Note: Last edited 8/3/20.

Richard leaned against a rock, chest working, cold air roughing up his throat. Darn spring mornings- beautiful, sure, but the chill was no fun when all you wanted to do was lie down and start breathing again.

‘Well, at least I’m still around.’ They had to have been lost around- about the big rock his mum and he had used to picnic on, at least before she got buried. ‘Wonder if she’d have woken up?’

He gritted his teeth, tapped the rock gently with his fingernails, and then, conscious of how painful it would be to punch bare rock, dropped to his knees and punched the ground over, and over, and over. Richard had promised his father, he knew, but did he really have to obey his promise now that…? Now that those two things had happened?

At least the second one had paid for it.

Richard frowned for a moment, and then he laughed, long, long, and with a throat that sought to knot itself till the air stopped flowing. ‘Now they’re after me. I’m sure they fear the one who’ll do for me what I did for father.’ He stopped laughing, and grimaced. ‘Call him dad, for goodness sakes, you’ve never flinched before.’

Ah, but things were different now.

No use bothering; let the dead bury themselves so that the living might imitate.

Richard had stayed out on the moors only a few nights, usually with a wee bit more equipment, but he guessed nothing would have to do.

*   *   *   *   *

He was wrong.

To briefly elaborate on his injuries, he had three (pleasant) bruises on his back- preexisting but aggravated, one spinal cord filled with intent to commit murder, four limbs newly soaked in concrete slurry, and a head like a drum- hollow and beaten. Beating, more accurately.

Still, Richard was alive, and that counted for much; so many people weren’t, people who might have been were the world a little more on- course. Still, one bastard at least was sitting in Missus Tophet’s kitchen now, rightly so, and with his face moldy to boot.

‘Breathe, my beating heart,’ Richard thought, ‘you can’t do it again.’ He held his hands up against his breast and swooned like some nancy boy romance protagonist, fresh from the latest bawdy street play and attractively singed by the (badly painted) jaws of the dragon. Tch. As if he would need some princess to save him.

Nah, if Richard was going to fight a dragon, he would do it on his own two feet and go down screaming in agony as he tried to turn tail.

Or maybe not; yesterday had revealed some sort of a backbone.

‘At least nothing bad happened to bring it out.’

Richard bent over, eyes tense, and then burst out into another rough guffaw, a single sharp report. Then he stood straight and looked towards the city- time to talk to Edward. Edward would understand and listen.

In fact, Richard might have to hold the guy back; he already hated the judge, and this would just set him off anew on some (futile, though Edward would never admit it) rant about injustice, oppression, and stuck- up morons. The last a little quieter, usually- even Edward was a bit wary of the Judge’s Guard.

Ten hours later, as the sun reached a half of the way down the sky from its height, Richard slipped through Edward’s door, flipped the latch into place, and leaned against it, not bothering to look up- with all of one room and a particularly strict schedule Edward was practically guaranteed to be right in front of him.

“You killed him,” Edward said, and his voice was steady, with just the slightest wavering. Richard look up.

“He killed my father, and they refused to punish him; I was in the right.” He was breathing harder now, a sudden intake and a sudden exhalation, a desperate emptying of his lungs, as if you expel violence from his chest. It didn’t work; it never had.

“You killed the head of the merchant’s guild, and two of his guards, Richard. What do you think that’s done to people?” Edward’s voice was steady still, save for that same waver in its volume.

“He killed my father, Edward. I hated him. He was supposed to die.” Richard’s anger was not gone, but it was submerged by the sharp doubt. Did Edward not agree? How could he not? “You hated the Judge! You hated his men, his cronies, the people who kissed his toes and the Sherriff’s. Why are you so mad one of them is dead?”

“You broke the law, Richard. I hate them, but I wasn’t ever going to break the law to fulfil that hatred, for goodness sakes. Now you’ve gone and broken the law. It’s not right.” Edward seemed tired, now that Richard looked, but that was no excuse.

