They came from the spaces that hadn’t had anyone in them.

That was the only way to describe it, not from the treeline specifically, not from behind the stone wall, but from the spaces, the gaps between things, the angles that eyes naturally skipped.

There were several of them, moving with the compressed, efficient violence of people who had been waiting for the signal and had used the waiting time to position themselves perfectly.

As soon as they appeared, they moved right behind Eskar’s men and started to kill.

Brenn was the first one down.

He’d barely had time to turn before the blade found him — fast, precise, the work of someone who knew exactly where to put a thing to end a fight immediately and Brenn went down without a sound in the way that was different from going down in a way that allowed for getting back up.

Ossian had his weapon half-drawn when the second figure reached him. Still ringing from the hegoblin’s blow. Half a second slower than he should have been. It was enough.

Eskar moved on instinct — fifteen years of instinct, the kind that operated faster than thought, throwing him sideways and back before his conscious mind had fully registered the blade that cut the air where his neck had been. He felt the wind of it.

The specific, intimate nearness of a thing that had nearly been fatal. He landed in a fighting stance with his sword drawn and his heart doing something loud and rapid in his chest, and for a moment he and the figure who’d tried to kill him regarded each other across two feet of rest stop air.

The figure was already repositioning.

Eskar didn’t let him.

He drove forward — aggressive, the counter-pressure of a man who knew that hesitation after a near-miss was how you got the second attempt and the figure gave ground, and in the space that created Eskar took a full count of the situation and found it to be extremely bad.

His people were down.

It happened in the space between two heartbeats.

That was the thing about real violence — not the Greyswood kind, not the contracted, anticipated, here-comes-the-enemy kind, but the other kind, the kind that arrived in ordinary daylight at a road rest beside an old stone wall — it happened faster than the mind could process it and slower than the body could respond to it, and in the gap between those two speeds was a place where a person simply stood and watched the world rearrange itself around them and could not do a single thing about it.

Jake stood in that gap.

Brenn was on the ground. Ossian was on the ground. The figures held the perimeter with the casual, distributed patience of people who had done this enough times that it no longer required effort, and the leader of the eastern men stood in the center of the rest stop with his hands clasped behind his back and smiled at Eskar with the warm, unconcerned smile of a man who had already won and was simply allowing the other party time to recognize it.

Jake’s hands were shaking.

He became aware of this the way you became aware of things in shock — distantly, as though observing someone else’s hands from a slight remove. His fingers were wrapped around his sword hilt and they were shaking, a fine, continuous tremor that had nothing to do with cold and everything to do with the particular terror of standing in a situation that had no shape he recognized. No contract. No formation. No Halvur at the point and Eskar at his shoulder and a clear enemy across a clear line. Just chaos, resolved into stillness, and men with blood on their blades standing between him and every direction at once.

He had lived two lives.

He had died once and been born again with a goddess’s blessing and a system sitting behind his thoughts like a kept flame, and in all of that — in the entirety of two lives, he had never once stood in a moment that felt like this.

Like the ground had been removed and nobody had mentioned it yet.

It was complete shock to him as to why they abruptly attacked them. He still couldn’t process this whole mess.

Eskar’s voice came out rougher than he intended.

"What the hell are you doing?"

He was looking at the bodies on the ground.

Then he looked at the leader’s smile. His blade was up and his body was in the stance and all of that was muscle and training operating independently of the part of him that was, beneath the surface, shaking with a cold that had nothing to do with the valley air.

He had thought —

He had thought they were clan men, family retainers. The kind of people who traveled a long way to collect a lost young master and bring him home to people who’d been missing him.

But this happened.

He didn’t expect them to turn into cold-blooded killers. Seeing the way they had dealt with his men, Eskar was now in a complete state of panic as they would kill him too.

"You said you wanted to take him," Eskar said. His voice steadied as he said it, the mercenary control reasserting itself over the cold shaking underneath.

"You said he was your young master."

The leader looked at him with the patient expression of a man who found other people’s confusion gently amusing.

"He is," he said simply.

"Then why—" Eskar’s eyes went to Brenn and Ossian and others. The words stopped working for a moment. "Why this?"

"Precaution," the leader said, with the tone of a reasonable man explaining a reasonable thing. "We couldn’t know who was with him. Who might interfere?"

He spread one hand in a small, open gesture. "You understand." 𝑓𝓇𝘦ℯ𝘸𝘦𝑏𝓃𝑜𝘷ℯ𝑙.𝑐𝑜𝓂

Eskar stared at him.

"No, I don’t. You killed my people and are telling me it was just for precaution."

"Do you want to die too?" Eskar’s face paled; he shuddered for a second, feeling the gaze of that man.