The girl nodded slowly and took a moment to wipe away her tears. She must have already suspected the truth. “I… okay.”
“Chin up,” Avraniel said almost gently. “They gave their lives, so you could get away from those mercenaries. If you have any respect for them at all, you’ll make sure they didn’t die for nothing.”
* * *
They managed to travel for about an hour before the girl began to look like she would keel over and die the next time they had to climb a hill. Avraniel scoffed. Pathetic. When she’d been a kid, she’d already been running off and wandering around on her own although they had almost always managed to drag her back in the end. She hadn’t had any parents, and nobody had liked her much, not that she’d liked them either, but they still hadn’t wanted to let her leave and do her own thing. In her opinion, elves were mostly arrogant jerks who believed they were better than everyone else despite all the evidence to the contrary. If elves were so great, then why was the biggest, most powerful empire in the world run by humans? The elves of Everton hadn’t expanded their territory in centuries, and from what she’d heard, elves around the world were little better. They seemed content to savour past glories when real glory was right there for the taking if only they had the guts to reach out and grab it.
As a kid, Avraniel had pushed herself harder than anyone else. She wouldn’t be like the others. She wouldn’t sit there and wait for the world to hand her a place. She’d find her own place in the world, and if she couldn’t find one, she’d make one. Even in her youth, she’d been able to keep on the move for hours, slipping through the densest parts of the forest with ease or simply leaping from branch to branch. Right now, she was sticking to the ground to give the kid a chance, but it hadn’t helped. The kid was a pushover, plain and simple. It was no wonder those mercenaries had been laughing. The kid was easy prey. She wouldn’t have lasted a day in the forest on her own even without the mercenaries. Hell, the squirrels could probably beat her in a fight if they attacked her together.
“Seriously?” Avraniel grabbed the girl and hoisted her over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes. She’d gone to the effort of saving her earlier, so she wasn’t about to let her die of exhaustion now. Avraniel ran through the forest until she spotted a clearing with a tree stump in it. The girl gave a cry of outrage as Avraniel plonked her down on the tree stump. “You’re tired already? We’ve been going for an hour. I know you’re only half elf, but I expected at least a couple of hours out of you.”
The girl glared. “I am tired. Mercenaries killed my guards. I only met them last week, but they were nice to me! And I’ve been running away from those mercenaries all day! I don’t think I’m doing too badly, all things considered.”
Avraniel chuckled. “You’ve got guts, kid, talking back to me like that. But the mercenaries caught you, so I wouldn’t say you were doing well.” The girl sniffled, and Avraniel covered her face with one hand. More tears? And why did she even care if the girl cried? Maybe all of her time alone in the forest with only squirrels for company had driven her insane. “Fine. How long were you able to keep away from those mercenaries?”
“Maybe… maybe two hours.”
“Well, well, well.” Avraniel tossed the girl a gourd of water. “That’s not completely hopeless, especially from some elf lord’s daughter. I guess running and hiding is all you can do when you’re not strong enough to fight.” As insulting as it sounded, she didn’t mean it as an insult. Only an idiot would fight if they had no chance of winning. The girl had enough brains to realise she couldn’t win a fight, so she’d done the next best thing and had chosen to run and hide instead. “Let me tell you something, kid, and I won’t even charge you extra for it either. The world isn’t nice, or fair, or kind, or good, or any of that crap – not unless someone makes it that way. If you want the world to be like the fairy tales, you know, all heroes and good guys and legends, then you better get stronger, strong enough to make it that way.”
The girl nodded slowly and gulped down some water. Avraniel grimaced and grabbed the gourd to keep the girl from drinking too much. She’d only vomit it out later, which would be messy and a waste of good water.
“What about you?” the girl murmured. “I’ve… I’ve never heard of an elf with such powerful fire magic.”
