by Karen Chance
“But survive we did, among them all, among creatures a thousand times more powerful. The ones everyone assumed would be among the first to go, the soft, the indulgent, the useless incubi, survived when countless stronger races fell.”
He whirled on me suddenly, so much so that we both almost went sprawling. “I did that, do you understand? I kept the remnants of us together; I forged us into a functioning whole; I found us a refuge! All I ask is for Emrys to help me hold it. And he could—easily, pleasurably. With two of us to absorb power, and with our gifts . . . no coalition would ever be able to challenge us. It would mean absolute security—”
“For you,” I pointed out.
“For all of us!”
“Not for Pritkin.”
“He’s incubus whether he likes it or not!”
“He’s human, too, and for him that sort of life is more like slavery.”
“It’s nothing of the kind!”
“Like those people whose world you turned into your refuge?” I’d seen it recently, a vast, sprawling desert world that had been taken over by the incubi. It and its people.
“If we hadn’t, they’d have been conquered by someone else. In those days—”
“But those days are over, aren’t they? They’ve been over for a long time. But I haven’t noticed any emancipation going—”
“Bah!” Rosier suddenly yelled in my face, causing me to jerk back. And stare at him. “I’m through talking to you!” he proclaimed, and strode off, his feet throwing up little clumps of mud.
• • •
“You need to stop panicking,” I said very clearly, some hours later. We’d made our way out of the steamy valley and onto a frigid mountaintop, but our luck was about the same. As Rosier was busy demonstrating.
“You stop panicking!” he snarled. “They’re not trying to eat you!”
“They’re not trying to eat you, either.” Well, I was pretty sure. “They just want what’s in the bag. Give them what’s in the bag.”
Rosier glared at me from his perch atop a birch, where he’d landed after the rock fall but before the avalanche. I’d taken refuge in a sort of cave-like depression in the rocks, but he’d been forced to jump over the cliff or be crushed by hundred-pound boulders and a mountain of snow. The good news was, he ended up grabbing the top of a tree. The bad news was that a mass of wild pigs apparently lived under it.
And had no intention of letting him down.
“How is giving them food going to encourage them to leave?” Rosier demanded, staring at them, wild-eyed.
“Because you’re going to throw it away from the tree,” I said, exasperated. “No, no. Take off the cellophane first. They won’t know what it is!”
“I can’t take the cellophane off and hold on to the damned tree!”
“Use your legs.”
“What?”
“Your legs!”
Rosier stared at me like I’d lost my mind. “I’m an incubus, not a contortionist!”
I took a breath and closed my eyes. That seemed to be the only thing that helped with him, if I couldn’t see his stupid face. “Use your legs to hold on to the tree. Use your hands to unwrap the food. Throw the food away from you. Then, when they go after it, get down and run in the other direction.”
There was some grumbling I couldn’t make out very well, and then some cellophane crinkling. And then a lot of agitated squealing.
I opened my eyes to see several pigs jumping up onto the trunk like they were trying to climb it, Rosier screeching and retreating even farther into the swaying, leafy treetop, and cheesy crackers raining down like manna from heaven. I sighed. “I said away. You have to throw them away from—”
“I am not Sandy Koufax!”
“Who?”
“Oh, for . . .” The treetop shook some more, and an outraged face appeared through the foliage. “Just do what I told you!”
“I am not using magic,” I said, grasping his big bag o’ tricks a little more tightly. Fortunately, he’d decided to lighten his own load by making me carry it earlier. Unfortunately, I couldn’t use anything in it without bringing the Pythian posse of doom down on our heads.
“Then use the gun!”
“The—you brought a gun?” I opened the pack, and sure enough, toward the bottom was a shiny new Beretta. “Why did you bring a gun? We can’t shoot anybody—”
“The hell we can’t.”
“We can’t! It would change time! I told you—”
“And I told you to shoot the damned pigs! Or will that change time, too?”
I put the gun away before I was tempted to use it on Rosier.
More tempted.
“Shoot them!” he yelled.
“That mountain just tried to bury us,” I reminded him, trying to speak calmly. “Do you want another avalanche?”
“We don’t have a choice!”
“It’s only been a few minutes. If you stop screeching—”
“I don’t screech. I have never screeched!”
“—maybe they’ll get bored and go away.”
“Perhaps if I hadn’t just thrown food at them! They’ll never leave now!”
“You don’t know that,” I said, just as several more pigs started trunk jumping. “And can I remind you that it takes all of a second for a Pythia to pop in?” I added, over his renewed screeches. “Once they know where we are—”
“Shut up and get me down, you appalling woman! Get me down, get me down, get me down!”
“I can’t talk to you when you’re like this, you know; I really—”
“Augghhh!”
I would have put the infernal noise down to Rosier’s tendency for hysterics, but then I heard something else. Something like the creak-crack-pop of splintering wood. And, okay, it was just barely possible that this tree wasn’t in the greatest of shape.
Annnnnd now the pigs were ramming it.
