Rythe Falls Read Free Page A

good man with a bow. Could take down a rabbit or even a mir on the wing with a single shot. Didn't matter a damn, now. For a single moment, Green wished he had a sword.
                  He tried to heel his horse into a run, but Perr's sword and arm were more than long enough to swing over the top of the talker's horse and slice a neat little chunk from the bowman's neck.
                  As the bowman slid from his horse to the dirt, he wished, instead, that he'd stayed home, minded his sister. Wished he'd never seen bow or sword. But not for long.
                 
    *
     
    Later that day, Perr and his lady Reih rode on, two good horses underneath them, three poor horses tied in a line behind to trade at Fort Iron Hill.
                  Iron Hill.
                  A small settlement, a village, perhaps. The last place of people before the swamplands began.
                  And in the swamps?
                  The mystical home that had once housed the Order of the Sard.
                  Sybremreyen, the temple was called. Sister-home to Reih's own Kuh'taenium. A place of power and mystery. And the last bastion, perhaps, in the war for Rythe itself.
                  A war, Reih knew, that had already begun.
     
    *

Chapter Two
     
    Perr would not hide who or what he was, even if he could. A big man covered in steel is a difficult man to hide. Reih had to, though. She'd learned that well enough, since leaving her role as Imperator behind her in the dust. The best disguise, she'd found, wasn't in wearing different clothes, or changing her hair. After all, she no longer dressed like a Lady, or a Councillor. Nor, she thought, did she even look as though she had particularly good breeding.
                  The best disguise wasn't to look like a different person, but to be a different person. To live it. The way a woman acts, holds herself, the words she speaks.
                  Now, after months on the road, they looked more like mercenaries, or a hunter and a man for hire, perhaps adventurers. Not soft, but hard. Not bred, with learning and money, but like they'd been hatched from some dangerous beast's brood. Reih knew she looked rough enough to pass muster as a fighting woman herself.
                  I've killed men, too, haven't I?
                  She took a light cloak from her pack before she hit the settlement. Too hot for much else, but the cloak had a hood. She'd look a fool to put it up in this heat, but it was dirty and bright and distracting.
                  Besides, people won't be looking at my face much, will they?
                  Perr didn't talk often anyway, and Reih was almost born to talk, so she did the selling. Iron Hill was mostly a trading settlement with little of interest. Just, really, a collection of rough houses in differing styles. Wood, mud and sticks, little stone to be had. Plenty of iron, in the mines that ate into the hills thereabouts, but not much good stone at all.
                  Roofing was thatch, by and large. Reeds, from the waterways and swamplands further south. No roads but dirt tracks. People, too, mixed like the buildings. Southlanders, their hair dark and their skin tanned year round, but a fair few easterners, some in from nearer the coast. Miners with dirt ground into their skin. Trappers and skinners that smelled a little like animals, now, they'd been at their trade so long.
                  People look different, different places, but to Reih their eyes weren't that strange. Hungry men and women, tired, wary.
                  It wasn't a rowdy place. Too hot for rowdy, too poor for ale and wine.
                  Just...bored. Like the whole settlement did their work, ate their food, got into their beds and dreamed about doing the whole thing all over