The Bandit Leader came back to the world on his hands and knees, coughing dust and smoke out of his lungs in long, racking spasms that tasted of charred wood and something chemical he couldn't name.

  He spat. Blinked. His ears were ringing with a high, insistent tone that flattened the world to a single frequency. When he shook his head to clear it, the dizziness rolled through him in a slow, nauseating wave that nearly put him back in the dirt.

  “Cole,” he rasped, coughing the taste of charred wood from his lungs. “Miller. Where are you?”

  He got to his feet. His hand went to his belt and found nothing. The revolver was gone. It was blown clear in the blast, buried in the crater, or simply erased from existence along with the carriage and the horses and any pretence that this job was going to be simple. He drew the long knife from his boot instead. The handle was warm from proximity to his skin, and the weight of it settled his breathing by a degree.

  The carriage was gone. In its place, a crater three metres wide sat smoking in the road, the edges charred black, the earth still radiating a heat that he could feel through the soles of his boots. The horses and driver were nowhere. The rain had not yet started, but the sky was bruising. Heavy, dark clouds were piling against each other with the slow, deliberate menace of something that intended to arrive on its own schedule.

  "Boss..."

  The voice came from his left. Thin. Wet at the edges.

  Cole was pinned beneath a splintered beam of the carriage chassis, the massive timber lying across his midsection at an angle that had driven his body into the soft earth. He was pale, the translucent, waxy pale of someone whose blood was busy elsewhere. His right leg was twisted at an angle that the human knee was not designed to accommodate. The shinbone had come through the trouser fabric. White against red. The boy was looking at it with the glassy, disconnected fascination of someone who hadn't yet accepted that the thing he was seeing belonged to him.

  "Help me up, Boss." Cole's teeth were chattering. Shock, not cold. "I think I'm stuck."

  The Leader looked at the leg. He looked at the sky. He looked at the tree line, where the road curved south toward the nearest posting station, and calculated the distance in minutes and the explosion in decibels and arrived at a number he didn't like.

  "Can you walk, Cole?"

  "I don't—" The boy's face contorted. The fascination was wearing off, and reality was arriving to replace it, and reality brought pain. "I don't think so. It hurts. Oh, Lord. Oh, Lord, it hurts—"

  "I know."

  The Leader crouched beside him. His voice had gone quiet. It wasn't soft, but quiet, the way a man's voice went quiet when the decision had already been made and the words were just the mechanism of delivery.

  "We can't carry you. Not where we're going. And I won't leave you for the constables."

  Cole's hand found the Leader's sleeve. The fingers were dirty, the nails cracked, the grip of a boy who had been recruited from a workhouse six months ago and had never once, in all that time, questioned an order.

  "Boss. Please."

  "I know," the Leader said again.

  He placed his left hand on Cole's forehead. The gesture was almost paternal, steadying and grounding, the last kind thing. His right hand moved once, quick and clean, and drove the knife into the space between the third and fourth ribs.

  Cole's eyes went wide. His mouth opened. No sound came out. The fingers on the Leader's sleeve tightened, held, and then released, and the hand fell back to the dirt with a sound that was too small for what it meant.

  The clearing was quiet. The three surviving bandits stood where they had risen, bruised and bloodied but whole, watching their employer with the blank, unsurprised expressions of men who had seen this arithmetic performed before and understood the variables.

  Nobody spoke. Nobody needed to.

  The Leader wiped the blade on Cole's jacket with a short, efficient stroke, the cloth catching the blood in a dark line. He stood.

  He looked toward the elderly merchant couple. The old woman was unconscious, her head lolled against her husband's shoulder. The merchant was stirring, blinking, his mouth working around sounds that hadn't yet organised themselves into words. His hands were still bound. He looked up as the Leader's shadow fell across him, and the sounds stopped, and his face did something that the Leader had seen enough times to no longer register as a thing that required acknowledgement.

  "Loose ends," the Leader said, to no one in particular. "They weren't what we came for."

  He put a finger to his lips.

  Two movements. Quick. The same clean economy he'd used on Cole, because the Leader was not a man who enjoyed his work, but he was a man who finished it.

  The clearing settled into a silence that was different from the one before. It was heavier and more complete, the kind of quiet that arrived after the last voice capable of breaking it had been removed from the conversation.

  "Right." The Leader sheathed the knife. "We move. Rain's coming."

  The first drops hit as they reached the tree line. Within a minute, the sky opened.

  The rain came down in sheets. It was freezing and percussive, hammering the canopy with a violence that turned the forest floor into a churning slurry of dead leaves and mud. The Leader tilted his face up and let it wash the blood and grit from his skin. The water ran off his jaw in dark rivulets that the downpour diluted and carried away before they reached his collar.

