Becky and Raymond had their own reasons for refusing to leave. If they went back without Franklin, they would face punishment at minimum and the end of any future prospects at worst. Staying was a gamble, but if they came through it alongside their lord, everything afterward would be different. Evan glanced at them and understood the calculation immediately. The people of this world weren't without their own kind of shrewdness.
"Suit yourselves." Robin was indifferent to the matter. He pulled his reins and the nightmare screamed once and pushed into the forest.
They walked for half the night, circling and doubling back until the three captives had completely lost their sense of direction. Franklin, Becky, and Raymond said nothing — their captors hadn't blindfolded them or bound their hands, which was already more considerate than they'd had reason to expect — but the disorientation was obvious in their faces. What they didn't know, and what Evan could see clearly with his infrared sight and his unusually keen nose, was that the route wasn't random. Robin's people were threading carefully along the edges of several high-ranked magical beast territories. A straight line would have meant fighting. The circuitous path meant arriving.
The camp sat in a pocket of land that the surrounding beast territories left alone, a precarious balance that someone had identified and decided to use. A palisade enclosed it, with a ditch outside the fence and a system of guard posts — some visible, some not. Looking at the layout, Evan thought that Robin knew something about military organization.
Inside, Franklin's group was given the same treatment as anyone else in the camp, minus their weapons. That was all it took. Without arms, and with the Liya Demon Forest on all sides, there was nowhere to run.
Evan woke early the next morning — or rather, he rose after a night spent lying still and thinking, since sleep wasn't something he needed. His habit of reviewing the previous day had been running: the more he thought about the previous night, the more questions he had. Robin operating a thousand li from his known base. Robin who recognized Franklin by name while Franklin hadn't recognized him. Two men from different duchies with no obvious connection. The whole thing was layered with things left unexplained.
He emerged from his tent. Franklin, Becky, and Raymond came out of theirs at almost the same moment, all three with the darkened eyes of people who hadn't slept. Evan gave them a nod.
Franklin hesitated, then moved closer. His wrist had been bandaged during the night. He glanced around to confirm no one was nearby. "Wang — might I ask a favor of you?"
"What kind of favor?"
"If something happens to me — I'd ask you to get these two out." He meant Becky and Raymond. Both of them rejected the idea instantly and in the same breath.
"My lord, we're not going anywhere."
"Better to die together."
"I know your feelings. I only mean in the worst case." Something in Franklin's expression as he said it — a small, calculating brightness in the corner of his eye.
Evan felt a brief, genuine warmth, and then felt it cool. The warmth was for someone who thought about his people before himself under pressure. The cooling came from Nicholas Andrew's years of observing people: this was a performance, executed well but still a performance. Franklin wasn't in any real danger — Robin wanted the ransom, not the body — and the speech about the worst case was designed to do two things: establish him as someone who valued his subordinates, and position himself favorably in Evan's estimation. The fireball last night had caught Franklin's attention, and he was working with what he had. If Evan had been only the eighteen-year-old he appeared to be, it might have landed cleanly. As it was, he carried two people's experience in one skull.
He remembered something he'd read once, or been told once, on Earth — he couldn't place the source:
Assume the worst possible motive for what people say to you, but treat them as though you believe the best.
"I wouldn't worry," Evan said pleasantly. "Robin has a reputation to maintain. He wants the coin, not the trouble. Pay him and this resolves itself."
Franklin smiled, though it didn't reach his eyes. "Thirty thousand is difficult for a baron's estate. We can manage it. Whether my father will choose to is another question."
"You're the heir, aren't you?"
"The eldest, yes. But there are younger siblings, and there are people behind them. If I don't come back —" Something moved across his face, a brief flash of something colder than calculation. "Some of them might not be entirely displeased."
Evan looked at him without comment. The boy had more depth than his years, and less patience for hiding it than he thought he did.
