Unfettered

by Terry Brooks

  See, the Lorians had made a mistake. On their way down from the Northern Barrier they set some trees on fire, and an outlying farm, and they killed a hermit.

  Even Janet was surprised by Eliot’s anger. I mean, she was furious, but she was Janet. She was pissed off all the time. Poppy and Josh looked grim, which was how they got angry. But Eliot’s rage was towering. They burned trees? His trees? They killed a hermit? They killed a hermit? His heart went out to that weird, solitary man in his uncomfortable hut. He’d never met him. They wouldn’t have had much to say to each other if they had met. But whoever the hermit was, he obviously despised his fellow man, and that gave him some credibility in Eliot’s book.

  And now he was dead. Eliot was going to destroy the Lorians, he would annihilate them, he would murder them! Not murder murder. But he was going to fuck them up good.

  He was tempted to let the Lorians try to cross the Great Northern Marsh, where the sunken horrors that dwelt there would deal with them, with extreme prejudice, but he didn’t want to give them even another day’s march on his grass. Besides, there were a couple more farms in the way. Instead he let the Lorians march part of one day, till noon, till they were hot and dusty and ready to knock off for lunch. Probably it was blowing their minds how easy it was all turning out to be. They were going to do it, lads, they were the ones, they were going to fucking take fucking Fillory, dudes!

  He let them ford the Great Salt River. He met them on the other side.

  Eliot stood alone, disguised as a peasant. He waited in the middle of the road. He didn’t move. He let them notice him gradually. First the guys in front, who when they realized that he wasn’t moving called a halt. He waited while the guys behind those guys got crowded into them, soccer-stadium style, and they called a halt, and all the way back down the line in a ripple effect. There must have been, he didn’t know, maybe a thousand of them.

  The man leading the front line stepped out to invite him—not very politely—to kindly get the fuck out of the way, or one thousand Lorian linebackers would pull his guts out and strangle him with them.

  Eliot smiled, shuffled his feet humbly for a second, and then punched the guy in the face. It took the man by surprise.

  “Get the fuck out of my country, asshole,” Eliot said.

  That one was on the level, no magic. He’d been taking some boxing lessons, and he got the drop on him with an offhand jab. Probably the Lorian wasn’t expecting what amounted to a suicide attack from a random peasant. Eliot knew he hadn’t done much damage, and that he wouldn’t get another shot, so he quickly held up his left hand and force-pushed the man back so hard he brought six ranks of Lorians down with him, much the same way Asterix took down entire files of centurions.

  Eliot dropped the cloak and stood up straight in his royal raiment, so they could see that he was a king and not a peasant. A couple of eager-beaver arrows came arcing over from back in the ranks, and he burned them up in flight: puff, puff, puff. It was easy when you were this angry, and this good, and God he was angry. And good. He tapped the butt of his staff once on the ground: earthquake. All thousand Lorians fell down on their stupid violent asses, in magnificent synchrony.

  He couldn’t just do that at will, he’d been out here all day setting up the spells, but it was a great effect. Especially since the Lorians didn’t know that. Eliot allowed it to sink in.

  Then, to mix things up, he undid a spell: he made the army behind him visible, or most of it. Take a good look, gentlemen. Those ones with the horse bodies are the hippogriffs; griffins have the lion bodies. It’s easy to mix them up.

  Then—and he indulged himself here—he made the giants visible. You do not appreciate from fairy tales how unbelievably terrifying a giant is, at all. These players were seven-story giants, and you did not mess around with them. In real life humans didn’t slay giants, because it was impossible. It would be like killing an apartment building with your hands. They were even stronger than they looked—had to be, to beat the square-cube law that makes land organisms that big physically impossible in the real world—and their skins were half a foot thick. There were only a couple dozen giants in all of Fillory—even Fillory’s hyper-abundant ecosystem couldn’t have fed more of them. Six of them had come out for the battle.

  Nobody moved. Instead the Great Salt River moved.

  It was right behind them, they’d just crossed it, and the nymphs took it out of its banks and straight into the mass of the Lorian army, like an aimable tsunami. A lot of the soldiers got washed away; Eliot had made the nymphs promise to drown as few of them as possible, though they were free to abuse them in any other way they chose.

