Fired

by Liam Reese

He cracked an eye open just enough to catch the glimpse of light coming from his hands, turning the spaces between his fingers a deep heart-throb red. Then the slight warm weight on his left hand was different, moving and wriggling and cold and hard, and he opened his hands in surprise and a little silver fish dropped from his palms into the waiting water, where it zipped this way and that for a few startled seconds before it settled down near the bottom of the basin.

  When he could tear his fascinated gaze away from the fish — the fish that he had made — Path was not even looking at him. She had her nose buried in her notes, and her hands were moving so quickly it made Thorn’s fingers ache in sympathy.

  “Fascinating,” was all she said, when he asked her plaintively if he was done for the day.

  On the fifth day, they took him out into the desert as the sun was setting and showed him a dead rabbit.

  “We didn’t kill it,” said Path defensively, in response to the look he gave.

  “As if we would,” said Crau.

  “Well, we would,” said Freg, “let’s just face it. But in this case, we didn’t. We found it earlier, and we thought, now, here’s an opportunity.”

  Thorn looked down at the rabbit. It was a jack, a mottled light brown so it nearly blended in with the desert floor around it. It looked so old that it was near ancient, eyes sunken into its skull, fur flea-bitten and mangy, paws ragged. It must have died of old age, or at least a disease that had not killed it quickly. Its mouth was open slightly and there were flies settled on its body.

  Thorn swallowed thickly.

  “I can’t do this,” he said.

  “Of course, you can,” said Crau, earnestly, “you just have to believe in yourself.”

  “No, I mean I can’t. I can’t touch it, I can’t — this isn’t how this works.”

  “Who are you to tell us how it works?” said Wayfare. All of the alchemists were clustered tightly around Thorn and the rabbit corpse, Crau leaning on his cane, and Wayfare was directly across from Thorn in the little circle. If Thorn looked up, he would see nothing but Wayfare’s eyes, large enough to eat the moon. “We’re the alchemists, we’re the scientists, we’ve been studying this from before you were born. We know how this works. You’re the student, and you have a skill that you don’t even know you have. Forge the thing.”

  Thorn shook his head tightly, jaw firmly clenched, but Path elbowed him in the ribs.

  “You made a deal,” she said. “You help us, we’ll help you. You don’t want to Forge if it might hurt someone — well, here you are. The bunny is dead. Can’t hurt him. But think of it this way. You might be able to help — give him a second chance, as it were. Breathe life into him, even in some other form. If he goes on as a sapling, at least he goes on.”

  Thorn flinched at the mention of the sapling, but her words had hit home.

  “I’ll try,” he managed. “I — I make no promises.”

  “No one ever does,” said Path. “That’s not what we’re asking.”

  He took a deep breath — then let it out again, mindful of Path telling him to breathe — and got to his knees beside the rabbit. He reached out a trembling right hand and put it on the belly of the pitiful creature. It was cold, as he had expected, and surprisingly hard. The rabbit had been dead for longer than it looked, and he wondered why no scavenger had disturbed it.

  Probably, he realized, because the alchemists had set up a watch over it.

  He closed his eyes and looked for the lines that would tell him what the rabbit had wanted to be or could have been. There was only the faintest hint of green, which did not come as a surprise to him. It was rather more of a surprise that there was any green at all. He knew he had done this once before, but it had been just after the creature had died, not however long this was — and he hadn’t known what he was looking for. Which was almost a help, when he thought back over the years. As he pulled the memory to mind, the verdant lines that hovered over and around the rabbit seemed to strengthen. He plunged more readily into his memory — just a child, on his knees by the dog that had been his only friend, feeling the warmth begin to dissipate, or rather to travel, to spread — taking the warmth into himself, and sensing just on the edge of his tongue the taste of something living and green —

  He had had no idea what he was going to do. But the body of the dog had disappeared, while he wasn’t looking, and in its place a small green plant grew up from the dirt floor, nudging at his fingers till he cracked them and let it through, reaching for the sunlight —

  Until his mother came in.

