lly's prose explosion - Zelda Universe Forums (2024)

I like to write, but I'm between drafts on my main project and writing silly stories about a trio of other characters in the mean time. it's a high fantasy with magic, but less "medieval europe" and more "spaghetti western."

here's one of those.

[warning: some swears, I guess? they're bleeped out, though.]

Table of Contents:
The Rite | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
Hare's Ward | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7

The Casters of Castorra
Part One: The Rite

1

Armsman Lyle Canton tossed two fists full of dry brush into the dying campfire and tried to let the hissing and the cracking of the new flame drown out the sobs of the caged children at his back.

No such luck. Every now and then, a muffled cry or un-muffled curse would echo out into the otherwise silent night. Their calls, of course, went unanswered. There were few human ears around to hear them this far out in the Castorra Plain, and the young soldier himself was done trying to offer whispered words of comfort. His superior officer, for his part, was horse in the throat from hollering at them to shut up about their damned f*cking parents.

Or, so Canton had thought.

“Eh, shut the f*ck up about your damned f*cking parents.” On his way back into camp, Broadarm Hinnis was stopped at the tailside of the boxy wheeled cage, peering in at the three little forms inside. Two of them lay still, but a third sat up on his haunches and looked up at the man with wide, red-ringed eyes. Hinnis rattled the iron bars of the cage, spat in the dirt, and then sauntered back to the roadside campsite. “Well, Arm Canton. Seems your fears were, as you say, not unwarranted. There would indeed seem to be something out there in the grass.”

The offending caged boy—the biggest, loudest, and the only one of their three little prisoners never contented to feign sleep—crossed his arms tightly over his chest and snarled.

“Hey. You’ll eat your own sh*t for porridge tomorrow, you make that noise one more time.” Hinnis flashed a gap-toothed grin, and the boy shirked back to the middle of his cage, settling amidst his companions

The Broadarm plopped down on the ground beside the fire and retrieved the flask buried within a shirt pocket of his sweat-soaked cotton undershirt. He was a man of near thirty, built like a back-alley cutter, but a splash of boyish freckles hid beneath a patchy black beard and ruddy complexion. Hinnis glanced back at the three little prisoners, all now silent as the night surrounding. Whatever guilt the he may have felt for terrorizing a trio of seven year olds, he drowned in the contents of the flask.

Armsman Canton chose to stay on his feet, hand on the hilt of his shortsword. Keeping the glare of the fire to his back, the young man squinted into the darkness.

A little ways up the hill, the well-trod earth of the Pont Urtza bisected the endless parched countryside that was their kingdom’s eastern border. The land was still, and the road was lonely at all points visible. So it had been for weeks. Their travels had not been disturbed, and Canton was not surprised. Generally speaking, the closer a party got to Alturret, the more likely it was to run into bandits. But they were still a ways away from the city, and these Castorra Plains were hard for living, and most of the eastbound types worth robbing tended to take the rails nowadays.

So here, Hinnis, Canton and their wagonfull of captives were far out enough into the brushlands that no one would bother them. But even then: who would dare attack a pair of King’s Blades and their new recruits?

Canton drew a line in the dirt with the toe of his boot. “But you said you saw something moving out there?”

Hinnis shrugged. “A family of rabbits, sleeping in the bush I pissed on.”

“Oh.” The Armsman took his hand off his blade, suddenly feeling rather silly. He turned back to Hinnis. “Yeah. That must have been what I heard.”

“f*ck's sake. Sit down, boy,” Hinnis said. He held the flask out in an outstretched arm. “You have not been long for this world, my son.”

Canton took the flask with a tentative hand. “Haven’t I?”

“No. One year out the Academy is not long. And here’s how I know that you’re one year out the Academy. Besides the fact that you told me, of course. Besides that. Here’s what gives you away. One: you are not drinking yet. You are not drunk. Fix it.”

Canton took a small sip and disguised it in a big gulp of what was mostly saliva and air and just a hint of a rye burn foul enough to be illegal. “Potent,” he said, setting the flask down beside him. He wiped his mouth with the back of a gloved hand.

“Two,” Hinnis said, counting off on his fingers now. “You are more afraid of our fresh recruits than they are of you.”

Canton took another sip of the liquor, this one legitimate. He strangled the urge to cough. “I’m not afraid of them.”

“Right you’re not,” Hinnis said, straining to lean over and grab the flask without moving his back-side from where it rested. Canton picked it up, tightened the cap and tossed it to the Broadarm’s outstretched hand. “You just keep telling yourself that, boy, and some day we can call it truth. And! Three, of course. Three is that you jump at every little shadow of a cloud in the daytime and every little beetle you hear scurrying about in the night. This far east of Alturret, what’s around us? Behind us, we got miles of desert. Miles. No one’s out to bother us.”

“Kassils.” Canton lowered his voice. “Angry that we’ve taken their sons.”

Hinnis waved him off with an exaggerated swat of his free hand. “Kassils hardly count, Canton. Those crazy religious fanatics don’t care about anything. That’s the point of them, isn’t it? When we took these boys off, did you see one man raise a spear? One wailing mother so much as wobble a widdle kitchen knife in your direction?”

“No,” Canton said. He let his eyes settle on the wavering flame in front of him. It dulled everything beyond and around it. His companion’s face was a dark splotch in his peripherals.

“That’s the beauty of this assignment. The southeastern recruitment is the easiest game in Egion. You and me, we’ll stop at one more village, grab one more little brat, maybe two, and be back to Alturret by week’s end, and then sit pretty. Yeah?”

Canton opened his mouth to say something, and then bit the words back. He simply nodded, and looked back to the flames.

Hinnis chuckled.

“What?” Canton said.

“I know what you’re thinking.”

“I wasn’t thinking anything,” Canton said quickly.

Hinnis tipped the flask all the way back and took one final swig, shaking a few last droplets onto his tongue. “That’s the fourth thing. How I know you’re straight from the Academy. You’re still afraid of old Gillem Hare.”

Canton shook his head perhaps too hard. “I don’t,” he said. “I wouldn’t.”

“You’re a year out, Armsman, so what? Nineteen? Too old to be believing in folk stories and wives’ tales. Gillem Hare isn’t real.”

“People have met him,” Canton said. “Or, claim to have met him, at the very least.”

“Oh, sure.” Hinnis stretched his arms above his head and leaned back. “Sure, sure. He’s everywhere, causing all sorts of trouble. Right, all places at all times. No, Hare’s a name people in Alturret use when they stir of mischief and cause us Blades our bellyaches. But he, himself, is not real, and even the people who know his name don’t come out this close to the eastern border. He's, eh, a concept. A phantom. Real as your lover back home, Canton, real as my second head, and he sure as hell doesn’t do magic.”

Canton scowled. “Not magic. Casting.”

“This far from civilization, it’s about the same thing,” Hinnis said. “Now put out that fire. Check the locks on our little birdcage over there. And then get some f*cking sleep so’s we can shake more firstborns from the Kassilfolk tomorrow.”

---

Armsman Canton awoke to a warm, easterly breeze on his face, the smell of prickled grass, and the rattle of the open cage door swinging on its hinges and clattering against its side. But beyond his eyelids, the world was still dark.

Canton sat upright in one breath and drew his shortsword. The firepit was empty, and the young man could hardly see a foot beyond his own nose, but Hinnis snored gently nor far away.

Canton scrambled to his feet and turned to the cage, blinking into the dark. The doorway hung open, and its contents, scattered to the Four. He tried to listen for the sound of footsteps, for a murmur of voices, any indication of where their three recruits might have gone, but the chorus of the wind through miles of stiff, dry brush was good enough camouflage for three sets of feet.

And it had been good camouflage, too, for the set of feet behind him.

Canton tried to struggle, but the one thick arm that held him from behind was too strong. Another pressed a few inches of cold steel to his throat. “Let go of the sword, Armsman.” The speaker’s gravelly breath was hot on Canton’s his ear. “It will make my life easier. And yours easier, as well. And longer. See, we won’t kill you, unless you give us reason.”

Canton loosed his fingers and the sword’s hilt fell through them and down into the dirt.

“Just two of you, then?” His captor’s accent was thick and provincial, with the flat sort of vowels common in the Navis Countryside, which was, by Canton’s best calculations, hundreds of miles away.

“No. We’ve got three more in a party out scouting. Due back soon,” Canton said. He swallowed, and as he did so, became even more aware of the very closeness of the blade to his neck.

“He’s lying,” said another man's voice somewhere out of view. “Though I can’t imagine why, because you've just got through telling him that you wouldn’t kill him unless you had a good reason to, and lying just feels like a good reason to me.” This voice was strangely textured as well, marked the sort of clipped diction favored in the upper crusts of the capital, again, hundreds of miles north and west.

From where he was held, all Canton could see was the open cage and the grasses that waved beyond it, and above that, a few yards up, the empty stretch of the Pont Urtza. But as the wind died down, he could hear the scene behind him. The smaller steps of a few pairs of feet on one side of him. And on the other side, he heard a voice groan, and gasp.

“Good morrow, Broadarm, sir!” This was a woman’s voice and she, at least, sounded Alturreti. “Have a nice rest?”

“You slu*t! You whor*! Untie me, or I’ll kill you." Hinnis was screaming and writhing in the dirt.

“Ah. A convincing argument, if I’ve ever heard one.” There was the thudding sound of flesh hitting flesh and Hinnis cried out in pain. “Dae, was this the one that was so awful to you?” The woman’s voice had grown soft.

“Yeah.” This came from one of the three young boys. “That one.”

“Shall we teach him a lesson, then? About proper conduct for a righteous man of the King’s Blade?” She hit Hinnis again, and from the yowling gasp that emerged from his companion, Canton had a good idea of where.

“What should we do with this one?” The man grabbing Canton’s arms said. He wrenched Canton around, and for the first time, the Armsman saw the unfolding scene.

Hinnis was sitting up on bound ankles, and his wrists, too, were tied. Standing over him, firmly grasping a fistful of the glowering man’s scalp, was a young woman. She was small and narrow but strongly built, with the short wiry hair and warm brown skin of typical of the eastern border.

Her companion was tall and fair, especially next to the cluster of three small boys who hardly came to his navel. One hand clutched a short and ragged-looking cutlass. The other ran through a mop of carefully disheveled blonde hair. “In that matter, as in all, I defer to your good judgment, Freeman Milt.”

“I wasn’t asking you,” the man with the dagger, Milt, said. “I was asking them.”

“Us?” Hinnis looked up, smirking, and the woman at his side kicked him between the legs. The Broadarm gnashed his teeth. Tears were forming in the corner of his eyes, and he squinted.

“Well, boys?” Milt said. “We need suitable punishment. What are you thinking?”

“Cut their balls of,” the biggest of their captives said.

“Make ‘em eat ‘em!” The second boy balled his fists.

“Now, now.” The tall man laid two hands on the heads of the boys at his side. “We are all gentlemen here, and civilized. Excluding Sid, over there, who is neither.”

“Oy,” the woman said.

“Put them in the cage,” the smallest boy, Dae, said. “And leave it in the road.”

The tall man clapped his hands together. “A brilliant plan! Thoughts?”

“It has style,” Sid said, holding tightly to the Hinnis’s head. “Milt?”

“It’s, what’s the word? Ironic.” Milt shoved Canton back around, and towards the cage. “And the horse?”

“Kassilfolk are always looking for a mount of this caliber,” Sid was forcing Hinnis to his feet. The man struggled, but she held firm, despite barely reaching his shoulders.

“So we sell it,” Milt said, leading Canton back to the cage. “And split the profit two ways.”

“Three ways,” the tall man said. He held the cage door open.

“Two,” Milt said. “You didn’t do anything just now.”

“Hey, now! If I weren’t here, right now, who would be holding this door open for you?”

“No one,” Sid said. “But it just falls open. A fact which you may have known, had you been the one to play the lock in the first place. Which you weren't. You are as useless as we all expected.” Hinnis was hobbling along towards them doubled over in some sort of new pain.

At this close range, Canton got a better look at two of his captors, and was astonished to find that they were all younger than he was, perhaps no older than fifteen or sixteen. Two fully-trained Blades had just been bested by a triad of teenagers.

Hinnis might have noticed this too, because he chose this moment to strike. The Broadarm leaned forward and rammed the tall young man holding the door square in the stomach. The stranger reeled back, grasping at air, and then fell to his backside in the dirt. Hinnis turned back to the girl and lunged for her, head-first.

Sid’s hands flew to her belt and she grabbed on to something that was not an obvious weapon; it was some sort of pouch, the size of two fists. She loosed a tie at the top and cupped her hand over the opening as Hinnis dove.

And then Sid stepped aside and rammed a knee into the man’s stomach.

It didn’t just stop him. It sent Hinnis up a full foot onto the air, and when he crashed to the ground, he had no arms before him to break the fall.

“What the f*ck?” Hinnis groaned and buried his face in the dirt.

The girl was panting as she returned the cap to the mouth of the pouch and retied its seal. “I think, Gray, you were just saying something about me being uncivilized.”

The tall man by the cage door rubbed his behind as he got to his feet. “By the Wills. You are, Sid, but sure as the hells am I grateful for it.”

“No, what the f*ck was that?” The Broadarm was writhing on the ground. “How the f*ck did you do that?”

“Casting,” Canton said, though he’d only meant to think it. Hinnis, now supine in the dirt, scowled.

"Smart man, this one." Gray laid a hand on Canton’s shoulder and shoved him up into the wheeled cage. “In you go.”

The cage ceiling was too short to permit a full-grown adult to stand. It was also narrow enough that when Sid and Gray hoisted Hinnis in with them, the man needed to double his sprawled body to fit when Milt closed the door behind them and forced the lock shut. Milt, as it turned out, was just as young as his companions but was tall enough and made of enough hard muscle that the Armsman did not feel nearly as awful about being bested by a pack of teenagers.

That relief subsided when Gray pocketed the key while Milt unhitched the horse from the cart.

“Hang on,” Canton said. “You’re just going to leave us here?”

The three children had pressed their noses up against the cage. The big round one stuck out his tongue.

“That was the plan, yes,” Gray said.

Hinnis pulled himself upright and leaned against the bars of the cage. “No. That's not the plan. The little one said put them in a cage and leave it in the road. In the road. That’s exactly what he said. That was the plan!”

Milt gently prodded Hinnis in the side through the bars with his steel. “You aren’t allowed an opinion.”

“Then what about me?” Canton said. “You haven’t given us any food or water. If you leave us out here, we’ll die. Who’s going to come along and see us?”

Sid leaned around the corner. “I have heard rumors that this is Kassil country,” she said, beaming. “Folks like that tend to be hospitable, without discriminating. Unless you do something unforgivably nasty. Like kidnap their sons, for instance.”

“It’s unjust,” Hinnis said quickly. “These boys were our right to take, as men of His Royal Majesty’s Blade. There are laws, and we’re the ones keeping them, see. We're doing our jobs.”

“Ah, well.” Sid clapped Milt on the shoulder. “That’s where you’re wrong. ‘Cause the way I always seen it, the King’s law don’t really reach this far out. And there’s only one man dispensing justice in Alturret and all points east. And Milt and Gray and me here, we labor on his behalf.”

Hinnis answered through gritted teeth. “And who might that be?”

“Gillem Hare?” Canton said.

Gray nodded. “Gillem Hare.”

i really enjoyed this story. i think your characterization is vivid, and it's very easy to get a sense of who your characters are. the dialogue between canton and hinnis in the beginning is especially potent.

your prose is easily readable and has good yet subtle variety in word choice and sentence form. i'm thoroughly entertained.

very nicely done, i'd be interested to read the rest of a tale told like this.

thank you so much, muzz! I'm trying to adopt a very particular prose style, so I'm glad it worked for you. I know it's a little inconsistent in places, but, you know, it's a process to cultivate a voice.

(I will totally reply to your thread now and stop being a lazy butt who reads other peoples' stuff and doesn't review it)

Hello Lly!

I am a Muse, or a ZU member who has volunteered to help other members improve their writing. I will be very basic in my first review of your work, then get more precise as I go on. However, I leave it to you if you want me to continue critiquing.

Your story was fantastic. It had defined characters, a vivid setting, and a compelling story. The only real critique I feel compelled to give is that you need to write more!

thank you so much for the critique, guys! I always appreciate feedback.

here's more.

2

Gray Calleford awoke to a sunbeam on his eyes and a shirt thrown over his face.

“Get up.” Milt stood over him, arms crossed over his barrel-like chest, and Gray blinked and rubbed his eyes in the sudden shaft of sunlight that punched through the open flap of the little canvas tent. His companion was fully dressed in his old trousers and an ill-fitting shirt of dark gray homespun.

Gray writhed on his mat, struggling for a position that was more comfortable and out of view of the sun and his towering friend. “Absolutely not.” He covered his face with the scant blanket and threw the shirt in a directionless arc.

“Fine,” Milt said. “Then we’ll leave without you.”

“Fine!” Gray said.

“Fine,” Milt said again, as he ripped the blanket off Gray’s face. “Also, you’ve missed breakfast. And lunch.” Blanket in hand, Milt turned on his heels, pushed out the half-open canvas flap, and left Gray alone in their quarters.

Gray sat up and shook his fist in the air, crying out. “If you wanted me out of bed, telling me there’s no lunch is about the worst—wait, hang on, what’s that for?”

Milt stepped in through the doorflap again, a heavy-looking bucket swinging in his arms. “Water’s a scant resource in these parts, so they say. Now I’m not sure how you’re going to explain to these friendly types how you managed to dump a whole bushel on yourself.” He held the bucket over Gray’s head. “But you talk fast enough, so I’m sure you’ll figure something out.”

“All right, all right, understood!” Gray scooted backwards and snarled at Milt as he rolled onto his feet and pulled his shirt on. “You’ve no sense of humor. None at all.”

Milt shrugged. “We need to make a good impression. Waking up at midday doesn’t do that.”

“Milt, we trekked in at dawn, triumphant and bearing their lost sons. I somehow think the Kassils will forgive me a few hours’ rest.”

“It’s not the Kassils we’re needing to impress, and you know it. She didn’t sleep, so neither did I.”

“The impression’s been made, so far as I have been able to tell. Hare's ward... or whatever she is... is summarily charmed.” Gray said, looping his belt around the waist of his loose linen trousers. “She has realized that I am dashing and intelligent and that you’re… well.” Milt hoisted the bucket onto his shoulder and took a step forward. “Oh, come on. We saved three innocent children from being taken by the Blade. We’re damned heroes. They gave us our own tent. And I think we made quite the team.”

“Just because she doesn’t hate us doesn’t mean she’s going to teach us.”

“She wouldn’t be the one teaching us,” Gray said. Milt set the bucket down on the ground, and Gray could see now that was weighted not with water, but with a small pile of rough brown stones. “You were going to stone me awake?”

“She’ll be the one teaching us until Hare decides we’re worth sh*t,” Milt said.

“So what, we sleep in the dirt for a few months until Sid decides that we’re ready for a next step? Flirt with the locals? Lock a few more Blades in wheelcages?”

“Don’t ask me like I know,” Milt said. “I just mean, Hare doesn’t exactly take on students very often. We’ve got our chance, Four knows how, so let’s make the best of it. This was your idea, anyway. You’re free to go home whenever the mood strikes.”

“Milt.” Gray’s shoulders sank. He massaged his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Look, I’m sorry. All right? I’m sorry I’ve not been rising before the sun like you and tending to the important duties of eating lunch and putting little stones into water buckets.”

Milt said nothing: he simply scowled and grabbed Gray by the wrist, wrenching him out into the afternoon.

Gray squinted his eyes to slits. The noontime sun hung straight above and reflected to infinity off the whites and golden browns of the sun and canvas tents surrounding. Their own tent was one of many. This Kassil camp, like the others scattered on the southeastern border, was a sea of off-white waves fanning out around a fire pit and triad of mud huts. They were spread out and open, the spaces between them generous enough to let pass a welcome breeze. The sun bore high and heavy: forty paces on, Gray could already feel himself sweating through his thin shirt.

Milt led Gray past two-score tents, around the rim of the camp and towards a bigger canvas structure on the opposite side. The pair passed a few women and children about their days, leading goats or pushing hand-carts from here to there.

Before recently, Gray had never actually seen a Kassil, but a walk through the grounds was good for his reeducation. They were a mixed bunch, some with the dark skin of the Alturreti, others with the yellow-brown complexion from beyond Egion. A surprising number—maybe half—were westerners like Gray and Milt. But all of them were clad in the same shoulder-to-ankle robes, and all bore the same whole-moon tattoos on the fronts and backs of their hands.

Most importantly, none of them looked immediately mad.

Gray had expected maybe a bit more appreciation or fawning, but most of the people simply nodded or smiled and walked on.

“Where are you taking me?”

“Sid told me to wake you and bring you around. The Chieftain wants to talk to us.”

“What about?”

“Fifth hell, Gray. How should I know?”

“You didn’t ask?”

“I am, you’ll have noticed, excellent at following orders. Even stupid ones. It’s my worst and best quality.”

“Tch.”

They had arrived outside the biggest tent in the camp, situated on the southernmost edge. It was easily eight times the size of Gray’s and Milt’s, and thrice as tall. Sid stood at its entrance, dressed on top on a maroon, tunic-like drape worn over her usual fitted trousers. It mirrored that of the locals, but for its abbreviated length.

One hand planted firmly on her hip. A line of sweat traced the top of her brow, and her eyes were blackened blue beneath. Gray glanced up at Milt: his, too, were bloodshot and darkened. “Awake, finally, are you?” Sid said. “Sleep well?”

“Was I not supposed to?” Gray tried to avoid Milt’s hard gaze as he wrenched his arm out of his friend’s grasp. “They gave us a tent a mats to sleep on. We stayed up all night. Why wouldn’t I?”

“Relax,” Sid said. “I’m just teasing. What, did you think I was going to throw you to the Plains for taking a nap? Wits. You’re slow when you’ve just woken up. Come on, boy, you’ve kept us waiting long enough.”

Gray has to crouch to enter the open flap of the tent, but he was happy to find it cool and dark inside. This was only the second Kassil tent he’d been in, but Gray had no doubt that this was the grandest: the ground was covered in a motley floor of mats and braided brown and yellow carpet. Waist-high urns, ornately painted in lines as thin and intricate as spider silk, sat at the four corners of the room. Along the far back wall was a handsome table of varnished rosewood, bearing three or four-dozen glass vials and leather pouches like the one Sid always carried.

Three people sat on the carped in the middle of the room. On the left was a young man of about twenty-five, his eyes green-brown and his sun-worn face the color of honey. He only half-sitting, with one leg firmly planted to the floor, knee-up. He held the plain hilt of a concealed blade in one hand—the other scratched at a loose tuft of threads from the fraying carpet. On the right was an older man with calm resting hands and a posture that seemed impossibly straight for the age his gnarled, leathery face implied.

Between them sat a woman of an indiscernible middle age. Her pallid face was smooth and sunburnt beneath her narrow black eyes, but the thin hair that hung to her shoulder was gray and wisped with white. Her smile bore a mouth full of straight yellow teeth. “So here they are.”

Sid stood in the center of the carpet before them. “This is the Chieftan, Rue Jelhese,” she said, indicating the woman in the center. “This is her son, Aldel. And this is the Kassil Headman, Mente. What you might call a High Priest.” Sid turned back to the woman in the center. “Mother Jelhese. May I introduce Graelen Calleford and Milt… uh.” She looked back at Milt, frowning.

“Just Milt.”

Sid shrugged. “Well alright, then. Graelen and Milt.”

Rue Jelhese was still smiling. Mente was unreadable. Aldel’s expression had grown somehow harder. His eyes met Gray’s own, and his lips became a thin, straight line.

“You may sit,” Jelhese said, holding her hands out. “Sidran has told us much about you, and the Headman and I have decided that it would be an honor to offer you hospitality for as long as you may require. We thank the Kass that you were in Castorra when you were. Otherwise, I fear we may never have seen our sons again.”

“Yes, why were you in Castorra?” Aldel was still staring directly at Gray. “I don’t trust this one, mother.”

“Don’t trust me?” Gray pressed his palm to his chest. “Why not?”

“You are a Calleford of the Navis Country, are you not?” All heads turned to meet Mente. His voice was a quiet rumble, with the smooth and easy grace of the educated and the confident. “I will admit, that gave me pause.” Milt snickered, and Mente frowned. “Is something funny?”

Milt’s posture shot upward to mirror the Headman’s. “I take it the Young Lord Calleford is not accustomed to having his name questioned.”

Gray felt his cheeks grow flushed. He shook his head as furiously as he could without pitching sideways. “Headman, sir, I am not my father. I’ve abdicated my title. You cannot hold his… attitudes against me.”

“His attitudes would have us killed and have our faith made treason!” Aldel sprang to his feet. “He’s a spy!”

“Oh, sit down, boy.” Jelhese clicked her tongue. “Headman Mente and I have agreed that you can be trusted. He speaks for the Kass. I speak for the people. And so the Kass and the people welcome you into our home.”

“But mother-”

The woman held up her hand. “Aldel speaks only for the wicked voices he hears chattering within his own head.” The young man struggled to hold back a scowl as he plopped back down to sitting beside his mother. “Now. Graelen and Milt. Sidran has told me of your newfound apprenticeship with Gillem Hare. Hare is an old friend of mine, and an old friend of my people. Ours were not the first Kassil children he and Sidran have saved from recruitment. We are deeply, deeply in your debt.” She nodded to Sid, who smiled politely. “That Hare has chosen you as his successors speaks to your character and devotion. I do not know how you proved your worth to him, but you did. And so are you worthy to me. Which brings me to the reason I summoned you here today. It would seem that neither of you have the satchel required for Hare's preferred style of casting. That is where we can repay our debt to you. So, tell me.” Jelhese rubbed her hands together and smiled that yellow grin again. “Have you heard of the Castorran Boar?”

--

Mudbrack came up to Milt’s middle-chest, though he did not allow himself to get close enough to the creature for precise measurement. The sow was giant, easily 70 stone of muscle and bone and fat beneath a tangle of coarse sienna hair. She grunted with each step, clopping lazily in the dirt of an enclosure a ten minutes’ trek from Jelhese’s tent.

He, Gray and Sid leaned on the fenceposts and watched the creature sniff at the hot dusty air. Aldel stood twenty paces behind and to the side, eyes trained on the back of Gray’s head. He did not seem to notice Milt’s staring as he chewed on the cracked skin of his lower lip.

“You take care of her?” Milt said finally.

“I’m no swineherd, boy, if that’s what you mean,” Aldel said stiffly. “Mudbrack’s the Vessel. Part of the rite, see. She's sacred.”