  He stared at the clouds. His employer had given him a window. A specific hour, a specific stretch of road, and a promise that the weather would cooperate if they kept to the schedule. He had assumed it was bluster. The theatrical posturing of a client who wanted to feel important.

  So they weren't kidding.

  He lowered his head, wiped his eyes, and signalled the men forward. They vanished into the trees, and behind them, the rain erased their footprints almost as fast as they were made.

  Alice came back to consciousness one sense at a time, and none of them brought good news.

  First came the rhythmic jolt of being carried. A broad, bony shoulder smelling of wet wool and stale sweat was digging into her stomach with every step, and each impact sent a white spike of pain through the base of her skull. Second was the cold. Her clothes were soaked through, the fabric clinging to her skin with the intimate, miserable persistence of something that intended to stay. Third was the sound. Rain hit the leaves, heavy and constant. Beneath it was the suck and squelch of boots in deep mud, and beneath that, the low murmur of men who were not speaking to her.

  Her hands were still bound. The charred rope was hot against her wrists, her own doing from the heat she'd built before the sky had torn itself apart, but it hadn't burned through. The fibres were damaged and brittle, but holding. Not enough. Never enough.

  "You're awake," a voice said from ahead. It was not a question.

  Alice didn't bother with the pretence. She lifted her head, and the world pitched sideways before settling into a smeared watercolour of greens and greys. She was slung over a man's shoulder. To her left, through the dripping undergrowth, she could see another man trudging with Florence's limp form draped across his back, her arms hanging, her hair trailing in the mud.

  Still breathing. Good.

  "Where are you taking us?" Her voice came out wrong. It was cracked, dry, and scraping against her throat like a file.

  The Bandit Leader dropped back to walk beside her carrier. The rain had plastered his hair flat against his skull, but his stride was easy and unhurried. It was the gait of a man who had walked through worse weather to worse places and considered this a commute.

  "Somewhere you won't be found." He said it the way someone might say somewhere with a nice view. He spoke lightly and conversationally, as though the destination were a matter of taste rather than survival. "Don't bother looking for landmarks. Don't bother hoping for the constables, either."

  He gestured at the dense thicket ahead. The undergrowth was a wall of thorny vines, knotted and impenetrable, the kind of growth that would shred clothing and skin in equal measure.

  "We're walking through a veil," the Leader continued. "Illusionary wards. Courtesy of a very expensive associate. To anyone tracking us, we vanished into thin air three miles back. To a passerby, this is just a patch of briar too thick to bother with."

  He walked into the wall of thorns without slowing.

  The vines did not tear. They did not scrape or catch or resist. They rippled with a shimmering, liquid distortion, as though the air itself had become uncertain about what was solid and what was not. The Leader passed through them like a man stepping through a curtain.

  The man carrying Alice followed. She braced for the bite of thorns, her shoulders tightening involuntarily, but what she felt instead was a tingle. It was dry and electric, crawling across her skin with the intimate precision of static before a lightning strike. The hairs on her arms stood. The back of her neck prickled. And then it was over, and the forest on the other side was different.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  The undergrowth was gone. The trees stood wider apart and the canopy was thinner. What little light remained fell in grey columns onto a clearing that looked as though it had been holding its breath for a very long time. In the centre sat a cabin. It was squat, stone, and half-swallowed by the earth around it, its walls furred with moss and its chimney leaking a thin thread of smoke into the rain. It looked less like a building and more like a geological feature, something the forest had grown around rather than something men had built within it.

  "Home sweet home," the Leader muttered.

  The interior was a single room, and it smelled like the history of every man who had ever used it and none of the women who hadn't. Woodsmoke. Stale tobacco. Damp wool left to rot rather than dry. Beneath those was the subtler note of cold stone and old grease and the particular sourness of enclosed spaces occupied by people who did not open windows.

  A blackened stone fireplace dominated the far wall, cold and unlit. A heavy table sat in the centre, rough-hewn, its surface scarred with knife marks that might have been practical and might have been recreational. Along both walls were makeshift bunks. They were piles of furs and straw that looked more like nests than beds.

  Two men were already inside, seated at the table, their hands resting near the sawed-off shotguns propped against the bench. They looked up as the door banged open, read the situation in the time it took the Leader to cross the threshold, and settled back without a word.

  Alice was carried past the table and dumped onto a pile of mildewed rugs in the back corner, the furthest point from the door and anything useful. Florence was dropped beside her a moment later, landing with a soft sound that was not quite a groan and not quite a word. She did not wake.

  Alice pushed herself upright against the stone wall. Her ribs protested. Her head protested. She ignored both and took stock.

  Five men.

