Beguiler

by Maxx Whittaker

“We all should. Do you think the fate of any kingdom would be different under the goblins?”

  Bannock wasn’t sure the question was rhetorical, but he kept silent.

  “The duwende didn’t lose their kingdom to the gosselin. It wasn’t mutual combat,” she spat. “They were stolen from, usurped, and brutalized. And when the duwende called for aid, the other human races couldn’t be bothered. What grudges would the Albian hold, I wonder, if their fate had been that of the duwende?”

  As Kenna said this, they passed into the tree line, a wind-scraggled copse of salt-poisoned birch, and their shadows falling with her condemnation made Bannock shudder. His Burdens stung like pinpricks up his arm.

  -Fifteen-

  Bannock and Kenna paused at the slope’s crest and caught their breath before the descent. They stood together, taking in the river valley far below.

  But like Witt, Bannock discovered Kenna lured people into a false sense of security when it came to silence.

  “What did you mean earlier, about the places you’ve been?”

  “What? Nothing. I haven’t been any places.”

  “You were somewhere before here.”

  “No.” He shook his head, singularly focused on a rock that resembled a stag. “No. Just sort of around.”

  Kenna turned on him. He could see her face in the daylight, eyes narrowed. “Around where?”

  “Albian! Saints, woman.”

  “Shall I show you the card up my sleeve?”

  “Please do. Especially if it’ll get you off my back.”

  “It looks exactly like a man dressed as a monk who is not a monk, with a mouthy squire in tow and a blade the length of my body hidden under his dress.”

  “It’s a robe.”

  “You’re a liar.” She poked his chest. “A liar in a dress.”

  “I didn’t gnaw on you back there in the tunnels.”

  “I didn’t say you did.”

  “Good. Because I didn’t.”

  “Good,” sniped Kenna.

  “Good,” he finished, turning away. Suddenly, Bannock remembered every reason he’d avoided women for all of recent memory. He scrubbed his face with both hands. A glow made him snap up.

  The bracelet. What the…? “Something’s coming.”

  “How do you know?”

  He held his arm up for her.

  Kenna pulled her sword. White light hovered along the blade. She glanced at his wrist. “Looks like I’m not the only one who knows some neat tricks.”

  They turned back to back, searching the tree line.

  “This is your arena; how do we fight?” asked Bannock.

  “A köttätare out at this time of day will be an alpha.” She raised her blade. “A minor köttätare is almost too fast to see; an alpha?”

  Bannock didn’t like the sound of her question.

  “It has to be stabbed through the heart. Silver will wound, but the köttätare regenerate. Slower from a silver wound but not much slower.”

  A woman’s scream split the valley. “Help! Fimbultyr, save me!” she cried.

  Bannock lunged; Kenna’s arm held him back. “No!” she hissed. “It’s a trick.”

  “Please! Anyone! Oh… oh! Noo!” The last word rose in a shriek. Bannock lunged again.

  “Don’t!”

  “That sounds like a woman!”

  “It’s supposed to. Listen…” Kenna pointed.

  Nothing. The valley was silent save for the river rushing, a small continuous thunder below.

  A baby’s cry rose above it, at first plaintive. When they didn’t move it became the strangled hiccupping shrieks of a terrified newborn.

  What if there had been a woman, Bannock thought. What if the köttätare had devoured her and her baby was next? Sweat wicked into his cassock and soaked the seams of his smallclothes.

  Kenna’s hand rested firm at the small of his back, alongside the Crusader blade. “Trust me,” she whispered.

  Bannock couldn’t tell her he didn’t trust anybody. But he could accept her skill and her time in the Wilds.

  “We probably won’t see it coming; try to be fast and if not…” She turned a full glance on him over her shoulder. “Kill me before it finishes, and I’ll do the same for you.”

  “That’s not reassuring…”

  She nudged him with an elbow. “It wasn’t supposed to be.”

  Twigs snapped inside the tree line, an almost incidental sound, like someone walking softly to be careful, not because they don’t want to be heard.