  Some of the ones who weren’t swept away wanted to fight anyway, because they were just that valiant. Eliot supposed they must have had difficult childhoods or something like that. Join the club, it’s not that exclusive. He and his friends gave them a difficult adulthood to go with it.

  It took them four days to harry the Lorians back to Grudge Gap—you could only kick their asses along so fast and no faster. That was where Eliot stopped and called out their champion. Now it was dawn, and the pass made a suitably desolate backdrop, with dizzyingly steep slopes ascending on either side, striped with spills of loose ruck and runnels of meltwater. Above them loomed icebound peaks that had, as far as he knew, never been climbed, except by the dawn rays that were right now kissing them pink.

  Single combat, man to man. If Eliot won, the Lorians would go home and never come back. That was the deal. If the Lorian champion won—his name for some reason was Vile Father—well, whatever. It wasn’t like he was going to win.

  The lines were about fifty yards apart, and it was marvelously quiet out there between them. The pass could have been designed for this; for all Eliot knew it had been. The walls made a natural amphitheater. The ground was perfectly level—firm packed coarse gray sand, from which any rocks larger than a pebble had been removed overnight, per his orders. Eliot kicked it around a little, like a batter settling into the batter’s box.

  Vile Father didn’t look like somebody waiting to begin the biggest fight of his life. He looked like somebody waiting for a bus. He hadn’t adopted anything like a fighting stance. He just stood there, with his soft shoulders sloping and his gut sticking out. Weird. His hands were huge: they looked like two king crabs.

  Though Eliot supposed he didn’t look much less weird. He wasn’t wearing armor either, just a slightly floppy white silk shirt and leather pants. For weapons he carried a long knife in his right hand and a short metal fighting stick in his left. He supposed it was probably pretty obvious that he had no idea what to do with them, apart from the obvious stabbing and whacking motions. He nodded to Vile Father. No response.

  Time passed. It was actually a teensy bit socially awkward. A soft cold wind blew; it was freezing up here even in May. Vile Father’s brown nipples, on the ends of his pendulous man-cans, were like dried figs. He had no scars at all on his smooth skin, which somehow was scarier than if he were all messed up.

  Then Vile Father wasn’t there anymore. It wasn’t magic—he had some kind of crazy movement-style that was like speed skating over solid ground. Just like that he was halfway across the distance between them and thrusting his blade, whatever it was, straight at Eliot’s Adam’s apple at full extension. Eliot barely got out of the way in time.

  He shouldn’t have been able to get out of the way at all. Like an idiot he’d figured Vile Father was going to swing the blade at him like a sword, on the end of that long pole, thereby giving him plenty of time to see it coming. Which would have been stupid, but all right, I get it already, it’s a thrusting weapon. By rights it should have been sticking out of the nape of Eliot’s neck by now, slick and shiny with clear fluid from his spine.

  But it wasn’t, because Eliot was sporting a huge amount of invisible magical protection in the form of Fergus’s Spectral Armory, which by itself would have saved his life even if the blade had hit home, but in addition to that he was spo
rting Fergus’s A Whole Lot of Other Really Useful Combat Spells, which had amped his strength up a few times over, and most importantly, had cranked his reflexes up by a factor of ten, and his perception of time down by that same factor.

  What? Look, Vile Father spent his whole life learning to kill people with a knife on a stick. Was that cheating? Well, while Vile Father was doing his squats and whatever else, Eliot had spent his whole life doing this: magic.

  When he and Janet had first finished up the casting, a couple of hours earlier in the chilly predawn, he’d been so covered in spellcraft that he glowed like a life-size neon sign of himself. But they’d managed to tamp that down so that the armor was only occasionally visible, maybe once every couple of minutes and only for a moment at a time, a flash of something iridescent and mother-of-pearly.

  The time-reflexes part of it worked a bit like that bullet-time effect in The Matrix, which is to say that it worked exactly like that. The trigger was Eliot twitching his nose like Samantha on Bewitched. He did it now, and everything in the world abruptly slowed down. He leaned back and away from the slowly, gracefully thrusting blade, lost his balance and put a hand down on the sand, rolled away, then got back on his feet while Vile Father was still completing the motion.

