Zia dropped to the ground, and before she could blink Heath was at her side. She could hear him saying something, but his voice sounded far away and echoy, like he was calling from the end of a long tunnel.

Pain pulsed through Zia's calf and she could feel her blood pounding in her head. She closed her eyes to block out the pain, but it did no good. The pain insisted on getting worse and worse with each pump of her heart.

Everything was a blur. A pair of strong arms scooped her up off the ground and started to run. Zia knew they were running because the fast bump, bump, bump of their feet matched the quick bump, bump, bump of her headache. With each step of whoever was carrying her, she felt a pang of agony in her left calf.

The carrier set her down on the ground and her new position shot a pang of pain up her leg. "I'm sorry, Zia," a voice whispered. The pain was so intense Zia could only focus on her breathing and keeping herself awake.

The world was fuzzy and swirled around her. Light and darkness swam in her vision. She felt hot and cold, sweaty and shivery. She just wanted to curl up in a ball and go to sleep, but she also wanted to get up and move around to prove she was alright.

But she wasn't alright. She could hear the panicked voice of someone calling her name, begging her to stay awake, to fight the urge to slip into a blissful sleep. She couldn't see his face, but Zia knew it was Heath; his voice was one she was very familiar with.

"We don't have any weapons," Jay's voice said breathlessly. "There's no way to fight back."

Fight back? Zia thought. But she threw the thought from her mind. She had very little energy, and she needed to spend it helping. She tried to think of something she could do to help, but nothing came to mind. She tried to sit up and gather her surroundings to look for something that could help, but someone placed a firm hand on her shoulder and eased her back down. It was a good thing too, because Zia's vision went even more fuzzy as the blood rushed to her head, making her headache more intense.

"Don't," Heath's voice said sternly.

But Zia wasn't listening. She had felt something cold against her ankle when she had moved.

Her knife! It was small, but it was the best that she had.

"My foot," Zia told Heath. She was surprised that saying those two words took so much energy.

Heath shook his head. At least, Zia assumed he did. She saw a blurred, round, face-like figure move back and forth. "No, Zia, it's your calf that's hurt.

"My foot," Zia repeated. "Knife... boot." Zia had barely struggled out the last word when Heath darted to her feet and reached into the soft leather of her boot. He grabbed the knife and gently unsheathed it from its brace on her ankle.

"She has a knife," Heath said breathlessly. "Ike, can you do anything with this?" he showed Ike the knife.

"I don't know. There's who knows how many of them and only one of me, with one knife. That means I would have to fight all of them at close quarters. My specialty is long-range combat. I prefer to not do close-combat."

"I do," Jay volunteered.

Heath nodded and passed the knife over to Jay. "Do you think you can take all of them?"

Jay laughed. "Do you? No, I'll be the distraction. I got a look at them when we were running. There are eleven of them, and they only have one man with a crossbow. The rest are equipped with swords. I'll keep the swordsmen busy while you two make your way to where the crossbowman is posted on the far hill and take him out."

"Two of us?" Heath's voice said. "I don't think so. We need to get this dart out of Zia's leg and patch it up before she loses too much blood. I'm staying here."

"I... can... take care... myself," Zia grunted.

"Don't try to speak, Zia," Heath told her, gripping her shoulder. "You just need to focus on staying awake."

"I'm... fine..." she tried to say.

"No, you're not. Just shut up."

"Excuse me?" Zia tried to say it with a smile, but her headache caused her to cringe.

"We need to move now," Jay said urgently. "They'll be here any minute now. We'll have to draw them away to keep them from discovering Zia. Ike, I'll give you thirty seconds' head start. You make your way to that crossbowman and take him out quickly."

"Aren't you worried you'll get shot?" Ike asked him.

"No, I am not. I'll be fighting their men at close-range, and it would be too much of a risk for the crossbowman to take a shot at me without hitting his own men."

"Then why do you need to take out the crossbowman if he won't be a problem?" Heath asked, slowly lifting Zia's wounded leg into his lap. The movement sent a flash of pain through her foot, and Zia grit her teeth so hard she was sure one of them would crack as tears sprung to her eyes.

"Because he will be a problem once I've taken care of all of the others." Jay's voice was grim, but Zia couldn't focus on that. Heath had started to examine her leg and Zia attention was glued to him. She couldn't decide if she wanted him to tell her that she was going to be fine, or give her the truth. Then again, if the truth was that she was going to be fine, who was she to complain?

"Great, we've got a plan," Ike said. "Now let's put it into action. Go!"

"Godspeed," Jay told him as he made his way back from where they had come from.