“I really ought to have walked up to the man who killed my father and shaken his hand, then bent down and kissed the tips of his muddied slippers, perhaps even refrained from ever washing my hand or lips again after receiving the holy touch of my father’s murderer, oughtn’t I?” Richard’s eyelids were pressing in, constricting, as if you push bulging eyes back into their sockets.

Richard never shouted when he was angry. Richard never yelled, he rarely resorted to physical combat.

Richard spoke calmly, softly, and with an edge to cut a dragon’s scales.

“No, Richard, I didn’t say that, I just think….” He broke his gaze from Richard’s. “I just think you should have let the court handle it, should have let the authorities do what they ought. Now…”

“I tried that, ya know,” Richard said, propping up one leg against the doorframe and leaning back, looking up at the ceiling while he spoke, “I let the courts do what they want. I let the same g******* courts that signed the order on my mother have their way. Do you know what happened, or are you blind, as well as heartless?”

Edward flinched then straightened, his own fire flickering in his eyes as he stared at Richard’s upturned face. “The judge was not just. The court failed. But they did not trespass the law, Richard, they upheld it. You broke it, and now so many people are suf-”.

Richard clasped his hands, fingers straining to break each other as he moved to face Edward. “Shut up. Shut up. Shut your mouth before I do it myself and give you a free ride to Tophet’s larder.” He breathed in and out a few times, deep and slow, gathered his breath, and spoke. “I kept the law. I don’t care who in hell wrote those laws you’ve fallen in love with all of a sudden, but I kept the law, because those laws can go back where they came from; all that matters is that I saw those two murderers hold my father down and jam their knives into him, three times each. I counted them, Edward, I counted them, and each one struck three times. The short one kicked my father’s corpse before they walked off. I heard them mention who would be happy about my father’s death.”

Edward started up, apparently still trying to finish his sentence, but Richard stormed forward and gripped his shoulders, forcing him back down on the man’s ill- kempt bed.

“I told the judge what I saw, and I told him what I’d heard. If he’d punished those two men and let their master free, I would have submitted. I would have submitted because I promised my father not to kill just such a murderer once, when my mother died. Then they, all three, walked out of the courtroom with the approbation of the court for deflecting such libel as I had leveled. I nearly got arrested for slandering them. I’m sure you don’t remember, because you lost the vast majority of your memory, and let’s not mention your principles, because I have seen a whale- full in the past few minutes, but you helped me out of there.”

Edward winced, waited for a moment, and then said, “You’re killing people, Richard.”

Richard stepped back at that, his anger shocked away for a brief moment. He recovered quickly though and made to lunge forward as grab Edward again, hissing, “They deserved it!”

“They probably did,” Edward began, but Richard interrupted him.

“You know d*** well they did!”

“But,” Edward continued, brushing aside Richard’s interjection, “you’re not just killing them. You know Thompson, down by Grub’s Dock? He got whipped for being half a foot too close to the Judge yesterday. He’s not the only one. Did you really think nobody else would suffer when you murdered one of the Judge’s friends? For goodness sakes, even now I’m probably going to go to the goal for you breaking my word that you wouldn’t pursue the matter further, and God help me, but hope I’ll avoid the gallows.”

Richard stumbled back a bit before he rallied, “Then why are you waiting here?”

Edward considered for a moment, and then his eyes lowered to the floor. He sighed. “I guess,” he said, “it’s gotta happen.” He mumbled something, perhaps “It’s gonna happen anyway,” then looked up, a bit of pain in his eyes.

Richard stood a little straighter- for all his anger, he was a bit afraid now. Edward was acting like he knew something Richard didn’t.

“You broke the law, you did the wrong thing, and there’s going to be consequences for that,” he said, “and I’m really sorry, but I don’t want to die.”

“Why?” Richard slackened for a moment as he tried to understand, and then the door behind him cracked, doorframe squeaking in agony as the door tried to squeeze through. Richard stumbled forward, towards Edward.

“Sorry,” Edward said, and closed his eyes. “I’ll make it up to you, I promise.”

