“Ride on,” he said. “We will take care of this and catch up.”

He didn’t need to say it twice. I heard the driver shout, passing an alarm toward the front of the caravan, and the wagon began to rumble faster down the road. Not so fast that I didn’t have time to see the shocked faces of the guards staring back at us as they rolled farther and farther away. I looked toward the approaching riders. Even with my poor eyes, I could see that there were only two of them, and the guards’ alarm seemed outsized. For them, I mean. My alarm was perfectly reasonable, as the horsemen appeared to be waving at us, and I was certain that what they were waving was swords. The Attolian, meanwhile, was striding confidently back uphill. Awkwardly I pulled my sword out of its sheath and followed him.

The first horseman, well ahead of his companion, tried to ride the Attolian down, but the Attolian stepped abruptly to the side at the last possible moment and swung his sword up toward the head of the horse. It reared and fell backward with its rider still on its back. The Attolian began to run then toward the second rider, who was more careful in his approach, swinging his horse away from the Attolian at the last moment and striking as he passed. They were too far away for me to see anything except that the second rider’s caution did him little good. He was unseated a moment later and fell to the ground. I didn’t see whether he got up. I had a more pressing concern. The first rider had struggled out from under his rolling horse and was limping toward me.

I clutched the sword in both hands and tried to imitate the stance I’d seen the guards take as they practiced together. As my attacker got close enough to see clearly, I realized with horror that he was no bandit. He was one of the Namreen, the emperor’s handpicked bodyguard. No wonder the wagons had rumbled away and no wonder the other guards had been shocked at the blithe way the Attolian had hopped off the cart.

I considered dropping the sword and running, but the Namreen was already too close. Even limping, he moved too fast for me to be sure I could escape him. I backed up a few shuffling steps as he shifted his sword to his left hand and reached for me with his right.

“Gut him!” screamed the Attolian from up the road, and I lifted my wobbling sword. The Namreen rolled his eyes, and without even switching his sword back to his right hand, he swung it at my head. As if it would help, I tried to duck. I felt the blow like a searing light followed by darkness, probably because I had closed my eyes, and I stumbled back as the Namreen knocked the sword from my hand. Putting both hands to my head, I continued backward off the road, the rough ground dropping away under my feet. I avoided the Namreen’s next grab by virtue of falling over. The Attolian bellowed from somewhere close by, and the Namreen must have turned to face him.

He didn’t reach for me again, and a moment later he was dead. His body dropped beside me, the Attolian’s sword straight through his head.

Jerking the sword back out and wiping it on the dead man’s clothes, the Attolian said, sounding puzzled but not angry, “Why didn’t you gut him? He had no guard up at all.”

Sitting up, I stared at the dead man lying in front of me while trying to blink the wetness from my eyes. It was my blood, I realized. I held my hands away from my head and looked at them. They were scarlet, the blood covering them an impossibly bright red. I would have screamed, but my throat was so tightly closed that only an airy whistling sound came out.

“Do you know,” I said in a strangled whisper, “do you know what happens to a slave who arms himself in the empire? Do you have any idea what they do to slaves who even look for too long at a sword, or a dagger, or anything more dangerous than a penknife? Do you have any idea, you imbecile, what they do, what they do . . .” My voice seemed to be getting higher and higher as I repeated myself.

The Attolian dropped his sword in the dirt beside the dead Namreen and without another word grabbed me in his arms. I’d just called him an imbecile. I was sure he was going to kill me with his bare hands. I struggled but couldn’t get free. He only squeezed tighter until I stopped thinking of anything but drawing my next sobbing breath.

“Kamet,” the Attolian said quietly in my ear, “it’s a flesh wound. It will be all right. It’s messy, but it will be all right, I promise. Don’t be frightened.”

There was blood everywhere. All over me, all over the Attolian. It was not going to be all right. I was going to die out in the dirt in the hot sun on the road to Perf, and my whole life would have amounted to nothing. Nothing. I would not direct the empire, or be a great patron of the arts, or collect my own library of manuscripts. I would die. I conjugated it. Will die, would die. Present tense, dying. I was dying. I was dying.

But the Attolian just kept repeating over and over that all would be well. “Head wounds bleed, but we can stitch it up, I’ve done it before, don’t be afraid. Kamet, I wouldn’t tell you this if it weren’t true. I swear to you, I am not going to leave your dead body beside the road to Perf. I didn’t come all the way to this godsforsaken cesspit so that I could go home and tell my king I failed him.”

Suddenly so chatty, I thought, and what was he calling a cesspit? Attolia, that was a cesspit. A backward, savage, stinking hole in the ground. I knew because I’d been there. They couldn’t read there. They lived like animals. They were still counting on their fingers, for gods’ sakes.

My feet stopped kicking and my breathing slowed down. He loosened his grip and sat supporting me with an arm behind my back.

“It really will be all right, Kamet,” he said.

“They are Namreen,” I wailed hopelessly, my tongue almost too numb to form words, doubting that the Attolian would even knew what I meant. The dead men were the elite of the emperor’s guard. Loyal and deadly and supported by the bottomless funding of the emperor’s purse, they were unstoppable. Obviously the emperor was not content that I might disappear carrying with me the guilt for my master’s death. He meant to bring me back, no matter where I might run.

The Attolian grunted and swiveled to look over his shoulder at the body behind him. He clearly did know who the Namreen were. “I suppose we won’t be catching up with the wagons after all,” he said.

A little later, he got to his feet and helped me to mine, then led me across the road where the ground rose into the hills we’d been winding our way through for the last few days. He found a place where a rocky outcrop provided a sliver of shade and sat me down. It only took a slight pressure on my shoulders and my knees folded up underneath me. He handed me a piece of fabric; he must have pulled the Namreen’s headcloth off as we passed.

“Hold this to your head. Press down on it.” He moved my hands into the correct position. “Just sit here while I take care of a few things.”

One of the horses was still nearby. The Attolian caught it and rode away, coming back later with the other horse. He stripped the bodies of anything useful and then loaded them onto the backs of the horses, tying them in place. He reined the horses together and sent them, with a few well-placed rocks, down the road toward Perf. Distressed by their grisly cargo, the horses would keep moving until they caught up with the caravan ahead.

“Why not keep the horses?” I asked, not seeing the point in advertising the death of the Namreen. I didn’t care if they rotted by the side of the road, but the Attolian shook his head.