If she had to fight, she decided to target the woman first, then the winker.
She wouldn’t ride away. She would never leave someone so outnumbered.
“What’s in the bags?”
“All we have left in the world.” The plea in Mallick’s voice put Fallon’s back up. “And little more than nothing.”
“Then you can make do with nothing. Off the horse, Grandpa. You, too, sweetcheeks.”
“Please. She’s just a child.”
The second woman pulled a sidearm. “She gets off the horse or I shoot her off.”
“Don’t shoot the fresh meat.” The one who’d winked got off his bike, rubbed his crotch. “I got some work for her.”
They laughed, all, in a way that didn’t make Fallon’s skin sticky. It turned her mind, her blood, very, very cool.
She dismounted.
“Six of you,” she said with disdain. “Two of us.”
The leader drew a knife from his belt. “It’s about to be one of you.”
He lunged at Mallick.
It happened fast, before Fallon could react and she’d thought she was ready.
Mallick’s fist flashed out, hard as a hammer strike. He knocked the man back into the woman behind him so they both fell.
With his other hand he hurled a ball of wind that blew the second woman and her sidearm twenty feet back. Even as she landed with a sickening thud, Mallick drew a sword.
Two rushed him, and the third left standing ducked aside and charged at Fallon.
She pulled out her knife, and without thinking set it on fire.
“Fucking Uncanny bitch.” He snarled at her, drawing his gun. “Bullet beats knife, every time.”
“No. It doesn’t.” She slashed the blade through the air, and the gun in his hand exploded into flames.
When he screamed, dropped it, slapped at the flames over his hand, she did one of the first defensive moves her father had taught her. She kicked him in the balls.
When he went down, she spun, prepared to help Mallick. He stood with his bloodied sword.
Two lay dead on the ground. The other three were wounded, and the one who’d winked at her was curled up moaning, with a hand she doubted he’d ever have full use of again.
“Collect the weapons,” Mallick said briskly.
He bent to take the gun and the knife from the leader. Fallon, feeling a little sick now that it was done, fought to keep her hand steady as she took weapons from the dead.
“That one’s gun’s melted too much to be of use.”
Mallick glanced over where the man moaned, cradled his ruined hand. He said, “Hmph,” much as he had about her weather forecast.
She slung one of the rifles over her shoulder by the strap while Mallick took two. After they stowed the other weapons, they remounted.
“You didn’t tell me to go.”
“Would you have?”
“No.”
“Then why would I waste my breath?”
“You may not have taken them all.”
“May no longer matters. You have courage. You fought your man well.”
“We shouldn’t leave them like that. The ones still able might come after us, or hurt someone else.”
“We don’t kill the unarmed and the wounded.”
“No, but …” She held out her hand, set the tires on fire.
“Injured, unarmed, and on foot, they won’t come after us, and it’ll be harder for them to hurt anyone else.”
Mallick studied the bikes as they crashed to the ground. “Well done. Good tactics.”
“Good sense,” she corrected, and began to walk her horse down the road again. Her throat was tight and dry, but she pushed the words out. “They would have killed you. They’d have raped me, then killed me. Or taken me to wherever they were going, raped me again, then killed me. The horses they might’ve kept if they had use for them, or they’d have slaughtered them for the meat.”
“Yes. Unquestionably.”
“You killed two of them. Maybe three because the one woman’s badly hurt. They’ll probably leave her there.”
“It troubles you I took their lives?”
“No. Yes,” she corrected. “I guess it did, until … They would have killed us. Not to survive, but because they like it. If we’d just been two people on the road, you’d be dead and I’d be … We made the right choice.”
“They made the wrong choice. Consider this your first lesson.”
With a nod, she glanced toward him. “You didn’t have a sword before.”
“Didn’t I?”
“I think I’d have noticed.”
He kicked into a canter. “You have to look to see.”
He kept the pace brisk, following the road before veering off when another settlement came into view. At one point she saw another kind of settlement, one of only houses. Large houses stacked close together, many of them very much the same.
Some had boarded windows, another showed damage from a fire. Deer grazed on the knee-high grass and the wind whistled through the empty streets.
But she saw a shadow at one of the windows. Not all the houses stood empty.
“Why wouldn’t people till the ground, grow food?”
“Not all know how,” Mallick told her. “Some hide and scavenge. Fear locks them in.”
She thought of it as they rode on. More than a hundred houses by her count, and close together for good defense. Wasted, she decided, as the ground that could be planted was wasted.
But as she had on several points along the journey, she marked it in her mind like a signpost on a map.
Once again they moved into a wood with rough, rolling ground where rocks shoved through. She heard the bubble of a stream before she saw it and, with Mallick, followed its meandering flow.
It widened, and water fell frothy and quick over ledges of rock. The rocks climbed higher, the water fell faster so its rushing sound filled the woods.
She spotted a few faeries fluttering in the pale rainbows formed by the strike of the sun on the splashing water.
Beyond the waterfall where its rush softened to a quiet music, Mallick stopped in a wide clearing.
Moss grew heavy on downed trees, lichen on an outcropping of rock. On the edges, trees bowed in an arching canopy.
When Mallick dismounted, Fallon assumed he wanted to rest the horses, so did the same.
“We should be nearly there. We could water them in the stream, walk them awhile, and get where we’re going.”
“We have.”
“Here?” While she had no objection to living in the woods, she didn’t relish living without shelter for the next couple years. “We’re going to make a camp?”
Saying nothing, Mallick handed her his horse’s reins, stepped forward.
He lifted his hands, shoulder high, palms out. For a moment there was nothing but the quiet echo of the waterfall, the shiver of the wind through the trees. The sun angled down, its light slipping through the canopy spilling into the clearing, and shadows shifted with the breath of the wind.
Then she heard the hum of power, felt the first pulse of it on the air, felt it raise the hair on her arms, at the back of her neck. The horses felt it as well and shifted restlessly so she shortened her grip on the reins.
Mallick’s eyes deepened so his face seemed to pale as the wind rose up, blowing through his hair, and hers.
Light and shadows changed, shapes formed like a sketch blurred behind rippled glass.
Then his voice rang out, his arms snapped wide.
“Open now what I closed. Reveal here what I cloaked. For this is the place of my making. And The One is come.”
The blurred sketch sharpened, took on form and color and shape.
Now in the clearing stood a cottage with a thatched roof and walls the color of sand. Smaller than the farmhouse, larger than the cabin, it had windows facing west and a thick wooden door. Beside it a small stable with a pitched roof held double doors, and close by a small greenhouse shimmered in the stream of sun.
Like the cottage doors, protective symbols had been carved around the frame of the stables, the glass door of the greenhouse.
A statue of the goddess, like the one at the cabin, stood beside the cottage door in a pool of polished stones.