Scorch’s wings tangled in the dense trees and Vivid was thrown from his back as they crashed. Scorch felt his scales morphing into human skin, his wings snapping back into his shoulder blades, and his snout reverting to a handsomely sculpted nose. In moments, he was Scorch-shaped again. And naked, naturally.
He was also exhausted. He panted, hands on his knees, fighting to remain conscious. He couldn’t pass out like he had last time. He had to find Vivid and make sure he was okay. He lifted his head with a groan and scanned the nearby trees for the assassin. When Vivid kneeled beside him a second later, Scorch jumped, emitting a truly embarrassing yelp.
“You’re too easy to sneak up on,” Vivid said, easing the monk robe from his shoulders and settling it over Scorch’s bare back. “The assassins will fix that.”
Scorch slipped his arms through the sleeves of the robe. It smelled pleasant, probably because Vivid had been bundled up in it all night. He struggled to keep his eyes open. “Are you hurt?” he asked Vivid. And then, a little more awake than before: “What do you mean the assassins will fix that?”
Vivid slipped him his canteen and Scorch was perplexed, once again, by the many secret compartments of Vivid’s clothes. “You’re coming back with me to the Assassins’ Hollow.”
“No,” Scorch said after a grateful drink of water. “I have to go back to the Guardians’ Guild and tell them what happened. The Master will be expecting me.”
“Don’t be a fool,” Vivid chastised, taking the canteen back for a sip. “Your guardians don’t want you back.”
Scorch rubbed at his face. He was too tired for this conversation. “Yes, they do.”
“Look at me,” Vivid said, and Scorch couldn’t help but look. His bleary, tired eyes focused on Vivid. “Do you truly think your Guild Master didn’t know exactly what he was doing when he sent you to the Heartlands? He knows what you are. Your guardianship to save the High Priestess was a suicide mission.”
“The Master would never do that to me,” Scorch said, but even as the words left him, he wondered. He remembered the troubled look in Master McClintock’s eyes when he gave him the mission, how tired he had been, like he’d been up all night with worry. Scorch frowned. Could he truly say he trusted the Master when he had proved to be terrible at reading people, recently and repeatedly?
“Why else would a Guild Master assign an untested apprentice to such a task?” Vivid asked.
“How do you know I was only an apprentice?” asked Scorch, and Vivid arched his brow. “Was it that obvious?”
“One way or another,” Vivid continued, “your Master discovered what you are. He might not have had the heart to kill you himself, but he sent you away knowing you would die. If you return to the Guild, do you think he’ll be happy to see you?”
Scorch pulled the robe tighter around his shoulders. He wasn’t cold, but he wanted desperately to disappear inside the soft cloth.
“Come with me to the Assassins’ Hollow,” Vivid said.
Scorch shook his head. “Even if the guardians want me dead, why would I become an assassin? I want to protect people, not kill them.”
“You need to learn to harness your power.”
Everything was still. The air. The trees. Vivid.
“What do assassins have to do with being an elemental?” Scorch asked. He was so tired.
“Where do you think I learned?” Vivid asked.
A breeze stirred and Vivid’s lips quirked up at the edges. It was almost a smile. Almost.
“Talk to me again once I’ve slept for a year,” Scorch mumbled, letting his body curl up on the forest floor.
Before he nodded off, he heard Vivid’s disapproving sigh and a soft rumbling voice. “Useless.”
How to Steal and Look Your Best
11
He was lying in the grass, the rush of the river babbling over sun-drenched pebbles. His eyes were closed and a breeze drifted over him. Easy warmth tingled beneath his skin and a fire crackled in the pit of his chest.
Far away, in a distant corner of his sleeping mind, he wondered where the horror had gone. He wondered when the scent of burning flesh had been replaced with the fresh air of Etheridge’s garden, when sprays of blood across his cheek became a beam of sun. He opened his eyes, and instead of murdered girls in bloody beds, he saw clear blue sky.
He stretched his arms, arching his back from the grass, and felt an unfamiliar heat pressed against his side. His hand found a trail of skin, textured with scars, and he traced his name until soft hair threaded between his fingers.
