“DON’T GO!” I SHOUTED from dead sleep, clawing at my bedroll in a panic before and realizing it is empty and I’m safe. I felt my body and was relieved I still had one. “Oh, Fields, and I thought I was over my nightmares.”

My shout drew Corbal’s attention away from opening the packs of bread. He was already awake and preparing a cold breakfast just before sunrise. He came over to my bedroll and helped me upright.

“You’re okay, Efrit. But I don’t think you’ll ever sleep peacefully.”

I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and saw his own were livelier than yesterday. It seemed he was able to sleep last night after all. He was kept warm enough…

“I, uh… Yeah, glad to see you slept well, Corbal.”

“Being warm helped,” he said with a smile, “this air is killing me. I’m not meant for cold temperatures.”

Corbal pulled open a pouch of some sort and stuck a fork in it. “Your body heat is like a fire itself.” He wasn’t too far off. I kept myself from elaborating. The compulsion to keep my secret guarded was constant. I had to honor Agnistreya’s demands.

Nebrei rolled over in her bedroll, tangling her hair somehow worse than it was. Its dark, curling lengths were easily forgotten after being stuffed under a fur hat. The cold wasn’t good to her, apparently, and exiting her bedroll to meet the frigid air was unthinkable.

“Efrit, start a fire. It’s too cold.”

“Sure,” I said, sparking a small one near her.

“Ah! In the fireplace, spæsmodroven. Jeez.”

“Heh, woke you up. Was that Mearlish?”

“It was a compliment, I promise.”

I had an inkling of doubt. A very large inkling.

Corbal noticed the spark, and addressed me with a kind of concern, “You’ve gotten much more precise with your aim, Efrit, and you don’t even practice. Hmm.”

“I do practice, kind of. I made yesterday’s fire, and the ones before that. Sometimes I’d pass time by making sparks in my room while I waited for your lectures to finish.”

He laughed a short, barking alto, “You shouldn’t be doing that, the room’s not meant for ignimancy. It’s not insulated like the ignimancy practice room… which I’ve never seen you in. I remember when we met and you seared a tree in half on accident. You’ve definitely honed it somehow, though the exact method is undetermined.”

Nebrei had joined us in wakefulness. “You took down a whole tree with ignimancy? That’s neat! I’ve never seen you practice, either.”

“No, because you’re too busy missing lectures,” I jabbed.

“At least I practice.”

“That’s somancy, that’s different. You can offer plants to your heart’s content, mine requires…”

It didn’t require anything. I could start a fire from nothing and sustain it for hours if I needed to, with Agnistreya’s blessing. I didn’t know what to say.

“…focus.”

A small white dot was made visible by the backdrop of Nebrei’s wavy auburn hair. Another followed. Soon, the air was filled with small white flakes that just fell from the sky. I held out my hand to catch some. One gently came to rest on my palm, and when I went to examine it, found only half a drop of water. That’s strange. I held out my hand to gather more but those melted just as well. I waited for some to accumulate on a rock before touching them, but almost before I even got close, they melted and formed a trail down the side of the smoothened rock before refreezing further down. When I returned my vision to the sky, it had grown full of the things, like the entirety of the sky was floating down in rounded zigzags. Nebrei had spots of it in her hair that lingered longer than the quarter second they lasted on my skin.

“Is this snow?” I turned to ask Corbal, but he was already watching me with a big smile on his face. Had he been watching me discover this? I felt foolish, but that charming smile was reassuring as ever.

“It’s snow, alright. Give it time and you can make snowballs.”

Suddenly I was afraid of the increasing size of the snow falling from the sky.

“It gets bigger? Are we in danger? What do we- Fields above!”

A giant brick of snow crashed into the side of my face, and I called out in fear. Nebrei was cackling for whatever reason.

“Grab some snow in your hands, ball it up, then throw it! That’s a snowball.”

I dug around in the quickly-accumulating snow piles, but the snow melted on contact and I couldn’t actually gather any.

“I think I’ll sit this one out.”

