by Jon Hollins
For a moment Balur was actually speechless. “You—” he started. “You are …?” He shook his head. “If this is being how elves are fighting,” he said finally, “then there is being a reason they were chased back to the forests.”
With that, he left the stupid fucking room.
He was waiting impatiently for the tavern to open when the group of fifteen or so elves found him. It was a mixture of hard-looking men and women.
“You,” said a women. “You pinned the firestarter by the neck?”
Balur rolled his shoulders. He had half-expected this, had been looking forward for a chance to work out some of his pent-up aggression. He decided he wouldn’t use his swords. He wanted blood on his knuckles.
He leaned toward the woman. “I was calling her on her horse dung. And I was calling everyone who follows her without questioning on their horse dung as well. She will lose this fight for you.” He curled his lips, showed his teeth.
Let us be seeing what fangs you are having, little one.
And then, from the back of the group, Ethen stepped forward. “I told you,” he said.
The woman held Balur’s yellow eyes steadily. Then she nodded. “Good,” she said. “We agree. So let’s talk about how we’re actually going to win.”
26
Mistakes Were Made
Will woke, and found that despite everything, he had a smile on his face. Dragons still controlled Avarra. Lette still showed little inclination to allow him into her heart, or even ride his body around the bedroom like a hobby horse. Most of the elves treated him with barely concealed disdain. And yet still he was happy.
There was a satisfaction to the work they were doing here. The raids he was helping to organize—they were making a difference in Tamar. They were part of a slow but steady change in the tenor of the country’s rulership. The people would not put up with Diffinax’s oppression forever. The people of Kondorra hadn’t. And this time, it wasn’t some slapdash accident that would push the populace over the edge, but a carefully coordinated effort. This time, things would go smoothly.
And on top of all that—he was doing everything from within the safety of a heavily defended, barely penetrable forest. All the people interested in introducing sharp bits of metal to his spleen were in an entirely different country. It was fantastic.
He washed and dressed quickly, then headed out into Elmington. The day was fresh and young, branches rattling and a slight breeze whispering about him. The early morning bustle of elves made the wooden walkways thrum beneath his feet. Below, carts were spread out in preparation for today’s return to Birchester.
He headed down a spiraling set of stairs—little more than notches circling the trunk of a tree. There weren’t many tasks left to be done, but he just liked being in the thick of things. He prowled between the carts, plucking at ropes, checking the wheels for rotten spokes.
“Restless?”
Will looked up. It was Afrit, Quirk’s friend from Tamathia. She held a bundle of sticks in one hand. She saw him looking at them.
“Pine,” she said. “I mean … they’re pinewood. It’s light. Celter … one of the elves. She told me that pine is good for arrows. I’m trying to work out how to make them.” She smiled apologetically. “I’m not very good still.”
Will smiled sympathetically. “You were a professor, weren’t you?” he said. “Before all this.”
“Practical politics,” she said.
Will guessed that must be a subject of study.
“I am, by the way,” he said. And then off her look, “Restless, I mean.”
“Me too.” She nodded.
They hadn’t really gotten to know each other well in the weeks they had been raiding into Tamar. Afrit had tended to steer clear of him and Lette and Balur. He had seen her several times, standing apart, waiting until Quirk walked away from them.
“So,” she said after an awkward pause, “you were the prophet of Kondorra?”
“Erm …” Will said, because that wasn’t strictly true. “For a while some people thought I was.”
“I read what Quirk wrote about you.” Afrit studied her arrows.
“Quirk wrote about us?” She had, Will thought, stayed very quiet on that subject.
“Oh.” Afrit studied the arrows harder. “I didn’t realize … She wrote about everything. The dragons mostly, of course. But everyone was interested in … well, everything. The whole social history of the uprising. So she wrote about that too. You were obviously important.”
Will tried to absorb that. People in a country he had never personally visited had read all about him.
“Gods,” he said. “No wonder you normally avoid us.”
“What … I … oh …” Afrit looked about, apparently for any patch of earth that seemed like it might conveniently swallow her. “No. It’s just …” She seemed to reassess her exit strategy, and then collapsed inward, sighing. “I’m sorry. I … Okay, this is just embarrassing. I was what can best be described as a fan of Quirk’s. Academically she is my … was … I idolized her. It was pretty awkward. We’ve got past that, obviously. But it’s still …” If Afrit twisted her pine sticks any harder she was going to be left making some very short arrows. “Anyway, she doesn’t really talk about Kondorra. And I mean, obviously I’ve read everything she wrote about it all. And attended all her lectures.”
“Obviously,” Will said.
“But that’s all from her perspective. And I was just sort of wondering …” Afrit hesitated. “What was she like? Quirk, I mean. When she was there?”
Will thought about that. About everything that had been said and done there. Finally he said, “Increasingly angry.”
Afrit waited for more. Will waited to see if he had more. Then a question occurred to him.
“Wait,” he said. “Are you and she …?”
Afrit’s blush was readily apparent, despite the darkness of her skin. “No,” she said quickly. “No, no, no. I’m not. We’re not.” She looked up at Will, a look of slight desperation in her eyes. “I don’t think she’s interested in that sort of thing at all.” Another desperate glance. “Is she?”
