Egret had seen all manner of humans and demi-humans in her travels. She'd seen the noblest of them, the Eckthelians, marching tall and proud with lances held high and their gleaming plate shining in the sun, the wind caught in helmet plumes of every color. She'd seen and heard the dwarvish people, Dwylan craftsman, merchants, and mercenaries, their deep voices carrying high over markets churning with foreign investors and traders, haggling and shouting over mountains of ground spices and arms draped with curtains of jewelry and silks. She'd even seen the Muck-rats emerge screeching and biting from their fungal cocoons covered in ooze. She'd seen the very highest and the very lowest of all humankind, all except the elves. Still, Egret considered herself a woman of wide experience, and not easily troubled by the customs and manners of any but the very lowest races.

  That is why she found herself at a loss for words as she watched the savage woman eat.

  She scraped porridge and rabbit meat into her mouth with her fingers, not caring that blood from her cut hand was mingling with her food, turning the paste pink as she ate. She scarfed it with the same urgency that Egret had seen drowning people fight for breath. The fact this woman had not eaten in some time was as obvious as a sword cut to the face.

  But Egret was certain she was no beggar, not until recently anyway. This woman was dressed in rags, but the rags of something that had once been fine, or what passed for fine in the empire to the south. Her arms were bare to the shoulder, and beneath the grime and that day's blood, she could see corded muscle and lean sinews. Not the muscle of a laborer, but of a fighter. Egret recognized the build of a swordsman, or swordswoman in this case. One of the woman's hands was wrapped in rags to bandage the cut she got from grabbing that thug's short sword by the blade, but the other she could see had the calluses that only formed around the grip of a weapon.

  "Were you a mercenary?" Egret asked. She didn't want to push the woman too far too fast, to make her feel interrogated, so she took out an oil-soaked cloth and began cleaning her mace, as though the answer to her questions were not very important. In truth, they weren't, but Egret was not about to travel with a complete stranger. Even a few lies would put her more at ease than nothing at all.

  "Mercenary?" the woman repeated around a mouth full of food, as though the word was strange to her. Since her native tongue was obviously not Common Eckthelian, she mightn't know what it meant at all. But after a moment of a brow furrowed in conversation, she gave the slightest nod.

  "Yes," she said. "A mercenary. I am."

  A lie. It had to be. Egret had offered it to her as an easy answer to explain a fighter with a sword and a brutal disposition wandering the hills, but it was obviously far from the truth. If she were a mercenary, why was she alone? Where was her company? Mercenaries did not often travel alone, and those that did were used to living in the wild. This one had tried (unsuccessfully) to steal from her cook fire.

  And then there were her skills. Egret had watched as this starving woman fought three men with nothing but a stone and her bare hands, and she'd won. She'd never even drawn the sword on her back. A soldier, whether a deserter or lone mercenary, would not have taken such odds. In fact, very few of the mercenaries Egret had met were truly warriors. Cowards and looters, more oft than not, happy to swell the ranks of a larger host and to burn undefended settlements rather than actually hold their ground and fight an armed enemy. Gold, after all, was a poor motivation to fight.

  "A Xoactali mercenary, traveling north looking for work?" she offered again.

  The woman swallowed and nodded again, long, black war braids swaying and her hunter's eyes meeting Egret's.

  "Yes. I'm looking for work. You need a fighter? I will go with you."

  No haggling over price, no questions about the job. She was definitely no mercenary. In fact, Egret was certain this woman was on the run. She seemed content to go with her towards any unknown danger because nothing that lay ahead could possibly be as bad as what followed behind.

  That suited Egret just fine. She might not know much about the uninvited guest she'd received in her camp, but she knew enough. She was dangerous, and she was desperate. Many of those she'd traveled with before had been no different.

  She finished polishing her mace and set it on the ground beside her helmet.

  "My name's Egret bel Sadia. I'm a sworn sister of the All Mother, and I travel in search of help."

  "Help?" a curious expression that looked to Egret almost like regret crossed the woman's face. The woman put down the bowl, now scraped clean, and stared at her hands. "I am not good at helping people. I'm not a healer. I'm a...fighter."

  For a moment, Egret was sure she was about to say "killer". From what she'd seen, that might have been more accurate.

  "I know you're a fighter. I saw what you did to those men over there. You're exactly what I need." She waved her hand towards the hills to the west, beyond which white-capped mountains stabbed at the sky. "I traveled here from the monastery Mon Magog. It's under siege by bandits. Eighty-seven innocent devotees to the All Mother are trapped inside, awaiting aid. Will you come with me?"

  The woman stared off towards those mountains, her face twisted as though she'd found something foul-tasting in her teeth.

  Those teeth...who caps their incisors with gold to make them fangs?

  "You want my help killing those men? Bandits?" She sucked her teeth and stood from the boulder she'd sat on. "In those mountains? Alright. I'll go with you."

