The charm seller nodded at him. “They’ve said so for many years,” she answered. “Many more than you’ve been alive.”
His gaze wandered around the copse. The flashes of green light were closer here, and more frequent. He looked up and was mildly startled to discover that the branches of these trees were filled with glowing orbs, floating like ghostly lanterns. The green wisps were so thick in places that Zed could hardly make out the leaves among them. Hundreds of the lights dipped lazily from the trees, low enough that he could reach out and grab one if he wished.
“Where did you go?” Zed asked, slowly drawing his attention back down from the lights. “Are we outside the wall?”
“A safe place,” Old Makiva said. “Outside many walls.” She tilted her head and frowned. “I sensed what Brenner had become too late, I’m afraid. And she sensed me. I knew she would come for me, so I left for a time.”
Zed was almost too afraid to ask the question. “What has she become?”
“A fiend,” Makiva said plainly, her eyes flashing. “There are worse things than witches in the world, Zed. There are some monsters that spread like disease, carving out what you are from the inside. Brenner has preyed on the guildless for months, sowing the same corruption that claimed her. Some she consumed and some she infected, sending her new children outside the wards before they transformed and were discovered.”
The woman sighed sadly. “I’m sorry, Zed. But she will destroy the city unless you stop her. She’ll devour your friends and destroy the focus. Then she and her brood can feed in earnest. There is nothing left of the Luminous Mother. There’s only her hunger now.”
Zed felt a sob catch in his throat. “How are we supposed to stop that?” he said. “She’s too powerful.”
Makiva’s eyes glinted. “Then you’ll need power, too.” The charm seller held her hand out, and a curl of green flame unfolded within her palm, burning with an unnatural light. “I can help you, Zed.”
Zed watched the flame dance in her hand. “How?” he asked suspiciously.
“The same way I’ve helped countless others just like you,” Makiva answered. “I’m part of a tradition of magic that stretches back long past even Freestone’s history. Once my students lived all across Terryn. They shaped the world with their spells.”
Zed shook his head. “How old are you?” he asked.
Makiva smiled mischievously. “You remind me very much of my last student—so kind and bright…and lost. He was around your age when we first met. And he wanted to help so badly.”
Zed felt a prickling dread crawl up his arms. “Who was he?” he rasped.
Makiva sighed. “I think perhaps that’s where things went wrong. The desire to be valuable got all twisted up inside him. It became a craving for power. Poor Foster…”
“Foster…” The name sent a wave of fear and revulsion coursing through Zed. “You want me to make a pact.”
Makiva smiled, her face sharpened by the green glow in her hand. “You could be better than he was, Zed,” she said. “You already have a fire in you. I sensed it the morning of the Guildculling. I can help you unlock it.”
“And what do you want in return?”
“Nothing,” the charm seller murmured. “Nothing for now. Save your friends. Save the city. Once you’ve made your way, we can speak again.”
Zed shook his head. His hands were shaking.
“Make no mistake,” Makiva continued. “If you don’t act now, then you and your friends will die. Micah, Jayna, Liza, and Brock—Brenner will slaughter them all. And then she and her children will devour the city. One of the last lights in Terryn will be gone forever.”
She was right. What choice did Zed have? “Fine,” he croaked. “I’ll do it.”
Makiva smiled at him, and though it was the same coy smile she’d worn when she gave him the elven chain, it looked ghastly behind the green light. “Hold out your hand,” she said gently.
Zed did as he was told, slowly raising his palm.
Something small began to burn in Zed’s hand. A red ember flared to life in his cupped palm. Zed stared at it with wonder. Was he doing this? The flame grew slowly, uncoiling as if waking from a nap.
Makiva moved before Zed had a chance to react. There was only a glint of metal and a sudden sting as she lashed out with a small knife—the same curved dagger she’d used to whittle his charm—slicing a thin line down his thumb. Zed hissed in pain. He tried to pull his hand away, but Makiva caught his wrist with her free hand. She held it in place with alarming strength.
