The next morning’s stew was lovely… Just kidding. No really. Don’t stop reading. It was a bad joke, and I shouldn’t have done it. You’re a good sport, though. I admire that about you. Just give me a second. Did you see the look on your face? Just a second to stop laughing. Yes, it was terrible, and I apologize. Really. Clears throat. Deep breath.

I used my identify skill on Beau. He’d sauntered over to the fire pit in the middle of the room, using it as a stage for his playing. I ignored his music, trying to focus on the information my skill gave me. He slid his mandolin over his shoulder and began to play. I was a sucker for music and that was beautiful. I was not a sucker for the person who played the music.

Beau, the Bard – Level 10 (Health 310/320) (Mana 220/280)

He seemed to be spending mana as I watched his stats change. I took a closer look at the mana around him. His playing was how he was casting. Well, of course. He was a bard. He looked down at his hand, letting a clump of hair fall coyly over his eyes. The song he was playing seemed to be healing him up as the poison dribbled a few health points at a time away from the total. He had more health than I did, but I had more mana.

Will +1

I did some quick math and realized I’d have to cast Flare twenty-two times to bring his health to zero. I had almost twice the mana I needed to do that. Now if I could just get him to stand still for the whole thing, I’d be fine.

“How did you get here so fast?” I asked, more to get out of my own head than because it mattered. “I thought the rules were that you had to be ten days away?”

I could see him thinking through my question. Beau had always been one to play things really close to his chest. He wasn’t going to blather out a villain speech if it might give me any advantage. I let him think, our eyes locked across the room.

Okay, he looked good. I could admit it. I suppose he had to, being a bard. Charm was one of his main attributes. He’d dressed the part. His big puffy-sleeved shirt made his shoulders seem broad. The brightly colored vest was as tight as his leather pants. He even had a hat with a colorful band and several long plumes jauntily stuck up out of it. And his eyes were liquid gold. All of it turned my stomach, but not in the way he wanted it to.

That had always been our problem. Beau just didn’t do it for me. Pretty boys never had. I had two ex-husbands and several ex-boyfriends who could attest to that. Knights in shining armor loved to save me from the bad boys that appealed to me. Between that and the fact that bad boys often turned out to be knights in shining armor on a bad day, I had only found one that did do it for me. Unfortunately for Beau, that had been his best friend.

“The Nemesis Engine is just a program with rules,” he explained vaguely. He thought he was being charmingly mysterious.

“So, you cheated?” I cocked my head to the side, putting a blank look on my face. He’d always liked me better when he could pretend that I was stupid.

“The system doesn’t let you cheat,” he gave a secretive smile.

“There was no way you could have been level three when you got me stuck here,” I countered. We did have an audience and I was painfully aware of it. He should have been at least nine days travel away. If he’d come in last night, that had only been three days. He should only have been three levels above me.

“And yet, you’ve managed to get up to level six already,” he said, his melody changing slightly. People were struck by the tableau. The tension in the room was intensely sexual. Beau and I had tons of chemistry. I just hated the guy, and not in a foreplay kind of way.

“Not quite an even fight.” I let my eyes drift half closed. If he was going to play the sex card, I could play it back. I didn’t have to show him how much I hated him for this whole mess.

Charm +1

I had fifty years of experience as a girl in a world where flirting was my only defense against a world ruled by men. It wasn’t that I didn’t know how. It was that I resented the need to do it. My own parents had each told me, in their own individual ways, that it was as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor one. I was a product of that age.

“When was it ever?” he smoothly whispered, and I almost felt sorry for him. The tune changed again, and I nearly groaned aloud, my eyes drifting closed.

The room stilled. I took a quick glance around and wondered how so many people had walked in when I wasn’t looking. It wasn’t going to take an hour to fill the room. Beau had started this fight and he’d started it playing dirty. He sang the song we’d written together.

“Calling me at midnight,” he crooned the first words. “How could I refuse. Who were you? Who was I? I was yours to use. Take me home, night caller. Take me with the midnight winds. Take me with you when you go from here, anywhere…”

They were smitten. Everyone was smitten with this song. They always had been. I’d written the words and he’d written the music. The problem was that Beau had wanted the song to be about him. It never had been.

“Night caller, playing all your games,” he began the chorus. Sexual tension charged the air. His bitterness tinged the mana in the whole room. Their sympathy was his. I had to do something or this was going to be over on a sigh.

