Bargain

by Riley S. Keene

  Ermolt released her wrist and she fell to the ground, clutching her arm. As soon as she was down, he put his boot to her armor and kicked her away. She cried out again as she hit the ground, the impact jostling the dislocated joint further. Flecks of blood sprayed across her chest from her ruined mouth.

  With a cry of victory Ermolt reached up and finally tore the dagger from his shoulder. He tried not to sigh in relief as he brandished the bloody blade at the other Conscripts.

  “Who’s next?” Ermolt bellowed. He felt the snarl across his lips and leaned into it, his face becoming a mass of snarling anger. His eyes promised pain.

  The Conscripts before him stilled as one. To them it must have appeared that he had just punched their commanding officer so hard through her armor that she was spitting blood. A few of the closest Conscripts took a step back. Hesitantly. As if they were afraid they’d spook the monster by moving too quickly. Ermolt snarled again and stepped forward, bloody dagger held over his head like a threat.

  Someone within the host—unidentifiable in the thick mass of Conscripts—called for a retreat.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Athala stepped down off her chair onto wobbly legs as the Temple’s host shuffled backwards down the hallway. She watched the Overseers follow, keeping the Conscripts engaged in combat as they fled. They were almost herding them out of the Keep, harrying them as they went. The Overseers aimed to wound or kill those who were too slow. To add insult to injury.

  Those who hadn’t chased out the Conscripts were milling around, helping their wounded or separating the dead. There were many who were still in these halls, but a large number were the enemy. The Overseers had done well in defending their Keep.

  And Athala had helped.

  Not only helped—she had burned. Dozens. She could see their charred corpses from here. Their screams still rang in her ears.

  Her stomach rolled and her skin felt hot, flushed. Athala’s forehead felt wet. Sweat. She went to wipe it away and her fingers came back red.

  Blood.

  She moaned low in her throat and scrubbed at her face. She expected her hands to come away soaked, coated in blood once more.

  She even expected to open her eyes and be back to that sanctum under Khule. For Ingmar to be looming over her, his eyes glistening with the essence of hatred. For his dagger to be lowering, slowly, towards her throat.

  Her fingers came away clear.

  No blood. No tinge of red. No sanctum.

  Just memories.

  Athala looked up slowly, waiting to see someone staring at her. There would be pity. She was losing her mind, after all.

  But no one had noticed. No one was paying attention to her.

  Athala sighed with relief and rubbed her palms along the sides of her dress. She didn’t care if she ruined the material with her sweat. She just needed to get rid of the memory.

  A few steps down the hall she found Ermolt, who had picked up the spoils of his duel. In one hand he had clutched the two-handed sword, while the other still held fast the bloody dagger he’d pulled from his shoulder. The sword looked more like a dueling blade than a broadsword in his giant hands. He loomed over the remains of the battlefield like a shadow of death. He shouted threats at the retreating Conscripts and laughed derisively at their folly.

  With the loss of so many Clerics—Athala tried not to look too hard at the dead whose bodies were burnt or charred—many of the Temple’s wounded were left behind. The wounded Conscripts—and the lone Temple Guard—were dragged in a rather ungentle manner down the stairs to the dungeon. She wondered how many of them would be put to the sword.

  Her stomach rolled again.

  Athala tried to look busy. Like she knew what was going on. She really had no idea what she should be doing, but she was afraid to be asked to do something if someone saw her idle.

  So she moved her chair back to the dining room it had been fetched from. While there she straightened up the table and moved some items to a bin. She just kept her hands busy. And her thoughts off the fight.

  A quarter of a bell later the hallway was quiet and Athala peeked around the corner of the door frame. Ermolt was nowhere to be found. Most of the injured were moved elsewhere. The dead were lined up along the wall, blankets thrown over them.

  At the far end of the hall, a figure approached.

  Elise.

  Athala rushed forward without realizing it. She felt a smile cross her face, the first since the fighting had broken out. The Conscript would be able to sooth her unease.

