PART 1 - THE SUBTLETIES OF NOBILITY
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Why birds? Why did they have to experiment with birds? A projected talon flew past Yoric’s cheek, the sound of it tearing through the wind coming right after. They couldn’t have experimented with turtles or something docile, no. Those ancient mages had to try to combine humans and birds. From atop his horse he looked up. The harpy kept its distance and then some as it flew toward the tree line. If the beast had been smart it would’ve flown away from the path on which Yoric and Abraham rode their horses. But no. The beast seemed to be an an idiot, which made this all the more frustrating.
They could’ve just put the beast down with a spell or an arrow, but it had snatched up a child. A young girl. Her shrill screams overlapped with those of the beast.
They might have been able to hit the beast and not the girl, but the chance wasn’t worth taking. Huntsmen protected those who couldn’t protect themselves. It wouldn’t matter if they took the beast down if the girl fell with it.
Trees came and went as Yoric pushed Warden to keep up as well as the gray gelding could. Warden’s sweat covered his coat and his breath was heavy. The chase had gone long. Too long. He couldn’t do anything for the girl if he couldn’t keep up.
“Yoric!” Abe yelled as he and his mount pulled up beside Saver. “Tensha can’t keep up this pace much longer! We’re going to lose her!”
Yoric looked up again. The harpy was gaining speed.
I’m gonna hate this. I’m gonna hate this. Arlox, please latch on to the beast.
The screech of his giant owl could be heard overhead as the bird kicked it into the next gear. His long wingspan created a shadow over the boys as he flew past them and toward the harpy.
He reached within. This type of Kova required so much effort compared to its basic form. This plan was awful. It was awful! But it was the only plan. It had to be done. It would be done.
Arlox drew Spirit from Yoric in order to increase his speed. Yoric felt his strength draining as though he were in the midst of an arduous run. His breathing intensified, sweat beading down his forehead. The bird flew closer and closer to the harpy, the gap between them seemingly disappearing. Timing would be everything. Mistime and he would fall short. Mistime and the girl would die. At this point he had one chance. Yoric unsheathed his Sosin knife. The hammer would not suit his needs.
Arlox dug his talons into the harpy’s back.
The world shifted and blinked around Yoric. The distance between himself and the ground increased in an instant. The treetops of the woods were now eye level. His left hand and both legs were latched onto the harpy. Yoric was now where Arlox had been. His right hand swung.
The harpy screeched, dropping the girl and using its talons to deflect the long knife. Yoric immediately let go, unlatching one of his throwing knives and throwing it straight to the ground. The sound of rushing air filled his ears as he began to fall toward the girl.
Arlox, please latch on to the girl lightly.
The bird had been flying in the same direction that Yoric and Warden had been riding. The bird swooped up, black wingspan displayed in its full glory, and flew straight to the girl. Timing, again, would be everything.
Sunlight reflected off of a sharp object from above. They were coming closer.
Talons.
These had been released from the fingers of the Harpy and now flew toward Yoric as straight as an arrow. Dodging was not an option. They would hit him before Arlox could get to the girl. Deflection was the only possible manner of avoidance. He’d have to do it upside down. Maintaining his current momentum was the only way this plan was sure to work.
Using the Sosin knife, he was able to deflect the talons aimed at his chin. One still caught in his arm, digging deep into the skin and sending blood into the air. Grunting, Yoric pulled the talon out and threw it away. It burned horribly. Harpy talons held a good deal of venom. He would not die, but it would take awhile for the wound to heal if he didn’t treat it soon. That was secondary, though. Arlox was getting closer to the girl.
Another Blinking of the world, and Yoric was flying upward toward the girl. He and Arlox had swapped places and momentum. Another pang of fatigue washed over him, but he had to grab on to the girl. He did. Blinking again, he changed places with the knife he had thrown. Abe was there with both of the horses.
“I can’t do much more, Abe.” It was true, though he didn’t like to admit it. The venom felt as though it had set his blood afire. Blinking was the advanced form of Prominence Kova, and doing it that many times in quick succession drained him. There was very little left he could do.
