“Can’t say I know about any gold,” Ben declared, his loud voice a terrible betrayal of the lie he was trying to sell.

Reggie Bowen smiled at him, and as he did so, Spidena pressed herself so firmly against Ben, that she may as well have been hugging him.

“Come now, no need to make things difficult, hey? I owe ol’ Vontrik a debt, but I’m not quite as… violently ambitious as he is. Pass along that gold nice and easy, and you won’t even have to lose any limbs like you would for him if he’d found you first! A fair trade in my mind.” Reggie smiled, his teeth small but clean.

Ben’s grip on his sack strap tightened. “I told you, I don’t know about any gold belonging to Vontrik. Everything I’m carrying is mine.”

“Oh, is that so?” Reggie gave a rasping laugh, and as he started to circle Spidena and Ben, the heavy scent of cheap cigars wafting from him, stinging the back of their throats. “That’s an interesting declaration, because from everything I’ve heard, you, Benthrop Hozel, come from nothing, and are worth less than that. So it makes no sense how you could possibly rightfully own anything.”

“You don’t know anything about me. She and I are going to leave now, and you won’t bother us anymore.” Ben tried to make his voice commanding as he turned his body to block Spidena from Reggie’s view.

The men all laughed.

During the conversation, the remaining five figures had finished encircling Ben and Spidena. Though Ben didn’t bother looking anywhere other than Reggie, whose slanted dark eyes remained half open as he lazily leaned forward.

“And what makes you so confident that’s how this will go, hm?”

“Because I’m pretty sure Vontrik said something about being careful to not piss me off when he said he wanted the gold back.”

There was an eerie silence that followed Ben’s words.

One where the sleazy smile on Reggie’s face retreated ever so slightly as he stared into Ben’s deep brown eyes and saw them flicker with amber…

The intensity of the moment was broken, when Spidena, whose hand had inconspicuously slipped into her carpet bag, drew out one of the three packages she had begrudgingly packed for their journey… The one shaped like a jar that had the very comforting words: ‘ARE YOU SURE?!’ scrawled across its old paper wrapping twelve times.

She hurled it to the ground, and in the time it took for Ben and Reggie to turn to see what she was doing, she crushed her heel over it. The crunch of glass echoed in the otherwise peaceful forest.

There was a beat in time where Ben experienced a flutter of hope that reached an astonishing high, but in the three breaths that followed when absolutely nothing happened following Spidena’s actions, he felt his wretched dread crawl back up and seize his stomach.

He slowly turned round to stare into Reggie’s sniggering face.

“A panicky lady you got th-” Reggie’s right leg started vibrating.

Then every man that wasn’t Ben, started doing the same thing.

Reggie’s left arm shot out as he proceeded to bob his head and tap the air rhythmically as though hearing music that only he and his henchmen were aware of.

Two of the five other thugs dropped down onto their knees, their arms out straight, while the other three spun in perfect synchronization around them.

Reggie clapped his hands, and his men froze in artistic tableaus. Then he clapped again, and they changed.

“WHAT IS HAPPENING?!” one of the burlier men cried out as he rose from his kneeling position, grasped one of his companion’s hands, and began rotating his hips with more flexibility than anyone would’ve ever expected of him.

“Run,” Spidena whispered as the men around them continued to make exclamations of surprise and alarm.

Ben was quite enthralled with the incredibly synchronized dance routine he was watching, however, and so he didn’t immediately react to Spidena’s urging.

“I said run! Run, run, run, run, run!” Spidena shoved Ben, making him take one dragging step, but he couldn’t help but keep turning to keep watching over his shoulder, that is until Spidena yanked his arm making him stumble.

The last thing he was able to witness was one of the two stronger men hoisting their slimmer coworkers into the air. The ones to be lifted stretched their bodies and arms primly. One of the men who had been hoisted in the air proceeded to then reach down and cup the cheek of the beefy fellow who held him up in the air. “I’ve wanted to tell you this for a while, Gestavos… But I never feel safer than when I am with you!”

