by Liam Reese
“What are you doing?” said Number Eighty-seven.
It wasn’t unbearably heavy. Thorn nodded at Ruben and hoisted it into his arms. The skinny bard wrapped his long arms around it, swaying under the weight like a stalk of grass.
There was a soft sigh from nowhere — from the Anvil.
“What are you doing?” thundered Number Eighty-seven.
“We are stealing your Anvil,” said Irae, “and after what I’ve just heard, I don’t even feel badly about it.
Thorn expected a How dare you! or perhaps a That’s what you think! or Over my dead body! But Number Eighty-seven didn’t seem to care what was expected of him. He gave a quick, sharp glance that cut through Thorn like a knife, and darted out of the room with a surprising turn of speed for someone whose knees had just been protesting so strongly.
“That was easy,” said Irae.
“He has gone for reinforcements,” Karyl predicted. “Don’t think this is over, Your Hi — my lady.”
At his slip of the tongue, Thorn shot a quick glance at Ruben, who appeared to be far more concentrated on not letting the Anvil slide out of his arms than what was being said around him. He tugged on the bard’s sleeve, drawing him towards the door.
“Let’s not wait around and find out.”
They made it all the way into the hallway before running footsteps sounded. Many of them, innumerable, a quick, steady tramp. The monks were running together, and they were not far away.
Jelen turned to Thorn. “I told you fighting was the right idea,” she said triumphantly, but her smugness was short lived. As the companions stood together in the corridor, down at the far end the first of the monks appeared. He was dressed similarly to his older brethren, but there the resemblance ended. He was approximately thirty years younger, and nearly as large and muscular as Karyl.
“Run,” suggested Karyl.
He tugged Irae along after him, but then she ran ahead, and led the way through the doors. So she had been counting; Thorn was desperately grateful.
Thorn was close behind her, heart pounding, breath already coming in fits and starts merely from the surge of panic. He could hear the staggered, flat footsteps of the bard behind him, and his ragged breathing. He prayed that Ruben would keep his grip on the Anvil.
There was another problem.
Of course there was. There was always another problem.
Irae turned left, then right, then left again, and they were back in the previous corridor, with the noise of the monks louder again.
“Hells,” she said, sounding confused, and turned down another doorway, which led them to a dead end. Irae grasped at her hair with both hands, and Thorn tugged her after him as he darted back into the hallway and ran on.
The maze of corridors that they had been so unerringly led down before now stretched out in front of them, and they were trapped within it like rats. This corridor ran straight for a long time before it turned, but in the meantime there was door after door, all of them closed, all of them identical. He couldn’t remember whether they had come through on the left or the right; the knowledge, the memory buzzed around the outside edges of his brains, but he could not capture it.
He took a few quick steps forward, and then stopped so suddenly that Ruben cannoned into him.
“What’s the problem now?” panted the bard.
“I know, but I don’t know.” Thorn rubbed abstractedly at his forehead, trying to control his breathing.
“What’s the problem?” called Karyl as he neared them.
“We’re lost!” said Ruben.
“I know that,” said Karyl, panting hard from exertion and pain. “I thought there was a new thing.”
“I can’t remember how,” said Thorn, quietly, to the wall, to no one. “I can’t remember, and I can’t get out.”
“Trees!” shouted Jelen to him. “They are just trees that have been Forged!”
He looked at the doors. All the same, all absolutely identical —
But the grains. The grains were different. The color, that was different too. The memories stirred inside his mind. The ghosts of the trees whispered to him. He looked back down the hallway, pictured vines and twining things, listened for the far-off howl of the wolves, the yip of the foxes.
“That should not work,” observed Karyl, watching him.
But it did.