* * *

It was later that day when the sting of Nebrei’s snowball faded and a distant scent of woodfire further revealed itself with a thin line of controlled smoke visible above the trees. What might have been a primitive path, formed by years of rivulets like a tributary of footprints in the snow that eventually threaded thicker into what could be argued as a road from the woods headed toward what must be Habern beyond the still-thick forest. Ice-bottomed basins remained where the snow had been repeatedly pressed down by thick boot tread.

“I think we’re nearing Habern!” I happily announced.

“That’s what the sign said too,” Nebrei discounted. I hadn’t noticed any sign. I searched for the sign, and in my distraction, nearly slipped on some hidden ice. I caught myself on Nebrei’s arm without thinking.

“Okay, fine, but just this once,” she huffed somehow both begrudgingly and playful, putting her tree trunk arm around me and lifting me off the ground. I was about to complain when my legs relaxed for the first time in hours. Maybe this was the better, safer option, despite my initial embarrassment.

“What about Corbal?” I asked through staggered breaths. The squeeze of her grip was a little uncomfortable around my midsection- she held me like she would a log under her arm- but I figured this was as gently as she could carry me one-handed while keeping her balance. Corbal was walking on the snowdrifts next to the road like he weighed nothing. He was light, as I remembered during the earthquake near my village, but I didn’t think he could walk on top of snow. I could try to melt some snow, but we’d still trudge slowly, only with wetter boots.

The scent of woodsmoke became thicker, maybe some kind of cedar with almost flowery notes, and we grew closer until at last the light of lanterns became visible through the snow. There was no gate to enter Habern, and no threshold to signal a distinct entry to the village. I based our arrival on the monumental rise of warmth in my chest at seeing the warm, orange light through latticed windows of plain, light-colored buildings with dark lumber supports built geometrically into their walls, just like the ones I’d seen in paintings. Their roofs were thatch and very sloped, probably to help keep snow off. Thick, dark doors were found on every building.

The town was quiet and seemed unoccupied, the only sounds muted behind house walls. Maybe the people had called it a night, and crept into their warm beds to sleep. Then I found some of the doors had boards nailed over them, and posters tacked to them. They were portraits of people’s faces, but I couldn’t make out the lettering. The text was bigger at the top and had a number at the bottom. We walked toward the town center and I was then drawn to the commotion of two people between two buildings who appeared to be slipping on the ice were shouting at each other, fists raised like they were going to fight. I looked to Corbal for advice- do I help them? Do I say anything?

In reply, he simply laughed and said, “Oh, they’ve got a tavern!”

Nebrei set me back on the ground and surveyed the area. “Oh, really? Where?”

“A tavern?” I asked.

“Drinks and food, and maybe beds if we’re lucky,” Corbal answered. The wind picked up and a squeaky hinge sound came from the west. A sign was flapping in the sudden wind, a light wooden plaque with some swirling text and a painting of a grey beast with a sword through its jaw. After some scrutiny, I figured the text read, “The Aber’s Lair.” I was proud at having remembered the symbols.

Corbal pronounced it properly, “Oh, The Abeyr Slaiyr! That’s quite a name for a tavern. The owner chose an interesting spelling.”

Nebrei commented, “It’s shorthand, I think. Seems fine to me.”

Silently embarrassed, I added, “Yeah, definitely looks like what you said!”

“Efrit, that’s not Lyvikian, it’s okay if you can’t read it. It’s a mix of Lyvikian and Mearlish,” Nebrei clarified.

I didn’t say anything, just swallowed my ill-believed pride and approached the massive door. It was taller than most of the doors at the Academy.

To the left of the hearty door were two windows, one of stained glass, portraying a hunter in woodland clothing firing an arrow toward the other boarded-up slot, which was likely recently installed judging by the unweathered trim and mismatched grain. The tread snow beneath had some sparkles of light mixed in. Someone must have broken the window, which was unfortunate and a little unnerving. I wondered what art it used to show. What was the hunter hunting? I looked back to the group, either for approval or direction, and Nebrei huffed and grabbed the doorknob. It looked like the right size for her hand. Corbal would have trouble with it.