“Ah.” Milt tapped the fencepost and scrambled for a response that invited no more admonition. “Impressive.”

“You think handling her is easy?” Aldel took a step forward. That spearing gaze was for Milt, now. “Easy enough to strike once through the heart, then? Easy enough to bleed clean? Easy enough to take the stomach and the bladder like the rite needs?”

“I didn’t say any of that,” Milt said. He tried to back away, but his back found the wire of the fence. Behind him, Mudbrack snorted. “I don’t think any of it is easy.”

“Not so funny when it’s you he’s on, is it, Milt?” Gray said behind his hand.

“All of you, stop it.” Sid stepped between them, hands up. “Look, we’re all agreed. Mudbrack is a very big pig--”

“Castorran boar. This is no common sow.”

“Boar, yes, right, fine.” Sid leaned just slightly away from Aldel. “So Milt and Gray have seen her. So you’ll take us to the wild herd, now?”

Aldel tossed his head back and laughed, a punctuating cackle completely devoid of humor. “As if the two of these hatchlings could slay a wild eastern boar. It would be a waste of my time.”

Milt looked from the boar to Aldel to Sid. The man had a point. Sid was small enough to saddle Mudbrack up and ride her about all afternoon. Gray, for all his gentleman’s sword training, had the constitution of a bundle of twigs and the load-bearing strength to match.

And Milt had enough worked with animals to know never to challenge one of this size to a death match.

“Milt could do it,” Gray said quickly. “He’s got loads of experience with this sort of thing.”

Sid’s left eyebrow bent upright. “Milt wrestles pigs?”

“Of course not!” Milt looked back towards Mudrack, who seemed to be staring expectantly as well. “Gray, where did you even get that idea?”

“It seemed to fit.” Gray shrugged. “What? As if I knew what you do in your spare time.”

“My spare time? What do you even—“

“Mind if I interrupt?” Aldel’s arms were crossed firmly over his chest. He stood four armslengths from the trio, but Milt could feel his fury smoldering from a distance. “Although all of this is very interesting. But I have things to do, not that I would expect any of you eastern vissasi children to understand.” Milt didn’t know for sure what vissasi meant, but he could guess the approximate. Aldel reached for the knife at his waist and unsheathed it: it was slender clip-point blade with an exaggerated edge of white-silver that caught the lowering sun. He held it by the tip and showed its hilt to Sid. “You know what this is?”

Sid carefully took the thing and turned it over in her hands. It was simple but fine, with a polished hilt of some kind of bone. “A knife,” Milt said.

“The only knife,” Sid said, placing the knife in his hands. “Have a look.”

“This is the only knife in your village?” Gray said, peering around Milt’s shoulder. “Give that here.”

Milt sighed and offered it over. Gray stabbed the air a few times, then twirled the hilt twice between his fingers. With an exaggerated bow, he offered it to Sid, who rolled her eyes.

“Kassilfolk don't defend themselves with weapons. They let the Kass and His power protect them from their enemies. Aldel carries the only knife in the village, and it's for ritual... what do you want us to do with this?”

“Nothing,” Aldel said. He crossed back to Sid and snatched the blade from her palm. “If you were worthy, I would take you tomorrow to the rest of the herd. We would go north to the foothills. You would each slay a sow with this blade, bleed her clean and take out her stomach and bladder. But I won’t waste my time.”

Aldel sheathed the blade and then put his back to them. “Without the bladder, you will never be able to properly learn casting. But that is no problem of mine. Good day.”

Sid buried her face in her palm and groaned, and Gray looked from her to Milt before following. “No. Please, Aldel. Come on. We’ve come all this way. We rescued your boys from the Blade! Just tell us what we’ve got to do to prove we’re worthy, and we’ll do it.”

Aldel’s shoulders heaved up and down in an exaggerated sigh. He spun back on his heels and walked, very quickly, back towards Gray, eyes to eyes, until he was standing close enough for their toes to touch. His hands were again on the bone-hilt of his dagger. “Alright, then, young Lord. Prove your worth. Go to Mudbrack. Get her on her back, and plant your hand like this—” Aldel placed his palm, fingers fanning, on Gray’s middle chest, shoving back slightly. “—on her chest between her two forelegs. No weapons but your arms. And your wits, should you happen to find them between now and the moment you enter the pen.”

Aldel was tall. The bridge of Gray’s nose barely met the bigger man’s chin. But he tipped his head back and stared as levelly with the Kassil as he could. “Sounds easy. Fine then, I’ll do it. And when I succeed, which I will, you will agree to be thoroughly impressed and take us to the herd and get us started learning casting. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“Fantastic.” Gray turned quickly, then, away from Aldel and Sid and Milt and towards the pen.

The enclosure was wide for one animal, but Milt wasn’t exactly sure what kind of land a creature like this needed to roam. She looked docile and satisfied enough, her big black eyes droopy, her lower lip lapping still and slack, the flesh bouncing with every padding step across the loose dirt and crushed dry grasses.

Gray glanced back to Aldel, who seemed to be smirking for himself, and looked up at Milt. His eyes were wide and questioning, fear dancing over their ice-blue surface.

Milt shrugged.

Gray turned back to Mudrack. With one, two, three uneasy steps, he stood so close to the fence the wire scraped the front of his trousers. Milt watched his shoulder blades shift as he breathed deeply in and deeply out, then stepped into the pen with the beast.

Mudrack stood at the middle of the circle. When Gray’s boots hit the dirt, her ear twitched, then her snout, but she did not move or even turn to face him.

Sid sidestepped until she stood directly to Milt’s left. “What do you think his chances of surviving this are?” she said for only him to hear.

“How should I know? I’ve never seen a Castorran boar before today.”

“No, but you’ve seen Gray work a hell of a lot more than I have.”

“Well, not by much.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I haven’t seen Gray do much of anything.”

“Hang on,” Sid said. “How long have you two known each other?”

“Two months.”

“Horseco*cks!” Sid said. “Two months? Only two months, really?”

“Trust me, it feels like a lifetime, some days.” Milt sighed. “I think... I think he’ll live. Supposing he gives up soon. Before he makes her mad. Otherwise…”

Gray was slowly inching towards the creature, moving a toe-length with each step. The sow did not move, but her ears seemed to twitch more and more with every closer footfall.

“...broken bones and busted ballsack,” Sid said. “We’ll be shoveling his parts out the dirt till sundown.”

“I suggest you move soon, my lord,” Aldel called. He stood five paces behind Sid and Milt, and his hand was cupped around his mouth as he called: “Your friends think you’re going to fail. Why not prove them wrong?”

Gray turned back, his foot scraping the dirt beneath him with a soft shuffle. Mudrack’s ears rose to points. “Now, look here,” he said, pointing to Milt.

But Gray did not get the chance to finish.

Mudrack lept around with a speed that Milt never could have imagined for a beast her size. She crouched for half a heartbeat, then sprang, tumbling gracefully on short slender legs, gathering speed, headed right towards Gray.

Her snout connected with Gray’s side, and she skidded to a halt as her mark sailed through the air, back over the fence and into the earth at Milt and Sid’s feet.

Sid dropped to her knees and wrenched him up by a fistful of his hair, bringing his red and tearing face close to hers. “Are you all right?”

The grumbling noise he made was hardly human and mostly drowned out by the whoops and cackles from the tall, surly Kassil behind.

Sid laid Gray back on the ground and was peeled back his sweat-soaked shirt as Mudrack trotted happily back to her station at the center of the pen. Whatever damage she’d done to Gray was generous: the skin on his side was turning an ugly shade of blue-green, but she hadn’t punctured the skin and Gray was slowly rising upright on wobbling elbows.

“Nothing to worry, she’s only tapped you. That was just play.” Aldel said, gasping for air. Milt turned back to flare at him, but the man paid him no mind. “Mudrack can’t bear the sound of anyone shouting but me.”

“Then why did you provoke me?” Gray said. His voice was a thin little wheeze, and he spoke through gritted teeth. "Forget it. I'll show you." Wincing, face contorted in pain, he slowly worked himself upright, planting one leg in the ground, and then the other. "I'm going to do this, just watch."

Gray was on his feet for one second before collapsing back down into Sid's lap.

This only made Aldel laugh harder.

Sid dropped Gray back into the dirt and sprang up, stomping every step towards the Kassil chieftain’s son.

“Now you look here, you old sh*t.” She got as close to him as he had gone to Gray before, but the top of her head only reached his collarbone. Still, her finger was pointed square in the soft flesh below his sternum. “Look here. I’ve had enough of your laughing and jerking about. Do you know who I am?”

The smile had run from Aldel’s face. He opened his mouth to answer but she did not allow it. “My name is Sidran. Don’t have a surname, not in the king’s books. But people who know me well call me Sid, and people who know me real well call me Sidran Hare. Does that name echo back to you at all? You can answer that question, Aldel Jelhese.”

“Yes,” he said flatly. “That does not give you cause to order me about, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“Horseco*cks it doesn’t. You’re not going to listen to me for who my father is, you’re doing to listen to me for who I am, which is Sidran f*cking Hare. The girl who—ignoring everything else—put her gods-damned life at risk to get your sons back from the King’s Blade. So when I ask—when your mother asks, when your Headsman asks—for you to help us, you’ll help us, or I’ll be forced to use your name when folks ask why Milt and me and this little lord here are waylaid in saving more of your people from being picked to extinction!”

Aldel sneered. “Listen, I— “

“You will help us, Aldel. You will bring us to the herd and help us prepare the satchels. And I will teach these boys casting. And if you need a second scolding on the matter, then you can march back to camp and ask your ma. Yes?”

He physically shrank back, his face fading from one sculpted of stone to one of wet sand. He glowered something to Sid that Milt could not hear.

Gray, whose head rested at Milt’s knees, groaned happily. “Well, I guess that settles that question, then. She likes us!”

i know i already said this, and it feels like im gushing, but it is an enormous amount of fun to read your characters. their personalities are very distinct. i like gray's style, and it's nice to see the subtle variation between character archetypes you write in. very well done.

is this part of a larger novel that you're working on?

thanks, dude! I appreciate your reading/enjoyment. I'm consciously trying to improve my prose, so practice helps.

they're prequel stories for the novel I just finished, and I'm writing them for funski between drafts. gray, milt and sid are all secondary characters who are 30ish in the novel proper, but they have some wacky adventures when they're kids, so I decided to write them some wacky adventures. it's 1/2 rigorously planned because I know these characters real well, and 1/2 random because I'm pulling several of the specifics out my ass.

Quote from Lly

thanks, dude! I appreciate your reading/enjoyment. I'm consciously trying to improve my prose, so practice helps.

they're prequel stories for the novel I just finished, and I'm writing them for funski between drafts. gray, milt and sid are all secondary characters who are 30ish in the novel proper, but they have some wacky adventures when they're kids, so I decided to write them some wacky adventures. it's 1/2 rigorously planned because I know these characters real well, and 1/2 random because I'm pulling several of the specifics out my ass.

they work really well, and you have a sophisticated grasp of prose. i wouldn't worry too much. :>

Now with EVEN MORE WILD BOAR.

3

Sidran woke before the proper break of dawn. The sky along the flat eastern horizon had already started to lighten and blush, but the sun was still perhaps a half-hour below.

The morning smelt of leaves and bark and damp earth and something else unfamiliar: sweat, maybe, or animal trace. They weren’t far from the herd. So Aldel kept promising.

Perhaps, today, he would be right.

Sid cupped her hands in front of her face and blew hot breath onto her nose and palms. She cracked her toes within her boots to try to bring the feeling back. This time of year in the east, the days were hot and the nights were freezing. The farther north they trekked, the closer they got to the shifting air of the hillocks, the worse it got. She kneaded at the numb flesh on her arms and legs and pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders.

Sid rose to her feet slowly: the air was filled with the sort of quiet it seemed a damn shame to break. The ground beneath her feet was packed for sleeping, but every other inch of the campsite was covered in brittle, dry grass that would snap like branches underfoot.

Her companions were sprayed out across the camp: Aldel, as usual, with his head tucked beneath his armpit and his fingers closed around the hilt of his dagger. Gray, hunched under a blanket and quivering. Milt, still and quiet as the night itself.

Aldel, she could deal with. The man was difficult, surly with intention, but he would be gone from her soon. She would leave him behind with his Ma and the Kassils and maybe never see him again.

But how long would she have to deal with Milt and Gray?

All around, the world was still dark. Sid could smell a stream some ways off, not far, and she badly needed to wet the dust out of her hair, but wandering before the sun was up would do her no good.

Somewhere at her back, a branch broke. Sid turned: It was Milt, already up, face scrunched, rubbing his forehead with the back of his hand. He blinked up at her. “Hey.” He slowly ambled to his feet, mimicking her instincts by drawing his blanket around his shoulders.

Gray, lying by his side, twitched suddenly and violently beneath his blankets. A half-second later he sprang to his feet, cutlass in hand. “We’re being attacked?” His knees were half-bent. His eyes darted this way and that, from Sid to Mild to the darkened western sky.

“Where?” Across the empty char of the fire pit, Aldel was up now, too, on his knees now, bone-hilt of the dagger clutched tightly in his hand.

“Who said we were being attacked?” Milt said, breathing into his hands.

“You did, just now.” Gray pointed his sword at Milt and shook it.

“No I didn’t,” Milt said. “I said ‘Hey’ to Sid. Us being friends, and all.”

“I can see where you misheard,” Sid said. “It’s an easy mistake to make.”

Milt shrugged.

“You woke me up with your brash stupidity, Lord Calleford,” Aldel said, sheathing the dagger. His chin was tossed back, but in the weak new light, Sid thought she saw a blush erupt on his cheeks. “Now I’ll never get back to sleep.”

“But it’s near dawn,” Milt said, nodding to the western horizon. “We should be packing up soon anyway.”

“Yes, well…” Aldel shook his fist. “I am still angry.”

“Of course you are,” Gray said. His voice flat. He belted his sword and kicked at the dust. “But I don't think it warrants note, it being wallpaper.”

“I am angry at you, little Lord, and you should apologize for raising alarm.” Aldel’s hand was, again, on the hilt of his dagger. Sid considered the pouch at her hip and stepped slowly towards the pair, grass crunching beneath bootfall.

“I have no reason to—ouch!” Milt smacked Gray in the side of the head with the heel of his hand. “What was that for?”

“Stop being a sh*t, Gray,” Milt said.

“I thought you were on my side!”

“I’m on your side until it becomes annoying. Apologize to the man.”

Gray muttered something beneath his breath and turned, shoulders hunched, back to Aldel. “Alright, fine. Aldel Jalese, I am sorry I had the audacity to wake you up ten minutes prematurely. It is a sin against my gods and yours and shall be a weight on my soul that I will carry with me for all of this life, and surely into the next.” He gave an exaggerated sigh, one that seemed to use every muscle above his waist and some below. “If there is ever anything I can do to right this most grievous wrong—”

“Actually, there is,” Aldel said, half-leaning to grab something out of his leather satchel. He retrieved a brown and fraying waterskin. “There’s a stream around here somewhere and I find myself thirsty. Go fill this up.”

Gray swung his hand into a bow that ran so deep, the top of his hair nearly swept the ground. “I am your must humble servant,” he said, and stood upright, stomped to the Kassil, and snatched the skin for his hands. “Anyone need anything else?”

“I’m alright,” Sid said. She pointed west, to the direction of the stream. “You have fun, though.”

They stood in silence as Gray’s stomping footsteps disappeared into the distance. Aldel’s temper smoldered like dying coals, but Milt was grinning like an idiot. He noted Sid staring. “I found out recently. It’s easy to get him to do whatever you like, provided you make like you’re his mum giving him a scold.”

“Fantastic, now I’ll just need to figure out a way to reign your ego in, and we’ll be all set.”

“We can’t afford to be standing around much longer,” Aldel said. He scrunched up his blanket into a ball and stuffed it in the open mouth of his pack. “We should start walking once the little lord gets back.”

“You weren’t so anxious to get moving when it was interrupting your sleep,” Sid said.

“The pack’s moving north. You ever want to find them? The sooner we find them, the sooner we can be rid of each-other.”

Sid couldn’t argue with that.

She gathered her sparse belongings and carefully returned to their bag, but kept the blanket wrapped around her. The sun’s first rays had scattered over the grassland, but Sid’s breath still billowed out in front of her.

She and Milt were packing Gray’s bag when they heard the crunching bootsteps that warned his return. They could see him in the weak light, trousers soaked halfway to his knees, hair dripping, teeth a-chatter. He thrust the bag into a laughing Aldel’s hands.

“Did you fall in, your lordship?”

“f*ck off.”

Aldel took a hearty sip of water and smiled. “Alright, now, we need to move. No more distractions. And keep up with me as best you can, though I know western folk can be weak of will and tire easily.”

Milt scowled as he draped a blanket about his friend’s shoulders. Gray’s fingers were about the grip of his cutlass, and his jaw was set. He looked about to say something.

“You know what?” Sid said suddenly. “I have an idea. I’m going to go down to the stream and see about the dust that’s gathered in my hair.” She ran her fingers through the dry expanse of her curls, and a few twigs and bits of leaves dislodged themselves in her hand. “By the time I get back, you three are going to be the best friends the eastern country’s ever seen. Or you’re going to have figured a way to hate each other in silence. Yeah?”

“But we need to go now,” Aldel said.

“Don’t worry.” Sid set off in the direction of Gray’s stomped tracks. “When I get back, we’ll keep up with your righteous eastern pace until we die for want of resting.”

She put her back to him and didn’t give him a chance to answer. Any protestation from the trio of men at the campsite died under the crackling crunch of the grass at her feet.

The path that Gray had laid was easy enough to follow, especially in the growing light, and it wasn’t ten minutes until she found herself close to the bed of a little stream about eight paces across. It was deep and quick and traced from hills and mountains in the northwest, but something wasn’t right in the air. There was that smell again: a hot-weather smell, like earth and rot and bad meat.

It took a few paces upstream for her to see the boar’s bloated carcass lodged in the middle of the stream.

If Mudbrack was huge, this thing was giant. It had been a male, that was for sure, with wild matted fur and tusks the size of Aldel’s bone-dagger.

And it stank. A whiff of it made Sid’s breath catch and her stomach turn about. Half the old boar’s head was rotted in, and an exposed wound on its lower belly spilled and festered. Bits of dead flesh and maggots washed downstream to where Sid was standing.

To where Gray had been standing when he’d filled up Aldel’s canteen.

“Horseco*cks.”

She took three slow steps away from the streambank and then broke into a run.

How many sips had Aldel taken of the water? She’d only seen him do two or four. But how many had he taken since he left? What was the chance he would swallow something nasty? What was the chance he would be able to stop himself before he did?

What would happen if he drank carcass-water?

What would happen to them?

Sid ran as fast as her legs could carry her, and in three minutes, she was back in sight of the camp, dashing in the new daylight, heart pounding, breaths quick and heavy, the blood rushing to her hands and her feet. She could see Gray laying in the sun, and Milt scanning the distance, and Aldel, with his head tipped back, bottle to his lips.

“Stop!” she shouted. “Aldel, stop! Stop!”

He didn’t even look at her at he shook the last drops of the canteen into his mouth. Sid’s legs wouldn’t stay when she arrived at the campsite; she threw herself at him, and the skin flew from his hands and into the air, last drops flying asunder.

Sid was pinning him to the ground, and he wrenched her to the side and hoisted himself up. “Crazy vissasi girl-child,” he said, grabbing her by the front of her shirt, up, until her nose touched his. “What, has one of your demon-gods possessed you to kill me?”

“No,” she said, still panting. “The water. I was trying to keep you from drinking it. It’s… it’s not clean, it’s…”

“Hah!” He laughed and shoved her aside, leaning over to get the water skin. Sid barely caught her balance. “The water from the north hillocks is some of the cleanest in all Egion. You vissasi were raised on mud and piss and cow’s milk. You wouldn’t know what good water tastes like.”

Aldel had tried Sid’s nerves twice that morning, and the sun had barely yet risen. She shrugged, and brushed some dust off the side of her tunic. “Fine, then. Let’s just get moving.” Milt handed over her satchel and blanket, and she shouldered both.

“You’re in luck,” Aldel said. “We’re not an hour to the herd.”

---

They were watching a pack of ten dozen wild boar between hillocks when it happened. She heard Aldel’s stomach turn and clench, and his hand went to his middle.

“Something the matter?” she said.

“No.” Aldel dragged his tongue along the top of his lip, where a line of sweat had beaded, fighting the odds of the chill air of the morning. Milt and Gray, two steps behind, stared at Sid for explanation. She offered none. “As I was saying, before I was interrupted. Each of you will select a boar. Male or female, it doesn’t matter, but it must be fully grown. You will approach it slowly and with humility.” He paused for a moment to breathe in deeply. A slow blush was creeping up his neck towards his face. “I will send a prayer to the Kass to still the boar. And you will--” He paused, pressed a hand to his stomach, and breathed three times quickly through his nose.

“Are you sick, or something?” Gray said.

“I mentioned the water,” Sid said.

Aldel held up two hands. “Silence! I am Aldel Jalhese. I am sworn protector for my Kassil tribe. Without my Kass-granted connection to the herd, you will not be able to complete the task, and you will never learn. Casting. Young Lord Calleford. You will go first. Rise and choose your mark. Approach…” He breathed in again. “Approach quickly.” He held the dagger by the point and Gray gently took it in his hand and stepped to a better vantage point.

With a look back to Sid, he scanned the pack below. They were a mixed group, a mass of rust-red hair, with some young among them. They grazed on the low brush that nested between the slopes, standing in groups of three or six, but Sid could see a few standing on their own.

Gray turned back. “I think I’ll use—“

“Don’t tell me,” Aldel said. “Simply go and I will read your movements. And—and be quick of it!” He pressed his lips together quickly and breathed a few more times into flared nostrils.

As Gray lightly jogged down the slope towards the herd, Milt took his place at Sid’s side. “I worry about him, sometimes.”

“Worry for yourself, Milt No-name, you’re next.”

Aldel let out a little whimper from somewhere deep and small, and Sid could see his face and the front of his shirt were soaked with sweat now.

“I been water sick before, friend,” Milt said with a sigh. “I know what it looks like. If you call Gray back, now, we can still—”

“Silence yourself,” Aldel said through clenched teeth. “The time approaches.”

Gray was at the bottom of the slope, standing before one of the lone boar at the edge of the pack. It was a full-grown female, but she was a sow, and small. He slowly approached her with small steps, one hand reached out slightly towards her snout.

“I must concentrate now,” Aldel said, fists clenched. He squeezed his eyes shut and spoke through barely-parting lips. Amidst the babbling, he said, loudly, “I have made connection with the herd. They rest, to a degree, beneath my control. Go forth, Calleford.”

The rest of the herd—moreso the boars nearby—had gone oddly still. The ones that had been grazing kept their heads upright but pointed away from Gray. Aldel continued chanting through pursed lips, swaying slightly back and forth on locked knees.

The sow took a step forward and sniffed Gray’s hand, then moved one closer still.

He stepped around the mass of her and towards the side, but the sow did not move. When he grabbed at the ankles of her front and back right feet, still, she did not move. When, with a grunt, he yanked them out from under her, she toppled, first sideways, and then swung onto her back, still, she did not move.

Her body was still and calm as Gray approached, arms shaking, dagger in hand.

But when Aldel released his hands, and opened his eyes, and took two steps back, she squirmed in the dirt and squealed.

And when the Kassil turned his body away and fell onto his hands and knees and vomited violently, into the dirt, the rest of the pack went mad.

And in three beats of a heart, the whole of the valley between the hillocks was alive and angry and converging on Gray.

Now with more scatological humor!

Sooooo yup. I was on a roll yesterday and wrote like 10,000 words so I just sort of finished this little novella! Enjoy.

4.

It was just like last time, only worse.

Last time, it had been Gray in the ring, just him and Mudbrack, one big, stinking hunk of sweat and flesh and hair. An animal, yet peacefully inclined.

This was something else entirely.

Gray felt his kneecaps shake in their sockets as the sow squirmed and kicked on her back with more than six score of her brothers and sisters closing in.

If Milt or Sid or Aldel were on the hill above shouting instruction, he could not hear them. Any other sound outside the valley was drowned out by the chorus of heavy, wheezy breaths and the padding of five hundred cloven feet stomping in the undergrowth.

“H-hello,” he said, fighting to keep his voice steady. “My name is Graelen Calleford, and I am here on behalf of the Kass. I—oh my.”

He hadn’t noticed it from above. He’d thought it a boulder, perhaps, or a small mountain. But now it moved amidst its smaller brothers and sisters.

This great alpha boar stood shoulders above the rest. His tusks were long as Gray’s forearm, and twice as wide. His hair was long and wild, matted with mud in some places, and in a ridge along his back, sticking straight up. It flopped forth and formed a fringe over the top of his head, but beneath the row of hair Gray could see two black gemstone’s eyes, rimmed with red, the size of his fist. His snout would blow hot air directly into Gray’s face if the beast got close enough.

Gray did not plan on letting it.

Last he’d checked, the sow he’d chosen was on the edge of the valley, and this meant that he’d have a clear path up the hill at his back.

Gray chanced a look over his shoulder.

The boar had filled in. They moved in a circle, three thick, and up the hill, Sid and Milt were on their feet. Aldel was nowhere he could see.

“Ah, sh*t,” Gray said.

Somewhere out of sight, there was a muffled cry—a man’s voice, not Milt’s, maybe Aldel’s—and there rose around Gray a chorus of screeches and grunts.

They came at him from all sides. Gray let out a squeal, one that sounded more high and porcine than he’d planned, and dove down to the sow’s side.

A cloud of dust puffed overhead, and with the back of one arm, he shielded his eyes. Something hard clipped the side of his head, something battered his thigh, but amidst the grunting and the kicking and the chaos, he was surprisingly still alive.

Beyond the commotion, someone called his name.

Two pairs of boots, one big, one small, were on the ground by his head. His splitting, aching, throbbing head. A pair of big calloused hands closed around his armpits, and he was lifted onto legs of mud and sawdust. Between the fur and snouts and kicked-up grass there were little globes of light, popping, phosphorescent.

The weak pillars of his legs collapsed, and those same hands caught him before he hit earth. “The fairies have come to save us,” Gray said, wholly without meaning to.

“Stand up on your own damn feet,” Milt said right behind him. The loud voice in his ear reminded him of how badly his head hurt. “Where’s the knife?”

“In my hand.” Gray flexed his hands in and out. “No, it isn’t.” He blinked some dust out of his eyes and hoped the lights would soon go away, but instead he got a better scope of the scene.

