There were upsides to a casualty. The first few hours and days were rough, yes; horror came first, then despair, perhaps fear, and sorrow—for some, not Eris, but the people around her often cried and made strange noises with their noses. It was never easy, not even for her. No matter who was lost. To see death up close, to smell it, to taste it. Humans were not built for such casual violence.
…but the horror and despair and pain and misery (etc.) lasted only for a time. Positives made themselves manifest as they drew nearer town, by the second day, as sorrow for Alp was replaced with cognizance of sore ankles and humid air, as she began to imagine what their winnings might buy, and as she considered how much heavier her pockets would be for Alp’s absence—well, better him than her.
All this was to say that Eris was not listening while Guinevere eulogized the headless shieldbearer into the aether. Her mind was someplace else, and it was not someplace dark.
They caught the market stalls just as they closed. Everything valuable was sold. Zydnus was the one who pawned the jewelry:
“Where’d ya get all that, Master Zydnus?” one woman said hesitantly.
“I didn’t steal it!” he yelled.
“Awful lot of silver…”
“It’s my inheritance!”
“Oh no! Did somethin’ happen to Master Brenas?”
“What? No, of course not—I mean, yeah, he—just—are you buying it or not!?”
Kaimas was a small town. Word went around quickly, and the word ‘adventurer’ to a halfling was a curse on the magnitude of ‘soap’ or ‘diction’ to Guinevere’s people. They knew, therefore, that the goods the party had to sell were acquired in the improper fashion of rowdy Big Folk, which was to say they were immoral, if not strictly illegal, to purchase second hand.
But they were also significantly beneath market price, so they bought. They wept, but they bought. By sundown the party retired to the Ancient Cheeseman Inn with pockets heavy in specie.
Eris’ back was so used to hard ground and rough dirt that the softness of the set-aside Big Folk bed of the Ancient Cheeseman made her back ache blissfully all night through. Pain never felt so deliciously cheddar.
The next morning they ate breakfast together. Loathsome as halflings were, they were fabulous cooks. With enough silver spent they were brought mountains of cheese and seas of mead. Meatpies, mashed potatoes, pancakes, and hashbrowns, and that was only for first breakfast.
Guinevere was on her seventh cup of mead. There was a terrible burn on her face, all across her cheek on the left side, but the pain didn’t seem to bother her overmuch.
Eris decided to poke.
“So,” she said. “Was your honor in battle worth the price?”
Another gulp. “Ay! And ef et wuzen’t fur tha haff-ling Ieh wooda had eem, tae!”
“If it wasn’t for me we’d have carried you home in a canteen,” Zyd said.
“Woonds doonae coant fur noothen wen Ragom smyls awn meh fur meh hon-or. Ief ya weeran’t sucha nys fellaw Ieh’da stook ya inta thaat fyr meself fur duin wat yoo ded! Gettin’ en the wei of a dool, hon-or a bool tae boot!”
“They do say fire purifies,” Eris said. “The ash left in your boots would have been honorable indeed.”
“Paaah! Flaesh weel heel.” Another gulp. She hiccupped. “Hao much uf tha tree-zur er we shearen with yoor croo?”
“We’ve already shared everything with the crew,” Zyd said.
“Nae—tha croo!”
“What about us?!”
“Tha croooo—”
“I KNOW—"
“I believe,” Eris interjected, “she means Rook.”
“What? Oh. The crow.”
“Ay, the croo, Ruuuuk.”
“Have you met him, by chance?” Eris said.
“Whae?”
“It merely seems odd that one who has met Rook would call him the ‘crow’ except in irony.”
“Whae?”
“…because he is not corvid in appearance, that is why.”
“Yae ee ez.”
“No he is not.”
“Yae.”
“He is blond, like you.”
“Yae.”
“Crows are black.”
“Nae, croos ar yella liek tha weet en tha feelds of ma tryb.”
Eris was stunned. “You are insane,” was all she could muster. She caught a whiff of her breath. “And drunk.”
“Ieh aean’t ensayn, Ieh no fur sertin Ieh met im troo.”