I started rooting around in the bag. “What else do you have in here?”
“Use the yellow ones. The yellow ones!”
“The yellow what?” There were only about a thousand things in here. “Pills, potions, amulets—”
“Augghhh! Augghhh! Augghhh!”
I turned the bag upside down and scrabbled around in the snowy, muddy slush. And found a bunch of individually wrapped little yellow rubbery things falling out of a small bag. Great, now I had to get one open. And thanks to recent events, my nails were shot.
But I managed, and a moment later looked up. And saw Rosier’s tree swaying back and forth madly, like it was trying to do the hula. Or, you know, like it was about to topple over into a herd of crazed wild boar.
I licked my lips. “Okay, now what?”
“Their throats!”
“What?”
“Their throats! Their throats! You have to get them down their—augghhh!”
I stared at him. Yeah, like that was happening.
But for once, Rosier’s panic was justified. I didn’t have to be a lumberjack to know that tree was on its last leg. Or limb. Or—
“Throw me the backpack!” I yelled.
“Oh yes. Yes, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he said furiously. “So you can take off with the food and leave me here—”
“No! You stupid—I’m not planning to leave you!”
“Then why?”
“For the pigs, you stupid, stupid—”
A great leather thing hit me in the face, hard enough to knock me down.
But there really wasn’t time to complain. My butt smacked down into an icy puddle, and the next second, I was throwing junk food everywhere. And this was not the moment to mess about with crap like strawberry roll-ups or turkey jerky. No, this called for the big guns.
I pulled out a little white box and went ballistic with the Twinkies.
Right then I was having a problem doing anything but standing and staring with my mouth hanging open.
I was still doing it when Rosier joined me a few moments later. His tree had ended up wedged against an outcropping of rock a little way down the path, instead of hitting the forest floor, allowing him to scramble back onto solid ground. And I guess the intervening time had given him a chance to get his shit together, although the usual smugness had yet to return.
Or maybe he was having a hard time finding the right words, too.
“You . . . didn’t use the knockout pills, I take it?” he finally asked, staring out into the void.
I shook my head.
He sat down and we split the last Twinkie.
“You realize we just sent a herd of flying pigs soaring out over medieval Wales,” I said, sometime later, when the last little oinking cloud had disappeared over the horizon.
“Hm.”
“You don’t look too concerned.”
Rosier got to his feet and then actually extended a hand to help me up. “Maybe it will give the Pythias something else to do. And in any case . . .”
“In any case?”
“Well. The expression had to start somewhere, didn’t it?”
Chapter Sixteen
“I thought you knew where this place was,” I said as we passed a familiar-looking mossy stump for the third time.
“I do.”
“So we’re taking the scenic route, is that it?” It was halfway through the afternoon, we were drenched with sweat, and we’d been rained on twice. Even worse, we hadn’t even managed to locate the court, much less Pritkin. At the rate we were going, we’d still be wandering around the wilderness when the cursed soul came and went and not even know it!
Rosier stopped abruptly. “Do you see that?” he demanded, pointing at something between the trees.
“No.”
“It’s a mill!”
I peered into the shade. “Okay.”
“Stay there. Find a seat, sit on it, and wait for me. Do not wander off, do not get in trouble, and do not talk to anyone!”
I glowered at him. Our brief moment of camaraderie had faded in the dreary sludge of nonexistent roads, chilly mountaintops, and steamy valleys, and he’d been getting progressively more ill-tempered all afternoon. Not to mention slower, as the missing shoe took its toll despite being replaced by a spare length of gray wool. Well, gray-red now, Rosier’s tender flesh having been lacerated by a couple thousand sharp-edged rocks.
“I can’t talk to anyone when I don’t speak the language,” I pointed out. “And where are you going?”
“To find the right road!”
“Why can’t I go with you?” I wasn’t thrilled about the company, but I was even less happy about being left on my own in the Wild West of Wales.
“Because I can travel faster alone,” Rosier said, his voice clipped as he tried to fish rock number 2,914 out of his makeshift shoe.
I scowled. “I’ve been matching strides with you all damned day, and even been ahead most of the last—”
“And if I have to endure your infernal chatter one more minute, I will murder you,” he added, panting. “And while that would undoubtedly be to earth’s great advantage, it would stick me here, without magic, for the next millennium and a half!”
He stomped off.
I stared after him, and scowled some more. Then I went to find this “mill.” I did not have high hopes.
Of course, I could be wrong, I thought, breaking through the trees. And finding a tumbledown structure with a water wheel that might be mistaken for a mill if someone squinted. But I barely noticed.
Because there was a stream, and it looked like a small, gurgling slice of heaven.
I hacked and stumbled and then slid the rest of the way down the hill and sat on the bank, tugging at the “shoes” my sadistic bastard of a traveling partner had supplied me with. Because, apparently, if anyone caught a glimpse of my Keds, it might change all of history. He was probably just pissed that he hadn’t thought to bring any hiking shoes himself.