  Though you didn’t get to be as big and fat as Vile Father was without learning a thing or two along the way. He didn’t look impressed or even surprised, just converted his momentum into a spin move meant to catch Eliot in the stomach with the butt of the pole. I guess it doesn’t pay to stand around looking all impressed on the battlefield.

  Though Eliot was impressed. Watching it slowed down like this, you had to admire the athleticism of Vile Father’s style. It was balletic, was what it was. Eliot watched the wooden staff slowly approaching his midriff, set himself, and all in good time, hammered it down as hard as he could with his metal baton. The wood snapped cleanly about three feet from the end. Fergus, whoever you were, I heart you.

  Vile Father course-corrected once again, reaching out with a free hand to snag the snapped-off bit while it spun in midair. Eliot batted it away before he could get to it, and he watched it drift off out of Vile Father’s reach, moving at a graceful lunar velocity. Then, seeing as how he had some time to kill, he dropped the baton and slapped Vile Father’s face with his open hand.

  Personal violence did not come naturally to Eliot; in fact he found it overwhelmingly distasteful. What could he say, he was a sensitive individual, fate had blessed and cursed him with a tender heart; plus Vile Father’s cheek was really oily or sweaty. Eliot wished he’d worn gloves, or gauntlets even. He thought of that dead hermit and those burned trees, but even so he pulled the punch. With his strength and his speed all jacked up like this, he had no idea how to calibrate the blow. For all he knew he was going to take the guy’s face off.

  He didn’t, thank God, but Vile Father definitely felt it. In slow motion you could see his jowls wrap halfway around his face. That would leave a mark. Emboldened, Eliot dropped the knife too, moved in closer, and delivered a couple of quick body blows to Vile Father’s ribcage—the hook, his instructor had told him, was his punch. Vile Father absorbed them and danced away to a safe distance to do some heavy breathing and reconsider some of his life choices.

  Eliot followed, jabbing and slapping, both ways, left-right. My mother, my sister, my mother, my sister. His blood was up now. This was in every way his fight. He hadn’t come looking for it, but by God he was going to finish it.

  Vile Father was moving in again, still without much expression on his stolid, hoggy face. Eliot felt as though he ought to be inspiring a little more terror in his adversary, but whatever. He flipped time to normal speed for just a second, coming up for air; Vile Father was whirling his abbreviated pole arm in a tricky cloverleaf pattern, much good may it do him. Eliot slo-moed again, ducking under it, working around it, pounding the man’s body like a heavy bag, hoping to knock the wind out of him.

  He ought to have been more careful. Eliot had seriously underestimated how much punishment Vile Father could take, or maybe he’d overestimated how much he was giving out. He’d definitely underestimated how quickly Vile Father could move, even relative to Eliot’s massively accelerated pace, and how completely he had sized up his overconfident, inexperienced opponent. Gently, even as he sucked up a hail of body shots, Vile Father barged into Eliot and managed to get his arms around him.

  Never mind, Eliot would just slip out—hm. You’d think you could just—but no. Ah. It was harder than he thought. A moment’s hesitation had cost him. Vile Father’s smooth baby face and yellow teeth and beefy breath were right up next to him now, and those ham hock arms were starting to squeeze and crush.

  Vile Father had evidently assessed the situation and decided that it didn’t matter how fast your opponent could move when he couldn’t move a muscle, so you took whatever damage you had to to get the other guy in a bear hug. He had, and now he was trying, slowly but strangely inevitably, to get his teeth into Eliot’s ear.

  Enough. This guy was strong, and he had all the leverage, but he wasn’t superhuman. Eliot felt like he was practically encased in Vile Father at this point, and he hadn’t taken a proper breath in about thirty seconds. He set himself and began to pry himself free.

  It was still a lot harder than you’d think, and Vile Father was not at all kidding about his personal vileness, but Eliot slither-wrenched his way out of Vile Father’s arms and staggered a few feet back. He was still getting his balance when he felt something poke him painfully behind one shoulder. He arched his back away from that fiery hot point and shouted:

  “Fuck!”

