Page 13 of Chained Knight

“Well?” the dark-skinned blond said, finally, in a resonant baritone. “What is it, Jazarl? A breathing statue?”

“Strange cloth,” the crimson-haired one added. “But no reek of his curst, rotting Law.”

They both spoke the chained man’s strange rolling language, too. Ari took a deep breath. None of them stepped closer, so that was all right. Could she get between the two to her right? Their ring was loose, but…

“Dazed, perhaps.” Blue-haired Jazarl tilted his head, his hands still raised and relaxed. “We shall not harm you, lady, if you be not of the Bright King’s servants. Can you speak?”

“Perhaps we should dispatch it, to be certain.” The paler blond tapped his swordhilt with a fingertip. “Quick and painless to be merciful as well.”

Oh, fuck.Ari snapped another glance to her right. There was a temptingly open space between the bronze one and the ebon-skinned blond who maybe didn’t want to kill her.

“Pay no mind to Darjeth, my lady.” Jazarl took a step forward; he was probably some kind of leader. And their names were strange, but that was becoming par for the course. “’Tis clear you are no servant of the usurper, no matter how odd your raiment.”

I’m not dressed weird,she wanted to say.You are. But when in Rome and all that—and she was most definitely not in Kansas anymore.

Not that she had been in the first place, but it was the principle of the thing.

“Mortal,” the crimson-haired one said, softly. “At least, very recently. Can you not tell?”

Now that was concerning.Mortal—did the word mean what she thought it might? Ari’s brain attempted to process all this, but without a sane, reasonable framework for what she was seeing and hearing the effort was immense, Sisyphean, shoving a mental boulder uphill.

“Is that what that is?” Blond Darjeth’s eyebrows raised. “But then, how…”

“Clearly she understands.” The other blond caught Ari’s gaze, his hazel eyes kind and warm; his smile was probably meant to be encouraging, too. “But she cannot speak if we chatter so.”

Silence fell. The men regarded her expectantly.

How in the fuck did I get here?Maybe she’d been bonked on the head during the landslide, and everything around her was being passed through a weird filter?

“H-hello.” The word trembled; it was clearly in their language. Her mouth shaped the syllables without any trouble, attempting to mimic their accent, and Ari hoped she didn’t sound like a gibbering loon. “I’m… I’m not from here. I don’t want any trouble.”

“Well, she is no clockwork nor other foulness, ’tis clear.” The stocky brunet smiled encouragingly as well. “In any case we cannot leave a lady unprotected, especially so close to the Keep.”

Jazarl took another step. Ari stiffened, but there was nowhere to go.

There never had been.

“Come,” he said, almost gently. “There is a fire, and you need fear nothing in our company. The Bright King’s servants respect our blades, at least for some little while longer.”

That sounded encouraging—except for the implications ofkingandviolence—and at least they weren’t handcuffing her. So Ari tried a smile, nodded like a good little girl who knew she had to propitiate authority to get along, and followed him.

The others surrounded her as they walked, and if the paler blond watched her narrowly, she more than returned the favor.

They listened to Ari’s halting explanation—not theI killed my husbandpart or theI got a guy out of a chain burritochapter, but a short, heavily editedthere was a storm and I ended up in a pondversion. And though they did indeed have a campfire—small, expertly built, near-smokeless despite the tang she’d detected upon waking—there was nothing approaching dinner. Which was fine because she wasn’t hungry… but it was deeply abnormal as everything else in this hallucinatory place.

Between them and the chained man, she was wondering if she’d somehow stumbled into a RenFaire camping retreat and gotten a dose of heavy psychedelics to boot. If that was the case, she simply had to wait for the drugs to wear off. The idea was vaguely cheerful, a sign that she was thinking rationally.

Or at least, attempting to.

“The water did not gripe you?” Darjeth exchanged a meaningful look with Jazarl. If this was a good-cop-bad-cop routine, it was a reasonably gentle one. Maybe she was really in an interrogation room, and the strange foreign language was her scrambled brain putting a protective layer of fantasy over the whole deal. That was another reasonable attempt to understand what the hell was happening.

If only she could just get a single clue which prospect was most likely, even the tiniest indication, it would stop the sickening, spinning sensation of being unable to trust her own eyes and ears.

“No.” Huddled on the ground, her back against a dry, moss-covered log—there was a lot more litter on the forest floor now—Ari tried not to look guilty. Now she was feeling bad that shehadn’tgotten dysentery; it was ridiculous, but the reflex of shame had been ground into her for years and simply wouldn’t turn off. “I thought it might, but I was thirsty.”

The crimson-haired guy, Alzarien, piped up. “Could you find the pond again?” He was examining each arrow in a quiver, sometimes paring the fletching with a small curved knife. The blade looked very sharp and the hilt ended in an oversized pearl, glowing under reddish daylight.

The canopy was too thick to see much of the sky, but sunset was lasting a long damn time. “Probably not,” Ari had to admit. “I… I thought I should look around. I found the road.”

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