  It wasn’t until she grew closer that Athala realized the Conscript was half carrying another. Merylle.

  “Elise!” Athala said as she approached. “Are you two alright?”

  “I’m fine,” Elise said with a grunt. Sweat streamed along her forehead from the strain of carrying the Overseer. “But she’s not. Could you give me a hand here?”

  Athala went around to Merylle’s other side, and the woman winced as Athala tried to support her other arm. “What happened?”

  “We fought our way in from the outside,” Elise said, panting for air between words. “Merylle and I led a force in to join up with you and help push them out. Some Conscript with a javelin objected to our doing so.”

  “Don’t worry, though,” Merylle gasped, her voice thin and quiet, “I caught it.”

  Athala looked down at the bandages around the woman’s lower torso, and flinched at the blood already soaking the wrappings.

  “She’ll be okay,” Elise said in a calm tone, her breath much more even now that she had someone else to help her support the Overseer’s weight. “She just needs rest. And it looks like she’s not the only one who requires aid.” Elise nodded at a mat someone had set out on the floor, obviously for some other wounded who had been carted off. “Here is good.”

  “I’d say to leave it for someone more injured than me,” Merylle wheezed, “but I’m okay with warming it until you find them.”

  Elise and Athala carefully lowered the woman onto the mat. Merylle visibly relaxed once she was settled. Elise knelt down next to her and Athala tried not to notice the tender way that she was holding Merylle’s hand. It was... charming. Elise would hate to know Athala had seen.

  “I’m going to go around and see what help I can give to the others here,” Elise said quietly. She smoothed a bit of Merylle’s curls away from her cheeks. “Are you going to be okay?”

  “I’ll be fine.” The woman gently patted her bandages once, and winced badly enough that she didn’t do so again. “I got seen to before I lost too much blood. Go and take care of those who weren’t so lucky.”

  Elise squeezed Merylle’s hand and then stood. Athala wordlessly followed, not sure what to say that wouldn’t make things uncomfortable.

  This was not the time nor the place for an ‘I told you so’, and Athala had more class than to ask what happened between the Conscript and the Overseer. But eventually maybe the story would come naturally and Athala could feel superiority over knowing her friend’s desires.

  Athala tried to help Elise care for the other wounded, but she didn’t know enough to be helpful. Herbs and bandages weren’t her style. Not to mention that there were plenty of Overseers around when all Elise needed was an extra pair of hands.

  And there was so much blood.

  Eventually Elise shooed her away, pointing out that she looked pale enough to faint. Athala had always been a bit uncomfortable at the sight of blood, but she didn’t realize how bad it was affecting her until she left the room, and immediately felt her head clear a little.

  Guilt loomed over her.

  Was killing and injuring others all she was good for? Surely someone else needed help.

  Athala sought out Ermolt, but she saw he had his hands full already. He had chased the Conscripts all the way out to the front gate, and he and what Overseers were still in fighting shape had remained at the entrance to the keep to discourage another attack. What’s more, he had gathered them in a loose circle
on the ramp up to the entrance and was instructing them in weapons maintenance, talking them through the proper use of a whetstone to even out damage to the edge of a blade after a fight. The broadsword he’d taken from the temple guard was across his lap and he was carefully repairing the damage he himself had dealt to the blade as he spoke.

  After a moment it became clear that she wouldn’t be of any help here, either. The Temple host was long gone, and she had no experience with weaponry, much less a weapon to actually repair.

  And she had no desire to see combat again so soon.

  But there was another way to prove she wasn’t useless. Anton. If he was involved in the battle, he could likely use her help in replacing whatever devices or potions were used in the fight. And working with alchemical components and magic would bring some stability to the chaos Athala felt boiling away inside.

  Anton’s workshop was on the west side of the keep, and Athala laughed as she saw the enormous scorch mark across the floor outside his door. Whatever he had thrown at the Conscripts on their way in, it had done its work—though the wounded had been long since gone, likely having simply left, after the Clerics saw to their wounds. Though likely with a bit more fear for an unidentified item being thrown into their midst.