“What the-”

Spidena was practically dragging Ben by this point, interrupting his exclamation, and forcing him to resume their escape with more attentiveness.

“We only have three hours to get the hell away! Move it!” Spidena called desperately.

It took a split second, but Ben finally snapped out of his trance, and after giving his head a shake, he shot off in a sprint, though he had to slow down when he realized Spidena was falling far behind.

Aside from her terrible fitness level, it seemed the witch wasn’t quite as helpless in the woods as she had led him to believe…

*

By the time they stopped running, Spidena was wheezing so soundly that tears were overflowing from her eyes, and she was relatively certain she wouldn’t be able to move so much as a pinky toe for days as every muscle she possessed practically twisted with deep ache.

Ben wasn’t winded. He barely looked phased by their bout of sudden movement, and as a direct result, Spidena recalled that she had been in the middle of hating him when they’d almost been robbed.

“How… Many… More… Men… Thug groups are after you?” Spidena barely succeeded in getting the words out as the back of her throat felt as though it’d been rubbed with dry sand.

“I don’t know. I don’t know how many people Ostrig told about me… I’m surprised he even said anything to anyone else knowing how risky it is,” Ben added the last comment more as a mutter.

“Why…?” Spidena didn’t bother finishing the question, and merely hoped that her traveling companion was smarter than he seemed at times.

“Why what?” Ben snapped

Ah. He wasn’t as quick as she’d hoped, and that made her indignant irritation surge into fury.

“Why is it risky for Ostrig to tell people you stole gold from him?” She straightened, her strength spurting forward from her deep well of rage.

“Because! Because of my… history with them! I said the gold was mine, and it is! It’s risky that they say it isn’t when I can… I can prove it.” There was truth in what he said. Some big truth in it… but a lie lurked, and Spidena became even more incensed to the point of thoughtlessness when she couldn’t pinpoint where it was.

“You call me a banshee, say I’m unpleasant, and you now have the audacity to be rude when you are the one responsible for everything! You came into my shop looking for help! You agreed to the price! I just saved your ass! You don’t get to be surly with me! So out with it or I swear on magic I will cut this damn fate tie, and let me tell you… Magic favors witches over seebs by a landslide when it comes to bad deals. So once I figure out how to end this tie, you better believe there will be backlash, and you will have to deal with it.” Spidena wielded her finger up into Ben’s face, her green eyes glinting brightly in the light of the forest, her left hand trembling at her side from ire.

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Ben balked. Reasonably so. While the earth didn’t quite tremble around him, there was the electric prickle in the air supporting Spidena’s threat.

“You said there wasn’t big enough magic in the world to break a fate tie,” he responded evenly.

“Would you like to see me try to find it?”

Ben flinched.

Spidena could see him visibly panick… At first.

But then… all notion of fighting or cowering appeared to leave him, and he simply allowed himself to accept whatever was to come.

“The gold is mine,” he started stiffly. “It just…” He let out a breath, his own deeply seeded darkness eking forward in his eyes. “I was sold. As a child. That gold was my price. Ostrig he… he brokered for my family. To sell me. The gold I stole was the price he received for me. He had no right to sell me.”

Ben’s awkward confession resulted in a nauseating revocation of righteousness that Spidena wasn’t too fond of.

She had nothing to say in the face of such a thing.

“What happened with Ostrig isn’t your business just because I’m paying for the incantation with a favor… But I am sorry you had to deal with that, and thank you for your help,” Ben finished, already turning away, his shoulders hunching more than they had before.

Spidena fidgeted with her skirt.

She was terrible at knowing what to say in these kind of situations. The ones where you learned about something terrible and traumatic about a person, and you knew you should be kind, or compassionate… Two traits she did not possess in any great measure.

“Do you want to know what I did to those men?” she asked a little too loudly.