  The Leader was peeling off his wet greatcoat. Miller, the name they used for the one who had carried her, was a broad man with heavy hands and a face that looked like it had been assembled from leftover parts. There was the one who had carried Florence, whose name she hadn't caught. Jenkins had taken up position at the only door, leaning against the frame with the loose, proprietary ease of a man guarding something he considered beneath his talents. The last two were from the table, one of whom had begun disassembling a revolver with the methodical patience of a man with nowhere to be and nothing to do but maintain the tools of his trade.

  The Leader caught the revolver Miller tossed him, checked the cylinder with a flick of his wrist, and tucked it into his belt.

  "What about the girls?" Jenkins asked from the door.

  "They aren't going anywhere." The Leader dragged the heaviest chair to the centre of the room and sat facing the door. His back was to the girls, which told Alice two things: he was confident, and he was right. "We sit tight. Strict timeline."

  He pulled a pocket watch from his vest, brass and tarnished, the chain looped through a buttonhole. He flicked it open. Studied the face. Snapped it shut.

  "Dawn," he said. "The Clients collect. We hand over the merchandise, take the payment, and we're gone before the sun clears the trees."

  "The Clients." Jenkins said it with the slight, upward inflection of a man testing whether a question would be tolerated. "Which ones are they, again?"

  The Leader's head turned. Not fast. Just enough.

  "The ones who pay," he said. "That's what you need to know. When they arrive, you don't speak to them. You don't look at them. You make the exchange and you leave."

  Miller settled onto a bunk, his weight making the wooden frame groan. "Why the secrecy?"

  "Because the kind of people who buy live cargo off the books," the Leader said, his thumb running along the watch chain, "aren't the kind of people you want remembering your face." He leaned back. Closed his eyes. "They are particular."

  The room absorbed this. Jenkins shifted against the doorframe. Miller lay back on the bunk and stared at the ceiling. The man at the table resumed his cleaning, the soft metallic scrape of the brush against the barrel the only sound besides the rain.

  "No drinking," the Leader added, without opening his eyes. "I want everyone sharp."

  The silence that settled was not comfortable. It was the silence of men counting hours in a room full of weapons, waiting for money, and Alice sat in the corner of it and counted with them.

  The hours passed in increments measured by the rain.

  The rhythm of it changed as the night deepened. It shifted from the heavy, percussive hammering of the early storm to something steadier and more patient, a constant thump-hiss against the stone roof that became, after a while, indistinguishable from the silence it was filling. Beneath it, the room ticked along on its own clock. The scrape of the gun-cleaning kit. The creak of a bunk as Miller rolled over. Jenkins's boot tapped an absent rhythm against the doorframe. The Leader's breathing was slow and even, the breathing of a man who could sleep with one eye open because the alternative was not sleeping at all.

  Alice sat against the cold stone and did not sleep.

  Her eyes moved in a slow, methodical circuit. Door: Jenkins. Revolver on his hip, knife on his belt, body angled sideways in the frame. Table: the cleaner, whose name she still didn't know, the two shotguns within arm's reach, the disassembled revolver in pieces on a rag. Left wall: Miller and the carrier, bunked down, Miller's pistol tucked into his belt even as he slept. Centre: the Leader, chair tilted back, revolver in his shoulder holster, positioned between the girls and the only exit.

  One door. Barred windows. Five armed men. Two of us, one unconscious.

  She ran the scenarios. She had been running them since they'd dropped her in the corner, cycling through permutations with the quiet, compulsive thoroughness of someone who had learned, in drawing rooms and at dinner tables, that the difference between a good position and a bad one was not the cards you held but the order in which you played them.

  If she were alone, she would have moved already. She was a mage. She was a poor one, a Tier 6 at the bottom of the ladder, the rung reserved for children who showed promise and adults who had failed to deliver on it. However, even a poor mage had resources that five mundane thugs could not account for. Heat. Surprise. The fundamental asymmetry of a person who could set things on fire in a room full of people who could not.

  But she was not alone.

  She looked at Florence. The girl was still unconscious, slumped against the wall, her breathing shallow and uneven, her face slack. Dead weight. No combat training, no magic, no instinct for violence. If Alice moved and the plan went wrong—and the plan would go wrong, because plans involving five-to-one odds and a single exit did not go right—Florence would be the one who paid for it.

  She makes this harder.

  The thought arrived without sentiment. It was a statement of tactical fact, delivered by the part of Alice's mind that had been raised on stratagems and contingency tables and the quiet, ruthless pragmatism of a family that treated every problem as a position to be optimised.

  But I am not leaving her to these animals.

  That thought arrived without sentiment, too. A different kind of fact. The kind that closed doors rather than opened them, that removed options from the board and simplified the calculation by making certain outcomes inadmissible.

  Alice adjusted her wrists behind her back. The charred rope shifted against her skin. Brittle. Weakened. Not enough to snap with strength alone, she didn't have the strength, but enough that the right application of heat would finish the job.