  The taste of green disappeared from the memory, leaving a burnt brown flavor, and he

  flinched away from it suddenly. His eyes flew open, still fixed on the rabbit. Nothing had changed. The alchemists were still there, crouched over him, watching him eagerly.

  He looked up at them and shook his head.

  There was a series of collective sighs and groans.

  “Ah well,” said Wayfare, grumpily accepting the reality of the situation. “No doubt it won’t be the first time he disappoints us.”

  He was glad when they let him go back into the cave. It was warm there, after the chill of the desert night, and the rock walls offered no reflections, no memories, just a comforting blankness.

  It was the morning of the sixth day that it happened.

  Crau’s turn had come again to teach him, and he was doing what was probably his best. It was a little bit difficult to tell, with Crau. He was terribly excited about everything that they discussed, regardless of whether or not it was centered on the art of Forging or no. He was the one who had filled Thorn in a little more on the possibilities of reversing a Forge—

  “Although I don’t know why anyone would want to,” he burbled. “There’s so much work that goes into it, so much skill to begin with, I can’t even fathom why you would want to render the whole thing moot.”

  “Suppose it had been done in error,” said Thorn, hesitantly. “Suppose it seemed the thing to do at the time, but you thought better of it later.”

  “That, my boy, sounds like a conscience, and I never heard of any of the Forged having any such thing.” Crau shook his head. “No, I don’t think you would ever need to worry about such a thing, but on the off chance that it happens, for some reason — look for the lines, and remember that you cannot Forge anything into something it does not want to be Forged into. The lines won’t let you. That’s when things go wrong, you see. You may think that your little mouse wants to be a fish all the time, of course it does, but if it had wanted to be something else — a rat, say, or suppose it wanted to be a bird and fly away, or suppose it wanted to be a human. Then the lines would—” He pulled his clenched fists away from each other, quickly. “Snap. No more mouse. No more anything.”

  Thorn had thought about the botched jobs he’d done of Forging, when he was younger, and felt stabs of guilt. Whatever records there were that suggested no Forged ever had a conscience were definitely not one hundred percent accurate.

  Today, though, they were discussing how to vary the approach to Forging, to make it easier to Forge on the fly, as it were.

  “Not just a case of having it just under your skin, oh no,” said Crau, shaking his head emphatically. “I know that sounds very poetic and nice, but it’s so much more than that. To Forge freely, you have to live with it in your head at all times. The more present it is, the faster it will be. Here, stop a moment and put it just —” He stamped over to Thorn with his cane and held one hand up in front of Thorn’s nose, nearly touching it. “Right there,” he said, cheerfully. “That’s where it belongs.”

  “If it stays there,” said Thorn, “I’ll just go around cross-eyed all the time trying to see it.”

  “One must make sacrifices for one’s art,” said Crau.

  There was a muffled bang from behind them, as though someone had slammed one of the doors that led to the outside.

  “It’s my turn!” said Crau, not looking around, and keeping his hand w
here it was. “You can do your bit tomorrow to brainwash him, Freg.”

  “Has anyone seen a runaway girl?” said a strange, plummy voice. “One of a set of two. I do have specific ones in mind, I’m not accepting applications.”

  Crau turned to look, and Thorn uncrossed his eyes.

  There was a stranger in the room. The strange, plummy voice belonged to him, though it was an odd match, to be sure. He was tall, rangy, and handsome in an unnerving sort of way, with a shock of reddish hair and a wide, thin mouth. His eyes were a golden brown, but as he smiled, they nearly disappeared. His smile was so earnest, so truthful, so honest and pure, that it set Thorn’s teeth on edge.

  “How did you get in here?” said Crau, stomping towards him, waving his cane every other step. “This room is strictly off limits.”

  “The door was open,” said the stranger, still smiling. “I didn’t see any signs.”

  “You didn’t think to knock?”

