Between a choice of humans and gods, Tully had chosen the god. If the plan proceeded as she hoped, the payoff would be massive. Even so, I would’ve hedged my bets on Baylar, if only I was less conspicuous.
With a course charted, the logistics of our oncoming journey swiftly fell in place. Each of us reviewed the details, which Tully took as an opportunity to carefully explain the logic behind every decision to Maddie. Rita and I were relegated to teaching aids – used to bounce ideas off and as consultants for redundant questions – yet it was still a better position to be in than Maddie’s. The Spiderblood’s constant quizzing could’ve turned a stone to dust.
Eventually, Maddie’s composure wilted under the expectant gaze of her tutor. Nothing remained to us other than an awkward silence
Upon exiting the wagon, we found Aron waiting for us. His wife and child were watching the pyres – the conflagration beginning to slowly die.
“What have you decided?” the man asked. Gone was the superficial charm he’d bandied so readily. In its place were bloodshot eyes, ruffled clothes hanging off his broad frame, and twitching lips oscillating between a smile and something far more fearful.
Tully took a moment to respond. “Excepting myself, Head Maleen, Vin, Kit, and… Davian, everyone will continue your journey.”
Aron licked his lips. “…You’ll leave us?”
“You will have a better chance without the presence of fugitives.”
His reply was strangled. “We’re associates of yours; House Baylar… They won’t let us just… leave! We need to go with you!”
“Rita will go with you.”
To shoot anyone who attempted to defect, I suspected. But they’d assured me that she was especially skilled at night-raids and quiet movement – that was what had gotten her a role as Maddie’s bodyguard. Who else better to catch an assassin than another assassin? A detachment under her instruction had a better chance than us – even composed almost entirely of people either greyer than dust itself or barely a handful of steps out of the womb.
“Rita’s not enough!” He looked down at the woman in question and raised both hands. “No offense.”
“She’s one of the most capable individuals Heltia had in its employ.”
“No.” Aron shook his head rapidly. “No, she can’t be enough.”
“Your chances won’t get better with a red-headed girl,” I began to list, counting up on my fingers, “a scarred old woman, a large man, a dark-skinned swordswoman, or a Strain. We’re easily the most conspicuous members of this caravan.”
“You’re also the warriors, Vin!”
“What good’s iron against a hoard of bronze? The moment fighting starts, we’re dead anyway.”
The man’s eyes flicked around, noting the other three already in the process of moving to notify the others. “Come on, Vin,” he whispered, voice low. “You know the kind of resources I have hidden away. If you take me and my family away, there’s no risk to you and your friends, and you’ll get everything I have.”
A flicker of glee danced within my chest at his begging, warring with the disgust I felt towards the pathetic man I loathed. I blinked, and tried to ignore both. “Aron…”
“Here.” He thrust a ceramic bottle towards me. “Honey wine from Heltia’s own supply. I was planning on selling it, but…” Aron raised his sparse eyebrows. “We owe you. Just… Have a taste and consider it, okay?”
The man shot me a quick smile and walked back to Daisy and Willow. The man’s wife was still mired in her fever. Even as my eyes followed him, my hand tilted the bottle, feeling the liquor slosh back and forth within. Then a pair of feet stomped towards my location and an overdeveloped arm snatched it away.
Ronnie glared down at me, barely keeping a wince at bay from the pain of abusing their healing tendons with such a rapid movement. We’d shoved countless looted potions down their throat, but instantly fixing tendons remained work too delicate for the brutish hands of alchemical concoctions.
The underdeveloped hand flashed in a series of signs as its partner cradled the bottle. I caught: ‘Idiot’, ‘Spiral’, and ‘Important’.
I could’ve put the pieces together just from the giant’s expression. “What’s a single drink going to hurt?” I insisted. “We’ve only got one bottle anyway.”
‘Idiot’ again.
“I’m not a child,” I spat. “I won’t sabotage this by thinning myself with booze.”
Amidst a flurry of signs, I only caught ‘Miss’ and ‘Again’, beneath stormy blue eyes. But while I was bereft of the specifics, I could recognise the same tired old spiel Bhan had run me through a thousand time in Bars. Drink is bad; Don’t compromise with even a drop. Whip had found me at my worst – reeking of spirits and staggering after a group of kids throwing rocks at her.
