Chapter 30 ： Tina
Evan left the Borbert mountains and headed southwest. He wore grey, kept his cowl up, and moved without drawing attention to himself, passing through territory that belonged to Earl Edward's faction. He was not particularly looking at what he passed through, but the villages registered anyway — low thatched roofs, villagers with eyes that had stopped expecting much. He observed this without comment, knowing there was nothing he could do about it.
He was still, in some part of himself, a visitor. The comparison between this world and the one he'd come from ran automatically, even when he didn't invite it. On Earth, at least the appearance of hope had been maintained for people at the bottom. Here, it was simply absent. The presence of extraordinary power hadn't elevated the common people — it had pressed them down more completely, because the gap between the powerful and everyone else was more extreme and more visible, and there was no ideological framework that pretended otherwise.
He walked.
The sound of horses came from a nearby village before he saw them — five riders moving fast, already clear of the buildings, laughing. On the saddle of one horse, draped across in front of the rider, was a girl. She was fighting him, crying, too small to do much about it.
"Feisty, isn't she," one of them was saying. "My lord has good taste."
"The father got in the way. We dealt with it. Once she figures out how things work, she'll stop fussing." Laughter.
Evan had not intended to involve himself. He stepped into the middle of the road.
He assumed they would stop. They didn't. They accelerated.
"Out of the road, commoner."
He understood the error one moment before they arrived. A lone man in grey on a country road — no horse, no insignia, nothing. In their calculation, he was property that had wandered into the path of its betters, and if it was destroyed in the process, that was its own fault.
His eyes went cold.
The sword cleared the cane with a single sound. The lead rider had no time to register what the light meant before his throat was open and he was off the horse, which reared and screamed.
Evan stepped sideways, blade at his side, a drop of blood reaching the soil from the tip.
The remaining riders pulled up. The one carrying the girl kept his position; the others drew swords.
Squire-knights, Evan assessed — not even that, in a couple of cases. Knight-attendants, which was a different category entirely: a squire-knight was a knight in training; a knight-attendant was a knight's servant who happened to ride. The distinction in this world was considerable.
One of them charged. He leaned from the saddle with his sword coming down. Evan moved with the horse's momentum rather than against it — his blade's forte turned the incoming stroke, and the point traveled up the natural line into the rider's throat. The man's expression said his body had done something impossible, and then he fell.
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"My lord, ride!" the remaining two called, and came at Evan together. They had enough of something in them to cover another man's retreat.
Evan didn't let them. If they returned to report, a cavalry detachment would follow within hours, and by that time he intended to be elsewhere. He wanted a clean departure, not a chase.
The sword blazed — the magical array responding to the concentration he'd developed over the past weeks, not a deliberate invocation but a natural response to his intent. Both squire-knights fell before they completed their charge, neither understanding how.
The one they'd called my lord heard the shouts, turned his horse, and saw what had happened. He still had the girl across his saddle and apparently didn't want to lose her — he hesitated a moment too long. She twisted and fell off the horse herself. He looked at her and then looked at the road and started to spur forward over her.
The sword moved. He joined his companions.
Evan guided the horse aside with a hand on its neck before its hooves could find her.
The girl sat in the road, frozen. Evan cast Soul Soothe — quietly, without announcing it. Death magic had applications that most people never associated with it; the same traditions that commanded the undead also understood the soul's distress and could ease it. He crouched to her level.
She was thirteen, perhaps fourteen. Thin — the kind of thin that comes from years of not quite enough food. A face that would be striking when she was older, a grace to her features that didn't match the patched clothing she wore.
"What's your name? Is there anyone at home?"
She came back to herself and rose to perform a curtsy — and Evan blinked, because the movement was exactly right, the form of a noblewoman's greeting executed with complete correctness by a girl in worn clothes on a dirt road.
"Tina, my lord. My father — they killed him. He hasn't been buried yet."
Her voice was controlled, though he could hear the edge underneath it. She had aged several years in the last hour.
"Evan Wang. What will you do now?"
She looked up briefly and down again. "I need to go back first. After that — I don't know."
He thought about her situation. Killing nobles, even the lowest-ranking ones, was a serious crime in this world. He was a lich and not particularly frightened of the legal consequences, but Tina was a young girl with no protection. He couldn't simply leave her here.
"I'll go back with you. We'll see to your father properly. Do you have any family you could go to?"
"No." She said it without hesitation. Then: "My mother was a maidservant to a baroness. The baroness gave her in marriage to my father — there was some trouble with the baron, my mother said he had been pursuing her and the baroness wanted her gone. My mother died two years ago. It's just been the two of us." She stopped. The rest of what had happened today didn't need to be said aloud.
He had already understood. Her father had tried to stop them. So they had killed him and taken her.
He caught two horses by the reins. "Do you ride?"
She shook her head. He helped her into the saddle, talked her through what to do with her hands and legs, mounted the second horse himself, and didn't look back at the bodies. Baron Iden would find out eventually. By then, Evan intended to be well clear of Liya Duchy.
The village wasn't far. When they arrived, several farmers had already brought the body inside and laid it out. They looked at Tina with the expression of people who had learned to handle bad news efficiently, and the bolder ones told her to leave quickly — if she had family elsewhere, go to them.
Tina knelt beside her father, said what she had to say, and rose. Evan found two men who were willing to handle the burial properly and gave them a gold coin each. Then he and Tina left the village. She had no belongings. The clothes she wore had belonged to her mother.
Two days later, Baron Iden's people came looking. They found the five bodies without difficulty. Iden was already in a poor mood — the fire ambush that had cost him the ransom, and before that the campaign losses — and the death of his son, combined with the public humiliation of having it happen and go unanswered, was more than he could tolerate calmly. He nearly ordered the entire village killed, stopped himself on the practical grounds that dead villagers didn't farm, had some people beaten, and issued orders.
He wanted Evan Wang and the girl found.