The men approaching through the treeline were not normal guards. M already knew it before he could fully see them, something in the way they moved, purposeful, two men who did not fear the road.

  "Stay silent," M said quietly to Leo.

  They came into full view seconds later, mounted on massive brown destriers whose flanks were dark with sweat from the ride. Both men wore full plate armour, silver and well-kept, catching the broken light through the canopy in sharp white flashes. They had spotted the river despite the trees and the distance. Good eyes M thought. Especially considering they both were wearing helmets.

  Leo's mouth had fallen open. He stared up at the horsemen with fascination. For just a moment a smile broke across the boy's face, and his unclean teeth showed, yellowed yet straight. They can avenge my father, M imagined him thinking. He had come to read the boy quickly.

  "Good day!" the nearer of the two called out, his voice carrying easy authority somewhat muffled behind the helmet. The horses slowed. "May we talk with you?"

  M rolled his eyes beneath his hood then nodded. He had identified them the moment he saw the sigil on their pauldrons. The King's Shield, thirty or so of the crown's finest, tasked with guarding the king and his family whenever they moved among people. These men were not city watch with soft bellies and dull eyes. Still, they ranked beneath the King's Sword, and M took some cold comfort in that. The King's Sword were only six men, and M was honest enough with himself to acknowledge he would probably lose to any one of them. Though he had, on darker nights, wondered how long he might last in a fair fight between one man of the king’s sword. Five minutes? Maybe Six.

  Both men dismounted with the practiced grace of soldiers, and crossed to where M and Leo had been resting by the water. One removed his helmet first. He was young, younger than he carried himself with a face almost unnervingly smooth, like silk and illuminating green eyes which were sharp and suspicious that moved over M and Leo. His hair was fine and blonde and hung long past his jaw.

  "Mind taking your cloak off, man?" he said to M. Directly.

  "No," M said, equally direct.

  "Now, now Virgo." The second man removed his own helmet with a tired patience that suggested he had been managing the first for some time. He was older, clearly. Bald, his face carried the quiet wear of years spent outdoors. He had the brown eyes of a man who had seen enough that very little surprised him anymore. "He's not obliged to undress for you." he laughed lightly.

  Virgo said nothing, but his gaze did not leave M.

  "Do take your hood off though." the older man said, softer than his companion, but not a request one declined.

  M had no problem with that, he drew his hood back. Then slyly looked down at their hips and saw their swords. Though they were covered by their silver scabbards.

  Both men studied M’s face. Virgo with suspicion. The older one named Grus, with something more like appraisal. Then a slow, quiet smile broke across Grus's weathered features.

  "Striking eyes," he said, he seemed to mean it. He then looked down at Leo. "And who's this little one?"

  M kept his voice flat, "I keep watch over him now. Both his parents are dead."

  "Bad business," Virgo said while looking at Leo, a slight pity on his face could be seen.

  Leo had been staring at their armour. Then he looked up, "Someone killed my father," he said. His voice was small and too steady for a child. "I need to find him, please help us!"

  M exhaled through his nose. He had told the boy to be silent.

  Grus's thin eyebrows rose. "Who, boy?"

  M let Leo speak for a moment, then cut in before it could go too long. "He wore a necklace. Eyes strung on it."

  The two guards looked at each other. It was brief, barely a glance, but M caught it.

  "This poor child watched his father lose his head," M said, and let the words settle. He was not above using grief as a tool, not when information was needed.

  Grus turned to look at the river for a long moment, jaw working slightly as though weighing something. Then he spoke, "I'm guessing you'd like to find that crazy bastard."

  "I must." Leo made a small fist at his side. His voice had more iron in it than most grown men could manage. Virgo looked at the boy with something that was almost fondness.

  "He's been at it a long while." Grus shook his head. "Innocents. Common folk, mostly. We've tried hunting him." A pause. "Couldn't close the net though." disappointment bled through the words.

  Virgo leaned forward. "Have you not heard? There's a bounty going up for him now."

  Leo's face shifted. His jaw tightened which did not belong on a child's face. He wanted the man himself, not the reward. He wanted to be the one. Even though he was just a child, the boy’s determination was through the roof. M recognised the look, because he understood what it was to want something so badly.

  "The reward?" M said.

  "Fifty gold coins." Grus met his eyes. "Issued by the king himself. Dead or alive."

  Virgo's voice dropped, almost to himself. "If I find him, I won't make it an easy death for that bastard."

  "That's precisely how he's survived this long," Grus said. He looked at his companion seriously. "We were taught never to underestimate men, Virgo, especially not monsters like him."

  Virgo looked down at the grass and did not argue.

  "Any more to go on?" M pressed for information.

