Robbing Centaurs and Other Bad Ideas

by Bethany Meyer

  “You put a horse. . . in the bag?”

  “Yes! Stop yelling about it!”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don't need her all the time, and I don't want her wandering off when I forget to tie her up, so she's in the bag!” Archer opened the flap of the bag for a moment, and a horse's snort came from within like a greeting.

  Now so thunderstruck that he could say nothing, Wick wordlessly took the dead flower and tucked it inside his messenger's bag.

  A mile or so later, when Wick had come to terms with the fact that Archer kept a horse inside his unfillable bag with the Satyr's Crown and goodness knew what else, he got up the courage to ask, “What else do you have in the bag?”

  “Why is it any of your business?” Archer demanded.

  Wick turned to him and exclaimed, “Because if you have a horse in your bag, I'd like to know what else is in there!”

  Archer rolled his eyes. “Not much else. The horse, two pieces of the Heather Stone, some cooking supplies for when I want to make something nice to eat, a cloak if I want it, some other food that will keep for a few days– those are in a bag by themselves inside the bag– some rocks, and. . .” He stopped himself, looked at Wick incredulously, then mumbled something under his breath.

  “What did you say?” Wick asked, almost certain it was some snide comment about him.

  Archer mumbled again, staring at the ground in front of him.

  “What?” Wick demanded. “Speak up!”

  “A river,” Archer finally said, raising his head and taking up a defensive stance as though he dared Wick to say anything about it.

  But Wick did have something to say about it. “There's a what in the bag?”

  Archer didn't break eye contact. “I think you heard me.”

  Wick took a moment to process, then collected himself to say what he was going to say next. “Why is there a river in the bag?”

  “In case I need it.” Archer rolled his eyes. After a moment of awkward silence, he muttered, “I dropped the fair folk's piece of the Heather Stone in a river when I was crossing down from satyr territory, and I couldn't find it again, so I stuck the bag in the river and just took the whole thing out. Once the river was out of the way, I found the piece lodged in the riverbed and kept going.”

  “Without putting the river back.”

  “I was in a hurry! I had satyrs looking all over the place for me after I stole their stupid crown, and getting the river back out would be harder than putting it in, so I haven't had time to get it back out yet.”

  Wick eyed the bag. It did seem to be bulging, but he couldn't imagine an entire river being inside it. Or a horse. Or a lot of things. And yet the entire Satyr's Crown was supposed to be in there. “How can taking the river back out be any more complicated than it was putting it in? Just open the flap and let it out!”

  “I told you, it would be complicated!” Archer bellowed. “I have a lot of things in there that I still want, and if I let the river out without collecting it all first, it would all wash away and I'd never find it all again! Sasha would be drowned in the mudslide! It's more complicated than it sounds!”

  Wick blinked, another strange sight on his face that made Archer's eyes bug out in shock. “Who's Sasha?”

  “The horse!”

  Wick decided that now was the best possible time to stop trying to make sense of this seraph and continued walking without saying another word.

  They kept walking, cresting hills and climbing through patches of rocks and thick bushes whenever the terrain got rugged.

  Wick had to keep reminding himself that Archer was individually robbing every race in Aro, and he had to be turned in at the first opportunity.

  Sometimes reminding himself wasn’t so hard.

  “Are you just going to let me have the bag already?” Archer asked, having apparently reached a point where he thought being irritating would get him what he wanted. “You wouldn't have to walk all this way for no reason if you just gave it to me. Then we wouldn't have to put up with one another.”

  “No,” was all Wick said.

  “It wouldn't be difficult to just do nothing. Have you ever tried to do that? Do nothing? There probably hasn't been a day in your life where you weren't running like you were in a race. You don't seem like the type to stop. You'll keep running until you're dead.”

  “You don't seem any different,” Wick said.

  Archer leaned sideways and stared at Wick with an exaggerated expression of concern. “I can't tell if you're joking. I am nothing like that, and I would have thought you could tell.” His expression soured, and then he stood up straight and kept walking. “I can't even tell you how irritating it is trying to read your face. Is there even anything to read? Do you even make expressions? Why do you even have a face?” He raised his hands in defeat. “You don't have a mouth. You don't have eyebrows. You barely have a nose. And I'm not even going to get started on how scary it is trying to look you in the eye. It's like staring into. . . I don't even know. How can anybody have a conversation with you for more than five minutes without losing part of their soul looking at your eyes?”

  If Wick gave a reasonable explanation, he would only be criticized more. He remained silent.

  In reality, while the other creatures used expressions to convey their feelings, the leshy used inflections of the voice and what faint feelings they could transmit telepathically. Many years of reading expressions had made Wick used to them, but the other leshy tended to find the changing faces unnerving.

  A little after noon, Wick stopped on a nice hilltop clear of trees and nearly set his bag down before he thought better of it.

  “Why have we stopped?” Archer demanded. “We're going at a good pace. We're just passing centaur territory now. If we keep going at this pace, we'll get to the seraph piece the day after tomorrow, in the evening. Perfect time for thieving.”

  “I need sun,” Wick said. “You had your food, now I need sun.”

