The Right to Choose

by Andrey Vasilyev

  “Wonderful!” Vika leaped up on the bed, standing taller than I was. Something awfully tempting caught my eye again, and I realized that all the arguing I’d been doing in my head meant nothing…

  The funniest part was that Vika didn’t want a kid, yet, without going into the details. It hit me that the whole thing had been an act designed to see how I’d respond. It worked, too.

  ***

  The bang of the door closing woke me up. Somebody was off to get beautified. Fine, let her go. I was on my way north.

  It’s the holidays!

  Welcome to a time of surprises and gifts, the best time of year—New Year’s!

  To celebrate the holiday, you just got:

  Three firecrackers made by Old Gothwald from the Western Mark

  True Winter Taste Lollipop

  New Year’s Hat with Pom-poms

  All of the above is already in your inventory.

  Also, everyone who logs into the game between December 31 and January 3 will be entered in a huge New Year’s lottery. For a list of the rules and prizes, check the announcement board in any of the cities or the official game site.

  Every day you log in gives you a 3% better shot at winning one of the great prizes, and maybe even the grand prize!

  But that’s not all!

  Find one of the fun New Year’s gnomes in any of the cities and see what they have for you. You’ll recognize their holiday outfits and the bells they ring as they walk. If they think you’re a worthy opponent, you could get a very nice prize.

  Chin up! Have fun, sing some songs, and have a great holiday! Ho, ho, ho!

  They weren’t lying; I found everything in my bag, including an acid-colored lollipop and the red, glittering hat. It even came with attributes.

  Great New Year’s Hat

  Holiday gift

  +2 to each of your attributes

  +5% gold from opponents

  +5% chance of getting rare and elite items

  +3% movement speed

  +7% chance of avoiding fights (you have to do a fun holiday dance for this to work)

  +10% chance of finding hiding places with New Year fireworks and party poppers

  Minimum level for use: none

  Note! This item will disappear from your inventory after the New Year’s holidays come to a close.

  It was a fun little thing, especially for low-level players.

  Oh, God, everything’s different!

  There was an enormous tree in the courtyard, complete with ornaments, tinsel, magic lights, and large deer antlers in place of a star.

  The walls were decorated similarly—holiday trees, deer, and a stern-looking old guy with a huge sack out of which peeked a child’s head. The halls were patrolled by guards wielding axes with the handles made out of tinsel. Cool!

  “Jarl, where did you find such an evil guy?” I noticed an angry and very sober Flosi being brought over by Nazir. My hirdman’s arms and legs were bound. “This moron tied me up. Can we kill him?”

  “He did exactly the right thing,” I said without the least pity for Flosi. “What did I tell you, drunkard? I said not to drink since we’re heading north. But no, you had to get into it. Apparently, you don’t care about what I ask you to do, so Nazir did what he had to do. Now, you’ll be coming with me, and not this alcoholic. Untie him and let him go wherever he wants; he has neither our trust nor our sympathy, anymore. I don’t need someone as unreliable as him.”

  Flosi paled. “Jarl, what are you saying? I just…”

  He couldn’t pound his chest with a fist; Nazir was still untying him.

  “You just?” I mocked. “Yes, I can see how you just.”

  “Hello, fine gentlemen,” Brother Mikh called. “Where are you off to?”

  “The jarl is going north, and he isn’t taking me,” Flosi grumbled. “Mikh, tell him.”

  “Yeah, right.” Brother Mikh knew exactly what was happening. “Go find some other idiot. Your word is like chaff, blown away as soon as the wind picks up.”

  Flosi blinked, childlike, and suddenly let loose a yell. “Gunther, you’ll stand up for me, right?”

  “What?” von Richter called back as he walked down the stairs toward us. “What are you yelling for?”

  Flosi told his story again, finally, finding himself a patron saint.

  “Flosi’s a blockhead, of course,” the knight said to me, as frankly as ever, “but you can trust him one more time. If he doesn’t keep his word, he’ll be tarnishing my honor, since I’m sticking up for him. I’ll be the one who licks some sense into him. How does that sound?”