Abe, a head taller than Yoric and with shoulders much wider, was intimidating at first glance. Yoric only saw a gentle giant most days. Now his eyes were molten rocks of fury. Yoric hopped onto Warden after helping the girl get situated atop the gelding. She was still sobbing, but the screaming had stopped. I hope she knows she’s safe now.
He wouldn’t tell her that, though. Anything could happen in the next few moments to change the status of it all. Nothing would be worse than being given hope and having it taken away again. Yoric wasn’t the nicest person in the world, but he wouldn’t be that cruel. He heeled Warden into a gallop as Abe’s fury, in the form of fiery Orange Hues, enveloped the air around the harpy.
The girl, no older than five or six, started, but Yoric kept her head in place with his good arm. Fatigue caused him to nearly lose balance atop Warden, but he was able to right himself. “Hush, young one. It’ll hurt your eyes. Won’t do to bring you back to your papa without working eyes.” She nodded, her sobbing reduced to sniffling. Yoric would have to scrub more than sweat out of his linen tunic. Better that than the leather jerkin in his bags. Thoughts of his bags led him to thoughts of his the stolen jewels within them, but now was not the time for that.
His sleeve was blooded and torn. His shirt and trousers covered in his own sweat, Warden’s sweat, the snot and tears of a child, and dirt. “Mama’s gonna throw a fit,” he muttered under his breath. The girl caught it.
She let another sniffle through and spoke. “Is your mama the Lady Audrey?”
“Just Audrey, little lady.”
“My mama always calls her Lady Audrey.”
Yoric sighed a bit, but it wouldn’t do to be annoyed with the questions of a young girl in shock. Despite the pain and the fatigue, he put a grin on his face. “If you want to be formal, you can call her Audrienne. That’s what the name that people who know her use. Just don’t tell her I told you.”
The lass gasped in awe and, as the wall of adrenaline that had kept her going had collapsed entirely, planted the back of her head onto Yoric’s chest. Snores soon followed. The hissing and searing of flames had ended, and a scent with the awkward mixture of burnt poultry and human flooded his nostrils. He found himself glad the lass was asleep. She had been through enough. The smell of a burnt human wasn’t something she needed to experience, nor the realization that it smelled the same as burnt anything. It wasn’t something anyone needed to, really, but such were the ways of the world sometimes.
Planting Warden in place, Yoric waited for Abe and Tensha. The fatigue wasn’t going away. That was the difference between using Complex Prominence Kova rather than the basic form. Basic Prominence readied more easily and didn’t eat up strength at nearly the rate that Blinking did. Blinking felt as though it took something deeper than his physical energy, almost like it wasn’t Kova at all, but that was a ridiculous concept. One he wouldn’t even be thinking of if we wasn’t so damn tired.
Abe, momentary fury now replaced by his usual kind disposition, finally came trotting back atop Tensha. Arlox sat atop the gelding’s rump, beak in the air and as proud as could be.
You should be proud, old friend. We saved a life today.
Arlox looked over, his beady black eyes meeting Yoric’s. The black plumage on the back of his nape was all ruffled from the fight. The bird never responded, though he understood each and every one of Yoric’s pleas. Commands didn’t work with the bird. He imagined the others had similar experiences. Not that he knew. It just felt like the true way of things. People like them would, without a doubt, manage a way to breed birds with human levels of pride.
Abe caught up. Luckily he didn’t seem so tired. One of them would need to be mostly cognizant for the ride home. They had ridden about one and a half hours or so. Yoric hadn’t paid attention to the distance they covered. He doubted Abe had either. It had likely been more that whatever he could estimate. They had ridden hard.
“You able to ride home in the dark, Yor?” he asked. Never patronizing. Just concerned. A good friend.
“I think so. A Void-damned claw ended up in my arm. I’ll need as much mint salve as I can get.” Ignoring the pain was growing difficult. It would be another hour or so before it subsided. Another two days before it began to spread. An awful poison made to trick people into thinking they were okay before the real suffering started. No other poison worked like that. No natural ones, anyway.