“Night caller, didn’t even know your name,” I fell into the countermelody, our duet. And we were suddenly in a fight over the mana in the room.

“A night together should be wrong,” we sang together. We were not Dolly and Kenny, but we were something. I’d had a lover in my mind. I’d been dating Beau, but it hadn’t been working. Our music was great, but I wanted to leave our relationship there. Then again, I’d been his first. He hadn’t been mine.

Our relationship was in this song for him, but he’d never been the one the song was about. I’d found my relationship with a spiritual essence. Beau had wanted to be that god of my life. He sang the song like it was his, but I couldn’t do that. To him, he was the dark lover in the night who took me away from the pain of my homelife. I could feel the energy in the room turn to him as I backed out of the song.

The melody was haunting. “Love me or let me go, no…” I turned away from him. I always did. “Turn, turn, turn around.”

I’d been telling him that I was leaving him. He was begging me not to go. The song took on that yearning of first love, lost.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

The echo of the song resonated long after he’d let it drift into another song. All my guilt had been brought forward. All his bitterness. The mana in the room was thick and it was like it didn’t belong to me. This was the battle? Had I already lost? Then I realized, Beau had switched back to the little melody that had been healing him and I looked back over my shoulder at him.

Beau, the Bard – Level 10 (Health 220/320) (Mana 150/280)

Slick. The jerk. He’d been prepared to defeat me with my own song. I had to admit it was epic. If I looked closely, I could see his stupid little smirk at the edge of his eyes. His mouth was mournful, but his eyes couldn’t lie. He’d sacrificed his health, allowing the poison to take him down, while he played our song for a room that lapped it up. They were his dogs. Twenty people clapped, money dropped in his upturned hat, and people glared at me as if I’d kicked the dog.

“You must be kidding,” I turned to Mabel, sure that she would still be on my side. She wouldn’t meet my eyes.

I tried to think, but it wasn’t in the right direction. I was mad at being used, and at how easily he’d played me like an instrument. I knew Beau. I should have seen it coming. Could he defeat me just by singing?

“Oh, this is stupid,” I exclaimed, throwing up my hands and snapping out a pair of Flares that went whizzing at him.

Beau didn’t even duck. They hit him on one shoulder and seemed to knock him all the way off his chair. He lay sprawled in the dust, his fingers still plucking out the melody of his healing song. I’d never seen Flare knock something back. Even in this he was overacting.

Beau, the Bard – Level 10 (Health 195/320) (Mana 140/280)

“Hey!” Mabel called out angrily. “They’ll be none of that in my bar!”

“What?” I sputtered, baffled.

“Do you want to burn us all out of house and home?” she yelled back at me.

“Fine,” I ground out. I switched it up so that I cast the water version of the spell, and doused Beau with a bucket’s worth of water. It was enough to make him sputter for a moment. I was hoping it would damage his instrument, the one he was currently playing, the mandolin.

“Hey!” one of those random adventurer’s called out. “What do you have against the bard? He sang well enough! No need to get nasty.”

“Yeah,” came another voice, and I was surprised that it was Beryle. When had he even arrived? “If you don’t like his music, then just don’t tip him.”

“Oh, I’ve got a tip for him,” I stated. What did I care if they disliked me for it? They could all hate me, but I was seeing my daughter tonight. I cast stone on his hands. He couldn’t play with stone hands. The spell only affected one hand, but it was the one that counted.

With a drama that would have made summer theater Hamlet proud, Beau held up his hand with a scream of pain that I knew he didn’t feel. I’d cast that spell on myself. I knew it didn’t hurt.

“You are insufferable,” I stomped around the bar toward his prone form.

“That’s enough!” someone shouted, but I ignored it. He was now humming the healing song and if I didn’t finish him, he’d somehow sing me to death. I cast Flare again.

Beau, the Bard – Level 10 (Health 200/320) (Mana 120/280)

“Please,” he whimpered, somehow singing it so that his healing wasn’t interrupted. “What have I ever done to you?”

Someone grabbed my arms from behind me.

“Let me go!” I didn’t bother to struggle. I didn’t need my hands to cast spells. It was just faster and easier that way. I cast Flare again, catching his lying pants on fire, in the front where it could hurt someone like him.

“Take her outside!” Mabel called out, angrily. I cast Flare another two times on the way to the door. “Dump her in the pig-pen. That’ll cool off her temper. That’s the last time I hire someone down on their luck.”

