The Horasian Emperor had been old and sick, Thorsten reflected. The man was very clearly dying. He made a sorry impression there on his huge, splendid chair, wrapped in finery. Soon there would be need for a successor, which couldn’t have come at a worse time with the rebellion and all.

Thorsten could have spat in his face, but the emperor looked so frail that it would have been like to kill him. He felt sorry for the man.

His own accommodations weren’t very nice after they took him away, a dark dungeon cell deep beneath some fortification. There, he waited.

The dungeons were relatively empty because most prisoners had been pressed into the army to fight in the war. The only other man there was a lunatic called Prat who professed to having killed his own mother, wife and daughter before cooking the latter in a stew. This had to be where the boundary was in terms of who was allowed to redeem himself through military service instead of punishment. The times were evidently grim.

Prat knew a thousand riddles and he would constantly pester Thorsten with them.

“Heh, heh, what’s this, what’s this?” he would say. “It disappears the second you say its name!”

And Thorsten would think for a time, haphazardly.

“Some…ghost,” he would reply eventually, and Prat would rattle the door of his cell.

“No!” he would scream. “No! Silence! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! I have another! Feed me and I live but give me a drink and I die!”

“Some…drunkard on the brink of death,” guessed Thorsten.

“No!” Prat screamed and rattled his door again. “Fire! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! I have another! What am I, what am I? I can fly but have no wings, I can cry but have no eyes, and wherever I go, darkness follows me!”

“A crow without wings and without eyes,” was Thorsten’s best guess.

“No!” came the answer as usual. “A cloud! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!”

It could go like that for hours. Then Prat would become very quiet and Thorsten could hear him weep. The hardest Prat wept was when they came and took him to be broken on the wheel. Thorsten never saw him again after that.

His last riddle was: “What am I, what am I? I have nothing to lose but my chains!”

Thorsten found that one most annoying of all, for it could be a hundred things.

“I don’t know, maybe it’s me!” he had roared, his voice echoing off the stone walls.

“No, I’m the mud skins down south on them plantations! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!”

Prat had been mad like that.

Towards his own final day, they called upon Thorsten more often. He was manacled and led outside to be loaded into the back of a cage wagon. People would throw dung and rotten fruit at him as they processed through the streets under heavy guard while a herald in the front of the wagon would read announcements.

“Hear ye, hear ye!” the herald would cry. “See the Thorwalsh demon, spawn of Olaf the Terrible himself, his last living son! Come to see him die a week hence on the outdoor stage at the Opera House! His Royal Magnificence the emperor himself will attend the vivid execution as we relive the fall of Thorwal!”

The rehearsals for his execution were held inside the Opera House so as not to spoil the spectacle for the people. There were great slabs of wood painted with pictures of the sea, a harbour and very primitive dwellings which served to set the scene on the stage. Everything was made to look dirty and barbaric, and the actors who played the Thorwalsh warriors were all behaving themselves like animals.

Thorsten’s role in the play was that of his own father, culminating in his death.

“We shall have his tongue,” the fat man said at one point, pondering the proceedings. “It would not do to have him spout profanities in the emperor’s presence.”

Said and done. They came for Thorsten that evening with five men, a hot knife and iron pincers. He had never felt such pain and was so weak afterwards that he could hardly stand. But still they dragged him out of his cell every day, and his mouth tasted like burned meat ever after, right until his sense of taste vanished altogether.

To play the part of the giantess that had crushed his father to death, they had an ogress who was ten paces tall, closer to eleven. She was rather young, had flaxen hair and was of a drop-shaped figure, wide hips and a little bit of a belly. She was also completely and utterly stupid.

“No, no, no, you crush him!” the fat man would lament and point at Thorsten when she had forgotten again and made to crush one of the actors or her own handlers.

For everyone’s safety, she was shackled even worse than Thorsten and surrounded by twenty men with pikes, heavy crossbows and thick ropes attached to her chains. They also had a scorpion pointed at her during the proceedings in case she went rogue.

She wasn’t a vicious creature, far as Thorsten could tell, merely a slow one, and she couldn’t tell one human being from another. From what he overheard, she had killed five people so far, more through carelessness than anything else.

“Oi quash he?” she would mumble, confused, and everyone would laud her.

She didn’t respond well to threats or being yelled at. This much, the people at the Opera House had already learned.

One time, she said: “Me hungwee!”

And an unfortunate actress, dressed up as the most absurd representation of a shield maiden, vanished up to her hips in the ogress' mouth. The woman survived because the ogress had only suckled on her, but it took a distressing amount of time to convince the great beast of letting her morsel go.

Thorsten had laughed when that happened, which in lack of a tongue sounded more like clacking and hurt abominably.

The ogress was the real reason for the frequent rehearsals because she would forget within moments whatever she was told. She was supposed to trample onto the reinforced stage, walk over to Thorsten and kill him by a single stomp of her foot. Then she was to destroy some of the painted wood buildings and walk off again, which was far too much for the poor thing to remember.

Worse yet, she was supposed to only pretend to squash Thorsten during the rehearsals, which of course she forgot as soon as she got all the rest of it right.

Thorsten was chained to a wooden post on a platform, and whenever the ogress had a good day he had to jump out of the way of her stomping foot. The first time this happened, when he still had a tongue, he had jumped so that she would step right on top of the chain.

The post had cracked dangerously, but more unfortunately her weight on the chain yanked him forward with more force than he could possibly resist, pressing him face-first into her toes. He got a mouthful of her that time, and hence dodged differently from then on.

It wasn't until the day before the event that the big ogress had one entirely correct run, making everyone involved with the project quite happy. Then, on the day of days, Thorsten ate his last meal.

He couldn’t tell them his wishes, so they gave him a single boiled egg, three salted herrings and a bit of fresh red beet along the side, but the small feast was no good. It hurt his mouth to eat it, whereas the awful rye gruel they had given him before tasted much better without a tongue.

This incident made him frightful for an entirely different reason, however. After today, he could fully expect to feast for all eternity in Swafnir's Halls. But what without a tongue? It would be dreadful, surely, to sit there and stare at meat and mead, knowing he would never again taste them. And all his stories, how would he tell his ancestors of his great exploits without a tongue?

It made him so sick to think of it that he retched blood.

