Three hours.
That was how long it took for the mountains to go quiet again. Three hours of steel on steel, screaming horses, arrows punching through leather and bone, and the wet, final sounds of men who would never ride home.
Elyra sat on a flat rock at the edge of the tree line, her father's ring heavy on her finger, and watched the Free Riders strip the dead.
They were efficient about it. No ceremony. No prayers. Just hands moving through pockets and belt pouches, pulling coins, blades, anything useful. The borderland mercenaries had carried good steel—southern-forged, expensive—and the Free Riders took every piece of it with the casual thoroughness of women who had been surviving on salvage since before Elyra was born.
