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Then Lashak snapped off the arrowhead, pulled the rest of the arrow out of his hand, and tossed it aside without even the slightest hint of pain.

All seven feet of him faced his opponent fully; he drew his greataxe, which was several times the size of the other man’s swords put together, and Guinevere realized with a sickening clench in the pit of her stomach that she wasn’t saved at all.

“Someone my own size?” Lashak echoed with a sneer. “Would that be you, then, half-breed?”

The stranger rolled his eyes. “That kind of talk may have been acceptable in whatever provincial backwater you crawled out from, but we’re a little more sophisticated here in the Dwendalian Empire.”

Guinevere blinked at him. How was he so supremely unrattled? He isn’t even wearing armor.

Letting out a battle cry that shattered the air, Lashak charged. And, without flinching, the stranger met him halfway.

Guinevere had grown up in a nice stone house in the Shimmer Ward district of Rexxentrum.

Her parents were untitled, but they’d spared no expense to raise their only child like a proper lady, commissioning the finest gowns and hiring the best tutors—even long after the money had started running out.

Deeply conscious of their sacrifices and desperate to shield herself from their criticisms, Guinevere had applied herself to her lessons with vigor, had never gone anywhere she wasn’t supposed to, had made friends only with those of her station or higher, and had never intentionally broken a single rule.

The only quirk she permitted herself was clinging to the totem crafted for her by the old hermit of Cyrengreen, and even then Guinevere had carefully replaced the rustic twine with the silver chain five years ago, to make it more fashionable.

Yes, she had lived an orderly, sheltered existence. And now she was down on her knees in the dirt, in her nightgown and her satin slippers, surrounded by dead bodies and a fire she’d caused, witnessing raw violence for the first time in her life.

Initially, she could make neither heads nor tails of the fight.

The two foes each did their utmost to kill the other in a frightening blur of limbs and metal, etched in the pulsing scarlet of the ever-growing flames.

But the longer she watched, the more the cycle of slashing and dodging and parrying made sense—like some particularly fiendish, complicated waltz—and it dawned on Guinevere that, while Lashak had the advantage in terms of size and strength, the stranger was faster and more agile.

And he was smarter, too. After crossing his swords over his head to block a ringing blow from Lashak’s greataxe, he darted out of reach, then made as though to leap to the right.

Lashak swung at where he assumed the stranger would land, but it turned out the latter had merely feinted—for he nimbly corrected his course and went left, then behind his opponent.

The curved edges of his swords carved a path from Lashak’s shoulder blade to his hip.

The bandit leader collapsed, howling. The stranger loomed over him, a sinister moonlit silhouette with bloodied swords and an impassive expression. His eyes snapped to Guinevere, and they were pools of liquid amber in the glow of the fire…

The fire!

She was on her feet before she knew it, the grievously wounded Lashak and the coolly triumphant stranger forgotten.

The wagon’s canvas bonnet was already ablaze, but she dove inside without a second thought.

Gagging on thick clouds of smoke, the agonizing heat a miasma against her skin, she grabbed the satchel that contained the most valuable wares with one hand and the handle of the pearwood trunk with the other, and she shuffled backward out of the burning vehicle on her knees and elbows, slowed down by her dear burdens.

She shrieked as a pair of large hands clamped around her ankles in a viselike grip and yanked her the rest of the way out of the wagon.

No sooner had the stranger deposited her onto solid ground than he told her to run. She complied expediently enough, but she’d barely taken two lumbering steps before he tried to tug the satchel and the trunk out of her hands.

She held on tighter.

“Leave these,” he instructed tersely.

Too rattled to speak, Guinevere settled for simply shaking her head.

He looked at her like she had two heads.

A fiery branch came crashing down, feeding the conflagration and dissolving into it.

The flames rose higher. There was no more time to argue.

The stranger wrenched the trunk from Guinevere’s grasp and tucked it under his left arm, then he scooped her up, satchel and all, and effortlessly slung her over his right shoulder.

It all happened so fast. She was so shocked that she could do nothing more than cling to the satchel like her life depended on it—could do nothing more than stare at Lashak’s prone, twitching form as the stranger set a breakneck pace through the woods, leaving the campsite behind to be swallowed up by smoky veils of red and gold.