  “But I could eat food without stopping,” Archer pointed out. “You're stopping. And you were standing in the sun for ages when I was following you. Hours, probably. Half the day. How long is this going to take?”

  Wick was tempted to roll his eyes at the exaggeration, but he fought the urge. “Only an hour or so, and then we can carry on. I had a good long time in the sun yesterday, so I just have to recharge a short while today and then I shouldn't need any more until sometime tomorrow.”

  Archer lowered himself into a seat against a rock and watched Wick dig his feet into the soil. “How long can you go without sun?” he asked. It was strange hearing a genuinely curious question from him.

  “A few days,” Wick said. “But it gets less and less comfortable, and I'll get slower and stiffer as I go. I won't be able to think as clearly. Sort of like if you didn't eat food.”

  “Sort of,” Archer said, making the so-so gesture with one hand. He said nothing more as Wick got himself settled and raised his face to the sun.

  With his feet in the soil, sun time rejuvenated Wick a little faster, and he was ready to continue in less than an hour. When he pulled his feet out of the earth, Archer inhaled deeply and picked his chin up off his palm. He had nearly fallen asleep.

  “All right, let's keep going,” Wick said. He almost added that they could still be to the seraph citadel in good time, but refrained when he realized that saying that would be encouraging the theft, and that was exactly the opposite of what he was trying to do. He decided to say nothing.

  A DAY AND A HALF later, they were only a few miles from Eri.

  The problem was, in order to reach Eri, Archer was saying that they would have to somehow cross a gaping stone canyon. A canyon that seemed to be kept from falling to pieces by dozens of massive iron chains.

  Wick took a step back.

  Archer had to be joking.

  But his smile was not the smile of someone who was joking. It was the smile of someone who was compl
etely serious and loved what the sincerity was causing.

  Somewhere, the seraphs who had chosen to build these chains in place of a real bridge had to be laughing just as loudly.

  “We can't cross here!” Wick spun to face Archer, hoping the suggestion was all for show and that Archer really did know the way around the canyon that yawned in front of them. “There's nothing to cross on!”

  “Sure there is.” Archer took a few steps backward, stepping out onto one of the waist-thick chains that stretched across the canyon.

  Wick jumped forward to stop him from falling, but Archer's balance never wavered. To make a point, he took one bare foot off the chain and stuck it out to the side, balancing on one leg with his good wing extended for balance.

  Wick lunged toward him. “Stop that. You're going to fall.”

  “Calm down.” Archer put his second foot back on the chain and turned around to face the way he was going over the canyon. “I've walked this way dozens of times before. A hundred times. A thousand, maybe.”

  “It can't be a thousand.”

  “Maybe it isn't. But I'm not going to fall, and you won't fall either so long as you focus on balancing rather than talking. Now come on. It's the only way to get to where we want to go, short of walking thirty miles west and going around, then walking thirty miles back on the other side.” Then he turned around and kept going, walking across the canyon on the chains. He didn't look back.

  Wick fought with himself. It was one thing to want to go across the canyon to get to the other side, it was another thing to make himself go across.

  But he had to. Didn't he? He wanted to first see what he was up against.

  He took a quick look over the edge and realized it would have been better not to. The drop was massive.

  Only seraphs would build something like this. If he fell, it would be fatal. It was dark at the bottom, but he could make out a few shapes. Whether they were rocks or bushes or even figures of his imagination, it didn't matter; even if the bottom was made of pillows, the height of the fall would kill him. And while the chains appeared to be strong and attached securely to the sides of the canyon, his mind filled with images of them pulling loose and plunging him into oblivion. If he fell, a few of the chains were close enough together for him to grab onto one and pull himself back up, but if a limb were caught it would break, wouldn't it?

  A terrible thought crossed his mind.

  Wick called to Archer over the drop of the canyon. “This isn't how you broke your wing, is it?”

  He hadn't dared approach the subject of Archer's wing before now. From the way Archer never touched it, never extended it, never looked at it, he could tell it was a subject that was best left alone. But if Wick fell and that was likely to be his fate or worse, he wanted to know.

  The last few syllables of the shouted question bounced off the walls of the canyon more than once before Archer responded. Without slowing his steady stride across the chain or even looking around, he shouted back.

  “No.”

  No.

  Archer shouted again. “Now come on.”

  Wick decided that thinking about it wasn't serving him, and before he could waste another moment in speculation, he stepped out onto the chain.

  It immediately wavered under his feet, but not as much as he had thought it would. The sheer weight of the chain kept it from swaying further than an inch from side to side. And for now, at least, the wind was low.

  Which meant that his main concern was balancing.

  The links of the chain were huge, most of them three to four feet in length. Some of them had small clumps of grass or swatches of moss growing on them, and more than a little grime from birds and weather coated the part he was trying to walk on.

  But somehow, Archer was crossing, and somehow, Wick already managed to make it a good ten feet away from the edge of the canyon, so somehow, he had to make it the rest of the way across.

  One foot in front of the other. He just couldn't fall.

