by Jon Hollins
Booing from the crowd. And gods, they molded themselves into the palm of his hand so quickly.
“I say we go down there. I say we pick a fight. I say we draw Barph out. I say we make our confrontation here. I say we take back Avarra now. I say this is our time.”
Cheers. Insane cheers. The crowd losing its goddamned mind. Just like that. Every single question Balur had put in their heads obliterated by the fire of Will’s speech.
Lette had been right. She’d been completely right. Will would destroy him up here.
Finally the cheering died down. Will looked at Balur, cocked an eyebrow.
“At what cost?” Balur shouted at him.
“At what cost?” Will turned the question over. He mused on it quietly, and everyone heard. And it was the right question to ask. It was the question that mattered. It was the question that could undo Will, but Balur just did not have the strength to throw a killing blow in this arena.
This was not life red of tooth and claw, but it was every bit as savage, and Will was the apex predator.
“Balur cares for the people of Essoa,” Will said. “He thinks their lives too precious. He thinks my plan a step too far. He asks at what cost. He wants you to see the blood my plan will spill and hate me for it. As he hates me for it.”
Silence. Just as absolute as before. And yet for Will, it did not seem so unkind. They were awaiting their cue. And Balur wanted to give it to them, but he did not have the words.
“It is a great cost,” Will said. And gods, he sounded so reasonable now. He sounded so connected to these people when he talked at them. If only they could talk with him and see what a mess he was. But of course, he would never allow that.
“It’s a terrible cost,” Will went on. “Hundreds of lives. Innocent lives perhaps. Perhaps more than hundreds. Barph is an uncaring god, and maybe he will be slow to defend his faithful. That is the cost.” Will nodded.
“You ask these people to be murderers,” Balur said. It was the best he could think of. And he did see some faces wavering. He did see a current of concern. If only he could somehow make it a tidal wave.
“Yes,” Will said. “Yes I do. And I do because of the very question you ask. At what cost? At what cost does our inaction come? At what cost do we ignore Essoa? At what cost do we allow Barph to rule? To thrive? At what cost, Balur? What cost would you have us pay? Would you have the world pay? What sort of man … or almost-man, I suppose, looks at this world and says it is okay to let it continue on its current path? Looks at it and says, a little longer under Barph won’t hurt? What sort of not-quite-man feels sympathy for Barph’s faithful servants here? For the people who have slashed into our ranks? Who have cut the throats of our loved ones? Who cherishes their lives? Who, Balur? What sort of faith does that man hold?”
The crowd was on its feet. The sound was immense. Will’s magically amplified voice barely audible. And this was the tidal wave. This was the power in the room. This was everything Balur had tried to capture. But he had failed. And now it was turned on him.
Lette had tried to warn him. He will destroy you. And he had thought she meant just defeat. But no, that was not it. He will destroy you meant “He will tear down what you stand for. He will turn you inside out in the minds of these people. He will make them hate you. He will make you the enemy.” That was what she had meant.
He should not have picked this fight. Not this way.
He looked off the stage. Cois was there. And there was fear in hir eyes.
The crowd was pressing in on the stage. They were pressing toward her. And Will’s smile was so wide it seemed to encompass the world.
Balur growled, set his feet. And perhaps there was something good in this. A clean death. A death where he tested his strength against the strongest thing he could find.
What a fucked-up world it was, where that was Will Fallows.
But then there was a hand on his arm. Cois’s hand. “Balur!” There was so much fear in hir voice. And this was not the death zhe wanted. His death could not save hir. And he did want to save hir.
“Balur!” His name again. Lette at the back of the stage, beckoning to him. “Move, you big arsehole!”
He hesitated. His claws itched for blood. People were clambering up on the stage.
“A tactical withdrawal!” Lette was almost screaming. Cois was hauling on his arm, dragging him toward Lette.
Will cocked his head to one side, a question Balur longed to answer.