Beau, the Bard – Level 10 (Health 150/320) (Mana 120/280)

“What?!” I started to struggle now. “He’s my nemesis. I have to defeat him, or I’ll lose my daughter. You don’t understand.”

“Stark, raving mad, that one,” I heard someone say as they dragged me through my own kitchen. Was I really going to be defeated because I was perceived to be the bad guy?

It was the story of my life. They’d tried to kick me out of biology labs because I dared to ask that the microscope stations be lowered so that I could see through them while in my wheelchair. I’d been sick for a while. Don’t ask. I already seem pathetic enough without my former physical limitations. At least, I thought so.

“Wait!” I screamed out, anger making me push back. In the other world, I’d been helpless. I wasn’t helpless in this one. Wind pushed my captors back. They dropped me in shock. I was a cook and a scullery maid to these people. I was, in their minds, some waspish harpy they could gang up on. I was back where I had started, in the mud by the well being yelled at by Mabel.

Why? Why did I have to put up with this? What did it matter that he’d started all this? I’d never been able to defend myself against the self-righteous, who would say or do anything to remain the heroes of their own stories. The unfairness dove into my heart, doing more damage than anything else ever could.

“What’s going on here?” came a voice that I’d thought would be on my side. Chester pushed his way through the crowd to stare down Mabel. Hope spluttered up like a trickle of water in hell.

“She gone mad!” Mabel yelled at him. “Attacked the bard and nearly burned down the whole tavern doing it.”

“Are you sure?” Chester scratched his head. We’d been fighting together all day. I let him talk for me, my heart trying to dislodge the sinking feeling that I was going to lose. Terra found me and rubbed against me, my mana surging back up fast. I’d barely taken it to half, but I didn’t think this battle was half over and neither did Terra. As long as a bard was breathing, he could sing and lie and swing that charisma around. “She’s been good to us.”

Beau wasn’t winning because he’d sung better or fought better or even because he was in the right. Beau was winning because people were on his side. Lies were forever easier to believe than truth. I’d attacked him. That’s all they knew. I wanted to have sympathy, but this happened to me a lot. People, thinking that life was fair, assumed that my complaints were too outrageous to be believed. I was lost in a sea of imposters who claimed to be good people but who really were only heroes in their own minds. How did someone fight that?

“He’s right,” Beau pushed himself up between Chester and the crowd. He hadn’t quite turned his back on me, but it was close. “She’s just not herself. Don’t blame her. I’ve obviously offended her with my song.”

I was all ready to fry his singed pants on the backside this time, when his words penetrated my furious mind. He was fighting for me? Had I already lost the fight? I checked my quest tab. Nope. It was still there. Meanwhile, he was still talking. Like I said, as long as a bard is still breathing, he’s lying.

“Let’s just be friends,” the smarmy bastard held out his uninjured hand as if to help me up.

And this is what I hate about knights in shining armor. “See?” Chester put out. “It was all just a misunderstanding.”

Chester knew about Beau. He knew about the quest. He should have known that I couldn’t let this go. Beau was an evil, lying, bard. In fact, Beau was solely responsible for my natural hatred of bards as a class altogether. His way of getting over me was to try to replace me over and over again. Beau slept with anyone who had even a single trait of mine. He would then call me at midnight to meet him for coffee, where he would sit this poor new girl next to me and compare us for hours. It was sick. He was sick. But when I tried to explain any of that, I was the one who sounded crazy.

The crowd mumbled and grumbled, but Chester stared them down, thinking he was doing me a favor. Like I needed that kind of favor. I wanted to be heard. I wanted people to know the truth. My heart screamed to be understood, but that wasn’t going happen. It never did. I knew better. I was always the bad guy.

“Karma will just heal his hand, and everything will be okay,” Chester said, his honorable intentions screwing me over as knights generally did in my life. Is it any wonder I liked people who didn’t claim to be heroes? At least they were never going to kill me with good intentions. What was a world worth, when people wanted lies more than they wanted to unearth unwelcome truths?

“I’ll heal him alright,” I muttered, glaring at my woefully overacting nemesis. He stood there cradling his stone hand as if it was a bleeding stump.

At least he was smart enough to flinch a little when I reached out my hand for his injured one. Trapped in his own lie, Beau put his stone hand in mine. Even if I hit him with four perfect Flares, his health was just high enough to withstand it. I had a feeling I’d misjudged this contest from the beginning. As far as being defeated, while I had all my health and over two thirds of my mana left, it was clear that I was the one losing the fight.