  The wind started up as he reached the middle of the canyon, but he forced himself to keep moving forward. Stopping would not make the wind go away. The wind grew stronger, so strong he was starting to worry it would knock him off the chain. Then, as it was getting to its climax, the wind cut out.

  That, of course, was when one of Wick's feet slipped.

  His heart nearly stopped. He tried to catch his balance again, tried to lean back to an upright position, but his own weight was pulling against him, and now the chain link he stood on was tilting just slightly, and oh no I'm going to fall.

  He had chosen a chain that was very close to another chain in case he needed to catch himself, but now that he was about to fall, he saw the folly in it. If he fell the wrong way, he could break his arm, or worse, he could snap his neck.

  This whole thing had been a terrible idea.

  But as he started to fall, somehow the foot that had slipped landed on top of the chain next to him. He caught a firm foothold. And then some part of his mind must have been still in perfect order because instead of falling, instead of flailing, instead of tilting over and getting his neck broken on the way down, he calmly stepped from one chain onto the other with all the grace of a trained dancer.

  He could have felt proud of it if it weren't for the moment of absolute panic before his foot touched down.

  After that, he focused on staring at the other side of the canyon and kept walking. A few hair-raising moments later, he made it to the other side of the canyon without slipping again.

  Archer made it to the other side a moment or two before Wick, and when Wick set foot on the other side, he frowned just a little bit and said, “I could have sworn you started on a different chain.”

  “So could I,” Wick said, looking behind him at the death trap he had just convinced himself to cross.

  “You don't. . .” Archer trailed off. He tried again. “You don't by any chance want to go solo on this one?”

  “What do you mean?” Wick asked.

  “You could just get the piece and I'll wait outside the city for you?”

  “And when I'm caught and arrested, I'll be the one to take the blame?” Wick gave Archer a hard stare. “I don't think so. I'm not even planning to do any of the robbing, if it's all the same to you. I'm just here to keep an eye on you, not to be an accessory to whatever crimes you plan to commit while you're here.”

  “At least I tried,” Archer said in a disparaging tone. “Well–” He shrugged, then looked over at Wick with a curious tilt to his head, “are you ready to rob some seraphs?”

  Something inside Wick itched to run away, to drag his traveling companion by the collar to the nearest authorities as quickly as possible, but he was still waiting to see if Archer could produce any proof. After only the briefest moment's hesitation, he nodded.

  They entered the city to rob it.

  Chapter Seven

  The First of Many

  Faulty Schemes

  THEY TRIED TO ATTRACT little attention while entering the city. For the moment, Archer was too busy trying to stay out of sight to breathe any mention of the upcoming robbery, so for the moment, Wick comfortable.

  But he still knew that he had willingly agreed to steal something. He also knew there was a chance that the proof he was waiting for didn't exist. That bothered him.

  For the moment he tried to distract himself with the glorious architecture of the city.

  The seraphs built beautiful cities. He had never been to Eri itself in the past, but he had been to several of the seraph's other citadels delivering messages and paying visits to important people, and all of them had been equally stunning.

  Seraph cities found a balance between working with the landscape and using the landscape to their advantage. Some trees had been cleared to build the city, but most of the larger ones had been left standing, and the large rock formations that covered the hillsides had not been moved. The seraphs built their buildings and
houses against the sides of the trees, up, up, up, into the sky. Bridges went over rocks, balconies leaped from incredible heights. Hardly anything had a railing. After all, if one fell, one could just fly, couldn't they?

  Unless, of course, one was not a seraph. The seraphs were fun-loving and lighthearted at their centers, even if they were reckless, and rather than trying to catch anyone who might fall, the seraphs loved to watch from their balconies and laugh uproariously at the visitors as they clutched their injured limbs. Many a silly tale was told at feasts and festivals about the wingless folk that plummeted from balconies, and the number of injuries never stopped the seraphs from singing their songs about the wonders of their cities.

  Wick noticed Archer didn't even look around at the glittering windows or the elegant architecture. Of course, he might have been here before, but he never even glanced up at the buildings. He greeted no one. Wick knew that greeting neighbors upon arriving home was only something the leshy did, but he would have thought that Archer would have at least acknowledged someone as he wove through the trees and under hanging houses. Now that he was paying attention, Archer seemed to be keeping out of sight as much as possible.

  Probably because he was trying not to be recognized.

  Wick tried to put everything else out of his mind and focus on what he was going to do to get Archer arrested. So far, his plan was teetering on the delicate line between weak and nonexistent.

  He wondered if he was doing the right thing. The rational part of his mind reminded him just how unlikely it was that the world could be ending without the centaurs knowing about it. If he acted now, while they were still in the city, he could still get Archer caught.

  But what if Archer was telling the truth? What if something horrible was coming? Wick could try to turn Archer in, but what if Archer was the only thing between Aro and destruction? It seemed unlikely, but what if it was true?

  He turned a corner and suddenly, there was Eland, across the street, talking to a tall, red-haired seraph.

  Wick's heart almost stopped. Eland would recognize both Wick and Archer on the spot. And if he did, who knew what would happen. Wick had to get himself and Archer out of sight, now.