by Travis Bughi
She knelt, grabbed her bow, and strung it.
The minotaur grunted and stood up, hammer in hand. Breaking through a solid wall barely seemed to faze him. He turned around and roared, lifting the weapon up with both hands, swinging his head back and forth. He ended with a snort and then focused his beady eyes on Emily.
Emily took up an arrow, drew the notched end to her string, and pulled back.
The minotaur charged again, his head swung down, and Emily tried to follow the motion. She released her arrow, and it glided through the air, cut along the minotaur’s chin, ricocheted off his armor, and then finally ended its flight by slamming into the wooden floor.
She leapt to the side, towards the scattered arrows on the ground. The minotaur, wanting to avoid charging through another wall, had moved slower than before, and his horns gouged nothing but air. Wasting no time, Emily grabbed up another arrow, and the minotaur stood back up and swung his hammer down toward her.
She rolled again, popped up to take a knee, nocked the arrow, and let it loose.
The arrow struck the minotaur in the left side of the neck.
He screamed in pain, and Emily grabbed another arrow. As she leaned forward, though, she took her eyes from the minotaur, and a hoof collided with her head. She knew it was only a glancing, weak, half-hearted strike, but as it connected, her world burst into a bright light, and she flew back through the open back door and onto the porch. Her vision was beyond blurred, pain wracked her body, and she barely understood what was happening around her. Through her foggy eyes, she saw the minotaur’s silhouette rise over her, both arms raised and ready to bring his hammer crashing down.
Then something wet struck her face, and the minotaur stopped, stood still for a moment, and then began to shake slightly. He appeared to stiffen and then to relax. Emily blinked over and over as waves of pain passed through her head until finally she could see what was going on.
Two more arrows were sticking out of the minotaur’s neck, and then a third appeared, and then a fourth. All were clustered in the center, and the minotaur flinched as each projectile struck him.
He stopped breathing, he stopped quivering, and then he collapsed.
Emily somersaulted backwards to avoid him, and she instantly regretted the movement. Her head swirled again, and she almost fell over as the nauseating feeling twisted her insides. It passed, and she looked over the creature’s body to see both Adelpha and Mariam behind it. Both had their bows and a handful of arrows.
Emily collapsed in relief.
As soon as the minotaur stopped moving, Adelpha dropped her bow and picked her bloody knife up off the ground. She jumped onto the minotaur’s back and rammed her blade into its neck.
“Die, damn you,” she growled out the words.
She yanked the knife out and fell back onto her calves, breathing deeply.
“Mother.” Emily panted. “Father?”
“He’ll live,” she replied.
Mariam’s eyes were no longer teary. She was calm, looking at the minotaur’s corpse with cold contempt. Emily took comfort in her mother’s returned confidence and then looked to Adelpha.
“Adelpha,” Emily said through heavy breaths.
The amazon didn’t reply
“Adelpha,” Emily repeated.
“What?”
“We need to bury him,” she said. “The minotaur, before a banshee rises.”
Adelpha looked at the minotaur’s size and then back up at Emily, disbelief written all over.
“We have to dig a hole big enough for this thing?” she asked. “Now?”
“Yes, right now.” Emily stood up, cradling her head with one hand. “That’s probably another reason why Heliena sent a minotaur. Even if it didn’t kill us, she knew we’d be hard pressed to bury it before a banshee rose out.”
Adelpha looked back at the minotaur, shaking her head in building anger.
“Damn her,” Adelpha spat. “Damn her soul.”
Chapter 15
They buried the minotaur in time, but they were beyond spent by the end after a long evening of hurriedly striking the dirt to dig even a shallow grave. Minotaurs were tall and bulky, and this mercenary had been no exception. To top it off, the three women were distraught and exhausted, and two of them were injured. Adelpha grunted and winced each time the dirt resisted her movements, and Emily found it difficult to stand for lengthy periods of time. But Mariam, ever the strong woman that she was, never took a break. She continued to work, shovelful after shovelful, until the grave was finished, and not even pushing the minotaur’s great weight slowed her down. Not until the lumbering beast had been rolled in and covered did she finally breathe a sigh of relief. Her family was once again safe.