  She would need to be close to one of them. She would need a weapon in reach. She would need Florence awake, upright, and moving toward the door at the exact moment the room descended into chaos.

  She would need a reason for one of them to come to her.

  Beside her, Florence stirred.

  The movement was small. It was a shift of weight and a murmur, her eyelids flickering in the way they did when the body was surfacing from a depth it hadn't chosen to descend to. Florence's lips moved. The word that came out was barely a whisper, more shape than sound.

  "Thomas?"

  Her hands tried to move and found the rope. The confusion hit her face in stages. It started as discomfort, shifted to resistance, and finally settled into the dawning, sickening recognition that the thing preventing her from moving her arms was not a blanket or a sleeve but a binding. The reason it was dark was not because it was night but because she was somewhere she had never been and had not chosen to go.

  "Where—" Florence's voice cracked. Her eyes opened, unfocused, scanning the dim room without finding anything they recognised. "Why is it so dark? The carriage—I don't remember—"

  "Florence." Alice pressed her shoulder against Florence's, a point of contact, something solid. "Don't move. Listen to me."

  "Alice?" The name came out small. Florence blinked at her, then past her at the room. She took in the stone walls, the table, and the shapes of men in the gloom, and the trembling started. It began in her hands and climbed her arms and settled into her whole body, a deep, involuntary shudder that had nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with the sudden, complete understanding of her circumstances.

  "We were taken," Alice whispered. She kept her voice flat and factual, because panic was a contagion and Florence was already halfway infected. "We're in a cabin in the forest. There are five of them. They're armed. They're waiting for someone to come and collect us in the morning."

  Florence's breathing was fast and shallow, the ragged intake of someone whose lungs had forgotten the rhythm. "Collect us? What does that—"

  "It means we leave before morning." Alice held her gaze. "I have a plan. But I need you to follow my lead and not ask questions. Can you do that?"

  Florence stared at her. The trembling hadn't stopped. Her eyes were bright with the kind of fear that either sharpened a person or shattered them, and Alice could not yet tell which way it would go.

  Florence nodded. A small, jerky motion.

  Good enough.

  Alice shifted her attention to the room. The man at the table had paused his cleaning, his head tilted toward the corner. Miller, on the bunk, hadn't moved. The Leader's eyes were open. He was watching them from beneath half-closed lids, the chair still tilted back. His posture was unchanged, but his attention was no longer elsewhere.

  Alice took a breath. She straightened her spine, lifted her chin, and let her voice fill the room.

  "We're freezing."

  The word landed on the silence like a stone dropped into a pond. The man at the table looked up. Jenkins shifted at the door.

  The Leader regarded her. "Quiet."

  "We are soaked through," Alice said. She did not lower her voice. She pitched it the way she had heard her mother pitch hers when addressing servants who had made an error. It was not angry or pleading, but carried the specific, immovable weight of a person who expected to be accommodated and found the alternative genuinely puzzling. "Our clothes are wet. The stone is cold. This room has no fire. If your Clients arrive at dawn to find two girls dead of exposure, I imagine that conversation will be brief and unpleasant. Unless they pay the same rate for corpses?"

  The Leader stared at her. Three seconds. Five.

  He chuckled. It was a dry, papery sound, the amusement of a man who found things funny the way a surgeon found anatomy interesting: clinically, and from a comfortable distance.

  "Got a mouth on you, Duchess."

  "I have a functioning understanding of cause and effect." Alice held his gaze. "We need a blanket."

  The Leader glanced at Miller. "Give them the horse blanket. Shut her up."

  Miller grunted. It was the grunt of a man being asked to do something beneath him at an hour beneath him for people beneath him. He swung his legs off the bunk, grabbed a coarse wool blanket from the foot of it, and lumbered toward the corner.

  Alice watched him come.

  Behind her back, she shifted her hands. The rope was dry. The fibres were brittle from the heat she had poured into them on the road, damaged but holding, a thread of hemp between her and the use of her arms. She focused. Not fire. Fire was light, and light was attention, and attention was five guns turning toward a girl with her hands behind her back. Heat. Just heat. Invisible and silent, the molecules vibrating faster and faster in the fibres until the structure gave way.

  The air behind her shimmered. The rope crackled, faintly, the sound swallowed by the rain on the roof.

  Three steps. Two.

  Miller loomed over them. He was bigger up close, thick through the chest and shoulders. His hands were heavy, and his face wore the particular expression of a man who enjoyed having power over people smaller than himself and considered this a personality rather than a deficiency. His eyes moved over them, slow and deliberate, lingering in ways that made Alice's skin contract.

  "Here you go, princess." He smirked. "Tuck in."

  He leaned down.