Seamus gave the fight his all. It was a pity that his all amounted to all of nothing. Bigger wasn’t always better, not when your opponent could simply sidestep you at every turn. Which, given Rasp’s inability to see most of what was going on, succeeded only in making the blacksmith angrier. Rasp, standing with his thumbs hooked into his pockets, allowed Seamus to do the majority of the work. Each time the faun charged, Rasp waited until the last possible second to duck safely out of the way. It was a continual dance. Left, right, back and forth, Rasp strung him along, purposefully stoking his opponent’s mounting frustration.

“Stop moving and fight me like a man!” Seamus bellowed.

“I am fighting you like a man.” Rasp rocked back on his heels and cracked a grin. “We like to dance around the issue until the other party gives up. Did no one tell you?”

This quip earned several drunken guffaws from the surrounding crowd. Faris had been right. There were more villagers present than usual. Rasp wasn’t sure how many exactly, as their shapes all melded into a continuous gray blur around him. But he could pick out individual voices he hadn’t heard before. The smell, too, was worse. Someone near the orchard end had already vomited on their neighbor’s shoes.

Seamus emitted a frustrated snort and charged. While Rasp couldn’t pick out the finer features of his opponent’s face or clothes, it was hard to miss the imposing brown shape growing noticeably larger in his limited field of vision. With the blacksmith all but blinded by rage, Rasp made his move at last. He faked right and then ducked, taking the faun down with a sweep of his leg.

Rasp dropped into the mud and caught Seamus from behind. Seamus flipped onto his back, but it didn’t matter. Rasp’s legs were already wrapped over the faun’s chest. He locked his ankles and secured Seamus’s head with one arm while clamping down over his throat with the other. This was no longer a fight, but a test of endurance. Specifically, if Rasp’s strength would outlast Seamus’s need to breathe.

The heavyset faun’s muscles twitched beneath Rasp. Already, he could feel Seamus’s strength begin to sap. Only a few seconds more, and it would all be over. The smell of sweat and faun musk permeated Rasp’s nostrils and trickled into his mouth, coating his tongue in a salty, gag-inducing film. The edges of his mouth began to water as that morning’s oat mush threatened to make a reappearance.

Gods, not now, Rasp pleaded. His antics were only entertaining if they were at someone else’s expense. Vomiting now would only ensure the majority of the splatter ended up on himself. He wanted the crowd to laugh with him, not at him.

“Mister Snow.” A stern voice cut through the ruckus with the weight of a sledgehammer. The crowd went eerily quiet until the only sound Rasp could hear was the snap of brittle twigs underfoot as the speaker drew nearer. “Kindly release Seamus. The doctor has already made three house calls this week. Let’s not waste her time with another.” Shit.

Rasp was all smiles. Like a puppy eager to show off its newest trick, he rolled away and left his opponent facedown in the mud, gasping for breath. He shot upright and attempted to dust the grime from his trousers, succeeding only in smearing it further into the grain of the thick wool. “Nice day for a stroll, sir?”

Judge Trant Belfast’s voice was flat with irritation. “Where is your keeper?”

Rasp gripped the wet soil between his toes as he considered which direction to run. The surrounding landscape was uneven and riddled with white spruce and poplars. While inconvenient, the trees were the least of his worries. It was the inconspicuous hazards like upturned roots, ground squirrel burrows, and the occasional steep cliffside that presented the true peril. As much as it pained him to admit, Rasp stood a better chance of talking his way out of trouble. A feat he was well practiced in, except the part where anyone believed him. Particularly Judge Belfast.

“Who, Faris?” Rasp said. “I think he fell down a well somewhere. These nice people offered to help pull him out. But then Seamus and I got into a bit of a disagreement over who got to carry the rope. That’s what you walked in on, in case you were wondering.”

“Are you finished?” Trant asked.

“I don’t know. Is it working?”

There was that damn snort again. Followed closely by an ear flap. And then a hoof stomp. Oh dear gods, the holy trifecta. Trant wasn’t just mad, he was positively fuming. Rasp wondered if this would be enough to make the judge reconsider his stance on pacifism.