  Egret could tell she was about to agree, even without some pledge of reward or recompense. This woman really was running from something.

  "Do you have a name?"

  The woman's eyes tore from the mountains in the distance and bore into her own.

  "Of course I have a name!" she spat. Then, perhaps realizing the edge in her voice, she softened. "Shy."

  Egret blinked. "Your name is Shy? Forgive me, but that sounds...odd...to call a woman like you 'Shy'."

  "Not if you speak Xoactali, fool! What, did you think my parents gave me a name in some foreign, ugly tongue? It means 'river'." She stared at her hands, one of them wrapped in gray rags stained brown by her wounds.

  "We won't be going anywhere until you've seen a healer," said Egret. She stood and began packing away her meager camp into her pack.

  "I don't need a healer. I've healed from much worse."

  Judging from the collection of pale scars across her dark skin, Egret believed it, but she knew better than to let this go. Shy was definitely not a soldier. If she were, if she'd seen what Egret saw when little wounds festered, she'd not be so confident in her own physical constitution. Egret wondered if Shy was used to having others to worry about her health. Was she an officer? A noblewoman duelist?

  "I watched a soldier die from a scratch. Healthy, strong, then one day he slipped while sharpening a spear head. It was only that big." She held her finger and thumb up for Shy to see. The distance between them was not long. "Right on the palm of his hand. He wrapped it himself and said it would be fine. On the march, his hand turned pink, then red, then black. He was screaming by then, begging for death. Eventually, they had to cut his arm off here." She held the edge of her hand up to her shoulder. "He died anyway. So yes, we are going to see a healer. Then we are going to Mon Magog to free my sisters."

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  Shy looked again at her bandaged hand, and then at her shoulder.

  "Fine. A healer."

  **********

  "You're looking for a tall woman, teeth like fangs, one of those dark-skinned heart-rippers from down south. From what I hear, there's only one woman fitting that description in the entire region. So finding her's the easy part."

  It was one of the last things he'd told her before she'd left Vicar's Court. Balletaria didn't think it wise to point out she'd already found who he'd wanted her to find, and that she'd had to abandon her tail to answer his summons. One such as her did not have the body armor nor the hired muscle to criticize someone like Chapriotti, not unless she was suddenly tired of all her fingers remaining attached to her hands. Now she had to find this woman all over again.

  And kill her. I've become a petty thief, and now an assassin. Bloody piss, what's happened to me?

  Balletaria scanned the muddy street and its pedestrians for any sign of her mark, but she was no longer there. The only dark faces there were ones covered in soot or mud or bruises.

  "So you're...what? A witch?" Balletaria turned to look at her companion. The woman was tall, but not willowy. Her figure was wrapped in robes, the like of which Balletaria had never before seen. It was carefully cut, not in the way a noblewoman's dress was cut, to accentuate strong features and to hide undesirable ones. It was embroidered with a tight script or lines of pictographs or symbols she didn't recognize. Her hat was most conspicuous of all, with a wide, floppy brim and the top tapering to a wilting point like some sad, wilting plant. "You wouldn't be able to find our mark with your...er, magic?"

  "A witch? Gods, no. I'm no blood-drinking cultist, and I don't make pacts with lying devils and eldritch monsters. I am a scholar. My power—or, I guess you'd call it magic—comes from study and experimentation. Magic is a word used by bumpkins and illusionists peddling their little parlor tricks to the ignorant. I am neither. What I am is a wizard. What I do is arcane science." She raised her hand majestically, as though holding some precious, delicate instrument above her head for Balletaria to admire. Then she smiled, placing a finger coquettishly on her lip, as though admitting to something naughty.

  "Besides," she admitted, "I'm a specialist. I don't use my sciences to find people."

  Balletaria stared. Was this woman mad? Why would Chapriotti send her to assassinate a dangerous killer with a madwoman as a companion?

  "So, what do your sciences do?"

  The wizard, Flora as Chapriotti had called her, just smiled, a full, wide expression in which her eyes almost disappeared. If that was to reassure Balletaria, it died miserably in the attempt.

  "Well, they don't find people. However, I've already thought of this. I made arrangements."

  Flora waved her hand high above her head to someone, and Balletaria had to turn to look. A tall woman, even taller than Flora, who already stood more than half a head taller than Balletaria, skulked towards them. She seemed to be walking as fast as she could without running, all while using her hands to keep a head wrapping, like a fine silken scarf, secured around her head so that it concealed her hair and face. If her goal was to be inconspicuous, and she suspected that it was, this woman was failing to the degree it was almost comical. She caught the attention of every person she passed, as discrete as a bull hiding behind a fence post. If a lich king, a golden dragon, and a fiery angel stepped from the stories and into the street, Balletaria was sure everyone would have first noticed this hunched, clumsy, shifty-eyed woman with her face bandaged in silk before deciding anything else merited their attention.

  "Amani, over here!" Flora called out, not failing to draw attention to herself as well. "Come meet our rogue!"

