Forever and a Knight

by Bridget Essex

  Wonder ruins this perfectly perfect moment by sauntering up to me and complaining, loudly, sitting her fat cat butt down on the floor and staring up at me with narrowed, demanding eyes. The meow she makes is the type of sound that a Halloween cat would spit out, and I sigh, staring down at her. She needs food and a litter box (I'm thinking the stable yard will do) pronto, so I pick her up and make my way out into the hallway.

  Kell's leaning against the door frame of the room across the hall from us, wearing a very deep cat-who-ate-the-canary grin. The bar maid from last night is walking backward out of the room, a blanket wrapped around her middle, her clothes in her arms.

  She's wearing nothing more than a very satisfied smile.

  Kell watches her for a long moment with hooded, darkened eyes. She reaches out, wrapping her arm around the bar maid and drawing the woman close. Kell's already dressed in her armor, and she pressed the woman to her front hard.

  My mouth goes dry as Kell kisses the bar maid so deeply that the bar maid's toes curl beneath the blanket.

  “I'll see you soon,” says Kell, her voice deep and husky, as the bar maid giggles and begins walking down the hallway. Kell watches the bar maid for a long moment before flicking her gaze to me. She raises a single brow, tilting her head to the side as a sly smile begins to cross her mouth. Kell then glances at the shut door behind me.

  “Well?” she asks, folding her arms in front of her.

  There can be only one question she's asking.

  “Not that it's any of your business,” I mutter to her, shifting my complaining cat over to my other arm. “But, no, we didn't do it.”

  Kell chuckles at that, her blue eyes darkening. “I was talking about the ghost,” she says wickedly. “Did you get rid of her?”

  A blush spreads across my face, but I don't answer her, only turn and walk down the hallway as Kell's laughter follows me.

  ---

  Attis' great black mare is saddled and ready to go out front of the tavern, so the only thing that takes us awhile to do, after telling Shannon that her establishment is now ghost-free (which she's pretty darn happy about), is to devour some breakfast and say goodbye to all of Attis' old comrades.

  They gather, laughing and telling jokes outside, but you can tell that their mood is much more sober than last night. They gaze at Attis with questioning eyes, and when Kell steps forward, a single tear streaks down the woman's cheek.

  “Be careful. Remember what I said about the wolves, all right?” she says mysteriously. Attis nods, her jaw clenched tight. “And you must pledge to see us a little more often.” Kell and Attis quietly embrace, with a tightness that I envy.

  But as Kell's gaze over Attis' shoulder catches mine.

  “Take care of her, will you, Josie?” asks Kell, her voice thick with emotion as she steps back, holding the warrior woman out at arm's length to keep Attis' gaze for a moment longer. “You'll do that for me, yes?” she asks me again.

  “Yes, of course,” I manage, before I'm embraced tightly, too, by an Alinor who should, by all laws of biology, be nursing the worst hangover of all time.

  But, of course, she isn't. She's actually super perky and bright eyed and bushy tailed, which I would have thought statistically impossible, considering the gallons of booze I'd watched her consume.

  Maybe she can hold her liquor better than I thought she could.

  “Next time we see each other, maybe I'll take you for a roll in the hay,” says Alinor hopefully, squeezing me. Then she's pounding my back as she laughs loudly. “Naw,” she says, with a quick shake of her head. “You're not really my type. But it's nice to tease you, lass. You've got a blush that would make a virgin envious.”

  I laugh. My blush has always been my curse, and I'm aware of exactly how red I can get—so my choices are either to laugh at her joke or get all prickly. And let's be honest: my belly is currently full of delicious pancakes. I'm not in the mood to be all prickly.

  My quick radio mouth saves me. “Oh, don't worry. I have something else that would make a virgin envious,” I tell Alinor, with a wink.

  And then...shockingly...

  She blushes.

  “Now, now—let's not start a competition to out-bawdy each other, miladies,” says Kell quickly, but her smirk is wide as she hooks an arm around Alinor's neck and drags her away from me. “It's your stunning intellect, am I right, Josie, that makes those virgins blush?” she asks me with a big wink. “Surely it's your intellect. But then again, it might be your enormous br—”

  “Brown eyes,” says Attis softly.

