“Not who?” she hedged, reaching again for his mind, and finding it still strangely blank, as if his intentions were floating, lost in a fog.

“Your hair is covered,” he said. “Your eyes, your face—oh, save me.” He backed away from her. “Your eyes are so green. I’m a dead man.”

He was an odd one, with his talk of killing her, and himself dying, and his peculiar floating brain; and now he looked ready to bolt, which Fire must not allow. She grasped at his thoughts and slid them into place. You don’t find my eyes or my face to be all that remarkable.

The man squinted at her, puzzled.

The more you look at me the more you see I’m just an ordinary girl. You’ve found an ordinary girl injured in the forest, and now you must rescue me. You must take me to Lord Archer.

Here Fire encountered a small resistance in the form of the man’s fear. She pulled harder at his mind, and smiled at him, the most gorgeous smile she could muster while throbbing with pain and dying of blood loss. Lord Archer will reward you and keep you safe, and you will be honored as a hero.

There was no hesitation. He eased her quiver and her fiddle case from her back and slung them over his shoulder against his own quiver. He took up both of their bows in one hand and wrapped her right arm, her uninjured arm, around his neck. “Come along, miss,” he said. He half led her, half carried her, through the trees toward Archer’s holding.

He knows the way, she thought tiredly, and then she let the thought go. It didn’t matter who he was or where he came from. It only mattered that she stay awake and inside his head until he’d gotten her home and Archer’s people had seized him. She kept her eyes and ears and her mind alert for monsters, for neither her headscarf nor her own mental guard against them would hide her from them if they smelled her blood.

At least she could count on this poacher to be a decent shot.

ARCHER BROUGHT DOWN a raptor monster as Fire and the poacher stumbled out of the trees. A beautiful, long shot from the upper terrace that Fire was in no state to admire, but that caused the poacher to murmur something under his breath about the appropriateness of the young lord’s nickname. The monster plummeted from the sky and crashed onto the pathway to the door. Its color was the rich orange-gold of a sunflower.

Archer stood tall and graceful on the stone terrace, eyes raised to the sky, longbow lightly in hand. He reached to the quiver on his back, notched another arrow, and swept the treetops. Then he saw them, the man dragging her bleeding from the forest. He turned on his heel and ran into the house, and even down here, even from this distance and stone walls between them, Fire could hear him yelling. She sent words and feeling into his mind, not mind control, only a message. Don’t worry. Seize him and disarm him, but don’t hurt him. Please, she added, for whatever it was worth with Archer. He’s a nice man and I’ve had to trick him.