then backward to the ground.
Talen scrabbled to his knees, but Sabin kicked his side and knocked the breath right out of him.
He couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. By the time his body finally remembered it had lungs, the rest of the men were rushing up the hill.
Sabin kicked at Talen’s face, but Talen curled up and the blow glanced off the back of his head.
Someone struck him with a staff. Another kick caught him in the hip.
Talen tried to get up and lunge out of the circle, but before he could get his legs, one of the tanner’s boys landed a blow to Talen’s head that dazed him and knocked away all sense of balance. He turned, falling, and saw a sea of men.
Someone kicked him in the back and the pain made him gasp. Someone else went for his neck.
Talen brought his arms up to shield his face.
“Where’s that rope?” one of them shouted.
Talen tried to roll over.
“Out of the way!” someone shouted.
“Now you’ll get it, half-breed,” a man said.
The blows lessened and then stopped. Talen glanced up.
Sabin stood above him, lifting what must have been a forty-pound fieldstone the color of fresh liver.
He raised it high, preparing to crack Talen’s head like a nut.
BOUNTY
T
alen rolled away, trying to escape Sabin’s stone.
“Hold!” someone shouted.
A horse snorted.
Talen tried to dart through the legs of the men surrounding him and was flung back to the ground. He froze, cringed, waiting for the crushing stone. But it did not fall.
“Twenty stripes, Sabin,” a man said. “I swear it!”
Talen glanced up. The men were not looking at him. They were looking at the bailiff of Stag Home who sat upon his dappled gray horse, glaring at Sabin. It was he who had been the rider bearing down on Talen from the other direction.
Sabin hesitated, and then, almost in defiance, he dropped the stone perilously close to Talen’s head.
“That,” said the bailiff, pointing at Sabin, “has just made you my riding horse.”
The bailiff was not a large man. But he was strong and fearless in battle. His face was shaven close, which revealed three scars where a bear had tried to take off his jaw. But it was his eyes, as pale as the horse upon which he rode, that fixed Talen’s gaze. Those eyes had scared Talen as a boy. He had thought the man was full of evil. His father had convinced Talen otherwise, but, faced with those eyes, Talen could never maintain his certainty.
The bailiff directed that hard gaze at the other men. “What is this here? Why are the fields empty?”
“There are Koramite Sleth about,” someone said.
Sleth? Soul-eaters?
Sleth were those who had given themselves over to Regret, the one Creator of seven who, when he’d seen what he and the seven other Creators had wrought, recognized that it was flawed and despised the work of his hands. To the men, women, and children who came into his twisted power, he gave horrible gifts—unnatural strength and appetites, odd growths and manifestations of beasts, and the power, with a touch, to steal Fire and soul. The stories of Sleth and the hunts the righteous led against them were legion.
Had Talen heard that right?
“This one ran like a monster,” one of the men said.
“Yes,” said the bailiff. “But it appears you caught him anyway.”
Talen looked up at the bailiff, but a wave of pain and nausea slammed into him, and he was forced to turn and vomit into the grass. He hurt everywhere.
“Get up,” said the bailiff.
Talen gagged once more, spit. He took three breaths to steady himself. He was dizzy and shaking.
He got to one knee. Something was running out of his nose. He wiped his face with his sleeve expecting blood, but it was nothing more than snot. There was a ringing in his ears, and he didn’t know if he could stand.
But he did know one thing: he would not show weakness. Not in front of these men.
Two more breaths. He could barely open one of his eyes.
Goh, these arrogant Mokaddian garlic-eaters. This would