The noise of the boar hadn’t stopped, but Gray no longer seemed their primary target. They moved instead amongst one another, crashing and colliding like flies in a mason jar, eyes blank with some madness Gray could not discern. Milt was holding Gray’s cutlass, a scary-looking wound leaking out from above his hip. And two steps off was Sid.

She stood with her feet shoulder-wide apart on knees slightly bent. The tops of her toes fanned out. One hand, she held straight, fingers spread to their maximum potential, thumb pressed on the flat of her palm. Her other hand grasped something invisible in the air at the side of her neck. And in her mouth, her teeth pinched the sides of that strange leather pouch. Its mouth was open and something white-silver slowly trickled out and dissipated, like sand in water.

And that’s when Gray saw it.

In front of her splayed fingers there was a wall, a thin wall, like a soap bubble catching light, only its surface was of that same white-silver. Dust and dirt passed freely through its face, but blades of grass and snouts and hooves and bodies rebounded off as if it were made of stone.

Sid stepped back and the wall traveled with her. “You got him on his feet yet?”

“I think he’s got himself a concussion,” Milt said. “But yeah, he can stand,”

Milt let go and Gray sailed downward. He broke his fall on the soft writhing mass of the sow.

“sh*t! f*ck! Truth’s left tit!” he pressed his hands into her underbelly and threw himself off, returning to his comfortable home at her side in the dirt.

The boar was screeching now, louder than before, and when he looked to the ground, Gray knew why. His knife had somehow lodged itself into her back, just the tip, but with her every movement it sank deeper and deeper into the cavern of her flesh.

Gray had an idea, one that would accomplish the task with haste.

Holding her up slightly with one hand to stay her movements, he reached, quick as he could, to where her back met the ground, and yanked the bone hilt from her flesh.

The sow screamed and wailed and kicked out with tremor. Some human voice cursed him to a fifth hell. Gray looked up to find Sid, at the boat’s wailing feet, doubled over, bag fallen from her teeth. A silver-white cloud rose above her and dispersed. The bubble-shield popped.

Perhaps the idea had not been so well-conceived after all.

“We’re in trouble,” Milt said, two hands tensing around the hilt of Gray's cutlass. He stood on the balls of his feet and held the thing up in front of his face.

“No, no, no,” Gray said from the ground, cutting the air with the knife. “You’re holding that all wrong. Trade.” Before Milt could protest, Gray rose and wrenched it from his hand and replaced it with the knife.

The familiar grip of the old training sword felt good in his hand. It brought back memories of school days on the back slopes of Limadon, of sparring with the other nobleman’s sons who came to stay in Navis Country.

It was natural. It was familiar.

It was loose in his fingers when the boar’s snout caught him and sent him down.

When his back landed in the dirt, the blade was gone, out of his grasp.

He closed his eyes against the pain in his head, worse than before. Now that he really thought about it, his stomach hurt too, and his tongue was dry. He sat up slowly, and leaned to the side, vomiting into the dirt to his left.

His body trembled. He finished it in a few shuddering coughs. He suppressed the urge to lay back down and got up slowly. It felt better. Some tangled knot of nerves was loosened and released.

“Not this one too,” he heard Milt say from somewhere close by.

Gray was wiping his mouth with his sleeve when he saw the next boar approach. It was headed for him—no, but it passed, and was heaving straight for Sid, standing still just out of the reach of the sow’s legs, her eyes closed, concentrating.

“Sid!” he called. “Sid, out of the way!”

She spun just in time on the balls of her feet, and the boar kept running until it met another.

But behind him, there was another thundering set of feet, another sick thud of flesh on flesh. “Yaegh!” It was Milt. Gray turned, and sure enough, his friend was on the ground, his face bloody, the wound in his side getting worse.

Sid turned just enough to see, and Gray saw her eyes go wide. She cried out and elbowed past Gray, effortlessly weaving past the oncoming boar that threatened her. She was kneeling at Milt’s side and tore a strip of cloth from the bottom of his shirt. Sid pressed it to the wound.

“You can’t do that here,” Gray said, as a smaller boar bumped into his calf before hurdling into the side of another sow.

“It’s not as if I can lift him… Milt Noname, can you stand?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Hurts like hell, though.”

“Don't care, off your ass.”

“Where’s your magic shield thing?” Gray said, helping to pull Milt upright. “Aaw, sh*t!” Gray coughed and buckled forward as an errant snout caught the back of his head and sent him into Milt’s shoulder. Its owner changed trajectory.

“Where’s your sword, Calleford?” Sid snapped. “You lost it because you were stupid. I lost my magic shield because you were stupid—aah!”

A pair of massive tusks attached to a boar soared past her, and her hands flew to her ear. When they came away, her fingers were slick with blood. “I… my…” she swallowed back the rest of her sentence. “They’re all around us now. I don’t know if we can safely get out of here.”

“Why is this happening?” Gray grabbed the knife from Milt’s loose hand and gripped it tightly in his own. He threw Milt’s arm around his shoulder and stood slowly, steadily. Milt put up a valiant effort, but he was weak and his face, growing pale.

“Water,” Milt said.

“We’ll see to you soon, friend, I promise.”

“No, the water.” Milt coughed. “Made Aldel sick. He’s controlling this—argh!”

One little boar—the smallest Gray had seen—barreled into Milt’s middle back before running hard and fast I the other direction. Blinking a dustcloud away, Gray looked to where it had come from, just on a whim, on an instinct.

He was glad he had.

“We need to move!” he said, grabbing hold of Milt’s arm and tugging. Sid, by extension, came with.

The cloud of dust and grass the alpha boar brought with it was like nothing Gray had yet seen. The creature thundered close, his horse-size hooves thundering, his breath like a drum, his wail like a chorus of human screams.

Milt and Sid lay in the dirt, just beyond its reach.

But Gray saw him draw nearer and nearer, and he thought of the knife in his hand, and the heart that beat within the monster's ribs, and the stomach, and the bladder, and he knew he only had this one chance to prove to Gillem Hare’s daughter what he could really do.

Head still pounding, throat dry as sandpaper, Gray got to his feet and felt the seconds peel by slowly as the beast approached. His snout passed inches from where he stood, and then his tusks, and beneath the column of its shoulder blade was a soft knot of flesh, and it was there that Gray launched himself.

The boar screamed and bucked, but Gray hold tight, sinking the knife in deeper, running alongside.

The muscles in his legs strained to keep up, but he knew if he stumbled the thing’s back feet would bash his head in.

The knife tore through muscle and fat and grit until it hit bone. Blood was oozing out of the wound now, droplets whipping in the wind, sleek on his hands, making holding on harder.

Some other creature bucked into Gray’s side and his fingers slipped.

He lost his feet beneath him and tumbled, head barely missing the crush of the alpha boar’s back legs, the back of his skull thudding to hard earth for the third time in under ten minutes.

Knife still lodged in his side, the beast thundered on. Gray looked around him, but as far as he could see, there was the dust and the dirt and the hurling, fighting bodies of one hundred and twenty savage boar.

---

Milt traveled through his world like a raft on rapids. The scene pitched and furled and screamed around him. He tried not to think about the streaming wound at his side, but he could not ignore the missing person at his side.

Sid held one half of him, but Gray was lost amidst a sea of dust.

“We need to get out of here,” she said, her voice betraying nothing. On the side of her he could see, the side of her that propped him up, her hair was thick with blood. “Come on, start moving, duck when I say to.”

“Gray,” he said. “He’s—”

“Gone and done something very stupid.” She dragged him along three steps. Bleeding ear and Milt’s weight considered, Sid was light on her feet. She anticipated the boars before they came, pulled him out of the way at just the right minute for the most part, and he met just a few snouts and rogue feet.

They were approaching the edge of the dust cloud.

Milt could ignore the pain but he could not ignore the sinking loss. Lord Graelen Calleford may have been an arrogant ass. He may have been the cause of each and every one of Milt’s current troubles, and countless more in the recent past. But he was a friend, and one of Milt’s only. “He’ll die in here.”

“If he isn’t dead already,” Sid said. “Oh. I… sorry.” She pulled him back as a smaller boar, streaming out the side from a tusk-wound, whipped by. “It’s right, what you said about Aldel. If we can calm him down, we might be able to calm this down, and… who knows?”

---

Aldel lay writhing in a pile of his own filth. His eyes were bloodshot. His skin, so flushed before, was paled to the color of cream, and shared that apparent texture. The front of his tunic was completely soaked through with sweat.

Sid grabbed him by the underarm and pulled him to his feet. The smell off him was awful, certainly worse than the days old carcass from whence it had indirectly come. “Are you quite finished?” She shook his shoulders and he quickly turned an exquisite shade of green.

“Water,” he managed.

“No! Nothing in your stomach, you’ll just hurl it back up. Aldel, look what’s happened.”

She wheeled him out so he was facing the chaos below, of one-hundred bodies crashing in to one another and kicking up the loose earth. Aldel rubbed his eyes and blinked. “Fifth hell…”

“Now you understand,” she said. “Milt is basically dying, and he’s the one of you I hate least, so that’s a damn shame.”

From his seat on the ground, Milt sighed heavily.

“And we’ve lost Gray.”

“Little Lord Calleford is dead?” Aldel’s sunken sickly eyes looked far too hopeful for Sid’s taste.

“He’s not. Not yet. And if you don’t still those creatures,” she said, throwing an arm around his shoulder. “I will see to it that whatever affliction you’re suffering right now kills you. And I hear death by sh*ts can be a mite unpleasant, though I don’t speak from a well of experience on the topic.”

“I… I can’t,” Aldel said. His voice was small. “I mean, I did at first. Control them, work them up, which was an accident. But what they’re doing now is of their own accord. And I don’t have the strength to stop them. But… but Lord Calleford could be fine. He might be able to leave quietly, provided he does not do anything rash. Like draw the ire of the alpha-male, for instance.”

---

The rest of the boar had somehow slowed. Whatever force had stirred them was quiet and still.

But the alpha boar was turning back around and headed straight for him.

Gray stood his ground, feet firmly planted, as the creature came closed and closer. He was losing blood quickly, but that didn’t seem to dampen his rage or check his pace. When he was close enough that Gray could see fully into the deep of the creature’s nostrils, he sprang to the side and out of their reach.

Somewhat impressively, he caught himself on his hands and sprang up immediately. All around, the dust was settling, and Gray could feel the first hot rays of the midmorning sun pierce the cloud. He wondered whether he should run.

And then he saw his sword.

There it lay—how could he have missed it?—half-concealed beneath the body of some badly-gored sow. Its blade caught the light, the brilliant, beautiful light, and Gray was so transfixed, so elevated, that he nearly forgot to dive again at the beast charging towards him.

Gray jumped just in time, and scrambled towards the carcass. Behind him, he could hear the clomp of hooves in hearth as the boar recovered, and then they thundered closer and closer at his back. Gray was nearly to the body when he dove to the side. He was quick, but not enough. The beast’s tusk caught the end of his leg, right at the ankle, right above the valuable soft tendon above his heel. It cut a hole at the hem of his trouser. He could already feel blood oozing down into his boot.

But there wasn’t time to dwell. The alpha boar was turning, again, and in two steps Gray was leaning onto the sow’s back for support as he pulled the blade out.

He stood at ready stance as the boar turned back to him, completely unsure of what to do next.

Was it his imagination, or was the creature slowing? He couldn’t spare the moment to measure. Wincing on the bad ankle, Gray feinted aside and out of the creature’s way. But his turns were growing more and more clumsy, and the dagger had slipped from the wound somewhere along the line, and it was bleeding freely into fur and dust and skin.

This had to be his kill.

Gray found a clearing in the chaos, a circle of ten feet around, clear of dirt of bodies or chunks of flesh. He stood at the center, clutching his sword, and waited for the beast to wheel towards him.

It did not take long. The boar turned twenty feet off, eyes meeting his. Perhaps he was merely imagining it, but in them he saw a madness, a determination.

This was the first real fight for his life, wasn’t it? The boar began to run head at him.

Clompclompclomp. Wheels of dust spun out at the beast’s sides. How many times before at his life really been so challenged? At Navis Manor, everything had seemed so assured, so certain. Certain things had always been taken care of. His future, for one. His personal safety.

Clompclompclomp. The boar let out a war cry, and Gray wondered for one terrifying moment why he had ever abdicated. What the hell had he been thinking? His entire life was back there. What did he have now? The sword in his hand, the blood in his boot, the sick drying on his sleeve.

Clompclompclomp. He needed to move.

The creature breached the edge of the clearing, barreled towards him, but he slipped to the side, galloping on two even steps, until he was facing boar's side, two feet upwind of the streaming wound.

He thrust the tip of the cutlass in the soft skin below the boar’s neck. In the fraction of a second he had to act, Gray wrenched it out.

The alpha boar took two steps, four, eight, and collapsed at the clearing’s edge.

The air in the valley between the hillocks was silent but for the creature’s slowing, labored breaths.

Gray let the blood drip down the gentle curve of the sword and to the ground, forming a trail for his paces towards the beast. He lay on his side on top of the body of a fallen comrade. Gray didn’t look at the boar’s misting eyes as he grabbed one cloven foreleg and hoisted it up, revealing the soft fur that covered its chest.

Gray had an approximate idea of where the heart was.

He made quick work of it.

Before long, Sid and Milt were ascending the hill. He expected them to come for him, but something else in the flattened earth seemed to catch Milt’s eye, and before Sid could grab his arm, Milt was staggering out of her reach.

Gray looked down. The alpha male was dead for sure. At least two dozen bleeding bodies scattered the valley. The rest had fled. But one lone voice squealed in the silence. The sow, the first sow, the one Gray had tipped over, still writhed upon her back.

Gray couldn’t hold back the laughter gathering in his chest.

Through it all, there she was, supine in the dirt, wailing like a piglet. Gray tossed his head back, ignoring the pounding ache, ignoring the blood streaming from his hands and down his arms to the sleeve of his shirt.

He closed his eyes to the midmorning sun and laughed at everything.

“What the hell are you giggling about?” Sid said. “And… what the hell is he doing?”

“Who doing?” Gray said. Sid was at his side, her hair completely matted by the top of her left ear. She was pointed behind his back. “Who’s doing what?”

Milt was standing over the squirming sow, bone-hilted knife in hand. He fell to his knees, and before Gray could object, the creature screamed, and fell silent and still.

He looked over his shoulder and waved one bloody knife back at his friends. “Done!”

---

In the same voice she’d used to reprimand Aldel, Rue Jelhese was speaking to Sidran Hare. “This is not what we intended,” she said.

They sat alone in the hot confines of a smaller tent, but this one, like the meeting tent, was richly decorated. It sat just beside the ring of mud-huts that made the camp’s center. They shared, between them, a pot of tea and a bowl of a brown rice porridge, spiced heavily.

Sid dipped her chin down to her collarbone as she spoke. “I’m sorry, Ma Jelhese. Nothing about this trip was as we intended.”

“Well.” The old woman topped up Sid’s little earthenware cup. “I expect my son has something to do with it.”

“It he feeling any better?”

“He will recover the biles he lost,” she said. Jelhese took a thoughtful sip. “The pride, I am not so sure. Oh, but that it not necessarily a bad thing. I have heard it said that traveling three days in your own soiled breeches is good for an inflated sense of self.”

“Have you heard that, really?”

Jelhese waved it off with one weathered, cracked hand. “Oh, something to that effect. Drink your tea, Sidran, before it gets cold.”

She couldn’t imagine that would be a bad thing. Since the morning at the herd, each successive day had been hotter and hotter, and the sun’s bearing foretold the coming of a brutal summer. Still, she sipped it anyway, if slowly, and let the sweetspice and honey fill her lungs and burn her throat. “So will you let them pass the rite, then?”

“Oh, well. What other choice have we? I fear we may have scared the herd off these lands for quite some time. We follow them into the mountains, you know, but that’s not for at least another month.” She tapped her chin with one little finger. “They began the rite the day they left with Aldel. That is the way. Mostly we see it through to fruition with out many challenges, so… there is little precedent for what happened here. But Mente thinks they are mostly worthy, so when they emerge from the temple, you may teach them casting, if you should choose. Still, I wonder at it.” She spooned a mouthful of the porridge and chewed before continuing. “I wonder if this might not be a sign of things to come.”

“Four gods, all. I hope not.”

“There is a strangeness to you. All of you, your father included. Something’s hiding in your wake. I do not know if I should call it a shadow, but it certainly sticks to your heels like one.”

Jelhese reached out and bridged the space between them on the rug. With two steady fingers she curled back the lock of hair hiding the missing top of Sid’s left ear. She winced as the woman’s skin brushed up against the scab. “It’s doing better, though,” Sid said with as much earnest as she could muster.

“When you go on your way tomorrow, I’ll send you well-furnished. Salve and bandages. Provisions and water as well. Enough to carry you to Alturret, at least.” Jelhese replaced the hair and leaned back to her spot on the other side of the carpet. “Plus some of the Kass’s grace, my love. Something tells me you’ll need it for whatever follows in your tracks.”

>> END OF PART ONE <<

Thanks for reading, guys~ writing for writing's sake is cool, but so much more fun when you have an audience.

ok so i love this so much gosh

and

this sentence:

Quote

And in three beats of a heart, the whole of the valley between the hillocks was alive and angry and converging on Gray.

is f*cking INCREDIBLE goddam gurl this is good. this sentence is a living creature. it's so lovely and amazing.

i think one thing that you do particularly well is sticking to your characters' personalities. none of them lapse into stereotypes - aldel is always particularly abrasive, with a prideful and stubborn head, gray is consistently gray, etc. it's good to see that your character's have taken on their lives and you are true to those lives.

i want to find something to say constructively but i honestly can't, i just think this is a damn fine piece of fantasy.

Thank you so much! I'm glad you liked that sentence. I was also fond of that sentence.

Okay, here's part two! It begins, as Part 1 did, slightly removed from the main action/plot. I would call it a prologue but I hate prologues. It's also a little harder to follow since I do some magic system stuff and some worldbuilding but bear with me. So. Without further adieu~

Part Two: Hare’s Ward

1.

Alturret was the city of Justice, at least in theory.

Egion’s westernmost city was intended, by decree of scriptures holy and political, to be a citadel of virtue and fairness and adherence to the laws of man and god alike. Before the Droughting, before everything worth seeing retracted to the northern city of Limadon, Alturret had thus been the seat of Egion’s formalized and well-respected legal system.

The courts and judges fled, but certain expectations remained.

And that is why, in the five hundred and fifty ninth year after the fall of Yeris, five hundred and eleven years after the rise of Egion, and one hundred and ninety four years after the Droughting, six young prostitutes stood before six swinging nooses on a well-worn wooden dais in Villor Square.

At the governor’s behest, they’d been dressed humbly but fully for their final moments in the Four-Faced God’s earthly grace. They wore long cotton gowns of Alturreti gray-green, shapeless, mostly, that covered their bodies fully from collar to anklebone.

In their matching gowns, with their black-brown hair askew, their chestnut faces streaming with sweat or tears, they stood as uniform as soldiers. Six women, forgotten, forlorn, waiting to hang in the name of the Just.

It was the height of noon in middle autumn. The peripheral edges of Villor Square were packed richly with the harvest bounty of the more fertile lands to the west or imported wares from the east. The Alturreti among the crowd mostly went about their business, sticking to the shade of a hundred brightly-colored awnings. A noontime hanging was nothing worth stopping for. Only the very curious locals spared a second look for the pretty young women who had been sentenced to die.

But a few gawkers congregated to the square’s middle. Merchants and travelers and two-hundred sundry outsiders stood shoulder to shoulder, braving the merciless sweat of the overhead sun for a chance to see the spectacle for which Alturret was so famous.

Six women stood before six wooden crates. Each would step up, and the bailiff read their crimes. After the hangman slipped the nooses around their necks, he would kick the crates out from underfoot and there they would hang, bodies slack, robe hems buffeting in the underfoot breeze.

This did not sit right with one young man in the crowd.

He was twenty-seven years of age, but the freckles on his smooth, sun-reddened face and the way his mouse-brown hair looped beneath his earlobes conspired against his maturity. There was a boyish mischief in his mud-green eyes, too, though his mouth was drawn into a thin, serious line.

He stood between two Sebasian traders, thick-built men with copper beards, and beneath their sunburn, just as ghostly white as he. Any passer by might have perhaps assumed that he was their apprentice, or accomplice, or perhaps a nephew.

But in the crowd, the young boy was alone and mostly anonymous.

No one knew his face, although in some circles, his name was nigh inescapable. The Alturreti spoke of him in lowtown taverns and smoking houses, in rooms without windows.

In the year since he finished his studies with the Kassil, Gillem Hare had made quite an impression.

But even so, he could not fight back the nerves that clenched his heart; the six women didn't have long, and the risk to him, if he failed, was incalculable. Whatever he did, he would have to do now, without plan, without structure. True, his reputation was for chaos. But that was misdirection. Gillem built his exploits like other men built houses, each plank plotted, each beam hewn for purpose.

The bailiff ascended the stage. He was an Alturreti man of trimmed beard and excellent breeding, clad in a coat of perfect winter white, and when he ascended the scaffold he stood a full man’s height above the crowd. With a little cough, the bailiff opened the leather book in his hand and read aloud.

“In the name of His Royal Majesty, King Ethess of Egion. In the name of the Governor, Sir Benoz Alcor Palentao the Third. In the name of the Four-Faced God, and He, our Kindest Patron, Justice. In the name of the people of this, His Holy Just City of Alturret. We find these six women guilty of crimes of the flesh.”

His black, knee-high boots clacked with each step as he strode across the lip of the stage. It cut amidst the low chatter of the market surrounding, but most of the audience in the square settled in respectful silence.

Gillem Hare did not have long.

Steady and quiet as a leaf in a windstorm, he shifted through the spaces between bodies, head down, clutching the small leather bag at his belt. With one hand, he loosed the ties at the top and stopped the opening with his thumb.

The man on the dais was still speaking: “—which we must recognize as women and men under the Four. Make no mistake: their crimes are as serious as any murder. They are as wicked as the liar and the thief and the cutthroat. With their skin they seduce the fair men—“ he coughed and turned slightly red “—and, eh, and women, seduce the fair people of this city. They are spawn of the Silent, hook-nailed children of the Darkness—”

There was no working this from the front of the platform. The dais’ floor was up past the crown of Gillem’s head, and two Blade Broadarms, carrying swords and rods, stood at the far right end of the platform, guarding the only staircase.

But on the left end, it was only onlookers that spilled to the side of the stage. Not a Blade in ten arm-lengths. From there the nearest Blades guarded the entrance and exit to the square, and just three stood behind the platform, watching the back.

Gillem hide amongst the mass to do his work.

He found a space between two caravan guardwomen as the bailiff prattled on. “These are times of growth and times of change, times of flux and revolution of thought. But this means that it is now more than ever important for us to remember the very foundation of our morality. And so, for your education…”

Gillem held his hand over the surface of the bag and focused. The silver stream of forma slithered out into the air about his stretched palm. There was no manipulating the rope nooses themselves with this little preparation—he couldn’t tell what their make was, not all the way from here—but if the grain of the crosspiece was anything like the rest of the wood the Blade used to hasty construction…

“…for the cleanliness of our city and of our society…”

Gillem guessed poplar. It had to be poplar. He knew the bends and channels of poplar wood, the way forma filled its veins. And if he knew it, he could cast into it.

And if he could cast into it, these six women might have a chance.

“...for the sake of all this we do sentence these seductresses to hang by the neck until dead.”

He stopped in front of the woman at the far left and met her eyes for two heartbeats before turning back to the crowd.

Gillem sent a thread of forma into the poplar beam, sawing back and forth, towards the supports.

He could see the crosspiece start to strain. If anyone in the crowds noticed, no one spoke. Still, only the bailiff’s voice rose above all: “In the sight of the Just Face of God…”

He needed to pick just the right moment to warn the six, or they would be crushed.

“I do sentence you, Menia Scali…”

Crrrrrrrrk. The crossbeam was creaking, but not quick enough.

He’d have to try something else. None of the women had yet slipped the nooses around their necks, so they, at least, would be safe.

Gillem Hare could not speak for the safety bailiff. But watching the man’s eyes travel up and down Menia Scali’s body as he condemned her to die quickly evaporated what little sympathies he had for the lawmen of Alturret.

It was tempting to send the support beams forward onto him, but there were three Blades behind the platform and they were just within range.

He sent a final wave of forma into a thick knot three feet up base of the two support beams holding up the gallows. And then, he pushed.

The six women, not yet flush with the holes of their nooses, dove out of the way as the gallows came crashing down, backwards, and landed in the square below with a clatter. The crowd erupted with murmers and then with shouts. In the five seconds that followed, the Blades scrambled for their weapons and scanned the mass of people.

The six women stood in shock for three beats, and then the first was off.

She was second from the stairs, the tallest of them all, and maybe the oldest. She bowled past three Blades and their clubs and elbowed through the mass, clearing the way for the five girls that followed.

To their credit, no one in the crowd grabbed them: the people stood, mouths slacked, and parted willingly as the women wrestled their way to the entrance of the square.

A mass of maroon Blades was gathering quickly to block their way. There were eight and then twelve and then twenty. None of the women were armed, and all of the King’s Blades were trained to kill.

Gillem had to get there first.

Pinching the neck of the bag, he shoved the caravan guards out of his way and dashed out, away from the crowd, between the row of market stalls that made the perimeter of Villor Square. Even the locals were stopping now, craning their necks to the chaos that erupted. It was easy enough for Gillem to push past the men and women and carts that choked the walkway.

As he rounded the corner, he nearly lost footing on the arched back of one sleeping black cat, but he kept going, ignoring the screech behind him.

He and the women arrived to meet the twenty-four Blades at the same time. But their eyes were not for him: the foremost man, a Shieldarm with fists the size of the first woman’s head, was shaking a mean wooden truncheon in their direction.

“whor*s of Alturret,” he said. “You’ve interrupted justice with illegal casting. Whoever among you staged this riot, step forward!”

If anyone planned to volunteer, Gillem did not give her the chance. Because Gillem knew well the make of the truncheon in his hand: it was oak, painted with a darkened varnished, carved at either end, but oak still.

Gillem had cast into a hundred of these before.

He wasted no time. Drawing a thread of forma from his satchel, he sent the thread into the body of the truncheon and ripped it from the man’s unsuspecting grasp. The Shieldarm blinked as it sailed away, but didn’t react in time as it barreled towards him. It hit the side of his skull with a definite crack.

His head preceded the rest of him to the sandy cobblestones below.

