The magus and I were nearly knee to knee, ahead of the others. I dragged the reins of my horse over to one side, and it stumbled into the horse beside it. I brushed shoulders with the magus for just a moment and then turned the horse on its haunches and drove it with my heels back toward the trees on the streambank. As a branch passed overhead, I grabbed it, using my free hand, and pulled myself up into the tree.

By the time I was secure on a higher branch and could look down, Pol and the magus had their swords out and one of the attacking horsemen was already lying in the water. I watched as the magus proved himself to be a swordsman as dangerous as Pol. Between them they held the three remaining attackers. Sophos was behind them, twisted in the saddle, his back to the fight, trying to get his own sword out of his saddlebag. Ambiades was doing the same, but he’d had the sense to first run his horse onto the bank, away from danger. Sophos, looking in the wrong direction, didn’t know how close he was to being spitted.

I called his name, but he couldn’t hear me over the other shouting, which in retrospect I realized was mostly the magus and Pol yelling at him to forget the sword and hide in the trees. Pol was being drawn out by one attacker, leaving the magus to fight two men and Sophos still unaware of his danger. His attention was on his sword belt, which was caught in the buckle of his saddlebag.

Swearing, I stood up on my tree branch and rushed along its length. I threw myself facedown, lying mostly on the main limb and partly on the outer branches, and reached through the prickling leaves. All that I could reach of Sophos was his hair. I grabbed that and pulled him off-balance just as a horseman slipped between the magus and Pol.

Sophos fell face first off his horse, almost taking me with him. He landed in the mud with his horse between him and the fighting, and if he’d stayed down, he would have been safe, but he struggled to his feet, sword in hand, as the cursed horse moved away. He was left standing with his mouth open, looking at the lifted sword of his opponent.

I closed my eyes, but at the last possible moment he must have shifted his weight and parried the blow aimed at his head. His return to guard position was slow, and I don’t know what he would have done next, being too far off-balance to recover, but he didn’t need to do anything. As I opened my eyes, Pol slid his sword into the man’s rib cage, nearly to the hilt. The man grunted and hung for a moment on the sword before he slid off into the water. There was another splash on the far side of the stream as the magus finished his opponent as well. I pushed myself upright on my branch and moved back toward the trunk of the tree.

There were four riderless horses, stamping around in the muddy stream. When their feet stopped crunching on the gravel and they stood still, looking confused, the magus was able to ask Sophos if he was hurt.

“No, I’m fine.”

“Good. Ambiades?”

“I’m fine.”

“Pol?”

“Nothing serious.” He was mopping up blood from a slice just below his elbow.

“And Gen? I see you found a safe place to wait while we were busy.”

I opened my mouth to point out that I didn’t have a sword to defend myself with, not that I wouldn’t have climbed the tree anyway, but instead I stared at him with my mouth hanging open like a horrified gargoyle. I pointed to his shirt. He lifted one hand, instinctively checking for a wound, before he realized. Hamiathes’s Gift was gone. He looked down at the neatly sliced leather thong lying over one shoulder. He ran his hand over it in disbelief, then felt frantically in the folds of his clothes. He checked the ridges in his saddle and saddlebags before he jumped off his horse and waded into the stream, cursing. Pol and Sophos followed after him, but there was too much mud in the water by then. Nothing could be seen.

“What happened? What happened?” cried Ambiades from the bank. He was the only one of us still mounted.

“The stone, the cursed stone,” said the magus. “I’ve lost it in the fighting. Damn it, who the hell are these people?” he said, shifting a body off a gravel bank in midstream.

“Are they all dead?” Ambiades asked.

“Yes, they’re all dead. Get over here and help me with this one.”

They dragged the bodies out of the water, while I sat forgotten in the tree. I very carefully rebraided my hair and watched. When the dead men were laid out on the bank, the magus remembered me.

“Come down and help look,” he told me. He was distracted and was asking more than ordering.

Reluctantly I slipped down from the tree and stepped around the bodies. They were soldiers of the queen of Attolia. One of them was a lieutenant. He was young, and looked younger with wet hair stuck to his forehead and water beading on his face. He’d led the other horsemen as they rode down on us, led them no doubt onto the end of Pol’s sword.

There was one part of his uniform that hadn’t gotten wet, with either blood or water, and its shape—a coleus leaf—caught my eye. After a moment I stooped to scoop a little water from the stream and dribbled it back and forth across the dry spot on his tunic. I soaked the image until it melted into the wetness of the rest of his uniform. The water was cold. It splashed on his neck and pooled in the hollow of his collarbone, but he didn’t mind, and he didn’t deserve to be marked with the coward leaf as he journeyed to the underworld.

When the mark was gone, I straightened up and noticed Pol watching me. I shrugged and wiped my hands on my pants, but my pants were muddy and my hands only ended up dirty as well as wet.

We left the bodies lying on the bank while the magus organized a search for Hamiathes’s Gift. Once the mud had settled, he had us stand in a line across the stream well below where the fighting had been. Staying in line, we worked our way upstream until he was sure we had passed the place where the stone would have dropped. There wasn’t enough current to have moved the stone far, but the stone was no different from any of the thousands of pebbles there on the streambed. Only the magus and I had held the stone. Ambiades had never even seen it. We’d stayed for almost a quarter of an hour, all of us staring at the gravel under our feet when Pol finally spoke up.

“It’s gone, magus.”

The rest of us continued to stare at the streambed.

“Magus.” Pol spoke more firmly, and this time we picked up our heads. Ambiades, Sophos, and I looked back and forth between the magus and his soldier.

“Yes,” the magus finally agreed, after a long moment of silence. “We’ve got to go. Ambiades, get the horses and bring them to this side of the stream. Sophos, see if any of those other horses are still nearby. We should have tied them up. If they have saddlebags, check to see if there’s any food in them.”

Three of the horses were standing with ours—misery loves company—but the fourth one was gone, presumably back to its camp.

“There’s no time to catch it now,” said the magus. “We’ll have to go as quickly as we can.” He pulled himself onto his horse and looked one last time at the stream. “I don’t believe this,” he said.

I watched him until even I felt uncomfortable and looked away, as Pol, Sophos, and Ambiades had done. He’d had the stone for a day and lost it; I should have been pleased. Five days earlier I would have been delighted to imagine what it would be like for him in the court of Sounis when he went back to his king and told him the gamble had failed, but I wasn’t enjoying myself. I told myself it was because I was wet from wading in the stream. Or it may have been that I was afraid of the people who would be coming soon to find out what happened to the lieutenant and his three men.