“What!” he said. “No. No, I will not throw my life away for your foolishness.”
She met his eyes in the near darkness, and he stopped. She knew that she was glowing softly; she could feel the storm within. “Do it.” She left him and walked to her wagon. “Bluth, turn this wagon around.”
He stood with a sphere beside the wagon, looking down at something in his hand. A sheet of paper? Surely Bluth of all people didn’t know glyphs.
“Bluth!” Shallan snapped, climbing into the wagon. “We need to be moving. Now!”
He shook himself, then tucked the paper away and scrambled into the seat beside her. He whipped at the chull, turning it. “What are we doing?” he asked.
“Heading south.”
“Into the bandits?”
“Yes.”
For once, he did as she told him without complaint, whipping the chull faster—as if he were eager to just get this all over with. The wagon rattled and shook as they went down one hillside, then climbed another.
They reached the top and looked down at the force climbing toward them. The men carried torches and sphere lanterns, so she could see their faces. Dark expressions on grim men with weapons drawn. Their breastplates or leather jerkins might once have held symbols of allegiance, but she could see where those had been cut or scratched away.
The deserters looked at her with obvious shock. They had not expected their prey to come to them. Her arrival stunned them for a moment. An important moment.
There will be an officer, Shallan thought, standing up on her seat. They are soldiers, or once were. They’ll have a command structure.
She took a deep breath. Bluth raised his sphere, looking at her, and grunted as if surprised.
“Bless the Stormfather that you’re here!” Shallan cried to the men. “I need your help desperately.”
The group of deserters just stared at her.
“Bandits,” Shallan said. “They’re attacking our friends in the caravan just two hills over. It’s a slaughter! I said I’d seen soldiers back here, moving toward the Shattered Plains. Nobody believed me. Please. You must help.”
Again, they just stared at her. A little like the mink wandering into the whitespine’s den and asking when dinner is… she thought. Finally, the men shuffled uneasily and turned toward a man near the center. Tall, bearded, he had arms that looked too long for his body.
“Bandits, you say,” the man replied, voice empty of emotion.
Shallan leaped down from the wagon and walked toward the man, leaving Bluth sitting as a silent lump. Deserters stepped away from her, wearing ripped and dirty clothing, with grizzled, unkempt hair and faces that hadn’t seen a razor—or a washcloth—in ages. And yet, by torchlight, their weapons gleamed without a spot of rust and their breastplates were polished to the point where they reflected her features.
The woman she glimpsed in one breastplate looked too tall, too stately, to be Shallan herself. Instead of tangled hair, she had flowing red locks. Instead of refugee rags, she wore a gown woven with golden embroidery. She had not been wearing a necklace before, and when she raised her hand toward the leader of the band, her chipped fingernails appeared perfectly manicured.
“Brightness,” the man said as she stepped up to him, “we aren’t what you think we are.”
“No,” Shallan replied. “You aren’t what you think yourselves to be.”
Those around her in the firelight regarded her with eager stares, and she felt the hair rising in a shiver across her body. Into the predator’s den indeed. Yet the tempest within her spurred her to action, and urged her to greater confidence.
The leader opened his mouth as if to give some order. Shallan cut him off. “What is your name?”
“I’m called Vathah,” the man said, turning toward his allies. It was a Vorin name, like Shallan’s own. “And I’ll decide what to do with you later. Gaz, take this one and—”
“What would you do, Vathah,” Shallan said in a loud voice, “to erase the past?”
He looked back toward her, face lit on one side by primal torchlight.
“Would you protect instead of kill, if you had the choice?” Shallan asked. “Would you rescue instead of rob if you could do it over again? Good people are dying as we speak here. You can stop it.”
Those dark eyes of his seemed dead. “We can’t change the past.”
“I can change your future.”
“We are wanted men.”
“Yes, I came here wanting men. Hoping to find men. You are offered the chance to be soldiers again. Come with me. I will see to it you have new lives. Those lives start by saving instead of killing.”
Vathah snorted in derision. His face looked unfinished in the night, rough, like a sketch. “Brightlords have failed us in the past.”
“Listen,” Shallan said. “Listen to the screams.”
The piteous sounds reached them from behind her. Shouts for help. Workers, both men and women, from the caravan. Dying. Haunting sounds. Shallan was surprised, despite having pointed them out, how well the sounds carried. How much they sounded like pleas for help.
“Give yourself another chance,” Shallan said softly. “If you return with me, I will see that your crimes are erased. I promise it to you, by all that I have, by the Almighty himself. You can start over. Start over as heroes.”
Vathah held her eyes. This man was stone. She could see, with a sinking feeling, that he wasn’t swayed. The tempest inside of her began to fade away, and her fears boiled higher. What was she doing? This was crazy!
Vathah looked away from her again, and she knew she’d lost him. He barked the order to take her captive.
Nobody moved. Shallan had focused only on him, not the other two dozen or so men, who had drawn in close, torches raised high. They looked at her with open faces, and she saw very little of the lust she’d noticed before. Instead, they bore wide eyes, longing, reacting to the distant yells. Men fingered their uniforms, where the insignias had been. Others looked down at spears and axes, weapons of their service perhaps not so long ago.
“You fools are considering this?” Vathah said.
One man, a short fellow with a scarred face and an eye patch, nodded his head. “I wouldn’t mind starting over,” he muttered. “Storms, but it would be nice.”
“I saved a woman’s life once,” another said, a tall, balding man who was easily into his forties. “I felt a hero for weeks. Toasts in the tavern. Warmth. Damnation! We’re dying out here.”
“We left to get away from their oppression!” Vathah bellowed.
“And what have we done with our freedom, Vathah?” a man asked from the back of the group.
In the silence that followed, Shallan could hear only the screams for help.
“Storm it, I’m going,” said the short man with the eye patch, jogging up the hill. Others broke off and followed him. Shallan turned—hands clasped in front of her—as nearly the entire group took off in a charge. Bluth stood up on his wagon, his shocked face showing in the torchlight that passed. Then he actually whooped, jumping down from the wagon and raising his cudgel high as he joined the deserters charging toward the battle.
Shallan was left with Vathah and two other men. Those seemed dumbfounded by what had just happened. Vathah folded his arms, letting out an audible sigh. “Idiots, every one.”