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The second thing I noticed once she undid the latch and went inside—the first was the latch itself—was the pungent smell of hard-earned sweat and a musk I couldn’t recognize. Within these cabin walls were a dozen well-used wooden tables encircled by equally used but sturdy pine chairs, each bearing the image of a loosed arrow on the backrest, with six or seven occupants split between two tables eagerly awaiting the closing of the door.

“Finally, somewhere warm!” remarked Corbal as he rubbed his arms on his sleeves as if to shake the cold from his coat. Nebrei perked up when she saw the stocky mearle behind the counter wiping down used mugs with a ratty cloth. He pointed toward a table near the sizeable log-filled hearth and took a seat closest to the heat.

While Corbal and I were making our way between the scattered tables, Nebrei quickly shouted some greeting I’d never heard her say before. It was too fast to catch exactly what was said. The riffraff tavern occupants’ displeasure was obvious from the scowling faces and stiffened postures, but Nebrei confidently navigated her bulk between tables. The mearle behind the counter instantly turned around as if expecting violence to break out. The gruffness of his face turned to relief as Nebrei met him at the counter with a smile. They spoke at length in Mearlish, during which I witnessed what little Nebrei had told me about the language. The tavern patrons’ disdain was later explained to me: they would not be getting refills any time soon.

The mearle language, Mearlish, was spoken at a pace most other languages would only reach in panic. Despite its haste, each concept was expressed with deliberate pronunciation, some including associated hand movements, which added another dimension to their communication. Each speaker interweaved their own words with the other to form a new shared sentence which would not end until a mutual understanding was established. The purpose of this was to avoid any and all misunderstanding: to lie or misinform in a formal conversation was considered barbaric. The need to correctly understand the other speaker before ending a conversation was not only a courtesy, but a foundation of mearle culture. Those attempting to adopt the mearle language without first embracing a mindset of amicable argument before personal dogmatism will certainly result in scorn from native speakers. Groups were rarely addressed in one conversation, which may seem confusing to those speaking simpler languages, but because the purity of each message was preserved so clearly between speakers, one idea could be passed around unbiased and unchanged from the original message. Nebrei mentioned once in passing her disdain for human politics and the misdirection of their promises before apologizing for her candor.

Among friends, however, some formalities were dismissed, leaving room for sarcasm and jokes, though still bound by the required mutual understanding. This explained why Nebrei would often press issues further than I would find comfortable. If she felt a disagreement had been left unresolved, she would be left wondering, causing her to agonize over it until any trace of vagueness was clarified. The mearle language, filled with intricacies and synergy, demanded a significant allotment of time to properly convey even a single idea: this is why Nebrei’s lengthy conversation with the bartender drew exasperated sighs from the unnoticed patrons expecting timely refills.

Corbal found us an empty table near a window and suggested we be seated, saying, “It may be a while before Nebrei rejoins us.” It was apparent Corbal understood Mearlish more than I assumed. The gesturing I could understand: a motion back to Corbal and me was an introduction, during which our names were mentioned in Lyvikian before Mearle words quickly swept them away. It was a little jarring to hear such beautiful language with the occasional Lyvikian word inserted ineloquently.

The barkeep’s response was a call to the kitchen. Nebrei laughed, and placed her hand on his shoulder as he did the same- a greeting I recalled from the day I met Nebrei. He laughed as well, and began filling mugs with a frothing liquid. A collective sigh was audible from the majority of patrons, save two men at a corner table. The burly man in the corner of the tavern was seated among one other of similar stature, both wearing medium mail under dark fur coats of similar pattern. What caught my attention was the wiry-whiskered man’s aged mace at his feet. It was a dull gray, riddled with nicks and scratches and at one joint was a patch of short dark hair wedged tightly.

