He shot three.
In succession. Without pause. The sound of it enormous in the fog, each report bouncing off the trees, the fog carrying it further than it should have. The three had not expected the rate of fire — they had expected the pause between shots that older weapons required and had started to move before the first shot and had not finished moving before the second.
They did not get up.
The girl had moved during the shots.
Not at him. Past him — she had used the confusion of the gunfire as cover and was already into the tree line, the remaining four between them now, her blade handling two of them with the efficient terrible fluency of someone who had been trained rather than taught.
"He has a gun!" she called to the four. In a language he almost recognized — not quite this country's common tongue, a regional dialect or a code. "Don't hold back!"
"Please don't," he squealed in response. Two rounds left. Two of the four had guns of their own — older, single-shot, the reloading time a factor he was calculating. "As much as this is exciting I'd rather not get my clothes—"
A shot.
He dropped from the carriage door to the road surface, felt the wind of it, came up moving. The two remaining rounds were for specific problems and he was identifying the specific problems. The shooter — reloading, hands occupied — was the first. He shot him. The second round he held.
Two left. Four people still standing. One of them is her and she appears to be on neither side. She wasn't dressed in black but a simple blue dress.
He looked at the girl.
She had dealt with two of the four. She was looking at him.
Crimson eyes. Wild golden curls
Across the bodies between them.
In the fog with the shots echoing off the trees.
Something passed between them — not warmth, not alliance. The specific communication of two people who had been fighting toward a similar goal rather than against each other and had arrived at a moment of mutual acknowledgment.
"Tie them up," she instructed. Low. "The ones that are still breathing."
"And then?" his gaze observing those wild golden curls swirling in the wind.
"And then." She did not finish the sentence. She looked at the road and the fog and the trees and the road that rejoined the main highway half a mile south.
He had the feeling she was thinking about something on that highway.
Something more interesting than this. His blood ran hot. She was gone.
He tied the remaining two with the carriage's harness leather — competently, not perfectly, the knot of someone who knew what it needed to do and did not exceed the requirement. He checked the assassin's knots. Pulled the last one tighter. He was surprised he caught her without a hitch. It was almost too easy. Except if he included the loads of money he lost from firing those expensive bullets.
The woman watched him.
"Who sent you?" he asked.
"Someone with resources," she joked, a bit awkward trying to release tension. Something he caught on a bit too quickly.
"Helpful." He stood. Looked at her without the mask. Her messy bangs and dark circles. "You're not going to tell me."
"No."
He looked at the fog. At the road south.
"The main highway," he said. "Something's happening there?"
"Yes," she said.
"That's also your business?"
"It intersects with my business," she said.
He looked at her.
"I'm going south," he said.
"I know," she said. She looked at the tied men behind her. Back at him. "You're very confident for someone who was nearly killed in his own carriage."
"I'm confident for someone who had a three-to-one engagement and won it." He started walking. "With a woman trying to kill him. Those are decent odds."
________
Zolani was in the trees when she heard the gunshots.
Six of them — not all together, in quick succession, the specific pattern of something with a rate of fire she had not heard before. She registered them with the part of her brain that catalogued sounds and filed them under not Fenton's people, different weapon, north of her position.
She filed it and kept running.
The second assassin had been harder.
Not physically. Harder in the specific way of someone who had been asked to do a thing and was doing it and was good at it and the goodness of it was not something she had been prepared for. Fenton's people were not incompetent. They were professionals who had taken a contract and were executing the contract with the efficiency of people whose reputation depended on execution.
She thought about this while running through the trees with one slipper gone to the mud and the knife in her hand that had the first man's blood on it and the shaking — she had told the shaking later and the shaking was arguing with her about the definition of later.
She changed direction.
The second assassin — the broad-built one with the careful hands — was behind her and to the left, and she knew this because Thread-sight had that quality when it was working well, the sense of presences and their relative locations, the map of a situation she couldn't see.
He's good, she thought. He's quieter than he should be for his size.
Too quiet.
She broke left. Hard. The direction she had been tracking him from — toward rather than away, because away was what he expected and toward was the only thing she had that he wasn't planning for.