But then Cois screamed. And he turned, and he ran.
They found shelter in the shadows of the slope leading down to Essoa. They crouched behind bushes. Cois was still trying to catch hir breath. Lette looked around.
“You can find refuge in the city,” she said. “For tonight at least. No one will look there.”
“No!” he said. Fury was still in him, still making him shout despite the packs of people looking to take out their anger on him. “Will has been taking these people, and their anger, something fucking pure, and he has been making something awful of it. Something perverted and wrong. And you are helping him.”
“I am helping you!” Lette’s voice was raised too.
“But you are not helping your people.”
“Avarra, Balur!” Lette was in his face. “Avarra is not just these people. These are ten thousand. There are millions to free. Millions. There are nations. It is a question of scale.”
“It is being a question of this whole plan having lost its way and having clambered up Will Fallows’s arsehole!”
And suddenly all the fight seemed to sag out of Lette in a great rush.
“He needs me, Balur. He needs me to hold on to his humanity.”
Balur laughed. It was loud and barking, and ill-advised enough to make Cois clutch at him again. But he couldn’t help it. “This is being him holding on?”
“Imagine how much worse it would be if I wasn’t here.”
“He has been going rabid, Lette.” He tried words one last time. “He is needing to be put down.”
Cois seemed to think this wasn’t enough. “Your boyfriend,” zhe said, “has become a fucking psychopath.”
Lette looked back up the hill. And there was so much pain in her expression Balur just could not hold on to the urge to damage her into seeing sense. “He’s still our best hope against Barph,” she said.
“Then there is being no hope.” That was all Balur could see now. The only place left to go was Essoa, and tomorrow an army would fall upon it.
Lette stepped away. “Good luck, Balur. Go quickly.”
“Be coming with us.” He knew it was weakness to ask, but she was tribe, and he couldn’t help himself. “Be finding another way.”
“These people need me.”
“These people are lost,” he said.
“Well, me leaving isn’t going to help them find their way.”
And that hurt.
“This isn’t a zero-sum game,” Cois said, picking up what Balur could not. “It isn’t just Will or Barph. We can find another way.”
Lette shook her head. “Getting you into Essoa is the best way I know how to help you. I’m sorry. Please, go. People are coming.”
Balur shook his head. It felt heavy and clouded and full of ugly thoughts. He took Cois’s hand. It was solid, and definite at least, for all that it trembled. Zhe pressed against him.
And then Balur turned his back on Lette, and Will, and the people who followed them. He turned his back on his cause, and he walked away.
52
Causality’s Casualty
There was chaos in the camp. Quirk felt storm tossed in it. People were everywhere, running and shouting and hunting for Balur—the lizard man who had somehow proven himself their champion, the one who was trying to save them from Will’s apocalyptic plan to pitch them all into a battle they couldn’t win. That was whose blood they were baying for.
A pack of men ran past her brandishing swords, screaming, “Death to the god lovers!” Someone crashed int
o her from behind, carried on without pausing to see if she was all right. Torches were lit. Quirk wondered if somewhere a cache of pitchforks was being broken out.
It was absurd. All of it. A farmer dreaming of deification. That farmer’s plan that they defeat a god with the aid of parlor tricks and sleight of hand. The willingness of the crowd to buy any line he tried to sell them, no matter the price. It was all falling apart. Whatever this dream had been, it was becoming a nightmare.
She needed to find Afrit. They had become separated in the chaos. She needed to talk to her about what to do about this. About what could be recovered.
She fought through the throng. She paused in pockets of still bodies and empty ground. She shouted Afrit’s name pointlessly—her voice drowned out by a thousand other shouts, some angry, some as lost as hers.
She plunged back into the stream of bodies who had somehow still not lost their enthusiasm for the search. They jostled and knocked at her. She was thrown to the ground more than once, almost trodden upon. Fire licked at the back of her mind, but that was the last thing this chaos needed. The dragons were already in the air, baying back and forth, spraying sheets of flame into the night sky, sending sheets of yellow illumination flickering through the crowds below.