Avraniel shook her head as the girl offered her the gourd. She wasn’t even winded, never mind thirsty. “I’ve always had strong fire magic. In fact, I’ve never met anyone with fire magic stronger than mine.” She grinned. “It’s convenient. If someone picks a fight with me, I can just set them on fire and let nature do the rest.” She cackled evilly and conjured tendrils of shimmering fire before letting them fade away. “It has other benefits too. I never feel cold, and I can walk through fire without getting burned. What about you? I can tell you’ve got magic, and with a bastard like Galterion as your father, you can’t be too weak. What does your magic do?”
“I have binding magic,” the girl replied. “It lets me bind and restrain things, especially things like ghosts, spirits, or demons.”
Avraniel laughed. “That sounds pretty damn lame, kid. It must not be too strong either since I didn’t see you using it on those mercenaries.”
The girl huffed. “What? My magic is not lame! I… I just haven’t practiced with it a lot. One day, I’ll become a ranger, and I’ll fight evil spirits and imprison demons and –”
“For your sake, I hope you’ve got a secondary form of magic because spirits and demons are one things, but you need to learn how to deal with all the normal crap people put up with, like people trying to stab you. Otherwise, you won’t last long. Hell, forget a secondary form of magic, you need to learn how to defend yourself in case you run into more trouble.” Avraniel’s eyes gleamed like molten gold. “Me? Even without my magic, I can put an arrow through someone’s eye from a mile away, and you can be damn sure that I know how to use all the usual stuff like swords, daggers, and spears. After I get you to that bastard you call a father, get him to teach you how to defend yourself. He might be a loser, but he knows how to fight.” She grinned. “When someone’s coming after you, it doesn’t matter how you deal with them. You can set them on fire, you can put a sword through their gut, or, hell, you can even bash them over the head with a rock. In the end, it’s all the same. Just make sure you win.”
“We only met today,” the girl said. “But I can already imagine you doing all of those things to people even the ones who aren’t exactly going after you.”
Avraniel’s lips curled. “You’re not so stupid, after all.” She tugged the girl to her feet. “We’ve rested long enough. We need to keep moving. There could be more mercenaries after you, and while I don’t leave a trail, you damn sure do. I can kill them all, but it’ll be annoying fighting them while making sure they don’t grab you. Besides, if they’re like the bunch I killed earlier, I doubt they’ll have anything good for me to take. For someone like you – someone valuable – people normally start off with the good mercenaries. Anyone else they send is going to be leftovers, jerks willing to go after a kid for a couple of coins.”
“But I can’t keep up with you,” the girl protested.
“We’ll go slower then, but we need to keep moving.” Avraniel turned and started walking. “Chin up, kid. At this pace, it’ll take us a week, maybe longer, to get to your father’s estate.” She chuckled as the girl looked about furtively. “And could you stop worrying about the monster? I told you. We’ll be fine.” Avraniel made a face. “Why didn’t any of those sons of bitches have a horse? It would have made things so much easier.”
The girl grimaced, but she did her best to keep up without wasting any air or energy on whining. Good. She was learning.
They kept going until nightfall although their pace had slowed to a crawl compared to the speed with which Avraniel normally travelled. She could have carried the girl, but she wasn’t going to become anyone’s pack mule. The girl had legs. She could walk. It wasn’t like she had anything
better to do either. She lived how she pleased, where she pleased, and right now, she didn’t mind walking through the forest with the girl. Those stupid squirrels could take care of themselves for a couple of weeks. It’d show them what a good deal they were getting, and it couldn’t hurt to take a trip through the forest every now and then. If something changed, she wanted to know about it before it became a problem. As night fell, she found a clearing, started a fire, and went off to find something for them to eat.
“Stay here.” Avraniel gestured to the forest around them. “And listen. Hear that?” The girl nodded. “Good. There are always noises in the forest. If it goes quiet, then you should start worrying. If that happens, hide. I’ll come back and kill whatever if making all the trouble. Hell, as long as it’s not a hydra, we can even eat it.” She cut a nearby branch off a tree and used her dagger and some fire to turn it into a makeshift spear. “Take this. I doubt it’ll do much good against anything really dangerous, but it’s better than nothing.”