He needed a priest, but all they sent him was some fat fool with the sun on his chest, blabbering about absolving sins. But even if they had a Swafnir Priest for him, Thorsten couldn’t have told him of his plight either.

Writing might work, but how to express his problem in Thorwalsh runes he couldn’t fathom, and no one else here could read runes.

He needed time now, most of all. Time to get closure on this problem, or some way to get his tongue back.

But today was to be his last day in this world.

He fought them violently when they came to take him, taking them by surprise and forcing them to retreat from his cell for the first time. He had been nothing if not pleasant prisoner up until that time while waiting for his execution, squandering all hope of escape. He had squandered another, he realized, by not waiting for them to take his chains off.

He cursed and cursed himself for it.

His rage gave way to acknowledgement of his situation. When they came for him again, this time with twenty men instead of just five, they found him weeping on the floor, just like Prat the madman.

He didn’t remember anything about the wagon ride to the stage. They hit him with clubs a couple of times for good measure and loaded him into the wagon, but it seemed to him that the way there took mere moments. He was running out of time.

The outdoor stage was a sort of ancient stone pit, probably built by those ancient, sophisticated people that had come in their galleys from beyond the Sea of Seven Winds, either killing, displacing or assimilating anything they found to form their great empire. The stone rows of seats had been extended at the top by wooden scaffolds with benches for the event, and the old stage had been flanked by great wood towers where actors, handlers and the ogress could hide while waiting their turn. Between these two towers was built a bridge up top carrying a number of mechanical contraptions, all wrought with rope, wheels and chains.

The ranks were full when Thorsten's wagon arrived and the emperor had taken seat in his splendid wooden box from where he enjoyed the best view of anyone. And the play was already in motion too.

It began with two young, beautiful actresses, one dark, one golden-haired, walking through a shrunk environment of rock, stick-sized trees and miniature houses.

The girls seemed to praise the Emperor a lot as they trampled everything beneath them to kindling, and they laughed about how feeble, backwards and disagreeable the Thorwalsh people were. The scene ended to great cheering from the audience.

While the setting was changed, a gargantuan green curtain was lowered from the bridge between the towers. Servants ran to take away the now destroyed landscape and replace it with the new one, a city if Thorsten was any judge, meant to misrepresent and denigrate Thorwal further.

He was given sackcloth hoses and a fur vest to wear, as well as a huge, gilded helm with an absurd number of horns. The makers of the play evidently tried to sail on three ships at once, trying to pass him off as a barbarian, a beggar and some sort of king all at the same time.

Over in the other tower structure, the ogress did not fare much better. So as not to offend Horasian sensibilities, she had to be made to wear a dress. She had worn a cloak of furs and rawhide during the rehearsals, along with a breechclout that left little to the imagination. Her new garment was of sturdy, solid craftsmanship, green cloth with yellow lace, but trying to make her understand how to put it on was a task they had obviously underestimated.

On the stage, the finishing touch to the city was made by upending several sacks of kitchen mice into the scenery, another insult to Thorwal and its people. When the enormous curtain was hoisted up again, the actresses started to trample the city under their feet, causing the little grey critters to panic and flee in every direction.

A few women screeched with outrage when the vermin started to run into the audience, but in general the scene was received with plentiful laughter and cheers.

“The rats are fleeing the sinking ship!” one of the actresses proclaimed. “Quick, stomp them all in the name of Horas!”

Thorsten had resigned himself to his fate, much as it still pained him. He had never feared death before today. He had been waiting for it eagerly, in fact. The play was an unnecessary detour that before today he had nevertheless found rather entertaining. It was just another story to tell in Swafnir’s Halls, a story he might now never tell.

It had all come crumbling down. And now, as he saw the play, it made his blood boil. The city where he had grown up alongside so many people that he knew and loved, to be destroyed so callously, and his people so utterly defenceless, he felt a rage at the back of his throat that made it hard for him to breathe.

The next scene was not as vivid from his vantage point as it featured another contraption from the bridge between the towers. This was a wooden frame on strings attached to two cranes which could be lowered, lifted and shifted with the help of many men and counterweights. To the spectators’ eyes it was disguised to look like the side view of a giant brown shoe.

Now actors dressed as mock Thorwallers were running across the stage and the giant shoe was lowered quickly between them and the audience. The actors, skilful jugglers and acrobats, then jumped onto the wooden beams that made up the framework and were lifted back up with it, thus creating the illusion for the audience that they had been crushed. They then dumped stripes of red cloth from their pockets to resemble the blood and gore. It was an engineering feat as well as a theatrical one, and the audience was well astonished, even if from Thorsten's perspective the magic didn’t work very well.

The next scene was a sea battle wherein actors walked inside wooden boats carried by shoulder straps, but it was confusing and nonsensical, and all the ships looked like dromons. There was no part of any giantess in this one, the Thorwalsh fleet instead getting itself sunk by sheer incompetence, vessels ramming into each other to the roaring laughter of the crowd.

Each time the curtain fell, a young, handsome narrator would tell the audience what they were about to see in the next scene. It was this narration that told Thorsten that his great moment had come.

He knew at once that fighting them would not do this time. They had been warned. They took him bodily to a place on the stage where his chains could be fastened to an iron ring in the ground, made sure he looked the part and left him there. Meanwhile, across the stage, the ogress was being coaxed by her handlers to trample him, and then to wait because she was suddenly overeager.

Boos and hateful shouting rang out when the curtain was lifted this time and Thorsten finally got a very good glimpse of the crowd. He could see the old, frail emperor in his box, surrounded by nobility. From the poorer folk, rotten apples, onions and cabbages started flying towards him.

When the ogress stomped onto the stage, the entire place went as silent as a grave all of a sudden, only her heavy footfalls to be heard.

Thorsten gritted his teeth and pulled on his chains, but it was no good. She was fixed on him and chewing her lip, having to concentrate hard so as not to forget what to do. The chain was so short that he would have no chance to get out of harm’s way, and there was no post that he might make her snap. It seemed hopeless.

But then, things started to go wrong.

“Crush him!” a shout rang out first from the audience, tearing apart the blanket of silence.

More shouting followed and the ogress turned, her big, blue eyes noticing the mass of people and becoming visibly scared. The handlers and stage folk were in panic, starting to urge her from all directions to get on with it.

