Cohost writing prompt: @Making-Up-A-Villain — Villain who is trained in the bow and arrow arts
The archer walks carefully into the camp, hands where the bandits can see them, face blank as her eyes dart from the berserker — a huge, knotted bundle of muscle and rage — to the paladin — oblivious, focused concern — and finally, cradled in the paladin's lap, the wizard's pale, unconscious face, a rivulet of blood slid down from her hair and across her cheek.
The most alert of the bandits, not engaged in sneering or casual swagger in the archer's direction, is the man pointing a rock-steady crossbow at Malia's prone chest.
"Seems you have us," the archer says, to the bandits' obvious leader, a grinning, slightly seedy fop with a bow of his own slung across his back.
"Seems I do!" He flourishes a bow. "Scathelocke, good folk. Doing a service to the poor of the parish by lightening your purses in their favour."
"You'd be the poor in question, aye?" She favours him with an unimpressed once-over. "I can empty my coin-pouch. My friends, no doubt, already have. And yet here you still are, in force, threatening us."
He grins wider. "Ah, now," he says, "it seems to me you're wandering adventurer types. Up on your luck, maybe, but never as laden with riches as coin-hungry village merchants think, eh? No, I have a better idea, friend: you see, although I am the finest bowman these woods have ever seen, this business of brigandry could use the hand of experience."
"Not a good start, if you wanted our help," the archer says flatly. "Came to the thought after inspecting the fullness of our purses, aye?"
He shrugs unrepentantly. "What say you, lady," he says, "to a wager?"
"As an adventurer, I'd say to you my life's a wager, often enough, and it doesn't leave me much taste for them as sport. What do you want from me?"
"You look to be of some skill with a bow." He nods cockily to hers, unstrung on her back. "And as I said: I'm unsurpassed. Let me set a target on some yonder tree, and we'll both shoot for it. If you're the victor, you can go. If I am, you stay a while and put your skills to use. Either way, no cause for any unpleasantness."
"I do prefer not to have unpleasantness," she says, measured, not looking at the wizard.
"Aye, then!" Scathelocke claps his hands merrily, unslings his bow; casually nocks a shaft and fires it into the bole a tree some distance away. "That's our target, lady; feel free to take your shot. Split that shaft where it rests, and you and yours are free to leave."
She looks at his smug face. "You can hit that, aye?" she says.
"Aye."
"That's some skill you have." She unslings her bow, unhurriedly strings it, and steps up next to him, ignoring any stirring among his casually menacing men. "Well. Let's see."
She nocks an arrow, raises her bow, draws. Exhales, holds her aim. Carefully relaxes the bowstring again, arrow still gripped against the string by the pinch of her drawing fingers.
"I'n not," she says, matter-of-factly, "accustomed to having to hit things quite so fine. I'm not at all sure I can."
"No harm in showing how close you can get!" Scathelocke says, grinning.
"Aye?"
She's fast; spinning on her heel, raising and drawing in a single motion, arrow loosed before they can react. The man with the crossbow begins to topple, shaft sunk deep in his eye; her bow hits the floor before he does, and Scathelocke makes the surprised sound of a man with a short and practical knife abruptly sunk as far as it will go in his guts.
Malia opens her eyes.
"You were dead the moment you touched our wizard, you fuck," the archer hisses, hand white-knuckle tight around the knife hilt, twisting; and stands unafraid but shaking as the bandits unravel like knitwear with a running toddler holding the loose end, into still-screaming blood-coloured filaments that whirl around the clearing as if in an eddying hurricane.
Scarcely a minute later, everything is deathly still, the trees strung with a horrifying, complex knot of vibrating string, still audibly buzzing with a chorus of faint, endless screams.
"I got coshed while I was taking a piss behind a tree," Malia says, one hand pressed to her head, and the archer ducks under the filaments to kneel by her.
"I'll keep a better lookout next time," she promises earnestly, and the wizard gives her a screwed-up grimace of a smile.
"You were all the way down the road looking for trouble from ahead," she says. "And see? Everything's fine now you're back." She reaches her free hand up, and twangs the nearest filament; the tormented howling loudens and changes pitch as it thrums.
They sit her against the barbarian's sheltering bulk, while the paladin gently inspects her head, fingers godlight-limned, and the archer drags away the crossbowman's corpse into the underbrush. A while later, she drags away Scathelocke, too, despite his terrible, moaning, gut-clutching prostestations that he isn't dead. Her voice is indistinctly audible, receding under the trees, the words of her reply lost to the breeze.
"I'm certain a paladin, at some point, is supposed to have some objection to leaving a stabbed man to die in a ditch," Malia observes, cuddled boneless against the berserker's chest. "Or leaving done what I've done to these souls," and Arlo grunts, soaks a rag from his waterskin, and begins to gently wipe the blood from her face.
"Well," he says, a hard little note in his voice. "Vengefulness is the least of the sins of an imitation paladin, aye?"