Not that thin sneakers would have been all that great, either, since apparently Wales is a Celtic word meaning “muddy rock pit,” but at least they had soles. The closest thing these had was a hardened piece of leather, and then a bunch of leather flaps with a drawstring loosely pulling them up to where they tied around the ankle. They weren’t so much shoes as baggies for the feet, and they sucked, oh my God.
But I finally got the laces to release and plunged my blisters into the water and oh. It was cold. It was perfect.
I lay there awhile, gazing up at the tree canopy. A couple of determined feeder vines were blowing in the wind toward the branches on the other side. Dip and reach, dip and reach. I kept thinking they’d grab hold any minute, and start stitching up the remaining seam of the sky, but they never did. It was sort of hypnotic to watch, though. Especially with liquid pleasure coursing over my bruised heels and battered toes.
After a while, my feet started to feel better, but my legs began to point out that they could use some attention, too. They were all scratched up, thanks to the fact that the latest “road” had been more of a goat trail and we’d had to tramp our way through miles of prickly flora. I wiggled down a little lower, but that left me with hard little pebbles under my butt, and a sweaty, mud-splattered body crying out for a swim.
I glanced around.
The big wheel was lazily turning, but I didn’t see anybody around the mill, which was half obscured by weeds anyway. Of course, that didn’t mean it was abandoned; everything around here had weeds. But even if not, people didn’t use mills all year, right? The harvest came in, you did your thing, carted off your flour or whatever, and that was it until next year.
At least I hoped so, because I really, really wanted a bath.
I sat there, chewing my cheek for a while and thinking it over. And scratching, because the damned dress was rubbing me raw. It was basically another sack, only with holes in it. Which would have been fine since my head and arms needed somewhere to go. Only these holes didn’t make sense. Unless the thing had been designed for a hunchback with an arm growing out of her chest and a neck where her shoulder ought to be. So I wasn’t wearing it so much as being imprisoned by it, and suddenly I couldn’t take it anymore.
After another surreptitious glance around, I shucked it, and just that, just getting rid of twenty pounds of damp, scratchy wool, was the most amazing feeling I’d had in a while.
I sat there for another few minutes, with the scratchy mass in my lap like a dead Snuffleupagus. And waited for someone to call out something about a trespassing naked chick. But nobody did.
Nobody appeared at all, and there were no sounds, except for the occasional call of a bird, the gurgle of the stream, and the rhythmic creak, creak, creak of the distant wheel. A fish flipped into the air and did a happy little wriggle before disappearing again. A fat rabbit stuck its nose out of a bush, regarded me for a moment, and started chewing on some grass. A tiny breeze sent a ripple across the top of the water, breaking the late-afternoon sunlight into a scintillation of gold.
And I left the wool monster on the bank and eased into the stream.
And, okay, that was cold.
Just stay in, I told myself. Stay in, stay in, stay in, and it’ll get better. And it did. In a minute, it got awesome.
I felt my whole bruised, scratched, and wool-tortured body relax into a feeling of quiet bliss. Oh God, I thought tearfully. I loved Wales.
I spent maybe ten minutes paddling around, mostly floating on my bruised butt, and watching my toes peek out of the water. It was a sweet little place. Very green. Of course, saying that about Wales was like saying that the desert was brown. Or that the sky was blue. Or that Rosier was a dick. Wales had to be the greenest place I’d ever seen in my life, almost startlingly so after Vegas.
Back at what I’d started secretly to think of as home, even places that should have been green often weren’t. Like down near the waterline of Lake Mead or along the banks of the Colorado. If you were lucky, you might see a few scraggly bits of desert scruff here and there, stubbornly clinging to the rocky soil, or a mostly brown vine trailing up a cliff. But that was as good as it got, at least from nature.
Of course, it was Vegas, so everybody cheated. The casinos and shopping malls and golf courses all had greenery around them. The Bellagio had its own indoor garden. And Boulder City, a little town where the workers had been housed during the building of the Hoover Dam, had installed a lush carpet of grass in the new playground they’d built for their kids.
Only to come out the next day and find thirty or more hardy bighorn sheep munching on the free buffet.
Hey, it was Vegas.
The townspeople had eventually made peace with the sheep, who simply refused to budge, and in true Vegas style had even set up tours to the place. If you went at the right time of day, you could see the standoff between the visiting sheep and the local kids, each on their respective side of the playground, each ignoring the other. What you couldn’t see was anything like this.
I looked around at the complete opposite of Vegas, where even things that shouldn’t be green were anyway. Like the mill wheel, with its fine coating of bright green moss. Or the water, which was a dappled emerald thanks to the treetops that almost met over the stream. Or the sky, which was taking on an olive tinge in the east that foretold more rain in my future. Even the rocks under my feet were all rounded and mossy, having long ago given up any rough edges to the relentless flow of the soft, soft water.
It was heaven on my sore heels.
It was hell on my hundred or so scratches, but I decided I could live with it.