  Whatever Kell says next fades into the background, and I stare at Attis, my heart literally skipping a beat.

  Her tone was so soft that, had I not been standing right next to her, I wouldn't have heard her words at all. But I did, and for a long moment I'm so shocked by the intensity with which she spoke that I really can't be certain if I heard her right or not, or if my overactive imagination is making me imagine the gorgeous knight I'm traveling with complimenting my brown eyes (which, I promise, are nothing special at all).

  But Attis isn't looking at me; she's checking the girth on Zilla's saddle, taking off her armored gloves to slip a single finger between the leather strap and her horse's stomach. She nods once, replacing her gloves, and turns, as if she had said nothing out of the ordinary.

  Maybe...maybe I was imagining things?

  “Be well, friends, until next we meet,” says Attis, holding her hand up into the air in a gesture of farewell to the armored women gathered in front of the tavern. The other knights each raise their fists to the air as one.

  Kell looks like she's going to say something else...but she doesn't. Her earlier mirth is gone, and she glances at Attis with her brows furrowed.

  Attis kneels down beside Zilla, and, unlike yesterday, without a single argument, I step into her hand, holding Wonder tightly in front of me. I vault into the air as she propels me upward, and I settle myself as best as I can into Zilla's saddle while still holding onto Wonder's protesting bulk. Attis undoes Zilla's reins from the hitching post and hands them up to me before turning back to the women, pressing the first two fingers of her hand to her mouth, and then holding out her hand to them.

  “Stay safe,” she tells them, her voice thick with emotion.

  “You, too,” Kell says softly, folding her arms in front of her while biting her lip...and flicking her gaze to me.

  As Attis, Zilla, Wonder and I stride purposefully down the road, toward the forest we emerged from yesterday, the women shout behind us: not words so much as a specific sound. It's triumphant, that sound, and I can see Attis smiling down below me, as she walks on the ground.

  We merge into the forest again, and the trees and underbrush are so thick that, in the matter of a few steps, it's almost impossible to tell that there was ever a road behind us. The trees swallow up any sound, the forest sighing in the wind.

  “Today, we must stop for supplies,” Attis tells me, tilting her face up to glance at me as she shoulders her way through a thorny bush. With all of her layers of leather and armor, she doesn't seem touched by the thorns, even when her gloved hand holds a particularly nasty branch out of the way of Zilla—Zilla who forges ever forward, her black head down almost sleepily and her stride steady. Attis lets the branch fall behind us and continues on.

  “The tavern we stayed at last night is close to the small village of Oakton,” says Attis, “and I know there's a smithy there, which Zilla desperately needs, and a goods store. But we must be quick in the village, because we have time to make up. We should have gotten started much earlier this morning if we intend to arrive in Arktos City as the festival begins.”

  Considering that we rose with the sun, I can't imagine how much earlier she wanted to get this show on the road.

  We travel pretty quickly through the woods, Attis striding out ahead of Zilla, and the massive black horse taking large steps across the forest floor to follow her mistress.

  I'm sleepy, as I grip my
legs tightly around Zilla's round barrel, and as I hold tightly to the reins, but my mind is energized enough to race. For example: “So, you said there's someone in Arktos City who can help me get home?” I ask Attis. “Who is it?”

  “Well, I have a friend named Virago who lives in Arktos City. She's a knight,” says Attis, skirting a particularly thorny patch of weeds, the thorns about as long as my hand. “A few moons ago, Virago was dispatched with her group of knights to hunt a beast, and the beast, being particularly nasty and powerful, managed to get itself through a portal into another world—and it dragged Virago with it. She called the world America, though, not Earth, but when she—”

  “Wait, I’m from America!” I tell her, my heart beginning to pound.

  Attis looks up at me a little funnily. “I thought you said you were from Earth?”

  “Well, I’m from Boston, which is in Massachusetts, which is in America, which is on Earth,” I explain, ticking the list off my fingers.

