Free Fortune and Fate (Twelve Houses) by Sharon Shinn

old, terribly thin and ragged looking, with tousled red hair and enormous dark eyes. His filthy clothes appeared to have been hacked off with a knife to suit his frame, and even in this cool weather, he was barefoot. Not even Karryn had looked so desolate or desperate.
     
     
    Wen slid off her horse and approached him cautiously, not wanting to alarm him. “Hello there,” she said in the voice she might have used to one of her younger sisters. “Are you lost? What are you doing out here all alone?”
     
     
    He tried and failed to swallow a sob. “My sister and I were on our way to Forten City, but she got hurt,” he said in a pitiful voice. “I think her leg is broken. I tried to make a camp—” He waved behind him to some vague place off the road. “But I couldn’t start a fire and there’s no water and I think she’s passed out. I thought I could get somebody to help me, but no one will stop—” His tears welled up again, though he tried manfully to suppress them. He wiped a dirty sleeve across his eyes and whispered, “Please, could you help us? Do you know how to set a bone?”
     
     
    Wen glanced around once more at the empty countryside. If ever a place was a perfect setting for a trap, this was it, and many an unwary traveler had been seduced to his doom by the appeal of a plausible waif. But the boy looked so small and frail, and there was the slim possibility he was telling the truth. “Indeed, I can set a bone,” Wen said, “and I can make a fire, too. Show me where she is and I’ll have everything sorted out in no time.”
     
     
    A smile broke through his grimy, tear-streaked face. “You will ? Oh, this way, this way!” He scampered off the left edge of the road, through a maze of bushes, toward what looked like a stand of squat trees. Wen followed warily, one hand on her sword.
     
     
    The boy’s sister was lying on the hard ground without even a blanket to protect her from the dirt. She looked like she might be thirteen or fourteen. Her hair, a darker auburn than the boy’s, spread out in a tangle all around her face, which was pinched and pale. She lay on her side, one leg curled up under her, one stretched out stiffly, as if it hurt. Wen didn’t immediately see any sign of blood, which made the boy’s story even more questionable.
     
     
    She knelt anyway and put a hand to the girl’s forehead to check for fever. At that instant, the girl’s eyes flicked open, though she didn’t move a muscle of her body. She looked straight at Wen and whispered a single word. “Trick.”
     
     
    Wen leapt to her feet, pulling blades with both hands, and whirled around seconds before she caught the crunch of feet in the undergrowth. Three bodies came barreling around the scant cover of the short trees. All men, all armed, only one of them big enough to cause her problems. Wen jumped high, kicked the closest one hard in the groin, and used the momentum of that maneuver to launch herself toward his nearest companion. The first man went down grunting, but he’d be on his feet again soon enough. She had to work fast. Midair, she raked her knife across the second man’s throat, deep enough to kill him outright. Landing on her feet, she raised her sword to counter the third man’s assault.
     
     
    He was the biggest of the three, and he looked slow and stupid. Certainly he hadn’t been prepared for his victim to turn into his attacker. “Back away,” she snarled. “I’d just as soon not cut you down.”
     
     
    But her voice—or the realization she was a woman—was enough to spark his rage, and he bellowed and lumbered forward, swinging his own sword in a ham-handed arc. It was quickly evident that brute force, not skill, had shaped his method of fighting. All Wen had to do was keep out of his way long enough to stay alive, then dart past his flailing weapon to slice him halfway up his torso. Not a deathblow. Gods, if she could keep from killing anyone else! But enough to slow him