It seemed like the play had turned into a disaster.

Thorsten stood with his hands in his irons, watching it all unfold. Yes, the play was vicious and meanspirited but it was also unfathomably dangerous when coming to think of it now. To place an ogress at the incalculable whims of a crowd. And expect her to perform an execution.

When the ogress didn’t move, the mob turned on her, flinging insults and more rotten food. The handlers meanwhile tried to call her back so she could be calmed and instructed, but the gargantuan girl would not take her eyes off the jeering people.

When she made a step backwards, her foot caught in her dress and she fell, smashing into the wooden tower structure and making the whole construction swing dangerously, as well as removing one of its legs.

Thorsten watched helpless from below. The square beams that the structure was made up of gave way on one side and the whole tower started toppling over and taking the bridge with it. Actors and stagehands rained down from above, smashing into the floorboards with sickening sounds amidst a wave of rope, wood and steel.

The ogress was on her feet again, revealing that she had crushed one of the young actresses under her rump when she fell. This was the least of everyone’s concerns, however, because the sudden rain of bodies and objects terrified her even more than the crowd. She screamed and ripped apart her dress even while the tower continued to disintegrate, and when one of the cranes' walking wheels smashed her in the head she jumped, stark naked, from the stage right into the now panicking mob of people.

The poor, giant creature half crawled and half trampled over the ranks, giving no regard for who or what was in her way. She wasn't nearly as huge as those terrors which had obliterated his home, but here in this confined space that mattered little.

The scorpion at the back finally thrummed loudly, but the iron dart missed its mark, impaling two onlookers instead. The few ogress’ handlers who had not retreated or been killed now rushed the stage, feathering the huge girl with quarrels. But they couldn’t stop her.

The huge wooden foot from before crashed down onto the stage, missing Thorsten by two paces while shattering to bits. It had hung onto the still intact tower until someone on top must have cut it loose when noticing that the tower in question had started to bend as well. Perhaps more importantly, Thorsten noted that the weapons of those actors who had been in the false foot were now strewn all around, and a nice, heavy axe just within his reach.

He reached for it and hacked away manfully at his chains, but the weapon turned out to be made of cast iron, untampered, and it bent and blunted quickly under his swings. He had to be careful, as well as keep track of the raging ogress and anyone noticing his doings.

The quarrels in her back made the ogress lash out at the stage again. Being at least ten paces tall she could easily stretch and reach places that seemed initially safe to her attackers. She got one handler in each hand and squeezed, making Thorsten uncomfortably privy to the cracking of bones before her giant fingers crushed the guts out of the men she killed. The other handlers thus retreated from the stage, and a pike thrust to her arse made the ogress turn back around again.

The defenders were not well organized, but nevertheless a small portion of unwavering pikes formed up on one flank, advancing upon her. The emperor’s guards at the green and golden box were also busy reloading their crossbows and forming a wall of spear points trying to defend their liege.

The wooden ranks that had been constructed at the top of the stone seat rows left only two narrow exits and a much larger number of bodies trying to squeeze through, in essence turning the outdoor theatre into a roofless slaughterhouse. Meanwhile, men at arms tried to get inside to defend their Emperor, wrestling and clashing with the mob of commoners trying to get out.

The only thing missing was a fire.

“And what you think you're doing?” a voice challenged Thorsten from behind.

A man was there, one of the handlers, holding an unloaded crossbow.

Thorsten charged him immediately, but the chain was too short and he couldn’t reach the man. He was held back like a hound on a leash.

“Just you wait!” the man hissed, producing a shiny crank device that he attached to his crossbow to load it.

The Horasians built all manner of different crossbows, including ones so heavy that they could not be loaded by hand. The heaviest ones used a windlass, a device of many ropes and a winch that could pull the string and bend the heavy bow. Lighter ones used a kind of lever for enhancing the strength of the user without sacrificing too much speed. This crank variation was entirely wrought of steel and very fancy, but it did not seem to load very quickly, thus giving Thorsten time to go back to his hacking.

He eyed the progress anxiously, caught in this absurd situation in which they both stared each other down while working on killing the other.

‘Whaler!’ Thorsten wanted to curse the man, but it came out as some throaty gag.

The Horasians caught whales for meat, blubber and bones, and most of all ambergris which they used to make their exquisitely pungent perfumes. It was the source for much animosity between the two peoples.

“Reaver!” the man shot back as though he had understood, cranking his device all the while.

The crossbow was quicker and its user grinned wide while putting in the quarrel.

Knights and proud warriors shunned the crossbow and everyone using it, supposedly because it was a ranged weapon that could defeat their expensive armour. The real reason, it had since dawned upon Thorsten, was that it was so damnably easy to use. It was long and cumbersome to load, but it didn’t take much strength and very little in the way of skill. A peasant brat who had only ever held a pitchfork could be taught to use a crossbow well within a fortnight. And from a range of less than three paces one could not reasonably expect anyone to miss.

Seeing his hopes fade, Thorsten resolved to throw his axe. He had been a good axe thrower in Thorwal, but those were tools specifically made for the purpose. Here, this battered lump of iron did not compare favourably, and so it flew all wrong.

The man raised the weapon to his chin to take aim just when the thing came flying, striking him in the mouth with a crunch of his teeth.

Thorsten was lucky. The bolt slipped off the wooden rail when the man flinched backwards, and all the time spent loading was wasted when the trigger was inadvertently pulled, thrumming all that penned-up force into thin air.

“Bastard!” the man spat through a mouth of broken teeth.

Thorsten clucked like a hen, his lack of tongue momentarily forgotten. The helmet on his head had made him sweat and so he pulled it off by one of its horns. It was remarkably ugly, over large and impractical to boot with its long sharp horns that would inevitably tangle with its wearer’s hands when fighting. But for beating someone to death with it...

He threw it at the man as well, as hard and well-aimed as he could muster. The crossbow man was busy fumbling with his cranequin, judging Thorsten disarmed. The heavy helm hit him in the top of his head and a moment later he was left on the ground twitching like a man affected by the falling sickness.

Thorsten couldn’t find another weapon in his reach and the link he had been beating still held firm. He should have thrown the helm in the first place, he reflected, for now he had nothing with which to cut the chain. He tore and yanked at it as he could, but it was no use.

