Ayla tried to think. Think. She wrenched her gaze away from the fight only to see the carriage driver slumped sideways on his bench, two arrows sticking out of his chest. He was an Automa; he was still alive but looked half gone, eyes wide and unseeing, chest heaving, his entire front stained with blood that looked black in the darkness. The flames hadn’t reached his bench yet, but they would soon. The horses were wild with panic, eyes rolling, straining at the reins. Ayla was surprised they hadn’t just run off, taking the burning carriage with them, but then she saw thick, heavy chains looped around the wheel axles, leading off into the dark. The horses were trapped.

Think!

The bandits hadn’t noticed her. They were preoccupied with the guards. It was only twenty paces or so to the edge of the road, the tree line. The bandits were human, they wouldn’t be able to see her in the dark. She could make it.

But.

She looked back at the driver. He was still conscious. Panting like a dying animal. Watching her, sort of, if he was capable of watching anything at all. The fire had begun to lick at the bench—it wasn’t soaked with oil, but it was mostly made of wood. It would burn, and he’d burn along with it. This Automa. This leech. She didn’t care if he died. One less to worry about, in the end. She didn’t care.

“Dammit,” she muttered, and clambered up onto the driver’s bench. She threw the driver’s limp arm across her shoulders, smoke acrid on her tongue, and dragged him off the bench. He was heavier than he looked, heavier than a human would have been. The two of them landed in the mud, Ayla listing sideways under his weight. He let out a small pained noise, eyes fluttering shut. More violet blood pulsed from the arrows in his chest. Ayla wriggled out from underneath him and laid him on his back; that was all she could do. If he died tonight, it wouldn’t be from fire.

And then she ran.

She half expected to be struck down before she reached the tree line, half expected the punch of an arrow to the back, but she was able to leap from the road into the woods unharmed. She paused for a second, breathless, blinking hard as her eyes adjusted to a darkness much deeper than that of the open road. Most of the trees were still bare from winter, but there were enough firs to carve the night sky into tiny pieces of deep blue glass like the mosaics in Queen Junn’s palace, catching the moonlight before it had a chance to filter down and illuminate the forest floor. Even ten paces into the woods, the light of the burning carriage—which had become an inferno, bigger than the biggest harvest bonfires, a pillar of pale smoke rising up up up into the stars—was little more than a slight orange glow off the tree trunks.