It was Finn Teodoros, laboring along at her side, who first saw the faces in the woods.
“Hist,” he said quietly. “Briony—Highness. Do not turn, but in a moment look past me on my left. Do you see anything strange?”
At first she could make nothing out of the complex, meaningless pattern of light on leaves—the graying of the day only made it harder to tell what was light and what was surface—but then she saw a glint of something a little brighter than what was around it. A moment later it resolved itself into a smear of orange fur and a bright black eye. Then it was gone.
“Sweet Zoria, what was it?” she whispered. “I saw… it looked like a fox. But it was the size of a man!”
“I do not know, but that was not the only one,” Finn said. His usual lightness of tone was gone, his voice tight with fear. He walked forward, carefully looking only straight ahead, and whispered in Hewney’s ear, then trotted a few more steps to talk to Pedder Makewell.
As she watched him, Briony saw another trace of movement in the dim, wavering light, this time on the far edge of the road, ahead of them and slightly to one side. Another strange, beastlike face appeared for a moment from behind a tree, then was gone, although for a moment she could have sworn it rose straight up into the air before it disappeared. Frightened, Briony stumbled and almost fell. Goblins? Fairies? Some outriders of the twilight army that had attacked her home?
Suddenly beast-men crashed out of the trees on either side, shrieking like demons.
“To me, to me!” Pedder Makewell bellowed. Briony saw him grab his sister and thrust her behind him, so that the wagon shielded her back. Makewell had a knife, but it was a poor thing, little more than a blade for cutting fruit and sawing over-tough mutton. Still, he held it up as though it was Caylor’s Sighing Sword, and for a moment Briony almost loved the man.
“Together!” Finn Teodoros called. He had the wagon door open and was pulling out what arms they had, many of them little more than props. The beast-men had paused just inside the belt of trees and now were slowly advancing.
“Throw them down!” shouted the first of the things in a loud, angry voice. “Throw down your weapons or we kill you where you stand.” It was with something like relief that Briony saw that he was no magical creature but only wore a half-mask. Several of the masked men had bows, the rest were well armed with spears and axes and even swords.
“Bandits,” said Nevin Hewney in disgust.
The leader walked toward him, grinning beneath his crude fox face. “Watch your tongue. We are honest men, but what are honest men who cannot work? What are honest men whose lands have been stole by the lords, who know no law but their own?”
“Is that our fault?” Hewney began, but the bandit chieftain cracked him hard across the face with the back of his hand, knocking the playwright to the ground. Hewney got up, cursing, blood running between his fingers where he held his nose. Dowan Birch held him back.
“Bone, Hobkin, Col—you watch them,” the leader said. “You others, take what they have. And chiefly search that wagon. Go to it, men!” At this his eyes, which had been flicking from one member of the company to another, lighted on Briony and widened. “Hold,” he said quietly, but his men were already busily and loudly at work and did not hear him. He walked toward her where she stood beside Finn Teodoros. “What have we here? Young and fair… and passing for a boy?” He leaned toward her, his breath rank. He was missing most of his teeth, which made him seem older than he truly was. The two pegs in his upper jaw protruded below the rim of the fox mask, and for a moment it was all too much for Briony. She drove her knife up at his belly, but he was a man who had been living on the edge of things for a long time: her thrust came as no surprise. He caught her wrist and twisted it hard. To her shame, the pain made her drop the knife immediately.
The Yisti knife, had the bandit known it, was probably worth more than the rest of the players’ possessions combined, but he had chanced onto prize he liked better and she had all his attention. “You are pretty enough in your way, girl,” he said, pulling Briony close. “Did you truly fool these yokels? Did they think you a boy? You will be happy to know that Lope the Red is not so easily gulled. You belong to a real man, now.”
“Let her be ...” Finn began angrily, but the bandit cuffed him and the playwright fell heavily to the ground and then struggled to rise as Lope the Red shoved at him with his foot.
Briony stared at the bandit chieftain and suddenly recognized something in him. He was a beast, a thief and a bully, but he was also the strongest and the smartest of these men: if the world continued in the same mad fashion as it had of late, many such men would be rising up from the shadows, and some of them would make kingdoms for themselves.
This is the truth, she thought. This is the ugly truth of my royal bloodline and every other. Those who can take power take it, then leave it to their children…
Finished amusing himself with fat Finn, Lope pulled Briony close again. Then, as the bandit chief reached out a dirty hand to feel for her breasts beneath her loose shirt, he suddenly cried out in pain and staggered back a few steps, the knife which he had twisted out of Briony’s hand standing quivering from his thigh.
“Bastard!” said bloody-faced Finn, hauling himself onto his knees. “I meant that for your stones!”
The rest of the bandits had turned at their chief’s shout, and stood staring as he took a staggering step toward the playwright. “Stones? I’ll have your stones off, if you even have any, you eunuch jelly.” He waved his hand and two more of the bandits hurried forward, overcoming the struggling Finn in a matter of moments and throwing him to the ground, then pinning him there with the weight of their bodies. Lope the Red pulled the knife from his leg with a contemptuous shake of his head.
“In the meaty part. Ha! You are no fighting man, it’s clear.” He leaned forward. “I will show you how to use a knife on a man ...”
“No!” shrieked Briony. “Don’t hurt him! You can do whatever you want with me!”
The bandit laughed. “I will do whatever I want with you, trull. But first I will carve this one like a joint of beef ...”
The air hummed and Lope the Red stopped for a moment, then slowly straightened up. He lifted his hand to his face and tried to take off his mask but found he could not: an arrow, feathers still trembling, had pierced his brow just above the eye and nailed it to his skull.
“I…” he said, then toppled backward like a felled tree.
“Take them!” someone shouted. A dozen armed men crashed onto the road from out of the trees. Arrows were buzzing in every direction, like furious wasps. One of the men who had pinned Finn to the ground leaped up in front of Briony only to fall back against her an instant later with three feathered shafts quivering in his chest and guts.
More arrows snapped past her. Men screamed like frightened children. One of the bandits clutched a tree as if it were his mother; when he fell away he had left it painted broadly with his blood.
Briony threw herself down on the ground and covered her head with her arms.
The Syannese soldiers dragged the last of the bandits’ bodies onto the pile. “All here, Captain,” one of the men-at-arms said. “Best we can tell.”