Riuta had only been built in the last year or so, according to Charlotte, and she wanted to see how it was faring. If it was anything like the rest of the province, then it wasn't faring well at all. They arrived just before the sun was about to rise, when the majority of people weren't outside to rage at them and already it wasn't hard to tell that Vincent's suspicions had been right.

Newer colonies always struggled, that was to be expected, but the dying crops and tiny wooden huts shouldn't have been there. After a year, they should have been establishing something worthwhile. Or perhaps not, perhaps it was normal for Ilsania. It wasn't like Vincent was an expert on anything except how to stay alive.

A woman with long greying hair met them at the entrance of the town, flanked by two men holding candles in brass holders. "Mayor Truman, I presume?" Charlotte asked when they reached her, her face hidden by the darkness.

"Yes ma'am, welcome to Riuta," she said in a voice that carried years with it. "I trust that you are not too tired from your journey to have a conversation with me."

"I can speak for a while. I know you've had some issues you've been wanting to discuss with me about for a long time," Charlotte replied as she opened the carriage door and climbed out. Nicholas followed close behind her, ordering Mira and another guard to take the carriage and the horses to the nearest stables.

Mayor Truman's house was close to the edge of the town, a single storey brick building that was still in the process of construction. Vincent left Sparks in the stables next door with a bale of hay and soothing words, following the Governor into the cold home. Two of the other guards walked next to him, people he had never bothered to learn the names of. It wasn't as if they had spoken to him at all.

"I apologise for the state of my home, Governor Thompson," Mayor Truman said as she led them into a small office, her two men moving to light the candles in the room. "It's not so easy to get our hands on the bricks to build it. Unfortunately, some of your guards will have to sleep in the inn, but I have enough room for you and your advisor."

Charlotte waved a hand at the older woman. "It's not an issue," she said, before turning towards Vincent. "You and Mister Bowers will accompany me in this meeting."

It was the first one he had sat in on during the whole trip. At most of the towns, when they weren't being yelled at by angry crowds or watching innocent people being shot, Charlotte sat with the mayor's of each town and talked through whatever problems they had. Vincent had never been given an opportunity to listen in on those meetings, no matter how curious he was.

He tried to keep the sly grin off his face as they walked into the office, shooting a quick glance at Spencer, who seemed just as pleased to be finally learning something useful on their long and stressful journey. The others waited outside as Nicholas closed the door behind them and gave Vincent a wary look.

"I'm sorry for having to do this so early in the morning, but like I said in my letter, this is urgent," the Mayor said while one of her men poured steaming mugs of tea at the desk behind her. She gestured for Charlotte to sit in one of the two armchairs in the middle of the office, and took the one across from her.

The two women sipped the tea they were handed, while Nicholas stood behind the Governor with his hands at his sides, looking more like a guard than an advisor. Vincent took his usual place by the door and waited with more anticipation than he should have.

"You said in your letter that there's a tribe nearby?" Charlotte asked. Immediately, Vincent hissed in a breath. Of course, it was a tribe, what else would it have been?

"Yes, ma'am, one that continues to attack us when we try to farm or dare to step foot outside the town," she explained and her gaze flicked briefly to Spencer, who stood at the door with him. "We haven't the resources to fight them any longer. Our gunpowder and vireen storages ran out some time ago and the townsfolk are too nervous to fight them at a close range."

Of course they were, they knew they'd lose if they tried. All he could think about were the spears that embedded themselves in the townsfolk days ago. Charlotte hummed in thought, drumming her fingers against the arm of the red chair. "What would you have me do about it?" she asked.

The Mayor looked at her with desperate eyes, the hand holding her tea shaking from either age or worry, Vincent couldn't tell. "Like I said, we don't have the resources to deal with this anymore. The people are angry, the natives are as well. I know we're only a new town but we don't know what to do. We're struggling," she said, her wrinkled face filled with despair.

"You and the rest of Morgot," Charlotte muttered, letting out a tired sigh. Pale morning light seeped in through the single window, bathing the room in its pink-orange glow. "When we get back to New Feridian, I can order extra gunpowder to be sent here. As for vireen, there has been a shortage lately, I'm in the middle of figuring out why. Crops don't grow well here but vireen is a native plant, you'd think it would be fine. Transports will come as soon as they can.

"Until then, I'm sure my guards would be more than happy to help you reduce the threat. They have vireen and working weaponry. It will most likely not be a permanent fix but it will hopefully give you a little bit of time to wait for gunpowder. Does that sound reasonable?"

The old woman nodded furiously, placed her cup on the table next to her chair and reached forward to grab Charlotte's hand. "Thank you, ma'am. You don't understand how stressed I've been since you gave me this town. I wanted to make our country and Queen proud, but it's been hard."

Charlotte gave her a pat on the hand, a sweet smile on her face as if she hadn't just suggested killing people again. "I understand completely," she said in a soothing voice. "I'm sorry it's been hard. I'm doing what I can to find out what's going on."