“I’d say it’s more Soul-damned, Yor, thanks to the Arcane’s involvement in their creation.” They began trotting southward toward home. They’d gotten awfully close to the northwest juncture of the Wall. It really had been a long evening. A long few days, really. Jewel thieving wasn’t exactly simple. The horses would need to trot a long while to get their strength back.
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“Aye, but I don’t want to sound petty.” While Abe had been born with the ability to manipulate Spirit into Ether, thus allowing him to perform acts of the Arcane, Yoric had not; hence his reliance on Kova.
“Not petty when one of those creatures has your arm hostage postmortem.” The fire raged within his arm. What he wouldn’t give for mint salve. Even a single mint leaf would stem a trickle of the pain for a moment. What he wouldn’t give for the Void-damned Arcane to have, in its millennium spanning history, at least some sort of restorative spell. Abe and Bianca had both said that thousands of years of research had yielded nothing in that regard. Nothing. All of the healing arts had been lost when the Void and the Earthen Ward had been destroyed. The Arcane was good for building, innovating, and destroying. It could not fix.
What good is a power that cannot fix?
- - - -
Soon after their bout with a harpy, the moon rose and darkness took the woods. Abe produced an ethereal pyramid of Red light that floated above and in between them. The harpy had followed the Heron Road north. Both Huntsmen had worried about why that was. It would’ve been much easier to lose them had it just flown above the tree line. They considered that it might not have been strong enough to carry the girl and fly up that high. That idea was quickly discounted as the beast had easily deflected Yoric’s Sosin knife with brute force and its talons. Harpies could live independently or in clamors that were led by a matron. There was a chance that this harpy was an idiot and wasn’t thinking about anything other than what was happening in the moment. Why else would the beast have come to Theralyn and snatched a girl in broad daylight?
Either it was an idiot and cared not for the consequences of doing such, or something was trying to lure huntsmen into some sort of trap. Either way, neither huntsmen nor their horses were able to investigate further at the moment. Harpies could be anywhere in the mountains, set up in caves that hadn’t seen activity other than that of bugs and rocks for hundreds of years. Yoric didn’t imagine the lass would be keen on them investigating before taking her home. Likely her parents wouldn’t be, either.
Yoric and Abe both sighed in relief as the road started to slope downwards. After a few more minutes of riding, Theralyn’s northern gate came in to view. Home. They were home and the girl was still breathing with no sign of injury.
The gate was like any other city gate. High gray stone walls extended from both sides of the barbican, surrounding the city up until they met the mountain which lined Theralyn’s western side. The portcullis was closed as it always was from sundown till sunrise. All sorts of beasts lived in the woods surrounding the city, though not so many as there were before Abe and Yoric had started working. Either way, it would not do for them to get into the city at night.
From this distance, Yoric was able to smell the most familiar of Theralyn’s scents. Bread! Wonderful Theralyn bread! Aside from the city’s fair lords, bread was what Theralyn was known for. Yoric heard six stomachs grumbling. His own, Abe’s, the three animals’, and even the sleeping girl’s. Yoric would’ve laughed if he wasn’t so tired.
They neared the gate. Abe put more Ether into his pyramids, moving the light behind them and expanding both its brightness and size in order to help the guards’ vision. The guards waited until they were a few paces away from the portcullis to call out.
“Who is it?” A gruff, unkind voice called out. Turnbal could sound intimidating when he wanted to.
“Huntsman Yoric and Huntsman Abraham,” called Abe. “We’ve brought the girl back.”
“You’re aware it’s past curfew?”
“The harpy didn’t care much, Turnbal.” Abe was raising his voice. “Yoric has poison in his arm. Are you gonna let us in, or are you gonna tell Audrey that he lost his arm because you followed protocol by the letter?”
The grumbling of iron chains and wood began as other guards opened the gate. Turnbal yelled back, “I’d tell Audrey that the huntsman lost his arm because he got into a bloody dangerous profession.” Both men laughed and messengers ran off to let Raina know they were back. She was the local Clerk of the Hunt, which meant she led Yoric and Abe toward jobs and vice versa. She would also be the person in contact with the family of the girl who’d been taken. The huntsmen followed as quickly as they could once they were past the gate.