  “I’m on a rather urgent mission. If I had knocked, and no one had answered, I would have come in any way, so there seemed no point in wasting my time.” The stranger looked bemusedly down at Crau, who came up to him — only to just past his waist, and no further. Crau put one hand on his hip.

  “We are in the middle of something very important,” he said, “and your interference could have set my student back by decades.” He poked at the stranger with his cane. The stranger calmly pulled a sharp silver blade from his pocket and made one quick slash.

  Thorn felt the world turn abruptly upside down as Crau crumpled to the ground. There was redness everywhere, Thorn thought, detached — what could it be? It had gone very quiet in here, for a cavernous room that echoed everything back at you three or four times.

  Then the reality rushed in on him as though from a great distance, and he knew he was looking at Crau, dead on the ground, and the stranger was stepping over his body and moving towards Thorn with a singular purpose. He still held the knife.

  “Perhaps you’ll be a bit more reasonable,” he said, with that odd voice like overripe velvet. “There’s no call to be rude just because I am, you know.”

  Thorn choked on his own cry of alarm. The stranger came closer.

  “I don’t think either of you quite understands,” he said, “that what I really came here for —”

  Thorn kicked at him, all in a panic, and his legs were long enough, his actions swift enough, to catch the stranger off guard. His kick was inexpert, to say the least, and should have been directed elsewhere; he lashed out flat-footed and caught the other man just below the kneecap. But his legs were strong, and the stranger yelped like a dog and crashed to one knee on the ground. Thorn kicked again, haphazard and only half aware of what he was doing, even less well placed this time, and caught him on the shoulder. The stranger’s grip on the knife was too firm to loosen, however, and he hefted it as if to throw. Thorn dodged away and around a corner into a tunnel leading towards the interior of the mountain. His heart pounded away like a mad thing in his chest, and he fell back against the wall.

  “Out,” he muttered to himself, a feeble command, but the door was back the other way, past the madman with the knife and his victim. Thorn felt as much horror over the thought of passing Crau as he did over trying to get by the stranger. His stomach surged, and he tried to talk himself past it. He looked up, sideways, back down again. “Never been in here before. They don’t like me to go exploring. Thorn,” he said, sternly, to make himself pay attention, though the th was lost somewhat. “If you don’t go out there... he will come... in here. If he comes in … here —”

  “Bad news for you, I must admit,” said the stranger.

  Thorn, startled, lost his tenuous balance and fell completely to the ground, and that was probably the only thing that saved him. The stranger’s swipe with the knife went far west of where it was intended to go, and Thorn rolled across the sandy floor, desperately trying to avoid the next blow. He fetched up against the opposite wall, which was not as far away as he would have liked and scrambled up in time to avoid the knife flung at him. It hit a crevice in the rock wall of the tunnel, and quivered.

  “I’ll have to sharpen that one,” said the stranger ruefully. Another one appeared in his hand as if by magic; Thorn couldn’t even quite tell where it might have come from. The stranger waved it at him. “I’m called Serhiy, by the by,” he said cheerfully. “I don’t know who you are, but you’ve somehow — by dint of being quite awkward, apparently — lasted longer than most. For this reason, I feel compelled to tell you that I didn’t come here to kill anyone. I just came to find a girl from Castle Balfour who has gone missing, and who also seems to have met up with a certain wayward princess. Honestly, I was hoping to have a simple outing and I’m feeling quite put upon at the moment, as I’ve had to kill one person already and I may as well be talking to a corpse.” He coughed a little. “My throat is terribly dry. Must be all this conversation. Don’t you have anything to say?”

  “No,” said Thorn, or at least he tried to say it, but there was something stuck in his own throat so that it felt as dry as though he were back in Braeve’s woods, and the word wouldn’t quite make it all the way out into the open air.

  “Ah well,” said the man called Serhiy, and he shrugged an elegant, eloquent shrug. “Hope for a good conversation and prepare for no conversation. I suppose you can’t win them all.”