Richard decked him, hard, and tried to think of how to get away. The place had a single window, near the back, but that would be watched.

An idea sparked. They thought he would be unarmed, and he was, but he didn’t have to be- Edward, prior to his treachery, had showed him a sword, and where the coward had hidden it. “Well, I guess this is your last friendly act,” he muttered at the unconscious former friend as he scratched the floor, trying to find the right piece of wood, the one that he could lift up to get at the blade.

A short minutes later, he was gripping the hilt with white knuckles, eyeing the rickety shutters of the window. ‘Have to hope they don’t have bowmen ready for me,’ he thought.

His arms loosened a bit, his grip shifted, and his legs tensed; then, with a quiet huff, e burst forward, just managing to jump through the window and roll to his feet, sword in hand, ready to sell his life dear or run for it, as the case might be.

His opponents, now that he got a chance to see and asses them, were two slender men in polished plate armor, each with the usual halberd- short sword combination, and wearing bright silk tunics, the face of the first decked with an elaborate mustache, oiled to perfection, burnished till it shone like a bronze mirror, the face of the second bare, revealing a soft, slack visage, devoid of decision or interest in either of his dull blue eyes.

Mustache noticed him first, but by that time, Richard was sprinting off down the (annoyingly empty) street at full tilt, sword held carefully away from his body in case he fell.

His chest worked hard, his heart harder, and his legs the hardest of all; pistons and pumps set to work in his body, and he laughed with joyful abandon, relishing the feel of rushing air on his face. Then shouts arose behind him, and he remembered again why he was running with such vigor.

The guards were unequivocally slower than he, Richard knew, for he had tested it three times, one of them only the day before. They were, however, much more likely to win were he forced to turn ‘round and fight, and possessed the undisputed authority to shed blood, and authority which would both clear their paths and obstruct his.

Richard continued down the street, a little slower now that he was in the thin crowds of a Tax-Day afternoon; he could attempt to hide in the crowd, but he was a relatively well known face in these parts after the trial, at least among the soldiery, and they would be out in full force, scattered across the town to enforce the tax.

The one place they would not be, though, was the shantytown on the back side of the old watchtower Andy Lublin had used to live in; due to a combination of diplomacy, stupidity, and poverty, the inhabitants of that area did not pay the tax, at least for now. There too a number of rather pretty houses had sprung up, a bit beyond the hillock the settlement had begun with. By now a small village had sprung up, and in that village, Richard thought, he would be safe.

He reached the shantytown half an hour later, and the first thing that hit him was the cacophony. The place was a tumultuous bustle, and for a moment he cringed back, dreading the jostle and clatter of the crowd. Then he steeled his nerves and headed in.

The woman to his left was swathed in the traditional southern headdress, and she was holding some small dog in one hand, knife in the other, preparing to kill and cook the canine. A few shanties up from her, on his right, a fight broke out as a peddler trod on another man’s foot. A few seconds later, the peddler was on the ground as three men, possibly brothers, beat him up, while a fourth seemed to be half- heartedly intervening. Richard moved towards the nicer part of the village hastily, not wanting to be caught up in the commotion and hoping desperately that they didn’t eat cats, like some easterners were said to.

No such luck, as he found out when he got shoved aside and tripped into a woman half- through skinning a cat. He stared at it, transfixed, and then moved off hurriedly, trying not to vomit and ignoring the masculine yelling that had erupted just behind him in some unknown language.

Someone grabbed his shoulder and pulled, turning Richard around on his heels and unbalancing him even as his assailant moved forward, knife in his right hand, left gesticulating wildly in the direction of the woman he had unwittingly disturbed, who was now hurriedly grabbing her implements and retreating into the rotten- walled, one room hut. Richard remembered belatedly that he had a sword in his hand, and he pointed it at his attacker, grimacing and trying to convey with his face a desire to stab, but not a desire to stab without provocation. It was a rather easy expression to make, he felt, and he definitely did not feel stressed in the least in the middle of the press with some guy trying to stab him to all appearances.