Without turning his head, without looking, he knew what had happened to the nightmares.
The wind had blown them away.
****
When Scorch roused from his sleep, Vivid was glaring at him. “I’ll obtain more Dream Moss when we reach the next village,” he said.
Scorch sat up with a sigh, raking fingers through his tousle of hair. Vivid’s words confused him, for he had not woken from a bad dream. Why would Vivid bring up the—oh. Scorch ducked his head to hide the blood rushing to his cheeks, and he lifted his knees to his chest to cover the blood rushing elsewhere.
“Did I,” he began with feigned nonchalance, “make any noise? Like I was having a nightmare?”
“You were moaning like you were in pain.”
“Pain,” Scorch repeated, utterly red-faced. “Yes. Gods, yes. Awful pain. Terrible dream.” He stole a glance at Vivid, prepared to explain his flush away as a lingering symptom of his elemental power, but Vivid wasn’t looking at Scorch, wasn’t even facing him. He was seated yards away with one of his twin daggers over his knee, sharpening the blade.
“More Dream Moss will shut you up,” Vivid said. “Just while you’re asleep, unfortunately.”
“Okay,” Scorch responded cautiously. He waited a moment for Vivid to continue, to say something else on the matter, or broach a secondary topic, but he didn’t, and Scorch was relieved. It gave him time to organize his thoughts and discreetly rearrange his robes, because it had not been a nightmare that pulled the moans from his throat.
Scorch got to his feet, which were bare, and tested his strength with a bounce. After flying miles nonstop and sporting an array of fresh injuries, compliments of the late High Priestess, Scorch didn’t feel as terrible as would be expected. The strongest emotion battering inconveniently against his insides was shame, sprinkled with, if he was being honest, arousal. He was familiar with the former as much as the latter and he buried both feelings with a laugh as he recalled their brief conversation before his hibernation.
“I have no shoes,” he announced. Vivid was concentrating on sharpening his blade and didn’t respond, so Scorch moved to stand in front of him. “I was just wondering if the assassins have a no shoes, no service policy.”
Vivid ignored him.
“Since you claim to be taking me to them, I figure it would be nice to have some idea whether I’m walking into my doom. With or without shoes.”
“If I wanted you to die, I would have left you strapped to that chair.”
Scorch’s mouth worked open, silently and stupidly, for several seconds before he found his voice. “Kio said she wanted to help me, and then she handed me over to be experimented on.” He felt her absence keenly. Had Kio been with them, she would have already soothed his cuts and wrapped his feet in leathers. But she was gone, over treacherous miles of Heartland, mourning within a golden temple.
Vivid slipped the dagger back into his sleeve and stood. He only came up to Scorch’s chin. “Have I told you I would help you?” he asked.
Scorch’s first instinct was to say yes, but his instincts were frayed as of late, so he took a pause to consider the man in front of him. Vivid had saved his life over and over, from the Circle and onward, but had he ever vowed to protect him or even seemed relieved when Scorch lived? Had he ever presented himself as anything but annoyed and inconvenienced by Scorch’s mere existence?
“Why are you taking me to the assassins, Vivid?”
“I’ve been instructed to collect stray elementals when the opportunity presents,” he answered, tucking his unruly strand of hair behind his ear.
“Right,” Scorch said, irked by the twisting in his stomach at Vivid’s reveal. “You’re not helping me. You’re only following orders.”
“Should I lie to you? Tell you I want to help you become your best self?”
“No.”
Vivid glared up at him, his lips a thin line of displeasure. “I’m not her.”
Scorch nodded, the shame creeping back. “I know.”
“In the next village, we’ll get you shoes and something else to wear. I won’t be bringing a haggard brute to the Hollow.”
Scorch scratched his beard self-consciously. He had trusted Kio and that had been a mistake. Vivid had obfuscated the truth, but he was standing before him now, stony-faced and sincere. Scorch had questions, and if going with Vivid to the Assassins’ Hollow could answer even a few of them, it was a risk he had to take, a trust he had to extend.
“Fine,” he said with a sigh of finality.