  Flosi stood in the middle of the group of kind and excellent people, a group that was fast turning into a circle.

  “New Year’s rain!” someone called from above us as sparks showered down. “New Year’s rain!”

  “Why, you…!” Flosi bellowed, shaking his fist at Tren-Bren and patting his beard to make sure it hadn’t caught fire. “I hope your wings—”

  “That’s Thane Hagen’s daughter,” Gunther reminded him quietly.

  “…grow ever bigger. And your chest, too—there’s nothing to look at,” Flosi continued, forcing a smile that showed his remaining teeth. He even waved to the fairy.

  “Where are you going?” Tren-Bren looked fabulous. Her dress was a mass of sequins, she was wearing crystal slippers, and the holiday hat was on her head. She looked like an angel.

  “To the bar,” I replied quickly. “It’s a holiday, so we’re going to drink!”

  Flosi’s eyes popped out. “Really?”

  “Yep!” Brother Mikh and Nazir called, grabbing his elbows.

  “That’s bo-oring,” the fairy said, waving her wand and flying away with a yelp. “New Year’s rain!”

  “She’s going to burn the castle down,” Brother Mikh said as he shook his head sadly. “Seriously!”

  “Let’s go,” I said. “Okay, you all head off in different directions, and we’ll get out of here.”

  “Where are you going?” Gunther asked, but I’d already stepped into the portal.

  Chapter Eleven

  In which the hero enjoys a moment of nostalgia.

  It felt like a hundred years had gone by since I’d last stood at the Holmstag gate. A chill went through me as I looked up at the gray, cloudy sky, gazed off at the distant, snow-capped mountains, and filled my nostrils with the kind of air you didn’t find anywhere else in Fayroll. Snow, too! It was white, pristine, and perfect for New Year’s. I’m home.

  “We’re in the North?” Gunther’s voice broke into my euphoria. “Why?”

  I turned to the knight and blinked in surprise. “What are you doing here? I thought you stayed back there!”

  “Why would I have?” It sounded like he was a bit offended. “You can go jaunting off wherever you want, and I have to dance and yodel around the tree in the Borderlands?”

  “Oh, you should hear how he sings!” Flosi broke in, as unexpected as the toilet flushing in the middle of the night. “I’ve heard him!”

  It turned out, he was still being held by Nazir and Brother Mikh. My group of escorts was growing, that was for sure. It was a separate issue how well they all worked together, even if they were each excellent in their own right. Oh God, Holmstag isn’t going to know what hit it. At least, we hadn’t dragged the fairy along with us. Otherwise, we would have left a post-apocalyptic landscape in our wake.

  Hagen, the game admin is happy to tell you that the latest update significantly expanded the number of quests available in the Northern Mark.

  Given your reputation with the peoples of the North, NPCs can now offer you the following rare quests:

  Hill Beast (group quest)

  Runaway Bride

  Krok, Village of Demons (quest series)

  The World—a Pie (raid quest)

  Wind and Sparks (quest to receive rare professional abilities)

  Northern Odyssey (quest series plus the chance to get several hidden quests)

  Fistful of
Gold (quest series plus action)

  In addition, you can receive two quest series and 500-plus ordinary quests.

  Get to work!

  Of course, there wasn’t anything about which NPCs exactly handed out those quests; it was just the names, meaning that I would have had to go running around finding the whos and wheres. If I’d been a normal player, I would definitely have set off in search of that fistful of gold, but sadly, I had too much on my plate as it was. For example, I had to calm my group down.

  “I’m home,” Flosi muttered angrily. “Get your hands off me!”

  “If we let you go now, we’ll have to scour the taverns looking for you later,” Gunther replied calmly. “Flosi, you’re an alcoholic, and you need to admit that.”

  “Yes, my name is Flosi,” the toilet worker replied, his voice rising, “and, yes, I drink, but that’s my business!”

