Admonishing Ray is meant to do nonlethal damage but it assumes you're fighting the sort of people you run into in Golarion, not random commoners. She tries Sleep, first.

They have very little in the way of spell resistance and they go down. 

Which one is the scrawniest and would be easiest to lift.

The youngest-looking of the men is maybe nineteen, with a scruffy straggly half-beard, and is still taller than her but probably doesn't weigh much more. He has a dagger on a belt and is wearing a pack of some kind. 

She lands, takes his dagger, pats him down for any other weapons.

He's got a knife in his boot but that's all. (His boots are also very worn, with a hole in the sole, and his leather tunic is ripped in the side and very poorly repaired.) 

Uh huh. Lawless and poor, and Leareth had wanted to fix it, and then the Cataclysm -

She floats in the air a few feet above him and then wakes him with a mage-hand slap in the face. 

He startles awake with a muffled squawk, scrambles up on hands and knees, reaches for his dagger and then his boot and then looks around wildly. 

"Here. Why did you attack us."

He twists around and his eyes go saucer-wide. "I - I..." He seems to be trying to answer but is panicking too much to manage it. 

Well, she'll also read his mind in case he's managing to think it. "I want to know if someone sent you or if you did it of your own initiative."

"...What are you?" he says out loud.

He's thinking that he can't make sense of her question and why she cares so much whether someone sent him, which obviously no one did, who would send them, it's not like they work for the King's court or like the King's tax-patrols would stoop so low as to steal people's horses, they're not the most trustworthy people but they're not that level. They'd been waiting for someone to go by on the path with farm goods for market, something better than vegetables, because they're hungry and out of meat and got caught and kicked out of the local noble's (warlord's) forest where they'd been hunting game before.

And then a harmless-looking old woman and kid came by with real horses, and didn't have no weapons on them, which was weird and maybe he should've suspected it was a trap but they had horses, he'd been thinking how much silver they could get for a horse in the city, and he hadn't been at all surprised when Gatch hissed for them to attack, get the kid's horse first. Who is this woman, what's she doing here, he had no inkling she was a mage - he thought mages dressed fancy, that they didn't just look like old peasant women who for some reason owned a horse, and the horses weren't even real, up close it was obvious they were magicked somehow out of river-fog - he feels very stupid and scared and he's wet himself and absolutely expects he's about to die... 

Soon to be the Queen of Cheliax, not that she's planning to tell anyone that. A cleric of Iomedae, but what does that even mean, here. A fourth-circle wizard wearing things that are extraordinarily valuable even back home and beyond value, here. "I'm not going to kill you," she says. "If you do it again I might. Go get out of here and I'll wake the other ones up and send them after you in a few minutes."

He stays frozen for a moment (he's considering asking for his weapons back, but that's very stupid and he doesn't) - he gets up and flees into the orchard. 

She is not giving his weapons back. Honestly it is arguably quite stupid to not kill bandits who do not have many realistic alternatives to being bandits and will presumably keep at it and kill people who are not bandits but - it is also arguably quite stupid not to kill spies in your palace. 

She checks the other two surviving men for weapons.

They've got daggers too. Cheap low-quality pot metal, already kind of dulled. One of them also has a little knife hidden in his sleeve. 

And food? Spare clothes? Anything she and Ma'ar could use?

Their packs contain some loaves of hard travel-bread, and a waterskin containing some sort of wine, and rolled-up coarse woollen blankets, and a coil of rope, and a couple of candles packed with a flint-and-steel. 

She is going to steal their packs and then fly back to where she left Ma'ar.

He's managed to fly himself to the other side of the river and is hovering in midair at head-height, above a field of barley, curled into a ball and with a clumsy shield of mage-energies around him, shaking. 

"Hey. We should head back to the horses and then land, the spell's going to run out soon."

It takes him a moment to respond, but he uncurls and makes eye contact, and then drops his shield and holds out his hand to grasp for hers. 

She guides him back over to the horses and then they can land and sit by the side of the road and she can hug him until he objects to this.

He seems much more in favour of hugs now, possibly because his clothes are drenched and even in the warm summer he's shivering a little, the river-water was cold. He buries his face in her shirt, where if he sniffles a bit it's plausibly because he got water in his nose, and slowly his breathing slows to normal and he stops shaking.

"What did you do to them," he says, muffled because he hasn't unhidden his face at all yet. 

"Three of them died in the Fireball. The other three I let run off into those fields, though I took their weapons and two of their packs."