The doors were speaking and rattling to Thorn, now, all of them, calling in the distance, and he took off down the corridor again, two doors down, three doors, and then on the fourth he seized the handle and flung it open to reveal another corridor. This was more familiar, he could remember now, the doors were darker on this hall, they must have come from the same geise pine —
On again, and the right door leapt out at him. He led them back through the maze, the shouts of the monks growing fainter behind them as they slammed the doors shut, and then suddenly they burst forth into the first long hallway, and the main door was open, and sunlight was spilling in.
Lisca’s head poked through the door. She grinned like a cat when she saw them.
“Thought you might need help escaping,” she said.
“Did you bring the horses?” called Irae.
“Of course I brought the horses,” said Lisca, “I’m not stupid.” Her head disappeared around the doorway and they rushed to follow her. The sound of the crowd of monks grew closer, thundering through the hallways in their wake. As they made it out into the courtyard, a shifting cloud blotted out the sun.
Lisca had indeed brought the horses, but it was neither she nor Lully who held them and waited. The door keeper had the horses by the bridles, and Lully was on the ground nearby, whimpering and holding her splinted arm. Graic crouched over her.
“I may not be a giant,” said the door keeper, “but that doesn’t mean that I don’t know how to fight to hold on to what is important.” He pulled a dagger from his robes and brandished it. “Come on.”
“Come on yourself, old man,” said Karyl, sighing, and in response the door keeper threw the dagger. It hit Karyl in the foot, pinning his boot to the ground. The big man yelped. Irae drew her sword.
But the door keeper already had another knife in his hand, and he hefted it meaningfully.
“You thought perhaps I was joking when I said we were all warriors, did you?”
“Get out of our way,” said Irae.
The monk threw the knife, but she sidestepped it with more grace than Thorn would have given her credit for, had he not seen it with his own eyes.
“Now you are making me angry,” she said warningly.
“Anger will undo you.” His eyes were alight. “Give me back what belongs to us.”
Irae gritted her teeth. “I don’t want to have to kill you.”
“Don’t,” said Thorn. “How many more knives could he possibly have?”
The next one hit Irae in the shoulder. She had batted it away as best as she could with her sword, and it was a glancing blow, but she gave a cry and her sleeve was dark with quickly flowing blood. Thorn gritted his teeth and unwrapped his slingshot from its place around his wrist, searching the ground for a stone that would fit.
Lully kicked the monk in the back of his ankle, and he went down with a shout.
The whole thing had happened in the space of a moment or two, but Thorn knew the rest of the monks would catch up soon. He rushed forward with Irae, who stood over the prone monk and dripped blood on him.
“I don’t want to kill him, but I still might,” she said through still-gritted teeth. “That hurt like all the hells.”
“Don’t,” said Thorn. “The last thing we need is the monks to hunt us down for killing one of their own.”
“He tried to kill us first!”
“We don’t have time to argue about this!”
“Then don’t argue. Change him.”
Thorn blinked at her. “What?”
“Change him.” She was fairly vibrating with energy. Her hand on the hilt of her sword clenched till her
knuckles were white. “Forge him. Turn him into something else, if you won’t let me kill him.”
“What? No.”
“Do it, Thorn.”
“I won’t. Not like this. Even if I could, I wouldn’t.”
He had never felt so much cold, clear conviction, even though he was wet with sweat. He wiped at his forehead with a shaking hand. Irae shook her head and turned away.
“Do something,” she said.
He pounced on a stone, slung it quickly, and swung it a few times before knocking the monk over the head.
“Enough to knock him out, not enough to kill,” he said. “There. Something. Get on your horse, Jelen.”
The horses had spooked, and it took him a minute to collect his. He threw himself awkwardly onto its back and spurred it out of the courtyard without even looking back to make sure that the others followed him.
He fancied that he could hear the princess grinding her teeth.
No one spoke until they had ridden long into the night. Irae thundered past Thorn not long after they left the monastery, and she led from then on. They went further to the north, rather than back to the south as Thorn had expected. As the night grew colder, the ominous clouds that had pursued them since they had fled from the monks finally made good on their promise. First rain and then snow sprinkled down.
