There were four archers in the ring, positioned at the cardinal points. He had clocked them in the first sweep. They had held through the initial shock of the companions engaging — trained enough to wait for a clear shot — and now they were finding their shots.
The first arrow came at Clara, completely unaware, to busy firing off flame arrows and other blaze spells and blowing things up with a delusional smile on her face.
He had the shield construct up before it reached her, the thin translucent barrier that caught the arrow and deflected it into the ground, the whole thing happening in silence because he was not casting out loud. He ran the shield continuously, covering the wagon in a full dome, deflecting without drawing attention to the deflection. An arrow hit and angled off. Another. A third that had been aimed at Edric.
Clara, aware that she was not being hit by things and attributing this correctly to her brother, did not slow down.
She worked with the focus of someone who had been training for this without knowing she had been training for this — the fire-adjacent affinity building and releasing in controlled bursts, not the spray of someone frightened but the aimed shots of someone who had spent months learning where magic went when she told it to go. She hit a man trying to flank Kiiro and dropped him. She hit the nearest archer and he went down without finishing the notch. She rotated, found the next target, fired.
She was, Arthur thought, very good.
Kiiro was handling the front third of the ring with the systematic efficiency of something three times the size of anyone it was fighting, moving through the formation with the controlled power of a creature that could choose exactly how much force to apply and was calibrating carefully — incapacitating rather than killing, where she had the room for it. She had the two remaining archers in sight and moved on them before they could adjust.
Tsuki had taken the rear of the ring. The silver light from her tails was doing something that Arthur had not seen in training — it wasn't hitting the bandits directly but was running along the ground and rising around them, a binding effect, and the men who stepped into it were stopping with the confused expression of people whose legs had decided to have a different conversation than their brains. She was moving between them with the flowing unhurried grace of something that had assessed the situation and was working through it in order.
Shadow was in the trees. Shadow had been in the trees since the bandits first emerged, and the sounds from that direction had diminished considerably.
Bella was still small and still moving and Arthur stopped looking at her directly because watching her work was doing something uncomfortable to his philosophical sense of what a small cat was for.
His father had put himself in front of his mother. He was holding the horses steady with one hand and had the other arm out, braced, the way Edric Voss stood when he was prepared for something to require him — not aggressive, not afraid, simply there. His mother had her hand on his back and was watching with an expression Arthur couldn't fully read from the angle.
Lyra's face was still in his shoulder. Saya had not moved either but he could feel her shaking.
He kept the dome up and deflected two more arrows and counted the remaining standing figures in the ring.
Seven. Then four. Then one.
Then the one sat down on the road of his own accord and put his hands up.
◆ ◆ ◆
The ring was quiet.
Arthur looked at it. Seventeen men were unconscious. Eight had been removed to the tree line by Shadow and were not going to be a problem. Five were bound in Tsuki's silver light, sitting against the road bank with the expressions of people who had made a significant professional miscalculation. The man who had sat down with his hands up was still sitting with his hands up. Bella had returned to Mira's lap and was grooming herself with a composure that did not invite questions.
It was, he thought, a little gruesome. Not by the standards of what he was capable of — he had contained it, the companions had contained it — but by the standards of a country road in autumn, there was a significant amount of evidence that something had happened here.
He started thinking about a light illusion construct to clean the visual somewhat. Then he stopped.
Lyra had lifted her face from his shoulder. She was looking at the road with a clear-eyed assessment that was frightened around the edges but was also doing the work of processing rather than refusing. Clara was already down from the wagon board, flushed and bright-eyed, Kiiro pressed warm against her leg looking for praise.
This was not his old world. In his old world the sight of a road ambush's aftermath in this condition would have caused serious problems for most of the population. In this world, in this country, on this road, it was the expected outcome of a road ambush that had been on the wrong side of the encounter. His sisters were not going to fall apart at the sight of it. They had grown up in a world where the forest started at the edge of the farm and the forest had things in it.
He let the illusion construct go.
His father climbed down from the wagon seat and looked at the scene with the thorough assessment of a practical man cataloguing a situation.
'The living ones,' Edric said. 'Tie them to the trees off the road. Leave them visible enough that the next travelers will see them and can report to the sheriff in Calmere.'
'Their equipment,' Arthur said.
His father looked at him. His mother, still on the seat, was also looking at him.
'To the victor,' his father said simply, with the quality of someone stating the obvious.
'Agreed hehe. I think it's the least they can do after having to endure their lewd eyes on myself and my daughters. Good grief, Thankfully my dear Bella handled business' his mother harumphed.
Arthur sent Shadow through the ring with efficient instructions. Weapons, coin, anything useful. The collection took about ten minutes. The tying up took longer and Arthur ended up burrying them to their necks like he always read about in novels and when he was done burying his 4th bandit he turned around to the ghastly expressions of his family. They seemed shocked that he had come up with such a method making him feel like it was justified since he had read about it..
By the end he had a very satisfying amount of additional material in his spatial pocket and the survivors were visible from the road with clear signs that they were all bandits and the road was clear.
His father climbed back onto the wagon seat and clicked his tongue at the horses.
◆ ◆ ◆
They were back on the road and Clara was already telling the story.
'The big one in the front was clearly the leader,' she said, 'and I could see immediately that this required decisive action, and Kiiro and I looked at each other and we just knew — '
'Kiiro is a cat,' Lyra said.
'Kiiro is my partner and we communicate very clearly, thank you — and so I stood up, with my chest out and my arms outreached and spoke softly "Kiiro, lets do this." because you have to let them know you're not afraid — '
'You were afraid,' Arthur said.
'I was appropriately cautious and then I decided not to be, and I stood up, and then thats when Arthur whistled which was his way of agreeing with my assessment — '
'The whistle was the signal.'
'His signal of agreement. And then Kiiro and I coordinated the response — '
'Kiiro and Shadow and Tsuki and Bella,' Lyra said.
'With support from the others, yes, but the initial decisive action was — '
'Tiny Bella took out eight of them without even casting a spell or growing in size, truly frightening that kitten,' Arthur said.
'Bella was very helpful and I want to acknowledge her contribution but the strategic command — '
His mother made a sound that was not a laugh but was adjacent to one.
His father was looking at the road ahead with the particular quality of someone who was concentrating very hard on the horses.
Saya, beside Arthur, had her hand over her mouth.
Clara continued for another ten minutes, covering the arc of the engagement in what Arthur estimated was three times its actual duration, with particular attention to the moments where Kiiro had been directly beside her and they had operated as a single tactical unit. Kiiro, golden and self-possessed on the wagon board, accepted this account with the mild expression of someone who had no objections.
Arthur said nothing. He listened to his sister describe the fight with total fearlessness, the fear that had been real and present during it already metabolized into a story she was proud of, and felt something that he filed simply as: good. She had felt the fear and stood up anyway and done exactly the right thing. That was what mattered. The story could be as embellished as she liked.
He was very proud of her.
He kept this to himself because saying so would make her impossible to have a conversation with for at least a week.
◆ ◆ ◆