Thankfully, the- oddly well- dressed- foreigner did back off, thankfully, his eyes flickering between Richard’s face and the sword, his eyes hidden under his glowering eyebrows. Richard shuddered and moved on.

He shouldered his way through the streets, if the rambling alleys could be called that, keeping as much as he could to the middle and shrouding the sword in his cloak. The nicer houses he was aiming to find were only about ten yards away when the man from before caught up to him, knife again in his hand, and this time followed by a gaggle of rough- looking men, all of them apparently ready to fight, though Richard didn’t stop to count the knives or the clubs, instead choosing to rush off towards his goal, now uncaring of the commotion and hoping only to gain refuge from the ruffians he had somehow offended.

The tallest of them caught up to him all too quickly, grabbing at his shoulder and pulling Richard back towards his knife. Richard slipped down and out of his grasp in a moment, pivoting on his rear heel towards his assailant and punching out with his left hand while his right tried to wrangle the sword from his tangled cloak.

The man gasped as Richard’s fist impacted his stomach, and then his knife rushed towards Richard again, forcing him to roll back, following him as the others began to arrive, first one, then two more, then the original problem, and finally Richard found himself facing seven crudely armed, and likely more experience, enemies, sword in hand and with no idea how to use it.

Roaring some incoherent battle- cry, Richard leaped forward, slashing wildly at the man who had first caught up to him, who stumbled back, barely dodging the blow as Richard swung the sword back towards the arm of the next man, pushing him back as well, and then the five other had regained their courage. Richard’s next blow met a sturdy wood club and lodged there, so he kicked out, landing a stomping blow in the tall one’s stomach before he turned tail and ran for his life.

His pursuers fell behind him rather quickly now, their enthusiasm apparently quenched by his martial prowess, and Richard had time to slow down and inspect the scenery.

The houses were well built, from what little he knew, and comely, made from brightly painted wood in the fashion he had heard was popular down in the southernmost part of the kingdom, a one story, square building with several appended miniature versions of itself, each one topped with a peaked roof.

One symbol he did notice: a crescent moon with the two points nearly touching and wavy rays like frozen pennons coming out of the outer rim. The thing had to be important, though- every house had at least three, either fashioned out of gold or painted large on a wall. He shrugged turned back to his own problems.

Richard collapsed against the stalwart fence on his left with a sigh and assayed to plan for the near future. He had, he realized, made no plan as to how he should act once he reached his goal, having based the desire completely on its probable lack of guardsmen.

Should he offer to work odd jobs around the place in return for lodging? It seemed unlikely that they would lack or manual labor, what with all the immigrants around them, but it was a possibility. Perhaps a better course of action would be to try and earn a bit of money, buy some supplies, and move out towards the hills before the guardsmen mustered the numbers to encircle and sweep the camp for his presence, though, come to think of it, he had never heard of the guards entering this quarter en masse as they sometimes did other villages.

Richard sook himself from his musing, having set upon the second plan, and began to look round for work. Right away he saw a swarthy man gesturing at him to approach, and, hoping for some work, he did so.

So soon as he reached his caller, he felt both his hands grabbed in an iron grip, and two more people came from behind the one who had hailed him and pulled his arms out to the side, lifting him just an inch or so off the ground in the process.

“So,” the man who had baited him in said, “you molested a woman, eh?”

“What on earth? No!” Richard shouted, slackening back into his captor’s arms in shock.

“Jacob said you touched his woman,” the interrogator said, “and he has the necessary witness to prove it. Can you say the same?”

“Are you talking about that woman I bumped into right before that-“ he nodded at Jacob- “rabid dog started trying to slit my throat?”

“Indeed. Your guilt is admitted by your own mouth,” his judge said, “I am Abdul, and I, as a priest of the holy Sun and his daughter, the High King of the South, guarantee this judgement, and I now grant you the single mercy which is granted to the infidel by the High King: tell me truly, do you, at this moment and forevermore, abjure all gods but He who Reigns in the Sky, the Sun, Light of the Heavens, and swear on your blood and the blood of your fathers to follow after him, to listen to his precepts and abide by them, to make his foes your foes and his priests your priests? Do you?”

