"Who's there?" he said.
"Who's there?" the voice called back.
Faiban opened his mouth, but footsteps began heading away from them as the voice called, "Hello? Who's that?"
Faiban sighed. "Wait here. I'll be right back."
Ashyn looked at the corpses and then the impaled heart. "No, I'll--" She started after him, but tripped over a root. By the time she recovered, the forest had swallowed even the glow of his lantern.
"I'll wait here," she muttered.
She glanced at the heart, shuddered, and turned away, only to find herself looking at the old man's partly devoured corpse. That was no better.
She backed up to a fallen tree and settled on it, lantern at her feet. She stared out into--
Pain exploded in the back of her head. The forest spun into blackness.
Seven
Ashyn awoke feeling cold ground under her fingers. She leaped up, only to feel another jolt of cold--this one from a blade at her neck.
"Don't," a voice in front of her murmured.
"You'd better be talking to her, boy," said an older voice behind her--the man holding the blade.
Her eyes adjusted to the semidark and she saw the first speaker. He was her age, perhaps a little older. He looked like a typical Edgewood villager, with light brown skin, and dark hair curling over his ears and tumbling down his forehead. She'd never seen him in the village, though. She tried twisting to see the older man, but the blade tip pressing into her neck stopped her.
"I didn't expect to see you out here," the boy said.
"Who are you?" she said.
When she spoke, he frowned as if her voice sounded odd.
"You knocked me out--" she began.
"Payback." The boy grinned. "You aren't nearly as alert as the last time."
She stared at him. "The last time?"
"When you . . ." He looked over her shoulder, presumably at the man behind her. "Um, when I got the blade."
She blinked, clearing her head, throbbing and still fuzzy from the blow. "I don't know what you mean."
He only smiled. "Ah, so that's your story." He winked. "I'd stick to it. Something tells me you'd get in trouble for letting this go."
He pulled a dagger from his belt. The blade shimmered in the lantern light, but it wasn't the steel that caught her attention--it was the filigreed handle.
"That's . . . that's my sister's dagger." She glared up at the boy. "You stole the Keeper's blade? Do you have any idea what the penalty is for that?"
Behind her, the man laughed, and the steel finally moved from her neck. She twisted to see her other captor, and when she did, her breath seized in her chest. He was at least twice the boy's age and almost double his size, with thickly muscled arms and a barrel chest. Scars crisscrossed his face. It wasn't the scars that stopped her breath, though. It was the look of him--the tangled hair and beard, the dirt creasing those scars. He was bigger and healthier than poor Cecil, but seeing that filth, there was no doubt what he was. One of the exiles. One of the damned.
Ashyn turned back to the boy. He wasn't nearly as filthy, but on closer inspection, she saw dirt on his clothing and under his nails. There was a gauntness to his cheeks, though, as if he hadn't been quite so thin a few moons ago.
She remembered the noises she'd heard when the governor had been interrogating Cecil. She remembered seeing a blade flash, deep in the trees. These two had been watching. Seeing what happened to Cecil, they'd realized that they weren't getting out of this forest by prancing over to the governor and saying, "I survived."
So they'd taken a hostage. A valuable one.