er 35

Yann hit the ground somewhere and coughed. He had to double-check every part of his body before he satisfied himself that he didn’t break anything.

He couldn’t remember if he went through any other Layers before he wound up here or what those Layers had been if he did go through them.

His confusion took a few more minutes to clear. He was definitely on the ground now.

His fingers dug into some more short-clipped, green fresh grass, but he wasn’t lying on the side of the rocky mountain.

He dragged his head up and coughed again while he looked around. Anríq lay a few yards away.

Anríq groaned and rolled onto his side before he sat up and looked around, too. He saw Yann and crawled over to him.

Anríq placed his hand an inch above Yann’s back and a tingle of energy floated through Yann’s skin from Anríq’s hand.

“I’m…I’m all right,” Yann croaked. “Where is everyone?”

Anríq narrowed his eyes at the surroundings. Yann pushed himself onto all fours and then sat back on his ankles to assess the area.

The two boys had landed in a pasture full of sheep at the edge of a medium-sized town.

It looked bigger and more developed than Middleborough, but he didn’t see any Black Watchmen guarding the place. The town didn’t have an outer protective perimeter wall for Watchmen to guard.

Marketeers, bakers, and vendors pushed carts or drove wagons through the streets selling goods to the townsfolk. None of them paid any attention to Yann and Anríq.

“The others aren’t in this Island,” Anríq muttered.

“Can you find them?” Yann asked. “We have to get back to them. I have to get back to them. Can you locate them in that Coil thing that Eliska uses?”

“I don’t know how,” Anríq replied.

He got to his feet and waited for Yann to do the same thing. The two boys started migrating closer to the town without discussing it first. Yann glanced behind him.

He needed to find a way to rejoin his father and the rest of the Watch—but how could he do that if the Watch got lost in the Coil?

Maybe Yann and Anríq were the ones lost in the Coil. His blood ran cold at the thought.

Yann’s father would freak when he found Yann gone. Yvan would never stop harassing Wesh and Eliska to find Yann.

Yvan would throw over the rest of the Watchmen’s safety to go looking for his son—or maybe Yvan would leave the Watch. That would be a disaster.

No amount of looking around the area would tell Yann how to get back to the Watch. He had no magic he could use to shatter this Island to send himself somewhere else.

Anríq could do it, but that didn’t guarantee they would meet back up with the Watch. Yann and Anríq might wander the Coil for years and never find the Watch.

Yann didn’t give himself the option to think about that. He followed Anríq toward the town. The road wound over hills and valleys through farmland surrounding the town.

Anríq didn’t seem to be going anywhere in particular and he definitely didn’t explain himself.

This country posed such a contrast to the rugged, rustic harshness of the snow Island. Everything here had been manicured by centuries of human work.

Hand-constructed wooden fences surrounded all the pastures full of milk cows and freshly shorn sheep. All the houses had been built with hand-shaved boards with glass windows and plenty of ironwork everywhere.

This town was much more refined even than Middleborough.

Anríq paused after a little while, bent his knees, and placed his hand a few inches above the ground on the side of the road.

“What are you doing?” Yann asked.

Anríq muttered under his breath. “I’m trying to find out where we are and how to get back to the others.”

“How are you doing that?” Yann asked. “You said you didn’t know how to.”

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Anríq didn’t answer for a minute. Then he stood up and started walking, but he stopped to do the same thing again a few minutes later.

“Can you find anything?” Yann asked.

“No,” Anríq muttered.

“How are you doing that? Can you feel where we are in the Coil?”

Anríq compressed his lips, straightened up, and cast a hard look over the horizon toward the other towns in the distance.

“Do you know where we are?” Yann asked. “Have you ever come to this Island before?”

“Yes,” Anríq replied over his shoulder.

“Is it possible the others landed in another part of the same Island?” Yann asked. “How could that fire bring us here and take the others to a completely different Layer?”

Anríq didn’t answer that, either. He started walking.

Yann hustled after him to catch up. Anríq’s silence didn’t bother Yann so much when they had the rest of the Watch around to talk to instead.

Yann couldn’t get stranded out here with someone who wouldn’t even talk to him.

“Where are you going?” he asked. “How do you know where to go if you can’t find the others?”

Anríq turned around so fast that Yann almost collided with him. Yann had been hurrying to catch up and didn’t stop in time.

He had to jump backward to avoid crashing into Anríq’s much larger frame.

Anríq narrowed his eyes and scowled at him. Yann shuffled his feet. “What? I’m just trying to understand.”

Anríq compressed his lips one more time and then dipped his chin once. “I will serve.”

Yann raised his eyebrows. “What does that mean? You’ll serve how?”