After spending a year with them, that was the image of me that stuck. “Oh, go jump in a river.”
‘Dung’, ‘Cattle’, and ‘Lick’ mixed with countless other gestures. My incomprehension saved me from parsing what must’ve been a truly devastating insult.
“Whatever you just said isn’t fair and you know it.” I threw my hands up. “We’re about to set upon the most dangerous task any of us have ever done before. If there’s ever a time to drink, it’s now.”
Ronnie’s dog, Yowler, had loped in from his position beside the pyre. He stared at me, hackles raised, as the giant cycled through dozens of gestures faster than I could comprehend. Their face slowly turned red.
The only thing I caught was ‘Whip’.
“What’re you even saying?” I snapped, mouth contorted into a sneer. “I can’t understand you.”
Ronnie bared her teeth in a silent growl and hurled the bottle to the grass beneath. It shattered on the red blades in an explosion of dark liquid, which quickly vanished into the pink soil.
I swore viciously, flinching back from the shards. A single step towards the Strain was all I managed before Davian had shoved himself between us.
“Hold on, Vin,” the old Strain crooned, hands on my shoulders.
“Hold on? Tell- “
“This is not the time for this.” He whirled. “That means you as well.”
The giant signed something, and beneath his long bangs the man paled slightly.
“Uh, we’ll talk about this later.”
Ronnie’s face crumpled. They placed a massive hand over their eyes and began to rapidly walk away.
Once again, I swore, but this time the words were directed elsewhere. Before the giant Strain could outpace me, my arm snatched the back of their shirt. Shaking me off would be an easy task for a person with a build like Ronnie’s – even without any Oxblood – yet they halted anyway.
“We’ll…” I swallowed against a suddenly dry mouth. “We’ll work it out, okay?”
A large hand settled on my head, tousling my hair. My gaze travelled upwards, finding Ronnie’s faltering smile and watery eyes. After a brief slap to my shoulder, the giant trudged away, back silhouetted by the dying pyre. I watched them settle a short distance away from where Kit and the others had settled. Yowler ambled beside the Strain’s seated figure, to be carefully shuffled into their lap. Ronnie buried their face in his fur.
“It won’t be the same.” Davian stood beside me, inscrutable features staring at the group.
I stifled the urge to snap at him for making such a redundant observation. “Yeah,” I managed instead, voice terse.
“You and Kit defeated thirty Baylarian soldiers,” he continued. “That isn’t the kind of deed that can be forgotten.”
My eyes strayed away from his own lopsided pair. “Does it change anything?”
“Could you have stopped Whip from getting shot?”
I turned. “What?”
His eyes were steady; his brows low. “Could you- “
Every emotion I’d felt in the past few days threatened to rise from my stomach and erupt from my throat. “I am not in the mood for this.”
“Answer the question.”
“I was pushing the cart, Davian.”
“You’re clearly capable of more than just pushing.”
“Maybe,” I stated tonelessly. “I still can’t be in two places at once.”
“Then whose fault is it?”
“Baylar’s,” I snapped. “You know this.”
“If you had been willing to fight from the beginning- “
“What could I have done?” My voice broke on that final word. “Tell me, Davian, oh wise, educated scholar. What could anyone have done?”
A new voice spoke. “Whip could’ve ducked.”
Kit had silently paced over to us over the course of the exchange. Davian and I stared at her. The silence couldn’t hide how the air between us crackled.
Fortunately for her, Davian produced a reply before I could. “That idea,” he said, the lines of his face rigid, “is absurd.”
“If she ducked she wouldn’t’ve died,” Kit snapped, stitches in her cheeks stretching dangerously. The force of her words was undercut by her rapid blinking and twitching features, as if she’d been exposed to a light brighter than her eyes could parse. “That’s not wrong.”
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
“But to heap the Raven’s share upon a person who was essentially a non-combatant is patently foolish.” The invocation of Avri was rare in its crassness; confined to older individuals who’d lived an era where it could be stomached. I’d never heard Davian do it before. “Her role wasn’t to protect herself- “
“Then whose was it?” The swordswoman leaned forward, lowering her eyes to the old Strain’s level. Her bandaged knuckles clenched around the hilt of her sword. “Huh? This oaf right here was behind the cart. Was it Gast? Big godsdamn shield didn’t help no one much – maybe if she had half a brain rattlin’ in her skull it would’ve.”