  Brush parted.

  Despite Kenna’s warning about not seeing it, the köttätare strode from the wood, clearly wanting to be seen.

  Bannock thought it equal to his height. Its figure was male, but it came on with a graceful, feminine gait. Shoulder points, hip bones, ribs; flesh clung thin and tight and the atrophy would have made the köttätare appear weak, if not for lattices of corded muscle beneath, the inner mechanics of a master predator.

  It wore a stag skull shoved down over its own. Bannock couldn’t tell if bulging eyes through the sockets belonged to the stag, or the köttätare.

  “What is it doing?” whispered Kenna.

  “If you don’t know, I’m worried.”

  It crouched slowly, folding to the ground with deliberateness.

  “It wants us to see it. It’s toying with us. Draw your sword,” she instructed.

  Bannock didn’t draw. He couldn’t afford to.

  The köttätare lunged and disappeared. Worse, it moved faster than even Bannock could see. He grabbed Kenna’s sword and ran his finger along its razor edge.

  “What the hell –”

  He smeared the blood across her forehead.

  “What are you –”

  “Trust me!” He couldn’t stop to appreciate the irony. Bannock sucked in a breath and held it.

  Everything stopped. The river froze. Birdsongs went dormant. Wind stilled.

  Everything except Bannock and Kenna, who gasped and bent back at the köttätare crouched mis-air, inches from her face.

  Her startle transformed into a dance; a crouch and a spin. Her blade’s silver arc cut a white line through the air. It parted the köttätare’s head from its neck with a high chime.

  Kenna caught her velocity, drew, and thrust. Her blade lodged true in the köttätare’s hollow chest. Lacy tongues of frost licked over its sallow breastbone, thickening to a glaze of ice as it spread.

  She spun the creature, still skewered, until it hung above the river valley. She kicked it free.

  Bannock exhaled.

  The köttätare fell stiff and helpless onto the jagged terminus of a rockslide far below. It shattered, fragments winking back prisms in the sunlight before falling and making small splashes in the river’s grey whorl.

  Kenna watched the conclusion, panting softly beside him. “We should go.”

  “It’s not dead?”

  “No; we didn’t get the heart. But a shattering means we got ahead of it, for now.” She stared up at Bannock and he stared back. “That was a bloody neat trick.”

  “What was?”

  “That.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  She sheathed and turned away, striding back along the cliff.

  Bannock held his breath again, catching a wren on the wing. He set the bird on Kenna’s shoulder, then exhaled. It hopped up onto her hilt, warbling a confused note.

  “Oh, you mean that trick.”

  “You’re an arrogant ass.” She smiled at the bird, picking at the folds of her hood. “But useful, maybe.”

  “Yes, and absolutely. Now if you’re done holding us up to show off your blade work…”

  “Go!” She pointed into upper wood. “Stop talking and go.”

  “Saved our lives and this is the thanks I get,” he said, snapping down her hood as he passed.

  “The thanks you’ll get is walking out the other side of this wood with your head still attached.”

  -Sixteen-

 
; -

  Bannock thought it funny this place was called Ashen Hill, because it was the only hill for miles along the river’s outwash. Really more of a ridge, a long finger pointing out to sea. Along its back sat ancient dwarven barrows like disjointed vertebrae.

  “Gorath’s kin live among their dead?” he asked Kenna as they picked their way down a shale-littered goat path.

  “Dwarves don’t have the same aversion to it as other races. But these aren’t their recent dead; that helps. The dead of Gorath and Gloran are in barrows up the mountain pass, off the road north of Madainn.”

  “Driven into ancient graves…” Bannock surveyed the brown, water-logged, windswept tundra. It was probably better in spring, lush and green. Winter made this hard for him to imagine.

  “What’s that I hear?”

  For a second, he thought she was serious, and tensed for another round with the köttätare.

  Kenna’s lips twitched. “Is that a heartstring being plucked?”

  “No.” Bannock took a step away from her. “I don’t have heartstrings.”