  “Not quite, my good man,” Brother Mikh said. “It’s everybody’s business. Your immoral behavior could bring us all down. The customs up here are much simpler—really, too simple.”

  “He thinks he’s going to tell me about the North,” Flosi snorted. “This is my homeland; every rock knows my feet.”

  “Every maggot, you mean?” I asked.

  “We all have our work,” Flosi went back to muttering. “Some of us buddy up to kings; others clean outhouses. Hard to say who’s better off.”

  “The mouth on him…” Nazir was clearly unused to underlings speaking to their superiors like that, and his next move was to cuff Flosi upside the head.

  “For that, I’m going to chop your legs off,” Flosi shot back, earning himself nothing more than a sarcastic half-smile.

  “Okay, cool it.” I was starting to regret getting involved with all of them, especially since our colorful antics were bound to attract the attention of other players. There were plenty of them, too; it was the capital, after all. There was the auction, the ocean of quests…lots of things.

  And free entertainment—a knight, an assassin, a Northerner, a shadowy character in a black robe, and a player—we weren’t something you saw every day.

  “Nobody’s lost their temper yet,” Flosi said with a threatening look at Nazir. “Yet!”

  “Maybe, we should just chop him up?” The assassin’s voice betrayed no anger toward the toilet worker, and no offense taken, either. He was just suggesting what seemed rational to him.

  “Hey, bro, what quest are you working on?” a player named Captain Full asked me. “You must have had a reason for pulling that crew together. Mind telling me?”

  “Definitely a quest,” a Level 110 dwarf chimed in. “Probably, hidden.”

  “An assassin!” somebody else called out from the crowd. “I’ve never seen an assassin together with a player, at least, not with a player from a different class.”

  “They don’t even run around with player assassins,” called somebody else I couldn’t see. “There aren’t more than a dozen quests that players can use to get their help, and they’re a beast to get, too. Come on, man, out with it; the people want to know.”

  The crowd was starting to grow, which I was not happy about at all.

  “Knowledge is power,” I replied. “I get your curiosity, but you’ll have to forgive me for not saying anything.”

  “Don’t be like that,” boomed an enormous half-orc as he bared his fangs. “Respect the people; it’s a holiday, you know.”

  “Guys, we all have our little secrets,” I said. “You have yours; I have mine. Let’s not get in the way of each other’s game progress.”

  “What do these people want, Laird Hagen?” Gunther put his hand on the hilt of his sword. We’d left the castle in a hurry, so he didn’t have his helmet, gauntlets, or shield, but he had the rest of his armor and his sword. “It looks like they’re bothering you.”

  “Let me go, already,” Flosi cried, ripping his arms away from Mikh and Nazir. “Gunnie, are you crazy? They’re not bothering us; they’re encircling us!”

  His axe rang as he pulled it out, and the sound of a sword being unsheathed was next.

  “Damn!” someone from the crowd whistled. “Dude, where did you get NPCs like that? I want some, too!”

  “I grew them in a pot on the windowsill.” I really didn’t like what was happening. Deep down, something told me that the crowd included some people who were less interested in where I’d picked up my retinue and more interested in the fact that I’d appeared in that particular place. They were going to tell somebody, too, somebody I had no desire to see.

  “What’s going on here?” A burly Northerner in a horned helmet stepped over from the city gate, with three equally large comrades behind him. “Who dared bare their weapons this close to the holiday?”

  “Put them away,” I hissed to my underlings before replying in a loud, happy voice. “Nobody, nobody at all, my good guardsmen.”

  The hulking figure blew his nose into the snow, holding one nostril shut with a finger. “‘My good guardsmen.’ That’s a respectable guy, right there.”

  “Thank you, the show is over,” I said to the players with a bow. They all looked at me in confusion. “Happy New Year, everyone!”

  “Clown,” I heard someone mutter.

  They can call me whatever they want as long as they let me into the city.

  “Let’s go,” I said, grabbing Flosi’s sleeve. He’d slipped his axe back into his belt loop, but he was still staring down the group of players.