Throughout the ordeal, silence dominated any conversation that could have been. Emily both wanted and dreaded words, but there was no time to bring up the inevitable. Exhaustion overcame them all, and by the time they carefully hauled Abe and Paul into their beds, the three women were ready to pass out.
Emily’s night was entirely uninterrupted. She’d stayed awake long enough that her head throbbed not nearly as much, and after spending months sleeping on hard ground, her old bed seemed awash in comfort. Not a single creak of wood or gush of wind stirred her slumber, and thankfully, no dreams permeated the blackness of her mind. It wasn’t until the morning sun seeped into the room that her mind returned.
As her lids peeled back, her consciousness came around, and feeling like she’d slept for a month, she resisted the urge to move a muscle. Her entire body felt like it’d been trampled by a behemoth, or at least chewed on by a thunderbird. She breathed a deep breath and then rolled over, glad to find the movement easier than anticipated. As she did so, she pulled her blanket up over her face, but there was no escaping the morning light in this room. The sun’s rays pierced the various cracks in the Stout home, and the old wood seemed to both absorb and radiate it back. Emily grumbled, rolled over once again, and saw Adelpha asleep on Nicholas’ bed with her mouth hanging open.
Then she noticed Abe’s bed was empty.
She jolted upright and looked around. Where did he go? she wondered. His bed wasn’t made, which was unusual for him, so she climbed out of bed and slipped out of the room. There was no need to change. She’d slept in her amazon gear, too tired to remove it before passing out.
She found Abe in the kitchen.
He was sitting in a chair in full gunslinger attire: his guns at his waist, his cloak at his sides, and even his wide-brimmed hat on his head. He looked something between tense and sad, facing the backdoor and the two large holes from the minotaur’s hammer. At his feet, the table still lay, shattered.
Emily sighed in relief. He was fine.
“Abe?” Emily whispered.
Her brother didn’t respond. His eyes were still locked on the door. She waited a moment, unsure if she should speak up again. Suddenly, Abe burst up from the chair, grabbed both his guns, and pointed them at the door. The chair he’d been sitting in was flung back, clattering to the floor with a loudness that seemed all too sharp in the cool morning silence. Emily watched as Abe stood still for a moment, guns aimed high and arms tense. Then he relaxed slowly and holstered his six-shooters. With his head hung so low Emily could scarcely see half his neck under the hat, Abe turned around, picked up the chair, and sat back down in it. He faced the door once again, both tense and sad.
“Can’t believe I missed,” he mumbled.
Emily sighed and looked away, unsure if Abe was asking for comfort or making a statement. After a pause, she took a couple of steps toward her brother but stopped just shy of him.
“Hey, don’t worry about it,” she said. “It’s not like you’ve had to draw that fast before. You’d have dropped him easy if he wasn’t wearing that armor.”
“Don’t matter,” Abe said while ignoring his sister’s soothing tone. “I could have put him down with one bullet, but I screwed it all up. And I still got hit, too.”
He put a
hand to his chest, where undoubtedly a nasty bruise had developed, and then started shaking his head slowly.
“Abe.” Emily closed the gap and put her hands on his shoulders, squeezing them tightly like her father would sometimes do. “Just stop, all right. This isn’t your fault, or your fight. You did everything you could. I won’t have you blaming yourself for my problems. There’s only one person who should be carrying the blame for this, and that’s me. And I’m not sharing.”
“Heh.” Abe sighed. “If only it were that simple.”
Emily didn’t know how to answer that, so in the end she chose not to. She just kept her hands on her brother’s shoulders and her mouth shut.
