Time for me to see what it’s like out there on my own. Time, maybe, to really live—

“And maybe fly,” she said, thinking aloud.

“Oh, you’ll fly, little hawk,” Tarma answered. “You’ll fly.”

BOOK TWO - Two Edged Blade

BOOK TWO

Two Edged Blade

Eleven

Eleven

“Great Jaesel,” Shallan said, her bright blue eyes widening in awe at the sight of what blocked the well-pounded trail, “What in hell is that?”

She must have unconsciously tightened her legs, because her high-strung gelding bucked, then bounced a little sideways, blundering into Hellsbane.

Trouble— Kero exerted immediate pressure on the reins, so the mare only laid her ears back, rather than reacting with the swift snap of teeth she would ordinarily have indulged in.

Shallan swore, made a fist and thumped her restive mount between his ears, and the fractious beast subsided. Once again the scouting party turned their collective attention toward the untidy sprawl of humanity across their path. “Sprawl” was definitely the operative term, Kero decided. There was a tangle of about twenty or thirty men, some standing, most in variations of “fallen,” all interlaced with ten-foot (thankfully) headless pikes.

“Didn’t the sergeant from Bornam’s Bastards say something about recruiting from the area last night?” asked a male voice from right behind Kero. Gies, she identified automatically; of the twins, he had the deeper voice. “I think so,” replied his identically-swarthy brother, Tre, and she knew she’d picked the right name for the right twin. “The sergeant wasn’t real optimistic.”

“I’d say he had reason not to be,” Shallan replied, shaking her ice-blonde head in disgust. “And from the look of this, we’d better detour before they get themselves sorted out and stand up.” A few more of the men got themselves untangled from the rest and stood aside. Their sergeant wasn’t shouting—mostly because, from the crimson color of his face, Kero reckoned that he was holding off a fit of apoplexy by will alone.

“Aye to that,” Kero said. She was nominally the head of this group, but only during the actual scouting foray, and they weren’t in the field at the moment. “Let’s take the back way.”

The four scouts turned their horses’ heads and went back the way they’d come in, following the pounded-dirt track between hacked-off patches of scrubby brush. Behind them the sergeant finally regained his voice, and began using it.

The four Companies Menmellith’s Council had hired for “bandit eradication” had bivouacked in a canyon, but not a blind one; there were at least four ways into the area that Kero knew of, and she had no doubt the twins knew a couple more. The “back way,” which was the other, nominally traveled, route in, took them over some rough ground, but their horses could handle it; they were all Shin‘a’in-bred.