  “That seems unnecessarily complicated,” Attis tells me, her brows up, but she shrugs easily and keeps going. “Well, then, that's very good—Virago did visit your world, after all. So, you see, when she returned from that place, she brought back with her a lovely woman by name of Holly. Since Holly is from your world, there is a very good chance that, even if they can’t take you back home, they may know how you can get there.”

  Virago brought a woman back with her? I raise my eyebrow, and I'm about to continue down that line of questioning (example: are all the lady knights lesbians, because that'd be pretty damn awesome...), but then the thick expanse of trees in front of us opens up suddenly, revealing a meadow, and a little village spreading out in the very middle of it.

  The small dirt road that ran in front of the tavern was a massive highway compared to the tiny trail through the grass that leads from the woods toward the sprinkling of houses and buildings here. Attis strides down that faint trail with Zilla close on her heels, and as we get nearer to the structures in the center of the meadow, I don't really notice the houses so much (only that they're one-story tall, pretty small), because I'm mostly paying attention to what's going on in front of the houses.

  The houses form a circle around a dusty expanse of ground that would, technically, I guess, be the village square. There's a stone well in the center of the square, and gathered in front of that well is a small crowd of people.

  A small yelling crowd of people.

  Attis sighs for a long moment, but she never breaks her lengthening stride as she makes a beeline toward the melee. Zilla follows her mistress willingly (I'm just hanging onto the reins for dear life; I doubt she'd listen to me if I tried to steer her), and as we get closer, and from my heightened vantage point on Zilla's back, I can make out that the crowd forms a circle around two people in particular: a woman and a man.

  The man is tall, with a scruffy beard and a floppy hat and the kind of grubby clothes that make you think he's covered in mud, when he isn't really.

  The woman, on the other hand, is shorter, though her air of command makes her seem taller than she actually is. She has long, straight black hair that falls over her shoulders and cascades down her back like an inky curtain, and she's wearing a big, poufy red dress which looks quite out of place, considering the rest of the villagers wear dirt-colored clothing.

  For some reason, the woman looks witchy to me, but I could never tell you why she gives me that impression. She stands as tall as she can, her hands in fists at her side, and she's shouting as loudly at the man as the man is shouting at her.

  They're practically nose to nose, and the crowd is yelling around them, too, weighing in with such helpful expressions as “yeah!” and “tell her!” but even though they're pretty focused, the assembled people still part like the Red Sea for Attis as she strides forward.

  The woman and man stop shouting at the exact same moment when they spot Attis. Everyone, actually, falls perfectly silent. So silent that you could hear a horse snort. Which Zilla does, tossing her head and shaking it a little out of boredom, her bit jangling in her mouth as she chews it, stomping her right front hoof hard on the ground.

  “Greetings,” says Attis conversationally, lifting up her chin. She narrows her eyes, plants her feet hip-width apart and folds her armored arms in front of herself.

  The wind chooses that moment to start up a little, blowing Attis' hair and skirting her red cloak along the edges of the dusty ground, puffing it out behind her. It's dramatic, and, as one, the people take a single step back from the proceedings.

  “Hello, Attis,” says the woman in the red dress, her brow curving upward as she folds her arms in front of herself, too. Her voice has a slight accent that I've never heard before, and her eyes are flashing dangerously.

  “Oh, good, knight—you are of the order of Arktos City, and that means you are just. You must settle this,” says the man then, spreading his hands. He, too, has the slight accent; it sounds almost a little French, I realize. The man steps toward Attis, his hands open to her. “We have a dispute that must—”

  “I am no knight, sir,” says Attis quickly. “I am but a humble mercenary, and—”

  “Oh, rubbish, Attis,” the woman in red snaps, and then she turns again on the man, stabbing him in the chest with her pointed index finger. “And you know very well that there would be no dispute, Haggis, if you'd simply pay me what I'm owed—”

  “You haven't done the work properly!” the man blusters (I guess his name is Haggis, which I'm pretty sure is also the name of a sheep intestine sausage). He frowns. “And you can't threaten me, witch. I know my rights!”

  Did he say...witch?

  Attis sighs; then she reaches for her sword over her shoulder, on her back. She simply holds the hilt for a long moment, and with her feet hip-width apart, she looks pretty imposing.

