The dagger was there to offset that cost.

The leader and the remaining spearwoman gaped, pallid and wide-eyed, giving Lusya a wide berth. She could close that distance with ease if they insisted on continuing. They each held their weapon in a defensive stance, as if to ward her off, their gazes flickering from her to the corpses of their comrades.

“I…I think we’ll take ya up on yer offer,” the leader said, inching toward the tree line.

“Ya crazy?” the woman exclaimed. “She just took five of ours!”

“If I thought we could win I’d pay ‘er back ten-fold. But I ain’t looking to join ‘em. She doesn’t even look winded.”

The woman looked over Lusya once more, then clicked her tongue.

With that, the woman joined her leader in backing away until they were among the trees, at which point they turned and broke into a run back in the direction they had come.

Once Lusya was satisfied that they had retreated, she approached the woman with the gut wound, who still bleeding out on the ground, squirming like a worm and making pitiful whining noises, her glassy eyes struggling to stay open. Luysa knelt beside the woman. With a thrust of her dagger into the skull, Lusya ended the woman’s agony.

With that done, she cut off some of the cleaner cloth from the dead to use as makeshift towels with which to clean herself off. Then, she heard rustling once more. This time, it was from the tent. The child had stirred.

Lusya hurriedly wiped off the most obvious blood from her face and hands and marched over to the tent. She crouched in the opening just in time to block the child’s path and line of sight as she tried to exit.

The child stood, swaying slightly and rubbing at one eye, the other glazed and unfocused. It was obvious she was still groggy.

“Lusya, what’s happening?” she asked. “I thought I heard something.”

“It is not time for you to rise yet,” Lusya replied. “Return to sleep at once.”

The child yawned. “But I heard—”

“It is nothing you need to concern yourself with. Return to sleep.”

The child gave an exaggerated tilt of her head and a languid blink, as if she had trouble understanding. Then, she yawned again and headed back into the tent.

“Okay. Good night.”

Lusya heard the child settle back into her bedding and peeked through the opening to make sure that was the case. Sure enough, the child was lying down once more. Within seconds, she had fallen asleep again.

Expressions of relief like sighing were foreign to Lusya, but she suspected she would have used one if they were not. She had done her research ahead of time. Human children tended to struggle with the concepts of death and mortality. The child was right around the age when she would first start to comprehend those ideas and her reaction to hearing of Father’s death suggested she was in the midst of that process.

Even if the child had not understood it at all, however, Lusya would want to avoid the child seeing the fresh corpses and blood-stained snow around them. It was not worth the risk that the child would find it traumatic or disturbing. Such things could precipitate an unacceptable increase in Malice.

If that happened, Lusya would need to dispose of the child and find another. That was not a dire setback, but it would be an inconvenience. Lusya did not know how long it would take her to find another candidate. There was no reason not to avoid that. Besides, she had committed to keeping the child safe. She considered ensuring the child stayed useful a part of that.

That meant she would need to clean up the clearing before the child awoke again. Moving the corpses and weapons would be trivial. The crimson snow could be more difficult, but she had little choice but to figure it out.

#

A couple hours later, Lusya had finished her task. The bodies and their fallen weapons had been deposited around a mile back toward Riverglade, leaving little chance the child would see them. The need to return to the child before she awoke meant Lusya had not been very thorough in hiding them, so someone else might discover the corpses before long.

By then, however, Lusya and the child would have departed. Even if someone did care to search for the killers of five strangers, they would have little success.

As Lusya had suspected, there had been no moving the blood. It had soaked deep into the snow and even onto the ground and Lusya had no vessel with which to move it unless she wanted to empty one of her water containers, which she did not. She could have used her hands and cleaned them afterward, but that would have been a slow, tedious process that risked the child waking before it was done.

In the end, Lusya had opted to burn most of the blood away with Miudofay, one of her Soul Blades. She had wanted to avoid using it to evade the risk of the child seeing it or hearing its name. Infamous as the Demon Blade was, it was doubtful one so young knew it by name or sight, but there was no reason to test that theory. For that reason and for fear of causing excessive damage to her surroundings, she had not used it to dispose of the bodies.

When it came to the blood, however, it had been the best method available by too large a margin to ignore. It did mean leaving some of what had gotten on the ground alone. Lusya’s control was only so good, and a scorch mark upon the ground would have been more obvious than the remaining stains.

Just minutes after she had finished, the first sliver of sunlight peeked above the horizon as a vibrant orange line. The child had yet to awaken again, but it was time for them to go. Lusya intended to keep this pace for the duration of their journey, traveling until a bit after dark and rising at dawn.

That would result in insufficient sleep for the child during the shorter nights and longer days of summer, but that was a minor concern. And, for the moment, Lusya’s research suggested the child’s rest was more than adequate.

Lusya made her way to the tent and gently shook the child.

“Still sleepy, Mama,” the child muttered as she shifted on her mat, her movements almost as though she were trying to burrow into it.

Lusya shook the child again. “Wake up, child.”

The child slowly opened her eyes. She looked up at Lusya and started, then looked around, blinking until her eyes widened and jaw dropped in apparent realization. Considering her earlier utterance, perhaps she had momentarily forgotten where she was. That was, Lusya had learned, not an unheard of phenomenon, though she had never experienced it as far as she could recall.

“We are leaving,” Lusya said. “We will eat and depart immediately.”

“Hooray, more adventure!” the child said, without a hint of the grogginess from earlier or the temper of the previous night. She stood up without prompting and rushed out of the tent.

Lusya followed and began preparing breakfast.