Gillem didn’t dwell. There were twenty-three more truncheons in this crowd, and so he tightened his concentration as he called forth twenty-three more threads. It was his whole supply, all he’d have for months, more than he’d ever worked at once before, but there wasn’t time—

“There! The caster is there!”

He was drawing off half his forma when he saw the Armsman pointing in his direction.

“sh*t.” Gillem’s stomach flipped from place. He dropped his concentration, and with it went the thinly-constructed silver line. It hit the ground and shattered, particles dissipating into dust. “sh*t.”

There went his whole supply, shattered like splinters of broken glass.

As a dozen pissed-off Blades approached through the masses, he took quick stock of everything on his person, which included the now-empty satchel, a water skin, the clothes on his back, one fivepiece coin, and a three-inch lock-blade pocket-knife. This he drew, taking four spry steps back and trying desperately to seem like he had a plan.

Back at the gate, the leading woman among the condemned was taking advantage of the chaos. She shepherded her fellows through the break in the Blades’ ranks, putting herself between their clubs and her younger comrades. So there was that.

The crowd about Gillem was thinning as one Broadarm bore down. He barely missed the cracking blow of the truncheon at the side of his head—it hit, instead, the face of an Armsman approaching his side.

Gillem ducked back and flailed his arms about, looking for anything blunt that might help him. His hand found the shoulder of a wide-eyed Sebasian trader ducking for cover.

“Sorry for this, friend,” Gillem said, thrusting the trader in the way of the next blow. The man cried out, and so did the Broadarm. Gillem turned tail and dashed back into the narrow row of market stalls.

This time, everyone cleared his path—women snatched their children’s hands and pulled them out of his way, men frantically hauled buckets of produce as Gillem Hare and twelve angry Blades barreled through the winding passage.

He nearly lost his balance as he skidded round the corner, and nearly lost his nerve when he saw them: the other half of the Blade’s company, poised beneath the shadow of the great Villor Clocktower—directly in his way.

A dozen pressed at his back, a dozen more approached from the front. Everyone between dashed out of the way, leapt over the front of market stalls and into the square.

Everyone but the cat. She snoozed, here, too, oblivious to the oncoming storm of boots.

Gillem had a plan, and it was ridiculous.

He crouched slightly, then nearly doubled over, his hands reaching out before him. His trajectory was for the guards approaching. His eyes were for the cat.

He was a hair’s-length from the first oncoming Broadarm when he snatched her sleeping form. She was a tangle of claw and fur and teeth, screaming, squirming, and Gillem ducked out of two pairs of arms, leapt to the shade of a market stall. The Blades at his front and back collided briefly, but recovered and snapped their eyes to his direction.

He reeled back and threw the screaming cat directly into their mass of sword and limb.

Gillem didn’t look back as he stepped onto the table of the stall, though he desperately wanted to. He lept head-on into the colorful fruit display, sending figs and persimmons flying in all directions. The cat cried, and so did one of the Blades, but Gillem paid it no mind as he dashed back towards the mass of shoppers now congregated at the square's center.

It was when his feet hit stone that he noticed he was bleeding.

It was a wide, long gash, running up and down the front of his left thigh. It made every long step distractingly painful. It was bleeding hard and fast.

There wasn’t time to dwell on it.

Most of the locals who’d been shopping stood now in the middle of the square, reeling from the commotion. Gillem hid as best he could among these, though he’d made enough of a disturbance of himself that there wasn’t much time to get lost among them.

He made an arc through the crowd along the back side of the square and tried to keep his pace at a slow and unremarkable scramble. He might have passed for a busy merchant, were it not for the blood saturating one leg of his trousers.

There was the north exit to the square, a narrow passage that led into the dense connection of alleyways between Villor and the old Courthouse District. There was no guard blocking the passage of a dozen or so outpouring Alturreti—at least, no guard he could see. Beyond it, he knew, was the twisting divide of a hundred endless nooks and passages.

Perfect for a man with a desperate need to hide.

Gillem fell in step with a family of northern traders, Limadon by the sound of them. He walked beside them, close enough to be among their ranks to any outsider, but far enough not to draw their interest. He let the tallest among them—a gawky teenage boy of six or so feet—stand between him and the confused throng of Bladesman rushing the square.

He passed through the gate without notice, and into the deep-cut shadows of the alley.

Gillem felt his heart slowing, and his breath loosening to match. The alleyway air was cool and damp and still and smelled of sweat and dust and upturned waste-barrels. Once he was four buildinglengths from the gate, he let himself fall back from the Limadon family; a chance look over his shoulder told him that no Blades had yet followed.

The network of alleyways ran between a mass of tall, close-set apartment buildings of weary rust-colored stone, and this street was no different. The going was sluggish; the roads permitted only one to pass in either direction, and sometimes a fallen waste-bin or a push-cart’s tricky wheel slowed traffic further.

Gillem took the first left out of the main alley and into another passage, smaller still, yet empty from end to end. The cobblestones underfoot were less worn, and here and there a doorway or a window choked with flowerboxes interrupted the imposing wall of red.

Fifty paces down he found an alcove, set back four feet, marking an ill-used doorway. Gillem fell in, and let his back slide down the wood of the door and into the dirt below.

The air was still and quiet. Finally, he could breathe.

He half-crouched, but set his leg out before him, knee bent slightly. There was no comfortable sitting; the pain ripping from the wound made sure of that. He ran his fingers through the slender rip on the front of his leg: the cut was long and fine and precise, if ill-aimed. He wasn’t dead yet, but he noticed now that a few inches more, and the blade would have cut uncomfortably close to a few important organs up and over, just below his pelvis.

Gillem was bleeding more than he’d like. Cold sweat was pouring from his brow, stinging his eyes, and knew that to any passer by, he’d be suspiciously wan. The wound would need stitching, and he was at least a mile’s walk from his nearest friend.

Getting there a bloody mess would be a feat; and that was not accounting for the fact that half the Blade of Alturret would be looking for one rogue caster who fit his description.

He took one small sip of his half-skin of water. With one shaking hand, he slowly poured the rest between the cut of the fabric and onto the bloody mess below. It stung the whole way, and Gillem nearly ripped a hole in his bottom lip for biting so hard.

Once the water was gone, he leaned his head back to consider his options.

There weren’t many, but he’d come up with something.

He had to.

The sound of footsteps came from the other end of the alley, from the entrance he himself had used. They moved with a shuffle, not the hard crunch of boots or the slap of sandals; bare feet, more than likely. They moved quickly as they grew closer, and were joined by the familiar sound of slow and shallow breaths.

It was too late for Gillem to move or conceal himself. He would simply have to hope that his new guest would be enough about his business not to mind the man bleeding in the alcove below.

Playing dead was his best option, and one which Gillem guessed was only a half-step beyond present circ*mstances. Still, he drew and locked his knife, holding it in a hand carefully concealed between his body and the wall.

He closed his eyes and listened as the stranger approached.

“Up.”

It was a woman’s voice. Gillem’s eyes fluttered open on reflex.

She was one of the women on the platform—the first one to spring to action, the one who’d put herself between her companions and the oncoming Blades. Her dress was askew, and a black bruise was forming on her jaw and about her left eye. But she was very much alive.

She held her hand out to him. “I said, up.”

He took it, and was surprised to feel the hesitation of his legs, and the heaviness of his tongue. “All right.”

“I can get us to safety,” she said, looking briefly over her shoulder. “But you’re going to have to move faster than that.”

---

“Ouch. Ouch, aaaaaaaaaaah.”

Gillem had gotten stitches before, but there was no getting used to the sensation of a hot needle through flesh. He suddenly felt empathy for the feelings of each and every shirt he’d ever mended.

“Like a little baby, you are.” She looked up at him, her mouth serious, her eyes a mocking grin.

He sighed and leaned back against the wall, tensing his jaw as she prodded into his skin. The basem*nt was silent but for his occasional sharp intake of breath, but above, he could hear the shuffle and clang of dishes and chatter. The Well’s Waste tavern was full of the usual late-afternoon crowd, thinly spread but loud as hell. It was the sort of place where a man could bruise his hands on another man’s face and enjoy a hearty meal for reasonable price. The sort of place where a woman condemned to gallows could drag a half-dead stranger to the basem*nt and no one would call the Blade.

Her name was Fuella. She was not so old as he had thought before, perhaps a year or two younger than he, but her face was hard-built and serious. Her hair was a rumpled curtain of black mahogany and smelled of smoke and dried flowers. Somewhere between laying him on the rickety worktable and coming back with bandages and needles, she’d changed out of the sack-like gown and into a drape-like robe of deep yellow-brown.

As she poked and prodded, Gillem stared. She didn’t notice it until she was nearly done.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re staring.”

“You... you stitch a wound very well.”

“Thank you.” She paused and unfurled a length of bandage. “I wish I could say the same of your being stitched.”

“Hah.”

“Okay, give me the leg. Oh, don’t be modest, you think this is the worst I’ve seen in my line of work?”

He simply leaned his head back and let her work unbothered. With surprising gentleness she hid the scrubbed skin of his left thigh beneath a snug mound of dressing.

“So, you’re really him?”

“Sorry?”

“Don’t be coy.” She rose to her feet and took a step back to admire her work. “You’re Gillem Hare, aren’t you?”

“You’ve heard of me?”

“No one will shut up about you,” she said with a wave of her hand. “I just expected you to be more… more… older.”

“Older?” He tried to keep his face as blank as possible as he swung his legs over the side of the table and sat upright. The shooting soreness of his leg made it near-impossible, so he buried his wince in a smile. “How older?”

“You’re a child.”

“I’m twenty-seven.”

“Horseco*cks!” She turned and slid onto the table beside him. It rocked with the sudden intrusion of her weight, but stayed standing. “You’re fifteen, no older.”

“I’m insulted!”

“Look at you,” she said. She grabbed his cheeks in one hand; the shock of her sudden touch nearly sent him toppling over the table’s edge. “No hair. Skin as smooth as a baby’s ass.” She wrenched his face to the side to inspect every inch of him. “No, I don’t believe it.”

“I take after my mother.”

“Well I should hope your mother didn’t have a beard.” She released his face from her grip; the skin on his cheeks tingled from where she’d been grasping. “Hmh. Well, I suppose Gillem Hare’s a good a man as any to have in my debt.” She slid off the table then, and its surface bucked this way and that, again.

“Your debt?”

“Yes. I saved your life.”

“Ah. Well, Miss Fuella, by my math, that makes us even.”

She snorted as she gathered her needles and cloth in hand.

“What?”

“I’d hardly called that even.”

“I mean, I don’t ordinarily brag, but I did save you from the noose. Or had you forgotten?”

“Yes, and I saved you from bleeding out in a disgusting flea-infested alley.”

“Precisely. So that makes us even.”

“I disagree.”

“How?”

“Well. I hardly think that dying in two seconds of a broken neck—” She curled a length of the loosely around her throat and gently tugged—“is worse than bleeding slowly and dying three days later of infection.”

“I—”

“Or.” She held a hand up to stay him. “Being caught by the Blade and bludgeoned to death in some dark room. Or being sentenced to some horrible prison camp in the Teilays. Which is a merciful sentence for someone caught rogue casting.”

“Hang on.” Gillem straightened and gripped the edge of the table. “I don’t think this is fair. A death is a death. It’s even.”

She arched one eyebrow. “Then maybe I should have kept you in the alley a bit longer, see how you’d feel then.” She crossed her arms beneath her chest and tapped one bare foot gentle against the flagstone of the basem*nt floor. Her lips disappeared into a tightly drawn frown.

Gillem opened his mouth to say something, but found himself cut off by a cackle of laughter. “Four gods. I’m teasing, Gillem. You far dimmer than I'd been led to believe.”

He felt his shoulders slacken a full inch. “Hah. I was just playing along.”

“No, you should have seen your face. You look like I’m the one what stabbed you.”

“I’m… I was just worried you were going to hold me to some debt. You know. We’re in this basem*nt, and gods all, I don’t know anyone up those stairs. And you being so deft with that needle—”

“Ah, well.” She set her things on the table beside him and rubbed her hands together. “I was hoping there was something you could help me with.”

“I’m not going to like this, am I?”

“No, you’ll—um.” There was a change in her face, like the fire in her eyes was dampened by something beyond them that was out of his reach. “I can’t stay in Alturret. They’ll be after me, the Blades. What you did today, they won’t like it. Not that I’m not glad you did it. But I can’t stay here.” She breathed in and out slowly. The fingers of her left hand kneaded the knuckles of her left. “My whole life is in Alturret. I’ve been in lowtown forever you know, and my mother, and my mother’s mother… I don’t know where else to go.” She looked away. “I figure you probably know a lot of people all over. Not just in Alturret. Because clearly—your accent, I mean—you’re not from around here.”

He wasn’t sure what else to say. “No. I’m not.”

“Oh, don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like I’m some lost cat or something, bone-thin and nearly crushed underfoot.”

He chuckled quietly to himself, but then wish he hadn’t. “I’m not laughing at you, it’s just, it’s funny you should mention a cat, because—”

Her hands were fists at either side. A sudden flush erupted on her cheeks. “If you don’t want to help me, you can just say so, I won’t be insulted. I can handle myself, I just thought it might be easier if I had some sort of introduction. But if you can’t be bothered—”

“No, I will,” Gillem said quickly. She blinked up at him, the tension in her face draining in an instant. “I’d be happy to. I’ve made a lot of friends—lots of enemies, sure, but some friends, too—and they’re, now they’re in my debt.”

---

The sun had disappeared behind the western treeline, and she heard no sound of voices or drunken laughter on either end of skin row, so Fuella turned out her lamp, stepped inside her home, and locked the chain on the door behind her.

The child was asleep, though fitfully. The baby’s fever had just broken, but Fuella thought it best to keep their small house silent tonight, even if it meant fewer coins in their jar by her bedside that week. It was a worthy sacrifice, but a sacrifice nonetheless.

That was one reason few of the women on skin row remained mothers.

Checking once more that she had bolted her door—one could never be too careful—she crossed to the table and poured herself a cup of sweetspice tea from the cooling kettle. Two-week stifling heatwave be damned: tea was good for the nerves, and Fuella had them more and more nowadays.

And besides, the cross-ventilation from the front windows to the back kept the one-room dwelling relatively cool. She wouldn’t even have to worry about noise tonight. The men of the Blade that had ascended on the town for the past week had left that afternoon, and the noise they brought to the neighborhood at night would now be replaced by a well-earned quiet.

Or so Fuella had assumed.

She hadn’t heard the voices at first—they were too quiet, too distant—but a punctuating shout ripped through the calm that had only just lain over the town.

Nor far away, a woman was screaming. Fuella could barely distinguish the words, but she didn’t need to.

She’d heard shouts like these thousands of times, if not out here, than in the streets of Alturret. For so long she’d had nothing to fear, and so she could seethe and hate in the open. She could curse the Blade to their faces, and expect nothing but a slap in return. But those days were long gone. Hate was pointless when she had something to lose.

She set down her cup and bolted to the corner of the room. Two strong wooden doors—stronger, even, than the entryway the home itself—secured the wooden closet. She opened it just a crack. Inside, the child slept, curled up in the corner, in a pile of blankets. In the dim light, Fuella could see the beads of sweat on her brow. The worst of the fever was over, but the poor thing was always restless on hot nights like these.

Fuella told herself she had nothing to worry about. Her child was a girl, and young. Still, she closed the doors of the closet anyway, firmly, and then returned to the front door, pressing her ear against the wood.

The screams were growing louder, the exact words, clearer. That meant the commotion was getting closer. She threw the bolt on the door as well—and then she heard the knock.

Fuella held her back straight and tried to slow the pounding in her chest.

She had nothing to fear.

The hand beyond the door knocked again. “Open up!”

There was a knife between her skirts, just beneath a slit, within easy reach. It was only for emergencies, but this may be one. She fought to keep her fingers still and sturdy as she turned the bolt and opened the door just a crack, the chain-lock holding.

It was not the face she had been expecting. “Hurry,” he said.

Fuella nodded, shut the door, unlocked it, and let the man in. He swept past, his black cloak bringing in a cloud of dust from the outside. It swirled in the weak stillness of the lamplight and settled on the cheap fringe carpet below. Fuella locked the door behind him.

“By the Wits. Gillem Hare, what are you doing here?” she said, trying to take his cloak, but he pulled his arm away.

“I came to warn you,” he said. “Fuella, the Blade are here and they’re recruiting.”

“I know that. I heard. How couldn’t I have?” She refilled her cup and clutched it tightly in her palms. “Where have you been? I haven’t seen you in nearly two years.”

Gillem was at the back window now, craning his neck out into the darkness. “You don’t have long. They’ll be here soon.”

“I don’t have anyone for them to take, Gil. Though I appreciate the concern.”

Gillem swept back across the room and towards the table, plopping onto the stool opposite her. She reached back to the counter and plucked a second earthenware mug from the dishpile, pouring him his own cup of tea from the pot.

He accepted it with a gracious nod. As he drank, she studied his face. He looked older now, and his face was gruffer, though still with only the most pitiful beginnings of a beard. But his dress spoke of a long time on the road: his clothes were worn and dirty, and his the treads of his boots were peeling off at the front. “Are you studying me?”

“Yes.” She tapped her fingers against the table. “It’s gone quiet.”

“Their cages might have been filled. Gods.” He set the empty cup down on the table with a clack. “I hate to think it. I’ll have to ambush their caravan once they’re far enough away from the village.”

“Or perhaps they weren’t here at all, and you’re making up excuses to see me,” she said, slowly stirring the surface of her tea with her little finger. “Which you don’t need to do, by the way. Though it was bold of you to knock at this hour. How did you know I didn’t have a client?”

“Why did you lie to me about having a child?”

Gillem leaned forward slightly in his chair, and Fuella followed suit. She met his eyes full-on. “I never lied.”

“You said you didn’t have anyone for them to take.”

“I did. I don’t.” She paused. “I have a child, but not the sort they want. Too young, and a girl. How did you guess?”

“Behind me, on the floor, by the closet. A pile of clothes. Children’s gowns and things.”

“You’re very perceptive!” She poured the final drops from the teapot into his cup. “I didn’t even see you glance in that direction.”

“A girl, though,” he said. He swirled the dregs in the bottom of the cup, running the bottom rim along the table. “How old?”

“Just one year and a season.” Fuella took a sip of her tea and watched Gillem Hare dip back into his head for a moment. His brow furled as he did the calculation, and then tightened, and beneath it, his eyes grew wide. “Yes,” she said.

“You’re certain?”

“Her father’s no Alturreti, that’s for certain,” she said. “And as long as she’s been on earth, she’s whiny and squirmy and wholly incapable of taking care of herself. So she doesn’t take after me.”

“She’s a baby.”

“After a fashion.”

“Not after a fashion, she’s wholly and completely a baby.”

“How do you know? You’ve not seen her.”

“May I?”

Fuella pinched the rim of his cup and hers and set them on the counter. Behind, she heard the scrape of wood on stone tile as Gillem rose to his feet. “You may.”

He preceded her to the closet, and she opened the heavy door slowly, pressing her index finger to her lips. He gave a shallow nod, and let one beam of light from the room illuminate the infant asleep on the closet floor.

She felt Gillem’s breath on the back of her neck grow slow. He made some little animal cooing noise, and she slowly pressed the door shut.

Gripping him by the elbow, she led him back to the table, and they returned to their seats.

“Wow,” he said. “She’s… she’s so small. So… sticky-like.”

“She’s a baby.”

“After a fashion.”

Fuella let herself laugh at this, if only slightly. “Is that all?”

“You’re sure she’s mine.”

“I’m not sure of anything, at least not yet. Time will tell. I suppose you’ll have to come back and see for your self once she’s old enough that we can tell what other of your charms she has inherited.”

“Well.” He sighed. “Horseco*cks, as you say. Of course I’ll come back. Oh! Has she a name?”

“Of course,” Fuella said. “She’s called Sidran.”

I am a machine who ingests caffeine and prose comes out.

2.

Sidran Hare knocked on the door.

As the footsteps approached from the far side of the room beyond, she adjusted the helm atop her head. It was stiff leather, sweaty and hardly functional, but it held her curls out of sight and kept nearly everything above the bridge of her nose cast in a helpful swath of shadow.

The door opened, and Captain Levon More’s voice preceded his person. “I specifically said that I was not to be disturbed.”

With the complete sweep of the door open, Sid could see the extent of his ire. More was tall and widely built of hard muscle. His face was squarish, framed with full but close-cropped black hair, and he might have been handsome were it not for the deep canyons of well-practiced frown-lines about his mouth.

He was practicing such an expression now, his scowl trained on the intruder in Armsman’s garb.

“I am aware,” Sid said in the lowest voice her throat could muster. “Broadarm Layiss sends his apologies from the post tower. He says it’s urgent.”

“I’ve just received the evening post,” he said. “A boy just sent it over two hours ago.”

“There’s something else,” Sid said, straightening. She tilted her chin up, just so. “Sir, I’m sorry. It’s not my place to know. But Layiss seemed to think it was of particular interest to you. The sort of thing you’d want to know the second it arose, he said.”

More’s brown eyes narrowed into slits. “It’s Hare. I know it is. Is it? Well?”

“Sir.” Sid made a show of looking back over her shoulder. “Er… yes. Yes it is.”

More scowled, and for a moment, his eyes were distant, fixed on some imaginary point just beyond the top of her head. But then she felt him looking at her, top to bottom. “You’re young to be here, aren’t you?”

“I’m sent from the Academy,” she said. “Training, and the like.”

“You were in the party that arrived yesterday?”

“No, sir. But of course, no party arrived here yesterday, sir. I’ve been here since last Resting. I came with Broadarm Welt.”

“What’s your name, boy?

“I’m called Mackin—sir.”

“Academy, you said. Very good. And how is old Captain Sansk?”

“Proper cold in the ground, I’d wager, at this point, sir. He’s been dead since Midsummer’s. Meaning no disrespect to the dead of course, sir.

“Hmm.” He looked her up and down again. “Very good. I’ll see to it in a moment. Now be about your way, boy.”

He closed the door without a word more.

Sid cursed beneath her breath and turned back. More’s room was second floor from the top of the north tower of the West Alturret outpost. From the landing outside his office, the stairwell spiraled up into darkness towards an ill-used top-floor entertaining room. On silent feet, Sid slipped up the stairs and around the corner, into the total darkness that pooled there. She kept her breathing steady and slow, and made sure her thieves’ tools were close at hand just beneath the lapels of her shortcoat.

More emerged not long after. He shut the door behind him, and Sid heard the tell-tale click of an automatic locking mechanism. For a moment, he paused, and she heard him sigh before proceeding down the steps.

She counted the footfalls, making sure he was three floors down before quietly treading back down to his door.

Then she counted to twenty. When she heard no more disturbances below, she got to work.

Playing this lock was easy enough. She had quick hands and wealth of experience, and the proper picks to do the job right. But she’d been hoping that he wouldn’t bother to lock his chamber door. True, the mail tower was the farthest point on the outpost from here. But More was a tall man, one who took long strides.

That meant she could be sure of ten minutes at the most. Seven walking there, and three running, once he realized he'd been tricked away from his office.

She spent two of these precious minutes playing the lock, but that would have to do.

His office was small and sparse and lit only by a half-illuminated form-lamp, the kind that was more customary in the hand than in an office. There was desk at the center of the room with a straight-backed chair behind it, plus a row of shelves along the back wall.

Last of all, there was a window, wide enough for one small girl to slip through. Guarded, at least she hoped, by two young men in equally-apt disguise.

They would call the warning signal if they saw the Captain return across the grounds towards his chamber. They would belay her as she ascended the thirty feet to the ground.

Ideally.

For now, she couldn’t worry it; there was a task at hand. She found her first quarry easy enough. It was as More had said—he had just received the evening post.

The sheaf of papers was marked from Limadon, and it was a bundle of dozens of documents. Registers, census data, the most accurate Egion had ever produced. The first copy to reach the east, written by the Blade Scrivener, stamped by the Grand General and then approved the King Himself.

Sid slipped the parcel between the folds of her shirt.

Once More discovered her dissembly, he’d change the locks, add new security precautions, and fly into a blind and paranoid rage. He’d tear at his hair wondering at that Gillem Hare was planning to do with the information he stole.

So much so, hopefully, that he'd fail to notice what else was missing.

Sid opened the top drawer of the desk and immediately found what she was looking for: a bundle of eight sheets of paper, bearing dense, printed text: OPENING CEREMONY SECURITY DETAILS. FIFTH RESTING / AUTUMN / 575.

She flipped through. Parade route headed from Courthouse District down to the new train-yard… two Armsman on each street-corner. One Broadarm per block. Forty-eight mixed marching in parade proper…

“Horseco*cks. He must think we’ve sh*t for brains.” She dropped the packet back into the belly of the drawer, rolled it shut, and made for the cabinets along the wall.

These were packed tightly with files, some newly printed, some yellowing, some even going back to the days before everything the government did was set to type. There was a drawer for arrest records, for financial documents, recruitment processing, movements, planning… the bottom drawer was locked, but easy enough to trick.

“Flush,” she muttered, thumbing through the documents. These, too, were labeled as "Opening Ceremony Security Details," thought the type on the front page was smaller, and it was printed on more formal letterhead. Thirty-odd copies on the same sort of paper, in the same sort of print, only twice as thick, twice-as detailed, and bearing completely different information. She pulled out one of the files and stuffed this, too, in the concealed pocket beneath the middle buttons of her overshirt. Then, setting the rest of the copies straight back into place, she closed the door and felt it locked with a click.

She had time, by her count, at least five minutes left. Perhaps she could leave at least a bit of mess, if only to irk him. It was certainly tempting. Maybe she could somehow send the forma in his lamp seeping onto the table, or loosen the legs on his chair, or—

She stopped.

A shout below, outside the window. She scurried to the wall, ducked beneath the sill and listened.

“You there! You! What are you doing?”

It wasn’t possible. She hadn’t been seen. She couldn’t have been.

“Impersonators! Imposters! Casting while in Blade uniform. You two! Put your weapons down and come willingly!”

She hadn’t been. It was them. It was always them.

---

“This is your f*cking fault!” Gray said through the corner of his mouth as seemingly every Blade in the Kingdom of Egion and all its holdings approached from three sides. The fourth side was the wall at their back, inside of which, thirty feet up, Sid was most likely crouched, listening, and cursing them all to a fifth hell.

“My fault? How is this my fault?” Milt said through clenched teeth.

“For letting me make this!” Gray said as he inched along the wall away from the window. He wasn’t quite sure to do with the six feet of woven forma net that was to be their undoing, so he simply dragged it with them.

