Two days out from the village, Tena had let the recent grief settle into the background where it would likely live for a long time, and her actual personality had started to emerge.
She was curious. She was observant. She had the particular brand of self-possession that came from a childhood with no siblings, a dead mother, and a father who must have talked to her as though she were a person rather than a lesser category of being. She positioned herself as Evan's servant — the world gave her no other framework — and he didn't correct it, because correcting it would require explaining social structures he didn't fully inhabit himself, and that conversation could wait.
She called him "master." He answered to it.
They stopped in a town large enough to have a proper smithy. Evan went in, declined the first items he was shown, and asked for the good ones. The smith — a careful man, old enough to have made genuine decisions about what to keep and what to sell — brought out a saber from the back room. A rose engraved on the grip, slightly worn. The balance was good.
"My father made it for a knight," the smith said. "Knight died before he could collect."
Evan tested the edge — the smith split a cloth on it without effort — and paid the asking price without bargaining. Ten gold coins.
Tena looked at the price and opened her mouth.
"The quality of your weapon affects whether you live," Evan said, before she could speak. "Don't."
She closed her mouth.
The Sterling Hand's first agent had been watching them since the town they'd left two mornings ago. He was competent — genuinely competent, not the surface confidence of the men who'd died on the road. He kept downwind, varied his distance, and never let himself get into Evan's direct sightline for more than a moment.
He also made the mistake of concluding that Evan was a swordsman who happened to know some magic, rather than a mage who had learned to use a sword.
That evening, Evan found a clear stretch of ground and taught Tena the four stances Angie had taught him — the Ox, the Plow, the Crown, the Fool — and the transitions between them, and the primary attack lines from each position. She ran through them twenty times while he corrected her form. By the end she was running through them without being told to stop, and by the time the fire had burned down she was running through them in her sleep, the way someone does when they've found something the body was waiting for.
Evan sat with his back to the fire and let his awareness spread outward.
The agent had found a position. He was good — he'd used the wind correctly, he was motionless, his approach had been patient. He'd also spent the afternoon watching Evan teach sword forms and confirmed his read: pure swordsman, likely ex-soldier, magic a secondary skill, not integrated into his close-range reflexes.
He came in at the hour before dawn, when humans slept deepest.
What he came in on was an illusion.
Evan had not been sitting there for the last two hours. He'd been fifteen feet to the left, motionless in the shadow of a grass clump, with the Wind-Binding Spell charged in his bracers and the Mirror Image holding his seated position by the fire. When the blade came down on what the agent had identified as the back of Evan's neck, the image dispersed, the Wind-Binding caught him before he could recover, and Evan stepped into range.
Four strikes. Wrists and ankles. Non-lethal by design.
The man hit the ground and stayed there.
"Who sent you and who do you work for?" Evan stood over him and waited. He had genuinely wanted to ask — he suspected Baron Eaton, both because of the history and because the sketch portrait in the dead man's coat showed both Evan and Tena, which suggested whoever hired the organization knew about her.
The man looked up at him with something between professional respect and calculation. He said: "Come closer. I'll tell you."
The look in his eyes decided it.
Evan stayed at his current distance and said nothing. The man's jaw worked briefly. A faint scent reached Evan's nose — bitter almonds — and then the body was no longer a body.
He looked at the man's left forearm. A mark, deliberately obscured under a cosmetic compound that had partially worn off: the Sterling Hand's identifier.
So it was them. Professional organization, reliable and methodical. One failed contract typically generated a follow-up at higher pay. He covered the body, used an earth-movement spell to inter it without ceremony, and went back to the fire.
Tena was awake. She'd been awake since the sound of the struggle, sitting with the saber across her knees, not moving. When Evan settled back on the other side of the fire, she said: "Is it going to keep happening?"
"Probably for a while."
She nodded and looked at the blade in her hands. Then she stood up, moved to the clear ground, and went back to her forms.