Rythe Falls Read Free

right out of a man.
                  Perr wasn't fast, or even particularly strong. He was just a big man with a strong arm encased in good steel. But more than that. He was a man who would never, ever, back down.
                  And he'd made his horse stand for long enough. Gently, with his steel-boots, he nudged his horse to motion.
                  'Whoa...hold on there, man-o'-steel. Three of us...'
                  The man talking was grinning. Across his lap he carried a long, heavy axe. An un-pretty thing, made for hitting men and making them dead.
                  And a poor weapon for a horseman.
                  The axe man, the talker, held his horse steady with his knees in the centre of the three robbers. He looked ready enough to take up the axe.
                  Perr's big horse began to trot, and while Perr rode, he figured the encounter in his head.
                  The man on the right side would break first. He had a bow, strung, already in his hands. Perr looked the man in the eye through the narrow slit in his helm. Bright eyes. Man was afraid, flexing his fingers. Might be good with a bow. Didn't matter.
                  Few were good enough, and the closer Perr got, the less it mattered.
                  Perr was riding slow, but closing. Fifty yards.
                  The man on the left had a heavy wooden shield strapped on his left arm, and a short, workman's axe in his right fist. Probably took the shield from some grave, looked old. Nicked and scarred wood, battered steel rim.
                  Probably took up the axe from his father, maybe. Old thing, too. Good for cutting wood and good enough for cutting men who weren't encased head-to-toe in steel. Wrong side, too. Shield wasn't going to do him much good. Axe would swing, probably. But Perr didn't worry about axes, overly, especially old wooden-hafted axes in the hands of untrained, unarmoured men.
                  'Don't want to talk, eh?' said the man in the centre. He spoke faster, now. Had too. Because Perr was closing faster. 'I can understand that. Hot as hells down here. 'Specially in steel. We'll go easy, you just...'
                  Perr wasn't talking, nor did he need to. His drew his sword, rasping, loud even over the pounding of horse hooves on dirt.              
                  ''Bout now'd be good, Green,' said the talker, who didn't seem quite so confident now Perr's longsword was in hand.
                  There was a sing-song twang of a taut string let free, a sharp ding of an arrow hitting steel and nothing else. Sudden thumping, then, Perr high in his stirrups, one hand on the reins, raised his sword to the sky. The talkative man brought his great, unwieldy axe to bear a little too late, then dropped it. A big, two-hander like that was only of use to a man with two hands.
                  The talking man would soon realise he wasn't that man any longer. He stared, dumb, uncomprehending, as his left arm and his great axe fell to the floor.
                  Perr ignored the speaker. He wasn't talking anymore. The man was done, or close enough.
                  By the time the one-armed man managed to hurl out a scream, the man with the heavy old shield was in the dirt, unhorsed. The shield was sheared through. The man wasn't trying to get up. Instead of trying to live, he lay down and watched his own blood being sucked into the dry dirt.
                  Perr could easily have let the bowman flee, but he didn't.
                  Because mercy today would mean a traveller's death in a week or two, or a month, but the bowman wasn't a thinker or a worker. He was a thief, a killer, and Perr knew it.
                  So did the bowman. His name was Green Othraine, and he was a