"Godspeed," Ike agreed. He turned to leave, but hesitated. Slowly, he turned around and looked Heath in the eye. "Take good care of her."

Heath nodded solemnly. "I always do."

Ike nodded and disappeared into the forest. Zia counted to thirty before Jay left as well, heading in the other direction.

"Did... Skilae... catch... up?" she asked Heath as soon as he left.

"No," Heath told her. "Bandits."

"How... they... find... us...? Weren't... on... path..."

"I'm not sure, but that's not important right now. What is important is you. Let's take a look at your leg."

"Is... dart... still... there?" she gasped, trying to sit up to take a look at it. Heath gently pushed her to the ground.

"Stay down, Zia," he said gently, and surprisingly calmly. "I'll take care of it."

"Is the dart... still there?" she repeated. She watched as Heath dug around in the supply bag that William Borton had given them. Zia hadn't realized that Jay had left it with them.

Heath brought a water skin out of the bag, opened it, and looked at the contents. Not looking at her, he roughly said, "Yes."

Zia blanched. "Get it out. Please, get it out now." She had already been struggling to breathe, but the thought of having an arrow in her leg made her feel ill.

"I'm working on it, Zia," Heath said patiently. He placed his hand under her neck and lifted her head slightly. He brought the water skin to her lips and tipped it back while she drank. The water tasted like dust and sloshed around in her stomach. Zia didn't want to drink it, but Heath insisted. When he was satisfied that she had drunk enough, Heath set the water aside and got to work on her leg.

"This might hurt," Heath warned her.

"Just get this thing out of me." Zia's voice and breathing was steadier after the water, but it was still shaky.

"Do you think you could roll onto your stomach for me?" he asked. "I need to get in a better position."

Zia nodded and bit the inside of her cheek as she rolled onto her stomach, the water she'd drunk sloshing around like an angry ocean as she did, using her uninjured right leg to hold her weight.

"I'll need to roll your pants up past the dart," Heath told her. "I'm going to break the dart in half so there's only a little bit and it will be easier to get the pant leg over. It will move the dart a little."

"Do it."

Heath nodded. Looking grim, he took a deep breath. Zia felt the dart in her calf shift as Heath gripped it, then a sharp pain when Heath snapped the shaft in two. Zia tried not to cry out, but a small groan escaped her clenched teeth.

Heath looked at her and winced in sympathy. "Sorry." He looked down again and began to roll her pant leg up past the arrow.

"It's fine, just get it out," she tried not to shout or sound panicked, but tears still came to her eyes and her breathing came in short rasps.

"That's going to be a bit of a problem."

Zia's stomach dropped past her wounded leg all the way down to her toes. "Why?"

"The dart might be barbed."

Zia's heart joined her stomach in her toes. She shifted her position so she could twist her trunk to look at Heath. "You're good with arrows. Can you determine whether it is or not?" Heath had dealt with a lot of arrows in his time as a skilled archer. If anyone could tell if the dart was barbed, it was him.

Heath sighed. "Without seeing it?" He hesitated. "No."

But there was something about the way Heath had paused that made Zia question the credibility of his answer.

"Heath, please, I can take the pain. Just get this thing out of my leg."

Heath sighed and ran a hand through his hair. "It's going to hurt. A lot. I need to touch the arrow tip in your leg to feel for any barbs."

"You're going to stick your hand inside my leg?" Zia didn't know which disturbed her more, the fact that Heath needed to put his hand inside her leg, or that he could.

"Not in- on. I can feel the arrow tip through your calf," Heath told her. Zia was so hysterical she laughed at herself for being so foolish.

"Go ahead," she said once she had gotten a grip on her sanity again. "I can take it."

Heath huffed. "I have no doubt you can take it. I just don't want to make you take it."

Zia didn't know what to say. Her mind was so muddled from trying to stay awake and trying to get quality breaths while her body was still twisted at the hips. Finally, she said, "Just do what you need to, Heath. I trust you."

Heath gave her a sad smile and set to work. He poured a little water over the wound to clear the blood, and the cool liquid stung the wound. He worked as gently and quickly as he could, but still the disturbance of the dart sent shots of pain up Zia's leg.

Zia counted to one-hundred forty-eight before Heath sat back and smiled. "It's not that bad. The dart isn't barbed, and the blood from the wound is flowing, not pulsing."

The way Heath said it made it sound like good news, but with Zia's flubbed brain it didn't make much sense. "Why is flowing better than pulsing?"

"You'd be losing much more blood if it was pulsing. Pulsing blood means it comes from an artery and the blood won't stop. But flowing is good. We can fix that."

"Well, what are we waiting for?" Zia asked.