It seemed as if hours had passed. Quirk felt exhausted. She was about to give up, about to head back to her tent, where in all likelihood Afrit had been weathering the storm, when she half tripped over a form in the dark.
“Gods!” she spat in misplaced anger, and then recovered herself a little. She had just kicked someone. Someone on the ground. She knelt.
“Are you …,” she started. Then the words died on her lips.
Afrit was lying on the ground.
“Afrit!” she shrieked. She shook the woman. Because she couldn’t be … she couldn’t …
She wasn’t.
Afrit groaned, raised a hand to her forehead. There was an ugly-looking tear in the skin above one eye. Blood coated one of her temples. “Think I took a tumble,” she said weakly.
“Gods.” Quirk lifted Afrit in both arms, carried her through the fields. She summoned fire now, heedless of what damage it might do, used it like a wedge to break up crowds and to fight her way back to their tent. When she got there, she lay Afrit down on the bedroll. She soaked a cloth in water from their skin and washed the worst of the blood away. Afrit smiled softly at her.
“What would I do without you?”
“Rest,” Quirk said. “I’ll pack.”
Afrit closed her eyes. Then she opened them again. “Pack what?”
“We’re leaving.” Quirk was surprised Afrit even had to ask.
“What?”
Quirk looked at her. Was she truly going to try to argue this point? She counted off the points on her fingers. “Will has gone power mad. The crowd has become a mob at his beck and call. He’s chased Balur and Cois out of this camp. He’s picking an unwinnable fight with Barph tomorrow. You just took a blow to the head.” She’d run out of fingers. “We have to leave.”
Afrit shook her head, then groaned and put a hand to it. “I’m not leaving,” she said.
“We’re leaving,” Quirk repeated. Afrit wasn’t even in a fit state to argue, in her opinion. “Just lie there. Rest. We’re going to have to travel soon, and get far away from this place. There’s no telling how much destruction tomorrow will bring.”
Afrit struggled to a sitting position, grunting as she did so. “Didn’t you hear what Will said?” she asked. “We’re facing down Barph tomorrow.”
Quirk stopped stuffing old clothes into their traveling packs. She fixed Afrit with as steely an eye as she could manage. “Did you not hear what Will said?” she asked. “Will is about to pick an unwinnable fight with a god and get us all killed.”
Afrit grimaced, trying to settle herself. “Why are you so convinced it’s unwinnable?”
“He’s a god, Afrit!” The vehemence of Quirk’s cry caught even her off guard, but she couldn’t stop. “Barph killed us all once already, and now he is infinitely more powerful. This is a seat of his power. We will die here. All of us.”
“All of us?” Afrit took the hand away from her cut. Blood was trickling down her forehead again. She blinked it away from her eye as she looked at Quirk. “I told you, this is bigger than me. This is bigger than us. This is all of Avarra.”
Quirk felt something rising inside her. Something like fire. And she did not want that here. Not with Afrit. Be the calm lake, she told herself. Be the absence of wind. Be the still trees.
“You mean more to me,” she said as calmly as possible, “than all of them. I can’t help that. I can’t change that.”
“I don’t want to mean that.” Lette shook her head grimly. “You can’t hang that much on my shoulders.”
“It’s not on you,” Quirk argued. Why was she so thickheaded about this? “This is me. This is how I have to live. We have to leave.”
“And what if everyone feels that way?” Afrit pressed. “What if everyone who is scared or afraid or in love—what if they flee now? What if they think their needs are bigger than the crowd’s? You say this fight is unwinnable. It will be if we run. If everyone thinks only of themselves. This is humanity’s chance. If we stick together. If we consider the needs of the whole. We can do amazing things.”
And they were all the right words. Of course they were. Afrit always had the right words. But just because they were the things one ought to say didn’t make them ring true in Quirk’s heart. And that dissonance just seemed to amplify all her frustrations.