  He hefted the knife and threw it, but somewhere in between the two actions something seemed to go wrong; he slowed down, his hand dropped, and an expression of extreme stupidity crossed over his handsome face. The second knife hit the bottom of the wall just where it met the floor, and clattered to a standstill without sticking, and Serhiy collapsed into a heap in much the same way. Thorn sagged back against the wall near it, and heaved such an enormous sigh that he felt as though his rib cage were about to cave in.

  Irae stood over the jumble of limbs that was Serhiy, holding a length of wood that Thorn only vaguely recognized as Crau’s cane. The curved end of it, which Crau had held onto as he walked, was bloody and there were a few hairs sticking to it.

  “For a villain, he isn’t very bright,” said Irae, dazedly. “He ought to have known not to keep talking.”

  “But I’m glad he did,” wheezed Thorn. He clutched at his chest, where his heart was still trying to catch up to everything that had happened.

  “So am I,” said Irae, and burst into tears. “Thorn,” she said, fighting the words out through sobs and obviously trying desperately to pretend that nothing unusual was happening, “I know who he is. He works for my uncle, he was the executioner at the time of my exile. He must have been tasked to find me and — he would have killed us all.” She sank to the ground, still holding the cane, and Thorn shuffled himself over towards her. After a moment of hesitation, he put an arm around her shoulders. “Poor Crau,” said Irae, looking miserably at the cane. “He didn’t mean any real harm, really. None of them do.”

  “No, no,” Thorn said, though privately he had his doubts about that. “He said he was looking for a girl who had gone missing from the castle, and only came upon you by accident. So, it may not have been what you think at all.”

  “But if it was —”

  Thorn hesitated, looking over at Serhiy’s body. He wanted to check for a heartbeat, but he also dearly did not want to get close enough to the body to do so. Well, the blood seeping out of his head in a slow pool would have to serve as confirmation enough.

  “We need to leave,” he said. “Who knows who else might follow him? We need to regroup, find the others, and see what they have managed to do without us.” He managed a weak smile. “Likely to be more than they had done with us.”

  “But your training,” said Irae.

  “I’ve learned enough for now,” he told her, though he wasn’t sure about that, either. “I can do what I need to do. And after we get your uncle off the throne and you back on it, I can come back and pick up where I left off.”

  “Leaving me behin
d,” said Irae. She was curled into him now, one hand seeming to have unconsciously found its way to be fisted around a handful of his shirt.

  “Leaving you behind at the castle, on the throne, where you want to be,” said Thorn. “Isn’t that the whole point of this exercise?” He took her fingers away from his shirt, but gently. “This has enough holes in it without you picking more.”

  He pressed against the seams of her four fingers, and she curled her hand around his thumb instead, like a child needing comfort. She drew her hand and his together up to her chest and held it close. Her eyes were fixed on the bleeding waste of space that was Serhiy.

  “We should go,” she said.

  Thorn nodded, and sighed, and took her hand fully in his, but only briefly.

  “That’s what I’ve been telling you,” he said.

  10

  The Path to Rebellion

  “Keep in mind,” said Berren, “I am not doing this for you.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Lully. “You’ve said so, several times.”

  She did wonder at his insistence, and was secretly curious as to why, exactly, he was doing this. This wasn’t a normal thing to do, nor a safe thing — he had told them himself what had happened to the last group he knew of that had started to rebel — but here he was, doing it regardless. She couldn’t help but wonder why.

  Why would he put himself in such immediate danger, unless he was loyal to the princess and had been so all along?

  She shook her head, mystified by the whole thing, and continued with her task.

  Berren, bastard son of Graic’s brother-in-law, unacknowledged by anyone, had listened to her story, asking questions when appropriate, nodding slowly at her impassioned answers. He seemed to take everything she said at face value, which she also didn’t quite understand. Didn’t he want proof, verification, that what she told him was true? No, it appeared not; on the strength of what she told him, he had come up with an idea.