My attention was broken as Nebrei slammed three massive mugs onto the homely wooden table, spilling foam over the edge from each equally. “I have good news! Mäkri has given us a room for the night, and free beer!” She dragged a chair from under the table and sat, eager to enjoy the barkeep’s gifts. “He said he’s thrilled to have another mearle in Mäkri-em, and that it’s been years since one visited. A special occasion!” The mugs were massive – mearle sized – so naturally Nebrei had no issue, but Corbal just stared at the mug given to him, ear twitching. He did that when he was thinking. To save him the trouble of digging out a smaller mug from his bag, I opted to check the bar for a smaller glass.

As I stood, Nebrei’s beer was already half finished, and Corbal offered her his, which she gladly took. Her size probably helped raise her tolerance. As I sidled between close tables, I felt eyes on my back I tried to ignore.

When I reached the bar, I looked up at the barkeep. His skin was also a shade of green, but less layered, like the depth wasn’t so deep anymore. He must be older than Nebrei, I thought. Wispy braids of grey hair framed his long face, complimenting the whiter, upkept beard decorating his chin. “Excuse me, could I borrow a smaller glass for Corbal?” I asked, and he paused his mug washing for the second time since we arrived. He didn’t say anything, just looked at me. His skin seemed duller than Nebrei’s, but his eyes were bright blue with white flecks. His face was kind, a good quality in a bartender.

“A smaller glass?” I continued, before recalling the Mearlish conversation. To myself, I spoke, “Oh, right.”

I pointed to the mug in his hands and then toward Corbal, mimicking drinking and holding my finger and thumb close together.

“Ah,” he said with a nod, then silently mouthed some words before adding, “Small one.” He reached up, higher than even Nebrei could reach, near the ceiling to a row of hanging mugs and retrieved a small cup. He must have been nearly twice my height. He leaned forward to reach my hand, but before he passed me the cup, he stopped in place. His deep, pale eyes were locked on my forehead, which he studied briefly. It was then I realized I had forgotten to cover my brand the entirety of the trip. It’s fine, he likely doesn’t know what that is.

Following his ages-long examination, his smile returned, and he placed the cup in my hand but didn’t let go. “Efrit, right?” he asked, his heavy accent made heavier by deliberately slowing down his speech. I was then unsure of my safety within this place. Reluctantly, I nodded. I stole a glance back at my table. Nebrei had drained two mugs already and was eyeing mine while Corbal watched excitedly. Mäkri must have noticed as well. He ducked under the bar and felt around for something, then returned to full height with a glass pitcher and another small cup. “To your friends!” he said, filling the pitcher from a large barrel with a tap. I took the pitcher and began to step away when he stopped me, telling me, “To you, this one. Better. Strong. Gift frausi Mäkri-em!” He rushed through the door to the kitchen, leaving me alone at the bar. I still felt eyes on me, so I turned around.

The two men at the corner table dwindled down to one out of my sight. The man with the mace was already watching me. He must have been the eyes I felt. I figured he might be for-hire muscle based on his awareness, stature, and garb. However, even after meeting my eyes he kept contact. The sound of the barkeep pulled my attention away. A chilled wooden mug was given to me, and the barkeep ushered me away, saying, “No coin this evening, it is friends.” I accepted the mug, replying, “Friends, yeah!” That was a suitable response, and with a nod Mäkri returned to wiping down heavy glasses.

I was just wondering how I was to carry two handled drinks and cups at once when Corbal appeared next to me. He smiled and offered to help. Whatever fear I felt was washed away with his glowing face. He had such a friendly personality, I’m better for having him. In that moment, Professor Wesley’s envy of longer life made sense. The realization that my comparatively sooner death would mean leaving Corbal alone struck my heart in a gut-wrenching way. Trying to ignore the morbidity, I watched the corners of his mouth crease into a bigger smile as he noticed I was staring. I handed him the pitcher and took my own drink, and we walked back to our table.

“Will we be okay to head to the Historian’s in the morning if we drink tonight?” I asked. My concern fell on deaf ears. If they weren’t concerned, I shouldn’t be, either.