The beauty of Theralyn, even in the night, warmed Yoric’s heart a bit. So many brown wooden lodges and buildings. Nearly every one of them! Normally a fire would be incredibly dangerous in a town as such. If Yoric could thank the Arcane for one thing, it would be arcanists.
Unlike mages, which was a group primarily made up of scholars and fighters, arcanists were the few who took their prowess with magic and applied it to the good trades of the world. Woodworking, building, smithing, even grooming! Yoric had gone to have his hair cut by an arcane barber many, many times. There weren’t any in Theralyn, sadly, but those he had met in his travels had been wondrous.
There was an arcanist woodworker who resided in Theralyn, though. Bjorin, his apprentice, and his predecessors were the reason the city could maintain this look. If buildings needed to be renovated, you went to Bjorin. If some lord from some land north of Regalia wanted an ornate, fireproof, wooden throne, they came to Bjorin. The old dwarf was an exile from the Autumn Isles to the east of Mithrock, across the Therana Ocean, though no one knew why. He had promised that it wasn’t murder, so all were fine with it. He did honest work for honest prices, so most took him for an honest man.
And so, thanks to traditions of arcane woodworking, in Theralyn stood beautiful lodges lined with thick, Alder wood logs with doors and glass windows worked into them. Lodges that served as homes had their logs lined horizontally whilst services and restaurants had them lined vertically. If one wanted to convert their home into a place where business was conducted, they had to consult Bjorin’s clerk. This also happened to be Raina, and the brown-skinned brunette tended to have longer days than most.
That point was evidenced when Raina scrambled out of her office, slammed her door, and ran toward the huntsmen with the messengers behind her. Her long brown hair was wild, very little of it flowing before being knotted in some way or another. Her black nighttime robe was hardly tied. The woman wouldn’t wander around with her shift exposed, would she? She was mad. Or tired. Or both.
She was pretty, though. Raina was only a few years older than Yoric and Abraham. She had seen twenty winters compared to their seventeen. Her blue eyes, though full of anger that he knew was likely going to be taken out on them, seemed to shine in the moonlight; but even beautiful eyes couldn’t escape the markings of exhaustion.
Gods, she needs a day off.
Raina’s hands were full. One hand held some neatly stacked papers, the other held a large glob of a pale green salve that nearly energized Yoric by simply looking at it. Yoric hopped off of Warden, using his good arm to keep the sleeping girl stable whilst providing himself some balance. Once off, he gestured for Abraham and brought the girl down. Handing her to his friend, Yoric pulled up his sleeve and readied himself.
Raina thrusted the papers in Abraham’s general direction. “Don’t you crinkle it or leave it disorganized, Abraham!” The giant huntsman grabbed them as tenderly as he could whilst holding a waking child which, unfortunately, wasn’t as tender as he would’ve hoped. The papers crinkled a slight bit under this fingers and he groaned.
Yoric nearly screamed when the ointment was slammed onto the infected part of his forearm. “And you, Yoric Youngclaw. I know that you know how dangerous Harpy claws are. I expected better,” she said as she continued to viciously rub the substance into his arm. This felt worse than the pain had at its peak. The battle between the salve and the venom felt as though it was freezing the infected areas bit by bit. A few tears escaped his eyes but he would not sob. Not in front of Raina. The Allfather and each of his children knew how she’d act if he sobbed.
“Honestly. You could’ve lost your arm. Have you ever heard of a Huntsman without an arm, Yoric?”
He would not sob, but he would let her goad him into an argument. It’d take his mind off of the pain.
“Ilgar the Left. Vander of the North. Andrith the Right. Likely a dozen others.” She grinned as she continued rubbing his arm. Likely she had wanted him to give some examples. The pain was subsiding a bit. Just a bit, though.
“Aye. You can name three out of a potential fifteen. A fifth. Twenty percent. The other thirteen likely faded into irrelevance. It’d be awful haughty to compare your hypothetical self to the greatest of the group.” She was almost done with the treatment. She gentled her pace, though a river returning to its forceful flow after a rainstorm was also considered gentling.
