“Now this is the kind of magic I can get behind,” Rasp said, speaking around the mouthful of food tucked into the corner of his cheek. He still didn’t fully grasp how Hop had turned something as horribly inedible as dried chicken feed into a more dense version of a biscuit. The food was somewhat rustic in its simplicity, lacking just a touch of sweetness to combat the stale mealiness of the aged corn, but it sure as chaos beat trying to chew a mouthful of rocks.
“That’s not magic, Rasp.” Hop sat beside him, his attention torn between their riveting conversation and whatever new thingamabob he was currently tinkering with. “It’s basic food preparation. Believe me, I’ve made do with worse.”
“Worse than a bloated worm?”
“Ever heard of a dirt cookie?” the faun grunted, voice audibly strained as he tightened a bolt, or screw, or something into submission. At least that’s what Rasp hoped was taking place. There were only a handful of other activities worthy of such strenuous grunting. And, frankly, he didn’t want to consider those. Especially since he had not been invited to partake.
“Is that anything like a mud pie?” Not that Rasp ever ate those, willingly anyway. Alas, having five older brothers often meant he was the recipient of many, many terrible pranks growing up. Mud was preferable to donkey shit, at least. How he’d come to know such information was not something Rasp cared to admit.
“Similar concept,” Hop said. “The taste is terrible, but you’re so desperate to fill your stomach, you hardly notice the grit it leaves between your teeth.”
It was not often Rasp met someone whose childhood was as grim as his own. His mouthful of soggy corn cake was suddenly difficult to swallow. “You ate it by choice?”
“When it’s the dead of winter and the ground’s frozen solid, you make do with what you can find.”
Rasp’s attention dropped to the last bit of food nestled within the palm of his hand. It wasn’t much, a bite at most. He’d done his best to eat his cake slowly, savoring every nibble. All of the sudden it felt wrong to finish it. He lifted his hand in Hop’s direction. “You want this?”
“You just spent the last two hours hounding me for a second helping.”
“That was before I felt sorry for you.”
“For what? Having to put up with you?”
“My company is a perk of the job, not a drawback, so no. I meant the depressing shit you try to pass off as normal.” Rasp’s hand closed around the morsel as a sense of sadness pooled within his stomach. “I swear, sometimes you say something so pitiful it makes me want to leave you on the doorstep of the next happy family we come across.”
“After all the trouble you went through to kidnap me, you’re just going to turn around and abandon me?”
“Abducted, Hop.” Rasp patted his arm sympathetically. “You’re not a child. Taking you against your will would have constituted abduction, not kidnapping.” And it wasn’t like they’d technically abducted him, either. Yes, he and Whisper might have destroyed the rest of Hop’s team and ended his employment with the Division of Divination, but in a bigger, more important way, they’d liberated him as well. It wasn’t their fault Hop had nowhere else to go afterwards.
“I feel so much better already.”
“Good, I knew you would.”
“I’m certainly not biding my time, secretly waiting for a better opportunity to come along.”
Better opportunity? What could possibly be better than life on the run? Never knowing where your next meal would come from, or who was out to kill you, or how many teeth you’d wake up missing after a night out on the town? Actually, come to think of it, Rasp wanted the answers to these questions as well. Who knows, maybe he’d invite himself along and see just how much better these other opportunities truly were.
“What’cha got in mind, Hopalong?”
The faun thought on it for a moment as he tinkered away on whatever was taking up the other half of his concentration. His answer was delivered slowly, as if considering the validity of each word as he spoke it. “Well, I’ve always wanted to find a little village to call my own. Settle down. Build a proper workshop.”
“Get yourself a wife and kids?” Rasp was certain he could find a few of those lying around the next village they came across. Of course that probably did constitute kidnapping.
“...Some of those things, perhaps.” Hop switched the subject before Rasp could double down on his idea to illegally procure the missing members needed to make his happy family complete. “Honestly, when you talk about Lonebrook, you make it seem like paradise. I think I’d like to go someplace like that.”
“Lonebrook?” Rasp frowned, not sure how he felt about sharing his happy family. “Did you miss the part where I mentioned the son of the local judge made me fight for money? He used to pay me in buttons.”
“I’ve seen you fight over buttons before, Rasp,” Hop ever-so helpfully reminded him. “I realize nowhere is going to be without flaw, but almost anything will be better than life at the beck and call of the Division of Divination.”
Hop’s story, the bits and pieces Rasp could wrangle out of him over the past two months, was rather sad. To start, he was born to exceptionally cruel parents–the fact that they named him Hopalong Humphry was, unfortunately, but the first of the countless ways they’d set Hop up for a life of misery. The eldest of three siblings, Hop was left in charge of raising his brother and sister, often going to extremes to meet their basic needs. This arrangement came to an end the moment Hop started to show magical talent. Instead of fostering their son’s budding talent, Mister and Missus Humphry promptly sold him off to the Division of Divination for a handful of silver.