“Of all the—”

“You were supposed to be eyes! You were supposed to be watching!”

Milt’s normally sun-tanned face had reverted to a sickly pale. “Yes, which is what I was doing! I can’t be watching your every last minute to make sure you don’t do something stupid that’ll draw their notice! I’m not your f*cking nursemaid.”

“Hah! If you’d been my nursemaid, I’d—”

“You there! Shut your f*cking faces and step away from the wall!” One Broadarm stood at the fore. A pack of at least twenty Armsmen fanned out behind him. “And you, little guy! Put down that net! Or… or whatever it is.” They stood a swordslength away from Milt and Gray, drawing no closer. Like opposing magnets, they hovered just out of reach, eyeing slack the silver-white net in Gray’s hand with suspicion and perhaps a tinge of fear.

“It’s forma,” said one of the Armsmen right at the Broadarm’s heels. “They’re casting.”

“Net, forma, whatever the hell it is, put it down.”

“Okay, fine,” Gray said slowly. “Milt, let me just help you fold it up.”

“I don’t see how—”

“Grab hold of the other end so we can fold it because everyone knows you need to fold forma to put it away properly.”

“You don’t—oh."

Gray tightened his mind and gripped the edge of the net as Milt followed suit with the slack on the ground. He tightened his grasping concentration around the eighth-inch of air before his fingers. “Let’s—together—now!”

Gray heaved back and then out with all the strength he could muster, and Milt followed suit. It flew out and caught the Broadarm at the front and the five or so standing behind him. With a dramatic—if unnecessary—sweep of his arms, Milt tightened the edges.

“Let’s run,” Gray said, grabbing Milt’s arm.

“Sid,” he said, as the six captured blades wrestled from their net and the rest of the Armsman crushed towards them.

“Oh, sh*t, right. Is she—”

“GET BACK,” shouted a voice from the crowd.

The warning came too late—a shadow hovered above the crowd of Blades, hovered for three sharp seconds before a wide rectangular desk crashed down from above with an alarming force.

Most of the crowd tried to scurry away, but a few unfortunate men remained within reach of the splinters and woodshards that propelled from the crash site. Beneath the net, the Broadarm himself had wrestled free. He dashed towards Gray, rapier drawn, and Gray reached for his own sword and blocked his opponent’s swipe just in time.

Someone else in the party screamed, and Gray had just a second to scramble out of the way before another object sailed from the window and crushed the flailing form of one particularly unlucky Armsman. Gray blinked, but in the darkness he could see it was a cabinet, wooden, too. And up above—

“Bastards!” The Broadarm thrust out at Gray, but he parried and ducked and blocked each time, defending with few other plans to speak of. This man was bigger than he, older, and if not more experienced, than certainly more brutal. Gray fought with style. Gray fought with finesse. This man fought with muscle, and he was wearing Gray thin.

“Waaargh.” Another poor man crushed beneath more falling wooden debris, this one just one cabinet drawer. Its papers fluttered gently in the hot autumn breeze.

Gray felt his body slowing down in spite of the panic that raced through his mind. Somewhere outside his view he heard Milt struggling, but Gray couldn't tear his eye away from the Broadarm. He struck from above, and then found an opening in Gray’s left side. He barely dodged the blow, and then stepped out of the way, but instead of ground his foot found the ankle of a fallen Armsman.

Gray tumbled back on his behind, and the Broadarm stood tall over him, tip of his blade tickling the cartilage of Gray’s nose. “Now, how’s about you come quietly, and I’ll—oof.”

He didn’t have time to finish, stumbling over and backwards onto the crumbled tabletop.

Milt spun the splintered leg of the table in his finger. “Surprisingly good weapons, these.”

“Idiots!” The shout came from above, but the sound was closer and closer with each hammered repetition: “Idiots! Idiots! Idiots, all!” Sidran suspended shoulders above at the end of a rope. She dropped the final length, and winced as she landed on two feet. She was dressed as they were in Armsman guard, and by the looks of it, not amused. “I’m out of ammunition. We need to run.”

She was right. The Armsmen who had scurried were gathering again, and by the looks of them, they’d found friends. In the distance, across the courtyard, three better-dressed Blades, maybe Captains, were running over. “Will’s tit*. Let’s move.”

---

“The f*ck happened back there?” Sid whipped the leather helm off her head and shook the sweat out of her hair. Her curls stood stiff around her head and belled out below her ears where the clammy embrace of the leather ended.

Milt knew that laughing at her right now would be a very, very bad idea.

“Milt’s fault,” Gray said. He slid his back against the base of the clocktower and half-squatted, digging in to a small paper package of wet dates.

“I had nothing to do with that, Gray.”

“You were supposed to be watching our backs,” Gray said through a mouthful of food.

“Which I was doing.”

The three stood on the north side of Villor Square. They’d shed their coats into a canvas bag that rested at Milt’s toes. Dressed, as they were, in plain black shirts and trousers, they blended in easily with the night-time foot traffic, which was bustling with the young and drunk Zenksday crowd. People shuffled past in twos and fours, boozy couples or groups of men free from the fear of a work-day hangover tomorrow. Most of the stalls were closed but a slim few by the square’s two entrances operated for the promise of loose-coin from the city’s hungry drunk.

“I don’t think I need to ask this questions, but who the hell made the net?” Sid said.

“Obviously, me,” Gray said. “And a fine piece of casting if you actually got a look at it. But Milt was supposed to warn me if—”

“Enough. You’re both idiots, and you both nearly got us killed today.” She chucked the helm into the open mouth of the bag and began raking her fingers through her hair. “Gray, I get. Milt, I’ve come to expect basic competence from you. Was I wrong?”

Even though he was a head and shoulders taller, Sid was somehow staring down at him, her eyes hard as cracked stone. She crossed her arms and co*cked one hip ever so slightly to the side in a pose Milt had only ever known to precede a serious scolding. “Look, I’m sorry, alright?” he said quickly, leaning very slightly backwards. “My eyes were up top. If I’d have known what Gray was up to, you can be damn sure I’d have stopped him.” He snatched the bag of dates from Gray’s unsuspecting hands and stepped out of his immediate reach. “At least we got what we were looking after, right, yeah?”

Sid sighed and snatched the canvas bag off the ground. “Yeah, yeah. I—” Sid’s hand flew to the slit down the front of her outershirt. “Oh.”

“What, oh?” Gray sprang to his feet. “Oh.”

Even in the weak lamplight of the square, Milt could see the heat turning Sid’s cheeks red-brown. “It’s was right there.” She dropped to her knees and pawed furiously through the contents of the bag. Milt heart the scrape of leather on cloth on metal buckles, but not to crinkle of paper. Still, Sid tossed through it again and again, not looking up as she spoke. “They were in my shirt. I—I put them there, I’m sure of it, but at some point when we were getting away… Lady Eracle’s holy trough, this is bad.”

Gray looked up at Milt and shrugged, then cracked his knuckles. “I don’t suppose this is our fault, too?”

In less than one beat of a heart, Sid was on her feet. A pinch later and she had Gray pinned to a wall, a knife from Four-knew-where pressed against his throat. “Yes,” Sid said, her voice very casual. Gray was suddenly sweating, and very hard. “I was, you see, distracted, by saving your lives.” She removed the knife from his skin and took two long steps back until she was back at Milt’s side. “We’re a team now. And that means it’s your tit* on the line as well as mine. One of us f*cks up, and things happen. Somewhere between hearing you shout and now, those papers slipped out of my shirt.” She returned the knife to some hidden space within the folds of her loose black trousers. “But that was our only chance. We’re not going to be able to get back into that office. So whatever chance we had to get our hands dirty at next week’s ceremonies is completely gone. Now.” She bundled up the bag in her arms and thrust it into Milt’s hands. “You’re going to go home by way of Lowtown.”

“But that’s completely—”

“The way home,” Sid said. She leaned in just slightly. “We’ve no idea if we’re being followed. Walk to lowtown. I’ll make sure we haven’t a tail. And when you’re clear, I’ll give you the signal.”

“If they’d followed us from the outpost, wouldn’t we be dead by now?” Milt said.

Sid scowled. “If you were a ratcatch, Milt, and you saw vermin grubbing in your kitchen, what would you do? Kill it right then, or follow it back to the nest?”

---

The Well’s Waste tavern sat on the fairer side of the Snare, a hopeless tangle of alleys and sidestreets that made up the neighborhood between the Courthouse District and Villor Square. Its front door sat at the end of a six-foot wide street that emptied out onto a wider main boulevard by one of Alturret’s many Temples to Justice.

Gray, Sid and Milt shuffled in the front door an hour before dawn, too bleary-eyed and sluggish to even consider navigating their usual basem*nt entrance.

To Gray’s great surprise, Cily Atares and her husband Eras were already up and about. They languished behind the counter polishing bottles and replacing glasses, and looked up in mild surprise as the trio dragged themselves across the room and towards the stairwell, nearly tripping over the scattered rickety tables as they went.

“We didn’t even hear you leave your rooms. You or Gillem,” Cily said as they leaned forward on the scuffed rosewood surface of the bar. She was a young and plain-faced woman, silver eyes worn from a night apparently sleepless as their own. She was Limadona and with the accent to match, and the golden hair collected in a loose silk headscarf that tied back at the nape of her neck. “Early morning, or late night?”

“Both,” Sid said.

Eras, a tall Alturreti man of thin stature and hairline, placed three small cups on the bar before Gray, Milt and Sid. “You’re wearing the new lads down thin, I see.” He filled the cups two-thirds with a purple-black liquid from an unlabeled bottle.

“It seems to be working both ways,” Sid said. She tossed her drink back in one sip and emerged wincing.

Gray followed suit. It was plum-flavored, at least in theory; the liquor hit the back of his throat in a flash before proceeding to burn a length-wise hole in the lining of his esophagus. The process reminded him of the clawing vacancy in his stomach. “Oyff.”

“As if I needed anything else to knock me out,” Milt said.

“Speaking of.” Sid stacked their glasses, one inside of the other. “I’m going to go get some rest in the hour before the sun comes up. I’d like to have at least some sleep in me before we have to explain all this to Gillem.”

“Explain all what to who?”

Gray nearly jumped out of his breeches.

Gillem Hare was coming around the corner of the basem*nt landing, slipping through the narrow doorway that led down to the basem*nt.

He’d snuck in silently, but now he filled the room. Gillem Hare, forty-some, with a face of white-brown shoe-leather that still seemed youthful at a cursory glance. His hair was brown-grey but full and thick, and despite being shorter than Gray himself, he, like his daughter, seemed to tower over the ceiling.

His lips were parted in a smile that reminded Gray of an attack hound before it’s dinner. He was looking right at Gray. “Heard an interesting story about you, Calleford.”

“From who?” Sid said, slipping off the edge of her stool. She put herself between Gray and Gillem, but was picking nervously at the bottom hem of her shirt.

“And then some careless boy starts throwing furniture out the Captain’s window.” Gillem slung his arm around Sid’s shoulder. “Now how might that have happened?”

Sid opened her mouth to respond, but whatever she planned to say withered into a little resigning sigh as her father squeezed her shoulder tighter still.

“So, my students,” Gillem said. He steered Gray and Sid back to where Milt was standing, knees-locked, in front of the bar. “While you’ve been diligently slipping tails before coming back here—and rightfully so, of course—I’ve been up half the night devising the perfect punishment for you.”

The plum liquor within Gray’s stomach roiled and threatened something fierce. His head was light; he had to hold onto the bar to keep from wavering where he stood. All this time, all this work—all the sacrifice, the leaving home, the sweating out in the plains, the nearly getting killed by a charging alpha boar, all of it was for nothing. “You’re going to send us home,” Gray said. “Listen, Gillem, please, I can try harder, I—”

“No. No, I’m not going to send you home.” Gillem said. He waited as Eras poured him a cup, full to the brim, of the same plum drink. He polished it off in two gulps before continuing. “Although, when this job is done, you may wish I had. All three of you.”

Gray didn’t need to look Sid’s way to know the last comment had slammed her. He expected to see her searching for comment again, or nervously picking a thread off her shirt, the mixed pains of remorse and fatherly betrayal evident on her face.

But instead, when Gray looked her way, he wished he hadn’t. Her jaw was tight. Her lips were pursed. Her eyes were squinted crescent moons, her fists clenched so tight that Gray wondered whether her nails were drawing blood from her palms.

She was simmering with more quiet hatred than Gray had ever seen in a person before. And she was staring straight at him.

Kudo's on your very unique twist to an otherwise hackneyed genre! I'm loving the sensory details--I can taste, hear, feel, and see your words, and that makes for an amazing reading experience. I can't think of any helpful criticism right now because i'm snotty and have a headache, but for now

MORE PLS

Thanks a bunch, Caly! I appreciate the praise and would love some eviscerating criticism if you can give it. (get well soon, also :<)

Woohoo. Plot thickens~

3

“As with all things, there will be an easy way to do this, and a difficult way.” Gillem unfurled the map on the table front of them. He pinned the curling edges by placing one thimble-sized glass onto each corner until it was tamped down to a respectable smoothness. “And you’re going to be doing it the difficult way.”

It was a map of Alturret, but unlike any Gray had seen before. The copy was well-worn, but certainly not old: the straight tracks of the rail-lines accurately dipped along the bottom perimeter for the city, and those had only been plotted in the last five years.

But it was scribbled, creased, ripped and mended over a hundred times. There were even a few scorch-marks in choice places, a perfect circle drawn around the governor’s mansion from the drip-away of a cup of black tea. And it was skillfully annotated: some still hand had drawn in each and every side-street and duck-away in the Snarl, and a network of lines in red ink ran between the Courthouse District and the wealthy Tabrena Hill neighborhood adjacent.

“This is Alturret?” Milt said.

“That’s what it says at the top,” Sid said. “Are you blind?”

Milt, for his part, seemed genuinely taken aback. “What makes you I—”

“Alturret, fantastic!” Gray said, putting both his hands up. “Lovely map we’ve got.”

Milt scowled. “Gray, I just think I should mention that—”

“Truly something!” Gray slapped the table and it shook furiously on bone-thin legs. “Loads more interesting than whatever we’re about to start fighting about.”

The four sat on either side of a rickety wooden table in the dank semidarkness of the basem*nt below Well’s Waste. In the six hours since Gillem had cryptically sent them to bed, none of them had spoken a word. Gray had hoped time would ease everyone’s nerves.

Apparently not.

“As I was saying,” Gillem said. “You can consider this both a punishment and a logical continuation of your training. Except for Sid. For her, I suppose, this is just a punishment.” He smiled and rapped the side of the table with his knuckles. “Anyway. See the red lines here, between the courthouses and the Tabrenas?” Everyone nodded. “Any idea what those are? Sid’s not allowed to guess.”

Gray looked up. Sid was looking less worn than before, but certainly no happier. She refused to meet his gaze, or Gillem’s. But at the mention of the red lines, she shuddered with her whole body and stuck her tongue outright. “Gyugh.”

“Okay,” Gray said. “I’ve no idea.”

“That’s why you think about it,” Gillem said.

“Hmmmm. Well, are those the same as these blue ones?” Milt was pointing twice, one finger on Tabrenas Hill, another to a district in the south-east with circular streets and swatches of green sketched over the map. “Where’s this, anyway?”

“Ollis Hill,” Gray read. “Clinks and clots, as you might say. Money types. Same with Tabrenas, though the gold flows a bit older in the veins there.”

“Both sets of lines are going downhill?” Milt said. “Look, here. This one’s going to… well, the red one goes to Courthouse. But look, see these streets here? It’s going by the governor’s mansion. And that there, isn’t that Low Council’s hall? It goes past all these important buildings.”

“Same with this.” Gray rubbed his chin as he stared down at the blue. “Goes from Ollis to Stavers, and that place is new, built for the railroads. But it’s nice. And it goes right to East Market, and then out. And then it looks like they both meet up here, under lowtown, and then they catch up with the Udrannan River… oh!”

“Why oh?”

“It’s a sewer system!” Gray slapped the table. “I’m right, aren’t I? Four, I’m clever.”

Milt’s eyes grew wide. “Oh.”

Gillem laughed, and Sid’s shoulders shrank back. Gray’s head snapped from one to the other to the third. “Why oh?”

“It’s a sewer system,” Sid said.

The realization hit Gray like a falling chamber-pot on a summer’s day. “You don’t really mean to make us—”

“Well, I can’t make you do anything,” Gillem said. “You’re free to decline the assignment.”

“If by that you mean we leave, then fifth hell, no,” Gray said. “Where do you mean to take us?”

“The Library of Alturret,” Gillem said. “Biggest library in Egion. Second only to the University Collection in Sebas.”

“After climbing round in a sewer, they’re going to let us into a library?” Milt said.

“They’re not going to let us in,” Sid said. “That’s precisely the point.”

“You’ve learned a great deal under me so far,” Gillem said. “Things I could teach you by telling. The way forma retreated from the Four corners of Egion to Limadon, for the most part. How to collect what little forma is left into the boar-stomach pouches you’ve made. How to cast in the air. How to make a stupid net and nearly get your friends killed.” He glanced at Gray. “And if you were learning at the Royal Academy for Casters, that would be where most of your education would end. You’d learn technique, but spend little time beyond it. Most of the art of casting is dead. Before the Droughting, there were days when anyone could cast, not just clots and clinks in Limadon. And not just to make a lamp or force the air for a breath’s time. You’ve seen it already with Sidran and myself. We can cast into things.”

“Like desks and cabinets,” Gray said.

“So long as they’re wooden. Anything that was living once has channels for forma. We call them veins. In anything that once lived, those veins lie empty. Waiting for someone to cast into it. But.” He pointed to the library’s spot on the map. “To cast into something, you must know its veins. And specifically know them. Every single thing in this world that lives has got different veins. Some of them are similar enough that we can cast into them by knowing something of its like. For instance, this table. What’s it made of, Sid?”

“Oak,” she said flatly.

“Sid’s cast into this table. A million times before. Sid knows the veins of oak. Sid can cast into anything what’s made of oak. If a man attacks her with a club made of oak, she can wrench it out of her hands right quick without a second’s thought. But. Say someone comes after her with a truncheon made of mahogany, say. Or cherry. Say she’s never cast into those before. She can make it quiver in his hands, maybe, or with luck, she can make him drop it. But if she doesn’t know the wood of the object’s make, she can’t make it her own. See?”

Gray shrugged. “And the sewers connect to this how?”

“You learn to cast in makes and types of things with practice,” Gillem said. “You learn veins and forma with time. But you get the bare bones of it from books.”

“Uhhh, could be a problem,” Milt said.

“Rightly so,” Gray said with a sigh. “We’re going to study?”

“With casting illegal to anyone not trained at the Academy, and not of the right blood, clearly these copies are under lock and key,” Gillem said. “You can’t just walk in the front door and get them. It’s guarded day and night from thieves and criminals, and rightfully so. But it’s much easier to get in from the back. Fewer guards. It’s a simple matter of disabling two or three men and playing a few locks. And climbing in through the toilets, of course.”

---

At an hour past midnight, they were off. They dressed to blend into the city’s maze of darkened stone, in trousers and shirts of gray and brown, provided by Gillem himself.

Sid led her charges through the Snare to a point in the tangled streets marked on her map. She’d never entered the sewer tunnels this entrance, though she’d been in their depths before; she relied on Gillem’s map and a low-lit hand-lamp to guide her to the way in. It was slow moving. She didn’t trust Gray or Milt for guidance, so she held the map and lantern both.

Her companions followed in silence, sticking to the shadows. They carried nearly everything else they’d need: knives, rope, extra forma, and empty oiled sacks for the expensive books they would haul back through the sogging, stinking sewers of Alturret.

The smell of the entrance hit them before the sight of it: of riverwater and sludge moving slowly down the gentle slope of the city. It was around the corner, and made the street on the ground between two tenement blocks; a narrow, grated pit about two Sids deep, secured at the top by a steel grate with grid wide enough to permit a misplaced foot to fall in.

The grate itself was waist-height set down from a narrow footpath along the side of the alley, and at the alley’s end was a square of metal more rusted than the rest.

“That’ll be the entrance,” Sid said. “Which one of you is going to lift that away?”

“Not me,” Gray said quickly. Milt gave him a withering stare. “What? You’re a hell of a lot stronger than I, friend.”

Milt snatched the lamp from Sid’s hand and slipped down onto the grate below, stepping carefully towards the metal corners. Sid grabbed Gray by the wrist and pulled him back towards the mouth of the alley. “We’ll keep eyes up. Signal us when you’re done,” Sid said. “But be quick about it, you don’t know who’s wandering.”

Around the corner, the narrow streets were cast in the total darkness of a quiet, moonless night. The only sound she could hear was the quiet shuffle of metal on metal as Milt slowly fussed the door from place.

“There’s some sort of sign here,” Milt said, voice loud but still to a whisper. “I’m not sure what to make of it.”

“What does it say?” Gray called back.

“Well, I can’t exactly—”

“SHH.” Sid held up her hand, though in the dark she didn’t know if it would do any good. There was a crack of broken glass underfoot somewhere not far off—the crunch of bootsteps on gravel—and the soft murmur of voices. “Milt, no time, get that door open.” Sid shoved Gray slightly and they inched along the narrow walk back to where Milt was kneeling, door heaved upright, above a vertical passageway. A few hands from the door, not quite flush with the opening, an iron later was welded into the tunnel’s wall, leading down into what the lamp revealed to be a slow, sloshing darkness.

Gray crinkled his nose and stuck his tongue out between half-clenched teeth.

“Put that away, you’ll get it dirty,” Milt said. He stuffed the lamp into Gray’s hands and took hold of the side of the passage, slowly lowering his feet towards the top rungs of the ladder. “Down we go.”

As he went down into the deep, and then Gray, Sid held her breath. The footfalls, though still a ways off, were absolutely getting closer. When Gray’s head disappeared completely from her view, she scurried in after as fast as he would allow.

Halfway down the latter and into the pit, there was a change in the air. Autumn in Alturret was warm, but dry, and nights usually merciful and pleasant. The same could not be said for the serviceable drain passages beneath its surface: here the atmosphere was damp and creeping, the muggy air seeming to stick to her skin and stay there. And it stank more than usual: Sid had crept the low passages of the sewers before, but then the rivers of waste and runoff had run deeper, flush with upstream clean waters that diluted the city’s refuse. A few weeks without rain had stayed the flow: the river of muck was shallower than usual. It looked to come no higher than Sid’s middle-thigh, though she did not care to test that theory.

The tunnel itself was rounded at the bottom and the top, but designed with service and repair in mind: only Milt had to dip his head to walk through, and with the water levels so low, the three were able to creep along the shoulder-wide walking ledge with ease.

Sid hoped the slow trickle of the water drowned their footfalls from the ears of whoever had been lurking in the alleys above minutes before.

At the head of the group, Milt crept along quickly, lamp-hand extended before him. Sid kept back the rear, looking over her shoulder at the patch of soft, dim light beneath the entrance through which they’d just come.

Between them, Gray was making a show of retching loudly every ten paces, and clutching his stomach.

“I’ve never so much appreciated the value of free air as I am now being removed from it,” he said, between gasps. “Can I pop out for a proper breath next time we get to another one of those entrances?”

“No,” Sid said.

“You’ll never get used to it if you keep ducking away,” Milt said. “Oh, alright, what now?” He stopped in his tracks, and it took Sid a moment to see why: the short cast of the light reached outwards to a solid wall of sleek black stone. Their pathway diverged: it continued to the left and right, but there was no place to go forward.

“Hmm,” Sid said. She fished the folded map out of her pocket and handed it along, up to Gray, who passed it to Milt. “Check the map.”

There was a crinkle of paper, as Milt turned the thing over in his free hand four or five times before settling it upright. He muttered under his breath, scanning the sheet. “I think right,” he said, extending the glow of the lamp beyond the corner.

“Y’think?”

“That’s what it looks like.” He folded the map and stuffed it awkwardly into the back pocket of his trousers. “Let’s go.”

At the path traced along the right shoulder of the tunnel, they didn’t need to cross the stream of sludge to make the appropriate turn. It was some comfort until she rounded the corner to see where they were headed.

Except for Milt’s lamp, the tunnel continued into a solid swatch of dark; there were no overhead entrances, not as far as her eyes could make. They stood in one illuminated circle of water, skin, cloth and filthy stone: everything else outside the light’s touch was a completely beyond their knowing. It barely extended two paces in front of their party, and didn’t even reach the opposite wall beyond the stream.

Milt seemed to be thinking the same thing. He stopped still, and didn’t move forth.

“Problem?” Sid said.

“No,” he said. “Just… creepy.”

“Ay, f*cking right,” she said, and they continued. Either Gray was used to the gently gagging miasma of the tunnels, or else he’d learned to keep mum about it. Sid guessed it was the former, but either way, they walked in silence, the only sound above the slow trickle of the water their thin and slow breathing.

The going was slow, and they seemed to be moving straight for miles. Milt kept one eye on the map and held the lamp straight.

An hour passed, and Sid felt herself growing restless. They weren’t so far beneath the ground, but with only one way to go in either direction, and no room for passing, they might as well have been at the center for the earth. She also couldn’t speak for the gentle curve of the tunnels, but after long Sid realized that it was possible they should have turned by now. She’d walked the tunnels before, with Gillem, but she’d been younger then—perhaps her memory was skewed.

She called for them to stop. “Milt, when are we turning?”

“What?” He turned, suddenly, the immediate light of the lamp burning on the skin of her eyes. She squinted and covered her face with parted fingers, and he lowered the lamp to hip-level. “Sorry.”

“Turning, Milt, when are we turning?” she said.

“Well.” He sighed, shoving the lamp at Gray. Milt straightened the paper with two hands. “I’d guess at first turn we see. Looks like it’ll need a left, so we’ll have to cross the water. We haven’t arrived yet, by the looks.”

“But the rays of the lamp don’t reach across the water,” Gray said. “We would have missed it.”

“No, but I think Gillem left us a note,” Sid said. “Such-as-many paces from the first turn to the left, I think. Should be right on the paper.”

“Uh, well,” Milt said. He took the lamp from Gray’s hands and traded it for the map. “I’m, uh, not exactly the right person to be handling this set of affairs, then.”

“f*ck’s sake, Milt, we were supposed to have turned three-quarters of an hour ago!” Gray held the map taut with one hand—the index finger of his other prodded a hole in the surface so sharply he nearly shredded it as on a knifepoint.

“Well how was I supposed to know that?” Milt said. “Like I can read.”