Heath smiled, but it quickly disappeared. "I'm going to pull the dart out back the way it went in. And it's going to hurt- a lot."

"You keep saying that," she pointed out.

"That's because it will keep being true."

Zia braced herself, trying to keep her left leg limp so it wouldn't interfere with the passage of the dart. But nothing could prepare her for the sudden, blinding pain that shot through her leg. Her calf felt like the white of a bonfire and the pain made Zia's head spin. Her muscles contorted and she tried her best to hold still. The pain was so intense she nearly blacked out. She balled up her tunic in her fists and squeezed as hard as she could. She hadn't felt this much pain since the night Arch rescued her from Daxtor. She felt the dart as it passed through her calf, tugging at the punctured muscle as Heath pulled it back quickly.

The pain eventually passed, but it felt like forever. When it finally stopped enough for Zia to relax, she twisted to get a look at her wound, but she only got a glimpse of it before Heath tore away the bottom of his gray tunic and wrapped the whole thing snugly in a bandage.

"That's the best I can do at the moment." Heath sounded so guilty that Zia's gut lurched.

"Thank you, Heath. You are truly my hero today."

Ike weaved in and out of the trees, traveling from shadow to shadow to keep himself hidden. He ducked under the protection of a large aspen tree and gathered his bearings. He spotted the crossbowman crouched down in a gathering of small shrubs. He was well concealed, but the glint of the sun off the metal parts of his crossbow gave him away.

Ike glared at him, wishing for once that looks could kill.

He worked his way slowly over to the crossbowman, creeping from shadow to shadow until Ike was in the man's left rear. At the crest of the hill, Ike could see Jay in the small valley-like plain beneath. Ike watched silently as Jay fought like a whirlwind, cutting, jabbing, and moving so fast his hands were a blur when he swung his knife. Ike watched in fascination as Jay deflected a blow that would have cracked his skull open by catching the sword on its hilt with the knife and deflecting it before quickly retracting his hand and slicing it across the man's belly. The man dropped his sword and Jay swiftly scooped it up.

Ike was so distracted watching Jay's magnificent fighting that he had forgotten the whole reason he was up there in the first place. He shifted his attention to the crossbowman. He had his crossbow loaded with a dart identical to the one that he had seen protruding out of Zia's leg- Thin, wooden shaft, iron tip, and black fletching on the end. The crossbowman had his sights set on Jay, waiting for a clear shot.

But he would never get one. Ike would make sure of that.

Jay fought like a demon, Zia's knife in one hand and the sword he had taken from one of the bandits in the other. He slashed and sliced and stabbed and jabbed. He kept his balance on the balls of his feet and kept a low center of gravity so he could dodge fast and attack faster.

He may have been outnumbered, but the bandits weren't all that skilled in combat. He took down one man, and another, and another, sometimes fighting two or three of them at once. Soon, there were only two men left.

Jay knew that the moment that the crossbowman would fire was nigh at hand, but he didn't fret about it. He trusted Ike- odd and bubbly though he may be. He had seen the young man in battle and had complete confidence that Ike could handle himself.

Ike was having some trouble. He had tried to get the crossbowman in a chokehold and make him pass out from lack of oxygen, but after stumbling around for a bit, the crossbowman slammed his back (and, consequently, Ike) into a tree. Ike rolled off the man's back and lay gasping on the ground. The crossbowman pounced on Ike and pinned him to the ground. Ike felt a sudden explosion on his face as the man punched him. His upper lip felt surprisingly wet, and it took Ike a while to realize that it was blood.

Ike tried to get the crossbowman off of him, but something distracted him. The man on top of him wasn't a man at all. It was a boy no older than the age of fifteen. He was tall, making him look older, but his face was so round and youthful that there was no mistaking him for anything other than a teenager.

Pulling his senses together, Ike threw the boy off him, sending him flying through the air.

Ike leapt to his feet and wiped his nose with his hand. It came away red.

He turned his attention to the boy who was approaching him. He had lost his crossbow when Ike had locked him in a chokehold. "You don't want to do this," Ike told the young boy.

"Yes, I rather think I do." The boy smiled evilly. He drew a knife from his belt and held it out as he came closer.

Ike sighed and shook his head. "I tried to warn you. But don't blame me when you end up tied to a tree."

The boy hesitated. "Warn me about what?" he asked, looking a bit pale.

"Oh, it's nothing," Ike said, waving it aside.

"Warn me about what?" the boy pressed. He was closer now, and he held his knife to Ike's throat.

"About this." Ike raised his fist and brought it down swiftly on the boy's temple knocking him out cold.