Richard stared at the floor, resolutely ignoring Abdul, his teeth pressed together so hard he wondered which one would crack first, his eyes wide open and bulging, his toes curled in so hard they seemed on the point of ripping themselves out by the roots. He was sick of this. Sick of it. First he kills three murderers and the Judge, always a paragon of virtue, wants his head.

‘Next I meet the one person I thought I could still trust, and he abandons me, no, he had the everliving courtesy to invite over some guests who were definitely not fully armed guardsmen, despite how much he hates them. Finally, I run off to the one place I might be able to get supplies from without looking every which way to check for guardsmen, and suddenly all these gentlemen want to chop my head off for bumping somebody.

Frag. Them.’

Richard exhaled heavily.

He threw aside the two men holding him, bull rushed his judge, and bore him to the ground, rearing back and punching, once, twice, finally kneeing Abdul in a mad scramble to his feet, bursting off the balls of his feet towards the rough hills that formed the backdrop of the shantytown.

Jacob and his compatriots pelted after him, shouting and yelling with every spare breath, but Richard wasn’t afraid anymore.

Richard wanted to punch them in the face, pick up a rock, and turn their throats into tattered messes. Unfortunately, that would be wrong, so he ran instead.

Now he slowly gained ground on his pursuers, taking advantage of the empty streets to push his legs into every faster motion, ever firmer motion, his feet pushing into the rough, neat dirt path with an insistent pressure, his muscles breathing hard with exhilaration.

Once he reached the hills, though, he began to slow down, conscious that he was no longer being chased.

He came to a walk, his feet growing a bit heavier as the exertion caught up with him, and he sat down, back against a tall rock, planting himself on a comfortable bit of moss.

He exhaled, his right arm clenched painfully tight, and he gritted his teeth. Hot, red anger flooded over, through, and past him. His arm unclenched, his jaw loosened, and his head fell forward.

He felt like he had been kicked in the chest, just once, really hard- enough to leave him struggling to breathe, but not enough to leave a bruise. His throat was twisting in on itself. His eyes were wide, his breathing slow and measured, hissing through his teeth at a steady pace.

‘I was right to kill them. They killed my father, just like those doctors kills my mother, and I never promised not to kill them, not like Dad made me do with the doctors. Why can’t anybody see it? The judge was more in the murderer’s pocket than out of it, I know, but how can he be so utterly callous? Inhuman? I hate him, hate him almost as much as the murderers.

He just sits there, listens, knows who is in the right, and orders then sent off to be executed. Doesn’t care. The man might as well be a dead fish for all the justice he has.

Leaving aside my undoubted luck in getting such a champion of justice to listen to me, he thought, even Edward, the guy who has said so often he wishes he had the guts and the desperation to kill the judge and his cronies for what they’ve done, wont’ listen to me. He even has the temerity to call in the guard on me because he’s scared for his own skin.’

Richard laid his hand on the soft earth, then clenched, watching as the muddy soil squirted out from between his fingers. He exhaled again.

‘Then I go to the people who’ve never heard of me in my g****** life, planning to try and do some honest work for a few days, and they try to kill me for bumping into somebody.

Great. Just great. Awesome. Lovely. This town can go burn on the Sun King’s altar, for all I care. It’s not like it hasn’t earned it.’

He stared at the ground for a few moments more, then leaned his head back against the rock, his lungs letting out all his air in a long, inconstant sigh. He muttered under his breath, saying, “Time to get going.”

*   *   *   *   *

Richard reached the next town down the coast to the east by the dawning of the next morning, yawning and stumbling a bit- he’d pulled all- nighters before, in order to get a bit more money, and that without any trouble, but the emotions of the days had drained everything out of him.

Shaking off his yawn and grumbling a bit under his breath, he assayed to find lodgings.

