Free Drawn Blades by Kelly McCullough

faded into several smaller and much quieter groups. After a few minutes of everyone politely ignoring us, one ancient woman with a pile of gray hair pinned up on top of her head half walked, half swam over to us and bobbed her head in the bathhouse equivalent of a bow. I nodded back.
    “Soldiers?” she asked in politely curious voice.
    I shook my head. “No. Just simple travelers.”
    She laughed. “Pull the other one, young man. Simple travelers do not have such scars.” She pointed to the sharp white line that ran across my chest at collarbone height where the Kitsune had very nearly managed to kill me, and then the scar that nearly took Faran’s left eye.
    “True enough,” I said in the same moment that Triss sent,
She’s got you there.
“Though, we’re still not soldiers. . . .” I trailed off, letting silence ask the question for me.
    “Call me Auntie Hua. My family owns this inn.” She cocked her head to the side. “I won’t ask, so don’t bother making up false names. Warriors, but not soldiers, and not bandits, not with the clothes you wore in. Foreign. Hmm . . . Oyani for real, perhaps, or mages. That or couriers or some other type of royal agent. Safe enough. I hope your stay with us is one you remember fondly.”
    She bobbed her head again, then turned and glided back to the place where she’d been talking with a few other old woman. The atmosphere grew much more friendly after that, and the invisible wall that seemed to travel with us got a bit smaller.
    Dinner was fried pork with mushrooms and broccoli—one of the last of the winter vegetables—on a bed of thick brown noodles. There was also a carp soup, and sweet rice balls.
    The Five Dancing Turtles was typical of the bigger inns along the western road. From here on out we could rely on cash to feed and house us and other hands to deal with grooming the horses and getting them saddled in the morning. Which is exactly what we did, with one day blurring into another all the way to the mountains.
    There, we turned south onto the much less traveled Great Mountain Way—north-south trade mostly traveled by ship along the coast. Add in the history of raids back and forth across the border with Kodamia and the villages became smaller and more scarce. With them went most of the inns and taverns. Though we would be able to put up at farms some nights, we provisioned up before leaving the western road.
    Once again I was glad Faran had talked me into horses. It meant we would eat better. I’d walked thousands of miles on tight rations in service of my goddess back in the days when she had sent me all over the eleven kingdoms bringing death’s justice to those the law couldn’t touch. They were some of the best years of my life, but there were parts I didn’t miss at all. Bad food and cold nights on hard ground without enough blankets were high on that list.
    The landscape changed now, with large patches of dense woodlands starting to appear on both sides of the road. Here, closer to the mountains, the weather was consistently cooler, and that was reflected in the trees, which looked more like those in the forests of my homeland than the remaining patches of coastal jungle around Tien.
    Three days after we turned south, we were laying our bedrolls out under the stars again. We camped near a small brook where Ssithra and Triss amused themselves by fishing up some fresh stirby for our dinner. I set our fire against a rocky ridge that hid the light from the road, and cooked the fish with a bit of pepper sauce and noodles, while Faran added in some berries she’d picked for dessert.
    We’d had a long hot day on the road, and not long after sunset both Faran and I quickly fell asleep. Triss and Ssithra had mostly slept the day away to avoid the sun. Now, with night rolling in and darkness bringing them into their greatest strength, they took over watch duty. Very little could get past a single Shade in its element, much less two.
    Which is why I