Chapter 19: The Pass

Shiori walked up the road alone at sunrise.

Tomoe watched her from the supply cart.

It was parked behind a boulder at the foot of the pass, and the mule's reins were wound twice round her fist.

The road climbed between two steep walls of grey rock and narrowed to a gap barely wide enough for a wagon.

On the heights above the gap, the raiders stood in rows, two hundred of them, in rough furs and mismatched iron.

One of them stepped forward, a huge man with a braided beard and an axe on his back.

"Sword Saint," he shouted down. "We heard you were dead."

"I am not the Saint," Shiori called back.

Her voice carried clearly in the cold air.

"I live on the mountain below. You have taken a fort that is not yours. Go home."

The huge man laughed.

His men laughed with him, a long rough roar that rolled down the rock.

"Make us," he said.

"I would rather not."

"Then come up and try."

Shiori stood still.

Then she drew her sword.

It came out of the scabbard with a thin clean ring, and the whole valley seemed to hear it.

"As you like," she said.

Tomoe held her breath.

She had seen Shiori cut a falling pine bough in half in the yard, but that had been a gift to a stove.

This was something else.

Shiori ran up the slope.

The first raiders met her at the top of the road.

She went through them in a flash of grey, her sword drawing bright lines in the air.

Men fell away on either side, and her feet never seemed to stop.

She leapt to a boulder and then the next, her coat flaring, and landed in the gap among the furs.

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