  “Anton?” Athala knocked on the door to warn the man of her entrance. The last time she’d entered without knocking she’d almost ended up the victim of one of his knockout bombs. “Is there anything I can do to help you in there?” She hesitated in the silence that followed. “Everyone else has something to do and I’m feeling a little useless so I really need to be doing something.”

  The silence continued. Athala swallowed hard.

  “I also think I just killed seven people, and really hurt like ten others,” Athala called, knocking again, louder. “So I really need to be doing something right now or I might vomit.”

  The silence continued. It was an oppressive silence.

  “A-Anton?” Athala felt the bottom drop out of her stomach as she gingerly turned the doorknob. She pushed the door open, peeking into the room.

  His workshop was trashed.

  The scorch mark that came from under the door and into the hallway was a small part of a much larger blast that originated inside the room. There were some smears of blood on the floor and walls, and bits of heat-blackened metal scattered around in the wake of whatever had exploded.

  There was, however, only one corpse in the room.

  Anton was slumped against the far wall. He appeared to have ducked behind his workbench after throwing whatever device had destroyed the room—and wounded his attackers—but it was clear that after that he was still in the middle of assembling a second device when they yanked him out from behind his cover and killed him.

  Killed was the wrong word.

  They butchered him.

  Her friend had been run through multiple times by either one or many weapons. His legs were broken, with bone jutting from the skin. A healing potion had been left just out of his reach on the edge of his workbench.

  It didn’t even look like he’d tried to fetch it.

  The Conscripts hadn’t just been cruel. They’d been monstrous.

  Athala ran from the room and vomited against the far wall of the hallway.

  Chapter Thirty

  Bells passed silently in the night, known only to Elise by the weariness that plagued her mind. She wasn’t exactly sure when the sun rose, but she was aware of it spilling through the windows of the Overseer’s Keep like an unbidden flood in a storage room.

  The dining room where she had set up a makeshift operating room was a mess of bandages and gauze, littered with bits of thread and spattered with blood. Nearly fifteen Overseers had passed through the doorway in one shape or another, and all of them had left in a better condition. The materials she had to work with weren’t the best, and the Overseers seemed to favor the pain reliever plant Freseri to actual healing potions, but she had endured anyway.

  There was one patient she hadn’t seen yet, however.

  The one woman whose skin she hoped to touch, whose smile would have made the long hours of sewing closed wounds and setting broken bones worth it.

  Merylle.

  Elise staggered into the hallway. Her exhaustion was a tangible thing that slowed her steps and doubled her vision. She wished to sleep. Perhaps for an entire day. But before she could sleep, she needed to find the leader of the Overseers.

  Sometime during the night, someone had cleaned the hall. The bodies of the dead were no longer lining the walls. The scent of pine assaulted her nose and Elise noticed the walls and floors had been scrubbed clean. No more blood. If it weren’t for the bits of charred or gouged stone, Elise would be hard pressed to know a battle happened here just bells before.

  But the hall was completely empty. The cot where Elise had left Merylle was gone. Elise stepped forward, confusion plain on her face.

  “She’s upstairs,” a small voice said from behind her.

  Elise spun, coming nearly face-to-face with one of the younger members of the Overseers. The man’s name was Bartold, although man was likely a bit generous. If he had seen sixteen summers total, Elise would be surprised.

  “Merylle,” Bartold said, shifting the broom he was wielding from one hand to the other. “We moved her up to her room about a bell after you started in on Eilert’s shin.”

  “Is she—does she need my help?”

  He shook his head, slowly at first and then faster. “Oh, no, no! She’s fine. Got help quick enough and just needs her rest. Stubborn as she is though, she’s still working. That guy came by to see her about a bell ago. The one with the scary eyes.” Elise stared blankly, unsure of who he meant. “The out-of-towner. Uh, Frey, I think his name is. She’s likely still up there with him, but I don’t think she’d mind you interrupting.” He smiled, and the conspiratorial look bordered on a grin. “Anyone else, maybe. But you? I think she’d be okay if you interrupted.”

