Outskirts of Yutor – Late Afternoon
The road had narrowed to a rutted dirt track two hours ago, hemmed in on both sides by walls of thorn scrub. The air had changed with it — heavier now, iron and wet stone underneath, something faintly rotten that none of them mentioned.
Sylric rode.
Dren and Dot walked. Had been walking for the better part of a mile, boots raising small clouds of pale dust with every step. The sun sat high and indifferent.
"My turn," Dren said, for the third time.
"Nope." Sylric didn't look down. "Get your own horse."
"I had a horse."
"And then you didn't."
A beat.
"If you'd stopped them when they bolted—"
"Not my horses."
Dren opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked at the road ahead with the expression of a man composing a speech he'd decided not to give.
*(Flashback — one panel: Sylric cresting the hill on his black horse, two other horses thundering past him in the opposite direction. He watches them go. Raises one shoulder. Lowers it. Rides on.)*
In the wagon bed, Yiva draped herself over the side and heaved again. Sweat plastered pale strands of hair to her forehead. She'd been at this since midmorning.
Dot glanced back, forehead creased. "She needs medicine. Real medicine, not whatever Dren's been calling medicine."
"That was perfectly good—"
"It was horse tonic."
"I'm fine."Yiva says
Sylric gave a dry smile. "Royals. Too delicate for trail rations."
Yiva lifted her head just enough to fix him with a look that could have stripped bark. Then her stomach turned again and she put her head back down with great dignity.
**Yutor – Market Square**
The hamlet announced itself as a cluster of hunched stone cottages around a muddy square. A few villagers looked up as the wagon rolled in — and then, with quiet coordination, looked away. Not disinterest. Something more deliberate than that.
Sylric's chains stirred faintly, the way they did when he was paying attention.
They stopped at a narrow market stall. Flatbread, leathery strips of dried meat, bundles of wilting herbs. Dot helped Yiva down from the wagon; she leaned into him a half-second longer than necessary before straightening, jaw set, cheeks faintly pink.
The stall-keeper studied her. "Got a healer two streets over. Girl looks half-dead."
"Bad trail food," Yiva said. "I'll live."
It was then that the child appeared.
She was seven, maybe eight — slight, dark-eyed, trailing behind a hollow-faced woman who might have been her mother. She stopped mid-stride and stared at Yiva with an intensity that had nothing to do with curiosity.
Then she lunged. Both hands clamped around the hem of Yiva's dress and held on, knuckles white, trembling head to foot.
Yiva went very still.
The mother grabbed the girl's arm. "Come on. Leave them alone." Her voice was flat — not embarrassed. Afraid.
The child wouldn't release. Her eyes stayed fixed on Yiva's face: not pleading, exactly. Something older than pleading. The look of someone who has already decided that hoping is dangerous but can't quite stop.
Yiva crouched slowly. "Hey. Are you hurt?"
The mother wrenched harder. The girl's grip finally broke. She was pulled into the nearest alley and gone before Yiva had fully straightened.
For a moment no one spoke.
"Whole place is wrong," Sylric said, without inflection, eyes moving across rooftops.
Dren paid for the supplies in silence. His attention didn't come back down from the rooftops.
Inn – Evening
One room. Two narrow beds, a scarred table, a single window facing the square. Dren had already claimed the chair nearest the door with the proprietary ease of a man who sleeps light and wakes armed.
Dot climbed through the open window and settled on the slanted roof tiles, legs dangling over empty air. The last of the daylight sat low and amber on the horizon.
After a moment, careful footsteps. Yiva eased down beside him, still unsteady, and for a while neither of them said anything. The town spread below them in the fading light — too quiet, smoke rising thin from chimneys, not a single child visible in the square.
"You've been somewhere else all day," she said.
Dot kept his eyes on the horizon. "Just thinking."
A tile shifted under her weight. She slipped — sharp intake of breath — and his hand shot out, fingers closing around her wrist before the thought had fully formed. Firm. Steady. He held her there a moment, then released slowly.
Yiva stared at the point where his hand had been. Then she looked at him.
"Thank you," she said. "For that. And for— the cliff. The pit." She exhaled. "All of it. I never said it properly."
Dot gave a short, hollow laugh. "I didn't exactly give you a choice."
"You jumped off a cliff after someone who'd been trying to escape you for a week."
He had nothing to say to that.
Wind came through the trees at the town's edge, lifting loose strands of her hair in a slow arc — and for just a second, in the angle of the light and the motion, he saw Liora. Not her face. Just the gesture. The way warmth moves.
His throat closed.
"You're strong," Liora had told him. "Stronger than you know."
