Only one of their own guards was hurt in the hand-to-hand fighting. He was down on the road, clutching at his knee. A blow, it looked like, not a sword wound. Their men were significantly more skilled than the outlaws, she understood. They were trained and chosen for this. A thing like this. One of Marina’s ladies was whimpering; the other gripped her sun disk as tightly as she could, white-knuckled, but kept quiet.

“We’re all right,” Marina di Seressa said to them, to Silvy. “We are.”

Silvy was still staring out towards the woods. She wondered if there might be more. A second wave? Then…

“Look!” she shouted. “Medor, look! Don’t do anything!”

“I see him,” the serjeant said. “Hold all arrows!” he cried to the other guards.

Silvy had the carriage door open by then.

She was down and on the road and running as fast as she ever had, racing across the grass towards a man leaning on a staff as she approached. A man she knew very, very well.

She slowed as she came up to him. She wanted to hug him so fiercely, but then she saw how Thierry looked, and instead she enfolded him gently, more so than she ever had in all the time they’d known each other.

“Oh, my friend,” she said. “What did they do to you?”

He didn’t answer. He was weeping helplessly. She held him, didn’t let go.

“You’re safe now. We have you. And you are safe.”

It was Marina, right behind her. She was looking, Silvy saw, glancing over her shoulder, much less composed than she usually did.

“You will never be safe as long as I live,” came a voice she didn’t know. It was the big man, the Jacquard leader, on the ground not far away. “You betrayed all these men.”

“I didn’t,” Thierry said, finding his voice. “I—”

“I will kill you, if Jad allows,” said the man. “I vow that.”

“I’m sure you would. But Jad doesn’t allow,” said Medor Colle. “I’m afraid he doesn’t.”

He stepped over that way and he ran the fallen outlaw through the chest with his sword. Neatly, no wasted expenditure of effort, blade in to kill, then out, to be used again now, if required. Calmly he bent and wiped it on the grass. Birds were singing all around them in the springtime countryside, Silvy would remember.

“Medor,” said Thierry, so quietly he could barely be heard. “He…I don’t think he was a bad man.” He coughed.

“What? You are clever, but a fool in the world beyond Orane,” the serjeant said. “A child. What do you think they would have done to the women had we been fewer in number?”

Thierry looked at him, and then down.

Medor turned to the other guards. “Leave two or three alive for questioning. Kill the others right here.”