“I don’t know how to use a spear.”
Avraniel scowled. “It’s not complicated, kid. See the pointy end?” The girl nodded. “Put the pointy end in whoever is attacking you. Who knows, if it’s a bear, it might save you the trouble and trip over and impale itself.”
“A bear?” the girl gasped. “There are bears here? Where?”
“This is the damn forest, kid. Of course, there are bears here.”
“Here?” the girl shrieked.
“Oh, shut up.” Avraniel sighed. “Not right here. Here as in… around. But if you keep shrieking, you might bring one of them over.” She tossed her cloak to the girl. “Most of the animals here don’t like me, but they know not to mess with me. If a bear turns up, put that on. It’ll leave you alone.” She bared her teeth. “Bears might be big, but they burn just as easily as everything else.” She headed out of the clearing. “Stay put. I’ll get us something to eat. I don’t know about you, but I am not eating berries or leaves for dinner.”
Avraniel didn’t have to eat much unless she used her magic a lot, and small fry like those mercenaries were barely worthy of consideration. She could fry thousands of chumps like them in her sleep. The girl was another story. She looked hungry enough to eat a cow or two. Avraniel caught two rabbits and murmured a brief prayer to the gods the elves worshipped. She might not like them, but she wasn’t stupid. The gods the elves worshipped were no joke. Crossing them was a bad, bad idea, and some of them liked rabbits, especially the fluffy ones. If offering them a prayer could keep them off her back, that’s what she’d do until she was strong enough to not have to worry about them. And, hey, at least most of them were upfront about what they wanted.
She got back to the clearing and tossed the rabbits to the girl. The girl gave an inelegant squawk and almost rolled into the fire in her haste to get away from the dead rabbits. Avraniel yanked the girl back before she could burn herself. “Get it together, kid. I did my bit. It’s time for you to do yours. I want those rabbits prepared and cooked.”
The girl gulped and poked one of the rabbits. “Um… how?”
Avraniel’s eyes narrowed. “What are you, some kind of princess? I know your father is an elf lord, but elf lords learn to hunt, and so do their children. Are you saying that you don’t know how to prepare and cook a rabbit? I was already doing that at half your age.”
Naturally, Avraniel left out the part about doing those things herself because nobody else wanted to do them for her and going to bed hungry sucked. On the upside, hunger was a great teacher. It was easy to learn when learning meant putting food in her belly.
The girl looked down at the ground. For a moment, only one, Avraniel almost felt bad. Then she remembered that the world was not a nice place, that the only way to make it a nice place was to be strong enough to make the world shut up and listen. Being weak or soft was a good way to end up dead, and coddling kids wouldn’t help them when things inevitably went to hell.
“My mother is a human noble. I… I don’t really get to go outside on my own much or do things like hunting or cooking.”
“Your life must suck,” Avraniel said before laughing at the girl’s outraged expression. “I still can’t believe it. That bastard had a child with a human noble? I’m going to laugh about this for years. The last time I ran into your father, kid, he went on and on about how elves are the greatest people in the world and how humans aren’t even fit to lick our boots. Damn.” She shook her head in disbelief. “He doesn’t even like other elves that much, but, hey, maybe he was in the mood for a good, hard…”
Avraniel trailed off. The kid didn’t need to hear that, and it wasn’t like she’d chosen her parents. She’d also realised something. “Never mind. I’m going to guess you’re not legitimate, which makes me wonder why you’re even here.” The girl’s jaw dropped in horrified amazement, and Avraniel reached over to close her mouth. “I’m not insulting you. I’m serious. Elf lords hardly ever sire bastards, and the ones that do usually pretend they don’t exist. It’s their version of honour. The most a bastard can usually expect is a cushy job and some gold.” The girl’s lips quivered, and Avraniel growled. “Don’t ever be ashamed of being a bastard. It’s not your fault. We don’t choose who our parents are, and anyone dumb enough to judge you isn’t worth a second more of your time. Take it from me, kid, if anyone should be ashamed, it’s your parents. It’s not like they had to screw each other.” Avraniel chuckled as the girl gave a slow, befuddled nod. “Good. You’re starting to wise up, but you still haven’t answered my question. Why are you going to see him?”