“She did, I was there,” Zyd said.
“Ee es a strung aynd maskyoolin warreor of ez peepel.”
“Do not tip your hand all at once,” Eris said.
“Doo yoo knot thenk ee iz hand-sum, Ere-iz?”
“I think he is a competent combatant who was waylaid by a reptile.”
“Butt doo yoo thenk?”
“Yes, of course, he is a handsome man. You may as well ask if I think the Earth is round, or the ground is hard. Perhaps you are curious of the sky’s color? Is it blond today, I wonder? It would give the crows good camouflage should any hungry cats try looking up in search of prey.”
“Fur mah peepel, a strung en hand-sum croo liek eem shood bee tha dreem husbind uf every Guardian in tha wooods, fur yoo always no, a strung man liek eem, needs a strung woman, to kyp eez chyildryn sayf en curry eem—”
“I do not need to hear details on the mating habits of lusty mares,” Eris said, “that is quite enough.” She was more agitated than she wanted to be, for a reason she couldn’t quite express, which only frustrated her more.
“Maaeers?”
“She means horses,” Zyd said.
“Whae aem Ieh a hoars?”
“Because at the first mention of the name of an eligible man you profess at your desire to be ridden,” Eris said.
It took Guinevere a long time to detangled this, but finally she replied, “Ere-iz—doontcha wesh to hav chylidryn tae continoo yoor tryb?
“As a matter of fact, no. I feel no need for my ‘tryb’ to continue.”
“Thaen whaet weel hapun aftur yoor goon?”
“I never hope to learn, for I intend to live forever,” Eris said with an evil grin. There was a knowing edge to her voice. This was not the naïve bluff of a teenager, not entirely. She meant what she said—and for someone like her, such a thing was not impossible. All that played out in her insidious tones. She added, “You may feel free to write a letter informing me of the conditions in the other place yourself, if the desire ever overcomes you.”
“Ieh kinoot rite.”
“Yeah, that’s the barrier…” Zyd said.
“Why does that not surprise me?” Eris said.
“Okay, okay,” Zyd said suddenly, cheese in his mouth, his arms swiping through the air, “what were you talking about in the first place? I can’t take this anymore!”
“Whaet? O! Tha tree-zur! Ya must shaer et with tha croo.”
“Please do not call him that,” Eris said.
“Hao much es fur eem?”
“His things are in my room, he can retrieve them when he is able.”
“Butt hao much es for eem?”
“Nothing’s for him,” Zyd said. “Just his stuff.”
“…wat?”
“Wait! Are you suggesting we give Rook OUR treasure? That WE took?”
“Surely not?” Eris said.
“Surely not?” Zyd said. “He didn’t even come!”
“Ee waz enjoored defendan yoo, that es y ee didnae come.”
“Not my problem!”
“Nor mine.”
“Wat ef ee sturvs?”
“He won’t starve! He’s got it nice and cushy up with the plant-eaters. They’re probably making salads right as we speak.”
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Guinevere gagged at the thought and threw a sausage into her mouth.
“Tragedy though it would be to watch him wither away,” Eris said, “he is not my dependent.”
“Nae! Wee moost coot eem en! We wur goen tae spleet tha tree-zur en foor, weerenta wee?”
“There woulda been a lot more treasure to split if we’d had four people to carry it back from the tower instead of just three,” Zyd said.
“We moost! Ee es oor frend, hon-or seys wee doo rite beh eem throo thik en theen.”
“He’s not your friend!” Zyd said.
“And neither of you are mine,” Eris said.
Silenced followed. Until…
“…but we do have enough,” he finally added. “Fine. Fine, fine, fine, fine. It’s fine, I’ll pay the fine.”
“Ragom smyls en yoo!”
Guinevere looked at Eris.
She groaned.
They were well-off, and she supposed it made sense to invest in Rook in the way one invested in a new suit of armor.
“Very well,” she said. “But he gets only one third of my third.”
----------------------------------------
A summer storm rolled in from off the shore that afternoon. A dull and peaceful, ember-lit atmosphere suffused the Ancient Cheeseman. They had the ground floor to themselves. Zyd ran off to fetch Rook, whose return was met with a crack of thunder, a flash of lightning, and the barking of a dog.