The two women kept talking, but Nicholas stepped away from them, moving towards the door. "Mister Mortimer, you will take those at the stables with you and find the tribe. I'm sure Mayor Truman's men will aid you. I don't want you to attack yet, not unless they do first, just survey so we know what we're dealing with," he said, pointing out of the window. "Mister Bowers, you will take their place at the stables and look after the horses with the carriage driver. Do you both understand?"

"Yes, sir," Vincent grumbled. He pulled the door open, making way for a disgusted Spencer, and followed after him. He doubted there was much else to be heard in the little meeting, only what he had heard a hundred times before.

One of the men that had been with the Mayor hurried to catch up with them as they walked towards the stables, offering to show them the way with a watery smile. People were walking the dirty streets, sparing the newcomers a wary glance, particularly Spencer, who said and did nothing about it.

He didn't stop when they reached the stables, but kept walking towards the tall trees behind them. With a smirk on his face, Vincent turned towards Mira and the other guard. "Mister Ulandra has told us to check out the native tribe not far from here," he told them and jerked a thumb at the young man behind him. "He's going to show us the way."

"But," the young man stammered. "He said that only you-"

"Doesn't matter, show us the way," Vincent ordered.

Mira let out a grumble and pulled her pipe from her pocket. "Let's get going then," she said. Vincent longed to pull the rock of vireen from his bag on Sparks's side, but he doubted he would need it. He would make do with the pipe he had smoked that morning; there wasn't going to be anything to worry about.

Mayor Truman's hired man couldn't have been much older than Vincent, and while he stammered his way through sentences, he was good with directions. Occasionally shooting a worried glance at Spencer, who was dead quiet, he took them out of the town and into the thick scrub. The dawn light made it hard to see by and Vincent constantly tripped on roots and fallen branches. For once, Spencer didn't laugh at him, as silent as the rest of them.

Instinctively, he had a hand on the hilt of his gun, wisps of vireen magic wrapping around it. With a sharp hiss, he ripped his hand away. Nicholas had said to just survey them, but he knew that eventually they'd be sent back to kill them. He had no idea what he was going to do when they found the tribe, it was something he would have to make up at the time. But he wasn't going to let anyone kill them, not anymore. It didn't matter if they were attacking the town, they had every right to and he wasn't going to kill them for that.

He didn't know how long they walked, it could have been an hour, it could have only been a few minutes, but it was dark and quiet and uncomfortable. There was no sign of anything in the trees, but he had to trust that the Mayor was telling the truth, even though his instincts told him that she wasn't.

All five of them stopped when voices drifted through the trees towards them. "They're not far from here, but we have to be careful," the young man said. "If we can hear them, they can hear us."

Even with vireen in his system, he couldn't see anything through the thick branches and bushes. He pursed his lips and gave the young man a sharp look. "Do you want to fight them?" he asked.

"N-No," came the reply.

"Then leave, we'll deal with this," he ordered, gesturing back the way they came. The young man didn't even wait a second before he was darting back through the trees towards Riuta, leaving the little group of guards to stand alone.

Mira, still smoking her pipe, regarded him in silence for a moment. "We're just supposed to watch them, right? See how big their numbers are?" she asked when she pulled the pipe from her mouth.

"That's what Nicholas ordered," Vincent replied. "They are apparently attacking the town and Charlotte has ordered that we deal with it."

"And the first step is figuring out if we can. Right, of course," Mira said. Even she looked like she didn't want to be there. Hadn't she mentioned that she'd had to kill native people before? Vincent wasn't sure what he was supposed to think of her, but maybe she had similar thoughts to him and Spencer.

He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. "Whatever the outcome is, I won't hurt them. I don't care what they're doing," he said, voice low in his throat.

"Disobeying orders can be seen as treason, especially for someone like you," the man with them growled, glaring at him. Vincent had completely forgotten he was even there.

"Don't care. They don't deserve this," he hissed.

"They're savages," the man said, voice filled with disgust. He went to say more, but Mira's hand on his arm stopped him.

She didn't smile for once and it made nervousness well in Vincent's gut. "Come with me, Robert, we'll walk around the back and see what we can find. Vincent and Bowers can take the front," she said, not waiting for anyone to reply before she marched the man away from them. "We'll meet back up here in twenty minutes."

They were gone within seconds, leaving Vincent and Spencer to stand in the middle of the scrub in silence. Anger coursed through him, but he pushed it aside as much as he could, not wanting it to get the better of him as it usually did. There were things to be done and he had to at least act like he was following orders. If he knew what the tribe was doing, then it would be easier to make up a lie should he need to.

Spencer didn't say anything when Vincent reached him, but there was a hint of a smile on his face. It was hard to not make a sound as they walked through the bush towards the voices. There was a nervousness within him that he just couldn't shake. If they were attacking the town, what would they think about two strangers spying on them?