I gathered my wits enough to spit a retort. “There were arrows in her shield- ”
“One too few.” Her voice smashed through my own like a foul stench. “Maybe Ronnie? Huh? If the big bastard- “
Davian bristled, yet the moment he opened his mouth, Kit continued to thunder over him, all raging voice and bloodshot eyes.
“Oh, you don’t like that? Is Ronnie not a big bastard? Maybe if the damn… damn tree of a Strain hadn’t half torn their arm to pieces they could’ve done somethin’. Or, or, or,” she stuttered, “maybe it was you – maybe if you’d hit th’ right Baylar piece of wasted skin at th’ right time there wouldn’t be a damn arrow to talk about!”
The old Strain’s twisted lips flapped, fingers curling impotently.
“Or maybe,” she said, quietening, “it was me. I could’ve stopped th’ arrow.”
I breathed a heavy sigh. Finally, I understood. “Don’t kid yourself- “
“I’m not.” She gazed at the ground, rubbing a fleck of ash from her face with bandaged hands. “People… die. But I could’ve. If I hadn’t of dived at that first volley an’ stayed standin’, I would’ve smacked the arrow out o’ the air.”
“Or you would have died,” I finished for her.
“Yeah.” The swordswoman scratched her head, seeming uncharacteristically small. “That’s how it goes, I guess. People die.”
Davian simmered quietly, but said nothing.
I opened my mouth, hoping to sink the tension despite not having grasped the means to do so. “You- “
The Strain erupted. “If Tully had simply allowed me to talk to them…” As soon as the anger appeared, it trailed away.
“I… don’t think anything could have stopped this. It’s not…” I paused, searching for the words. “It’s not, uh, nice to say it, but… This is as good as it was going to…” I looked at the ground. “Go.”
“I could have- “
“We could have… given Maddie up,” I stated. “That’s it. That’s all that would have stopped it. And they might have still killed us anyway.”
“You have no way of knowing- “
“Davian.” Kit’s voice was low and jagged. “Shut up, ‘fore I shut you up.”
The Strain looked at her, then slammed a palm into his own forehead. “Damn it.” The man adjusted the quiver strapped to his waist and stalked towards Tully. In his absence, the two of us formed a small island in the sea of red grass.
“Thanks,” I said quietly.
The swordswoman quirked her lips. “Yeah, well. Either you was gonna hit him, or I was gonna hit him, and I don’t know if the old man’d survive either.”
“I wouldn’t have hit him.”
She shot me a token smirk. “Sure.”
“I might’ve hit you.”
Her ensuing snort was more authentic for its briefness.
We watched the pyres. My eyes settled on Taja, slumped form facing the dying flames. He seemed in a forest of his own, apart from all others. His dark skin had been transformed to pitch by the unbearable light of the fires. The teenager had no home, no family, and nowhere to go.
“It wasn’t your fault,” I said, and tried to mean it.
“It was a lot o’ people’s faults.”
“People die in battle.”
“By all that’s good ‘n green,” she proclaimed, shaking her head, “you think I don’t know that? I’ve been in more fights than this whole clearing’s got fingers to count.” A thumb and forefinger rubbed the bridge of her nose as she let loose a short growl. “But it wasn’t… I dunno if it was Whip’s… I can’t…”
“It’s not yours- “
“Blood, Vin – then whose was it? Whip’s dead.”
I could’ve kept talking. But just like back in the abandoned farmhouse, nothing I said would have reached her. Instead, I moved rest a hand on her shoulder, then thought better of it and settled for shrugging.
“C’mon, Vin. You’re clever.”
I chose to keep my gaze away from hers. “You see Taja down there?” I nodded in the teenager’s direction.
“Th’ nomad kid.”
“Yeah. He’s going to rot away if we leave him like that.”
“…You wanna bring him in?”
“Yeah. Could you tell the others to… I don’t know. Be kind?”
“The kid’s not…” Her voice trailed off. “Alright. He’s your responsibility, though.”
Before I could protest, she began walking towards the others. I watched her go and cursed quietly.
Taja sat, shoulders quietly shaking. I took a step towards him, the movement made deliberately slow to buy as much time as possible to determine an approach. When I’d finally reached him, no perfectly writ actions had made themselves known to me. Fumbling words were the worst disservice anyone could pay to someone trapped so deep. But they were the only path I had.