Just as Thorn started to strongly wish for a friendly stand of trees to shelter in, Irae turned to the left off the sparse path, and led them to yet another outcropping of rock.
“I have taken shelter in more rocks than a snake,” Thorn grumbled to Ruben as he got down from his horse.
Ruben had carried the Anvil all the way, which had thrown off his balance, so he had a little trouble with his dismount, and could not respond until he had picked himself up off the ground. Notwithstanding that his horse appeared to wish him ill, he stood and petted his steed’s velvety nose for a moment, catching his breath.
“It’s better than nothing,” he said at last, “and a great deal better than some things. Give me a friendly, open stand of rock over dark, damp woods any day.”
“We will be damp regardless of where we are,” Thorn reminded him, “and it’s night, not day.”
“The point stands.” The bard tucked his jacket a little more firmly around himself, and nodded in Jelen’s direction, who was checking her horse’s hooves. “At any rate, she’s directing this game, isn’t she? It’s too bad that she has become so bitter.”
“Become bitter?” said Thorn.
Ruben squinted at him. “You sound a bit bitter yourself.”
“That woman has been nothing but trouble for me since I met her.”
“But you have to admit,” Ruben pointed out, “she has definitely gotten worse.”
Thorn thought about it and had to admit that, yes, indeed she had. “Why do you think that is?”
Ruben blinked at him. “Are you joking? You really don’t know what the problem is?”
“No, I have no idea. Do you think I would be asking if I did?”
“Probably not, I suppose. Though that felt unnecessarily harsh.” The bard was unperturbed, however. He was most likely used to being spoken to a bit harshly. “She’s jealous. It’s as plain as the nose on your face.”
“What?” Thorn was baffled.
“Oh yes,” Ruben enthused, warming to his theme. “She sees you as her own personal pet project, her own discovery — the Forged called out of the woods, directed to the aid of light. Perhaps a bit ironic, given that we have just robbed a monastery. And now here comes along little Miss Lisca, a noble, sweet, and unassuming child.”
“Child being the operative word here,” pointed out Thorn.
Ruben shrugged. “All I know is what I see,” he said, “and also hear. And from what I have been able to tell, with my sure knowledge of human nature and skills of observation, our dear Jelen does not like to share.”
“That’s ridiculous,” said Thorn. “She has no claim on me.”
Ruben eyed him. “Are you certain that’s true?”
Thorn was about to set him straight when the woman in question called for their attention, clapping her hands sharply in the cold air.
“We can set up camp here for the night,” she said. “I deem that we have come far enough from the monks, and they won’t be able to follow us so easily anyway, now that snow has covered our tracks.”
“Yes, thank heavens for the snow,” muttered Lisca, trying to cover more of herself with her cloak.
“In the morning we will carry on. Now that we have what we need, we can turn south once again.”
“Why didn’t we go south to begin with, after we left the monks?” Thorn asked. All he received in return to his query was a cold stare.
“It is too bad that we didn’t spend more time with those monks,” said Karyl heavily. “I had hoped they might have something to heal my side a bit more.” He gestured towards it with a thumb. “The bleeding has stopped, but the bits that are turning green and white have me worried. Add to that the fact that I can no longer feel my toes — and it isn’t just the cold. I think that knife caught a bit of my foot.”
The fond look Irae gave him, and the hand she put on his shoulder, spoke of a deep sympathy, but all she said was, “We will be back in civilization soon, and then we’ll cure everything that ails you.”
“Where do we go first?” Thorn said, finding it in himself to try again despite the frigidity of her last response. This one, however, was arguably worse, as she did not even look at him. “Jelen,” he said.
“Will you start a fire?” she asked Karyl instead. Karyl gave a quiet groan and stood up. She caught herself quickly. “No, no, never mind. I’ll do it.”
“Jelen!”
“Sit down, sit down.” She patted Karyl back into place.