  “If you don’t move, I swear on my life, it’ll be the last time you ever go anywhere with me.”

  The Northerner obeyed unwillingly, though he flashed an inappropriate gesture to the crowd as we left.

  We walked into the city, where I picked up the pace and dove into some side alleys.

  “There are several people following us,” Nazir said to me softly after five minutes of evasive action. “That’s no accident. Maybe, it would be a good idea to—”

  “No, it wouldn’t,” I replied, waving an arm. Sic an NPC on a player in the middle of a city? None of the people I had behind me would have been able to help if I’d done that. The other players would have torn my head off since what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Okay, my people would help a little, but it would still be really bad.

  It would have been much more interesting to see who they were and which clans they were from. But how? Nazir was an NPC, and I didn’t want to get into yet another conversation, myself.

  Out there, in the North, the holiday was even more ever-present than it was in the Borderlands. The homes were all decorated to look like Ded Moroz’s village, bells were ringing, NPC kids were running around throwing snowballs at each other, and there were tinsel- and ornament-covered trees everywhere. Plus, I saw a couple gnomes with ugly, bearded faces dressed for the holiday. They were grabbing passing players by the pants and trying to get them to play different games. I guess that’s who that message was about.

  The largest holiday tree, a giant of the forest, stood near the könig’s palace.

  “Wow,” von Richter said, looking up. “How tall is that thing?”

  “What did you think?” Flosi, who had calmed down, puffed his beard out proudly. “This is the North, brother. We don’t have many holidays, and Yuletide is the most important one. We have lots of fir trees, though monsters like this only grow in Hamesdall Grove, a reservation some people call the Grove of the Gods. They say the first trees were planted by one of the old gods. You can only chop them down once a year, for Yuletide, and the penalty for breaking the law is death.”

  “As it should be.” Brother Mikh was looking up at the beauty, enchanted, as well. “There’d be nothing left but stumps, otherwise, if people had their way.”

  Flosi couldn’t have been prouder. “Yup. Everyone goes to see the biggest tree in the North, standing and watching before they bring it here to the palace.”

  “What do the people do then?” Gunther asked.

  “They head back to their villages. There
are too many to fit in the capital, so there’s no point in them coming here. Once the tree’s cut down, they all head back to work.”

  I glanced over at the beauty one more time before heading into the palace. It was great, but we were pressed for time. I was worried that the könig might have gotten the celebration started early.

  ***

  There were new guards—the usual, rather than the Sea Kings.

  “Where to?” one of them asked hoarsely. He was wrapped in furs and had an egg-shaped helmet on his head. “What do you need?”

  “Going to see Harald,” I replied. “I want to wish him a happy Yuletide and see how he’s doing. I haven’t been here in a while.”

  “And all of them are with you?” the guard asked, pointing at the group behind me with the blade of his axe.

  “Yep. All my people, all good people; the könig knows them.”

  “I know his mug,” the guard said with a look at Flosi. “It’s been a long time since I last saw him.”

  “He’s with me, now. The könig gave him to me.”

  “That makes sense.” The guard nodded and went back to looking everyone over. “The slanty-eyed one isn’t getting in, but everyone else can go.”

  I got why Gunther and Flosi were fine since they were familiar faces, but I wasn’t sure why Brother Mikh was allowed through. I’d been sure that he and the assassin would both be held back.

  “People don’t like me,” Nazir joked, though his eyes were serious. “Always kicking me out.”

  I needed to sweeten the pill. “Not at all. It’s just that people know the warriors Hassan ibn Kemal raises, and they prefer not to make things more dangerous for themselves than they have to. You should be proud, not hurt.”

  His face didn’t tell me what he was thinking, but he didn’t object. Vanity is everything.

  ***

  Nothing had changed in the könig’s palace. It was just as empty in the corridors, it still smelled vaguely of dust and rotting wood, and the noise was still coming exclusively from the feast hall.