Neither of them had noticed Robin standing at the edge of an adjacent tent with Cecilia beside him — they had just come out together, and the way they stood said something about how they spent their nights. Robin caught the end of Franklin's last sentence. His expression produced a brief, private smile that wasn't kind.
Raymond, watching Evan and Franklin talk, understood what Franklin was doing even if he said nothing. Becky understood less, which was apparent in the earnest way she watched the exchange.
Breakfast hadn't been called yet. Evan walked the camp perimeter. From one of the tents he heard an outburst of admiring noise and went to see what was happening.
A half-elf was drilling with a rapier. Not Cecilia — this one was younger, twelve or thirteen, with the quick, centered footwork of someone who had trained for years. The blade moved fast and without embellishment. Every form Evan watched was designed to kill. As pure swordsmanship, she had him completely outclassed.
He watched for a while, genuinely absorbed. His own practice was, as he well knew, unstructured — he had taught himself one motion through brute repetition and had never thought seriously about footwork. Watching her move, he understood immediately that footwork and blade were supposed to be one thing, and that without the footwork his thrust was only half of what it could be.
The girl noticed him watching. She stepped into a glide and came at him without warning, the rapier's point arriving at his face.
Evan startled. His hand moved without thought — the sword-cane came free from its sheath with a ring of metal, and he thrust on pure reflex. A blade-light rose from it, pale as a white streak, already accelerating past what he'd intended, and he pulled back as fast as he could. He had pulled back, but not fast enough for comfort. His heart was still catching up when something else registered: the back of his neck, gone cold.
An arrow blurred into his peripheral vision. His body turned, his blade came up in an arc like a spreading fan, and the arrow rang off it and fell to the ground. He stepped back several paces, sword lowered and pointing at the ground, left hand still holding the cane, and let his eyes settle.
A roar of approval went up from everyone watching. Evan blinked. Robin's people were cheering. Franklin, Becky, and Raymond were staring at him with open astonishment. Cecilia stood with her bow in hand but pointed at the earth.
He looked at the girl in front of him. "Why did you attack me?"
"Because you're awful," she said. Her face had gone red and she was still slightly breathless. "Last night you bullied my sister, and this morning you were standing there spying while I practiced, and then you hid a sword inside your cane like some kind of sneak!"
"Hold on. Who's your sister? How did I bully anyone? And this is called a sword-cane — the sword is the whole point of it. That's not sneaky, that's just what it is."
Robin laughed. "Wang, her sister is Cecilia. This is Andrea. Apparently she heard the whole story from last night and decided to give you her opinion of it this morning. Children, you know how it is. My apologies."
Evan accepted this gracefully enough. "No harm done. You have excellent footwork, Andrea."
"Don't flatter me. Your technique is actually pretty good, you know, for somebody who's obviously making it up. What school do you study?"
"No school. I taught myself one thing — the thrust, from every direction. That's all I have."
Robin's eyebrows went up. "Just the one technique?"
"Just the one. Use it until there's nothing left to improve." Evan demonstrated — a sequence of thrusts, each from a different angle, the air splitting ahead of each one with a faint hiss. "I noticed your footwork because it's something I haven't thought about."
Andrea's expression shifted from suspicious to interested against her will. She launched into an explanation of footwork and blade integration that Evan listened to carefully, filing everything away.
From there she went further: the basic guard positions — the Ox, the Plow, the Crown, the Fool — and the common patterns of attack. Head cut. Middle and high thrust. Low strike. Close-range work. Binding. Half-swording. The short cut and the slice. This world's swordsmanship, she explained with the thoroughness of someone who had absorbed it completely, was built around the principle of simultaneous offense and defense, and around using the entire length of the weapon in a single action — so that in one movement a fighter might use the crossguard to receive a blow, the true edge to clear the opponent's blade, and the point to find a gap, while if the point were deflected the momentum carried forward into a pommel strike to the face.
Evan hadn't known any of this. He had known there was more to it, vaguely, without knowing what the more consisted of. He listened until she finished, and then he gave her a slight bow.
"You could teach me a great deal."