  “Yes you do! I hear them… they practically sing. Mee mee mee meeeee!”

  “I’ll just start back now.”

  Kenna laughed and started down again. “No you won’t. You don’t like me, but you hate that witch even more. Lesser of two evils, Bannock!”

  “You don’t have to tell me that,” he muttered, following. “It’s my guiding philosophy.”

  “No guards or patrols,” observed Bannock as they crossed the floodplain. “Smart.”

  Kenna nodded. “Tempting, especially for the duwende; you could see for miles out here from atop the barrows.”

  “And be seen. If their aim is for everyone and everything to pass through unnoticed, they’ve done well.”

  “Hunting parties go out at dawn, or at the golden hour before sundown. Furnaces vent into the bogs. The clans live scattered inside and between the barrows in small groups.”

  “That has to be rough for dwarves.” Bannock couldn’t remember hearing a single story that involved just one dwarf.

  “It is, but not impossible for a people who want to survive.”

  “Wary as they are, how did you come to work for them?”

  “They saved me long ago, up in the mountains. I repaid their kindness and… here we are.”

  The spare version. Bannock wondered what she was hiding.

  After a few steps she gave him a look.

  “What?”

  “You never ask a question when I expect you to. When a normal person would,” Kenna accused.

  “First, I am a normal person and those people are nosey gossips. Two, I value my privacy and extend that courtesy to everyone around me.”

  “Oh, so your self-centeredness is actually a gift.”

  “About as much as your getting thorny out of nowhere. Of course, pride is your favorite sin.”

  “You needed me back there. I don’t see a silver sword on your back,” said Kenna.

  “You needed me too! Remember?” Bannock held his breath, pausing a tail of cloud across the sun.

  “Let’s talk about that,” said Kenna, scrubbing at the blood smear on her forehead. “Why does –”

  “I wouldn’t –”

  She spat onto her fingers and rubbed harder. “You just smear your –”

  “Wipe that off if –”

  “Blood or fluids all over and –”

  Bannock took a deep breath and walked. He walked as fast and as far as he could in three odd minutes without straining his lungs.

  Just over two-hundred yards by his reckoning.

  He turned back and exhaled.

  “Then expect me...to…” Kenna’s voice was almost too quiet to hear as she turned a slow circle.

  Bannock waved.

  Even at two-hundred yards he could read the words her lips formed.

  “We’re stuck together!” he called as she trudged over the scrub. “Until the contract is done, and this bracelet comes off, we’re best mates!”

  “We might be mates but you’re a –”

  He bridged her lips with a finger. “You wiped off the blood; now you have to speak nicely to me.”

  Kenna’s lips brushed him with an upturn. “Only until you get winded and pass out.”

  She had a point. He smiled back and pulled away is finger before she bit him. “See? We need each other.”

  Kenna opened her mouth to retort but what came out was, “Wait for your squire!”

  And it wasn’t her voice.

  Bannock watched Witt slide down the rocky path on a breakneck trajectory with the boulders below. He watched and counted down.

  “Three hundred crowns. Hastings. A ship. That’s all I asked for.” He cast his eyes heavenward. “My life’s sins don’t total this punishment.”

  “Boy!” Kenna’s cry split the air; hair stood up on Bannock’s neck and Witt froze against impossible velocity.

  Kenna stalked him; there was no other way to describe long, measured, dangerous strides. She bent and put them nose to nose. “Köttätare. Caledon bears. Blackblade mercenaries. Do you have any idea what lives in the wood?”

  “Well…” Witt cleared his throat and glanced at Bannock, who shook his head. He wasn’t helping either of them.

  “Well, um... köttätare. Caledon bears. Black… blade –”

  Kenna grabbed his shirtsleeve and thrust him forward into the tundra, and in a horrible bit of foreshadowing, towards Bannock. “It’s not a place for playing wooden swords. You could have been killed! We were nearly killed!”

  “You were? I missed it! What happened?”

  Witt looked from Bannock to Kenna, who swore under her breath and stormed past.

  “Was it great?” whispered Witt when he caught up to Bannock.