He took a seat at their table. Once informed of the profit sharing scheme he said, “Pauper that I am, I’m even poor in thanks. But thank you.” He looked to Eris.
“Do not thank me, it was the barbarian’s idea,” she said.
Another table had been cleared away and their veritable armory assembled on it. “For such peaceful people it’s strange the halflings aren’t more offended by this sort of display,” he said, motioning the weapons over. Three swords, two daggers, a bow, two suits of chainmail, two axes, and three helmets.
“Al wys peepel keap arms,” Guinevere said, “en tha haff-lings ar wys.”
“The wisest keep two,” Rook said.
“That would explain why you are down to only one,” Eris said.
“Less; for if dexterity came in units of two, I think my right arm accounted for more than half.”
“You would say you are down to quarter-arms then, hm?”
He picked up Pyraz’s dagger in its sheath. “Now, in fact, I would.”
Eris smiled. A moment of silence, when…
“Anyway,” Zyd said loudly, “we thought we’d let you pick what you wanted. Before we sold the rest.”
“Here,” Rook said. He tossed the dagger to Zyd. “You’ll make better use of it.”
Zyd drew it. It was sword-sized for a halfling. His eyebrows raised at the sight of the blued steel and deep fuller. “Where did you get this!?”
“The blade came with the dog,” Eris said.
“It’s Elven!”
“It is not Elven.”
“Yes, yes it is! I saw an elf with a sword that looked just like this once, it even has the same writing, right there!”
“It is a dagger of the Old Kingdom. They use Regal script, but they are not the same.”
“You just don’t want to admit that I have an Elven dagger and you don’t!”
“How did you know?” Eris said. She put her head in her hands and saw Guinevere, for the first time, since Rook entered. She was leering drunkenly in his direction, a look on her face like a statue to which had been taken a hammer.
Rook referred back to the table. He picked up his own sword. The scabbard was relatively unassuming, but she’d seen the steel within enough times by then to know its quality. On the pommel was the crested head of a bird. A look of relief, a flash, played across his face. Then a hand on the other sword, the Dwarven blade recovered from the Manastone Mines.
“We’ll have to return Erkent’s sword to his widow,” he said.
“But I want it!” Zyd said.
“Someone here will recognize it, Zyd, it’s not worth it.”
Rook had a habit of dropping in and out of refined speech. He was an aristocrat, that was certain, but he knew how to speak with the rabble. It was a curious thing to watch. Was it conscious, Eris wondered, or a practiced response?
“Ay, butt tha Dwurfven ax ez mein!” Guinevere shouted suddenly. Everyone turned to stare at her.
“Okay,” Rook said. “What about the armor?”
“It would have done you good,” Eris said. “But it is heavy. Conspicuous. Uncomfortable…”
“True, and it can also be taken off, unlike the discomfort from a missing limb.”
“You would know,” Eris said.
“It won’t fit me anyway,” Zyd said.
“Nae mee,” Guinevere said.
“There may be something we can do about that,” Rook said. “Let’s keep them for now.”
So it was a comfortable stay in Kaimas commenced. They ate, drank, and slept copiously for weeks, with no regard for their own solvency. Unlike their stay in Vandens in Spring, this time they all spent time together, often dining together, sense of camaraderie looming like an executioner at the gallows.
That was Eris’ opinion. She associated with her companions no more than strictly necessary, even when they reveled downstairs, even when Rook invited her personally with a knock at her door. She stuck to herself—and before long, the invitations ceased.
That was fine by her. She had other things to take care of. First, to reacquire certain things lost. A new mirror was purchased. Cosmetic supplies. An entire new wardrobe, including a dress, which she wore everywhere before realizing it would be impossible to take out on adventure. Any supplies lost were replenished.
Then her attention turned toward the book in her backpack.
From the outset it was plain and unassuming, if also large and heavy. The leather bound tightly around its exterior was a velveteen red. When her hand drew near the front cover, it lifted to meet her fingers. Her blood and the ink on each page were magnetically linked. With enough practice, a magician could navigate each chapter with nothing but the gestures of her fingers, without ever touching the papyrus herself.