  "Castle Marlite." Virgo looked up. "Everyone's moving that way, hunters, mercenaries, the lot. Bounty posters are going up as we speak, but the formal announcement of the bounty hasn't come yet. Consider it a kindness. You'll find some more information there…. They're calling him the Eye Ripper."

  The name landed in the air between them. Leo went very still.

  "The Eye Ripper…" He repeated, just above a whisper.

  Grus offered only a faint, grim smile. "That's what everyone's calling him."

  M stood, pulling his hood back up. "You have our thanks."

  "Least we could offer." Grus scratched at his neck where the gorget met the collar, a private discomfort. He glanced at M. "What brings you and the boy through here?"

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  "The same road as everyone else." M said nothing more.

  Grus nodded then said, “Seen or heard anything suspicious around here?”

  Both Leo and M shook their heads, they hadn’t seen or heard anything. Virgo watched M. Still measuring him.

  "Time to move," Grus commanded, the easy authority returning to his voice. Both men fixed their helmets back into place, becoming armour again rather than men. They walked to their horses, and Grus paused once with his hand on the saddle. "Perhaps we'll meet again."

  "We will," M said. "When we come to collect the bounty."

  Grus laughed, warm and genuine. "That’s what they all say."

  Virgo looked back once, and his voice was quiet enough that only M could be sure it was meant for him. "Keep the boy out of this mess… His determination will get himself killed."

  Then they were gone, riding towards Fenwell, the hoofbeats swallowed up by the trees until there was nothing left of them. Leo sat for a while with his eyes on the ground.

  "My father had blue eyes," he said softly. "Beautiful blue eyes." He swallowed. "Maybe that's why the eye ripper killed him."

  "Then the Eye Ripper ought to love me," M said, pointing to his own face, one eye red as an old wound, the other grey as winter ash. "We ride for the Castle now. We need to find as much information on him as possible."

  Leo nodded. He said nothing else. They mounted K and fell into the rhythm of the road, the horse's pace slow and even.

  The silence lasted longer than usual. Leo said nothing and M quickly noticed the boy's shoulders were trembling slightly, a quiet shaking he was clearly trying to hide. Then came the sound, small and broken, the kind a child makes when they have held something in for too long. Leo was crying. It was clear the boy was thinking about his father and mother.

  His small hands gripped the front of the saddle and his head dropped forward. Seconds later Leo wiped his face with the back of his hand and stared out at the trees. His voice came out unsteady. "Do you… know any stories?"

  M glanced down at him.

  "My mother used to tell me stories," Leo said quietly. "When I was scared." He swallowed.

  M looked back at the road.

  "Want to know how I got cursed?" he said finally.

  Leo went still.

  "That's a story," M said. "Though… Not a pleasant one."

  "Yes… I like scary stories," Leo said. It was clear he just needed a voice to distract him.

  M then let out a slow breath. "My mother died while giving birth to me on a red moon. Everyone in the town looked at me like I was the devil himself. I was born with these eyes, that didn’t help either. My own father hated me from the day I was born, he was barely home, barely ever talked to me. I slowly turned cruel as boys can be when cruelty goes unchecked." M started speaking a great deal, which was definitely unlike him, then again, he had a story to tell.

  "My mother died a month ago," Leo said quietly, his thin lips trembling slightly. Trying to relate with M. "And my father was never really home either."

  The road slowly slipped by beneath them.

  "I was ten when it happened. It was a cold day, raining heavily." M's jaw tightened slightly, then released. "There was some celebration going on. The whole town was out. I was walking alone, had no friends. Then I saw this girl."

  The trees on either side of the path seemed to lean in.

  "She was with her mother at one of the stalls. They were passing through, not from our town, I think. She was roughly my age. Small and skinny." A long pause, then he continued. "She was wearing a black cloak. Finely made. Elegant in a way I recognized even at ten, that silver clasp was beautiful. It was the nicest thing I had ever seen on anyone who wasn't nobility."

  Leo silently listened.

  "I walked straight over to her and asked if I could wear it. She shook her head. She didn't say a word. She just… shook her head and looked to the ground. She was so shy she could barely hold herself upright in front of strangers."

  Leo nodded slowly.

  "Her mother was talking to someone, wasn’t looking at us. So I… Took it from her. ”

  Leo turned to look at M quickly.

  "I reached out and tore it off her shoulders. She fell. The clasp caught her neck on the way off, drew blood, a thin little line of it on her throat. I remember watching it appear. Beneath it, she wore nothing but a thin strip of cloth. " His voice remained flat. "I put the cloak on. Then turned in it. A crowd gathered and watched, some of them laughed because a crowd will laugh when it doesn't know what else to do." He swallowed slowly. "She lay there through all of it. Completely still. Eyes full, but she didn't cry. She was too overwhelmed for even that. She started shaking heavily."