They stayed like that for a silent moment and looked at the wall, the smashed ceiling, and the scattered table. After a deep sigh, Emily finally took her hands off Abe’s shoulders, purposely tipping his hat as she did so. Abe caught it easily, and turned his head to reveal a smirk.
“How’s father?” she asked.
“Ask him yourself,” Abe replied, then nodded his head toward the minotaur-sized hole in the wall.
Emily’s heart bumped up into her throat. She hadn’t expected to speak with him so soon. She’d been hoping he was still asleep.
There was no hesitating now, though. If Paul was awake, then he had heard everything and would be expecting his daughter shortly. Emily sighed and crept over to her parents’ bedroom door. Like a child who was about to receive a severe punishment, she tried to avoid peeking through the smashed wall, lightly knocked on the door, and then cleared her throat.
“Just use the hole, dear,” Mariam replied.
Emily sighed and let her head fall. Somehow, that response was worse than if they’d just ignored the damage. She stepped to the side and through the opening, carefully stepping over the scattered debris that was still strewn about.
Inside, Paul was lying down on the bed with his head and neck propped up by pillows, and Mariam was sitting at the foot of the bed near Paul’s feet. He looked tired, very tired. They both looked at Emily as she walked in, and her stomach flopped over.
“Mother, Father,” Emily started. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
Barely a moment had passed, and yet already she was apologizing. In retrospect, maybe a silent moment would have done better, because they didn’t respond. Emily opened her mouth to apologize again and took a few steps forward.
Finally, after all they’d been through the night before, her eyes began to tear up.
“If I knew, no, even if I only thought,” she said, “that anything like this would happen, I never would have come. I never wanted this to happen. I’m so sorry. I thought for sure we’d be able to tell if anyone was following us on the plains, and who would find us way out here in the middle of nowhere? I don’t know how that minotaur knew where our home was, but I swear I’m going to fix this. I swear to you. I swear!”
She clasped her hands together like she was begging and breathed deeply as two wet lines trickled down her cheeks. She was so sorry about what happened to her father. She’d been holding back her pain and sorrow from the moment the minotaur had kicked Paul, just long enough to do what was needed, but now they were streaming out of her.
So to her, it seemed quite odd when her parents looked at each other and Paul smirked. The right side of his tired face crept up, and then Mariam smirked back at him.
Emily choked back her tears.
“What?” she asked, completely surprised.
“You called this place ‘our home,’” Paul responded. “We thought you didn’t consider the plains your home anymore.”
“Well, not the plains,” Emily answered truthfully, “but my family? Yes, you all are my home. I mean, what I’m trying to say is—wait, aren’t you two supposed to be, well, mad?”
“Oh, I’m furious,” Mariam said, and then stood up from the bed.
Emily jumped a bit, but relaxed again when she saw her mother didn’t intend to dole out punishment. Mariam instead wrapped an arm around Emily’s shoulders and walked her closer to the bed.
“I’d tie your hands to a chair and take the rolling pin to you if I had my way,” Mariam said, speaking casually of a punishment Emily had yet to receive, “but fortunately for you, your father got to me first, and I suppose he’s right on this one.”
“Right about what?” Emily gulped.
“You’re going to need all your strength to kill that banshee who sent the minotaur,” Paul answered, “and scolding you all day won’t bring Heliena any closer to the grave. I’ve spoken with your mother on this, and she’s in agreement.”
Emily stood rigid, stunned. Her senses told her one thing, but her mind refused to believe it. It sounded like her parents not only approved of her intentions, but encouraged them. Emily didn’t know what to say.
“Now, look,” her mother said and had Emily sit at the edge of the bed with her. “You can’t change what’s in the past. There is no chance to go back and do things differently. Trust me, it can’t be done. I swear that I’ve wished for it more times than I can count, and I think, finally, I’ve learned my lesson. So, speaking from experience, understand me when I say your only chance to get this right is here and now.”