She was not there yet.
The air around the book crackled with energy. It was precisely like being around Manastone, like the refined Manastone necklace she wore tucked beneath her shirt, which even now blissfully burned against her chest like a small focus of sunlight.
In an elegant cursive on the first page: Astros.
This book described three spells—true spells—and presented magically charged runic inscriptions to assist in the casting of each. Mastering them would not be easy, although metabolizing the basics would take only weeks. A true spell required the refashioning of the material world through nothing but an extension of the mage’s will and the power harnessed around her. The techniques were complicated and required careful study. Miscasting a translation spell was not as likely to kill her as an attempt to conjure a fireball gone wrong, perhaps, but its consequences could be devastating all the same.
The three, in the words of the magician who wrote this book, this Astros: Hold Portal, a useful spell for binding shut doors and keeping them bound forevermore and after; Arcane Semblance, a devious and powerful technique through which the Sorcerer may, through use of Mana, manipulate the very light that penetrates onlookers eyes and deceive them into perceiving him to be very unlike who or what he truly is; and Aethereal Voice, with which voices may be mimicked, sounds may be conjured, and entire armies may be shaken to their souls by noises plucked from thin air.
One of these was less entrancing than the others, yet Eris had never used a spellbook before. Thus she chose Hold Portal to begin.
She woke every day at dawn, and until it became too dark to read at dusk, did nothing but practice. Nothing in the world mattered to her but mastery of these spells. Often she went without eating. Her water would exhaust itself, and even a short trip to the cistern downstairs was too long a distraction from her work.
The door to her room was thin and wooden. It had a latch for a lock. On the seventh day she stepped outside and pulled it shut, the open spellbook in her arms like a child. Her eyes glanced all the frame over, her fingers reached beneath her shirt and grabbed her necklace, and she closed her eyes.
She imagined the cracks at the frame’s top and bottom. She envisioned the light that poured from each. Then she reached out with her mind and smothered them. She imagined the door pulled firmly taut. She glanced down at the runes on the page and drew mana from them, breathing in—
And letting go. The runes on the page went dark. She closed the book and reached for the door—
It was locked firmly shut. Frozen entirely in place, it wouldn’t budge an inch.
The spell worked. She did it. She had learned a spell, a real spell, from a book, with no mentor, on her own. That was no small accomplishment. She felt brilliant, smug, self-satisfied, even as she went for the handle again and found it still wouldn’t move.
She was locked out of her room.
“Whaet ar ya doen?” Guinevere said. She was coming down the hall, from her own room, going downstairs.
“Going to dinner,” Eris replied.
“With yoor book? Waers yoor kee?”
“It is in my pocket, I have locked the door already. Shall we away?”
“Ay! Laes goo!”
The spell had faded by the time she returned. The process began anew the next morning.
The days passed in seconds with her head lost in that book. The dead runes in the chapter on Hold Portal were a sign of progress, and nothing was more addictive than progress.
Useful though it seemed to be, Eris had no desire to appear as anyone other than herself, so she left Arcane Semblance for last. Aethereal Voice was more complicated, more subtle, and more useful than Hold Portal, and far easier to cast wrong; yet it was also easier to test, to practice, to experiment with, and after only four days her window was thrown open and her voice was thrown forth into the streets with it. She delighted herself infinitely by harassing the halflings below as they went by. Childish, no doubt, yet it never ceased to make her smile. Any words in any voice she could imagine, any noise at any volume, from any point she could see: that was the power of the Aethereal Voice.
The runes in the book went dark.
One left.
To change an entire appearance with mana was no small feat. Even projecting her own voice was a serious expenditure of energy, if done too often, with too much disregard. For her safety, when learning Arcane Semblance, she relied heavily on the book’s runes as her guide.
Now she spent over a week doing nothing else but staring into her own reflection.
She worked slowly. First she tried her hair. From brown to blonde. She lifted a hand to her scalp, dragged her fingers through each strand, tapped mana from the air, and as they went, so too did darkness.
