With Oralia having gone comatose with worry, Briony took over the questioning. The little faun’s gruff demeanor immediately transformed the conversation from a debriefing between allies to something more akin to an interrogation. Briony crossed her arms and scowled as she looked Mul up and down with suspicion. “So you, and you alone, managed to get out by the skin of your teeth, is that it?”
“What? You find that hard to believe?” Mul returned her scowl with interest. “I am a capable Stoneclaw warrior.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” Briony shrugged. “What I really want to know is how in the seven realms you managed to find us. We’ve been hunkered down in this same spot for four days. Four days, and not once has any of the passing soldiers taken notice. And then you come along and find us on your first go. It’s like you already knew where we were hiding.”
“I’m a hunter,” Mul replied. “I track things for a living. It really wasn’t that difficult.”
“In a forest teeming with soldiers?” Briony challenged. “Without even knowing where to start? I covered our tracks as we went. No one should have been able to find us.”
“Well the soldiers don’t have a raven watching their backs, do they?”
“So it wasn’t you, it was your weird bird family then?” Briony’s stare lost some of its severity. “I find that more believable, actually.”
“Great,” Mul snapped. “Glad I was able to put your suspicions to bed.”
Unfortunately for him, Briony was far from putting anything to bed, particularly her ongoing interrogation. “On the other hand, I can’t help but notice that you look like you’ve been through the seventh realm of chaos and back.”
“You think? I just spent the last four days running for my life.” Mul folded his burly arms over his chest with a huff. “And, in case you care at all, no, I don’t want to talk about it. So bugger off and let me be.”
“You’re lying. You sold us out, didn’t you?”
If murder was an expression, Mul was certainly wearing it now. His eyes nearly bulged out of their sockets as he whipped his head at her, bearing his teeth in a snarl. “What the fuck are you going on about now, faun?”
“I’m saying, what if you didn’t get away?” Briony countered. “Maybe they caught you, threatened you with death, said that they’d give you your freedom if you helped find us, huh? That seems just as plausible as you single-handedly escaping all on your own.”
“My gods, you’ve gone batty, haven’t you?” Mul glared past Briony at Oralia. “You’re hearing this, right? The hermit’s off her rocker.”
“That’s not my name!”
Oralia continued to stare at the crumbling cave wall. She had overheard every word of their conversation, yes, but the will to deal with it was gone. Just like her team. And Sascha. And her determination to press on.
“I’m not batty,” Briony said to Mul. “I’m suspicious. What you’re telling me isn’t making any sense. Look at you! Your clothes are practically singed from your body. You obviously had a close encounter with a witch and somehow not only survived, but got away too!”
“So?”
Briony pressed her face closer to his. “So that’s suspicious. You’re suspicious.”
Briony broke him, and not in the way she expected, either. Mul’s eyes welled with tears. “You’re right. I’m sorry. They chased me down and then they-they…they infected me.” The rest of his story was swallowed in a single, pained wail as Mul buried his face into his arms.
Briony’s left ear flickered in confusion. “Infected you?”
“I said I don’t want to talk about it!”
“Did they hex you?”
All she got for her efforts was more pitiful wailing.
Briony swiveled in Oralia’s direction, her face notably paler than it had been before. “A little help, please? There are spells that can be traced by the caster. If they hexed him and then let him go, he could have led them right to us.”
“Magical hexes are your department,” Oralia replied, voice laden with numbness. “Not mine.”
“Yeah, well you’re the nice one, not me! Do that thing you do, come on.”
Oralia stared at the faun, confused.
Briony threw her hands into the air to help illustrate her point. “Make him feel, I don’t know, worth something, maybe? Get him to a functioning state so he’ll tell me what I want to know.”
Slowly, feeling as though her bones weighed twice what they should have, Oralia abandoned her spot on the ground and crawled closer. It was strange to think that, between her and Briony, she was considered the more supportive one. She rested her hand on Mul’s left shoulder, feeling every heave and shudder. “In what way did they infect you, Mul?”
Mul lifted his head from his arms. The tears streaming from his eyes had left trails of clean skin peeking through the thick grime caked over his face. His husky voice was so low, Oralia strained to catch it. “I caught their disease.”
Unless the disease was madness, Oralia had her doubts. “How so?”
His thick eyebrows furrowed at the question. “What’s not to get? They infected me. I caught their disease!” A glimpse of pain pinched his broad features, as though admitting this out loud was simply too much for one man to bear. Mul’s hairy head sagged back down near his chest. “They made me one of them.”
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“I am not following,” Oralia said.
Mul’s muffled words came in the form of a wail. “They made me a witch.”
Oralia pulled her hand away. While what he was claiming was not possible, she could no longer ignore the churning in her gut. The dark veins beneath her skin buzzed ever-so-slightly. She’d chalked it up to mere nerves, before. Perhaps there was more to Mul’s story than she realized.
Briony shook her head in disbelief. “That doesn’t happen.”
“They did!” Mul insisted. “I’m the living proof, aren’t I?”
Oralia cut back in before Briony reduced her efforts back to square one again. “I would not know, Mul. You have yet to tell us what happened.”
“Fine!” he snapped. “There were two of them, alright? Real witchy-witches. They followed me after Sascha and I split up. The magic devils got me cornered and were laughing ‘cause they had fancy spells and shit and I couldn’t get close enough to touch them. They took their time, toying with me over and over again, making me angry. And that’s when it happened. Something inside me broke. My skin started to burn and my stomach got that tingly feeling, like when you fall backwards off something real tall.”