Nebrei seemed cheerful but sober even after so much beer, and she noticed my own sobriety. She took care of pouring the drinks, and was measuring out a bit for Corbal when she noticed the wooden mug I’d been given. “Oh, he gave you the strong stuff, did he?” she said before gulping yet another mouthful. I asked her what she meant by strong stuff. Without hesitation, she goaded me to chug as much as I could as fast as possible.

“Why would I do that? It smells really good.” I took another quick sniff. “It doesn’t smell like your beer, is it some kind of fancy tea?” I asked her. Corbal snickered. A little put upon, I decided to indulge them.

I held the mug to my lips and gulped a mouthful before I had to keep myself from instinctively vomiting. The overwhelming, viscous taste of anise and burning hair lined my mouth. “What in Fields’ name is this fiery abomination?” The irony was lost as I panted fumes that felt like the dry heat of a fire. Nebrei burst out laughing, raucously spilling her beer. Nearby patrons were oblivious, or maybe dulled from years of drunken antics. My stomach felt incredibly hot, almost as hot as my own flame, but the waves of sheer burn rolling off my tongue with each breath were something I’d never felt before, and I held my breath for a minute. Each inhale invited more poison into my lungs. Corbal snorted, and asked me, “Efrit, do you remember the ambrosia powder? This is ethanol alcohol, it does a similar thing.”

A moment later I felt like my head was shoved into a tiny box and sent over a cliff.

“…alcohol?” I replied after some time to Corbal, who waited expectantly. It took great effort to stay focused. “But I’ve never tasted any before. Is this alcohol?”

Nebrei laughed and clicked her glass to the copper-topped rim of mine, which, for whatever reason, made me laugh as well. She tipped my mug enough to make me drink more as she did the same. Corbal leaned on Nebrei as time seemed to pass faster. My belly burned in a way unlike my fire, but it became harder to notice. My hand was on the table in the same spot for a while, my elbow markedly stiffer. The cacophony of tavern sounds became slurred together.

Corbal said something. His words were indeed words, but they were without meaning. The room became muted though I could see people laughing and talking. The other patrons were harrumphing and drinking their own drinks, and the world felt comforting despite a looming darkness creeping into the edges of my vision.

Nebrei tried to catch me as I fell from my chair to the well-worn pinewood floor. I made no attempt to catch myself. I couldn’t even if I tried; my limbs were numb and stiff. Nebrei’s face turned serious and she motioned away. I recognized Corbal’s voice, and then Nebrei was carrying me up the stairs near the back of the tavern. Blackness filled the gaps between scenes.

I was in a soft bed, Nebrei watching over me. I blinked and she was facing the door, speaking loudly. I blinked again and saw her dragged to the floor by two men in dark clothing. I couldn’t scream or say anything or move, and even through the layers of grogginess I was afraid. Try as I might my muscles would not respond. I was mostly alert with a useless body. The man with the mace was dragging me across the floor and out of the doorway, and before it closed, I saw Nebrei unmoving on the floor. I focused as best I could through the grogginess and summoned my fire, but only a spark appeared, fading as quick as it came. “…not quite out…” I heard a raspy voice say. Another replied, exasperated, “…supposed to bind him with one arm?”

Even through my hazy thoughts, I knew being bound was unnecessary, as I was still paralyzed by whatever poison I had unknowingly consumed. The captors opted to tie a rope around my waist and wrist anyway, and a blindfold over my eyes. My body was strangely stiff when the shorter man hoisted me over his shoulder and carried me down the stairs to the tavern’s main room. I wondered who ordered this attack. The men in the corner? Nameless? The barkeep? He would be the only one with the means to drug me, most likely. What did my brand mean to him?

Though I was unbothered by the cold mountain air, the uncertainty of terrain and destination brought me chills. My nostrils were flaking and dry from the cold, and my fingers ached as well. My blessing wasn’t keeping me as warm as it usually would, or maybe I only felt less of it. It was dark out but my captors used no torch. It wouldn’t have mattered, anyway with the blindfold. But how they avoided tripping over the roots and rocks was a mystery.