I hand over the big, bright Hyrkanian bow to Marius, and a quiver of thirteen arrows with it.  His flesh is inscribed with elaborate oaths of service to the life of paid pain - the warrior life.  I would thank Wotan for receiving so experienced a murderer to use, if I was not sure that the Great Father would tear out my tongue and cast me into a seraglio as a lesson in what gratitude will get me.<br/><br/>All the same, I look at the machinery of those muscles and the fine, dark promise of the tattoos, and I know I am a lucky girl.<br/><br/>The other bow goes to Amara; her quiver holds seventeen arrows.  I spend a moment taking the measure of her, feeling like an epicure studying the sweep of a champagne glass.  And the cool craft of her features is as alluring as blown glass.  Her smell effervesces in the head.  All very alluring.  Her distress, all the more so.<br/><br/>"Can we do this?"  Amara asks.<br/><br/>The lads are already beginning to look up, and there's a dark rim to their staring eyes as they face the questioner.  I need their eyes clear.  They have to lead us, straight and swift and true.  They need to not think on the most poisonous question in the world.<br/><br/>So I speak fast.<br/><br/>"Yes."  I tell Amara and her protector and the lads and the little girl in black claws so far off already.  "We will do this."<br/><br/>Though, technically, we cannot.  Technically, her doubt is justified.  Technically, nothing can move at all.<br/><br/>When I first began shooting - after he gave up taking me to be whipped for my impetuousity and relented to teach me to shoot - my father's fletcher and game warden, Bolor, explained.  He sat me down in the high, ice-green grass at the edge of a sun-stripped glade, and whispered to me while a doe foraged some seventy-five yards away.<br/><br/><div class="quoteheader"><div class="topslice_quote">Quote from: Thoris</div></div><blockquote class="bbc_standard_quote">"Can you hit the doe with this arrow?" Bolor asked me, holding up an arrow like atop a weather vane.<br/><br/>I replied I did not know.  I was not all that sure I wanted to.<br/><br/>"You cannot shoot the doe with this arrow."  Bolor explained.<br/><br/>Then I wanted to.  Somewhat.  Just to show him.  I told him I could.<br/><br/>"No."  Bolor insisted.  "This arrow is where it is at any point in time, right?"<br/><br/>I nodded.<br/><br/>"Even in flight, at any given moment, the arrow is at a single point in space.  Just like we are at rest here, and the doe there; unmoving.  To occupy a definable point in space, an object must be at rest.  If everything when it occupies an equal space is at rest, and if that which is in movement is always occupying such a space at any moment, even the flying arrow is therefore motionless."<br/><br/>I frowned.  I suspected Bolor was not having me on, and this realization made his words all the more perplexing.  He talked on.<br/><br/>"Nothing moves.  Nothing can even start."<br/><br/>He leaned in.  He gripped the arrow in his hand.<br/><br/>"Except that belief makes it so.  Except that intention forces it to start."<br/><br/>Bolor held the arrow fixed hard in his grip, showing me how impossible it would be to take it.<br/><br/>"You cannot kill that doe with this arrow."  He damned me.  But I wanted to kill the doe with that arrow.  I needed to.  And, after I broke two of Bolor's teeth and took the arrow, I did.</blockquote><div class="quotefooter"><div class="botslice_quote"></div></div><br/>"We will do this." I repeat, slapping Liam on the shoulder to get the lads moving.  I rake the fond fire of my eyes over Amara's as I pass her, close enough to nearly brush hands.  I keep hers in mine until the luster spreads.<br/><br/>She had asked the most critical, most deadly, most important question in the world.  I gave the only answer.<br/><br/>And so now I lope for the forest, leading the lads who will lead us, and telling them, "Take us with all haste to whatever blighted place the raiders might have come from in the direction they fled.  If they are really doubling back and laying ambushes like Arden says, we may even beat them there."<br/><br/>I brush my hand against the waterskin by my side.  It is full, and the one beside it is empty.  We are prepared.  All we need now is speed, and lots of it.<br/><br/>"We will forage from the slain," I tell Amara, addressing her concerns for funds and food.  My thoughts are on the raiders - on what location, in the direction they went, they might conceal themselves at, that is associated with dark rites.  Surely Liam or Parzi will know.  We will discuss it on the way.  Even information, plans, must be foraged.<br/><br/>Bolor once told me that the bearded stargazers of Colgos had proved their fastest hero, Arkhales, could not outrun a tortoise if the shelled slouch had a head start.  "The pursuer must always reach a point the pursued started at, and by then, the pursued will have moved on," he insisted.<br/><br/>But I want to out run the raiders to their lair.  I want to reach their reedy, reeking terrain, scout them out on it, and shoot them down in shocked rows.  The hero will out run the tortoise.  We will do this.  Amara will rescue herself.<br/><br/>We move.<br/>