Ch 6: A NIGHT AT CAMP

They made camp in the woods half a league outside the village. Fionnobhar had suggested they take a room in the Drummondville inn, but, even in the grips of a deathly fever, Marten had firmly opposed the idea. He didn’t want to spend another minute in that village of the dead, much less a room still awash in the blood and viscera of people for whom he’d been responsible.

Fionnobhar carried Marten slung over one shoulder like an undignified sack of potatoes to the place where the knight had previously made camp, his belongings safely stashed in a hollow tree beside the remains of the previous night’s campfire.

Marten saw everything and registered none of it, his teeth chattering as sweat dripped off him to leave a trail through the woods and down the road behind. Light hurt his eyes, and everything glowed with a strange sheen, blurry and out of focus. The setting sun, as dark as it was through the trees and behind the clouds, was too bright for him. Every sound was too sharp and too loud. Every heavy, clanking step the knight took jostled Marten to his bones, making his entire body ache.

When Fionnobhar deposited him against the tree and began setting up camp, Marten squeezed his eyes shut tight and willed the rest of the world to disappear. It didn’t work. Miserably, he accepted a drink from Fionnobhar’s flask when the knight offered it, and the drink burned its way down his throat, momentarily cutting the fever’s chills.

“I'm going to catch something for supper,” Fionnobhar told him. “If you’re going to die before I’m back, don't get back up again, okay?”

Marten fell into restless, troubled sleep before the knight returned.

In his dreams, shapes and colors twisted and morphed from pale, still corpses to howling faces to strange figures that jerked and lurched through the streets like puppets, following him through every house he tried to enter. Trees became bodies, the sky flesh and blood, and the ground under his feet shifted into dessicated remains—rocks to bones, soil to dried-out skin, and rivers to wet liquified organs. With every step, his boots sank deeper into the softening, rotting ground, and he looked down in horror as fungus and roots in the shape of spindly, grasping fingers reached up to wrap around his ankles and drag him deeper until the flesh was pressing in from all sides, sickly pulsing in time with his own rapid heartbeat, smothering him like a living grave.

Marten jolted awake with the feeling of dead hands grasping and tearing at his clothes. Panicking, he flailed against the blanket draped over him, his right arm trapped against his chest, convinced the dead were on him again. It took him a second to orient himself: in the dead of night, with his back pressed to a tree trunk, away from that awful village.

From the other side of the low flicker of the campfire, Fionnobhar sat, still in full armor, watching him.

The thick, woody smoke tickled Marten’s nose. He barely managed to roll onto his stomach before throwing up the drink Fionnobhar had given him earlier. The smoke didn’t smell anything like the crematorium bonfire from the barn, but it was close enough to trigger his gag reflex.

After a long minute of staring, Fionnobhar stood, walked directly over the fire, and crouched down in front of Marten where he lay. Reaching over, he roughly prodded Marten’s shoulder, hard enough to push Marten over onto his back. Annoyed, Marten shuffled back against the tree and sat up, pulling the blanket with him. It was a cloak, he realized, as black as the rest of the knight’s get-up.

“You didn’t die in your sleep,” Fionnobhar informed him, sitting back on his heels. “And you’re not a bloodghast.”

“The fever’s broken. I feel better now. Unless I take a turn for the worse during the day, I think the danger has passed.”

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“That's good.” The knight’s tone immediately lightened, and he handed Marten the flask again.

Marten gave it a tentative sniff before declining, sensing that pouring strong alcohol into a queasy stomach would only result in another round of vomiting bile. Fionnobhar casually shoved the flask back in his pack before offering Marten a stick of roast rabbit from the fire, which only made him feel more ill. What he needed was a gentle chicken broth, but obviously, the knight was not equipped for such culinary feats. Marten tried to give the flame-charred rabbit a nibble without thinking too hard about cremation.

“I’m glad I didn’t have to kill you,” Fionnobhar said. “I was thinking while you were out of it that you could be useful to keep around.”