Six hours later, he was staring at a stone wall, eyes hard, jaw trembling in a futile attempt to crush his own teeth in his mouth, both arms seized up in rictus. The cell was, he observed, about ten feet long, ten feet wide, and ten feet tall, with three walls, a ceiling, and a floor made of disconcertingly regular stone blocks, smoothed and clean, with regular, smooth- sanded grout covering the mortar. The last wall of the cell was composed of a wall, about waist- height, with a place in it left open for the door, a ribbed panel of metal too light to be solid and too quiet to be hollow, while the rest of the gap was filled in with dense grating made of polished, gray steel.

He relaxed his arms, slowly and carefully. Not much point nowadays, but he might as well be in fit condition when the time came for the execution. He closed his eyes, waited a moment, and opened them, screaming incoherent obscenities at the wall.

As abruptly as he had begun, he stopped. What was the point? He felt no better, and his throat was scratchy now.

“I hate,” he said, his voice low and controlled, “I hate the judge. No doubt. I want to string his body up on the highest mast in harbor, probably his own. I’m sure he deserves it. I almost don’t care that I can’t prove it, that I can’t be utterly sure I am in the right. I want to kill him the same way I want to find those men who killed my mother and slit their throats. I’m scared. I don’t like it when I hate this much. It hurts, and it burns. It’s like a scratching, rending ball of hot acid in my chest and throat. I hate being angry.”

He fell silent for a moment, eyes closing again as he contemplated.

“Why should I give a damn who killed my father? He would have died someday.”

He stood up and leaned back against the smooth wall, dropping his head back to tap gently on the tiles and looking up at the same regular pattern on the ceiling. He growled at himself, hunching over with the sound and straightening up. ‘I should not be calm.’

He spoke again. “His death was wrong.” Richard knew that. “I hate that he died.” Richard was sure of this. “I killed the ones who killed him, both the actors and their puppet master.” Richard remembered the night during which that had happened. “I believe that I was right to kill them.”

He roused himself to lay flat on the featureless floor of the cell, eyes staring up, mouth softening into a trembly smile.

“I really didn’t want him to die. I loved him; I love him.” He sighed. “Why’d they choose him to die?”

He woke up the next morning in a garment wet with tears.

The guardsmen who came to escort him to his execution were rougher looking than the two he’d run by the day before, their faces unscarred but roughened both by age and by something intangible which made him shrink back a bit. They wore breastplates, greaves, and bracers, but no helmets, and their gauntlets were hard against his muscles as they gripped his upper arms to drag him away. He didn’t resist; why try? No way to escape that was really worth it. Besides, Richard had done what the wanted; he had killed his father’s killers. ‘I will be content with that,’ he swore to himself, ‘I will.’

He walked down the plain hallways of the prison, barely noticing the same regular tiling persisted, until they reached the guardroom, filled as it was with partying guardsmen, and stood opposite the final door that separated him from his final death- walk.

“Hey, boy,” one man said, coming up to him as his captors paused in dragging him, “Thanks for the drinks. I’ve not had wine this good since I guarded the Lady Albredth’s feasting room and shook the cook down for a sip, and it’s all due to you. Good luck with the execution!”

A party of five, sitting round a table nearby in half- armor, swords missing from their sheathes, roared their approval, lifting a mismatched assortment of ornate goblet. Richard could almost feel the alcohol on their breath. He closed his eyes and tried to ignore them.

“Well if you’re gonna be that way….” The man who had accosted him moved back to join the other five, and Richard opened his eyes just in time to see the dismissive wave which prefaced his captors jolting back into motion.

The iron- bound door of the prison opened into the gaol courtyard, only about thirty yards from the execution post. Richard’s legs tried to shake, but he forced firmness into them, walking as well as he could with the two men holding onto his arms.

As he exited the great gate of the gaol, he caught sight of the platform on which he would die, and, in the window just behind the swordsman responsible for the imminent beheading, he saw a glint of steel. ‘Must be really zealous about making sure I die, he thought, They even brought in an amateur headsman. I should feel honored.’ He grimaced, shivered a bit, and pulled himself together. He’d decided on this course of action, and he would see it through to the end. He had only one end now. After all, rescue was his only hope, and when Edward had deserted, who else remained with the guts to go against the Judge on Richard’s behalf?