It was Will’s turn to consider if legging it for the trees was socially acceptable.
“I don’t … I wouldn’t …” He spluttered. Then, because Afrit’s desperation seemed to demand it, he gave it two seconds of thought. “No,” he said. And then, because it seemed like the right thing to say, “Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” she said. She seemed a little more at ease now that that was out of the way. “Friends is good. I can live with friends.”
Will considered. Were he and Quirk friends? He wasn’t sure. He thought she found him familiar in this sort of situation, but … friendship?
What about him and Lette?
“I hope so,” he said finally. It seemed the best resolution to what was essentially a bit of a mess. He sought desperately for a new topic to take them far, far away from this one.
“If you are friends with Quirk,” he said, forcing cheer into his voice at knife point, “would you mind having a word with her about this idea of joining forces with Vinland? I keep bringing it up, but I think she’s stopped listening to me.”
“Vinland?” Afrit looked at him askance. “You want to align with the Vinlanders?”
Why? Will wondered. Why does everyone look at me like I’ve started lactating when I say that?
But rather than say that, he said, “Yes. They’ve held the dragons off. They’re so enamored with Barph that they’re basically impervious to the dragons’ criticisms of the gods. They’re an obvious ally. And our forces stand a greater chance united.”
“The Vinlanders,” Afrit repeated, in a more contemplative tone. “A nation of people who have dedicated themselves to the worship of Barph, the god of, basically, drunken anarchy. A god whose entire corpus of mythology consists of him consuming vast amounts of wine, and then talking people into doing incredibly unwise things. In fact”—she held a finger up in
the air—“from what Quirk has written, he’s basically a godlike version of your friend Firkin. That’s who the people of Vinland worship. A giant, almost omnipotent version of your village drunk.”
“But—” Will started, then found he knew exactly why everyone had looked at him like that.
“And,” said a familiar voice, “he’s an absent god, who never manifests, or does anything whatsoever, so worshipping him is a particularly stupid thing to do.”
Will found himself wishing that Lette had not arrived at this exact juncture.
“Is Will talking about Vinland again?” Quirk’s voice also wended its way between the wagons, quickly followed by its owner. She was rolling her eyes as she approached. It was not, Will thought, half as appealing a habit on her as it was on Lette.
“I wasn’t—” Will started.
“Yes you were!” Afrit stared at him outraged. “You were literally just asking me to make your case to Quirk on your behalf.” She seemed simultaneously more relaxed and more on edge as Quirk approached. She pushed one braid behind her ear.
“I think you’re misunderstanding the point I was trying to make.” Will lied straight through his teeth.
“I think you misunderstood the bit where you’re not meant to make a jackass of yourself.” Lette wrapped a companionable arm around his shoulder.
Will was momentarily struck dumb by the fact that this was the sweetest thing Lette had said to him since they met in a Batarran brothel.
Carefully Lette removed her arm.
“I should probably …” said Afrit, stepping away, looking down at her feet, and clearly with no intention of actually finishing that sentence.
“Actually.” Quirk caught Afrit by her sleeve. “I was wondering, have you seen Ethen this morning?”
Afrit furrowed her brow. “Ethen? No.”
Quirk wrinkled her nose. “Gods piss on it. It’s already after I wanted to leave. I said to him …” She shook her head. “Him and a bunch of his cronies. They’re all …” She waved a hand vaguely at the forest.
“Have you tried the tavern?” Lette asked.
Quirk nodded. “First place I looked. I thought I might find Balur there as well.” She looked at Lette. “You don’t know where he is, do you? This time I picked a staging ground without a brothel to try and avoid exactly this sort of problem.”
Afrit cocked her head. “So Ethen and Balur are missing?”
“Well.” Quirk shrugged. “The word missing seems excessive. ‘Temporarily misplaced.’”
“Is Ethen the superaggressive one that weighs about eighty pounds?” Will asked. There were a lot of elves, and he still had trouble remembering everyone’s names.
“How many cronies?” asked Lette. Her eyes had narrowed again. “And are we sure we want to be seen in public using the word cronies?”
Quirk looked at Lette. “You’re suggesting something, aren’t you? What are you suggesting?”
“That using archaic words like cronies makes us sound like the sort of people who shouldn’t be allowed to organize large military raids into neighboring countries.”
“Not that,” Quirk snapped. “The other thing.”
Lette opened her mouth.
Which was when they heard the running feet. They all turned to look, trying to peer between the thicket of parked wagons. Will grabbed the side of one, hoisted himself up for an unobstructed view. So he was the first one to see Balur come tearing into the clearing.
The lizard man was bleeding heavily from a broad gash to the skull and another to his arm. His armor was blackened, and a savage burn crept up over his right shoulder. Ethen was close behind him. Half the elf’s hair was gone, and the left-hand side of his face was lost in blood. There were a few others, ragged, half-broken, stumbling in their wake.
Balur looked up, saw Will, adjusted his course. He came around the corner, saw all of them gathered together.
“Oh fuck.” Lette hung her head, started to shake it.