Tired, angry and frustrated he sat himself down, looking at the battle before the stage to gain some solace. It had ground somewhat to a standstill. The ogress had made short work of anyone but the large mob in front of her. How she was able to do so was rather obvious now. The fools had taken off her chains to get the dress on, and then neglected to put them back on for time constraints. There were more dead people than he could count, most crushed under her when she had jumped in panic right onto the ranks, mauling anyone she could get her hands on.

She was kneeling in the remnants of the emperor’s box with a wall of steel points before her, keeping her at bay. Every now and then, her hands would find and opening and pull another man from amongst the defenders whom she then dropped and crushed deliberately under her knee. She was bleeding from a hundred wounds, but these were mere scratches to her. Thorsten recalled the battle he had lost in that ford on the Andra, many days ago, and he couldn’t help but hate what he now saw.

Behind him, his attacker had stopped twitching in the meantime and had now to be presumed dead, but his crossbow had not fallen backwards with him. Thorsten crawled and tested his reach, finding it easy to drag the crossbow to him with his foot. He should have thought of it much sooner.

The quarrel he could attain in the same fashion, but there was no way to get the crank device into his hands. The crossbow was a heavy but nevertheless nicely decorated thing with a sturdy steel bow and thick, twisted linen thread for a string.

It was the antithesis of any Thorwalsh weapon, complicated, expensive and unwieldy to load. Throwing axes were much easier, though of course requiring a lifetime of training to master.

Despite this, it was immediately apparent to him how to load the crossbow, namely by pulling the string backwards until it snagged inside the gap of the metal wheel protruding from the wood on the upper side. This wheel could be made to turn and let the string snap forward via the trigger on the bottom side of the device.

That was all very well and good, except without the loading device Thorsten found that his arms did not possess enough strength to get the string anywhere near as far as it needed to go. He therefore put his feet into the bow and pushed the crossbow away from him while holding onto the string with his hands. It was still nearly impossible and something tore apart painfully in his back, but under moaning and groaning he finally succeeded.

He got so excited then that he almost lost the quarrel when pointing the crossbow downwards. He had to place his thumb on it to keep it from sliding. Then, after careful aim, he loosed the pointy bolt at the battered link in his chain.

It gave a mighty clang and the crossbow thrummed so loud that his ear started ringing. The bolt was embedded deeply in the wood below and the top half snapped off. And the blasted link was merely nicked on one side.

“Raah!”

Boiling with rage, he swung the stupid crossbow like a pickaxe, right at the link, snapping it in two just at the nick he made. He had finally found some real steel.

His joy was yet elevated more when he noticed that the fat man who had taken his tongue lay dead below a large wooden beam nearby.

Now he had to get out, make an escape somehow. He discarded the unwieldy weapon at once and took another crude axe from the ground. It was of the same dastardly making as the previous one, a cheap decoy that looked the part and little else, but as a rule, human skulls were even softer still. It also had a nasty long spike at the back that he thought might prove useful.

He went immediately via the still intact tower where they had offloaded him, but no sooner was he getting close than he could hear the rattling of arms and armour coming his way. Reinforcements had arrived, and he initially thought of passing himself off as an actor. That wouldn’t work very well, however, on account of his hands still being bound together and the length of chain he carried.

He rushed back to the stage at once, looking for ideas. The other way off the stage was barred by the collapsed tower and the ogress was still engaged in heavy battle in front of the stage, even worse than a moment ago.

This was because she had climbed to her feet, all her terrifying height, which made the line before her break and try to run. But there wasn’t really anywhere they could run. In their desperation, people were now flinging themselves from the top of the extended seat rows, disregarding the injury they would endure upon impact with the ground outside.

And the ogress was laughing.

Sometimes she stomped two people at a time. Often only half a body would end up beneath her and get crushed. And what was going on above wasn't much better.

She had gotten hold of a pike, which in her hands looked like some bloody meat skewer. Some Maraskans sold roasted meat on skewers just like that on the street. And the ogress, a shy, dull, timid creature hitherto, was using hers exactly the same way.

The meat lumps on her skewer were people, of course. And most of them still flailed with life. She had apparently fallen into some sort of bloodlust such as wasn’t alien to a Thorwaller.

She needed to be stopped. But then again, this was nothing if not justice. Thorsten saw the Emperor of Horas, that frail, done man, lying on the ground behind the ogress, vainly stretching out a hand at his fleeing men.

‘If I kill him...’ Thorsten thought.

He tried to imagine what his father might do, but Jarl Olaf, Hetman of Hetmen, would never have been stupid enough to get himself caught like this in the first place.

Thorsten wasn’t his father's equal in terms of cunning, as he had learned quite painfully.

‘But how would he sit in Swafnir's Halls?’

Would he be flat as a flounder, all squished and squashed as he had died? That would be absurd. But if he could be whole, then surely so could Thorsten.

He recalled a story now, of Hrangsgar, the warrior with one arm, one leg and one eye, who upon entering Swafnir’s Halls had knocked over every ale horn because he had grown unfamiliar to his missing limbs. The great priest Thorgun Swafnirson had told it to a boy who'd lost a finger while throwing axes at the time. The memory made Thorsten smile.

He jumped off the stage amidst the blood and gore, diving into the shadow of the ogress. The emperor noticed him.

“Help me!” he squealed. “In the name of all that's good I command it, oh!”

The frail man noticed at last who Thorsten was, and the realization made his eyes wide. He was a dying man any which way, crushed by sickness and burden. Thorsten once again reconsidered.

‘If you are unsure, boy, flip a coin!’ His father had taught him once. ‘When t'is in the air you'll know which side you want.’

He looked calmly at the emperor but just then the choice was taken from him when the ogress took a sudden step back and her heel landed squarely on the old man. It seemed to sink through the body, compressing all that puffy fine dress and snapping the emperor’s brittle bones as if they were nothing. His death rattle was a squeak when the air was violently forced out of him and his head rose to kiss the heel that had crushed him, a final insult to his injury.

It was an unworthy death for a sovereign, but perhaps a just one after all he had supposedly done.