“I will serve by talking to you the way you want me to. You require healing through talking to me—so I will serve you that way.”

Yann’s eyes fell the rest of the way out of their sockets. “You will?! Are you sure?”

“Yes, I will.” Anríq turned away and started walking again. “What would you like to know?”

Yann stood rooted to the spot watching Anríq walk away. Yann struggled to believe what he’d just heard.

He didn’t want to let himself believe that Anríq really invited him to ask as many questions as he wanted to.

Anríq didn’t turn around. He kept walking. He made it thirty feet away before Yann woke up enough to run after him.

Yann pulled alongside him and fought his pulse under control, now that he fully realized what Anríq was about to do. Yann didn’t want to believe it was real.

He chose his first question with care and cleared his throat before he asked. “Why are you doing so much to help us?”

“You heard what Wesh said. The Voyant is causing all of this instability. Whatever the Watch is carrying gives him the power to wreak havoc in the Coil. If it does, then the highest service will be to stop him.”

“Why did you become a servant? Did something happen between you and the Barbarians? Did they throw you out?”

“They didn’t throw me out. I left to become a Servant.”

“Why?” Yann blurted out. “Did you want to become a Servant?”

“Yes,” Anríq replied.

“Why?” Yann repeated. “Why would you turn your back on your tribe and your people? Did you do something to make them shun you?”

“I became a Servant because I didn’t want to be a Barbarian. I wanted to be more. I wanted my life and my magic to be good for something other than attacking people, robbing them, and maybe even killing them. I wanted my magic to mean something.”

“What about your family? You said they wouldn’t welcome you back.”

“I don’t know if they would welcome me back. I haven’t gone home to my tribe since I left.”

Yann fell silent for a minute. Anríq hadn’t said anything so far that Yann didn’t already know or at least guess.

“How did your family react when you became a Servant?” Yann almost stopped walking when he remembered. “You were just a boy then—only twelve.”

Anríq didn’t turn around or take his eyes off the horizon. He expressed no emotion over whatever happened with his family.

“They didn’t like it,” he mumbled. “They tried to talk me out of it in more ways than one.”

“What do you mean?” Yann asked. “What did they do?”

Anríq shrugged it away. “They beat me up. They even tied me up and kept me confined in a pit for a few weeks.”

Yann’s jaw dropped and he fell a few more paces behind before he came back to his senses.

He caught up with Anríq, but Yann hesitated to ask any more questions. He regretted asking now.

“What did you do?” Yann finally asked.

“I left,” Anríq repeated. “They couldn’t keep me locked up forever. My father released me, held a feast for me, and offered to make me his heir over all my brothers if I only stayed. When I refused, he cursed me, turned his back on me, and refused to look at me or talk to me again until I left.”

“Wow,” Yann breathed. “That sounds terrible.”

“He threatened to kill anyone who gave me the Servant’s mark,” Anríq went on. “I had to go somewhere else to get it. I wandered for a year before I found someone willing to defy my father and give it to me.”

“Did you travel to another country where no one knew him? Is that how you did it?”

“No, the person who gave it to me knew him very well. She knew about his threat and she did it anyway.”

“She?” Yann repeated. “Who was it?”

“His mother—my grandmother.”

Yann swallowed hard. He couldn’t ask any more questions—not about that.

He would probably never know the full story of how Anríq became a Servant or all the heinous suffering he had to go through to fully live his destiny.

Yann couldn’t ask. He realized now what a colossal mistake he made by bringing it up in the first place.

Eliska was right about Anríq’s history being none of Yann’s business. Yann should have left it in the past instead of tormenting Anríq by bringing it up and making him remember it all.

Yann followed him in silence for a while.

“What did you mean earlier when you said you wanted you didn’t want to be a Barbarian?” Yann asked. “Aren’t you still a Barbarian even if you’re a Servant?”

“I will always be a Barbarian,” Anríq replied. “I can’t make myself into anything else.”

“Do you still not want to be one? You could change your appearance. You could cut your hair and change your clothes to cover up your tattoos.”

“It has nothing to do with being a Barbarian,” Anríq replied. “Or maybe it has everything to do with being a Barbarian.”

“I don’t understand.”

Now it was Anríq’s turn to fall silent. He took a few minutes before he answered.

“The Barbarians use magic for marauding and stealing and destruction. If other people don’t matter enough to protect them or at least to leave them alone, maybe I don’t matter, either. If my magic is only good for destroying other people, maybe it’s only good for destroying myself, too.” Anríq shook his head to clear his thoughts. “I don’t understand it. I only know I couldn’t stay. I would have turned my magic on myself if I stayed. I wanted to turn it on myself for a long time. It came down to a simple choice—become a Servant or die.”

End of Chapter 35.