“Your mother and I will stay with the Dylans until it’s safe,” Paul explained. “Abraham’s gunslinger career has made them more than indebted to us, so I doubt they’ll ask too many questions or gossip too much if we ask them not to. We’ll leave at night and so should keep hidden from any prying eyes that might possibly be lingering around. I should be able to make the journey well enough with breaks and your mother’s help. Also, thankfully, the trip is not very far, as you well know.”
“I’m not going to insult your brother by asking him if he’s going with you two,” Mariam said as she stood up. “So before you three leave, we have some work to do. I don’t much care about repairing our bedroom wall right now, but I want those holes next to the back door sealed up before we leave. No budging on that one, I’m afraid. So come, come. We have quite a bit of work to do in a short period of time.”
Mariam began walking towards the hole without waiting for a reply from her daughter, but Emily stayed seated, still not quite sure of everything she’d just heard. It seemed surreal, to say the least, and not entirely complete. Through the opening, Emily saw Abe, still in his chair. She didn’t like the idea of him risking his life for her again, but she knew it’d be useless to argue with him. It took a second, but she finally decided to accept what was happening to her. Never in all her years had she expected her parents to understand, and worst of all was that it’d taken a near tragedy for her to see that they would. It felt wrong, forced. She felt sick. However, her mother’s words came to her, and she realized that this was the only life she was going to get. There was no changing what had happened; there was only the need to push ever onward.
With her parents’ acceptance came a chance to do the right thing. There was only one right thing she could think of, too, and it scared her. Quartus save me, she thought, realizing her parents now possessed more courage than she did.
“What if I don’t come back?” Emily whispered.
Mariam stopped, kept her back turned, and took in a deep breath. Emily saw the fear in her mother, then, and knew that the confidence her parents had just professed was not without a bit of unjustified faith. Emily waited as Mariam held her breath for a moment with her shoulders clenched tightly and then let it out slowly.
“You will,” she answered, relaxing her shoulders.
And there it was: confidence.
“How do you know that?” Emily responded, raising her head.
Mariam looked back and met her daughter’s eye. “Because I saw what happened here last night. I watched you fight that minotaur. Heliena has every right to be afraid of you. And if she’s not? Well then, she is a fool.”
* * *
Adelpha looked into the wind and spat her hair out of her mouth just as the Great Plains shoved it back in again.
They were on their way back to Lucifan with only a single, partial night of rest under their belt, and the wind was kicking up stronger than usual. Adelpha held up an arm to block some of it while Abe kept a singular grip on his hat. Emily just kept her face directed away.
Adelpha sputtered again, and it seemed she was trying to say something, but she gave up as they crested another hill and a burst of wind racked them. Adelpha waited patiently until, finally, they reached a shallow valley where the wind wasn’t so bad and she could get a word out.
“What I don’t understand,” she said, “is why a minotaur came after us in the first place. I thought they were on our side. Weren’t they protecting that angel?”
“You’ve got it wrong,” Emily said, ignoring her own hair as it flailed about. “They weren’t protecting anyone, just being well mannered and letting a guest stay at their home. They aren’t a faction of people like the amazons, or even an organization like the knighthood. Talvorn won’t take a job to kill me, sure, but he has no say over whether or not any other of his kind does.”
“They don’t have a ruler,” Abe explained further, “or any sort of government structure for that matter. They endear themselves to those they wish, creating strong bonds with selected kin, and don’t get in anyone else’s business unless it directly concerns them. Minotaurs don’t have a lot of grey in their relationships. You’re either a friend they’d die for, a stranger they don’t care for, a business partner they have a contract with, or an enemy they’ll kill. I’m sure that Talvorn didn’t even know about that minotaur, and if he did, he would have found some way to warn us.”
“Not that he had any time,” Emily muttered. “I’ll admit it. That minotaur your sister sent to kill us was damn good. I can’t believe he could track us so well and so close without us noticing him.”