  The trees moved around them, just faintly, as though disturbed by something in the air.

  "The mother finally noticed, she was now tending to her daughter who had fallen. So I ran away with the cloak still on my back. I felt as though I had won something."

  “Then what?” Leo was intrigued by this story.

  "Her mother found me three days later. I remembered thinking it strange, that she had somehow tracked me down. Her face was different from the market, something had gone out of it."

  M shook his head, then closed his eyes.

  "She told me her daughter had fever in her bones for a long time. Her lungs were weak.”

  He exhaled slowly in regret, eyes still closed.

  "The girl walked home in the cold without her cloak. She was shaking so violently she could barely walk. They had no fire, no warm blanket and definitely not the cloak I had stolen. She was dead by midnight. The cold had taken her. Obviously, the mother blamed me for the death."

  Leo’s mouth was wide open now.

  "She didn't scream or weep in front of me. She just looked at me… with a senseless face."

  Leo stared at M's green cloak as though seeing it for the first time. M was now fully engrossed in the story he was narrating. So much so that K was veering off the main forest path, neither of them noticed.

  "I went home that day and wore the cloak, I don’t know why… Just did."

  He looked down at the green fabric.

  "Then after a few minutes, got bored, I removed it, it left my shoulders, but after a few seconds… The pain came. As if… Fire, burning everywhere, all at once, beneath the skin and deeper than that, like being turned inside out and held over a flame. I screamed until the walls shook. Father wasn’t home then. I put the cloak back on and the pain gradually went away."

  He exhaled.

  "Then father came home and saw me wearing the cloak, I was on the ground… shaking.”

  He paused.

  "He tore the cloak off me, same thing happened as before. Pain. I snatched the cloak off him and tried telling him what was happening. He just stared at me like I was some kind of pitiful creature. He died a few months later. Whether it was shame, grief or old age, I couldn't tell you… I was all alone. The neighbours reported it to the local authorities within the day. Two corrupt guards came to the door, told me I couldn't stay in my own house no more, said that I was a child in league with the devil. They kicked me out and gave my house to some random folk."

  Silence held them both for a long moment, nothing but hoofbeats.

  “But.. You’re wearing a green cloak, not the black one you stole.” Leo said, confusion flickering in his eyes.

  "The pain doesn't start the moment the cloak comes off. There's a few seconds of peace before it hits." He paused. "I figured out if I move fast enough, I can swap one cloak for another and it never begins. Any cloak works."

  "What happened to the mother who cursed you?" Leo asked. His voice, very small.

  "I don't know," M said. "I've always wondered." He looked at the road ahead. "I.."

  Regret overwhelmed M’s brown face. Leo then let out a laugh, a short, disbelieving sound and shook his head.

  "There's no way," he said. "You weren't like that." He grinned, still half-convinced it was some dark joke being played on him. “Mother always said magic was dead. You’re just trying to scare me even more.” His mother was right, for the most part, most magic had died out a hundred years ago, it was slowly becoming a fairy tale. Though there were still remnants of it, some in people, some in objects and some at certain locations.

  M had been so deep in the telling that he had stopped tracking the landscape. That was unlike him. He cast his gaze ahead now, reorienting until he heard it. A sound from the right. Low and strained.

  M's head turned sharply. A cluster of dense brush ran along the edge, thick and tangled. He signalled Leo to silence with one hand and redirected K quietly toward the undergrowth, dismounting in a single smooth motion and parting the branches just enough to look through.

  A girl was bound to a tree, twenty yards beyond the brush. Her dress was fine, finer than anything that belonged on a forest road, mouth stuffed with cloth, she was trying to pull at her bonds with a focused fury rather than a panicked one. Her face surprisingly unafraid. As though she was fully expecting someone to arrive and correct this situation on her behalf.

  Ahead of her were five men, sat around a low camp fire, rough-looking, men who lived outside the law long enough that it showed in their posture and the way their eyes moved.

  "Said she was the king's daughter," one of them said. He was broad and heavy-jawed. "Ransom like that'd set us for life."

  Another man, skinnier, licked his lips, his gaze sliding back toward the girl.

  So this is what the King's Shield were looking for, M thought. It settled into place with a cold, quiet click. Leo had crept up beside him. He looked through the gap in the branches, and his face hardened.

  "We have to save her," Leo said. Low and firm.

  M studied the camp. Five men. The way the girl was tied, her wrists behind the tree, these men knew what they were doing. These men had somehow kidnapped the king’s daughter, they were definitely trained and not to be underestimated. He closed his eyes for half a second…