“As your personal physician?” Marten guessed. The knight clearly engaged in a dangerous lifestyle; he would surely benefit from having a doctor on-hand. That didn’t mean Marten was keen on volunteering. But then, he supposed he did owe Fionnobhar his life.

“In part,” Fionnobhar said vaguely, distracted by something in the bag he’d carried from the village back to his campsite. “Hey, doc. You're an educated man. Would you say that a normal animal, like, say, a cat or something— If a cat is cursed, would you call it magical?”

“That sounds like a question better suited to a philosopher or a witch.”

“Well, I haven’t got either one of those on hand, so I'm asking you.”

“Curses are magic, so if it's only a question of whether the animal has magic attached to it in the moment, you would have to say yes.”

“And would you call a person an animal? Or, say, a beast? A creature?”

“You’re aware there are entire schools of philosophical debate devoted to that exact question, are you not?”

“You’re a doctor. You must have dissected people and animals alike, right? We both know they look basically the same on the inside.”

“On a purely physical level, yes, we share similarities in flesh and blood,” Marten allowed, not liking where this was going.

“Great!” Fionnobhar said brightly. “Then this won’t go to waste.” Reaching into his bag, he withdrew a putrid severed head.

“That’s the mayor!” Marten exclaimed, aghast. “What are you doing?”

“I would have taken his wife, too, but it’s a bad look for a knight to go around with a bag full of women's body parts,” Fionnobhar explained, shoving the head back inside. “Whereas chopping up men is just par for the course. He’s cursed, therefore he's magic, therefore his head counts towards my quest.”

“What quest?” Marten asked, dreading the answer.

“One bequeathed to me by my lady love. In her goddess’s name, I’m to hunt and kill one thousand magical beasts, and bring her their heads.” He patted the side of his bag of holding. “Like so.”

“She has a monstrous appetite.”

“As she should! Her goddess obviously knows my lady’s worth, and wants me to prove mine before she’ll give us her blessing. These are courting traditions dating back centuries.”

“Her goddess…”

“Endenreste,” Fionnobhar supplied helpfully.

“Did Endenreste actually tell your lady this is what she wanted? Or did your lady— Is she a priestess? How did she interpret the signs and arrive at this conclusion?”

“My lady was very clear. Endenreste wants one thousand heads.”

“That’s…unusually straightforward for a god, these days,” Marten said delicately. “Your lady must be doubly blessed for her goddess to speak to her so plainly.”

“She’s remarkable in every way,” Fionnobhar confirmed, sounding pleased, and not remotely suspicious as to the nature of his quest, never mind that the gods hadn't spoken directly to anyone on the continent in centuries.

Marten decided it was none of his business. “Well,” he said, valiantly attempting another bite of his rabbit, “I wish you the best of luck on your quest, Sir Knight. I’m lucky it brought you to Drummondville when it did. And I appreciate your efforts to cremate the remains and contain the disease.” He glanced at the bag containing the mayor’s head. He was unlikely to persuade the knight to relinquish it and destroy it alongside the others, and Marten certainly wasn't going to fight him for it. “I don’t suppose you’d allow me to take a sample from the head in order to study the infection in search of a cure?”

“Again, it’s a curse. But sure, I’ll carve a slice off the stump for you.”

Marten grimaced around his rabbit. “I appreciate that.” He paused, curiosity nudging him despite his better judgement. “What brought you to Drummondville, anyway?”

“A wyrm,” Fionnobhar said enthusiastically. “I heard rumors of one writhing around out here in some farmer’s well, and then I heard rumors of a village in quarantine. Deadly illness has nothing to do with me, but I asked around, and thought it sounded pretty curse-adjacent, so I took a detour to check it out. And here I am.”

“I see,” Marten said faintly.

It was mere happenstance that the knight had intervened in Drummondville; a different roll of the dice, and Marten would have died in the mud under the teeth of those ravenous corpses. The disease would have spread beyond the village’s streets, leaving a trail of violence and body parts across the countryside. His own town could easily have fallen just the same.