There wasn't time to answer his question, not when the trees were parting up ahead. The sight of the tribe took his breath away. When he heard the word tribe, he thought of haphazard tents, of people who were more animal than human, of angry attackers, but every time he saw the natives of Ilsania, his thoughts were proven completely wrong.

This tribe didn't even use tents like others did, but simple wooden structures built to lean against the trees. Unlit campfires dotted the clearing they had set up in, woven mats surrounding them. It was huge, bigger than any he had ever seen, spreading further into the trees where he couldn't see.

And there were people everywhere. A few slept in the shelters or on the mats in the middle of the open air. Others tended to the food they had stored in woven baskets, or talked among each other, but they weren't the ones that caught Vincent's attention. In the middle of the space, on a mat next to an unlit campfire, lay a man, injured and bleeding, a gunshot wound in his stomach.

So much for having run out of gunpowder. Spencer made a noise in the back of his throat as they huddled behind the thick trunk of a tree. "And they want you to kill these people," he muttered.

"I thought they weren't your people," Vincent whispered.

"Doesn't mean I can't sympathise with them. They don't deserve any of this," he said and ran a hand through his dark hair. "That man is dying, all because they're fighting people who came out of nowhere to take what they owned."

"Isn't that what we do? Steal?"

"We steal from those who deserve it. These people don't."

Vincent frowned and watched the injured man on the mat. No one else seemed to pay him much attention, despite the fact that he was dying right in front of them. It felt wrong to watch, but he couldn't tear his eyes away, an awful sadness washing over him. It reminded him of the man they had seen a few towns ago, shot for no reason even though he was just trying to bring a gift.

As he watched, a woman walked towards the man, tall and lean, with grey hair running down to the middle of her back. Like most of the people around her, she wore a few thin strips of cloth to cover herself, although others didn't even go that far. She squatted down next to the man and said something to him that Vincent didn't understand.

In her hands was a lump of something he couldn't see through her dark fingers. She pressed it to the wound on the man's stomach, ignoring how he bucked in pain. Pale pink smoke rose from her hands, smothering them and the man's torso. She sat in silence as the smoke drifted up into the sky, catching the attention of a few of the others around her. She focused only on healing her patient, but even Vincent knew that there was no hope for a wound that bad. Vireen could only do so much.

The smoke eventually faded and the woman sat back with a heavy sigh. Whatever she was holding fell from her grip and rolled across the dirt and grass towards Vincent and Spencer's hiding place. A rock, just like the ones he had in his bag, pink veins running through it. How did she get her hands on something he had only seen properly in a mine?

It wasn't a question he was going to get answered for a long time. The man sat up and hugged the old woman, tears in his eyes. There was no wound in his stomach, just a faint scar to show that something had once been there. It shouldn't have been possible, but there was no denying what he saw. The man was completely healed from a wound that should have killed him.

"What the fuck?" Spencer asked

He should have kept his mouth shut. The old woman's head shot towards them, her eyes narrowing as she stared into the trees. Luckily, no one else noticed what she was looking at, but that didn't stop her from trying to find them. Vincent glared at him, a finger to his lips as he waited for the woman to look away.

But she didn't. She stood, leaving the man to be embraced by others, his family. A hand landed on Vincent's shoulders as Spencer stood, shooting a smile his way. "I just want to see," he said when Vincent tugged on his sleeve. "They won't hurt me."

The old woman was close to their tree when Spencer revealed himself, hands held up in surrender. She gasped, freezing in shock as he walked towards her. He looked everything like them but also nothing like them, dressed in the same grey uniform he had been wearing for days, his hair short and clean compared to theirs. But he had their dark skin, slightly paler, and their face shape. He looked like one of them.

Eyes wide, she reached towards him. Spencer froze where he stood, arms still in the air. Vincent wanted to reach for him, to pull him back, and hated that he was scared that something would happen to him. There was no way of knowing how they would react to someone who was obviously Nuran born walking into their camp.

He stayed where he was, biting down hard on his lip. The old woman grabbed Spencer's hands and pulled them down to his sides, smiling brightly at him. One hand moved to his face, cupping his cheek as if he were familiar, the other still holding tightly to his hand. There were tears in her eyes, streaming down her cheeks as she whispered something to him, but Vincent didn't understand any of their language.

It seemed that Spencer didn't either. His face wasn't visible, but he was as stiff as a board as the woman held him like he was family. The others, even the once injured man, stared at him with mixed expressions of curiosity and fear. The woman, still smiling, tugged at Spencer's hand, whispering to him all the while.

She tried to pull Spencer forward, towards the group of people who had stopped to stare at the stranger in their midst, but he resisted. He shook his head, pulling his hand from her grasp roughly. She watched in surprise as he turned away, pushing back through the bushes and trees, but didn't try to follow him.

Vincent's hand was in Spencer's before he could realise what was going on. They walked away from the tribe, from the woman and her vireen, past Mira and the other guard waiting in the distance. Even as it faded from view, hidden among the leaves, Vincent couldn't stop staring behind him, and couldn't stop thinking about what he had seen.