Free Sartor by Sherwood Smith

to leave the road,” Atan said.
“Because it seems to be bending to the south.”
    Fear was a better fuel than the dry remnants of their bread.
Ignoring hunger, and then growing thirst, the girls sped through the gently
undulating landscape to the west. Late in the day, a black line began to emerge
through the smeary gray haze, resolving into sharp definition just as the light
faded. From beyond the tangled brambles and dusty hedgerows and occasional
copses of autumn-scraggly trees emerged the sky-sweeping green of tall conifers
and pine, stippled here and there by the flash of scarlet and gold of just-turned
leaves. The brambles gradually gave way to withered blackberry shrubs and
sharp-leaved hazel.
    The air smelled different. It smelled green , Lilah
thought. To Atan it smelled like life, and to Merewen it was home.
    o0o
    Kessler recovered his vision with the dawn, and though the
headache still lingered, he returned to where he’d left the girls.
    There was no sign on the aged, hard ground of their having
left the road, which continued to bend southward around Shendoral. He wasted
the morning following the road until he came to a shallow valley at the bottom
of which the gradual accumulation of dust revealed that no living thing had
come this way for uncounted years.
    He wasted the rest of the afternoon riding back again to
that last campsite, and then searching in widening circles until he discovered
three sets of prints along the bottom of a dried stream-bed. The prints
vanished in the tall, scrubby grass, but their northwestward direction was
enough to give him a vector.
    He knew their destination. He also knew Shendoral’s
reputation. Were it true, and were the girls to reach the boundary of the
purported magic, he would be forced to ignore the second part of Zydes’s
orders, a matter that left him indifferent: Shendoral’s magic was said to
visit any violence onto the perpetrator. Kessler did not want to test whether
that was truth or myth, so he would ignore the order to kill the maidservants. But
it might make grabbing his target a little more difficult.
    He spotted the girls silhouetted on a brief rise just as the
sun was setting.
    Atan heard the approach of his horse’s hooves on the
otherwise silent air, and croaked, “Run!”
    Despite dry mouths, aching legs, and gnawing bellies, the
girls ran.
    Kessler urged his drooping horse into a steady trot, for it
would go no faster. Trees blocked the straight chase; the animal wove its way
westward through the increasing growth.
    Kessler kept watching for signs of magical boundaries, but
there were none. As he neared the girls, he scrutinized them, trying to determine
which was his target. The blinding magic had not permitted him to see which one
was the assailant. All he knew was that the magic had come from some object in
or on one’s hand.
    It was time for a fast experiment. He pulled one of his
throwing knives from a boot top, and, choosing the tallest of the three girls,
he threw. The idea was to wing her, and thus stop all three so he could find
the one wearing or carrying a magic artifact; untrained civs usually panicked
at the first sight of a weapon or wound and stood around wailing and fussing.
    The three girls veered just as his knife left his hand,
disappearing down a sudden incline.
    Then his horse stumbled over an unseen root and almost fell.
He reached, touched the sweaty neck, and decided to retrieve his knife and
abandon the chase for now. He would rest the animal, and track the girls in
daylight.
    Lilah had been the one to see the fading light glint on the
blade in the man’s hand as he cocked his wrist for the throw.
    All three dived flat into a thick growth of ferns a
heartbeat before the knife thunked in a great tree trunk where they had been. Wriggling
through the ferns, they emerged from the other side and ran until lightning
jabbed their sides and their throats burned.
    They ran until they realized the galloping they heard was
their own