She brought the knife down, its edge streaked with Zed’s blood, until the tip of the metal had sunk beneath the curl of flame in his palm. Zed gasped. As it burned through blood and blade, the color of the fire changed, green eating through the red, downward from the point of the dagger.
Soon the flame in his hand was entirely green. Zed no longer felt any heat coming from it.
“Back in my time, they called them will-o’-the-wisps,” Makiva said, smiling down at the glow. “Or fox fire. Though I doubt they remember that name nowadays.”
As he stared down at the flickering emerald flame, voices began to call out from the woods—voices that Zed recognized.
“Zed! ZED! Wake up—please!”
“Just hold on, and keep that thing away from me!”
“Oh, no, no, no. It’s coming back!”
Zed glanced up, searching the trees for some sign of his friends, but he couldn’t see anything beyond the flickering lights—lights the same green as the fire in his hand.
Pain began to bloom in his chest—the same pain he’d felt after Brenner struck him. But even as the pain returned, it was ebbing away, soothed by a new warmth.
“It’s time to go, I think,” Old Makiva said, though she didn’t release his wrist. “Be careful, Zed. Use this gift wisely, and keep your ears held high.”
“Wait!” Zed said frantically, turning back to her. “The green fire—how do I use it? What does it do?”
This time when she smiled, the charm seller’s eyes flared with the same eerie light as the fire.
“It burns, Zed.”
“Please wake up. Please, please, please.”
Warm honey-colored light bled through Zed’s eyelids. There was a sharp pain in his chest, but it was quickly fading.
Zed took a gasping breath. It felt like the first he’d taken in a while. He swallowed more air, and began coughing violently.
“Take it slow,” said a voice from right above him. “You’re all right.”
Zed opened his eyes.
Micah was kneeling over him, his dark eyes intense with concentration. His hands were pressed against Zed’s chest and gold light spilled from his downturned palms, as if he were holding a tiny window that opened out onto a warm spring day.
“He’s alive,” Micah called, keeping his gaze focused on his work.
“You did it.” Brock’s voice was astonished. “You actually healed him.”
Micah rolled his eyes. Zed couldn’t breathe well enough to laugh, but he grinned at Micah, and the boy smirked back at him.
“Brock!” Liza’s voice shouted. “It’s coming back again! We need you!”
Zed took in his surroundings. He and his friends were inside the focus chamber—they must have dragged him in here. It was a large, empty room layered in stone tiles. At the center of the room the focus floated over a raised plinth, glowing with purple-blue light. Zed remembered the eerie mix of mint and sulfur when he’d first found it—two smells that did not work well together.
Liza and Jayna were pressed against the door, barricading them inside. Brock leaped up to join them, and just in time. There was an enormous crash from the other side, and all three were nearly thrown to the floor.
Liza recovered first, her eyes studying the door. “It won’t hold,” she said finally, suppressing the panic Zed was sure lay just beneath that statement. “Those tentacles can shatter steel. All we can do is be ready.” She glanced to her brother. “Ho
w is he?”
Micah scowled. “He got hit with a steel-shattering tentacle—how do you think he is?”
“I’m all right, actually,” Zed said. The pain was almost entirely gone, and his breathing had returned to normal. Zed tried to sit up, but Micah’s hand was firm on his chest.
“Like Fie you are,” he said. “I’m not finished showing up your mouthy friend.”
“Micah,” Liza said. “So help me, if you pass out because you were too stubborn to quit healing…”
There was a horrible screeching on the other side of the door, then the sound of tearing metal. Jayna screamed and scrambled away from it, ducking behind Liza just as a slick, ropy tentacle ripped through the door as if through parchment.
“Behind me, now!” Liza shouted, motioning with her hand. She raised her shield, as if it would do any better against the creature than a reinforced steel door.
Micah cursed, but he finally took his hand away from Zed’s chest. He and Brock helped Zed to his feet, and they all crowded behind Liza’s raised shield.
