Ylda went limp as Nitka Porn's blow landed and then the outlaw rode away, waving a derisive fist at Hardan across the bulwark of mounted men and attacking sarifs on foot.
He was battling for his life a second later. A spear found his body, and then another. Arrows hailed upward at him, piercing his padded limbs and drawing blood. In a moment he would be over-powered. Yet he fought on, trying to break through the press of rebel sarifs to pursue Ylda's captor.
"Hardan," a terrible voice roared above the shouts of his attackers, "escape.... Outnumbered!"
A spark of sanity remained in his weary brain. And the words of Malth Jed fanned it into life. His swords hissed, carving out a momentary gap, and he sent his maar plunging back the way they had come. He saw Malth Jed, sagging in his saddle, racing before him, and even as he watched a feathered shaft jutted abruptly from between his shoulderblades.
The stocky sarif slumped forward, clinging in his death agony to the saddle, and so they rode away into the growing daylight of the Drylands—a wounded cursing Wetlander and a jouncing bundle of dead sinews and bone that had once been a man....
Two hands of days had passed before Hardan dared leave the sheltered cave beside the Gron River not far from the ashes of the abandoned wagons. The two maars had pastured in a grassy hidden ravine and there too had he buried the stocky body of Malth Jed.
Then he had taken up the trail of the wagons again, and, despite the soreness of his half-healed wounds, come up with them in a matter of three days riding. He found them camped at the Isr River junction.
So now he lay on his belly in the early twilight, peering down into the rough circle of wagons, his eyes searching for the white-robed form of the girl he loved.
At last he saw her with one of the priests and a priestess sitting beside a small cooking fire apart from the others. But she no longer wore the garb of a novice. Instead she wore the green cloak of a Consar over her bulky vurth-stuffed coverings. A moment later he saw that her legs were linked by a short length of chain, riveted to either ankle by a cuff of metal. And across the fire squatted an armed man, a guard.