  It rather defeats my purposes if you go around announcing me as such to everyone.

  The woman, Amani, turned to stare at the street behind her, where market stall owners, pedestrians, and pleasure girls averted their eyes just a fraction of a second later, just enough so the woman knew they knew she was conspicuous, a sort of collective message that seemed to say, "We all see you, but we don't care to know you."

  Balletaria had seen this kind of shiftiness before, not a just a little in her past self. She knew the symptoms of someone being followed.

  Flora dropped a hand onto Amani's shoulder, causing the woman to jump nervously, a skittish stray cat horrified to find a child's hand on its back.

  "Amani here will find our girl, won't you Amani?"

  Amani, like a child mortified to find her parents had just volunteered her to sing or perform a trick in the presence of company, stared wide-eyed at Flora.

  "You did the thing, right?" Flora prodded. "You know, the thing with the bug?"

  "Oh! Yes, well..." stammered Amani.

  "Wait," Balletaria interrupted, holding up her hands. She scanned the street around them, an old habit of a city-dweller used to guarding secrets in a street full of ears. She gestured to the others to follow her into the shadow of a nearby alley, unable to keep the look of consternation from her face. Soon the three of them were huddled in the gloom between a pawn shop and a butcher's that smelled so foul it made their eyes water.

  "I'm sorry, but who are you?"

  "I'm, well..." but the tall woman seemed unable to finish. Her voice was high and thin, and carried with all the force of a sparrow's fart in a hurricane.

  "This is Amani of Ayad," Flora explained when Amani seemed unable. "Don't worry, I can vouch for her."

  "I don't even know who you are!" Balletaria protested in a hushed voice, more than a little flabbergasted that Flora seemed determined to carry on this discussion as publicly as possible.

  "Amani" was a strange enough name, but Amani of Ayad? Was that a surname? Balletaria had known many nobles and blue bloods, but she'd never heard a family name preceded by "of". Between that and the odd quality of her clothing, a sort of travelers cloak over pantaloons and loose shirt, she could only assume this woman was another foreigner, but from where? Her accent, clipped and precise, was unfamiliar to her and of no help.

  Stranger still was that this woman was armed. A long bow of curious design stood unstrung in a soft case on the woman's back, along with a quiver of arrows. Balletaria was not partial to long bows herself, and had only handled them on a few occasions. She was far more proficient with crossbows, the compact designs the Gentry called streetbows that were lethal within fifteen strides but not much further. But even with her limited experience with the taller, more elegant weapons, she could tell this one was of strange design, with a forked branch curving away from the bow nock, masterfully carved from what may have been animal horn. Even with most of the bow hidden in it's case, Balletaria could tell it was an unusual make.

  All of this unsettled her, convinced her that this woman's arrival was complicating her situation beyond the tolerable.

  "Look," she tried again, staring directly at Flora, praying silently to gods she did not believe in to be understood by this madwoman as clearly as possible, "Our mutual friend gave me a task, and a serious one." It wouldn't do to say Chapriotti's name out loud, not even in a place as small as Ditch.

  Flora smiled and nodded, as though trying to show Balletaria how attentive she was being.

  "We have to find this woman, a dangerous, foreign assassin, if I'm not mistaken, and stick her without getting stuck in turn, right?"

  Another nod.

  "And we have to do this. I mean, failure is not really an option, not unless I want our mutual friend to stuff me into a dead horse and sink it in a swamp. That means if we want to survive our mark and our mutual friend, we need to be discrete. You and Amani are the opposite of discrete. I'm stuck with you, but I'm not obligated to bring her. So, while I applaud your rather...er, high degree of personal initiative in this enterprise, I have to insist we do not involve anyone else, especially someone who's not one of the Gentle Folk. Unless your friend is a seasoned throat-slasher from one of the more prominent slum-gangs of Hubris, she should probably stay uninvolved, and we should be getting to work."

  "Ah," interrupted Flora, holding up a slender finger that Balletaria could see was twisted with tattoos like budding, climbing vines, "but we have no idea where this woman might be. But Amani does. Don't you, Amani?"

  The scarf-wrapped head gave a tiny nod. "She's left town. She was starving, so she tried stealing some food, but she got caught. She got into a fight with some men, and then she ate. Now she travels with a woman in armor. They're looking for a healer."

  Balletaria stared. "How could you possibly know that?"

  "I told you, the bug!" chirped Flora. "The bug that Amani told to follow the woman!"

  Balletaria realized she would get no answer from the wizard that didn't sound like absolute drivel, so she silently turned her gaze to Amani.

  "Oh, yes, the bug," she confirmed, as though Balletaria simply needed the drivel to be repeated in order to make sense.

  When no additional explanation was forthcoming, Balletaria balled up her fists in front of her eyes and squeezed, as though she were trying to press the answers she needed from thin air like wine from grapes.

  "WHAT BUG?" she nearly screamed.