Vivid’s eyebrow twitched.
“Fine,” Scorch elaborated. “I’ll go with you to the assassins.”
“It wasn’t up for debate.” Vivid passed him their shared canteen and started walking. “Before you start complaining, you only have a few more miles to walk barefoot,” he called over his shoulder.
“A few more miles?” Scorch asked, the naked soles of his feet trying to avoid the pointiest sections of terrain as he walked. “After we find the main road, it’s forever until we reach the next village.”
“True, but we won’t be walking by then,” Vivid stated matter-of-factly, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.
“I’m not flying us anywhere anytime soon.” Even if Scorch had the energy for another change, he didn’t think he would be able to accomplish it.
“You won’t need to,” Vivid said. “We’re going to steal a horse.”
****
Scorch was lying in the middle of the road. He could feel the wagon’s vibrations rattling his bones. As the sound of hooves and wheels drew closer, he fought the instinct to roll out of the way. If this was all an elaborate scheme to get Scorch run over, he would only have himself to blame, and on the long list of different ways he’d recently nearly died, death by lying in the middle of the road was the dumbest. But it was Vivid’s idea, and so he tried his best to go along with it.
The afternoon had grown blustery and Scorch hoped his monk robe would not blow open. He doubted the wagon would stop if he were obscenely exposed; it would diminish the likelihood, at the very least. He could not help but wonder if Vivid was making the wind tease at the hems of his robe, but that line of thought threatened to redden his cheeks again, so he banished it and did his best to pretend he was a beaten up monk who needed help. Hopefully, the folks driving the wagon cared about monks in the road. Scorch thought that was a pretty big gamble, but Vivid had insisted grimly that it would work.
Sure enough, the squeak of the wheels slowed to a stop before Scorch was crushed to death. Through his shut eyes, he heard a troubled gasp and then more squeaking as a body lumbered out of the wagon seat. Footsteps came closer until they halted by his head, and then there was a crack of tired knees bending.
“Oh my Gods. Are you alive?” someone whispered over Scorch’s body.
He let his eyes flutter open and groaned. The groan was real because he was on top of a rock and it was digging into his spine. “I-I was robbed,” he rattled.
The man above him had a handlebar mustache and kind eyes. “What kind of monster would rob a monk? They took your shoes, too! Here,” he said, gently grasping Scorch’s shoulders, “let’s get you standing up.”
Scorch laid on the theatrics as he hobbled to his feet. “Do you have any water?” he asked faintly.
The man linked his arm with Scorch and helped him walk to the back of the wagon. “Should have a fresh jug back here somewhere.”
“Oh, bless you,” said Scorch before bending over with a roaring cough. He braced his hand against the wagon’s side, his eyes watering.
“Wait right here,” said the man, and he scrambled through the canvas flaps. “I know I have some back here. Just got fresh from the river this morning,” he hollered, voice muffled.
Scorch coughed again, louder, to cover the snort of the horse. “Take your time,” he wheezed as he peeked around the front of the wagon. The man began to emerge from the canvas with a large jug cradled in his elbow and Scorch steepled his hands together in prayer. “A bite of something to eat might soothe my harassed nerves, if you have any to spare, my child.” For a second, he was convinced saying “my child” to a man easily thirty years his senior was a mistake, but the man only nodded enthusiastically and ducked again into the depths of the wagon.
Scorch hacked another loud cough to mask the clip-clop of hooves. Vivid was sitting atop the horse with the reins in his hands, looking absurdly casual to be in the midst of thievery. Scorch couldn’t help but lift a dubious brow at the inferred seating arrangement, but Vivid showed no sign of scooting back in the saddle, only cocked his head in silent assignment, and Scorch had no choice but to lift himself onto the horse. He nestled in behind Vivid. There was some intimate pressing, but it was, regrettably, unavoidable. Vivid leaned forward to whisper something in the horse’s ear and then she was off, galloping at such a pace that Scorch was forced to either wrap his arms around Vivid’s torso or fall off.