Oralia waited, but Mul’s story required further prompting. “And then?”
“Bees.”
“Come again?”
Mul ran a broad hand over his dirt-caked face as his voice trembled. “There were bees, Oralia. Everywhere. At night! My eardrums are still vibrating with their murderous hum.”
Oralia turned to Briony for clarification. Unfortunately, the faun appeared as confused as she felt.
“It was a miracle I didn’t get stung,” Mul said. “The bees swarmed my attackers instead, chased ‘em off. Judging from the screams, I don’t think they got very far though.”
“I see.”
Mul glared at Oralia through the gap in his fingers. His red, teary eyes had a glimmer of mania to them. “You don’t believe me.”
“I do, Mul. It was traumatic for you, I can see that. I am simply processing everything that has happened, that is all.” Bees? A murderous swarm of killer bees? The truth was in Mul’s expression, however, and Oralia did not doubt his story. She simply wondered how much stranger this misadventure was going to get before it claimed her sanity entirely. For the meantime she could at least pretend to know what she was doing.
“What happened afterwards?” she asked.
“I went and hid with my tail between my legs like a coward.” Mul wiped the dampness from his face with his muddied sleeve, which succeeded only in spreading the grime coating his face. “A raven found me the next morning. They led me to an old bunker and that’s where I stayed until it located you lot.”
Briony raised her horned head. “Bunker?”
Mul snarled at her. “What? You gonna give me shit for that, too? Accuse me of colluding with the enemy some more?”
“What bunker? Where?”
He shrugged. “It was buried underground way out in the trees. Looked like it hadn’t been touched in decades.”
“Can you take us there?”
“Now?” Mul demanded.
“Not now.” Oralia cut in before either of them started up another screaming match. “Any move will be made after dark, when we are least likely to run into a patrol. Provided you can find it again, Mul, of course.”
“Of course I can. I’m a tracker, remember?”
“Good.” Good was the last thing Oralia was feeling but it wouldn’t help to make such an admission. “Rest now, Mul. Briony and I will alert you if anything comes up.”
Mul, temporarily placated by the fact that someone was telling him what to do, peeled his hands away from his face and curled into a ball in the dirt. Oralia waited until his panicked breaths grew slow with sleep, before nudging Briony to join her near the mouth of the cave.
“You did not question the validity of this so-called bunker,” Oralia noted.
“A secret underground bunker is more believable than bees,” Briony replied. She plucked a wet leaf from the dirt floor and rolled it before sticking it between her teeth. It wasn’t very appetizing from the face she made the moment she started to chew, but it gave her something to do nonetheless. “Lonebrook didn’t always rely on tunnels, you know. Before that, they used bunkers. The bunkers worked great in theory, but not so much in actuality. Especially not in the spring, when the ground was prone to flooding. Trant had all the bunkers closed up once they got the tunnel system in working order. Supposedly there’s one or two in the area still standing.”
“Who else knows about this?”
Briony shrugged. “Only Trant and Novera, as far as I know. The bunkers were abandoned ages ago, before I ever got involved. I doubt anyone even remembers they’re still standing.”
Oralia hesitated before asking, “And you trust Trant and Novera Belfast did not sell us out?”
“It wasn’t them.”
Oralia didn’t press the issue. Briony knew the Belfasts better than she did. She could only sit back and hope that if Mul could retrace his steps in the dark, it would not be straight into a trap. If nothing else, sitting on her hands would be slightly easier to do in something other than a damp burrow.
Briony chewed the rolled leaf as she stared out through the tangle of hanging vines, shaking her horns with a scoff. “I’m still stuck on that other thing he said. Can you believe it? Bees.”
“I do not think Mul is lying.”
“I know he’s not lying. That one’s not creative enough to come up with something like that on his own.”
“Twice now, he has gotten stuck in a seers trap,” Oralia said, watching the still forest from between the tangle of overhanging tree roots. “Is it possible for magical abilities to crop up late in life?” She didn't know Mul’s exact age. Mankind had relatively short life spans, and what would have been considered barely out of adolescence for an orc was practically geriatric for a human. Mul was older than Rasp, though. Which meant if his magic was just now appearing, it was most definitely late.
“Latent magic isn’t unheard of,” Briony agreed somewhat reluctantly, as if she was still coming to terms with the idea that someone so undeserving had been gifted with power. “It’s rare in humans, though. They usually start showing signs in childhood, early adolescence at the latest.”
“I imagine, given the environment he grew up in, suppressing it would have been necessary for survival.” Rasp had done the same, or tried to anyway. Gifted with unimaginable power, the younger Stoneclaw brother had found it much harder to keep his magic a secret. Denying its existence had only ever brought him more pain.
“But to not even know?” Briony said.
“Denial is a powerful tool.”
“Kind of like how we’re in denial? That somehow evading capture is going to do a lick of good?”
“It gives hope.”
“To whom?” Briony demanded.
“They at least know someone is on the outside. We could be stringing together an elaborate escape plan for all they know.”
“Doesn’t that go against everything your lover warned you not to do?”
“It does,” Oralia agreed, unable to disguise the hitch in her voice. “But that is the nature of hope. It does not conform to reality. We could be amassing an army, for all they know. Secretly skirting around the sidelines, dismantling the ruling power one piece at a time.”
Briony stopped chewing to point out, “We’re sitting on our hands doing nothing.”
“Which is what we will continue to do. So as long as we remain at large, hope will have to do the rest.”