I sat down a few steps away from him. All that indicated his awareness of me was a silent flinch.
The heat was scalding. Saliva dried in my mouth. An apology danced at the tip of my tongue, and I swallowed it. I breathed in, and tried to channel Bhan as much as possible.
“You’ve suffered,” I began, “and there’s nothing anyone can do to change that.”
I looked at him and saw only clenched teeth and tightly-screwed eyes. His face was wrought in another language, and had I spent more time with the boy I would’ve been capable of deciphering it. But I hadn’t. All I could hope was that he was more like me than not.
“But… you’re with us, now. From here, until whatever end finds us.”
I sidled towards him, and drew Taja into my body with an arm. I waited for the teenager to throw me off – to scream and rage – but he did not resist. He only sobbed.
Dirt, snot, and tears burrowed into my coat. No more words were spoken, and no promises were made. I couldn’t tell him that anything would make him whole again, but maybe a day would come where he didn’t feel so broken.
I had to hope.
----------------------------------------
Despite our argument, Ronnie, Gast, and Kit had welcomed the teenager readily. Jana had made some grumbling noises about having more ‘dead weight’, but had given in without more than a token amount of fuss. Taja slept, having passed out hugging a wide-eyed Tippi, who’d yet to figure out a way to extricate himself from the larger boy’s grasp. Crumpet had wandered off after parroting her carer’s words and being screamed at for it.
Without any fanfare, Davian had emerged from a discussion with Tully to inform us he would be in the blockade-group, with Aron somehow wriggling in to take his place in the forest. I hadn’t thought the old Strain had enough of the Dolphin’s tongue to persuade our leader of such an obviously awful change. Perhaps the scarred woman had sensed a plan relying on the mercy of a god couldn’t get much worse. Though he’d succeeded in his objective, the man still sat some distance away from the rest.
A few dozen steps in the forest, I knelt beside a flat boulder and tried to assemble the pieces of my Face. The sap of the nearby heartwoods could be used as a strong adhesive, when mixed with a good helping of tar. I hadn’t the time to make any though, so I was left to spit in the mixture and hope the resulting slow-setting glue would be enough to keep my mask together. Every movement sent a trickle of pain through my still-healing shoulder.
The fragments were placed atop the red moss and assembled like some cruel puzzle. I’d dedicated almost a year to carefully crafting the mould of the Face. My days were spent with eyes and hands fixed on the wood in my hands, carefully running a knife down its side to make a model that held everything I dreamed of, even as my feet caught on rocks and dirt as I trailed after my mentor. Yet the nights were worse; wasted dragging sticks through wet dirt, frantically trying to make all the facets I wanted to fit within the inconspicuous space of a tiny mask. Bhan had offered advice, but never assistance. It was one of the few things I’d ever done that was worth anything.
With a thin brush patched together from a collection of horsehair and a splinter of wood, I applied a layer of glue onto the edge of a larger shard and carefully squashed a smaller piece onto its edge. Holding both together, I slowly lowered it into a gap in other, similarly crafted pieces.
“Come on,” I muttered. “Come on.”
It settled into the arrangement I’d spent hours putting together as the pieces had sloughed away from one another, glue failing and needing to be wiped over and over again, and suddenly the fact I had mulishly ignored for all that time stared me in the face.
I was missing several pieces.
With a strangled yell, I scooped the mask up – feeling the entire thing drip apart as I did so – and hurled it at the nearest tree. The moment it left my hand I felt sickened, but no amount of flailing could snatch back what already done. When it hit the tree, its pieces fragmented further and cast themselves deeper into the woods.
I hunched over and stomped my feet and breathed through my teeth because the scent of woodsmoke filled the air and felt the trees bend over to mock me and clenched my nails into my palms-
And released a pained grunt as they sunk deeper than they should have. I swore, and slowly extricated my nails from where they’d embedded themselves, feeling the blood bubble out from the fresh wounds. I kicked away a patch of grass and ran my fingers through the pink dirt, clearing most of the red liquid off my fingers in an attempt to uncover what had buried them so deeply. Then I stared.
“Hey, uh, Vin?”
I turned, shoving my hands in the pockets of my coat. Kit cautiously approached, face turned to consider the forest’s covetous canopy, each branch twisting to steal as much of the sun’s radiance before it hit the ground. The swordswoman settled atop the boulder without finding the small flecks of blood atop it. They blended into the red moss too well.