The ogre girl's sudden shift had been prompted by the scorpion finally hitting its mark, putting a one-and-a-half-pace dart through her. The tip stuck out of her back, dripping blood, and she started swaying like a drunkard before finally falling forward. This was most unlucky because she ended up taking a number of stalwart defenders with her. Those who were only trapped partially called out at once to be freed.

Then, there was another shout from the stage: “No! His Royal Magnificence! No!”

It was a cry of great despair from one voice softspoken and noble belonging to a young man in a shining cuirass, green sash and an open sallet on his head. The different-coloured sashes marked the ranks of officers, Thorsten knew, but he did not know what green stood for other than that the man who wore it could command a line of crossbow men such as now emerged.

Having come too late, the young officer forgot his charges and jumped off the stage at once, throwing himself at his dead ruler’s body. His helm went clattering to the ground, forgotten and disregarded. He did not even seem to take note of the armed and shackled Thorwaller at first.

Thorsten was still wrestling with himself. If he had any sense, he would kill the young nobleman and have the crossbows feather him for a glorious death, departing finally to Swafnir’s Halls as he so desired. Supposedly, the mead there tasted so sweet that it made grown men cry when first it touched their lips, and it never ran out.

But something made him stay.

He looked where the ogress had fallen. So much death everywhere, bodies burst open from the pressure when she stepped on them. So much foolishness.

In their efforts to leave, soldiers had tried to cut their way through the crowd, slaying men, women and children indiscriminately. They stood now, drenched in the blood of innocents, among still so many who were alive and cried, looking for loved ones they had lost or clutching those they still had to their persons.

“What happened here?!” the officer asked harshly.

Thorsten looked down, noticing it was him the man was addressing. The young man had tears in his eyes and was cradling the old Emperor’s head like a baby.

The officer flared at him in rage: “For Horas’ sake, man, speak!”

Thorsten opened his mouth to show that he had no tongue, and only then did the other notice the chain and shackles, staring in sheer disbelief. A nod to the ogress and a helpless shrug was all Thorsten could offer. It wasn’t his fault; this was all the fat man’s doing and whoever else participated in this farce. Putting an ogress in such a confined space with so many people and the emperor no less, putting him a box that could only be accessed towards the stage with no way of escaping should something go awry. They should have placed him at the top of the last row and made a staircase just for him and his entourage, separating him from the common folk.

For whatever reason, they had neglected to do so, and now the ruler of the Horasian Empire lay squashed in a puddle of his own guts.

“Where you trying to save him?” the officer asked, still kneeling.

Thorsten considered for a moment. Then he gave a nod.

‘After all, why not,’ he thought. ‘Why shan’t I see what life still brings for me?’

If they let him live, that was. And just as well if not.

-

Linbirg awoke in the warmth of Mara’s lap. She could still feel the wetness embalming her and how heavy her hair was where that same wetness hat dried and matted it. She remembered the night before and rejoiced at once that it had not been a dream. How many of Marag’s Children she had been made to please, she did not remember. She must have fallen asleep from exhaustion at some point.

It had been dark and hot and terrifying. There probably hadn’t been so many Children of Mara, back when Linbirg’s ancestor had made this strange pact, so he likely wouldn’t have had to spend endless nights with his poor mouth at work like Lin had.

She was completely naked, her smallclothes torn away in the lusty play, and she could also feel it in her bones.

“You are hurt,” Mara spoke softly when she felt Lin stir.

A giant hand came down for a caress.

Lin sat up and looked at her legs, chest and belly. She felt as though three horses had trampled her, but she couldn’t see anything more than a few bruises.

“Your face, little one,” Mara cooed. “They have cut your face!”

Lin felt it with her fingers, remembering the ice on the lake, the sharp pain when she had crashed through it. And she remembered all the rest of it as well.

The beginnings of daylight were coming through the great grey ceiling, giving her a much better view than before. The structure was like a giant, otherworldly tent held up by tall wooden logs which in turn were held in place by the weight atop them. The ogresses had plenty of space, everything soft and warm. The air, on the other hand, was so stale and thick that one could have sliced it with a dagger, and it made Linbirg’s throat tighten. But on the whole was the giant sleeping bag a much more agreeable accommodation than most, certainly compared to the ogresses’ prior camp.

“It’s nothing,” she told Mara to change the subject. “But I need your help, quick. We have to go and take the city.”

“Take?” Mara asked, confused.

She still spoke softly so as not to wake the others, but despite her efforts, giant bodies started to stir all around.

“Conquer it,” Lin said. “I wanted to do it last night, but you all…”

‘Shoved me between your thighs instead.’

Mara frowned, “We thought you had come to do your part. Did not the grey woman send you to us?”

Linbirg wanted to smash her fist into her own head, “I escaped, you big, stupid monster! I jumped out of the window into a pool of frozen ice! A boy helped me, and his friends, and we wanted to take the city so that...”

‘So that what?’ She thought, which was a good question.

She wasn’t from Honingen. She didn’t want it.

‘Or do I.’

Lionstone was her ancestral home, but Honingen was a deal more prestigious, not to mention powerful. And there was a power vacuum in the kingdom. The old king had run away, perhaps died, and now Janna and Laura were unaccountably gone too.

She had lots of questions all of a sudden, and a mighty appetite in her stomach. When she looked up at Mara, however, the ogress seemed to be in a fragile state of mind.

Lin had to scramble to reverse her outburst, “I apologize for calling you a monster. I didn’t mean that. Forgive me, please.”

Mara growled softly, “I eat your people like you eat bread. I am a monster, but I'm not stupid.”

There was something threatening about the way she said it. It wasn’t the first act of threatened insubordination either. Lin had better tread lightly.

“You're not stupid,” she said. “I was angry, is all. Yesterday, the boy was there, and his friends. They waited for me to come get you. They had a plan, I think. Now I don’t know what to do, and time is running short. Just about now, my absence from the palace will be noted, if it hasn’t already. Things will be set in motion, men with weapons looking for me. If they find me...”

“I'll squash them,” Mara finished. “And the grey woman, too.”

Lin liked to hear that very much, but there was another problem, “How do we take the city? Do you have an idea?”

Killing her knights came back to haunt her again and again, she noted. But regrets didn’t bring them back to life.

Mara shrugged: “You say it’s yours now and we step on every worm that says otherwise.”

