He rode through Earl Eward's territory in grey traveling clothes with his hood up. He kept to the roads but didn't stop in any settlement large enough to have a garrison. The countryside was what he'd expected from the histories: low thatched structures, faces that had learned not to show expression in front of strangers. He had enough of Ashton's memories to know this was normal for the region, and enough of his own prior-life's background to find the normalcy uncomfortable.
He wasn't in a position to change it. He kept riding.
He was passing a cluster of houses set back from the road when the sound started — not distant, not vague. Immediately in front of him: hoofbeats, men's voices with the particular quality of entitlement that alcohol made louder, and a girl's voice, sharp with fear and anger.
Five horses came out of the settlement at speed. The lead rider had a girl draped across his saddle — thirteen or fourteen, not yet grown, fighting with everything she had in a situation that had stopped responding to fighting.
"She'll settle down once she knows what's good for her," one of the men said.
Evan moved to the center of the road. He assumed they would stop.
They accelerated.
He had not, in two months in this world, fully internalized how much a commoner's life was worth to the people who felt themselves above them. He understood it intellectually — Ashton's memories had it clearly — but his body still carried eighteen years of a different expectation. The horse came at him and he registered, one half-second before contact, that it wasn't going to slow down.
He stepped, drew, and cut.
The lead rider was dead before his horse finished rearing. Evan was already clear of the hooves, the blade low, one drop of blood falling from the tip to the road.
The remaining four men processed what had happened at varying speeds. Two of them drew swords. Two of them looked at each other with the expression of people whose social role required them to do something they urgently didn't want to do.
"Evan's not worth doing twice," one of them started, and got no further.
He was through them in the time it took to say the sentence. Two throats. Two more deaths. The last man — the one who had been carrying the girl, and had in the confusion of her fall not yet gotten clear — died reaching for his sword.
The girl sat in the road. She looked at Evan and then at the four bodies and then back at Evan. She didn't scream. She looked like someone in the first moment after a very large sound.
Evan cast a simple Calm — a basic mental-steadiness application from the edge of death-magic's emotional range, which worked by quieting rather than suppressing. She blinked several times. Color returned to her face.
"My name is Evan. What's yours?"
She stood up carefully, arranged herself, and gave him a curtsy that was completely out of place in the road next to four cooling bodies, and was also executed with a precision that had nothing to do with the torn, patched clothing she wore.
"Tena. These men killed my father." A pause. "His body is still inside."
"I'll come with you."
Her home was a single low room divided by a cloth partition, almost no furniture, a ceramic bowl that she used to offer him water. He helped her find two neighbors willing to take money for a proper burial, gave them each a gold coin, and stood back while she said goodbye to her father with the economical grief of someone who'd decided to finish the crying before it started.
She had nothing to bring. The clothes on her back, one patched, another set her mother had left her. That was all.
She didn't cry when they left the village. She sat her horse — one of the dead men's — with a natural easiness that Evan noticed from the first step. Not the easiness of someone who'd ridden often. The easiness of someone whose body understood horses in a way that transcended familiarity.
By the end of the first day, the horse and she were moving together in a way that took most knights three years of deliberate training to approximate.
Evan watched this happen without commenting on it. He had enough experience with this world now to know what he was looking at. If she'd been born to a different family — or to a different gender's expectations, by certain schools of knighthood — someone would have identified this and built on it from childhood. He filed it and continued west.