Yiva watched his expression shift into somewhere she couldn't follow. She thought: *too much. Way too much. Stop talking.*
She was still thinking it when a child's cry came up from the alley below — sharp, small, cut short.
They both went still.
Dot stood. "Stay here."
Yiva stood. "Not happening."
He looked at her. She looked back.
He bent and scooped her into a carry — she made a sound of pure indignation — and dropped lightly from the roof to the street.
"I have a stomach bug," she said, through gritted teeth. "Not a broken leg."
"Faster this way."
The Alley
The mother stood over the girl, switch rising and falling in short, mechanical strokes. The child had curled into a ball on the dirt, shoulders shaking, making no sound — the silence of someone who had learned that crying louder made it worse.
Dot's expression turned to stone.
Yiva moved first.
She crossed the distance in four strides and drove her fist into the woman's jaw — clean, tight, no hesitation. The mother staggered into the wall, stunned, blood on her lip.
Dot stared at her.
Yiva planted herself between them, breathing through her nose, and looked down at the girl. "It's alright. You're alright."
The mother found her voice. "You don't understand." Her eyes were wild — not with anger. Something closer to desperation. "The pirates. They come every month. They take children — sell them, up and down the coast. If I give her up willingly, they leave the rest of us alone. If I don't—" Her voice fractured. "They slaughter everyone. Every last one of us."
The girl pressed herself against Yiva's leg and held on.
No one spoke.
Dot crouched slowly until he was at the girl's level. He looked at her for a moment — at the red marks on her arms, the way she held herself, the careful blankness in her eyes that children learn when they've stopped expecting anyone to stay. Something moved across his face that he didn't try to hide.
He looked up at the mother. "When do they come?"
---
**Inn Room – Same Time**
Dren sat at the table nursing an unmarked tankard. Sylric leaned against the wall, chains loose in his hands, watching the window.
"You feel it," Sylric said. Not a question.
"Since the market." Dren set the tankard down. "Someone's been counting us."
"Three on the north roof. Two watching the stable." Sylric's eyes hadn't moved from the window. "They're waiting for dark."
Dren stood.
The arrow came through the window and he snatched it out of the air — one-handed, barely a glance — and set it on the table like a piece of mail he'd already read.
Two figures vaulted the sill in the same breath. Brother and sister, matching leather, short blades already moving.
The brother grinned. "The Drought. In the flesh."
The sister circled left with the ease of someone who'd practiced this. "Bounty's been calling our name for weeks."
Sylric looked them over with the detached interest of someone evaluating slightly below-average livestock.
"Want them both?" he asked Dren pleasantly. "They look like Weak."
The brother's grin curdled. "Weak?"
Dren rolled his shoulders. "Wrong night."
The Alley – Minutes Later
Dot had just helped the girl to her feet when the shadow fell across the entrance.
The man dropped from the rooftop behind them — heavy, scarred, cleaver in one fist and pirate colors on his belt. He took in the scene with the unhurried assessment of someone arriving exactly on schedule.
"There she is." His eyes settled on Yiva. "Not great at hiding who you are, princess. The dress gives it away. My employer would pay very heavy for Greenwood blood."
Dot stepped between them.
The pirate charged — fast, direct, not bothering with feints. Steel against open hands. Dot took the first hit on his forearm and felt the impact sing up to his shoulder, traded it for a body shot that doubled the man forward, slammed a knee up to meet his jaw on the way down. The pirate hit the wall and came off it angrier, cleaver swinging wide.
Behind them, without warning — the mother lunged. A kitchen knife in her fist, edge at Yiva's throat.
"Stay back," she said, voice cracking. "Or she dies.Stay back."
The little girl looked up at the blade at Yiva's throat. At her mother's face. At something that had changed in her mother that maybe she'd been watching change for a long time.
She sank her teeth into her mother's forearm.
The woman screamed. The knife dropped. The girl grabbed Yiva's hand and ran.
Dot glanced back — saw the blade falling, saw them moving, turned back to the pirate. Something in his face settled.
He drove forward. Hit the man hard enough to take him off his feet, into the wall, into the ground. A wet snap. Then silence.
Dot rose slowly, breathing hard.
He looked at his hands. Then he looked up.
From every alley, every rooftop, every shadowed doorway — the village came forward. Torches. Pitchforks. Kitchen knives and rusted blades. Dozens of faces, drawn tight with something that had been building for a long time before tonight.
"He'll bring more of them!" someone shouted from the back.
"Kill him before they come for all of us!"
Dot stood alone in the alley, the pirate at his feet, the mob tightening in a slow ring.
He had just broken a man's neck saving the lives of people who were now raising weapons at him.
He didn't move.
The mob tightened.
To be continued.