For a moment, no one said anything—Gray blinked up at Milt in a sort of amazed silence, then looked back at Sid, who was suddenly feeling a throbbing headache take root in the space behind her eyeballs. “You mean to tell me you’ve been leading us for an hour and you can’t even read the map?”

“Lots of people can’t read,” Milt said.

“Quit being defensive.” Gray smiled widely.

Milt gently shoved Gray towards the water. “Quit taking pleasure in our being lost."

Gray wrestled himself out of Milt's grasp and stood upright, wiping imaginary dust from his shoulder. “No! No! Not for anything! Because for once, we’re tied to the post with our drawers at our toes and it’s not my fault!”

“It’s not that you can’t read that’s got me short, Milt, it’s that you’ve been leading is this whole time while not being able to manage the map.” Sid plucked the paper from Gray’s grasp. “Basic functioning competence. That’s all I’m asking.”

“In my defense, I’ve tried to bring up the subject five times since this morning. Six, maybe,” Milt said. “But I’ve been interrupted every time by you two bickering.”

“Defensive! Again! Give that back, Sid, I’ll lead.”

“No,” Sid said, finding their place on the line. There was Gillem’s annotation: A quarter hour’s steady pace to a left turn. Have to cross the water. “Pass me the lamp, we’re going to trace back. And don't dawdle. We've wasted enough time already.”

In the first few minutes of their trek, silence settled: Sid at the front, sweeping the lamp every so often to check the opposite wall, Gray close enough behind that the fronts of his toes nicked at her heels every few paces, and Milt respectfully admonished not far behind.

And then Gray spoke up. “Milt, what else can’t you do?”

“f*ck off.”

“You can't f*ck off?”

“I think you're mistaking my instructions for an answer.”

“No, I’m serious. As long as we’re down here—hours, maybe, longer than necessary, in the loose bowels of the Silence, I think it warrants some discussion, so we’ll all be able to aptly prepare for the next time you ruin our evenings.”

“Fine. Would you like a list, then?”

“Yes.”

“Of all my failings, lined up perfect-like, so even you can understand them?”

“Yes.”

“Alright, then. I can’t properly tie my own corset so well as you, and my bust will never be as perky as yours.”

“Hah. Well, I’ll bet—”

“I am not now—really, I won’t ever be—the biggest barrel of pig's balls in the room. Not while you’re around. And it causes me great suffering to think on how I will never measure up.”

“You’ll never—“

“Enough.” Sid stopped steady enough that she didn’t fall sideways when Gray hit her square in the back. Gray himself was not so lucky. He stumbled onto one foot, and then dipped to the side, nearly toppling into the rippling surface below before Milt’s steady arm caught him from behind. “You two are not allowed to talk anymore.” Gray opened his mouth to respond, and she covered it with her hand. “No. Silent until we get to the library.”

If they had any objections or issues—true to instruction—neither voiced them.

And for fifteen paces more, the only sounds in the sewers below Alturret were the trickling waters and the soft movements of their feet. Had Sid not been languishing in the sudden quiet, she might not have heard the distant voices from farther down the passage, in the direction from which they’d come.

Sid turned the lamp out and blinked against the darkness.

“What’s going on?” Gray said. But she ignored him, and held her hand out against his chest to stop him walking.

It took her a moment to see it against the black, but far off, in the direction they were heading, there it was—another lamp, like theirs, a pinprick against a swatch of starless sky. Only it was growing closer, and faster: it bobbled furiously. It joined shouts and the sound of running feet, heading right towards them.

She turned back to her companions. “Milt,” she said. “Run. Back. Go.”

“But we—“

“Go.”

“But the light—”

“Go.”

He did as he was bid.

Even in the blackness, his pace was steady and straight, and soon they were jogging, breathless in the wet and heavy air: Sid used her right hand to feel along the wall, to make sure she didn’t stray too far, and the other opened the pouch of forma at her belt. It was a good thing she’d be at the back—Milt was strong, and Gray, good with a blade, but in an unexpected fight in the dark, a caster was good to have on first lines.

On they ran, for minutes that stretched out like hours; the light at their back bobbed closer and closer, growing in her peripheral vision. The distance between them closing tighter and tighter, until—

“Oof.” Sid heard a thud of flesh on stone, and then flesh on flesh, until Sid found herself crashing into Gray’s back.

The pathway had ended. Below, the rush of water continued, from what Sid guessed could have been a gate or portcullis. They were sealed off.

The lamp as drawing closer. Sid could hear the voices, now, distinct: two of them, both male. One had the flat, drawn accent an Alturreti, lowtown by the sound of it, and the other… Limadon. Maybe Alturreti lowtown, also. Cold, quivering. And familiar.

“What do we do?” Gray said. “Do we fight?”

Very familiar. She shushed him and listened.

“—at least have some fun,” the familiar voice said from fifty-odd paces away. “How does that sound, friends? All sealed in, aren’t we?”

She was certain. The sound made her legs wet as soggy paper, her stomach full of sand. The pounding in her head thudded on. That voice. It had been so long, but that voice—she’d never forget it.

It was impossible. He couldn’t be here. There was simply no way, it was too heavy a coincidence, too strange and damned and fortuitous all at once. The voice couldn’t be his, but he had to be.

But here and now, equipped as she was, back to a wall, Gray and Milt’s safety to consider—now she was hopeless to face him.

“I need time to sort this out,” Sid said quietly. She reached for Gray’s hands and pressed the map and lamp into each. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” Gray said.

She didn’t answer. Sid loosed the satchel from her bag and dropped it on the ground before her friends. She made sure she had a firm grip on her dagger. And then, quietly as she could, slipped from the edge of the platform and into the water and sank her whole body below the depths.

---

Aaaand we're at 27,600 words! my, this is getting longer than I thought it would.

villains and anti-heroes are fun fun fun to write write write.

4

In the light of swinging form lamp, Milt could see the top-shadowed faces of their captors: two men of rough middle age, one with a face the texture and color of raw wheat dough, the other, hook-nosed and equally pasty, a flop of red-brown hair parted greasily at the side. And neither wore Blade maroons: they were dressed like Milt and Gray were, in close-fit black and brown, the uniform of the nighttime sneak.

Both were two arms-lengths away, their hands clearly visible, with no weapons drawn.

“I count two,” said Dough-face. “You said there was a third, Pagos. Well, boys? Where’s your ambush savior?”

Sid was gone—almost certainly into the water—but it didn’t seem wise to elaborate. A quick glance at Gray seemed to seal the agreement. Whatever trap Sid had planned would not be helped along by their revealing her whereabouts.

“I’m… I’m not sure,” Milt said, grasping blindly for a lie. He found one quicker than he’d expected, and it came along easily at first tug. “He was just our guide through the tunnels. Must have given us the slip when he heard trouble.”

“Hmmmm.” Dough-face took a step forward and squinted up at Milt. “You lying, boy?”

“No, sir.” He looked directly into the man’s mud-brown eyes, then away before it seemed too suspicious.

His gaze fell to the ground below. He saw the forma satchel resting by Gray’s feet at the same time as the red-head Pagos. He squatted down to pick it up as Dough-face drew the lamp closer to Gray’s nose.

“Casters,” Pagos said. His voice was low and cold, with a slight quiver. “This is what I was sensing.”

“And these two?” Dough-face said.

“No satchels on them,” said Pagos. “The third, whoever he is, didn’t want to be followed. He dove into the water followed the river while we were distracted. With this off his hands, he’s out of my feeling now.”

How could he know they didn’t have satchels? How could he tell where Sid had gone? Milt bit back the question and tried to think of a plan. There was a knife on his belt. Gray’s cutlass was back at the Well’s Waste, but he had a knife, too. These men weren’t Blades. If it came down to a match of sheer strength, they had a sure chance.

“What do you want with us?” Gray said.

“Two casters wandering about in the sewers at night,” Pagos said, holding up the satchel. He passed it off to his companion. “It will fetch a pretty piece when we bring you in to the Blade.”

“But we haven’t done anything,” Milt said.

“Doesn’t matter. Even carrying one of these without the right blood and papers is cause to hang.” Dough-face slipped the satchel into his pocket. “And, by my count, a hundred piece in our pockets per head.”

Milt whistled through his teeth. Not accounting for inflation, but that much coin would be wages for a good two years back home. “Wow.”

“No kidding,” Dough-face said.

“A rate like that, hell, I’d turn myself in.”

“Rightly so.” Dough-face hitched his trousers above his hips. “And you two not being much of a fight, it’s practically sugar cake.”

“Who said we weren’t fighting back?” Gray drew his knife and stepped back until his spine was shoved against stone. He nudged Milt with his free elbow.

“Ah, see.” Dough-face set the lamp down on the ground: the light it cast on their faces was long and hard, the shadows heavy across the strange, sagging pulls of his face. “This fight isn’t quite fair.”

Gray smiled through gritted teeth. “I hate to mention it, friend, but you’re not armed, and we are even numbers.”

“Pagos is the only weapon I need,” Dough-face said, clasping his friend on the shoulder. “One hound against two kits. Hardly a match, is it?”

“A hound? You’re a hound?” Gray visibly flinched; he lowered his knifepoint just so, and his jaw dropped to match. “There’s no way.”

Pagos’s smile was quick and lipless. “I can prove it, if you’d like.”

“A hound would fetch twice what a caster would, three times, maybe,” Gray said quickly. He raised his weapon again and regained stance. “No matter how much trouble we’re in for casting, your trouble would be tenfold just for existing. You’re lying.”

“What’s a hound?” Milt said. Sid and Gillem had never mentioned it before, nor Gray. But from the way Gray’s voice was cracking, the way the muscles in his knife-arm twitched, he guessed it was nothing good.

Pagos waved one long-fingered hand in the air before him as if stirring an imaginary kettle. The way his fingernails caught the light and moved this way and that was almost hypnotizing. “Care for a demonstration, boy?”

Gray sliced at air. “No.”

Pagos sighed. “I wasn’t asking you.” His hand stopped suddenly, and he made a fist, snatching at air.

Milt grew numb. Every part of him: he noticed it first with his eyes, with the impossible sensation of his eyeballs being locked in place, his lids forced open. His arm was still as well, painfully at his hip, and his legs and arms were locked in place as if made of concrete just now drying.

And his lungs. Four gods, all, his lungs were frozen, still with half-drunk air made ice. He tried to breathe but didn’t—his chest would not expand, could not. And through it all, through everything, his heart battered on within his ribcage, blood pushing through his veins. He could feel it. Everything in him moving, and he couldn’t move at all.

He couldn’t even move his mind now, either. His eyes were open, but what was he really seeing? Light and dark. Shapes, some moving, some still, crashing into one another, passing before one another. And outside was the slow trickle of water on water on stone, and voices, saying something, but nothing he could understand. It wasn’t language. He didn’t know language, at least not anymore, and so it was moaning and crickets and bleats and nothing else, getting louder and louder still, and through it all, the pounding, blasting beating of his heart was growing faster and faster and—

And he was on the ground. Hand over his chest, rising and falling with the seizing breaths he remembered how to take. Sweat streaming on the skin he’d forgotten he had.

He blinked a dozen times over dry eyes. The shapes made sense now. How could they not have? These were two people standing over him, both grinning. Two strangers. The dough-faced man loosing a length of rope from his belt. Pagos, rubbing those hands together. Those hands. What had they done?

Gray was not standing over him. Milt wondered where he was until he realized his head was on something soft. Gray’s knees. He tilted his head back and tried to say something but it came out only as a dry croak.

“You bastards,” Gray said. “What the hell did you do?”

“What the hell did they do?” Milt tried to say, but it came out sounding more like a long string of consonant clicks of the tongue. He rolled his head off Gray’s lap and hoisted up into a sitting position, then, gripping the wall, steadily pulled up onto two feet.

“Not our worst,” Dough-face said lazily. “Barely anything.”

“It felt like… something.” He massaged his temple with the heel of his hand.

“You’re going to hand us your weapons now,” Pagos said, and the dripping nasal sound of his voice set Milt’s stomach tumbling. He held the blade out by the handle, and Dough-face snatched it from his loose grip.

“I still don’t know what a hound is,” he said. There was something about his voice, now, a frustrating laziness to it. The way is rang against his ears sounded somehow distant.

If his captors noticed a change, they didn’t say anything. They shifted their focus to Gray.

He was standing with his spine in the crook where the pathway met the wall, his legs slightly apart. One hand was on the stone: the other held the knife firmly, point out towards Pagos. “I’m not giving up without a fight.”

“Put that down, boy, really,” Dough-face said.

“No need to chastise, friend,” Pagos said quietly. “This one’s mouthy. I like shutting up the mouthy ones.” He flicked his wrist, and a half-second later there was a clatter of steel on stone as Gray’s knife hit the ground.

Gray himself was frozen in place: only his fingers had moved, and they’d done so in a strange, wrenching way, as if forced apart by some invisible hand. The rest of him was still, statue-like, the color washing from his face until his skin was the color of bleached stone.

His eyes were not blinking.

“The hell are you doing to him?” Milt said, but Dough-face took him by the shoulders and turned him against the wall, forcing his head out so he faced towards the water.

“You’ll not want to watch him,” he said. “Stand still.”

Milt did nothing as the man triple-tied his hands behind his back with a length of jute rope. It was still so hard to think, like his mind was moving at half its normal speed. He thought of fighting back, but he’d handed over his knife, and willingly. It had seemed so sensible at the time. Only now he heard Gray slump against the floor, making the same little gagging and gasping noises he’d been making not two minute before.

The slow black ripples of the water caught the glow of the lamp and glistened back before disappearing into darkness again.

Milt wondered where Sid was. She’s slipped underneath the water, hadn’t she? So where was she now? Why wasn’t she rescuing them? Why wasn’t she throwing furniture out some high-point window to save their lives again?

Dough-face secured the final knot and turned Milt back around. Gray was living up to his namesake, his skin the color of a spent wax candle, and his eyes hollow and deep-set. Dough-face grabbed him by the crook of his arm and forced him against the wall, another length of rope in arms.

And as they were dragged back in the direction from whence they’d come, tunnels around silent but for the sound of their footfalls, he realized that it was possible that Sid had no plans of slipping in for a rescue at all.

…

Now that Milt really thought on it, putting up a fight may have been a better idea.

They sat bound to chairs, back to back, in the gray first-floor room in of some flat in the Snare. Where exactly they were, he couldn’t say: the walk had turned him around, and he wasn’t so good with the jumbled streets yet anyway, so he could have been a half-mile from Well’s Waste or the next building over.

The chamber they occupied was wide and empty, but felt cramped: the ceiling seemed unnaturally low, and the whisps of golden hair on Dough-face’s head dragged along the textured grain above.

That Milt could count, there was the front door, and a back door that seemed to lead down to a stairwell. Beside it on the wall at head-level was some sort of rust colored stain, spattered then smeared, by the looks of it. It was the interesting sort of stain that usually had an equally interesting story to match. Otherwise, the room was almost impossibly plain: two desks in the corner laden with neatly stacked tables in trays. Another table by the door, a catch-all station for coats and changes of clothes. Their daggers were there, too, and Sid’s satchel.

On top of this sat Pagos, sifting through a stack of papers. “Hmm.”

Dough-face paced the room somewhere out of Milt’s sightline. His every step was shuffling, as if he were incapable of lifting his heels more than a hairlength off the ground. “Find anything?”

“Not yet,” Pagos said through a yawn. “You could try asking them.”

“Oh very well,” Dough-face stepped into view and stopped, body parallel to the spot where the chairbacks met. “Have you at any point in your lives been charged with a crime under the name of His Royal Majesty, King Ethess of Egion?”

“f*ck off,” Gray said, voice worn. Milt felt his head drop a bit.

“Ah, thought as much.” Dough-face clapped his hands together. “To the Blade, then, for regular processing.”

“Sun’s not up for another five hours,” Pagos said, flipping past a sheet. “No need to give up yet. We could soon find out these are thrice-convicted murderers, wanted for slaying a rail-Lord’s daughter or somesuch.”

“They seem a bit young for that, don’t they? Children, nearly, now that I really think on it. Seems such a shame, children about to hang, and we’ll probably not be allowed to watch.”

Milt couldn’t tell what he was looking through, but from he could make out, it was some sort of text accompanied by picture—they were portraits, sketch renderings. “What are those?”

“Price tags, we’ll call them,” Dough-face said, strutting again out of view. “Oh! Hang on a second.” He skittered back to place. “You two may have heard about the attack on the Blade’s Northwest outpost last night. I have heard rumor that the perpetrators were little more than children. Rogue casters. Two of whom match your description, roughly. Might you know anything about that[/]i?”

“What kind of prick-petting oaf would attack a Blade outpost in Alturret?” Gray said.

Dough-face leaned forward slightly. “Certainly not [i]you, hmm?”

“Certainly not Lord Graellen Calleford of Navis Country, born in the fifth day of spring of 559?” Pagos held a sheet up to the lamplight before turning it towards them. “Blue eyes, blonde hair, approximately ten stone, and about as tall as you? Certainly not this prick-petter?”

The sketch’s likeness was uncanny, if dated. The young man in the portrait had more manageable hair, a cleaner face and did not at present seem tired to the point of death after two hours getting dragged about in a sewer. But it was unmistakably Gray.

Pagos was beaming as he pointed to something below portrait-Gray’s chin in bolded lettering.

“Three thousand piece?” Dough-face’s hands flew to his cheeks. “Truth be. He really did kill a rail-Lords daughter, didn’t he? What else did he do, cook her into pies and serve her at the Midsummer’s Fair?”

“No, no, nothing but run off,” Pagos said, setting the paper aside on the table. “It’s not reward for capture. It’s reward for safe return, all bits attached. It seems our little Lord’s a runaway.”

“Three thousand piece for your bony ass?” Milt counted it out in his head again. Thirty years’ wages—taxes, food, home, and everything for half a lifetime—all for one mouthy idiot tied to a chair behind him. “A rate like that, hell—”

“Don’t,” Gray said quickly. “Don’t even think about dragging me home and claiming that reward for yourself, Milt.”

“I don’t think he’d get the chance, given that you’re now ours to claim,” Dough-face said. He was giggling silently—whatever tired had settled before on his face was banished in an instant by a different side of the same sort of thoughts Milt was having.

“But if we got out of this, somehow, Milt, if you so much as feign temptation, I will murder you in your bed.” He paused. “Please say something.”

“I’m trying to decide how much I like you,” Milt said with a sigh. “I’ve a lovely mother who could buy herself ten houses with that reward.”

“Milt—”

“And I like my family more than I like you, easily enough. They’re blood, for one. And none of them have nearly gotten me murdered by the Blade.”

“Milt.”

“Or gored by ten dozen wild pigs.”

“M—”

“Or heartily sloshed on by a Kassil asshole drunk off carcass water, for two-some days.”

“Milt!”

“And it’s not as if any special harm would come to you if I were to return you home, so I don’t even think I’d have to feel proper guilty about it, but gods all, Gray, you know I’m joking.”

Gray sighed heavily and leaned back. “Thank you.”

He smiled, though it wasn’t as if Gray could see it. “If I actually meant to turn you in, I absolutely wouldn’t let you know until it was too late.”

“This is precious,” Dough-face said. He leaned in and grabbed a pinch of Gray’s cheek. “This is invaluable. Three thousand piece, and he banters like a full-grown courtier.”

“A-ha!” Pagos had another sheet in hand, held up, as before, to the light. He turned it back for all to see.

The sketch was a bit cruder. The hair was wrong, and the mouth. It looked more like his father than it did like him, but this, too, was unmistakable. This poster was clearly his own.

He was reminded all at once of the broken soreness in his head from not an hour before. “Aah, horseco*cks.”

“Milt North, born on the third day of spring of 599. Oh, birthmates, nearly! Two days off. Did you know?” Pagos handed the page off to Dough-face. “This is all delightful. I bet they didn’t even know. I bet they’re finding it out now, along with the rest of us.”

“North?” Gray said. “You kept telling us you don’t have a surname!”

“We don’t recognize it, it’s just for papers and things, it just—f*ck. sh*t.” He momentarily forgot Gray way tied behind him and threw his head back—their skulls met with a dull crack. “Ouch. sh*t, sh*t all.”

“It was funny when it was my face on the thing.”

“Yes, but mine is almost definitely—”

“Seems someone’s skipped out on his contract of service,” Dough-face said, in the sing-song voice of a parent scolding a child. He read from the paper. “I have heard in the west they don’t take kindly to runaway bondsmen. Apparently not. A hundred and fifty piece for us, and you hang for example in the village square. How quaint.”

Milt had known since he’d seen the paper in Pagos’s hand. He hadn’t thought hanging, he wasn’t yet eighteen, it could have been something else, but apparently not. He was going to die in front of everyone. His friends and family, and, by the Wills, his sister. Stupid little thing. Stupid, righteous little thing. She’d watch, of course. No, or maybe she wouldn’t. She could be sensible and foolish all at the same time.

Unless they got out of this. Yes, it was still possible. He tried to swallow back the thoughts churning in his gut. Unless Sid—who’s abandoned them completely, who had no idea where they were.

He wanted to feel something. Despair. Regret for ever agreeing to help Gray with this mad scheme in the first place. Or maybe anger. “This is your f*cking fault, Gray.”

Yes, anger felt right.

“How is this my fault? I didn’t make you come with me.”

He didn’t say anything—it didn’t gratify a response. Nothing did. And besides, Milt knew that there was one way to annoy Gray, one way to drive him properly, furiously insane, and he could only accomplish it by not responding.

“See? You acknowledge it! Not my f—”

“Enough of that,” Pagos said, his voice a thunderclap, sharp and sudden and bouncing back from the four corners of the room. Milt and Gray closed their mouths immediately as he set the two posters aside and swung off the table, joining Dough-face’s side. “Now. We need to decide what to do.”

“Yes, I see what you mean.” Dough-face was rubbing the naked flesh of his chin. “Three-thousand piece is clearly worth a trip west. But is the extra fifty piece worth moving the North boy along with us?”

“But what if it turns out he is one of the two who attacked the Northwest outpost?”

“Well, then he’s worth even more.”

“But will they recognize one without the other?”

“I see what you mean. Hmm.” Dough-face clapped his hands together. “Alright, boys. Either way, as Friend Pagos said, we’ve five hours until sun up and five hours to decide where this little one—” he rapped Milt gently on the side of the head. “—meets his slightly early death. So here’s what’s going to happen: I’m going to move you to the cages downstairs and we’re going to do some quick mathematics, and maybe get some sleep. Yeah?”

---

Sid hoped that the drip-drip-drip of water off the elbow of her shirt would not give her away to her mark. It didn’t seem likely; the woman around the corner looked more interested in the wider city street before her than the alleyway at her back.

At least, so Sid hoped.

She was still dripping wet with the upstream flush of the Udrannan, and the early snowmelt meant that her sopping wet clothes and twice-scrubbed hair chilled her down to the marrow. It was better than the feeling of being coated with sewer water, though only by a small degree. And getting herself clean had taken precious time for a plan that was only half-conceived and half-thought and might see herself and the two boys dead before the sun’s rise.

But if it worked, it would all be worth it.

The air in the dense confines of lowtown was still and muggy with the radiating warmth of late-night fires and narrow buildings and the steady sweating of enamored skin. One woman stood outside a tavern and dressed in the simple and well-thought garb of a girl still somewhat new to the workings of the deep, dark drawers of the neighborhood. Her deep blue gown bore trailing loose skirts beneath a tight-fitted bodice that showed a generous neckline; a red scarf draped about her shoulders, and it was, if Sid’s nose served correctly, heavily perfumed with something sweet and heady.

Everything else—knife, probably, and coin-purse—were concealed beneath the skirts. Sid wasn’t interested in any of those.

Well, perhaps the knife. But if bright eyes and quivering arms were any indication, the girl in the alley was likely a quicker draw than the girl on the street.

Sid waited until the tavern erupted in cheers and laughter to strike. She slipped out of her hiding spot in two silent steps and grabbed the woman, forcing her back with her into the shadow. She screamed, and Sid pressed her palm against the woman’s mouth, knife to her neck. She wheeled them about, two steps deeper into the alley, behind a pile of crates, and thrust her against the wall.

The girl was young—perhaps Sid’s own age, and a finger-length taller. Her skin was a shade paler than Sid’s own, her eyes a topsoil brown. These teared slightly onto reddening cheeks as Sid fumbled the bodice’s front buttons.

“Stop whining,” Sid said. “I only want your dress.”

The girl screamed beneath Sid’s hand.

“Shut up! I’m serious. We’re just swapping clothes. I’m not even going to take your coin purse. You can keep that, as well. Aah, balls.” With her free hand, Sid reached into her own pocket, pulling out one full piece coin. “Here. I take your clothes, you take mine, you get this for your troubles. Now quit mewing and disrobe.”

The transaction took three minutes. At the end, as at the beginning, there was one girl in a cheap blue gown and a sweet-perfumed scarf, and one in a dripping wet shirt and trousers; only the person within was different.

The forlorn girl was quivering horribly, teeth a-chatter, short knife in one hand, refreshed coin purse in the other. The clothes seemed to hang off her twig-thin frame, the trousers barely holding above her narrow, girlish hips.

“How do I look?” Sid said, spinning once. She wrapped the scarf twice around her neck and dipped into an elaborate curtsey.

The girl sniffed and said nothing.

“Aah, hells. Go home, kid. And sorry. But it’s for an important cause.” Sid clasped her on the shoulder and, with one final twirl, slipped out of the alley and onto the main road.

She followed the street up into the next turn, her steps as quick as she could make them without yet breaking into a full run. She’d wasted two full hours—two long, precious hours—and to get back to the Snare could be an hour longer.

She'd have to make good time if she was going to save her charges and kill the man who had ruined her life.

Thanks, Gamz! I really appreciate it.

It's been a while since my last update, and might be a while until the next, seeing as I'm cheating on my NaNo to write this. Oh well. This story is fun.

WARNING: this chapter gets a bit darker, I guess? More violent, in any case. Enjoy~

5

It was the deepest kind of Alturret night—moonless, and steeped in the sort of stillness that only came just before the first of the workweek. With the rest of the working city asleep, only the city’s most dedicated drunks and thugs prowled about.

But there were few enough of even these about in Villor Square: most of the shady types congregated in lowtown, and a some crept about in the Snare, but here the open expanse of the courtyard was crypt-quiet.

It was a peaceful patrolling assignment—peaceful, and exceedingly dull. Armsman Catcher was not enjoying himself. As the slow tick-tick-tick of the clock overhead echoed into nothing, he wondered what good an extra pair of eyes here would do. The three boys who’d attacked the Northwest outpost had last been seen here, true, but then disappeared into lowtown. It seemed pointless to wait for them in the Square.