That was very strange. Blonde hair. She arranged it in a bun, a ponytail, a braid, all just to see what it was like. She was disturbed not to recognize herself in a mirror at first glance. But after three hours, the brown returned. Blonde became dirtier and dirtier until no hint of light was left at all.
Her eyes next. She did the opposite: once brown, they were now golden. Simple enough to change with the spell.
Three hours, back to normal.
Had she been someone else, she may have tried fixing some flaw in herself, some various imperfection in her own appearance, but there was nothing Eris would have wished to change. She saw only perfection. So when she had mastered the basics, she was forced to try something more extreme.
She molded herself like clay. Her shoulders broadened. Her hair shortened. Her hips narrowed. She drew power from the page and channeled it into herself, and all the while she held the image of her impersonation fiercely in her mind:
It was not easy. It took nearly an hour of concentration, and when she was done she was overheated, tired, hungry, and nauseated. But when she looked in her hand mirror…
She saw Rook, dressed in Rook’s clothes.
She felt her—his—face. Stubble on his—her—chin. She knew it was only an illusion, and still she felt just like herself, but to the touch…she was not herself. And when she looked down, she did not see herself.
The final runes in the spellbook went blank. But this time, Eris didn’t notice. She was back with her mirror. She spent a very long time looking into the glass after that; and once the spell faded, for the first time in her life, she was disappointed to see her herself.
----------------------------------------
Zyd and Rook were arguing downstairs.
"We don't have a good history with bounties!" Zyd said.
"She needs our help," Rook said.
"She's probably already frozen," Zyd said.
"The sun is out and it's high summer, how cold can it be?"
"In Chionos? Fucking cold!"
"Do you have a better idea?"
"What about that Spire? Let's go there!"
"We already went there," Rook said.
"There's more. There's always more!"
"Snaiga isn't far."
"Snaiga might as well be in Seneria! I'd rather walk to Korabel!"
Eris found it hard to look Rook in the eyes, but she sat at their table. His arm was healed. They were all fat on halfling drink and food, and, once more, nearly bankrupt. It had been two months.
"Is there some disagreement?" she asked.
"Some Magister's daughter got lost in the snow and Rook wants to go looking for her past the White Mountains," Zyd said.
"A magician in Snaiga is offering a bounty for anyone who finds his apprentice and brings her back," Rook said. "News came today."
"It's a million miles away! We don't even know if she hasn't made it back by now!"
"And the reward?" Eris said.
"Reward enough. Six thousand drachmae," Rook said.
"Snow sucks!" Zyd said.
Chionos was the land to the south of Rytus. A land of perpetual winter, where a blizzard had fallen eons ago and never once lifted. There it snowed every night, without fail. It was a place suffused with magic. Very dangerous. Very cold. And very exciting.
"I do not mind snow," Eris said. "And no doubt Guinevere is quite accustomed to it."
"I said the same," Rook said.
"What if this girl were to die for our inaction? I could not live with myself," Eris said.
"We have a—" he stopped abruptly, realizing Eris' irony, then catching her true motivation, "there's more than just the reward in cash."
"What?" Zyd said.
"A magician is a powerful ally," Rook said.
"Indeed, one with his own apprentice must have ties to Pyrthos," Eris said. "There must be something you would want from him."
"...like what?"
"Longer legs, perhaps?"
"That's not funny!"
"She wasn't joking, you might not mind the snow if you only could wear stilts," Rook said.
"Stop it!"
"Letting joking aside," he continued, "you're right that this might be settled quickly. We should leave soon."
"My business is settled," Eris said. "Is your arm healed?"
He rolled his shoulder. "Nothing but a scar now."
"Then we should be off presently. Do you know the way?"
"Gah!" Zyd shouted. "Yes, I know the way! I swear—if—when—first you take my lantern, now you make me go to Chionos! No one ever goes there, it's full of snow, it's cold and wet and terrible!"
"Not so different from where I'm from," Rook said. "Don't worry, Zyd. If you get stuck in any snowbanks, I'll pull you out."