Bess and Rein had made the same calculation independently: leaving Felix here meant going back empty-handed, which ended careers and earned punishments. Staying, however it turned out, at least meant they'd been loyal.
Evan understood the moment he heard them. Interesting people, in their way.
"Fine, come along," Reuben said, without particular feeling, and turned the Nightmare back into the trees.
They walked half the night, doubling back on themselves repeatedly. Felix and his two companions lost their bearings completely within the first hour and couldn't have retraced their steps for any sum of money. Evan, watching the route through his thermal sight and tracking by scent, understood what Reuben was doing: the path wasn't random wandering. It threaded carefully between the territories of several high-ranked magical beasts, shaving distance by cutting through the margins of their ranges. Someone in this group knew the Lia Fellwood.
The camp, when they reached it, was smaller than Evan had expected and better arranged than he'd imagined. It sat in a natural gap between several active beast territories, a balance point in the local ecology — still surrounded by a proper stockade with a ditch outside it, and a double watch system, overt and concealed, that he spotted within minutes of arriving. Reuben had built a real operation out here.
Felix and his companions were treated indistinguishably from Reuben's own people, except that they had no weapons. Evan understood the logic: without weapons, in the Lia Fellwood, escape was not an option. No restraints needed.
The next morning, Evan was up before anyone — he didn't sleep, though he'd learned to perform the motions — and had already turned over every detail of the previous day before he opened the tent flap. The questions he'd been carrying were getting louder: why had Reuben come three hundred miles from the Yingji Woods? Kidnapping Felix couldn't be the main purpose. And Reuben had been very casual about mentioning the Fangs Mercenary Company at breakfast — watching Felix the whole time.
Felix came out looking like he hadn't slept. He pulled Evan aside when the guards' attention was elsewhere.
"Mr. Evan. Could I ask a favor?"
"Go ahead."
"If something happens to me — would you get these two out?" He glanced at Bess and Rein without looking at them directly.
Both of them cut him off before he finished: "We're not going anywhere without you."
"I know. I only mean if the worst happens." His expression, for a moment, showed something that wasn't quite what he was saying. A small calculation behind the concern.
Evan felt a brief warmth at it, and then set the warmth aside.
He was carrying two people's worth of judgment, and one of them had spent decades watching how nobles operated. The speech was designed — not cynically, not coldly, but designed nonetheless. Felix had seen Evan's magic last night. He'd been working out how to make himself worth helping. The concern for Bess and Rein was real enough; the performance of it for Evan's benefit was also real.
He'd grown up reading a principle from somewhere he couldn't quite place: assume the worst about people's motives, treat them with the best of your manners regardless. As a hidden Lich in someone else's camp, he didn't have a lot of other options.
"You'll be fine," he said. "Reuben wants money, not bodies. Give him the money."
"Thirty thousand gold coins. The Aymon family can produce that — but they might not."
"You're the heir?"
"I'm the eldest son. But there are younger siblings behind me, with people behind them. If I died here, some of them might not be entirely sorry."
The expression that crossed Felix's face for a moment was older than seventeen. He caught it and smoothed it away, but not before Evan had seen it.
Reuben was standing very quietly at the edge of a tent nearby, Cynthia beside him, both of them having emerged from the same tent in a way that explained their proximity. They hadn't been seen. When Felix said the part about his siblings, Reuben's mouth moved briefly — not quite a smile.
Evan noted it and said nothing.
Before breakfast was ready, he walked the camp and heard a crowd cheering somewhere ahead. He stopped at the edge of the cleared area.
A half-elf girl was practicing with a rapier — not Cynthia, much younger, twelve or thirteen at the most. She was fast. Her footwork was a complete system in itself, each movement connecting to the next, and her forms were not decorative: every line of every strike would have killed someone, if there had been someone in front of her. She was, purely as a swordsperson, well ahead of Evan.
He watched for several minutes before she noticed him watching.
She noticed him, took two steps, and thrust at his face.
Evan's hand moved without asking his permission. The rapier came out of the sword-cane and deflected, fast — something that hadn't quite happened before, a quality in the speed that he registered even as it was happening. He pulled the blade back immediately, which was the only reason she wasn't hurt. The near-miss left him off-balance and her wide-eyed.
Then an arrow came at him from the treeline.
He didn't have time to think about it. His body turned, the blade came around in a sweeping arc, and the arrow hit the flat of the steel and fell. He stepped back, the sword low and pointing at the ground, his other hand still holding the cane, and looked at Cynthia — who was holding a bow but had already lowered it.
The crowd erupted. Evan looked around. Reuben's people, several of them, plus Felix's three — all of them with the expression of people who had just seen something worth seeing.
He looked back at the girl. "Why did you attack me?"
Some of his irritation made it into his voice. She put her hands on her hips. "You were rude to my sister last night, and then you stood there watching me practice like some kind of spy, and you hid a sword in your walking stick which is sneaky and horrible!"
"I wasn't rude to your sister. And this is a sword-cane — swords are for fighting, there's nothing sneaky about it. Who is your sister?"
Reuben laughed. "Mr. Evan, this is Angie. Her sister is Cynthia. She heard about last night and decided this morning was the right time to express her opinion. Children, you know."
Evan looked at Angie. "Your swordsmanship is excellent."
"Hmph. You're just saying that." A pause. Her curiosity won. "Your sword was actually pretty good just now too. What school do you study?"
"I don't study any school. I worked out one move and repeated it until it worked — a thrust, from every angle. That's all I have."
Reuben frowned. "That's your whole method?"
"That's my whole method. One technique, mastered completely — better than ten techniques learned halfway."
Angie squinted at him. "Really?"
"Watch." He demonstrated: thrust after thrust, from standing, from stepping, from turning, each one a different angle and a different weight, all of them the same motion underneath. The sound of the blade cutting air filled the clearing.
"Your footwork is completely wrong," Angie said immediately.
"I know. I was watching yours."
She told him everything she knew. Her footwork system had four stances — the Ox, the Plow, the Crown, and the Fool — and she explained how each one created different angles of attack and defense, how the transitions between them were as important as the stances themselves, how the whole body participated in each strike through combinations of thrust, cut from the strong, cut from the weak, half-swording, and the use of the crossguard for close-quarters binding. The sword, properly used, was never in only one position: a skilled practitioner in a single motion could use the guard to receive an opponent's blade, the edge to control it, and the point to find an opening, all in the time it took to breathe.
Evan listened carefully and memorized everything.
He gave her a small bow when she finished. "You could be my teacher."