That might mean squashing a lot of people, but it was a price Linbirg was ready to pay.

Just then, a horn was blown outside. She looked to Mara, finding the ogress raising a brow in suspicion.

“It's not time for work yet,” she said in a tone that was stubbornly certain. “Let us take a look.”

She rose, holding Lin dangling from her hips while other ogresses stirred and rose with them.

But Linbirg had a bad feeling in her tummy, “Wait, what if it’s the countess' men?!”

The giant woman pulled a bundle of stitched-together furs from her shoulder and nonchalantly rolled Linbirg inside like some food parcel. Her objections fell on deaf ears, and when the ogress tightened the wrap she could hardly shout anymore.

There was an opening through which she could see out when she craned her neck, which she conceded was better that nothing. She just hoped no ogress would inadvertently step, kneel or Praios-forbid sit on the bundle not knowing that she was inside.

Mara stuffed the fur roll under her armpit and led the others out of the giant tent. It was large enough so that the ogresses could stand to their full height there, but the tunnel leading to the outside required them to crawl on their knees. Every time Mara's weight shifted onto her hand Linbirg got a painful squeezing. The ogress was obviously sparing her most of it or Lin would have gotten squashed, but it did feel a little like some sort of revenge.

“What you want?” Mara barked when she was outside and stood upright.

Lin couldn’t see anything but it sounded like there were more than just a few people. More ogresses came out of the sleeping bag from behind as well.

A man answered, “Uh, there's been...a man, who escaped from Galahan Palace last night, an alchemist known as Retoban the Blue. The man is a fugitive. You wouldn’t happen to have seen him?”

Lin was wondering why he didn’t ask for her instead, before remembering that he couldn’t. If he let Marag's Children know that Franka had lost her hostage then there was nothing to keep the ogresses from going rogue.

Mara turned and spoke roughly with the others, a particularly frightening exchange in ogre tongue.

Then, she turned back to Franka’s man, “We haven’t squished any blue men, sorry to say. Anything else?”

There was a silence. Lin didn’t know how well Mara could lie or how believably she could put up a front that said everything was ordinary.

“Aye,” the man announced eventually. “Work day starts now.”

All in unison, the ogresses started complaining in their gruff, ogrish tongue. They evidently understood these words by now, and they didn’t like their meaning.

“You'll break your fast shortly!” the man had to shout to be heard. “Today, our highborn countess has a special feast prepared for you in recognition of the fine work you've been doing! It will just take a little more time! The feast will be had at the palace before noon, you have my word! Just make sure none of you are missing out! Our lady wishes all of you to...to taste of her generosity!”

Mara started conveying these words at once, turning complaints to approval while also pressing down her arm to squeeze and put an end to Linbirg's struggles.

“It's poison!” Lin croaked between gasps for air. “Don’t go there!”

It was Phex's blessing to have met Retoban who had told Linbirg of this. According to him, the poison had been meant for Janna and Laura, but now with the giantesses gone and Linbirg escaped, it was obvious that Franka meant to rid herself of Marag’s Children. However much the old lady might want to keep them for their sheer strength and labouring power, they had become too much of a threat now. Lin would like to prevent it, but until Mara decided to lift her arm there was nothing she could do.

The man, meanwhile, carried on announcing, “Before the feast, all of you will be tearing down that thing you sleep in. Our lady wishes to move it where it doesn’t impede the view on her city so much. Remain outside for the moment so my men and I can go see if the alchemist isn’t hiding in there. Are all your creatures out?”

Mara grunted, which he seemed to take for a yes. Then there was motion.

“Oi!” Another man called after a short while when Mara was walking. “Where you think you're going?”

“Taking a shit,” Mara replied, snarling. “You want to watch? It's got to be bigger than you.”

The man did not, and so he let Mara go.

Linbirg understood why Franka wanted the sleeping bag moved. Without the ogresses, it was useless and too big and heavy, so she wanted it out of the way while she still could. She was tying up loose ends.

Mara walked for a while before letting go of Linbirg, unrolling the bundle and letting the girl plummet into a patch of dirt.

“Why must you squirm so much?!” The big ogress chided. “You tickled me so, I almost let go of you!”

Linbirg breathed and wheezed, “It’s poison! Don’t eat a single bite of Franka’s food, it will kill you!”

They were behind a growth of brush and relatively shielded from view, a circumstance that judging by the smell had served many other people in search of a privy before. Lin scrambled to her feet at once.

Mara chewed her thoughts while squatting, releasing the loudest fart that Linbirg had ever heard.

“Poison,” the ogress echoed as if the word was entirely new to her. “What do you want to do?”

The excuse for a privy call had not been a lie, Linbirg discovered, and no exaggeration either.

Lin gagged, “You must...urgh, you must not eat it, is all. Go to the palace when they tell you to, give the others a signal and then…it would be good if you took Countess Franka hostage. If she is there, you should just take her. Don’t kill her yet. With the others…at least at the palace you can kill them all. Don’t let too many escape.”

“Mh,” Mara grunted as her turd hit the mud with a large, wet thud like some fat corpse.

Then she lifted her breechclout and Linbirg had to step out of the way of the torrential ray of piss flying at her. It pooled on the ground, chasing her feet and she had to step further and further away. She couldn’t help but feel that Mara held a grudge against her.

“Can you put me back, please,” she had to ask, uncomfortable.

It was very cold on top of it all and she was naked.

Back before the gargantuan sleeping bag, Mara instructed the ogresses as to what needed doing and the work commenced at once without complaint. Whether the instructions on how to proceed had already been conveyed, Linbirg did not know. She was pinned in Mara’s armpit again, and before long she made a note in her mind to have her ogres bathe when all this was over. The stench was starting to come through.

Ogres did possess a sense of cleanliness, however, as was demonstrated by what happened next.

Suddenly, the man who had announced the coming feast started to shout, “What are you doing?!”

Mara chuckled, as did a few other ogresses, and she seemed to move a lot, including up and down. She had taken the man into her hand for some reason.

“No, no, please!” He shouted, and Linbirg thought that the fighting had already begun.

That wasn’t so, however, because as soon as the kerfuffle started did it end again. One could hear the man stammer incredulously after the ogress released him.

“I am a knight!” He shouted, his voice breaking.