  Nothing the Lorian was carrying should have been able to get through the Spectral Armor. He spun away, still ahead of Vile Father, but not nearly as far ahead as he expected; in real life both their movements must have been a blur. This guy was running magic weaponry; Eliot should have looked at the blade on that thing more closely. Vile Father was packing something that could actually cut him.

  It must have been Fillorian metal. Magic metal. I bet he took it from that hermit, Eliot thought. I bet that thing’s made from a Fillorian plough blade.

  Oh, that is it. Eliot snapped.

  On his feet again, Eliot spun around the blade and grabbed what was left of the weapon’s shaft and wrenched it out of Vile Father’s hands. That probably took some skin with it, he thought. Good. He threw it as hard as he could, as hard as Fergus could. It was still rising when it disappeared into a low-hanging cloud.

  He skipped back and set himself the way his boxing instructor told him to, then he shuffled forward. The boxing thing was mostly just for the aerobics, plus it was an excuse to enjoy the company of the boxing instructor, whose amazing upper body was enough to make Eliot not even miss Internet porn in the slightest, but it had some practical value too.

  Jab, jab, cross. Hook, hook. No more holding back, he was snapping this shit out crisp and firm. He was rocking Vile Father back on his heels now. Eliot found he was baring his teeth and spitting words with each punch.

  “You. Killed. A. Hermit. You. Weird. Sweaty. Bastard!”

  Don’t go down, cocksucker. Don’t go down, I want to hit you some more. They were practically back against the Lorian front line when Eliot kicked Vile Father in the balls and then, indulging a personal fantasy, he swept the leg and watched Vile Father rotate clockwise in a stately fashion and simultaneously descend until he crashed, thunderously and with a lot of slow-motion blubbery rippling, onto the packed sand.

  Even then he started to get up. Eliot kicked him in the face. He was through with these fucking people.

  He dropped all the magic at once. The strength, the speed, the armor, all of it.

  “Go.”

  Well, he didn’t drop all of it all of it. His voice echoed off the stone walls of the pass like thunder. Leave a man his vanity, and his sense of theater. It was just good PSYOP. He picked up the broken stub of Vile Father’s weapon and threw it into the sand. Fortunatel
y for his sense of theater, it stuck there upright.

  “Go. Let this shattered spear mark the border between our lands. If any man cross it, or woman, I make no guarantee of their safety. Fillory’s mercy is great, but her memory is long, and her vengeance terrible.”

  Hm. Not exactly Shakespeare.

  “You mess with the ram,” he said, “you get the horns.”

  Better leave it at that.

  Eliot scowled a terrible royal scowl at the Lorian host and turned and walked away, speaking a charm under his breath. He was rewarded with the soft rustle and creak of the little stub of wood growing into a little ash tree behind his back. A bit of a cliché. But hey, clichés are clichés for a reason.

  Eliot kept walking. His breathing was going back to normal. The pass ran north-south, and the sun was finally cracking its eastern rim, having already been busy lighting the rest of Fillory for at least an hour now. The ranks parted to let him go through. God he loved being a king sometimes. There wasn’t much of anything better in life than having your own ranks part before you, especially after you just delivered a bona fide public ass-kicking to somebody who deserved it. He avoided eye contact with the rank-and-file, though he did point two fingers at the most senior of the giants, acknowledging that he’d done the High King a personal favor by showing up.

  The giant inclined his head toward Eliot, slightly, gravely. Their kind played a deep game.

  It was a funny feeling, coming back to real-time after having watched the world in slow motion. Everything looked wildly accelerated now: plants waving, clouds moving, people talking. It was a beautiful clear morning, the air an icy coolant washing over his brain, which was overheated by combat. He wasn’t angry at all, anymore. He decided he would just keep on walking—he would walk the whole half-mile back to the Fillorian encampment by himself. Why the hell not? A lot of people tried to fuss at him about his punctured shoulder, which was probably still leaking some blood, and now that the adrenaline was wearing off it had started to sting pretty furiously. It felt like the point was still stuck in him.