“Why are you so set on dying here?” Her shield of calm was melting under the heat of her anger.
“Why are you set on abandoning everyone else to die?”
“Because I love you!”
And it was such a strange thing to shout those words in anger.
Lette paused, bit her lip. “And I love you,” she said. “But I won’t leave.”
“If you loved me, you’d leave.” It was out before she could stop it. And it wasn’t the right thing to say, but it was the honest thing. It was finally what she felt.
“If you loved me, you would never have said that.”
And now the floodgates of honesty were open, Quirk couldn’t stop herself. “That is such sanctimonious bullshit!” She stared around. “Who do you think you’re performing for? Who is judging you? Not every opinion has to be the correct one. Not everything you feel has to align with an agenda. It is okay to be selfish about the people you love.”
Afrit was shaking her head, blood dripping from the cut as she did so. “I don’t lie, Quirk. Never. And I would never lie to you. If you think you’re hearing some performance, then you’re just projecting your own insecurities onto me.”
“I am trying to save your life!”
“You’re trying to save yourself from hurt.” Afrit was unremitting. She gave no quarter. “Do you think you are the only one who has felt hurt? Do you think I spent my time in the Hallows rejoicing over our separation? Emotion isn’t a badge people wear. It isn’t an award. It is life. You have to accept it. The good and the bad. And I fear your dying, I truly do. But I will bear that pain and that hurt if it means Avarra survives.”
“Even if we don’t.”
“Even if we don’t survive this conversation.”
And there it was. A gods-hexed gauntlet. Right there. Stay here and watch Afrit die again, or leave Afrit behind right now.
The breath caught in Quirk’s throat. All the flames gone now. And there were tears stinging her eyes.
“Either way,” she said, “I end up without you.”
“You don’t know that’s true. Nothing is written in stone. Not Barph’s victory. Not our fate.” And finally Afrit’s stony façade started to crumble. “Don’t leave me here, Quirk.”
And now the tears fell freely. “I can’t watch you die. Not again. I can’t.”
“You don’t have to.”
But that was only if Afrit came now. And Afrit
was refusing. Afrit was here committing suicide. And Quirk’s words and her love could not reach her.
Quirk reached out. She held Afrit’s face in her hands. An intimate touch, and one she avoided most times, but one she needed now. The smooth warmth of her skin beneath her palm. One last memory to hold in the nights to come.
And then Quirk grabbed her pack, and slipped out of the tent, and left Afrit behind.
53
All the Usual Hazards of Playing with Fire
Quirk stumbled away, blinded by the night and her tears. But she would hear Afrit’s running footsteps soon, wouldn’t she? She would feel Afrit’s hand slipping into her own. Afrit’s fingers finding their typical grooves. Wouldn’t she?
And still she stumbled on. And still the darkness pressed down on her. And still Afrit did not come.
She felt cold. She felt her body shivering. She tried to summon fire to warm herself and light the way, but she could not.
She went on. She wanted to collapse and sleep. She wanted to scream. But she could not.
She went on. Over the rise and fall of the Avarran landscape. She clambered over broken-down fences and pressed through sprawling hedgerows. She went on and away. That was all she had left. All she could do. She had to flee from this place. She had to leave Afrit’s death as far behind as possible. She couldn’t face it. She wouldn’t. It would be something distant. Soon all this would be distant. Soon this wouldn’t hurt.
Wouldn’t it?
The darkness began to lift from the landscape without her truly noticing it. She was lost in herself and in the landscape. Everything was unfamiliar to her.
And then the sun lifted its head above the horizon, and Quirk realized its significance. Day was here. The day Afrit would die.
She fell to her knees and retched violently.
When she was done, she tried to get to her feet again. She had to get away. She had to.
She could not.
She stayed there on her knees, paralyzed by all the decisions she’d made and failed to make.