Ripped from everything he knew, Hop poured his heart into becoming a successful artificer, determined to return home and rescue his brother and sister from the life they’d been dealt. The Division of Divination had other plans. Immediately following his graduation, the academy insisted Hop repay his debt to the institute by accepting a lowly position as a traveling artificer instead. Resolute, Hop sent any spare money home addressed to his siblings, only to later learn there was no one left to receive it. His family had moved on without him, leaving him alone in a world that intended to wring him dry.
Rasp remembered the day they’d met and how, after he and Whisper had laid waste to the rest of the party, Hop hadn’t even bothered to run, content to wait his turn to die. Since then, Rasp had made it his personal mission to rekindle the faun’s former passion–there could only be one grief-stricken husk in the group, after all, and he wasn’t about to share his hard earned title! Thus, amidst copious amounts of complaining and feet dragging, Rasp selflessly put up with the extra curricular training sessions solely for Hop’s benefit.
And definitely not just because Whisper told him to. It was all one hundred percent Rasp’s idea. Who was utterly selfless, and absolutely deserved to finish eating the piece of corn cake slowly turning to soup within his sweat-soaked palm.
“There you go again, making me feel sorry for you.” Rasp shoved the soggy morsel into his mouth, trying his utmost not to sputter crumbs as he spoke. “Tell you what, I’ll take you to Lonebrook when all of this finally blows over. I’ll introduce you to the Belfasts and whatever happens afterwards, happens. Who knows, maybe they’ll agree to adopt a third son.”
“Third son?” Hop stopped his incessant tinkering for the briefest of moments. “I thought Faris was their only son?”
“They just tell him that so he doesn’t get jealous.”
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“I see.” There was another thoughtful pause before Hop asked, “And are the Belfasts aware they adopted you?”
“Not yet. It works best as a surprise, I think. Just spring it on them without warning, that way they can’t say no.”
“I will forever be envious of your confidence, Rasp. Imagine what I could accomplish had I not felt the need to ask permi…” Hop’s voice trailed, leaving the rest of his backhanded compliment unsaid.
Rasp opened his mouth, a halfhearted protest already curled on his tongue, when Hop’s hand clamped down onto his shoulder and squeezed, signaling for him to keep quiet. Rasp fell silent, straining to catch whatever had his companion on the alert. In the distance, through the rustling of the wind and a squirrel angrily chattering several trees away, he heard the ominous snap of a twig underfoot. Rasp instinctively slipped the folding knife from his pocket. He had an actual sword, but it was all the way across camp, stashed under his saddle. A lot of good it did him now.
“There’s more than one,” Hop whispered. “They’re starting to close in. I think they have us surrounded.”
Old Rasp would have opted to stay and stand his ground. That Rasp, however, had possessed a working sense of vision. It was much easier justifying such reckless behavior when you were capable of seeing who or what was trying to kill you. He still preferred fists over magic, of course. But he also preferred those fights to be a little less one sided. “Can we leg it?”
“I don’t–”
Dry branches rattled together as someone extracted themselves from the undergrowth across from them. The disturbance cut off Hop’s grim answer, immediately dispelling any hope of a swift getaway.
“Good afternoon, gents!” an overly friendly voice hailed to them. “We have had quite the night deciphering that trail you left us. Now” –there was a notable pause as though the speaker was looking for something– “where might that third one of you be?”
“Hello, creepy stranger!” Rasp returned the greeting, mirroring the threatening warmth of the newcomer’s voice. He gestured his hand from the blurry outline of the intruder to the vague, brownish mule shaped one currently grazing off to the side. “Here she is right here. We call her Bonecrusher. Get any closer and you’ll find out why.”
Hop slammed Rasp with his shoulder, hard.
Okay, so maybe there was still some Old Rasp hanging around in his brain somewhere. He liked to come out at the most inopportune times too. Naughty little devil.
“Oh, boy,” the newcomer said. “We’ve got ourselves a comedian.”
Before Hop could mitigate the damage, Rasp opened his big mouth once more and made things substantially worse. “Can we skip the banter and get to the part where you tell us who you are and what you want?”
“Delighted you asked, friend. I am Irvan and we are proud members of the Stolen Uprising, the Sons and Daughters of Defiance, the citizens’ answer to the crimes committed by the–”
Dear gods, they were going to be here a while. One of the key selling points to a successful revolution was uniting the cause under a single name. The moment you started throwing in the extra titles was the moment things got too confusing to keep track. Rasp leaned closer in Hop’s direction, murmuring, “Are these the resistance fighters that have been giving the Division of Divination the run around?”
“Looks to be. I think it would be best for me to handle–”
Too late. “Hey, Toddlers of Defiance, good news! We’re not with the division, either. So you can just go on your merry way and find someone else to fuck with, alright? Alright. Thank you, bye-bye.”
Irvan’s hazy shape swaggered a little closer. Rasp could not tell what species he was. Some type of smudgy cloud according to his poor vision. “I’m afraid you misunderstand,” Irvan tutted. “You see…”
“Good gods, he’s still talking.” Rasp hung his head, whispering under his breath to Hop, “Can you pinpoint where the others are?” If these were the same idiots that’d been following them since the last village, then that meant there were four more members hanging back, using the trees as cover most likely.