Six months out the Academy, and all he’d had a chance to do was stand and wait for things to happen.

The man at his side—Armsman Talsea, two years older, a head shorter, and twice the muscle—sighed heavily. “Nothing’s going to happen tonight.”

“Aye.”

“It’s as if the Captain thinks those boys are just going to stroll on through, out of disguise, and wave us down.”

“Aye.”

“Pointless, this.” He loosed the truncheon from his belt and spun it between his fingers. “Completely pointless.”

Catcher didn’t bother agreeing again. He half-leaned on the wall and peered out into the stone spread of the square. A slow wind blustered about the square, sent the stall’s awnings aflutter and rippled the posted city flags on the gabled rooftops surrounding.

Amidst it all, the sound of footsteps.

It was the clatter of boots on cobblestone, coming from somewhere behind them, someone dashing through the streets of the Snare. Catcher clutched Talsea’s shoulder, but he was already set, truncheon in hand, listening close.

She burst into the square a blur of deep-blue and red and squeezed between a gap in the stalls. Catcher caught a whiff of her perfume—a she, yes, certainly. A short woman with chestnut skin and wild brown curls, ambling gracelessly through the dark. Her dash slowed to a jog until she paused in the square’s middle, looking around wildly, one hand clutched to the open skin above her breast, the other gesturing in a fit.

Talsea and Catcher were three steps into their approach when she caught sight of them and ran forth, closing the gap between them. “Oh, sirs,” she said. She was breathing in and out deeply, her cheeks flushed. “Oh my, sirs. You must—I just saw—I didn’t know where else to go! Oh, it’s terrible!”

Catcher took her in, top to bottom. She was some sort of prostitute, that was for sure, though coming as she was from the Snare, and given that she wasn’t afraid of the Blade’s approach, a possible step-up from the half-piece skin in lowtown. She was a firm little thing, too, and young. Not pretty, not exactly, nose a bit crooked, but the bits he could see were inviting enough.

Talsea coughed and made a show of cracking his spine straight. “Calm down, calm down miss. What seems to be the problem?”

“There’s been a kidnapping,” she said. “Oh, gods. It—it was hours ago, and I caught sight, but I was on a, a job…” Her hands went to her mouth. “I couldn’t get away in time. Oh, I hope they’re all right.”

“A kidnapping?”

“Two men, older men. A thin one and a fat one. Dragging these two boys along. Young men, rather… westerners, I think. I got a good look. One was blonde, the other had black hair, and, ah… they had these, these pouches, like, made of leather.”

Catcher looked down at Talsea, whose eyes were wide and mouth agape. “You don’t think it could be them?”

“Don’t know,” Talsea said. “Miss, were the men who were carrying these boys off… they weren’t Blades, were they?”

“Oh no, sir. I shouldn’t think so.”

“Hah!” Talsea whacked the flat of his palm with the wooden stick. “Right, them. Catcher. You’re to find the closest Broadarm and let him know what’s happening. And I’ll be the first to see to this lady’s concerns.”

“But—” But it wasn’t fair. Days and weeks of nothing happening, and the first sign of trouble, he’s sent off to run around for backup.

“But nothing. I’m your senior and you’ll do as I say. Alright, missy. Did you see where they went?”

“Oh yes, I saw them go right into a house in the Snare,” she said. “I can take you there right now. Follow me.”

---

Milt was apparently still displeased.

He sat on the opposite side of the cage as Gray, as far away as possible without fusing to join the wooden bars that made the wall. The cage itself looked suspiciously familiar: raised upon wheels with a hitch at the front perfect for rolling along behind two horses, designed, probably, for young recruits to the Blade. It sat in the middle of a small basem*nt room, one with walls and floor of poured concrete and one flickering form-lamp.

“Listen,” Gray said, shifting slightly so he no longer sat directly on his tied-up wrists. “I don’t see why you need to keep ignoring me.”

Milt did not answer. He faced away, forehead pressed between the bars, staring at the room’s second door—the one that led, presumably, to an alleyway outside.

“I understand that you’re angry. You can still be angry. Just say something so I know you don’t hate me.”

No answer, still.

“Alright, fine. You hate me. You know what? I don’t care. I didn’t make you come with me and it’s your fault we’re in this cage anyway. You know that, right? You’re the one that got us lost in those tunnels. If we had turned when we were supposed to, we’d have been better equipped to run. We might have even gotten to the library.”

Milt did not move.

Time for a different tactic. “I’m not sorry. I’m in just as much trouble as you are. You may be about to die, but I’m basically going to die anyway, once my father’s through with me.” He waited. “You’re the one who should be apologizing to me! If you hadn’t gone and gotten us lost… if—hells, even last night, if you’d seen those Blades approaching us, you could have warned me if you’d been doing your actual job.” Still nothing. “You practically suggested I make the net. Practically. You shouldn’t have let me.” Not a blink. Not an exasperated sigh. Not a tensed muscle in the neck. “What I’m trying to say is that I hate you and you deserve whatever you get and—f*ck.” He grabbed the bars of the cage and shook as hard as he could. The cage rocked and rattled but stayed up firmly on four locked wheels. “Milt. Milt. Gratify me. Say something. This is torture. At least scowl in my direction.”

No such luck.

Gray shifted again; with his hands tied behind his back, and his legs cramped awkwardly, it was impossible to get comfortable. The fact that Milt had been sitting perfectly, completely still for almost an hour was damn near impressive.

And then Gray got an idea.

Slowly he rose, his stiff, cramped knees popping into place as he went up. He shuffled over to the wall of the cage where Milt was staring with an expression purposefully vacant. Gray took two steps back and then, with every ounce of strength his worn body could muster, threw his full body weight at wall of the cage.

The while cart tipped under their collective weight, and for one impossibly long second, it stood upright on the flat edge of two wheels.

Gray pushed again.

They were sailing towards the ground until they weren’t. With a crash and rattle of wood against wood and wheels spinning in sockets, they were sprawled on the ground, still in the cage, still tied, both tasting concrete.

Turning his head to the side, Gray ran his tongue along the top and bottom rows of the teeth. When he found all accounted for and nothing else on his front broken, he dug his chin into the ground and oriented himself before scooting to an upright position.

Sitting on alternating wooden shutter-flats and concrete was, as it happened, much less comfortable than sitting on a solid wooden platform. So was it difficult to straighten a spine in a cage whose width barely permitted one to sit upright. Gray tried to find a comfortable way to seat himself and failed; Milt slumped again, this time with his back to ceiling which was now their wall, but there was a wide red welt across his forehead from where he’d been drilling it into the bars.

“Well,” Gray said, once he’d slithered up beside him. “What have you got to say to that, then?”

His eyes were closed. They did not even move beneath his lids.

It was infuriating. It made Gray want to smash something, or push something over, only he’d already pushed over the only thing in the room there was to push. It didn’t make sense. It wasn’t fair. “Why aren’t you talking to me?”

“I don’t believe it.” He did not open his eyes. He did not raise his voice above a low murmur, and his tone was almost impossibly still and even, all things considered. “Is this what you’re like when you’re feeling guilty?”

“I’m not—I’m not feeling guilty. I’m just—I’m bored, and I’m trapped, and you’re being terribly passive-aggressive.”

“I’m being—I’m what?”

“I’m not guilty.” Gray meant to cross his arms over his chest, only they were tied behind his back, and so instead he slumped his shoulders forward slightly.

“I know it might be a new feeling for you, Gray. But it’s the sort of sick feeling you get when you know you’ve done something terribly bad to another person.”

“I didn’t do anything.” He sighed. “Maybe back then, back at the beginning. f*ck. I never meant to get you killed, just to enlist some help.”

“Is that an apology I’m hearing?” He opened his eyes and sat forward slightly, stretching forward at the waist. “No, don’t answer that. Listen, it’s like Sid said. One of us f*cks up, and it’s all our tit* on the line. If… if we get out of this, look, we can’t keep blaming each other and holding score. Otherwise, we’re going to go insane. If we haven’t already.”

“So you’re not angry with me?”

“Just because I’m talking to you, doesn’t mean I’m not angry. If my hands weren’t tied they’d likely be around your throat, you prick-petting oaf.”

“Listen.” Gray thought very carefully about his next words—now seemed a poor time to make a promise he couldn’t keep. “You’re not going to die. Not at my father’s behest, that I’m sure of. I’ll stop him if comes to that. I can be very… convincing. And you won’t die at the Blade’s hand because the second they come back downstairs I’ll offer to triple the bounty on your head. Along the way home, we’ll figure something out.”

For a long moment, Milt didn’t say anything, until finally: “Ah. Uh, thank you.”

“We’ll get ourselves out of this,” Gray said, though he barely convinced himself. He hadn’t yet forgotten about the brief torture at Pagos’s hand, how, with nothing more than a flick of the wrist, he’d turned them both into writing, semi-conscious masses of gristle and bone. He shuddered slightly and pressed on. “If not us, than Gillem. Or Sid. Wills. Where is Sid? Usually so tenacious, but tonight she’s four hours late to the rescue.”

“Given up on us, I’d wager.”

“I would seem she—no. Wait. Ssh.” He bit his lip and strained his ears: above, footsteps. More than two pairs. And voices. There was Dough-face’s, there was Pagos’s, and then someone else… “Voices. And not just our old friends upstairs.”

“Someone else?”

“Shhhhhh.”

In the silence they listened. He couldn’t make out distinct words, just rounded vowels and the scattered point of exclamation. He thought he heard a woman, perhaps, but when she didn’t speak for a while longer, he assumed he might have been imagining it.

The conversation wore on for another minute, and it rose steadily by degrees. Gray was trying to make individual words out—someone was saying "Blade," and then he heard “outpost.” He concentrating so hard on the conversation above that he nearly missed the tell-tale clink of a pick in the lock of the door to their right.

Thirty seconds later, Sid swept in from the alleyway above and leapt three steps onto the floor of the basem*nt. The smell of her perfume preceded her into the room—something cheap and heavy that threatened to swell his throat shut.

On top of that, she was wearing a dress, some long and low-cut deep blue affair, with a red scarf tied at her waist.

Looking at the two boys in the sideways cage on the floor, she scowled silently. “Must you make everything more difficult?” she whispered. “Show me the door on this thing. Actually, no. Brace yourselves, this could be painful.”

Gray didn’t know why she was whispering, because there was no way the men upstairs would hear them over the sound of their own screaming argument. He also didn’t know why she was in a dress, or how she’d managed to retrieve the satchel she was presently pulling from the folds of the scarf.

He didn’t ask.

She loosed the tie at the satchel’s neck and called forth a few silver-white threads of forma, tossing them into the bars of the cage that were their new ceiling. Gray and Milt sat, unmoving, as she bit her lip and held her hand just slightly out. Her jaw was tight, but her eyes, cool, and her lips parted gently. She made it look effortless.

There was the low, whining creak of wood overhead, as Sid took a breath and released. “There,” she said. She skittered forth and grabbed the bars in hand. They snapped within her grasp like kindling, and she effortlessly tossed the splinters of eight wooden bars over her shoulder in just a minute’s time.

“Up.” They clambered out, and she made quick work of cutting through Gray’s hands with a knife from beneath the scarf—Milt’s, he realized. The moment his hands were free, she pocketed a length of the rope and handed him the knife, and then his own.

“No time to wait,” she said. “Gray, untie Milt once you’re clear of the Snare. I want you to meet me in one hour at the train-yard, southwest corner of the station, behind the building. Make sure you aren’t followed. Come on.”

She grabbed a fistful of Gray’s shirtsleeve and dragged him to the door and into the alley, Milt following suit. “Alright,” she said, pushing him in the direction away from the nearest main road. “You go that way. I’ll see you soon.”

“Where are you going?”

“Back inside,” she said. “I’ve got to finish some business with our mutual friend Pagos.”

…

She pressed her back against the side of the alley and waited.

The argument was ending. The Armsman had opened the door, was shouting something about getting backup, telling them they had no right to the pair of criminal boys who were, at least in theory, tied up in the basem*nt. He slammed the door and stalked down the road to the point where it intersected Sid’s alley.

She sprang.

In his furor, the Armsman, strong though he was, was unaware. She shoved him into the wall in one swift motion and pressed him into the brick, tying his wrists with practiced skill and speed.

He cursed and bucked his shoulders, but in one eyeblink she’d bound him. She shoved him forward and onto the stone ground.

“I can’t have you running around,” she said, pressing one heel onto his back before he could squirm up. She took the second half of Gray’s rope and wrapped it about the slimmest bit of his ankle. He cried and tried to kick, but too late. His legs were secured now, too, albeit looser than his wrists.

“I’ll kill you,” said the Armsman beneath his breath. “All of you. You challenge the Blade, don’t be surprised to find yourself cut to ribbons.”

Using Gray’s knife, Sid sawed at a fistful of the loose bit of her scarf. “What a clever threat,” she said, freeing two separate scraps of fabric. “I’ll bet it took you a good long while to come up with. Now hold still.” She snatched the scruff of his hair and pulled his chin out of the dirt, stuffing one piece of the scarf into his mouth. Behind his teeth, he screamed, but with her other knee she pressed his nose back into the dirt and tied the rest of the strip around his neck and lips, so he could not spit the gag onto the alley floor.

Last of all, she plucked the truncheon from his belt and tossed it aside. Brushing imaginary dust from her front, Sid got to get feet. “You provided a nice enough distraction for me to free my friends, so if I’m feeling especially charitable, I’ll come back and untie you.”

The Armsman screamed behind his gag, and Sid stepped out of the alleyway.

It was like passing into the threshold of a different world. A knot on her stomach pulled taut, and Sid suddenly felt sick at the thought of what she was about to do. Two hours of methodical preparation was done, and done perfectly. Now there was nothing but a doorway between her and her revenge.

She stamped out a shuddering sigh. She rolled her shoulders in their sockets, loosening the tightness around her neck. And then, loosening the ties at the neck of her satchel, clutching the knife in her right hand, she took the four strides to the doorway and threw it open.

Pagos and his dough-faced companion sat at a table by the threshold. They did not jump at her entrance. They looked calm, almost impossibly calm, as they met her gaze, ignoring the weapon she bore in her hand, the mouth of the satchel poking out from her hastily made scarf-belt.

“You’re back,” Dough-face said, flatly. “I’m afraid your friend has just stormed out in a huff.”

Sid breathed in and out quickly. She thought about the room: the two chairs back to back at the middle, the two tables, all were cheap poplar wood. Concentrating, she drew a thread of forma from the open mouth of the sack, and then another, and then another, and then a fourth, short and slender things, balancing in the air above her palm.

Pagos continued to stare at her face, the corner of his mouth cricked up in a smile.

Dough-face looked down to her hand and grinned as well. “Ah,” he said. “The third caster. The ambush savior. Here to rescue your friends, are you?”

“You could say that,” she said, and then moved. Four threads of forma shot from her hand, towards the table, through the surface into the legs, and she pushed outward and down. It bucked up and toppled over towards the two men, knocking Dough-face over, and he sailed to the ground, a flurry of yellowing papers fluttering about him as he went down.

Pagos strode to the side and moved along the wall towards the corner of the room, his long strides quick, his hawk-nosed face still a perfect cold.

Dough-face scrambled up and reached for Sid’s legs, but she sprang back and tried to pull the table with her. It struck him in the middle of his back, but he rose up anyway and dove towards her, fist flying towards her head.

Sid ducked. Her knife-hand reached out on the instinct to shove him back, but instead, the blade caught him in the chest. She felt the squelch and crack of the knife piercing through the space between bone. His little gasp was hot on her ear.

She had every intention of pulling her hand off the hilt, but her knuckles felt locked, her hands, unwilling to move. She tugged at the knife. It would not come. She had to twist the blade a little in side his body before she could slide it out, its knicked surface black with blood and scraps of flesh.

She gagged as Dough-face’s body fell soft onto her shoulder, and brushed it aside. He spattered to the ground with a soft thug, stomach-first, his arms tumbling limp at his sides.

Her first instinct was to be sick at the sound and sight of him. Underfoot, Dough-face did not stir. The wound had been quick and precise, even if she hadn't meant for it to be. He was dead, or would be soon. The first man she ever killed.

Sid could feel the wetness on her midsection and shoulder. The front of her dress was soaked with blood, purple against the blue of the fabric, trailing down the front of her skirts. But she did not look at the damage to her gown, nor to the dead or dying man on the floor.

Her eyes were for Pagos. He stood against the wall. The still mask on his face had cracked like the surface of a lake against spring’s first thaw. His smile had fallen, and there was a rage behind his eyes.

Sid didn’t want to give him time to act upon it. She drew three more lines of forma from her satchel and shot them towards one of the chairs, two in opposite legs, one stretching out through the veins of the seat, and she hurled it towards him, up from the ground and towards the wall. Pagos slipped out of the way and it clattered against the wall, wood shattering on stone.

Still, he cried out as the splinters rained down upon him. Sid took another step forward, three more threads, and sent them towards the second chair. She threw that too, this time adjusting for were she guessed he’d duck. Left. She was right. The chair hit him square in the chest, and he cried out and buckled as the pieces of this one clattered to the ground below.

She dashed on towards him. Picking up the small pieces of wood would be harder, but the table to Pagos’s right could be more ammunition—

She stopped.

Not of her own volition. Her legs simply froze where they were, mid stride, her ankles freezing in their sockets. Her arms stayed awkwardly in the air, her cheeks puffed slightly with a half-expelled breath.

Not even her eyes could move. They were stiff in their sockets. But she didn’t need to move them when Pagos glided across the floor into her view. “I don’t know who you are,” he said, the phlegm of his voice gurgling slightly in his throat. “But I know you’re here to rescue your friends. And I know you’ve just killed mine. And I just can’t let any of that sit.”

Sid’s mind raced. She didn’t need her hands to call forth another string of forma. Most people did—beginners did, students like Milt and Gray did, but not her. Moving forma to her was like walking, like speaking, like breathing. But as it stood, she was in Pagos’s grip. And she couldn’t do anything now.

“I’m going to ask you some questions,” he said. “And you’re going to answer them. You’ll notice you can’t move anything. Not your eyes, not your lungs. So I’m going to lean off just a little bit, and you’ll tell me everything I need to know. But before we do that, so you can’t scream for help—” Pagos stepped out of her view and walked eight paces, and Sid heard the door close behind her. He strode back into view. “I’ve locked us in. So now we can begin.”

Some of the grip that held her loosened, and Sid felt the internal clockwork of her body spin back into action. Her belly ached for breath and found willing lungs. Her blood flowed through tingling, hungry veins. Her eyes could move in their sockets, but they were dry; she still couldn’t blink.

In the channels of her body, Sid could feel now that her forma was frozen. That was how Pagos was stilling her. He was holding her, and he could throw her as she had thrown the table. Pagos was a hound, and one of rare skill, inborn and developed through years of practice. He could manipulate the forma in things living. He could catch a person's scent and shape and signature and follow them for days. And, if he so desired, extinguish that forma with minimal effort.

Pagos would have no qualms or worries about snuffing out someone’s life. Even a young woman’s. Sid knew. She’d seen it before.

It would take a powerful caster to wrench free from his grasp, but thankfully, she was one of those. She just needed to wait until the proper time.

“So,” he said, taking a step closer. “Little girl. I don’t recall seeing your face on any of the posters, and I’ve just been through all of them. Who are you, and how much money will the Blade pay to see you hang?”

“Nothing,” she said. There was a strange catch to her voice, as if she were choking. She supposed she was.

“I disagree,” he said. He reached out and straightened the bloody neckline of her dress, gone askew when Dough-face fell forth onto her shoulder. “You’re a caster, and clearly one of some experience. It’s become clear to me that you and the other two boys are the ones who broke into the Blade’s outpost. But is there someone out west willing to pay more? Are you also a runaway heiress? Another escaped slave, perhaps?” He shrugged. “Or perhaps not. You do look local. Although… troublesome girl with a caster’s satchel, prancing about in gowns, slaying bountyhunters left and right. Strange that I’ve never heard of you.”

“You have,” she croaked. “You have heard of me.”

Pagos laughed. “I think I’d remember meeting you before, girl. A child-caster is not something I’d soon forget.”

Her stomach turned. To hear him laugh at her situation, so see him so cool—this was bad. He was in control and knew it. She’d expected to see him a little frayed by the death of his friend, expected to find some crack in his concentration. But she wasn’t so lucky. Pagos seemed to spare no thoughts for the Dough-faced man leaking out on his floor.

“So, then, if that’s how it must be, then that’s how it must be,” he said, finally. “I suppose I’ll turn you into the Blade after all. You, and the North boy. Your third friend—Lord Calleford—I’m afraid he’s worth more to me if I deliver him to his father than he’d be if I delivered him to the Blade. Which works out just fine, I think. I can only carry one person west on my own, and it would seem someone has slain my partner.” He tapped Sid lightly on the nose.

No, losing his friend hadn’t shocked him in the least, and she guessed that the sudden revelation of why she was bent on killing him wouldn’t do the job, either. But she knew of only one thing that would. And so, preparing her veins for the influx of forma, preparing her mind to concentrate, she spoke: “You won’t be going west,” she said.

“And why is that?”

“You won’t have cause to.” She waited a beat. “I’ve freed them already.”

There it was: the mask fell. A flicker of shock raced across his face. The forma in her body burst into life, and Sid called forma from the satchel at her belt, as well.

She burst out of Pagos’s grasp and wrenched up the table by his side, shoving it towards him. The lip of the table charged into his hip, and he buckled to the side, and then she smashed the weight down into his body.

She had to act now. She could run, but who knew when she’d get the chance again? If she bested Pagos only to run, surely he’d come after her—or else flee, never to be seen again.

Ignoring the gurgling in her stomach, fighting back the pitching anticipation, she dashed forward, knifepoint out, towards the body slowly pulling itself up beneath the splintered legs of the table.

She was a breath away from him when her body froze again. He was holding her again, completely, tightly, and she was a stone statue. Or, no—a puppet under his command. Against her will, she felt her fingers peel apart, and drop the knife. She felt her knees creak shut and her standing turned into a squat, until her body lost its balance and she toppled down onto the ground on her back, rocking on the curved hook of her spine.

She could not breathe, could not swallow the dryness of her tongue. She heard the shifting of the planks of wood, and Pagos got to his feet. He stood over her and looked down through half-lidded eyes, then turned his attention to plucking some stray splinters from the black fabric of his shirt.

“So,” he said. “A better caster than I thought. I’ll not make that mistake again.” And without any indication of movement or shift in his intention, Sidran’s body began to hurt.

Every muscle screamed out, every bone groaned. Her throat burned, her head thundered as pain shot up and down through tendon and muscle. She wanted to scream but couldn’t, not against the storm of impossible sensation. And she didn’t know what she could stream to—for the world around her was fading, the forms around her making less and less sense, ceiling and floor becoming disconnected, every image separating by color. All she felt was dread and fear and terrific, overwhelming pain.

Sound came to her ears like rain on a tin roof, but she could clearly make sense of one final thing that Pagos said:

“If I cannot have them, then I suppose I’ll have to amuse myself by punishing you.”

And then her world folded as under a great weight, collapsing into a splintered rubble of chaos and confusion.

recently started a new job that requires me to commute a total of four hours a day, so it's been hard to find time to write. I also struggled with the characterization in this chapter and scrapped it a few times and had to start over.

so this was slow in coming! not sure if anyone's still reading anymore, but if you're hanging on my every word, I apologize! I'm hoping to be back on a regular writing schedule soon. I've missed it! anyway, without further distraction...

6

Milt awoke to the twittering of a nearby lark and the slight pressure of something blunt in the soft muscle beneath his collarbone.

“Vagrants!” The voice was sandpaper to his ears. The man it belonged to stood directly over him, wide and towering, a black silhouette against the still-dark sky of a morning waiting to break. But even in the weak light, Milt could see, beyond the stranger, the darkness stretched out unimpeded by buildings or blocks into a mostly-flat horizon. The trainyard extended like this for acres, seamed by cris-cross lines of steel and timber.

Milt blinked upward as his eyes adjusted. He could see more features of his face, now, an Alturetti man of late middle-age with bristling gray hair and a baggy workman’s jacket. His wide slack mouth was turned down and tight at the corners, eyes narrow slits.

The handle of the broom in his hand pressed against Milt’s chest, but Gray, slumped against the wall beside him, got a boot to the side of the head.

“Yeow!” Gray scrambled upwards. “Bastard!”

“I, bastard?” the man said, pulling his broomhandle away just enough for Milt to pull himself to his feet without impaling anything important. “This is the third time in a week I’ve caught vagrants and layabouts sleeping in this trainyard. And this close to the grand open! This the way it’s going to be from now on, then? What, you think you’re too good for the alleyways now, eh? Eh?”

Milt mumbled something he hoped sounded like an apology, and bent over to gather their things strewn about the ground: Gray’s knife and his own, the length of rope they’d been holding on to, a few quaterpeice coin. His breath curled out before him as he did. Fall was settling deeper into the soil with each passing night. The cold pricked his skin, and it would be an hour until the sun properly rose and set it right again. But he did his best to gather what he could with numb fingers, while Gray stared daggers at the broom-weilding man.

“Next time I see you two, you’ll not have time for toothless apologies,” The man straightened. “I’ll bring the Blade right up. They’ll teach you sh*t-stained scoundrels some proper manners, I bet.”

Gray opened his mouth to say something, but it collapsed in his throat as Milt gave his arm a sharp tug. “Walk.”

Behind them, the disgruntled groundskeeper rambled on, but he had shouldered the broom and was walking off into the wide expanse of the yard, his words fadeding into the silence as Milt dragged Gray up the incline to street-level. It was steep going, and their feet seemed to find every hole and stone that pocked the earth. They followed the station’s western wall for guidance, gripping protruding stones along the way. When they reached the façade, Milt found himself catching breath he’d not even noticed getting away from him.

His head was light, his throat was dry, and his tailbone, sore from sitting. But most of all, he was exhausted, deep into his bones, even though he’d just been woken up.

Standing as they were on the fresh-paved stone of the street outside the station, alone as far as they could see, and free, finally, from distraction, he remembered. Why his legs and arms ached. Why the skin on their wrists was raw. Why he and Gray had been sleeping behind a train station at all.

Gray must have realized it just then, too, because he moaned, long and loud. “I was really hoping that all of that last night was just some terrible nightmare, but from the looks of us—smell of us, too—I guess not.” He sussed his hand through his hair and examined his fingers under the light. Wrinkling his nose, he wiped them on the front of his equally-grody trousers. “Loys. Sid never came for us, did she? How long’s it been? How long did we sleep?”

