Cringing, he did so. She slung the short sword at her own hip before poking him again.

“You’re in charge now. You three will escort me to the captain. The others can carry your sergeant back to camp.”

Even if the local captain tried to kill her, pain would be a temporary agony. I can kill, but not be killed. Yet that being so, what had happened to the man who wore the cloak before her?

HIGH HALDIA HAD begun its life in ancient days as a posting town, a string of buildings along the Istri Walk that led from Nessumara to Seven. From this spine, the city had grown outward into unequal halves. They walked into the eastern part of the city along a handsome avenue lined with merchant houses and trading emporia mostly untouched by the destruction that had visited the main road. These buildings, too, were entirely closed up for the night. No spark of light betrayed life within.

The streets had room to sprawl, nothing like the crowded streets of Toskala, the steep lanes in Olossi, the nerve-racking roped paths of Haorrenda, or the narrow canals and elaborate foot bridges of Nessumara-on-the-delta. Three squares were strung like beads along the thoroughfare. The entrances to four temples anchored the corners of the first square. The second was faced with two temples, north and south. On the third square, the assizes court and arkhon’s hall stood opposite a massive compound dedicated to Taru the Witherer, beloved of farmers.

The captain in charge of High Haldia’s garrison had set up his headquarters in the arkhon’s hall. She rode Warning up the steps and through the main entrance hall into the courtyard. Men shrank back from her billowing cloak. A graveled path bisected the courtyard, flanked by terraces of white and pink tea flowers and decorative herbs set out in blocks like neighborhoods. A fountain depicted the island at Indiyabu where the Guardians had risen from the lake, but the spouts had dried up. Much like justice, Marit supposed. Run dry.

A dozen men edged out of the shadows into a loose circle around her.

“I’ve not seen you before,” said their captain, a trim, muscular man flanked by a pair of gargantuan spear carriers. He had the imposing presence of a man who can make decisions without second guessing himself, but he did not look her in the face.

“No, you haven’t. I want an escort down Istri Walk, to the main army.”

“I’m under no obligation to assist you.”

She snorted. “I suppose you get folk every day riding into High Haldia on a Guardian’s horse and wearing a scrap of cloak so as to pretend they are a Guardian?”

His gaze met hers just long enough that she tasted the merest tangle of his complicated mind: He admired a bold woman with a sarcastic sense of humor. He didn’t like the commanders he worked for, but he was good at fighting and they rewarded him well. He liked the job more than he disliked them. “They don’t call themselves that. Which you’d have known, if you were one of them.”