“Both of us right in one night, and Da not here to witness,” Leesha said.
“He’ll never believe it,” Elona agreed. She dabbed at her eyes with a kerchief, and Leesha pretended not to notice.
“So was that the same Marick you used to shine on?” Elona asked. “The one you ran off to Angiers with?”
“I never shined on him, Mother,” Leesha said.
Elona scoffed. “Sell that tampweed tale to someone who doesn’t know you. The whole town knew you wanted him, even if you were too prudish to act on it. And why not? He’s handsome as a wolf, and a Messenger on top. That’s man enough for any woman. Why do you think he used to make Gared so jealous?”
“Everything made Gared jealous, Mum,” Leesha said.
Elona nodded. “He’s just like his father: simple men, ruled by their passions.” She smiled wistfully, and Leesha knew she was thinking of Steave, her first love, who had died the year previous when flux took Cutter’s Hollow and the wards failed.
“The Marick I saw when we were alone on the road wasn’t much different,” Leesha said.
“And you used Gatherer’s tricks to keep him off you,” Elona guessed, “instead of taking it as the perfect opportunity to have a romp with no one the wiser.” It was true enough; Leesha had secretly drugged Marick into impotence to prevent his taking advantage of her on the road.
“Like you would have?” Leesha asked, unable to keep the bite from her tone.
“Yes,” Elona said, “and why not? Skirts lift up for a reason. Women have needs down below, just as men. Don’t lie to yourself and pretend otherwise.”
“I know that, Mum,” Leesha said.
“You know it,” Elona agreed, “and yet still you sew your petticoats shut, and think denying yourself somehow makes you heroic. How can you treat every body in the Hollow when you don’t understand the needs of your own?”
Leesha said nothing. Her mother had a most unsettling way of reading her thoughts.
“You should go up and talk to Marick while your other suitors are out of town,” Elona said. “He’s had years and tragedy to season him, and come out a hero. The folk outside can’t stop singing his praises. Perhaps he’ll be more to your liking now.”
“I don’t know…” Leesha said.
“Oh, go on!” Elona said. “Take a plate of food up to his room and talk to him. It’s not like you have to let him stick you this very night.” She smiled and winked. “Though if you did, it’d be a better use of your night than fretting over problems that will remain come morning.”
Leesha laughed despite herself, and hugged her mother again.
Several times they passed scenes of slaughter; bodies, alone and in groups, torn apart by corelings when night fell upon them without succor.
The Painted Man cursed the sights, spurring Twilight Dancer on harder, not bothering to stop after the first. The others who followed him, even Gared and the Cutters, were inexperienced riders falling well behind his powerful stallion, but he didn’t care. There were refugees on the road, driven out of their homes by Ahmann Jardir, the man he had been fool enough to call friend, and he needed to find and protect as many of them as he could before night fell.
But he would hold Jardir to account for every life lost. Corespawn him if he did not.
More than an hour of hard riding brought him to a large group of refugees. The sky was awash with color as the sun set, but the folk were still working on their wards. They had painted the magical symbols on wooden boards, but the area they needed to secure was irregularly shaped, and the net was out of alignment.
He galloped right to the edge of the wardnet, pulling Twilight Dancer up short and leaping down with his warding kit. People cried out at the sight of him, but he ignored them, inspecting their wards.
“It’s him,” one Warder whispered to another. “The Deliverer.” The Painted Man paid him no mind, focusing on the task at hand. Some of their wards he turned or twisted to align properly with others, but many he altered with charcoal, or turned the boards over and replaced entirely.
A crowd began to gather around him, folk clutching one another and whispering as they stared at his tattooed hands and tried to get a peek under his hood. None dared approach him, though, and his work went uninterrupted. When his companions finally caught up, Erny fumbled his way down off his horse to assist. Rojer and the others placed themselves protectively between him and the crowd.
“Deliverer!” a woman screamed at him. He glanced over to see her struggling vainly toward him against the pull of Gared’s trunklike arms, her eyes alight with fanatical fire. He turned back to his work.
“Please!” the woman cried. “My sister is still on the road!”
The Painted Man looked up sharply at that. “Take over the warding,” he told Erny. “Draft as many of their Warders as you need. I’ll leave a couple of archers to buy you time to finish.” Erny gulped, but he nodded and called to the Rizonan Warders, who had been standing back with the rest of the refugees.
“Let her go,” the Painted Man told Gared when he reached the pair. Gared complied immediately, and the woman fell to her knees before him, clutching at his feet.
“Please, Deliverer,” she said. “My sister is with child; too far along to sit a horse. She and our gray parents couldn’t keep up with the group, so our husbands bade me take the children on ahead while they set a slower pace.”
“And they haven’t caught up,” the Painted Man finished for her.
“It is nearly dark,” the woman said, weeping upon his feet and clutching at the hem of his robes. “Please, Deliverer, save them.”
The Painted Man reached down to her, placing a hand on her chin and gently pulling her to her feet. “I’m not the Deliverer,” he said. “But I swear I’ll save your family if I can.”
He turned to Gared. “Pick two archers to stay with Erny while the wards here are completed,” he said. “The rest of you are with me.” Gared nodded, and moments later they thundered out of the camp, riding even more frantically than before.
It was dark when they found them: five people, as the desperate woman had said. They stood in a tiny makeshift ward circle, surrounded by dozens of corelings. Flame demons spat fire and wind demons swooped down from the sky. There was even a rock demon, towering over the rest.
Each time the demons struck and the wardnet flared to life, Rojer could see the holes in the web; holes more than large enough for a demon to squeeze through.
The two young men stood by those holes, stabbing out with pitchforks to drive the demons back as an elderly couple tended to the obvious reason why they had fallen behind.
The young woman at the circle’s center was giving birth.
The Painted Man growled and kicked his stallion forward, leaping ahead of the others. He cast his robe aside, and it floated to the ground in his wake. Gared and the Cutters gave a cry and followed suit, freeing their warded axes as they galloped toward the fray.
The Painted Man rode Twilight Dancer right into the rock demon, the warded metal horns welded to the horse’s barding crackling with power as they punched through the black carapace of the demon’s abdomen. The Painted Man leapt from his horse as the demon was driven back, grabbing one of its horns to hold on to as he rode the coreling to the ground, punching it repeatedly in the throat with warded fists as it went down.