“A huntsman has to think highly of themselves, Raina. How else-,” a grunt escaped from his mouth, but he continued, “How else would we have thought to fight a harpy in the air?”
Her eyes widened. Not in awe, mind, but in anger.
“The air? How in the Mother- did you Blink? Multiple times? In the air?” Her voice had an edge to hit. Very little of the salve remained to be rubbed in, but she had returned to her forceful scrubbing. Getting a rise out of her was as good a time as any, especially when she had tried to do the same to him.
Raina continued on. “What if you had been too tired to Blink back into the ground. I presume you were riding for hours. Did you once think about what might have happened?”
“No,” Yoric said sternly.
“We are a shield between beasts and those without power,” Abe recited.
Raina tried to object, but Yoric took his chance. “The girl might have seen six winters at most. Abe and I have seen thirty-four combined. The horses were tiring. The harpy was not. We couldn’t hurt the harpy from range without likely hurting the girl. We-“
“Fine,” Raina interrupted. “Fine, fine. Just try and set up a better kill box next time like Bianca taught you. It wouldn’t do to lose either of you.” The treatment had ended. A freezing war was still being fought in Yoric’s forearm, but she still held his arm firm. “You’ve both been coming back with more injuries these past few months than you have in years. Please exercise more caution. I will run out of herbs and antidotes if you don’t.”
Putting his hand on top of hers, Yoric nodded whilst Abe sighed. The woman cared even if she did have a roundabout way of showing it. They needed to at least try to accommodate her. What if she thought to withhold jobs from them?
She wouldn’t do that? Right?
A little voice spoke up. What Yoric had heard as whimpers, sobs, and a couple coherent sentences a few hours prior was now a bit more sure. Being in Theralyn seemed to embolden the lass a bit.
“I want to go home.”
All three of them flinched. Getting the girl home was the first thing they should have done. Raina directed Abe to hand the papers back over after confirming the girls name. Lyana, it was. Yoric had been right. She was six.
The messengers returned to their post atop the Northern gate. Abe picked the girl up and put her on his shoulders. She gasped in awe. “Is this what you see every day, Mr. Huntsman?”
Abe laughed a bit. “Quite nearly, little lady. Quite nearly.”
“I wish I was this tall.”
“You might be one day. Train your body well, eat healthy, and pray to the Mother a bit. You might be.” Lyana smiled and held on to Abe’s head as they walked down the street. The pain still raged in Yoric’s arm. It had been hours between the puncturing and the administration of the salve. It would be a few more hours before the pain was tempered, and even longer before it was gone entirely.
Eventually they came to a lodge. It was two stories tall with a great big window which faced toward the street on each level. An average sized house like this could belong to anyone. A hardworking lumberer, a modest trader, a nobleman or woman who wished for a bit of anonymity. Yoric was surprised when he knew the folks who answered the door.
“Belmar? Anna?” Two short, round, middle-aged bakers ran out of the door as soon as Abraham put Lyana down. Tears streamed down their faces as they picked up their daughter.
“Goodness!” Anna cried out. “Goodness, goodness, goodness! You’re safe!”
“Our baby is safe.” Belmar let go of his daughter whilst Anna held on. He looked to the trio. “Abraham. Yoric. I- I’m afraid there isn’t a world where I can rightfully repay you. You shall never pay to enjoy our wares ever again. Is that understood?” Yoric laughed this time. Seeing Lyana reunited with her parents had woken him up a bit, and the baker’s stern tone caught him off guard. He put his right arm up; he had tried both, but the other would not move without screaming in pain.
Belmar, with gentle hands, examined the wounded forearm. His radiant grin dropped into a frown as quick as could be. “Truly. We won’t forget, Yoric. Abe. Thank you.”
Yoric smiled. What was up with everyone grabbing his arm without asking?
“It’s what we’re here for, Belmar.” Arlox, who had been sitting atop the lodge, let out a confident screech. That fowl affirmation rang out into the night.