“What?” Quirk looked from Balur to Lette, back to Balur. Her eyes were wide, her breath coming quickly. “What have you done?”
Balur held up a finger, sucked down a few lungfuls of air, met Quirk’s eye, looked away, breathed heavily a few more times, and then finally said, “Okay, I am admitting it. Raiding their encampment was not being a fantastic idea.”
27
Monstrous Truths
Lette had been tortured before. It was an occupational hazard. And so she knew that everyone broke. It didn’t matter how tough you were: Everyone had a limit. And knowing that meant that she normally gave up information pretty quickly. Being certain of the inevitable endpoint, she was generally inclined to avoid the messy middle. Occasionally she had toughed it out, either waiting for Balur to arrive, or simply because the prick torturing her was just so very annoying. And she had found that she had a pretty high tolerance for a lot of your average torturer’s bullshit. But just like everyone else, in the end, she always broke.
Still, she was fairly sure that the one secret she might actually take to her grave was that she loved Balur.
It was not a romantic love. That was one reason she would never admit it. Because Balur would never be able to understand that. But it was not exactly like the tiny ember of love she still kept alight for her parents and her siblings either. Which would only complicate matters should she need to describe it. It was simply this: that she would defend him to the death. And she had no doubt he would do the same.
He called them a tribe from time to time, but it was not that. Tribe could betray tribe. Tribe could kick out the weak. Tribe could be ruthless, in a way she found herself powerless to be. No, she would defend Balur no matter what incredibly stupid or dangerous thing he did.
Like bring a fucking dragon down on their heads, for one very specific example.
28
Monstrous Consequences
Lette saw the look in Quirk’s eyes and before she quite realized what she was doing, she put a knife to the woman’s throat.
“There’s no time for that,” she whispered into Quirk’s ear.
Afrit saw the reflection of light on the blade, let out a yell, and lunged, but Lette was already pulling the knife away. She stepped, stiff-armed the professor in the solar plexus, and brought the woman to a sharp halt.
Then she took a breath.
She could hear shouting. Stamping feet. She could hear branches breaking. The feet of the elves tapping on the walkways above. She could hear the horses for the wagons shuffling about. Smell the tang of their shit and piss. She could smell the sap where branches had been sawed from trees to make fresh arrows and bows. Last night’s rabbit being heated up over breakfast fires. She could feel a slight thrum in the ground beneath the leaves at her feet.
And she could hear the beating of wings.
“Abandon the wagons. Abandon everything.” She spoke low and fast. “And run.”
Then she turned and did just that.
Lette had come to like these elves. They were insular, and rude, and were so accustomed to poverty that they didn’t even realize they should complain about it, but they were also tough as old leather, and didn’t give a shit about what you thought. They did not play half as many harps as bards suggested. In fact she suspected bards mostly just wanted to believe that somewhere out there was someone who believed all the harp practice they did was sexy and worthwhile. Most of the elves she had met, though, would rather use a harp to make a fire that they could roast a bard’s balls over.
But despite liking them, there was no way she was going to hang around and get killed by a dragon on their behalf. Gods, she was helping them all by setting a good example. If they all just turned and hoofed it, then they’d all be fine and dandy. Or at least they would be for about thirty seconds longer than if they stood still.
She covered ten yards, heard Balur’s heavy footsteps fall in behind hers.
Fifteen yards. Quirk started screaming at people that they needed to run.
Thirty
yards. Quirk began to run as she shouted.
Forty yards. Elves were asking what was going on. A few were starting to move. More people were yelling from between the wagons.
Fifty yards. Had she imagined it? Had she made a fool of herself? Was there no dragon coming?
Fifty-six yards. The whole world detonated. A series of short, sharp blows to her skin and her sanity. Heat roiled over her. And no, she had not made a fool of herself. The screams confirmed it. The cracking wood and sound of parting flesh confirmed it. The sense of horror in her gut confirmed it. Splinters and shrapnel peppered the ground around her. Branches slapped at her. The ground churned beneath her feet. Fear rode her as if she wore a saddle and bridle.
Seventy yards. Chaos. A churning, roaring tidal wave of madness racing after her. A deer burst past her, its antlers on fire. Screams and running feet swallowed the world behind her. Waves of heat rose and fell at her back. She could hear the forest burning. Living wood cracked and shrieked in protest at the impossible heat. She couldn’t make out the individual screams anymore. She did not dare look back.
A hundred yards. Balur pulled up alongside her, head down, eating up the ground with long, loping strides. When she glanced over at him, he did not meet her eye. Blood ran freely from the wounds in his head and arm, leaving a trail of glistening beads behind him.
A hundred and twenty yards. Trees were falling, crashing to the ground. Something vast was in the forest behind them. It roared. A massive sound. The ground trembled as if in fear. Heat battered her, the fire racing her, pace for pace. Drops of sweat poured off her like rats fleeing a sinking ship.
A hundred and fifty yards. Starting to get a sense for the size of the group fleeing with her. More than she had suspected at first. There were more figures in the corners of her eyes. She glanced, caught sight of elves. And then Will. Head down, legs pumping. Her heart skipped a beat it couldn’t afford to miss.
