When Mal saw the assassin, lying prone on the canvas between two guards, she shocked Otto most of all when she screamed “Murderer!” and began trying to throttle him. It wasn’t the kind of thing he would have expected from her, and it seemed to come as a surprise to Kirkbuzzer as well as far as anybody could tell. The assassin’s eyes bulged, spluttering for air as her strong hands pressed down on his windpipe. If his limbs weren’t tied, splinted, and incidentally broken, they would have flailed. As it was, he writhed.
Mal felt the strong hands of the ninja guards on her shoulders, and relinquished her grip before they forced her to. She stepped back, shoulders heaving. Fire burned in her eyes with blast furnace intensity.
“The Shaman’s hospitality knows no limits,” said a guard. His eyes, visible through the slit in his mask, were blue and reproachful.
“Then the Shaman is a fool, and you’re all as good as dead. You hear me?” said Mal, raising her voice and turning to address the gathering crowd. “Dead! If you let that poisonous man live!”
“Silence!” rang out a voice. The Shaman stepped out from among the people, throwing back the hood that had concealed her face. “Fool, am I? I extend the hand of friendship equally, without favour, even to the violent and the cruel. To some this appears foolish. However, I believe in the power of good over evil. Evil cannot survive in the presence of good, not for long.”
“The trick is lasting long enough when evil men are trying to destroy you and everything you stand for,” said Mal.
“I see only one person bringing the shadow of violence to our secret grove, and the broken man before me had nothing to do with it. Take her to the cell,” said the Shaman, waving her hand to a guard.
“You… you idiot! You’ll see!” said Mal, striding forward to face the Shaman. She towered over the old woman. “Mercy is a foreign concept to him! Yours is wasted!” she said as the guards dragged her away.

A dog-like animal scratched its ear as Otto rounded the corner to the cell door. It was on a chain, but the chain had a link made out of thin wood so that the animal could give chase to an escapee at a moment’s notice.
“Miss Malison?” said Otto through the door. “They’ve let me take the afternoon off to try to talk to you.”
“Leave,” came the voice from the other side. “If you want to help me out, go put your boot on that snake’s neck and press down until you hear something break.”
“This isn’t like you, miss.”
“And how would you know?” said Mal acidly. “You don’t know a damn thing. You big stupid – man.”
Otto stood quiet for a second, then nodded to himself. “Well, miss. I’ve got the whole afternoon to listen if you’d like to insult me more. But I’d rather talk to you about – well – anything, really.”
“Oh, you flatter me. What do you want to hear? That I’m sorry? I won’t lie to you, Otto.” She appeared at the window, unnaturally still, a stark contrast from her habitual perpetual motion.
“He’s a bad man, I know that. But it isn’t the answer to bend down to his level. Killing him-”
“Makes me as bad as him? Come on, Otto. Surely even you’re smarter than that old saw.”
Otto set his jaw. “I wasn’t going to say that. Killing him means you don’t get your bounty, remember?”
“I don’t care,” said Mal, bitterly. “I thought I could let him live, take him in alive. Turns out I can’t.”
“What happened between you?” said Otto.
“You wouldn’t understand. You’re too civilised.”

Days passed, and Mal was released from the cell on the condition that Otto be her minder and keep her well away from Kirkbuzzer at all times. As the assassin slowly began to recover his capabilities this task got steadily more difficult, Otto negotiating guards to keep them assigned to opposite sides of the village.
One of those days, when Kirkbuzzer was moving around on crutches with a guard by his side to catch him if he fell, Otto failed. While he was distracted in conversation with a fine-looking young woman carrying a basket of vegetables, Mal slipped under the stilts of a nearby house into a dark crawl-space underneath.
“Miss Malison?” she heard him say as he walked past her hiding spot, with a grim little sense of satisfaction. She had duped him, then. He thought she had sneaked away. But Mal hunted like an insect. Once she knew she was in place, she only had to wait. Their tasks usually took them across the village – therefore the assassin’s would do the same. He would be here eventually. Then she could strike.
She came out of the crawlspace and grabbed the ninja guard by the shoulder, slamming him into the wall opposite. He fell, groaning, and she advanced on the assassin, struggling to back away on his crutches.
“Now, I don’t know what you’ve been told-” said Kirkbuzzer, holding up his hands.
“Told?” said Mal, and sent a fist across his jaw with a crack. The crutches fell away, and his knees buckled as he fell back into the dirt. She stood over him, imperious. “What possible explanation could you have for what you’ve done?”
“Who are you?” said the assassin. Mal didn’t have an answer for him. Words were useless to her now. She put her foot on his chest and shoved him down into the ground, and he wheezed as ribs threatened to crack.
“I’ve been looking for you for years, and you don’t remember me?” she hissed. “Maybe a name will jog your memory. Juliustown. You remember that?”
The assassin’s eyes widened. “Oh, shit!” he croaked.
It was at that moment that Mal was tackled to the ground by one of the ninja guards. “She’s insane! She tried to kill me.” said Kirkbuzzer, wiping blood from his mouth. Mal looked up as a shadow crossed over her, and saw Otto.
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” she snarled as the guard bound her wrists together with rope and hauled her upright. “This is between me and him.”
“Listen,” said Otto to the guard. “I’m an officer of the Motte town guard, and this man is wanted for questioning. It would be best if you released him into our custody.”
“You expect me to believe that, you limp lettuce?” said the guard who was raising Kirkbuzzer to his feet. “You couldn’t enforce a dress code.”
Otto looked very sad for a moment, and then his right hand came up like a knife into the man’s stomach and knocked all the wind out of him at once. The ninja bent double and Otto brought his left elbow down on his head, driving him face down into the mud. He extended his hands, palm up, and looked around at the ninja guards.
“Well? Isn’t anyone going to arrest me?” he said. The guards were not cowering, exactly, but nobody wanted to be the one to step forward first. “Well, somebody give me a key to the cell, and I’ll let miss Malison in as well.”

“I didn’t think you had it in you either, to be honest,” said Mal.
“That makes three of us.” They were sitting on the straw-covered floor of the cell. “I just… really wanted to show him I’m not a pushover.”
Mal laughed. “You are a pushover, Otto. It’s what I like about you.”
“Being around you all the time, you’ve rubbed off on me,” Otto said.
“I have, have I?” snickered the tracker, childishly. Otto huffed.
“You know what I meant! Besides, I didn’t just want to show him.”
“You wanted to prove it to yourself.”
“That too. Aren’t you going to ask me where I learned moves like that?”
“Let me guess: an ancient mystic you arrested for vagrancy who became your secret mentor,” said Mal.
“Wrong.”
Mal sighed. “Where did you learn moves like that?” she said, as if reading lines off a blackboard.
“Correspondence course,” snorted Otto. “But I like your story better.” A moment came and went. “He killed someone you cared about.”
“He killed everyone I cared about. My whole town. He poisoned them. I never found out why.” Mal took a deep breath. “My son. I left him behind. We couldn’t afford to eat, so I went out on a hunt. When I came back, everyone was sick. Dying.”
Otto sat, speechless, not sure what to say.
“I thought it would be enough to see him locked up. To know it would never happen again. I was wrong. When we get him back to Motte,” Mal said hoarsely, “you’d better make sure he hangs.”

The silence that followed hung in the air for a long time, until it was shattered by the sound of bare feet on the dirt – a boy, sixteen or so, sprinting from the woods. “Soldiers! Soldiers on the march!” said the boy, wheezing from the exertion. “They’re coming this way!”