The creature that had been Brenner shredded the metal door apart in moments. Spindly, bone-white legs cracked as the monster ducked its awful head through the opening it had created, tentacles writhing around it like a halo of worms.
Brenner’s eyes were wide and wild and hungry as it forced its way inside. Zed no longer saw the Luminous Mother there. Watching the creature pull itself through such a tiny space, he only barely suppressed a wave of nausea.
Liza gestured her friends back as the creature rose to its full height, towering over them like a gigantic harvestman spider. Its bony legs clicked against the stone floor.
“Brenner,” she said nervously. “If you’re still in there…if you can hear me—”
The tentacle struck amazingly fast. It shot forward, but Jayna’s hands were already raised, and a glowing semitransparent barrier blossomed just in time to intercept the blow.
“Yeah,” Micah said, “I don’t think the monstrous severed head is listening.”
“I’m almost out of mana,” Jayna whispered. When Brenner’s grinning face tilted curiously to take in her prey, Zed worried that she could still understand them after all.
“Just—just stay close,” Brock said, pointing a dagger up at the creature. “Everyone stay together and we’ll be all right.”
Brock was a good liar, but no one was that good. The situation was hopeless, and all of them knew it. Zed saw Liza reach back and grip Brock’s hand with her free one.
Zed looked down at his own hands and caught sight of something glinting beneath his shirt. The elven chain twinkled with an eerie green light that seemed almost to be coming from the metal itself.
Then he remembered the dream. And Makiva’s burning eyes. And her promise. It burns, Zed.
“It will be all right,” he murmured. “I can protect everyone.”
“Zed…” Brock said warningly.
Zed knew Brock would argue. Or try to stop him. Brock had been protecting him for as long as he could remember—from bullies, and nobles, and even Dangers. But Brock couldn’t protect him from this.
So Zed didn’t give him the chance to try. He bolted away from the group without another word, his friends gasping and shouting at him as he went.
The monster’s wild eyes turned from the others, following him. Brenner’s smile opened into a mangled cavern of teeth and she bayed out an inhuman scream. The creature’s skeletal legs tore forward, skittering across the stone tiles with disturbing speed.
Zed dashed to the side, his palms raised and pointed right at it. He just needed to put some distance between it and his friends. He just needed—
He tripped.
It seemed to happen in slow motion. His foot caught behind him—he wasn’t even sure on what. Zed tried to right himself, but his balance was already thrown, and his other foot slid out from under him. He pitched forward, his hands braced out, and realized as he fell that he was going to die.
Zed’s shoulder hit the floor of the chamber with an audible crack and a shock of pain. Above him, the creature screeched excitedly.
He waited for it to strike, remembering with terror how intense the pain had been.
But the blow never came. Instead, Zed heard Brock shouting, “Hey! Hey!”
He glanced up just in time to see his friend standing below Brenner’s head, plunging his dagger upward from beneath it.
The creature shrieked as the blade struck. Brenner’s distended eyes rolled from Zed to Brock, and her tentacles all moved suddenly as one, stabbing downward together.
Brock released the dagger and covered his head.
Liza dashed forward, her mouth open in a shout.
Zed threw his hands up, and he thought of fire.
And there was fire. It surged from his palms in an enormous green funnel, casting the entire chamber in emerald light. In an instant, the monster was swallowed by the flames, only a dull smudge visible from within the inferno. It screamed, but soon even that was consumed by the blaze.
Liza reached Brock a second later, tackling him away just as the creature’s legs gave out from beneath it. It crashed to the floor in a plume of green flame, right where Brock had been standing.
The blast guttered out quickly from Zed’s hands, but the Danger was still covered with green fire. Its legs clattered frantically against the tiles, and its tentacles lashed out in every direction. It managed to lift off the ground, hurtling across the length of the chamber and nearly smashing right into the focus.
Then, with a sickening snap, one of its legs split in half, and it toppled again to the floor.
The creature’s tentacles thrashed from beneath it, as if trying to escape the fate of the rest of its body. But the flames that consumed it didn’t behave like normal fire. They spread hungrily along the entire length of the beast’s form, burning with unnatural speed.
