Was that a noise? The scuff of a foot? A voice, speaking soft words?

Magic lifted his crest and hissed.

“Keep moving,” whispered Bai.

Kesh kept glancing back over his shoulder as they walked away. Surely those noises had only been rats scrabbling through the leavings or birds fluttering in the abandoned buildings. There was no one here. No one at all. The army had poured past Candra Crossing, and the town’s population had drained away after them, dead or fled or taken captive.

“Careful, now,” said Bai as they approached the River Hayi. “Listen.”

A shallow river sings with a different voice from one at flood: water babbles over smoothed rocks along the bank, purls above barely submerged sandbars, shushes through a backwater of reeds. Through the gaps between houses he saw the ford. Where the water rippled and lightened, poles had been hammered into sandbars that almost breached the surface. Where the current dug deep, the water ran dark and swift, and from this bank that gap looked wide and dangerous.

“I wonder where they came from,” said Bai as the ginnies bobbed their heads.

Four people stood on the bank, two adults and two children.

Kesh choked down a yelp. “You said no one was here.”

“Those are refugees. I’m surprised they’re not running. Here, now, fetch those skiffs pulled up on the bank. I’ll take your leads.”

“What do we need a skiff for?”

“Those children can’t swim the ford.”

“We’re not going to slow ourselves down by helping them?”

Bai called. “Do you need our help getting over the water?”

She strode away. With a curse he trudged over to the skiffs. Most were dragged well up onto the shore, but two had been shifted down to the waterline and left there, sterns rocking. He checked around nervously but saw no sign of a struggle, of any poor townsman struck down while attempting to escape, of goods and possessions abandoned midflight. He grabbed the towline of the smaller skiff and shoved it around until the water lifted it; here in the shallows the current wasn’t overwhelming and he could haul it upstream toward Bai.

What was she about? She had halted a prudent distance from the ragged group: two young women not much more than girls with dusty clothes and hair matted with leaf and twig, and a pair of grubby children. The littlest, likely a girl, was very young, old enough to walk but small enough to need carrying most of the time.

The young boy’s piping voice raised as Kesh splashed within hearing. “They can’t be thieves,” he was saying indignantly to his elders, “for no person can steal the holy ones. She must be a holy one, too. Maybe she ran away from a temple to get away from the bad people.”

Bai laughed, rubbing the jowls of the ginnies. “The offer is sincerely meant, but I can see you’ve had trouble, so if you’ve a wish for us to move on without bothering you, we’ll just ford the river and leave you be.”