“I can’t say.” He turned over his shoulder and squinted out at the western skyline. He considered the hang of the moon, and the relative soreness of his backside. “Two hours, maybe three.”

“There’s no way Sid should be taking this wrong.” He leaned back against the front wall of the staton, and then seemed to think better of it, and took instead to pacing lengthwise across the narrow, fresh-cobbled street. “sh*t. She didn’t seem right to me back there, Milt. What was that she said? About her friend Pagos? As if she knew him, or something.” He tapped his chin. “I don’t like this. We can’t just stay here. We should find her.”

“I… dunno.” Milt felt a tight heaviness in his gut, and his hand clenched in and out, as if his body were remembering Pagos’s strange attack. But his mind was elsewhere, and something different carried the shudder up his spine: relief. He was out of Pagos’s clutches. He had stood at the open threhold of death, and kicked the door closed before he could be thrust in. “She’s probably fine.”

“Probably fine?” Gray blinked. “Are you mad? I think she went after Pagos.”

“It’s pretty obvious she’s forgotton about us, or else gone back to the Well’s Waste to teach us a lesson. You’ll see. We’ll walk in at noon after waiting all day, and she’ll have stayed up all night to gloat at us as we drag ourselves in.” Milt put his back to Gray and pointed where the road curved left, around a cluster of sagging lowtown tenemant blocks. “Come on. This way takes us straight ‘round lowtown, up towards the courthouse district. It’s the quickest way back to the Waste.”

“Did you not hear me just then? Sid said she had business with Pagos. She’s gone after him. And I know Sid’s capable, Milt, but he didn’t just defeat us—he drove us to forfeit, without twitching his baby finger. We should at least investigate.”

An image came into his mind. Of him going back to that tiny tucked-away room in the Snare, of knocking on the front door, of Pagos answering, his thin lips peeling back to a cruel smile, a chuckle from that weird, gurgling throat of his—

“We should get Gillem first, at least.”

“We haven’t time to get Gillem.”

“But it’s like you said. We don’t stand a chance against Pagos. How are we going to get her out of there?”

“We’ll think of something.”

“Whatever something you think of, Gillem’s plan will be better ten times over.”

“Would you like to to be the one to tell him, then? Tell him his little girl’s been captured, all for helping us, and we were too piss-pants to try to help her ourselves?”

“I’m not being piss-pants, Gray, I’m being logical. I won’t rush into a situation, especially not after…” Milt’s voice faltered. “You’re being stupid. We should think it through with Gillem.”

“Think it through with Gillem? And grab a coffee while we wait? Maybe paint the walls and blink them dry? Pagos could be torturing her now!”

“She’s been there two hours, what’s a half hour more to gather ourselves?” Milt regretted this instantly. Gray’s expression went from one of mild annoyance to a blank calm. His shoulders drooped slightly.

“I won’t leave her,” Gray said. “She came back to save our carcasses, and I won’t leave her. And you shouldn’t either. I’m going without you. If I don’t come back, at least I tried.”

“I am trying.” Milt took a step back. He flicked absently at the flat edge of the knife in his hand, eyes trained carefully away from Gray’s acid stare.

“You’re not. You’re running away. You’re scared. And—well—f*ck, so am I.” He drove his heel into the dirt and turned on it. His voice trailed as he walked away, towards the alley between row of houses from which they’d emerged two hours before. “But I’m not a f*cking coward, so I’m setting it aside to help our friend. And since you won’t… well. I guess I’ve been overestimating you for far too long, Milt. Goodbye.”

He sprang into a dash, and then was gone, lost between the deep-set shadows of lowtown’s winding streets.

For a moment Milt stood, a lone figure in the penumbra of one of the street’s dozen bulbous gas lamps.

But he wasn’t without company: the lamps alternated with planted poplar trees in perfect straight array. And though this morning was cold, it was still early autumn, so the branches of the trees still sang in the morning.

It all felt so strange, so contridictary: the larks singing against the cold and darkness. The fresh-paved stone and modern train station beside the sagging tenements of lowtown. And he, slightly hunched, half in shadow, the lamp’s glow catching the metal of a blade he pointed ready at nothing in particular.

It was still in his hand from running off from the groundskeeper. He must have been holding it this whole time: the leathed of the hilt was warm beneath his fingers. But when he turned it over in his palm and transferred it from one hand to another, he realized it didn’t fit his grip quite so well after all.

It was a pocket-knife, newer than Milt’s own. Something was inscribed in the burgundy leather with golden thread, letters he didn’t know but recognized solely on face; a name, he knew, one that he’d seen time and again on wrought iron gates and everything else on the estate. It was a beautiful thing, well-cared or to be sure, and also, Milt recalled, Gray’s only weapon not currently locked away in the trunk in the basem*nt of the Well’ Waste.

Gray had just run off to face Pagos and rescue Sid, all on his own. He was completely unprepared and completely unarmed.

And he would be doing it alone.

Milt retracted the blade and shoved the knife into his pocket. He threw his head back and swore loudly to the lightening sky. The larks in the three nearest trees erupted from the branches and scattered to the Four as Milt followed Gray’s trail at a sprint.

…

For lack of a more accurate term, Sid woke up, though she hadn’t really been sleeping. Her senses had merely been fuddled to the point where her consciousness was lost. She could see shapes and colors and lines but make no sense of them. She could hear words and movement but everything sounded as if it was played backwards, and under water.

All she knew was pain. Indescribable, inexplicable pain. Pagos hadn’t touched her—nothing was touching her, she couldn’t even move—and yet her muscles screamed. Her bones ached. Were her tear ducts not frozen, she’d have been sobbing. The pain ripped past the shroud that had surrounded everything, her memories, even her sense of self. It was all there was. It was all she was: a silent, quivering mass of punched and screeching nerves.

But now, everything was becoming clear again, though slowly. She could see a wall and ceiling and the splintered remains of the table. She could hear the clack that she knew to be boots on boards, the nasally drone that she came to recognize as voice.

Last of all, she remembered who she was—Sidran Hare, daughter of Fuella and Gillem Hare, rogue caster—and where she was. A room, the Snare, with Pagos. In the place where she was dying.

Despite the quick return of consciousness, most of her body still couldn’t move. She could breathe again, not shallow and quick, but deep, full gulps, gasping. Her chest heaved in an out. She could blink again, and tears rushed out of her eyes, and down her cheeks.

She was crying. Sobbing. Rocking gently on her back on the ground. She, Sidran Hare, wailing like an infant.

She stopped and forced herself silent. The room was silent, now, too, as Pagos had stopped moving. “All better?” Pagos said. “I suppose I can let you have your body back. You’re no longer a threat to me.”

She wasn’t ready for the sensation that came: the inside of her body melted. Her muscles became slack, as if the imaginary stings holding them had suddenly been clipped. Her legs collapsed to the floor, her arms to her chest, and for the first time she noticed she’d been bound.

So Pagos had touched her after all: her hands and feet were tied with rope, but she was almost certain he’d done nothing else, not yet. She squirmed to her side, and then an upright position, until out of the corner of her eye, she could see him. The dry skin of his lips cracking as they stretched into a broad, gingival smile. In his hands, he held her forma satchel.

Tied up, weapons gone, she couldn’t defend herself. She was weak, so weak, more tired than she’d ever thought possible, and her mind was slow. But if she could just get him to loose the ties at the top of the sack, maybe she could call a thread of forma out from it. It was a stretch, but if she could gather her wits—well, she was Sidran f*cking Hare. If anyone could do it, it was she. So maybe—

“I’ve emptied it,” he said. Her face fell. “No forma left in the room but for what’s in that lamp. But it’s busy, lighting the room and such.” He paused. “Your knife is in my pocket. Your muscles are weak, I’ve made sure of that. You feel as if you have not slept in days, and eaten in weeks. If you don’t get food and water into you soon, you will die of something like hunger and thirst. A death which, I hear, is most unpleasant. But I won’t waste my breath telling you more. You’ll find out for yourself soon enough, I think.”

She tried to sit upright, but her body shuddered at the motion. She was tired, the weight of her head on her spine so strong. Where had her fight gone? Not just the strength of her body, but her will?

Pagos tossed her satchel to one side. She wanted to hate his stupid grinning face, the slow drip of his voice. The two horrible things she would never forget. Her hatred for him had driven her for so long, had kindled her fire in the beginning and kept it burning during the tough years at Gillem’s side.

And somehow, in the past few hours, it had burned out. The final embers consumed, the ashes cold. She had failed.

And it was her own damn fault.

But at least Milt and Gray would be safe. Sid shifted up onto her haunches, and struggled to lift her chin from her chest, to meet Pagos’s gaze. “Pity, though,” she said, muscles in her cheeks pulling up into what she hoped was a smile. “Pity that nothing you do to me is going to get your three thousand piece back. Lord Calleford’s long gone, by now.”

“Yes, I’m curious, actually.” The clack of his boots on wood was two sounds really, first the clop of the heel, then the tapping of his toes. He almost seemed to lurch with every step, walking whole-footed like that. “What’s Calleford and his man doing all the way out in Alturret? Learnig casting from some illicit source. The Kassil savages, perhaps. But where did you come from? You’re local, that’s clear on your face, but what interest do you have in our little lord? Some sentimental attachment? Are you hoping to collect his bounty for yourselves? All interesting questions that shall entertain me for months to come, after I’ve killed you.”

Sid wanted to say something back, anything, but her breath failed her. Whatever spite had bid her speak was nestled back, now, sitting and waiting for her to die like the rest of her body.

Pagos stopped, and drew breath to speak again, but a knock at the door interrupted him. His eyes grew wide for a half-breath, but he forced his expression calm again, his smile false and full of teeth as he held up one long, bony finger towards her. “Be still, my love,” he said, and Sid felt her muscles tensen against a will that gave in easily, “I’ll see to it.”

Pagos had only opened the door a crack when some weight threw itself against the woodgrain, and he falteted back. A person—a tall blur of a man—forced his way in, grabbed Pagos by one shoulder, and threw him into the ground, down towards the massive puddle of blood, narrowly missing the dough-faced man’s lifeless body.

It was Gray.

Sid’s heart sank into her stomach as he charged in, bearing what looked to be a metal support pole for one of the market stall’s canvas overhangs.

Pagos’s left foot slipped in the slick blood of the floor, but he made it to his feet by the time Gray had shut the door and stepped in. For a moment they stood, eyes locked, like gamblers waiting for a coin to fall.

Between them, on the floor, was the lamp. If she could only get Gray to kick it over, she thought, or to somehow bring it closer. Its light of the lamp in the corner by Gray’s feet made their faces strange; it gleamed off the fresh-spilled blood on Pagos’s arms, and caught the calculated rage in Gray’s eyes.

These turned to Sid, and suddenly she felt very small, very strange, slumped against a wall, her body limp as a rag, the front of her dress stained purple with the blood of the man she’s just killed. She was helpless and vulnerable and she hated herself for it.

But Gray nodded slightly before turning back to Pagos.

“I was afraid I’d have to come looking for you,” Pagos said. “But you’ve made it easy for me.”

“I’ll… I’ll go with you willingly,” he said, his voice trembling slightly. “No fight, nothing. But you’ll let Sid go.”

“Sid.” One red eyebrow arched slightly, as he wiped the heels of his hands on the front of his black shirt. “So she has a name after all. I must thank you for telling me, though, I’m afraid I’m going to have to decline your request. She’s… untradeable at this point. ”

Gray flared his nostrils and straightened his spine, extending the rod farther as if it were a sword. “That’s not an option.”

“I don’t think you understand. You’re in no position to bargain, Lord Calleford, and anyway, your associate has killed mine—” he indicated the dead man with an open palm. “—and I think you’ll agree that that’s something I cannot overlook.”

“Do what you want with her, then, and you’ll lose three thousand piece.” He lowered his rod-arm.

“You’re bluffing. I’ll kill her.”

“I don’t care.”

Pagos laughed. “You’ve just come back for her, idiot, of course you care.”

Gray didn’t seem to have an answer for this.

“Though, I have no idea what you were planning to do at this juncture, Lord Calleford. But I suppose I can’t complain, if—”

He didn’t have time to finish. Gray chose that moment to spring. His face was a feral snarl, his eyes bloodshot and crazed, as he learched forward and brought the rod sideways towards the flat of Pagos’s left temple.

But Pagos was quicker than he looked. He ducked and twisted out of the way, sidestepping around his fallen friend, and Gray missed by a fingerlength. He faltered, the mad energy on his face disappearing, only to be replaced by feet as the toe of his boot found a slick pool of blood by the dead man’s belly.

Gray fell forward. The rod flew from his splayed fingers and hit the opposite wall with a clack, and Gray fell, face-down, in the pool of blood.

The lamp, Sid could see, was just beyond the reach of his fingers. Her mind, still churning back to life, was slow to form a plan. But if Gray could grab it, and smash it, and interrupt the inner mechanism, then maybe the forma would be free. Then maybe she could reach for it, and then maybe she would have the concentration to do something with it.

Right now, it was their only chance.

She tried to call for him, but her voice had no strength. She barely spoke above a whisper, and didn’t have the chance to try again. Pagos straightened, held his palm out before him face-down, and pressed into the empty air.

Gray’s arms flailed out and fell still, and he cried, as if some invisible force had landed onto his chest. The cry turned into a screech, and he writhed beneath some great weight that crushed his body at the canyon between his shoulderblades.

Sid felt something stir within her as she watched him yowl in pain—she could see the muscles beneath his bloodied skin straining to be still. He gnashed on his lower lip to stay his screams, but yowled still beneath his teeth. And Pagos stood over him, his cruel smile gone, replaced by a flat, bored inpatience. “No use fighting,” he said. “Though I respect the effort.”

She watched the corners of his eyes clench tightly shut and then fall still. His breathing was ragged and punctuated with sobs. His shoulders rattled, but the rest of him was still and limp.

“Sorry.” Gray’s eyes met hers. “Sid. I’m sorry.”

“Milt?” she said, mouthing, barely above a mumble.

“He’s getting help,” Gray’s said, and then he tensened.

“No point,” Pagos said with a wave of his hand. “Because I’m going to tie you both up, and we’re going to leave right now. But now I know to be quick, so thank you for telling me ahead of time.”

Sid wanted to berate him for being so stupid, for being weak, for thinking that he was strong enough to face Pagos on his own. But she knew she was guilty of the same thing. And they would both be punished for it.

…

Milt had sprinted all thirty minutes from the train station, but even then, he hadn’t collapsed the distance between himself and Gray, or at least hadn’t encountered him. And by the time he arrived at the alleyway, panting and sweating, the wear had long since grind his little morale into dust. His stomach was empty, his limbs were sore, and his body was beginning to rebel against his will, a punishment for the three days without real sleep.

All things known, Milt was in no shape to face Pagos and the Dough-faced man. He stumbled along the building’s exterior wall, one hand scraping along the sooty red stone for support, legs barely strong enough to lift his feet off the ground. Pagos—the hound, whatever that meant—would pound him into sausage with a flick of the wrist.

When he saw the Bladesman on the alley floor, Milt took a moment to catch his breath before moving forth.

The man was short and stocky and probably not much older than himself. He writhed and jolted, face blackened and scraped from untold hours planted in the dirt, and when he noticed Milt, he shouted behind some sort of gag. It was a strange thing, made of a flimsy-looking red fabrid with edges cut and jagged. In the dim light, it took Milt a moment to recognize it as Sid’s scarf. She must have tied this man up, though Milt didn’t know how.

He probably could have asked, if he’s had a moment more to waste. But as it was, the sun was nearly risen, and he needed to see to Gray and Sid and Pagos as soon as possible.

Never mind that he didn’t have a plan. Plans took time, and time was a luxury.

Milt carefully stepped over the Bladesman towards the basem*nt door. He pressed his ear against the wood, but heard nothing beyond, and so he tried the latch and slowly inched it open.

The basem*nt was still lit by the forma lamp on the wall, and its dull, steady quarter-light revealed a room just the way he’d left it: one wooden cage, knocked over, side battered to splinters. But the door to the stairwell was open and ajar, so clearly someone had been downstairs already. Pagos already knew they were gone.

Milt shut the door quietly and crept along the wall to the street. He first poked his head out to make sure the road was clear, then turned towards the front door. This time, he didn’t have to put his ear to it to hear the voices beyond. Even muffled by the wood, Milt knew the screaming beyond it was Gray’s. When that died down to moans, then whimpers, he heard another voice, low and dripping—Pagos.

Milt cursed, and felt his pulse begin to pound. So Gray was being hurt. It would be him, alone, armed only with a knife, against whatever Pagos was. Sid may or may not be there. Gray was probably indisposed. The sun was about to rise, and the Blade was almost certainly out looking for them.

And Gillem was completely clueless to their situation. And he, alone, was hopeless against Pagos. And Sid could already be dead, and if Pagos didn’t kill Milt on the spot, he’d hang at the hands of the Blade, or Gray’s father, and if he hadn’t gotten them lost in the tunnels, none of this would have happened in the first place.

The only way out of this was to face the Hound.

Or. A thought twisted in his gut like a thorn in a wound before being yanked out. There was another way: he could run. The street extended, unimpeded on both sides, and turned around darkened corners. He could sneak away on light shoes; Pagos would never know he’d been lurking outside the door. He could be swallowed up by one of those corners, and the shadows within, and be carried somewhere else: to a new life in another district of Alturret. Or home. His head surged, and he thought again of his sister, his brothers, his mother. He couldn’t go back there, not yet, not with the bounty fresh on his neck. But he could leave this mess behind, crouch low for a while, then go back and visit. Bring them with him, even, nowhere specific, but away—maybe Limadon or Sebas or Meistruck in the west.

He could build a life. One without the complications of enemies and thieving and sneaking in the dark. The shadows around the corner sang to him.

Beyond the door, Gray screamed, and then fell silent again. As terrible as their encounter with Pagos before had been, neither of them had been tortured to the point of screaming.

All of this really was his own fault, Milt knew.

He sighed and stepped back into the alley and took stock of his person. He had two knives never intended for combat use, two half-piece coins, and one pair of sweat-stained clothes. He also had one writhing, bound and gagged Bladesman, unarmed and furious. But he was worthless on his own, and Milt knew if he loosed the man’s gag, he would scream for help and draw unnecessary attention, so that was no help.

But maybe—Milt felt the gentle tug of an idea as he turned towards the struggling Bladesman. He bent down and wrenched the man upright by the slack rope at his bound wrists. The man struggled and writhed, but he was a head shorter than Milt, and probably cramped and tired. Milt was easily able to thrust him to his feet and press his back against the wall beside the alley door.

The man protested with a screeching grunt as Milt yanked the scarf down the man’s chin. The Blade’s tongue forced the ball of fabric out, and the muffled scream turned into words. “You f*cking worthless f*ck. Do you have any idea what we’re going to do to you, all of you, when we get you back to outpost?”

“But how are your friends going to find you?” Milt leaned into the Blade with the full weight of his body, but his left arm fumbled the door’s latch and pulled it open.

“Scream like a motherf*cker,” the Blade said, baring teeth. “Just one shout from me, and the patrols’ll come running. The Snare is thick with them tonight.”

“Good. As loud as you can,” Milt said, as he propped the door open with his foot. “Or they’ll never hear you.”

And with one fluid motion, he shoved the man into the basem*nt and down the half-step. The Blade landed, screaming and cursing, onto the splinter-covered ground beside the cage.

Milt shut the door and dashed back to the building’s front.

This time, he did press his ear to it, and he found the room had gone silent. Gray wasn’t screaming anymore, and Pagos was quiet, too, until he said, faintly: “Don’t move.”

Milt’s stomach clenched as he heard the bootsteps walk away from the door and towards the back wall, to the stairwell.

Milt counted to three, and then opened the door.

The room was as still chaos: Gray was lying in a pool of blood, and for one terrifying second Milt throught he was dead, until he saw Dough-face, clearly stabbed, lying in the splatter’s center. Sid slumped against the opposite wall. Everything in the room was strewn about; all the tables and chairs had been reduced to splinters, and papers littered the floor, and the lamp sat in the corner by Gray’s head.

“Quick,” Milt said. “Come on!”

But Sid didn’t stir, and neither did Gray; they were limp and pale, their arms slack by their sides.

“Come on,” he repeated.

“The lamp,” Sid said, forcing her head up. “To me.”

“What?”

“Do it.”

It was three armslengths from his foot, beyond the corpse, beyond Gray’s sprawled form. He could hear Pagos bounding back up the stairs, and Milt knew he had only seconds.

He stepped over the body, careful of the blood, and he could hear Pagos now, cursing. There was no time to run for the lamp, not anymore, and Milt felt his body stiffen involuntarily, arms frozen in place, as Pagos crested the top step.

His red hair was stringy and unwound against his bone-white skin, his eyes rimmed, his face a twisted snarl. “Petty distractions,” he said, his throaty voice almost impossibly calm. “Clever. But not clever enough. Lower the knife, boy,”

Again, Milt didn’t realize he’d been clutching it. It was Gray’s blade again, clutched in his right hand. He felt his fingers jerk open, and the the knife tumbled out of his grasp, bouncing off Dough-face’s stomach to clatter onto the ground beside some kind of arm-long metal pole.

Milt felt Pagos’s mental grip on him loosen, though not by much. He couldn’t most his arms or his legs, but his left hand, out of Pagos’s sightline, seemed ot have a bit of agency. It hovered at his side, by the lower hem of his shirt, precisely by the sheath of his own knife, still concealed at his belt.

But he could only just move his fingers—reach for the knife, brush his hands along the hilt, but certainly not weild it or throw it. If he could loosen Pagos’s attention just a pinch, if he could break the strange grip just for a second, then perhaps they stood a chance.

He went for it. He took in a breath to make sure his lungs still worked, and then said, loud and sharp as his stayed breath could manage: “Sid, don’t!”

Pagos’s head snapped away from Milt and towards Sid for a second, but it was enough. His attention was split. Petty distractions, indeed.

Milt wrenched the knife from his belt with his left hand and threw with his right; it wobbled through the air and missed Pagos by a head, but Milt didn’t have time to contemplate. He dove down and snatched the rod and Gray’s blade.

From his knees he threw the knife, and this came close enough that Pagos’s eyes grew wide as it approached, and flinched, throwing his arms before his face.

Milt took the opportunity to shuffle two steps to the side, towards the lamp. Before Pagos could recover, he clutched the end of the rod and threw that, too: it flew surprisingly true, smaking Pagos lengthwise in the chest. His breath hissed out between clenched teeth, but Milt didn’t revel.

He dove for the lamp, turned it over in his hand, and feinted it towards Pagos. He flinched visibly, but Milt turned towards Sid, and put all his remaining strength into this last throw.

It sailed across the room, his the wall three heads above Sid’s hair, and shattered, glass and tubing, the mechanism breaking open.

The free light forma flitted into the air like fireflies, like dust. They cast a strange dancing luminescence into the air above Sid’s head, and then swirled down, a flickering boglight twirling in the space above her lap.

She clasped her hands around it, and the room went dark.

Pagos shuffled and cursed, and Milt felt along the wall away from the place where he’d been standing: he was out of ammunition, and didn’t want to be a target.

But Pagos was otherwise occupied. He gasped, and then coughed, and Milt heard the tink-tink-tink sound like dry topsoil thrown by the wind, like sand hitting something solid. The coughing turned into gags, and the whirling sound grew louder.

Pagos retched, and his feet shuffled, stumbling along the floow, away from where he’d been standing, to the sole source of light in the room: the weak line of dawn pouring in from the crack beneath the door.

When Pagos was still a few strides away from the exit, there was another noise: a loud, heavy thunk. Pagos cried out, and cursed between his gasps, but burst into a shout as Milt heard a dull cracking sound that could only be the noise of wood on skull.

Pagos broke into a dash, and he wrenched the door open and scurried out.

The light that burst in behind him was pale and dull, but to Milt’s eyes, almost blinding. But it allowed him to see what exactly it was that Sid had been doing to Pagos: in the doorway, there hovered a cloud of wood dust and splinters, whirling, alive, directly where his head had been. And scattered about his path were bigger pieces of wood: chair legs, scraps of tabletop, a strange road that marked his pathway from the room’s twin doors.

In a breath’s time, the splinters and dust fell still, fluttering to the ground below. Across the room, Sid sighed, and her head slumped forward.

Milt got to his feet and tip-toed to the door, peering out in either direction.

“He’s gone,” Milt said. Gray was slowly getting to his feet. His face was smudged with blood on one cheek, and a clump of it clung to his hair; the sight of that, along with his hollow eyes, made Milt’s stomach churn. But he was in better shape than Sid. She wasn’t even attempting to move anymore, and Milt had to hoist her up and throw his arm below hers to her her upright.

Gray gathered their things, and Sid made a few cautious steps. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice low and scratchy. “I’m not usually like this. I can usually walk.”

“I’ve always admired that about you,” Milt said. “Walking.”

She choked a weak little laugh, which Milt was grateful for, because his joke hadn’t been anywhere close to funny. “Thank you,” she said. “You saved our asses back there.”

“Not entirely,” he said. “That last thing with the light… and the sawdust.” With his free hand, he mimed a little tornado midair. “How did you do that?”

"Casting," Gray said. "The good sh*t. The real sh*t. Sid turned light forma into free forma and cast it into teeny tiny pieces of sawdust she couldn't see."

“We just overwhelmed him,” Sid said. “Got the high ground. Outnumbered him. But we need to get out of here, because, f*ck, Milt, that was just lucky circ*mstances, it was. If conditions had been any different, he’d have slaughtered us.”

“Not just luck,” Gray said as he grabbed Sid’s other side, and they made for the half-open door. “There was some genuine cleverness in there somewhere along the line. Throwing the Bladesman in the basem*nt. Wish I’d thought of it.” He paused. “It’s a good thing you came.”

Milt said nothing, and Sid, worn thought she was, looked up at both of them, the question in her eyes. But she didn’t have time to ask after it. Soon they were swept in the awkward dance of trying to get three through the door at once. Milt stepped out first; the sky was purpled overhead, but all around the narrow alleys of the Snare were still thick with the slanted, deep-cut shadow of morning.

“The Bladesman said patrols will be out thick,” he said.

“That’s my fault,” Sid said. “Part of a plan that seemed a lot cleverer before I’d put it into action.”

“Seems to be a lot of that,” Gray said beneath his breath. “How are we going to get back to the Waste?”

Sid straightened as they began their walk. They were a strange sight, dragging through the twisting, jumbled streets of the Snare, but she seemed to brighten with every step. As they rounded the corner, she smiled and said, "very carefully.”