Chapter 4: Part 5 - What Friends Are For

Vasha hadn't exactly expected fireworks when she was reunited with the rest of the Marauders. They weren't demonstrative types; honestly, neither was she. Still, the rush of gratitude she felt when she entered Eastern Colonnade and saw them huddled together was almost enough to make her weep.

Haki saw her first; Vasha caught sight of his grin over Gull's shoulder. "Well, if it isn't our prodigal engineer. You've taken your time."

Vasha hadn't the faintest idea how long she'd been wandering in the wastes of Malchor's Leap. She'd been with Yelazar for two days and another had passed after she fled. Even with Yelazar's compass, she'd lost her way whilst attempting to turn south. Every path and valley had seemed determined to send her west, and she'd ended up wandering through a landscape of rocky, bone-white outcrops. The camp she'd been making for all this time had to be long behind her; this was one she hadn't even known existed.

"I ran into some complications," she said. The rest of the Marauders turned to survey her. Gull looked unusually unkempt, and Roan's pauldrons were askew, but they looked otherwise unharmed.

"What sort of trouble?" Roan asked.

"Yelazar." There seemed little need to expand the subject beyond that. "How long have you been here?"

"A few hours," Gull replied. "Haki and I were dropped near one another, north of here."

"Right in the middle of a bunch of damn rockpools," Haki grumbled. "What would we have done if we'd ended up in deeper water?"

No-one answered his question. The implications were clear enough: Yinn didn't care where they were deposited. If simply arriving in Malchor's Leap was enough to thin out the teams, that was acceptable to him.

Vasha looked past the rest of the team, to where the land behind the encampment dropped away to the sea. If Gull and Haki had come up that way... "You said you'd only been here a couple of hours–"

Gull was the first to grasp Vasha's line of thinking. "There was a delay in Rata Sum. Yinn was sending us all through personally, yes? With that device of his?"

Vasha nodded. She could still sometimes feel the strange tingling sensation it had created in her flesh, usually when she was on the verge of sleep.

"He sent you through, then Roan," Gull went on. "Some of the other teams went after you. Haki and I were left waiting with those pirates – and Grey."

"Which was when Yinn wandered off," Haki said. "Someone came for him, and there was some kind of argument, and then he just left us to it–"

"We hung around for nearly a day," Gull finished. "Two of the pirates were so drunk by the time Yinn got back, they could hardly stand up. He sent us all through anyway."

And he hadn't bothered to properly separate Gull and Haki. Vasha could see the same questions on everyone else's lips. What had rattled Yinn so badly? Who was he in trouble with in Rata Sum? Was someone else watching over them?

Vasha shuddered. Someone was watching, all right: the Archon. She hadn't told the rest of the team about that mysterious figure, though. There wasn't much to tell, for one thing – her investigations in Rata Sum had proved fruitless. There hadn't been much chance since the end of the previous round, either.

Mostly, though, the discovery that the Archon was particularly interested in her had made the whole thing feel oddly personal. She was reluctant, somehow, to speak his name aloud.

Roan rolled his shoulders, as though shaking off all thoughts of what lay behind them. "We haven't got time to worry about Yinn. I've spent long enough waiting for you three to catch up. We need to move."

"And go where?" Gull sounded exasperated, as though this was an argument they'd had before.

"West," Vasha said, and realised she'd spoken at the same time as Roan. Their gazes met and she shrugged. "Into more danger, right? Yinn isn't likely to send us anywhere else."

At that, there was no disagreement. For all Roan's impatience, though, it was two more hours before they left the camp. Yinn had sent them to Orr with little in the way of supplies; there were packs to fill and armour to repair, and disgruntled Pact members to interrogate.

"You're interfering with our operations," one heavily armoured norn told Vasha, without taking her eyes off the road that approached the camp. "Damn amateurs. You're all bumbling around as though you had bags over your heads, and we're left to pick up the pieces."

"If you'd tell us what the terrain ahead is like, we wouldn't get into as much trouble," Vasha argued, but the norn's lips were pressed into a thin line and it was clear she'd had enough of talking.

"Don't bother." Gull's voice made Vasha turn. "I know this place. We don't need directions."

The Pact soldier gave a dismissive grunt, but Gull's words were enough to make Vasha follow her back across the camp. They passed Roan cleaning his mace and Haki haggling with the armourer, before coming to a stop in the shadow of a broken wall on the eastern edge of the camp.

Where Gull swung to face Vasha and, without ceremony, said, "Yelazar."

Vasha raised an eyebrow. "What about him?"

"Do I need to know what happened when you ran into him?"

"I don't see why you would–"

"Because I've seen his type before." Gull's tone brooked no argument. "Roan told me about the fight you two got into in Harathi Hinterlands. It sounded like exactly what I'd expect from a man like Yelazar. As soon as he sees a woman on her own, he decides she's fair game. Makes him meaner, nastier, and he forgets all about fighting fair. Sound about right?"

Vasha absorbed that in silence. If she was honest, she'd done her best not to think about meeting Yelazar in the Hinterlands. She would never have been able to ally herself with him otherwise. "I think Yelazar's like that with everyone," she said finally.

"Really? Because I had the bad luck of running into him in Rata Sum before we left, and he was exactly as I've just described. Take this as an insult if you want, but there aren't many women left in this game, and even fewer human ones. Yelazar was always going to see you as an easy target, and now you're about the only one. So if you got stuck with him before you arrived here–"

Finally, Vasha understood what was happening. Gull wasn't worried about the integrity of the Marauders, or what sensitive information she might have let slip to Yelazar. Gull was worried about her.

"I'm okay," she said, meeting Gull's eye. "Really. Yelazar wasn't exactly a gentleman, but he didn't try anything... creepy."

Well, apart from suggesting she'd make a useful vessel for his necromantic minions if she happened to die, but Vasha had almost expected that. She certainly wasn't going to dwell on it.

Gull stared at her for a long time. Finally, she nodded. "Good. Because if you weren't okay, I'd want you to tell me. Then, next time we ran into Yelazar, I could break his neck."

Vasha swallowed a laugh. She was oddly touched by Gull's offer, even if it was decidedly violent.

She could see, from the corner of her eye, Haki coming towards them with a disgruntled look on his face. "You know," she told Gull, "I could have killed Yelazar myself. I wouldn't have broken his neck, but I could have shot him."

Gull grunted. "I know that. We're here to look out for one another, though. That's what friends are for."

Friends? The word made Vasha come up short. As Gull walked off, Vasha surveyed the Marauders, still scattered around the camp. Were these people her friends? Did they even understand the meaning of the word?

Maybe they did. They were loyal. They protected her. They expected her to be the best she could be. Wasn't that friendship, of a sort?

Vasha shook her head. She'd never wanted to be friends with the Marauders; she'd certainly never expected it. They'd accepted her, though, in a way she hadn't anticipated.

And, somewhat to her surprise, she found she both liked them and felt at home with them, as she never had anywhere else in her life. She wasn't sure what that said about her personality, that these were the closest friends she'd ever had – the Marauders, and Jean.

"Form up." Roan's voice boomed across the camp. He stood beside the southern gate, hoisting his pack onto his shoulders. Vasha hurried across, falling into step beside Gull and Haki, the latter still grumbling. She found herself watching them out of the corner of her eye. Friendship, she thought, was the wrong word. Belonging, though? In a funny way, that fit.