Faris was going to owe him big for this. Rasp didn’t take responsibility for his own actions, let alone someone else’s. “Oh, alright. You caught me. He didn’t fall down the well. I pushed him.”

If Faris had any sense at all, he’d be halfway back to the house by now. He was a survivor who, above all else, valued self-preservation and knowing the precise moment to slip out the back unnoticed. Which failed to explain why the idiot chose that moment to step forward from the crowd and accept his fate. “You can stop now,” he said, placing his hand on Rasp’s shoulder.

“I’m here, Father.”

Trant’s calm voice sent a chill up Rasp’s spine. “Out of the well so soon?”

“It was more of a trough, really.”

“I came to check on this so-called training regimen of yours. Imagine my surprise when I found not an exercise yard, but an unauthorized gambling operation. I suppose it explains why half the village is sporting mysterious bruises.” Before Faris could interrupt, Trant continued, “At least tell me you split the earnings. Your ward is doing most of the work.” “I—uh,” Faris stammered.

“Snow, has Faris been giving you a fair share?”

Rasp paused to consider his answer. Judge Belfast had most definitely laid a verbal trap for him to stumble into. Alas, the only way for Rasp to find it was to fall in headfirst. A nervous grin spread across his muddied face. “He pays me in buttons, actually. He doesn’t think I know the difference.”

Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.

“You never complained before!”

With a wearisome sigh, Trant turned and addressed the crowd. “Go home, all of you. If you have time to stand around then you’re not busy enough. Anyone caught out here again will be assigned extra work duties.”

The blurred shapes around them shifted, moving as one back through the sparse orchard toward the main path. The clearing grew eerily quiet once more. Rasp rolled his weight from one foot to the other, feeling suddenly exposed. Trant and Faris spoke softly beside him, but he didn’t catch a word they said. The skin on the back of his arms prickled as he tilted his head this way and that, listening for a sound that was not there. Something was wrong.

The croak of a raven echoed between the trees. Alas, there wasn’t time to decipher its warning call. Trant’s gruff voice snapped Rasp back to the present. “Hold out your hand, Snow.”

Rasp curled his fingers in hesitation. Why? Was he going to slap it? Cut it off, perhaps? That didn’t seem very pacifistic. Maybe he’d finally succeeded in pushing the judge over the moralistic cliffside. After a few agonizing seconds of deliberation, Rasp raised his hand in front of him.

“Palm up, boy.”

Rasp twisted his hand into the correct position and was taken aback when the judge deposited something cold and clinking into it. A fistful of coins, he realized. Collected from Faris’s money purse, no doubt. What in the realm was this?

“In the future,” Trant said, “if you let my son take advantage of you, at least make sure you’re getting a share.”

Rasp sucked his bottom lip between his teeth. “I’m very confused right now.”

“Did you just pocket my half?” Faris said to his father.

A sharp snort from Trant silenced his son’s protests. “Take Snow back to the house and get him presentable. We have guests,” he added, with a tone Rasp couldn’t quite pin down. “And for the gods’ sakes, take him the back way. I can’t afford for the two of you to be seen like this.”

With a meek acknowledgment to his father, Faris hooked his arm through Rasp’s and escorted him from the clearing. The journey was as awkward as it was quiet. For a long while, the only sound between them was the occasional splash of a puddle underfoot. They were already halfway, having cut through the back apple orchard and nearing the garden that was presently little more than an empty stretch of frozen dirt, before Rasp found the courage to speak.

“How dead are we?”

“I don’t know,” Faris murmured. “That didn’t go anything like I expected.”

“I can’t believe he didn’t hit you.”

“Father’s never hit me.”

“Ah,” Rasp concluded, “explains why you turned out so rotten.”

This earned a lackluster shove from Faris. His heart wasn’t in it though, as made evident by the fact that Rasp was still standing. “What’s your excuse then? Hit too many times?”

Not hard enough, Rasp’s father would have said. That was probably the most confounding piece to this puzzle of a situation. Like Trant, Rasp’s father had also been the leader of his people. But the two men’s approaches to discipline were as different as night from day. Paler Stoneclaw had ruled with an iron first. Honor and duty came before all else, including his sons. Judge Belfast may not have understood Faris, but he didn’t spend his every waking moment tearing him down one fault at a time. Beneath all the bickering, Rasp swore the two actually liked each other. A fact he still couldn’t seem to wrap his mind around.

