Authors: Karen Chance
“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.
A moment later, Rosier’s tree gave up the ghost, and fell into some others with a great snap, creak,
crack
, as loud as a bullet echoing out over the forest. It normally would have had me flinching and panicking and fleeing in the opposite direction, before everybody and their dog came to find out what the hell. But right then, I was having a problem doing that.
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?”
“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.
It was providing a bath for a future war mage.
“That’s nice,” I thought, drifting lazily over into a reed patch, where some little fishies started trying to nibble on my toes.
And then realization struck, and I almost drowned.
I came up, spluttering and coughing, and staring around—at a mass of black birds that had just taken off from the treetops. Their flapping and cawing covered the sounds I was making, like the weeds covered my body. Which was lucky. Because the river wasn’t that wide and Pritkin was just down from me, dabbling a foot in the water on the opposite bank.
I grabbed a bunch of weeds in both hands, and stared.
He was dressed in some whacked-out ghillie suit, or considering where we were, possibly something a drunk Druid had devised: a tunic covered in branches and leaves and vines, a hood shaggy with more of the same, and a pair of brown boots barely visible under the drooping foliage. His face was painted like a commando’s, too, all brown and green splotched, and his hair was midlength and shaggy instead of short and spiky.
But it was him. I knew him instantly, and almost yelled his name in sheer relief before I remembered. And clamped my teeth on my lower lip, hard enough to hurt.
Because this Pritkin didn’t know me.
This Pritkin wouldn’t even know the name I’d been about to shout, since he didn’t go by it yet. This Pritkin was a dangerous mage in a dangerous time, and he probably wouldn’t take it well if he knew he was being spied on. Fortunately, the reeds ensured that he didn’t immediately see me.
Unfortunately, that didn’t really help, since I had no idea what I was supposed to do now.
My thought processes, such as they were, went something like: urp.
Oh, shit, oh, shit, oh, shit, oh, shit!
Rosier. Scan hillside frantically. No Rosier.
Damn him!
What a time to disappear—and for me to let him go!
But it shouldn’t have mattered. We hadn’t seen a soul all day. We were out in the middle of nowhere and Pritkin was supposed to be at court and it shouldn’t have
mattered.
But he was here and it did and Rosier had only just left, maybe half an hour ago. It couldn’t have been much longer than that, so who knew when he’d be back? And what was I supposed to do in the meantime?
What was I supposed to do when Pritkin decided to
leave
?
Only he wasn’t.
He was getting naked instead.
For a moment, I just stared. I don’t know why. Probably still in shock. But the great ghillie-what’s-it went thump on the ground, leaving him standing there bare-chested in a pair of cut-off drawstring trousers and a decent tan.
I blinked. Pritkin didn’t tan. Pritkin was British-tourist pale even in Vegas because of all the war mage paraphernalia he carted around. It required a full-length coat or, when jogging, a bulky hoodie, to hide the various lethal bulges, and neither left the sun a lot of opportunities.
But he wasn’t a war mage yet, was he? And it looked like he could tan, after all. Which was more than a little disconcerting, because with the shaggy, sun-streaked hair and the Celtic version of board shorts, he looked less like a dangerous mage than a surfer from Malibu.
He looked like it in other ways, too. The man I knew didn’t have a choice but to work out. No chance to use his incubus abilities anymore meant no chance to boost his magic, and war mages were constant targets. But this guy didn’t have that problem. And while he was still nicely defined, he looked more like someone who liked to stay active than a bodybuilder.
Except when he stood up and turned away in order to strip off the shorts. Leaving it impossible not to notice that the legs were the same, thick and hard with muscle, probably due to the daily Wales workout. Like the thighs, which were slightly paler than the calves and chest, as if they didn’t see the sun as often. And the still lighter mounds higher up, which stretched and flexed when he moved, to toss the last of his clothing on the heap.
And then to turn around and stretch on the riverbank instead, giving me a chance to see that other things were the same as I remembered, too.
Like the fact that he was injured.
Pritkin was sweaty and muddy, which didn’t worry me much because
Wales
, but one knee was scraped bloody. And so was his right leg, where what looked like a livid burn snaked down from midthigh to just above the shin. And his hip . . .
I bit back a sound as he turned this way, because it was one huge bruise.
It looked like he’d recently been in a fight that, considering the shape he was in, I wasn’t sure he’d won. But he must have, I told myself, before my blood pressure went through the roof. He was here and in one piece, and I doubted he’d be stripping down in the presence of an enemy. Or leaving his stuff on the riverbank. Or diving into the water unarmed—
And not coming up again.
I looked both ways after a minute, when he didn’t reappear, but there was nothing. Just the old wheel, leisurely turning, a lot of slow-moving water, and no Pritkin. I waded out of the reeds to get a better view, thinking that maybe he’d swum under the surface somewhere I couldn’t see, but still nothing.
And, suddenly, I lost it.
The combo of shock, vast relief, panic, and then more shock made the second mental shutdown more extreme than the first. All I could think about was him being hurt and passing out after he dove in. And drowning while I just stood there, stood there like an
idiot
.
Okay, that didn’t make sense, I knew that, because he hadn’t died in medieval Wales! But what if I’d somehow changed things? What if he’d caught a glimpse of me just as he dove and it threw him off course and then he hit his head on something? What if I’d come back to rescue him, only to kill him myself, and that might sound crazy to anyone else, but they didn’t
know
, they didn’t know my
life
, and—