  “What is the situation here?” Attis asks, her voice booming across the whispering crowd. The voices stop, and many wide eyes train on Attis.

  “Well,” says an old man who steps forward, sucking on the ends of his handlebar mustache before blowing them out. He clears his throat, shifts his weight on his feet, then continues: “It's like this.” He has his thumbs hooked into his belt loops, and he's leaning so far back, it looks like he wants to sit down in a chair that isn't there. “The witch Ilya gave Haggis a potion to cure his daughter's illness. But it didn't work. She wants payment, but Haggis is not about to give payment for nothing. I think that's the heart of the matter, really,” he says, blowing out a sigh of air that makes his mustache move outward.

  Ilya, the woman in the red dress, sighs for a long moment, her fingers pinching the bridge of her nose before she straightens up to her full height, and bristles. “I did make the potion, you old fool, and when that idiot gave it to his daughter, he didn't do it properly.” She rounds on Haggis again. “You know that you messed it up. And now I haven't the ingredients to remake it, and I told you to make certain that she—”

  “What is ailing your daughter, sir?” asks Attis succinctly, pinning Haggis in her sights.

  The man shakes his head, his gaze downcast. “Well...” he begins, shifting his weight from foot to foot and taking his floppy hat off his head, wringing it in his hands. He's silent for a long moment.

  “She's dead,” says Ilya, words sharp as she folds her arms in front of her.

  I stare at the woman, waiting for the punchline.

  And...there isn't any.

  She's serious.

  The girl's dead, and the potion that Ilya made for her was supposedly going to...bring her back from the dead?

  Really?

  “Ilya,” says Attis sharply, turning to the woman in red. Ilya tilts her chin up defiantly and holds Attis' gaze with flashing eyes.

  It's pretty apparent these two women know each other.

  “Yes?” Ilya snaps.

  “I don't even know where to start,” says Attis, fisting her hands. Her eyes are narrowed, and she's snarling. “You know the laws. You know
that to bring someone back from the dead is—”

  “I know the laws, but if I have the talent, why should they apply to me? I have hurt nothing,” says Ilya proudly, raising her voice. “And it's not,” she snarls, “like you're one to talk.”

  Something passes over Attis' face, a dark cloud shifting and changing her features almost imperceptibly, but the darkness is gone just as quickly as it came, taking with it all of Attis' fight. She's still standing, feet still hip-width apart, and her arms are folded in front of her again, but she seems subdued somehow, almost caving inward, deflating.

  Ilya folds inward a little, too, her shoulders slumping. “I'm sorry, Attis,” she says quietly then. “That was a low blow.”

  Attis shakes her head, running her gloved fingers through her hair. She turns to Haggis. “How long has your daughter been dead, sir?” she asks him, voice soft.

  “Two days,” the man tells her, voice shaking.

  Attis sighs. “As I'm sure you know, two days is a long while. In order for the magic to work, the spell to resurrect her would need to be recreated almost immediately, and you'd have to administer it properly before sunset,” she says, flicking her gaze to the sun that's shining through the thick layer of clouds directly overhead.

  I shouldn't be surprised that Attis knows about spells. I mean, after all, she healed me with magic (which I'm actually taking pretty well, considering I would have found the very idea of it laughable at best and utter horseshit at worst a mere two days ago, long before I'd seen all of this with my own eyes and was forced to believe). But still, I don't think it's normal for a knight-type person to know that much about magic. The people surrounding the witch, the man and Attis are looking at Attis with impressed faces, and they're exchanging glances again, lowered voices whispering among themselves.

  “What is the ingredient that you're missing to recreate the spell, Ilya?” Attis asks her, turning to the witch.

  The witch shakes her head, crosses her arms again almost petulantly, her mouth pursed in a downward curving line. “I can tell you right now to save your breath, Attis: it's impossible, so don't you start making promises like you do,” she begins, but Attis stares Ilya down. After a long moment, and a little flustered, Ilya breaks her gaze with Attis and glances down at the ground. She sighs, and begrudgingly, Ilya mutters, “I'd need a phoenix feather.”