Ben paused in his steps, and looked over his shoulder at her. At first there was a coldness in his eyes that made Spidena want to shy away, but then there came the half smile with the barest hint of appreciation that she wasn’t prodding the matter any more.

“Yeah… Yeah I do.”

Spidena dropped her chin to her chest in relief, then pushed her fatigued legs to catch up to him again. “Troll snot.”

“Pardon?”

“Troll snot. But not just any troll snot. Troll snot from a troll on his wedding day. Makes anyone I’m not touching start to dance, and if anyone has a love confession to make, well… They make it.”

“Trolls are real?!”

“Sort of.”

“How can you have troll snot, use troll snot, have it work, but trolls ‘sort of’ exist?” Ben questioned with a deserved note of disbelief.

“Look, the world is full of mysteries. Like how sometimes you are irritating and sometimes you’re halfway decent.”

“Gods that’s annoying.”

“What is?”

“Hearing that there is no concrete reality.”

Spidena cackled. “I love it. Magic runs constantly and reliably behind the scenes of nature… But the moments it decides to break the rules? It’s at its most powerful. So it reveals itself in the weirdest ways, in the most interesting of places. The rest of the time we just see it peeking through. Like one day I could be buying apples and I’ll notice one apple will have this shine to it… And I’ll know magic bent the rules a little for it, and if I eat it? I’ll have great luck for a week. Once I bought a pink shawl– I hate pink, but because I did I kept getting free food from random places.”

“Is it magic or you that is as weird as a duck’s dick?”

“What?” Spidena rounded on Ben.

“Have you ever seen a duck’s dick? It’s like a nightmare crafted corkscrew-”

“That’s enough,” Spidena waved frantically, shushing Ben. “Compare me to any kind of dick again and I’ll have Wolf shit in your hair.”

Ben’s mouth turned downward, but he nodded. “Fair enough.” Then, eyeing the witch who still had sweat and dirt streaking her forehead from their dash through the woods, he ventured on. “That was a quick, non-permanent bit of magic you did with the troll snot so… That was a charm? I thought you said you couldn’t use charms. Or is it that because of the troll snot, it counts as a potion…?”

“Oh Gods… Potions… How to explain potions to a seeb… Alright. Potions can have long lasting effects, but are rarely instantaneous. They are also a lot more unreliable in their results. You see, everyone has a different constitution, and even the exact level of dodder you are or aren’t, and even the type of witch you are can affect the effectiveness of a potion. Seebs are a lot easier to predict the results for.”

“Your entire profession sounds like a costly liability.”

“It is one of the many reasons no one wants to start setting up insurance policies for witches and their businesses…” Spidena admitted with a tilt of her head.

“So what was the snot jar? A potion? A charm?”

“A charm isn’t supposed to be storable, but… Because of the troll bogeys, it was. Despite charms being the lowest in terms of power of the magics, it is still useful, and preserving one like that? Is wildly expensive. Almost as expensive as the incantation you bought from me, but I packed it because I figured I’d need it with us being fate tied,” Spidena confessed with a streak of indignation coming through in the end.

“Right… I noticed you brought those packages only after you figured out we were fate tied. Why did you only pack them after finding out? Wouldn’t you have needed them with me being… problematic?”

“I appreciate a man who is self aware enough to admit such a thing,” Spidena began, though she said it with a softened, teasing smile that helped diffuse the harshness of her words. “Asking for a favor, I could have left you at some point if things became too troublesome. The deal was on my terms when it was just a favor. But being stuck together with someone with big magic—a stranger who had dangerous people after him…? I knew I’d have to be overly prepared.”

Ben nodded silently to himself as they walked.

“Do you happen to know where we are…?” Spidena asked idly.

Ben stopped abruptly in his tracks. Turned in a full circle, then looked up at the cloudy sky.

“Not at all.”

And just like magic, Spidena found herself exasperated with Benthrop Hozel all over again.