Rasp half expected Hop to tell him to give his phantom aura vision another try. Thankfully, the faun could read the fucking room, and seemed to sense now was not the opportune time for yet another surprise magic lesson. “I hear four others,” he said. “Two behind, two flanking.”
Irvan, the self appointed spokesperson for the Babies of Defiance, carried on as though he enjoyed the sound of his voice. Which, to be fair, was a very nice sounding voice. Rasp was particularly interested in hearing the way it gasped with his hands cutting off its air supply. “We were sent into the territories to recruit like-minded individuals of the, how shall we say, magical persuasion? We haven’t had much success in that regard, but we do keep hearing tales of a particular witch that has thwarted the Division of Divination at every turn so far. As you can imagine, we are very interested in making their acquaintance.”
“Tell you what, if we come across any witches, we’ll let you know.” It was daring, Rasp realized, but the little devil stomping around the back of his brain was done with talking. He stood, nodding for Hop to follow. “Come on, I’ve heard enough of this. Let’s go.”
The four hidden members rushed forward, snapping every blasted twig between them and the edge of camp, as they moved in to cut off Rasp’s escape.
“Not yet, stand down,” Irvan called off his companions. “Forgive my men, good sirs. They've been put through a lot lately. As you can see, there’s no need for this to end in violence. We’re not like the division. We do not force anyone into working for our cause. All that our leader asks is that you accept her invitation to speak with her face-to-face.”
Rasp, once more, spoke so only Hop would hear. “What kind of weapons are we dealing with here?”
“Two fighters in full body armor with swords, two others with walking staffs–looks to be the magical kind. Their spokesperson is the archer, but he’s using his hands to talk.” Hop leaned closer. “I vote we play along and wait for Whisper to find us again.”
“What’s the point of teaching me magic if you’re too scared to let me use it?”
“At least two of these people are witches as well, Rasp. There’s no telling what they can do. Best not to risk a confrontation until we know who we are dealing with.”
Rasp raised his voice to the leader of the other party. “Your leader, is she here?”
“It’s a bit of a journey, I’m afraid. If we leave now, we can make decent headway by nightfall.”
Yeah, that wasn’t happening.
“Lantern,” Rasp hissed, flexing his fingers. He bowed his head and tightened his grip on the iron blade within his hand. His surroundings shifted in the span of a single breath, so fast it made the inside of his head spin.
Hop’s muffled voice sounded farther away. “What?”
“Light the damn lantern!”
Several voices rang out, shouting all manner of warnings he did not bother to decipher. There was movement, too. Fast footsteps and the clatter of swords being drawn from wooden scabbards, but Rasp kept his focus. Magic lifted from his body and, like a moth to flame, found the sources he sought. Once more, the iron pulsed with a dull red glow within his mind. With his targets locked in, Rasp pulled the heat from the flame and amplified it. Power coursed through his veins and shot forth. The dull red glow burned hotter, hotter, hotter.
The muffled voices turned to screams.
Lights flashed within his head, warning that the strain was too much. His practice session had been conducted with a pan–an item that was both relatively small and incapable of moving on his own. Rasp’s current targets were larger, on the move, and pulling far too much of his magic too quickly. Already, he could feel his concentration starting to slip. His surroundings melded together in a chaotic haze of shifting light and dampened shrieks.
“Rasp!” Finally, a voice broke through to him. Rasp struggled to maintain his concentration as his consciousness started to resurface, only vaguely aware that Hop was shaking him. “Stop, please!”
With a wave of his sore fingers, Rasp severed the connection between his magic and the iron and fire elements. The sudden drop nearly took him out at the knees. He blinked the last of the flickering lights from his eyes, leaning heavily against Hop as he waited for his other senses to play catch up. His nose, in particular, was not adjusting well. The only smell it picked up was that of burnt hair.
“Fuck my hands hurt.” Rasp paused, realizing the surrounding forest had gone eerily quiet. “Why aren’t they attacking us? Was that all it really took to make them run?”
“Yeah,” Hop gulped. “It definitely was.”
Something about the faun’s tone made his stomach drop. “I fucked it up, didn’t I?”
“It’s my fault actually. I was so enraptured by the idea, I overlooked several glaring details.” After a moment, Hop steadied his breath and clarified, “Plated armor is made of iron. Helms, too.”
“...Oh.” The magnitude of Hop’s explanation struck him low and Rasp felt his knees buckle beneath his weight. He struck the ground as the lurch in his stomach rolled upwards, clogging his throat with hot corn and bile. The smell. Oh gods, the smell was going to be burned into his memory forever.
“If it helps, the three not wearing armor got away.”
“That doesn’t help!”
“It’s not your fault, Rasp. You didn’t know.” And then, for whatever reason, Hop kept talking. “Well, I mean, it is your fault. But I realize you didn’t intend to cook the soldiers alive in their armor.”
Yep. That mental image was going to haunt the dark corners of his mind every sleepless night for the rest of his life. Rasp forced the lump of vomit back down with a difficult swallow. “How are you so calm? Why aren’t you panicking?”
“Shock, probably.”
“I’m going to be sick,” Rasp moaned as he sank further into the dry leaves.
Hop yanked Rasp to his feet with a firm tug. “No time for that. We should get moving.”