They dashed down the road, and Scorch could hear the poor man calling after them. He felt guilty for the deception, but he could hardly be worried about it at the moment, not with the leather beneath his fingertips and the hard muscle tensing beneath his touch.
They rode in silence—because Vivid never spoke and hated when Scorch did—so Scorch spent his time organizing his thoughts and trying not to grind against Vivid’s back. It was a difficult task, but Scorch thought he made a valiant effort. Organizing his thoughts was undoubtedly the more trying task, and he was relieved when, after not too long a time, they came upon a dusty little village; Scorch remembered passing it on their way to the Heartlands, but they’d not stopped there for supplies, not after what happened to the boy in the other village.
Vivid dismounted and Scorch could finally breathe again. He slid to the ground, his bare feet finding the only sharp rock on the entire road. He whimpered in pain and gingerly lifted his foot to inspect the damage: a small cut on his heel. When he looked up, Vivid was just turning his head away from him.
“Shoes,” he stated, taking the horse by the lead and walking down the village road.
****
The village was a humble clump of houses, but it had the essentials to suit their needs. Vivid tied the horse to a post outside the seamstress’s hut and they wandered inside. It was a single-room shop, its walls lined floor to ceiling with shelves of fabrics, shoes, and hats. Racks were pushed into every corner, laden with vests and trousers and jackets of formal and casual make. At first, Scorch thought the shop was absent of its keeper, but then a ruffled blouse and feathered hat began to move and a wiry young man was shoving his way out from behind a pile of clothes.
“What can I do you gentlemen for?” the shopkeeper asked, eyes sizing up the men in front of him. “Or can I just do you gentlemen?” He laughed, throwing back his head and clapping his hands together. “I’m sorry! Ha! Kidding, kidding. How can I help you?”
Vivid threw Scorch a pouch of coin. Scorch made a mental note to ask him where he sequestered so many bulky items in his tight leathers.
“He needs everything,” Vivid said, turning to leave. “I’m going to find the herbalist tent.” That was just for Scorch, spoken in a deep pitch that made something flutter in Scorch’s stomach.
Vivid walked out, leaving him alone with the tailor. He shuffled his feet awkwardly. “I need everything,” he sighed.
The tailor smiled. “I’ll say. Slip off that robe and we can get you
measured up.”
Scorch lowered his voice to a whisper. “I don’t have anything on under this.” He tugged at the robe.
“Trust me,” the tailor replied with a smirk, “that’s perfectly alright with me.”
****
An hour later, Scorch walked out of the shop with a sack full of tailored garments. Because he still needed to tend to his injuries, he had insisted on keeping the monk robe a while longer, but he did have new boots on his feet, in supple, red leather. For some reason, the tailor kept pushing the color red. “It suits you,” he insisted. “He’ll love it on you,” he also insisted, and Scorch had frowned in confusion.
Now, dressed as a monk with fancy new boots, he looked up and down the street, but Vivid was nowhere to be seen.
“I procured us a room.”
Scorch jumped, startled, then turned around to find Vivid standing directly behind him with a cloth sack in his hand. They walked together down the road until they reached a tiny inn. There was a bar stationed in the corner and a dining room, but Vivid waltzed right through the downstairs and they winded their way up a creaky staircase. On the upper floor, there were only four doors, and Vivid already had the key for their room.
The quarters were modest and dusty, but to Scorch’s delight, there was a tub filled with water, and a tray of food sitting on the bed.
“Food or bath?” Vivid asked, shutting the door and locking it.
“What?”
“Are you hungrier or dirtier?”
Scorch checked in on his bodily desires. “Hungrier,” he decided.
Vivid unsheathed his daggers. “Eat while I take the first bath.” He set the twin blades on the stand beside the tub. “Do not touch my weapons.”
Scorch scoffed, but he made a wide berth as he passed the daggers and headed for the bed. His mouth watered at the sight of freshly baked bread and roast beef. There were two plates on the tray and he picked one up greedily, sitting on the bed and balancing the plate in his lap. He stuffed a bite of meat and bread into his mouth and glanced up at Vivid, who was lingering beside the tub uncertainly.
The Sun Guardian Page 18