Thorn stood up. “Jelen. You have to speak with me. You cannot just ignore me forever!”
She looked up at him at last, and where there had been ice in her eyes before, now there was fire far brighter than any that would be built that night. “I have to do nothing. You do not have the luxury of ordering me around.”
“I’m not trying to order you around. I’m trying—” What was he trying to do? Frustrated, he struck his palm with his other hand, balled into a fist. “I’m trying to understand. You’re angry with me. Again. I am tired to death of trying to pacify you. I keep trying to make you not angry with me, but it appears to be your default state!”
“How can I not be angry with you?” she raged. “I try very hard not to give you direct orders. I remember what I owe you. But when I ask you — when I ask you one thing—”
“We escaped, didn’t we? Look, I didn’t have time to do what you wanted. None of us had the time for it. And I couldn’t just let you kill him. What right had you?”
“He was going to kill me if he could have! What right had he?” she shouted.
“We did steal something from them,” offered the bard reasonably from his place on the ground. “I think their upset was understandable, myself.”
“It didn’t belong to them in the first place,” said Irae. “We needed it.”
Thorn rolled his eyes. “If that isn’t a classic excuse for taking what you want without any regard for anyone else—”
“It is for a greater cause,” rumbled Karyl.
“The only cause you’re here for is her selfishness, and you know it,” snapped Thorn. He could feel his secret welling up in him, threatening to spill over and drip off his tongue. “If she wasn’t so good at promising things that we don’t know she has any chance of following through on, none of us would be here.”
“I would still be here,” said Lully. “You can’t say things like that.”
“Why are you here?” Irae’s voice was suddenly dull, and her eyes plaintive though she tried to hide it. She looked at him directly for the first time in what seemed like forever, her plain, noble face thrown into relief by the strange light of the snowfall. “Why did you come here, if that’s what you
think?”
He faltered and wilted before her eyes. “Promises,” he said. “There were promises, and — I wondered if perhaps it would be worth it to try.” To try and make things work, he did not say; to try and do what I said I would.
Her voice was low, subdued, but clear and very strong. “The next time you try to stop me, you had better be ready to do something about it. What did you mean, when you said that you wouldn’t, even if you could?”
It was time.
His lips were trembling, so he compressed them until they were white, and took a deep breath through his nose.
“I can’t,” he said.
She folded her arms. “What do you mean, you can’t?”
“I mean I can’t. I cannot reliably Forge anything into anything else.”
The bard made a small sound of dismay. “Well, there goes a few days of research and questioning down the drain,” he said.
Apart from that the little group remained silent. Irae turned from one to another, as though seeking an answer, but she didn’t seem to be able to put words to what she wanted to ask.
“I have the powers, the abilities,” he said. “I have used them before. But before you came to me, it had been a long time. Years. Not years since I had used them, I don’t mean — years since they had obeyed me.”
“What do you mean?” said Lully, since Irae seemed unable to form the words.
“Oh.” Thorn shrugged, aware of how ludicrous it looked but incapable of stopping himself. Everything was ludicrous, right now; this entire conversation, where it was happening, who it was happening with — ridiculous. “I would try to Forge a mouse into a sunflower, and I would end up with a kestrel that drew blood as it tried to get away. I would Forge a fish into an oak sapling, and it would Forge into nothing but another type of fish, but a dead one. I thought it was broken. I thought I was broken. So I kept trying, and failing. And my entire life —” He stopped and looked up at the rock face above them, the uncaring snow spiraled down. “My entire life,” he told the sky, swallowing hard, “was about living apart. Being something different that frightened people. And then even what made me different was changing. And I thought, my entire life has been completely worthless, because of what I’ve had and what I’ve lost.” He stopped, closed his eyes for a moment, and took a deep breath. “And then you came, and you said — Come with me, and use your powers for my cause, and you will be rewarded with the common courtesies that every man should have.”