It only drew more chuckles from Mara.

“No, you’re a wipe,” she corrected. “An arse wipe, heh, heh.”

She had apparently wiped herself clean with the man, and Linbirg shuddered to think whether this was normal behaviour for her. Giving the game away too early was ill advised, but once again she couldn’t influence what was happening. But neither did the incident seem to be of any consequence. The knight was silent from then on, but there were no rebukes or anything of that nature, as if the ogresses often mistreated Franka’s people.

They had to walk a tightrope every day, Linbirg guessed, both sides threatening each other. Marag’s Children could do anything so long as they did not overstep the mark completely, which probably meant that the humans they came into contact with lived rather dangerously.

The supports were pulled out of the sleeping bag before long and Lin could see through the little opening how it flattened out. When Mara asked where they should take it, the knight did not reply.

“To where the pepper grows,” replied some sour man. “Or back to that spot where it was. Makes no matter.”

The ogresses could pull the huge object easily enough, dragging it over the fields and back to Galahan Palace. They moved quickly, and it pleased them apparently to drag the thing right over the knight and his men first. It was soft and airy so the men probably got away without injury, but this constant, callous maltreatment was something Linbirg would have to curb in the long run.

Ogres and people clearly weren’t meant to live side-by-side. The former was infinitely more powerful and could mistreat the latter almost with impunity. There was no sort of balancing force. If Lin took control over Honingen, surely her ogres would take that to mean they could have their fun with the city people. This certainly wasn’t what the butcher's boy had in mind, and it might spell problems for Lin too.

She was just a girl, after all. A knife in the darkness, a crossbow on the street or a poisoned supper, and her reign would be short-lived.

‘Or I instruct Mara to kill every last soul in the city, in case of my death,’ she thought. ‘And then I'll let everyone know.’

That should keep any catspaw at bay so long as they were of sound mind.

‘Only the mad ones to worry about then.’

It would probably be prudent to have any known madmen rounded up, just to be on the safe side. But this still meant practising moderation far as cruelty was concerned. A man who thought he had nothing to lose was a dangerous thing.

After putting the giant sleeping bag where it needed to go, back to where Janna and Laura had once slept, Mara walked her force to Galahan Palace.

“Be welcome, Marag's mighty Children!” Lin could hear the countess call out sweetly. “I wish to thank you on this die for your fine service! Come and feast on this meat! Drink of our ale and be merry, and if you feel a bit drowsy afterwards then do not despair! There will be no more work required of you today, so you may rest and sleep to your hearts' content!”

Silence answered her, only frozen grass crushing under the ogres' heels.

“What?!” the countess snapped at the murmur of someone else. “Of course I said day, what were you hearing?!”

Then, Linbirg's eardrums nearly burst because Mara let out a battle cry, “Raaaah!”

The other ogresses picked up the cry and Linbirg's fur cocoon was transferred as everything started to move so quickly that she couldn’t tell up from down. Ogresses screamed, men, women, horses; crossbows thrummed and flesh was brutally crushed from bone.

Mara shouted commands with a fearsome growl in her voice that made her sound like some demon. She was quite cunning for an ogress, Lin had to admit.

Then it was all over, as quickly as it had started.

One ogress could easily take on a number of men, but on this day even the numbers had been in Linbirg’s favour. When Mara unravelled her she saw bodies on the ground, stepped upon almost casually. A knight near Mara's foot dragged himself forward by his last good arm before the ogress crushed his head and helm under her bare heel.

A woman was dangling by a leg enveloped in an ogress' fist, lifted and treated to playful licks and nibbles from below.

Ogres loved killing. It was a simple fact of life. Two young boys were running from a group of laughing monsters, toying with them on a hunt like a band of giggling girls.

It was unworthy and vicious.

There were also far fewer men than Lin had expected and in anguish she turned her eyes to Honingen. It didn’t make any sense. Franka should have known of the danger, despite her cunning ploy, but it didn't even look like all her Immen Knights were protecting her at this time. Lin could only find two of them.

She sat on Mara's hand like on a throne, the fur under her. She was still naked, bruised and covered in the remnants of yesterday’s pillow play with the ogres. It had to be a queer picture she made and an even queerer smell surrounding her. And the time under Mara’s armpit had probably not helped in that regard.

But she was victorious – for now.

“Isenmann!” An ogress said, presenting her with Countess Franka Salva Galahan.

The old woman’s knot of hair was partially dissolved, hanging in a long grey wisp much longer than Lin would have expected. Blood was running from that old wrinkly nose and she had dirt on her face. But she still wore a mask of hatred and carried an air of superiority even as she stuck up to her elbows in the ogress' fist.

“You little cunt,” the countess snarled. “I knew you would be my ruin the moment I laid eyes on you.”

“Where are your men?” Lin asked pointedly. “I see only two of your knights and a handful of others. Why aren’t they here guarding you?”

The old woman looked sour, “Does it matter where they are? They are not here. And thank Phex they weren’t either, oh, heh, heh, there is a blessing in disguise.”

She seemed surprisingly light-hearted all of the sudden which unsettled Linbirg.

“What? Who?!” she was forced to ask in confusion.

“Her whelps,” Mara growled. “They run off some place, the boy knight and his pretty woman.”

Franka laughed, “An ogress knows more than you, child.”

“I didn’t want to kill them,” Linbirg lied at once. “I hold them no grudge. Unlike you.”

She gestured for the lady to be put down but Mara intervened by making a sound that indicated disagreement, “Mh, I've always thought they looked soft and, mh, tender.”

“Fine,” Lin waved off. “If they show their hide around here, you can eat them both.”

Franka still looked unimpressed, but then Mara rubbed it in by smacking her lips together and next to them the serving woman that was being eaten gave a last cry of despair before large white incisors tore her apart below the shoulders. That finally seemed to worry the old lady.

“Too bad you won’t be around to see it,” Linbirg smiled while the working mouth of the ogress chomped and chewed its victim. “But I'll watch. Might be I'll have some of your sugar while I do.”

She really didn’t have much of a bone to pick with Franka's grandson and his Fenwasian wife, but then again it would be ill-advised to have any Galahans and their spouses milling about these parts. If they turned up, the handsome couple would be ogre food. It was unfortunate Linbirg hadn’t been born an ogress or she might just eat them herself.