“Faris!” a gentle voice hissed, tearing Rasp from his thoughts.

Faris jerked to a stop. “Mum?”

Novera Belfast’s voice came from within the blurry tangle of shoulder-height shrubbery located to their right. “In the thicket, dear. You’ll have to come to me, I’m afraid. It’s best if I’m not seen near the house.”

Faris released his grip on Rasp’s arm and grabbed his hand instead, pulling him into the very heart of the twisted nest of interwoven branches and brittle twigs. Rasp considered making a snide comment about the unexpected hand holding, but the thorns that tore at his bare arms and face sufficiently distracted him from doing so.

Faris didn’t appear to mind. With his fist locked around Rasp’s hand, tightening each time his ward pulled in the opposite direction, Faris plowed a path through the thicket and delivered them safely onto the other side. Rasp’s only consolation was that the ground here was less thick with stabby vegetation. He felt Faris’s grip lessen and ripped free, muttering as he picked the thorns from his abraded skin.

“You’re wearing your travel clothes,” Faris whispered, his hoarse voice marked with sudden urgency. “Mum, what’s going on? Why are you leaving? It’s not seekers, is it? It’s too early in the season for them to be here.”

“They’re not from the division, no,” Novera said. Her scruffy shape was roughly the same height as Faris’s. For some reason, Rasp always envisioned her taller. It was the demeanor, he decided. Novera had the temperament of a housecat. Warm, affectionate, and capable of sending the entire household scurrying like a nest of plague rats with a single hiss. “Your father asked me to take my students into the hills as a precaution. I don’t know how long I’ll be away. I’m sorry, I wish I had more time. I only wanted to say goodbye.”

Faris staggered forward and enveloped his mother in what Rasp assumed was a heartfelt embrace. That, or they were trying to strangle each other in the most inefficient way possible. Rasp shuffled his aching feet and tilted his head in the other direction, silently wishing Faris had left him on the path. He didn’t like this sort of thing. The way their voices cracked with unabashed emotion, the crying, all that disgusting snuffling—it left him uneasy. Like a turtle without its shell.

Faris’s and Novera’s hushed conversation shifted to goodbyes as Rasp’s thoughts turned inward. He had overheard Novera and Trant arguing a few nights before. They weren’t yelling, merely talking loud enough for a person creeping the halls to overhear. Rasp didn’t catch most of what was said. He’d heard Novera sobbing afterward, though. And the judge had been in something of a mood ever since. Was it somehow related to this?

Rasp nearly jumped out of his skin when Novera clasped his hand with her own. Despite the lines that creased her calloused palm, her grip was as strong as his. “I know you’re not what everyone thinks you are,” Novera said softly. “And there will always be those who won’t accept you. Just know it gets easier once you’re able to accept it yourself. No one wants to be the first break in the family chain.”

Rasp stared up at the shifting gray light that filtered in through the hazy branches overhead. Novera often knew what she was talking about. He just wished, for the life of him, that he knew what she was talking about, too. His banishment from the Iron Ridge, maybe? It’d hurt, sure, but Rasp was over it now. There was no sense in wallowing over a situation you couldn’t change.

Something about Novera’s goodbye felt strangely permanent. “Am I going to see you again?”

“I don’t know, love. I wish I could take you and Faris with me, but I’m afraid it’s not in the cards.”

What an odd thing to say. Faris, he could understand. He was her blasted son, after all. Rasp was just an overstayed houseguest that may or may not have been a prisoner. Despite this, Novera was nice to him. Possibly the nicest anyone had ever been to him. But that didn’t explain why she’d take him with her, or why she was leaving in the first place.

Maybe it was the same reason Rasp had been picking fights all morning. The apprehension in the air, the feeling that something was coming. Rasp could feel it stewing in his lower gut, twisting his intestines into knots as the dread slowly ate away at him from the inside out. Did Novera feel it, too?

The scent of lemongrass and tears enveloped Rasp as Novera threw her arms around him with a sudden shaking shudder, whispering so only he would hear, “Promise me you’ll take care of my son.”