In a matter of moments, there was nothing left of the creature but a charred and smoking frame.
Zed watched it all numbly, as exhaustion took hold. The spell had eaten every bit of his mana. Darkness pressed against the edges of his vision.
That was when the adults showed up.
There was a clamor of shouting and thudding feet from outside. The shredded steel door burst open with a metallic shriek, and Zed saw Lotte’s blond curls and stunned face emerge into the chamber. She was followed by Hexam and several Stone Sons, their weapons drawn.
All of them took in the scene, gaping at the charred pile still smoldering with green embers.
The knights pulled away and circled the Danger, cautiously pointing their swords at it.
Liza and Brock had crashed into a groaning pile several feet away. Jayna was pressed against the far wall, sobbing into her hands. Micah just stared blankly at the smoking lump of what had once been his guildmistress.
“What—what is this?” Lotte rasped. Her eyes found Zed, still laid out where he’d tripped.
We just saved the city, Zed realized.
He opened his mouth to say so, but the world faded to blackness as he fainted instead.
It was a beautiful late-summer day in Freestone. A cooling breeze blew in from outside the walls, bringing with it the music of birdsong and the scents of flowering plants from somewhere deep within the unseen forest beyond the wards.
Sounds and smells, light and wind. These things and nothing more were able to pass through the rejuvenated wards. Another day of peace had dawned in Freestone, and it was all thanks to the Adventurers Guild.
And so the guild was throwing itself a party.
Brock stepped outside to find the training yard transformed. Swaths of colorful fabric had been draped over the fence and hung from the adjacent rooftop, but messily, as if a basket of mismatched linens had blown away and landed there. The armorer’s table had been swept clear of tools and now was laden with small cakes and a bowl of punch. Festive hats had been placed upon the yard’s many training dummies.
But it was the dwarf standing
in the yard who brought an immediate smile to Brock’s face.
“Jett!” he cried, and he nearly tackled him in a hug.
“Easy,” Jett said, laughing. “I’ve not quite got the hang of balancing yet.”
Brock pulled back to get a good look at his friend. He’d propped himself up on an ornate wooden crutch, and though he’d grown somewhat pale, he was out of bed at last and he looked healthy and strong.
“Something’s different about you,” Brock said, narrowing his eyes.
Jett gave him a condescending look, then lifted his left leg, which ended just below the knee. His trousers had been pinned carefully closed. “Aye, something’s different,” he said, his tone playful. “I can’t quite put my foot on what.”
Brock frowned, unsure how to respond, and Jett laughed at his discomfort. “It’s all right, Brock. I lost a leg, and I wish I hadn’t.” He gripped Brock’s shoulder. “But that’s all I lost, and in the end, it’s not all that much. Do you get my meaning?”
“I think so, yeah,” he said, and the knot in his stomach came loose at the sight of the good humor in Jett’s eyes.
“Good.” Jett nodded. “Because it only takes one foot to kick butt, and I aim to prove it.”
The yard was slowly filling with their guildmates, some of whom helped themselves to the refreshments, all of whom gave Brock and Jett knowing smiles or slaps on the back. The party was meant to celebrate the fact that King Freestone had promised to issue a public statement about the recent threat to the wards and the young apprentices who had put a stop to that threat. Some weeks had passed, and their scrapes and bruises had healed, and now, today, their heroism would finally be acknowledged.
Brock couldn’t help but feel some thrill in knowing his actions had kept Freestone safe—and if the thrill doubled at the thought of getting credit for those actions, well, he didn’t feel the need to apologize for it.
Zed certainly deserved some recognition. He emerged from the guildhall wearing his finest tunic—it was the very one he’d worn during the Guildculling, and Brock marveled at how little had outwardly changed about his friend since that time. Who would ever have guessed that the short, slight elf-blooded boy with the goofy smile would prove so capable in the face of Dangers?
The Adventurers Guild Page 21