The Judge sat in his customary seat, raised above the semicircular platform, on his left seated the Sheriff, a small pale man with velvet- gloved hands, and on his right a tall, thin man with a developing paunch, the son of the last man Richard had killed. Richard looked straight at the second one for a full five seconds before he had to return his attention to his feet.

The guardsmen were arrayed at the base of the Judge’s box, on the edges of the platform, and at each of the six entrances to the large court.

Oddly enough, Richard could see no more guards in the windows, though a quick once- over would not be enough to find them if they sought to hide. He wondered if he had imagined the glint; the past five executions he had been at had no such guards to his knowledge, at least not from what he could see for himself or hear in mingling with the gossips.

‘I guess the Judge really hates me.’

All too quickly, he was standing before the block, the stentorian voice of the head crier was proclaiming the charges to the crowd, and he was being prodded to state how he had pleaded in trial.

He had not had a trial, but nobody really cared. The words were all that mattered, and telling the truth wouldn’t change anything.

“I pled guilty,” he heard his voice saying, “I did rightly.”

The guards were positioning him now, turning him roughly and preparing to force him to kneel. He was just about to do it himself when something hissed next to his ear, and his hair ruffled in a sudden gust.

The headsman hurked. He fell over onto the headrest meant for Richard.

Richard stared at the corpse for a moment, then looked around, just in time to see the three nearest guards all fall down at near the same moment, each with an arrow in some their neck or, in one case, buried in the center of his forehead, sticking straight out like some dark parody of a pennant as he lay on the floor, eyes turned with unseeing stare upon the sky.

Someone grabbed his arm and jerked him off balance. Richard stumbled, caught himself, and looked up to see a masked man dressed in rather subdued merchant’s clothes, his face half covered by drab bandana, his eyes blue and flinty.

“Come on, kid,” he said, hand returning to his bow. He nocked an arrow and then aimed and released before Richard finished inhaling.

“Who?”

“Doesn’t matter, kid. Come, now.”

Richard obeyed, sprinting after his rescuer without a second thought except for ‘who would rescue me?’ in his mind. They rushed through the panicked crowds, shoving aside the few who stood in their way, bowling over a few who were too slow to evade them. The trumpets blew behind them, and he strained his ears for the clatter of the guards coming after them at full pelt, but he heard only a few footsteps heavy enough to be an armored man. Even those few ended with sudden crashes of metal on stone after a few seconds.

Why weren’t the guards coming after them faster?

Who had rescued him?

About a half hour later, his guide stopped himself, launching himself into a jump and landing with a thud against a pile of flour sacks, bouncing off it and turning to face Richard, who stopped barely an inch short of the man’s nose before backing up a bit.

“Here’s where you’re on your own, kid,” he said, and Richard’s heart sank. Why rescue, then abandon?

“Why?”

“Your friend paid us to get you out, not to babysit you. He barely had enough for that, frankly, and I only took the job because I got to thumb my nose at the Judge, petty ass that he is. Only way I’d do more is if I thought you were bandit material, and frankly, you don’t seem it. Finicky morals just get you killed when you’re plundering anybody you can find for fun and food. So budge off.” He turned away after that final command, sauntering off towards the edge of the village and the hills.

“Wait,” Richard yelled at him, “Ed- my friend, he hired you?”

His rescuer swiveled around so that the was now walking backwards, cocked his head, then laughed, a short bark of amusement. “Yeah, real piece of work that one, all torn up. Pity, could ha’ been a bandit like his da if he’d been his father’s son. Now stop bothering me.”

Richard subsided and watched the bandit leave for a few moments. Then he shook himself.

‘I guess Edward might not be an utter traitor, just a coward. Still not forgiving him. Now, where to go?’

He started to walk towards the hills.