  Bannock watched Kenna to make sure she wouldn’t glance back. He grinned and nodded. “It was pretty great.” It’d been too long since he’d had a real fight.

  “I got your first hundred crowns,” said Witt, digging a fat leather purse from his bag.

  “Bloody liar.” But when the purse struck his palm, Bannock heard the unmistakable tinkle of hammered gold. “Should I ask?”

  “Nothing to it but being a good citizen.”

  “A good citizen of the Guild?”

  “What is this place?” asked Witt, windmilling his arms and ignoring Bannock’s question.

  The boy could be heard and seen a mile off. “Not really circumspect, are you? Dwarven barrows.”

  “Dwarves! Oh Fjolnir, this is the best adventure. I knew I chose the right person.” He elbowed Bannock, who grunted. “Think about the bard songs! The handsome squire and his strong, fearful hero.”

  “You have too much imagination and not enough to do.”

  “I’m supposed to have swords to sharpen and armor to polish and forms to practice,” accused Witt.

  Bannock swore then and there he’d take every piece of gear the duwende would give him. The rougher, the better.

  “And just think when we get –”

  “Shhh.” Bannock pressed a finger to his lips. “This is the adventure, Witt. Look; look...”

  They stood and looked out over the red-gold expanse beyond the barrows, a jewel set in the silver prongs of outflow from the bogs, water that joined a thin silver band of the sea out on the horizon. Frigid gusts stinging his face still carried a hint of life, the green-decay scent of marshes and pungent grains of volcanic soil carried away a cold breath at a time to rebuild the mountains at their backs.

  “This,” Bannock murmured to himself. “I want this someday. To live in a place where time passes in eras.”

  “No.” He could hear Witt’s frown. “No, you can’t live in the middle of nowhere. What if the world is in danger!”

  Bannock chuckled, and gave the boy a small shove toward Kenna, who was climbing the barrow ridge. “I hate to break your fragile heart, but the world is always in peril. Always has been, always will be. Anyone who thinks he can change that is
a madman. Or will be very shortly.”

  “Then what’s the point? What’s the point of heroes and adventurers?”

  Bannock didn’t appreciate until Witt spoke just how hard he’d crushed the lad. This made him glad not to have children; he was fairly sure these were the deceptively existential questions children asked and his answer would be the sort of answer a father gave that left his child with crippling terror or a lazy eye or some other product of parental incompetence.

  “The quest. The quest is the point,” he decided on the spot. “And if it’s noble, or even remotely just, he or she has done their part in saving the world.”

  “It’s fellowship that saves the world,” said Witt.

  “I guess it is.”

  “So, that means you’ll join up with the duwende, and take me with you to Hastings, and all that?”

  “Not a chance in the coldest depths of hell.”

  Witt grinned, huffing his way up the stony ridge. “You’ll change your mind. I’ll ask again tomorrow.”

  Bannock kept silent. No matter what Kenna said, or Witt said, he wouldn’t change his mind about helping anyone but himself. His quest was solitary, and selfish.

  -Seventeen-

  After the stark beauty of the wildlands, Bannock found the dwarven barrow briefly loud and suffocating. Peat smoke filled the air like a hundred campfires, and noises echoed in every corner.

  Maybe it was the too-recent memories of an abbey cellar; cellar, of course, being some ancient Theldalas variant of dungeon. At least the Church had convinced him of this association.

  Kenna greeted a dwarf girl about Witt’s age when they were inside the gate. Bannock couldn’t hear what they said to each other over the ping of hammers and gasping bellows, or the high notes over a dwarven work song in the old tongue.

  Gaslight torches bathed pale stone in a rich golden glow but didn’t illuminate the ceilings or corners of the passageways. Bannock thought this was probably comfortable for duwende eyes, keen in semi-darkness. But his eyes, capable of seeing more than most, strained at the shadows. Fear, he realized at a pounding heart. Old fear; someday he’d pry its fingers loose.

  He surfaced to find everyone staring at him. “What?”