“I…” The girl hesitated. “He said he would legitimise me, but he wants to do it formally, according to the old ways.”
“Is that so? Well, congratulations, you will officially have a giant jerk for a father, and you’ll have to put up with the endless bundle of crap that is elf tradition. On the upside, if your father keels over and dies, you get a nice cut of his estate.” Avraniel sneered before reaching for one of the rabbits and drawing her dagger. The girl flinched away and gave a small shriek. “Oh, come on. I’m not going to stab you. If I wanted to stab you, you’d already be stabbed. What I am going to do is to teach you how to prepare and cook a rabbit. If we’re going to be stuck together for a week or so, you need to pull your weight.” She handed the girl a dagger and the other rabbit. “Take this and copy me but be very careful. Fire isn’t much good for healing people unless you count cauterising wounds shut as healing.”
“Do we have to?” the girl asked. The thought of cutting up the rabbit had her looking more than a little queasy.
“You need to learn how to do stuff like this. Sooner or later, everyone ends up stuck in the middle of a forest being hunted down by several dozen people who want to murder them. What are you going to do, ask for a break so you can get food from a tavern? And let’s say you do learn how to hunt, how are you going to eat what you kill if you don’t know how to prepare and cook it properly?” She snickered. “I guess you could try eating a rabbit with its fur still on.”
The girl swallowed thickly. “That sounds awful.”
“I’m sure it is. Now, do what I do.”
A surprisingly short time later – the girl was a quick learner although she very nearly emptied her stomach on no less than four separate occasions – they had prepared both rabbits and had them cooking over the fire.
The girl stared at her hands. “Do we have any water to wash our hands?”
“We don’t need any.” Avraniel gestured. Flame enveloped the girl’s hands, and she screamed like a banshee, only to fall silent when she wasn’t crippled by agonising pain. “Not bad, huh? Wasting water on clean up is a mess. I can just burn all the dirt and grime off, and my control is more than good enough to keep my fire from burning you.”
“Amazing… how did you learn to do this?” the girl whispered. She waved her hands around and watched the flames ebb and flow around her fingers.
“Practice makes perfect, and water is better
used for drinking and cooking than cleaning.” Avraniel gestured again, and the flames vanished. “Most people don’t realise it, but you can alter fire in a lot of ways. It’s not just about making it hotter. You can make it more force than heat if you want to blow something apart, and you can even control the direction that heat flows which is important if you’re trying to melt something without making a mess or if you don’t want to get caught in your own explosions.” She snapped her fingers, and a cloud of flame swirled to life around them before dissolving into sparks. “It helps that you’ve got magic of your own. I can feel it and use it to control my fire more accurately.”
The girl giggled as the sparks faded into nothingness. “I bet you learned because it reduced how much work you had to do.”
“Laziness makes the world go around, kid. Why do you think people invent stuff? It’s to save them time, effort, and money.” Avraniel glanced back at the rabbits and took a deep breath. “Those are done now. Eat up.”
They were enjoying dessert – the girl had rummaged through her pockets and discovered some candy, which she had oh so generous deigned to share with Avraniel – when the elf realised something. She must have been spending way too much time around the squirrels if it had taken her this long to notice it.
“Hey, kid, I just realised… I don’t even know your name. I could keep calling you ‘kid’, but it might make things complicated if we run into other travellers with kids.”
“Katarina Valerie Jenson.”
Jenson? Avraniel fiddled with one of her daggers. She spent most of her time in the forest unless she had something to sell or she was being paid very generously, but she recognised that name. “Wait! Isn’t that the same last name as one of the members of the Council?”
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