After a moment, I realised she still awaited a reply. “What is it?” I asked, far too gruffly. I cleared my throat and tried again. “What did you want to ask me?”
“Well,” she began, “I been goin’ ‘round and seein’ what people know of, uh, Whip. Before everythin’. Where she was from an’ what she thought an’ who she was an’ that… and, uh, I was wonderin’ if you… Had somethin’ to add.”
Blood dripped from my hands, wetting them and the clothes they were stuck within. “Do you want something specific?”
“Uh…” Kit licked her lips, brow furrowed as she stared at the dirt. The stitches in her cheek were strained. “D’you know where she’s from?”
Some questions could be asked regardless of time or circumstance. This was not one of them. I didn’t want to speak of someone dead for barely more than a day. Not at this moment. Maybe not ever. Yet almost against my will, the words bubbled to the surface.
“She was from the Heartlands, I think.” I reached back into the vast chasm of my memory, flinching away from its sides and all the things embedded therein, seizing upon her rare mention of parents. “Her mother was… a tutor, or tactician; maybe both. She was the Blooded, I think. A Spiderblood. Never mentioned a father. Whip didn’t talk about the past often.”
“Was her mother a tutor or tactician?”
“I don’t know. Maybe neither. Whip only ever mentioned the things that were taught to her, and they seemed like strategy-related things. The kind that demanded a good education.”
“How d’you even know the mother was Blooded?”
I closed my eyes, searching. “I believe… It’s more likely. But Whip’s mutations were weak; it might’ve been the father who was.” Being borne of a Blooded mutated Strains more than being sired by one. “Must’ve had weak divinity if she was.”
“You don’t know?” Kit’s tone was flat.
“…No.” The word sent a spike of inexplicable panic through me.
She twisted her torso towards me. In the lines of her face, disbelief was falling to something more thunderous. “You don’t know?”
“That’s what I said, Kit.”
“You worked with her for a year,” she said through gritted teeth, “an’ that’s all you know?”
My voice grew louder to match her own. “Her past was her business, alright? If she didn’t- ”
She stood, eyes more white than brown. “A year, Vin. And nothing?”
“ -want us to know about it, then that’s her choice.”
“We’re sittin’ at the godsdamned grave of a woman we all cared about,” Kit hissed, “an’ none of us know anythin’.”
She emphasised her final word with a shove strong enough to send me back a step. I’d been caught off-guard – idiot; fool, a voice hissed. Anger warped my expression, sparking an anticipatory gleam behind her eyes. The only thing that prevented me from striking her was the all-consuming need to keep my hands in my pockets.
The lack of response provoked another bout of words to tumble from Kit’s mouth. “How do you know nothin’? With so little, what’s there to bury? Huh? A small little woman too weak t’make it. That’s all. That’s all!”
At her final yell, I turned and kicked a speartree. The force of the blow reverberated backwards in a mirror of the initial strike, sending me stumbling several steps away. After a tense moment, I fell back onto the boulder. Scarcely ten heartbeats later, the object of my ire settled next to me.
We sat.
The wind rustled through the crimson leaves, shaking individual branches even as their trunks remained stolidly still. Birds rode the breeze above. Below, the countless lives that eked out an existence in the forest trundled along according to their small desires. The speartrees jutted through it all – unmoved.
Blood inched out of my hands. “We’re too late to save any of her,” I said and that word – ‘save’ – reverberated from the air and down my throat and through my bone and brain and nestled deep in my veins and I shivered with the incredible heat filling my body.
Kit said something, but I did not hear it. She left.
I shivered, mind swooping and diving even as I tried to twist it away from that word.
When I felt together again, I drew my hands from my pocket. At the tips of my fingers, where there were once nails, short spikes extended, bone-white and eerie in the mottled light of the heartwoods.
Tapping them against the boulder jarred my entire finger. I felt sickness brew in my gut.
Operating some instinct born outside this body, I flexed an old and intangible muscle and watched the talons withdraw back into my hand. Yet when I prodded the skin atop my fingers, I felt no obstructions where they could be hiding. The material had vanished, as if it had never existed.
Beneath my feet, flowers began to bloom from the crimson dirt in response to my dripping blood.