  Elise brayed with laughter, a bit loudly perhaps. Something about the notion just tickled her the right way and her exhausted mind latched onto the idea. “You know,” she said between giggles, “I think you have the right of it.” She shook her head, trying to hold back the tears that threatened. “Forgive me. It’s been a long night. I think I’ll go check on her wounds myself and then sleep until supper.”

  Bartold looked at her curiously at first, but then nodded in understanding. “Alright. Her room’s upstairs down the right hall before her office. And hey, if you’re staying here, I’ll ask someone to bring you up some oatmeal or something before you fall asleep. Won’t do you any good to skip so many meals.”

  With a yawn, Elise waved a hand through the air before walking away. She was indifferent to if she ate before bed or not. Sure, she’d be ravenous upon awakening and likely hate herself with every fiber of her being. But she would just have to worry about that later.

  She climbed the stairs slowly, taking each one as if it were a mountain all on its own. There seemed to be a thousand of them. Elise gripped the banister, not trusting herself to climb the stairs without sliding back down them on her backside.

  Elise found Merylle’s bedroom easily enough. She paused in front of the door to listen if she could hear talking. Nothing. Either this Frey person was gone, the door was too good, or the rest of the Keep was too loud. Or she was too tired. With a shrug she knocked once and then entered.

  The room was small. Smaller than Elise would have imagined for the leader of the Overseers. It was dominated by a large four-poster bed that was topped with frilled white bedding that looked soft and inviting. Merylle was propped up in bed against a mound of pillows. She looked tired but in good health.

  But she wasn’t alone.

  A man sat on a bench next to Merylle’s bed. Between them was a parchment of some sort. It was either a map or a scroll—which Elise couldn’t make out. They had been leaning over it, and pointing to something when Elise burst in.

  Merylle looked up an
d for the briefest moment it looked as if she might scold Elise. But her face broke out into a beaming smile instead. “Good morning,” the Overseer said, her tone pleasant and surprisingly chipper. Perhaps she’d actually gotten to sleep. “Just a moment, darling.”

  Elise nodded dumbly and stepped from the room. Merylle’s laughter followed her. “You don’t need to wait outside. Get in here, silly woman.”

  As Elise stepped back into the room, the man was standing. He tucked the now-rolled parchment into a container on his hip. He gathered his robes and bowed deeply to Merylle before marching from the room. He didn’t even give Elise a second look. There was something about the man that looked familiar, but he wasn’t one of the Overseers her and Ermolt had been training. That didn’t mean she hadn’t seen him around the Keep before.

  “How are you feeling?” Elise asked as she approached the bed. The sight of the fluffy blankets forced a yawn from her. “Your wound must have been worse than I thought if it was bad enough to make you stop long enough to rest.”

  Merylle chuckled, but waved her hand dismissively. “Thank you for your help. I appreciate you and your friends putting your lives on the line for my people. I also appreciate you saving my life.” She smiled.

  “I believe you were the one who recklessly stepped between me and a javelin.” Elise felt the smile melt from her lips. “Most of the wounded will recover within a few days—most of the wounds were cuts and light concussions, although I did set a few broken bones. There were three with serious wounds that will put them up for a couple of weeks. Hartmut has some serious bruising on his ribs, but he’s a hardy guy, so he will be able to work, but not fight.” She sat on the bench next to Merylle’s bed with a heavy sigh. “Seven dead, counting Anton.”

  Merylle winced at the mention of the dead. She put a gentle hand to Elise’s forearm. “Thank you, again.” The Overseer shook her head. “The man who just left was Ibeyar Frey. He’s... an old friend of mine. I mentioned him before. I got in touch with him to help with the assault on the Temple, and his people saw the whole thing unfold.” Merylle shifted uncomfortably. “We had a spy in our midst.”