The Desert Spear

keep,” Arlen said.
    “Damn your ripping keep!” she shrieked. “Leave me alone, you son of the Core!”
    Arlen looked at her a long moment. “All right.”
    Renna locked her jaw tight, refusing to cry as he walked away. She got to her feet, keeping her back straight despite the pain as she retrieved her knife from the charred remains of the demon. Despite the conflagration, the weapon was undamaged, and still tingled with residual magic as she wiped it off and returned it to its sheath on her hip.
    She stood a long time after Arlen left, two sides warring within her. One wanted to scream and charge into the night, looking for demons to vent her rage upon. The other part wondered if Arlen was right, and threatened to drop her weeping to the ground at any moment.
    She closed her eyes, embracing both the pain and the rage and stepping away from them. It was amazing how quickly she calmed.
    Arlen was simply being overprotective. After all she had done, he still didn’t trust her.
    In a place beyond feeling, she set her feet and began the first
sharukin,
flowing from one move to the next, trying to force the forms into her muscles so deeply that they would come without her even thinking of them. As she did, she recalled every moment of the night’s battles, searching for ways she could improve.
    He might be the almighty Painted Man to others, but Renna knew he was just Arlen Bales of Tibbet’s Brook, and she’d be corespawned if there was anything he could do that she couldn’t.

    That went well,
the Painted Man thought sarcastically as he walked away. He didn’t go far, sitting and putting his back to a tree, closing his eyes. His ears could hear the scraping of caterpillars on leaves. If Renna needed him, he would hear and come.
    He cursed the childhood naïveté that had kept him from seeing Harl for what he was. When Ilain had offered herself to his father, he had thought her wicked beyond words, but she was just doing what she needed to survive, as he himself had done out on the Krasian Desert.
    And Renna…if he’d gone back with his father instead of running off when his mother died, she would have come back to the farm with them, safe from her father and spared a death sentence. Their own children would be promising age by now.
    But he had turned his back on Renna; another path to happiness abandoned, and her life had become a horror as a result.
    He was wrong to have brought her with him. Selfish. He was thinking only of himself to damn her to this life just to keep himself sane. Renna was choosing his path because she felt she had nothing left to lose, but it wasn’t too late for her. She could never go back to the Brook, but if he could get her to Deliverer’s Hollow, she could see that there were still good folk in the world, folk willing to fight without giving up the very things that made them human.
    But the Hollow, even if they took the straightest route possible, was still more than a week’s travel from their keep. He needed to return Renna to civilization immediately, before her new wildness became the only thing she knew.
    Riverbridge was less than two days away. From there they could go on to Cricket Run, Angiers, and Farmer’s Stump before reaching the Hollow. Every chance that presented itself, he would force her to interact with people and remain alert through the sun instead of sleeping the mornings away and tracking demon patterns in the afternoon as both of them had taken to doing.
    He hated the idea of spending so much time amid people himself, but there was nothing for it. Renna was more important. If people saw his wards and began to talk, so be it.

    Euchor had kept his word in letting refugees cross the Dividing, but with all of Rizon’s harvest lost and summer solstice come and gone, it was hard times for all. Riverbridge was swollen on both sides of the river by a growing tent city of refugees outside the walls of the town proper, poorly warded and rife with filth and poverty. Renna crinkled her nose in disgust as they rode through, and he knew the scene was doing nothing to dissuade her rejection of civilization.
    The number of guards at the gate had increased as well, and they looked disparagingly at the Painted Man and Renna as they approached. It wasn’t surprising. Covered head-to-toe even in the hot sun, the Painted Man’s appearance never failed to draw attention, and Renna, clad in scandalously revealing rags and covered in fading blackstem stains, did little