“You're welcome to it,” Franka smiled, beaten. “Enjoy your victory. Heh, it seems this silly old woman has provided you with a victory feast, too. All this food, it would be a damnable sin to let it spoil. Eat your fill, child. You have earned it!”

Linbirg returned the smile coldly, “We know it’s poisoned, my lady. All your gifts are.”

“Gift!” Mara suddenly shouted, jostling and shaking Linbirg on her hand. “Gift! Gift!”

She pushed past the ogress holding the countess and grabbed the one that had eaten the serving woman by the shoulder. Linbirg was entirely confused until she saw it.

To wash down her bloody meal, the big oaf had opted for a barrel of ale, pushing in the top and quaffing the contents all at once.

Gift apparently meant poison in the ogre tongue, which under different circumstances might have been a funny coincidence but now was nothing but a sad sort of horror.

Mara beat the barrel out of the other ogress’ hand, smashing boards and rims apart. Her voice cracked when she was speaking. She reminded the others to let food and drink alone, revealing that two others had probably doomed themselves with their stupidity.

“But...we have the grey woman,” Mara said with tears in her eyes. “How can her magic hurt us?”

It was a forlorn hope and Mara knew it, of course. She was just grasping for straws. Lin hoped, too.

‘Maybe it wasn’t poisoned,’ she thought.

Maybe Franka had just been trying to win the ogres' friendship. With Linbirg gone, maybe even presumed drowned, perhaps her greed hat gotten the better of the old lady.

But when Linbirg saw her again, the cold satisfaction on Franka's face told her something else.

“Three is better than nothing,” said the countess. “I pray one day your beasts will understand they can use anyone like they use you. And then you are in for a reckoning. I know what you are, you little cunt, the tales of your misdeeds have caught up with you. I only regret not killing you when I had the chance.”

Linbirg frowned, “I won’t make that same mistake. Mara, crush her slow.”

The big ogress grunted and gestured but few others had eyes for what was happening. Some were crying while others looked worried, not quite understanding what went on. The ogresses could turn from a horde of murdering demons into a flock of young washerwomen in mere moments, and seldom had Linbirg seen it more on display. They weren’t all like Mara, blessed with the wits to see the whole tapestry, much like most men weren’t either. They were also precious little use on their own.

“Ahhh!” Franka cried out when Mara crushed her right arm at the elbow.

The old woman’s bones were brittle and crunched like music in Linbirg's ears.

Crunch.

The left arm went very much the same way, except this time Mara twisted her heel to prolong the torment.

Franka was on her belly, crying. Linbirg watched from up close on the ground, huddled in the soiled cloak of some dead knight. She enjoyed it.

“Enough!” the old lady begged. “Let me die, you've had your revenge, child!”

Linbirg pursed her lips, “But we haven’t even gotten to your knees yet.”

She gave Mara a nod.

Crunch.

For being flattened bit by bit, the countess managed to stay awake for a surprisingly long time. Bad weeds didn't wither, as the saying went.

As her wits started to go and she was only babbling incoherently in a pool of her own blood, Mara finally broke the woman’s back before pulping her completely with both feet rhythmically trampling. Franka Salva Galahan, countess of Honingen, was turned into an unrecognizable paste that one would have had to scrape into a bucket for burial. By that time, all three ogresses who had tasted of the food were dead.

-

The night was light and full of mud. Krool’s knowledge ended more or less at the causeway but sticking to it got them through much more easily than either of them had dared hope. Dari could see the castle easily, but the light from above meant that they could just as easily be spotted; so easily, in fact, that they had practically no way of getting inside unseen.

There were too many watchers on those walls and towers, much as though they expected something to happen.

The moon was red on this night, a large, round pool of blood in the sky. Its light was red as well, which was irritating. Out in the bog, some withering reeds and crooked birch trees had been red too, whereas others hadn’t. Dari didn’t know what exactly to make of that.

Now they cowered behind what little cover there was, watching the castle.

“Borbarad was wrong,” Dari told Krool, whispering. “They are not here!”

Krool pointed at the castle, “They must be in there.”

Dari scoffed, “Do you have any notion how big they are?! If one of them was in there we wouldn’t see a castle. It would be flat as a Maraskaner’s nose!”

“Heh, heh, fairies are tricksy cunts,” he whispered. “Nothing is as it seems. You’ve seen it.”

Indeed, she had. At one point while crossing the causeway, Krool had suddenly been much faster than her. Her legs had been heavy and she had to pick herself up, running after him. Then, suddenly, he had been behind her, himself running to keep up.

“What you run for?!” he had snapped at her, and she had understood.

She was getting strangely used to mistrusting her own eyes.

“Is that castle even real?” she asked. “Perhaps the fairies have just made them look like a castle?”

“Aha, don’t be silly now,” Krool chuckled. “They’re either in there or not in there. Only one way to find out.”

“Can you turn invisible?” She asked him, looking between the steep, open hill around the castle, intentionally void of cover, and the muddy pools they had to crawl through to find a different approach.

Dari decided she hated bogs.

“Nay,” Krool grinned,” but I pass for a fool well enough. Uh, can you sing?”

“Depends on how strong the wine is,” she replied. “But you are certainly not thinking of walking up to that gate and knocking, are you?”

He didn’t reply.

They could see helmeted heads atop the battlements and every now and again a puff of mist becoming visible in the moonlight. The night was simply too bright to climb the small hill unnoticed.

“The main house makes part of the outer walls, I think,” she pointed at the large roof that seemed to be on the backside of the castle opposite the gate. “If there are no battlements there we can...”

The palms of Krool's hands were the same colour as hers, which was a thing she had always found strange in the black-skinned Forest Islanders from the far south. She was reminded of it again when suddenly he held her mouth shut.

“Shhh!” he made. “Listen!”

She did. There was something behind them that was neither horse nor man coming up the causeway. It made strange sounds, scraping, muffled steps with little weight, but also huffs and puffs that sounded almost human.

Krool dragged her further aside, uncomfortably close to the dangerous boggy waters. She could smell it, almost worse than him.

Then, a figure emerged, tiny but two-legged, but also too misshapen to be a child. But it was a child, roughly speaking, a young, crippled little girl with something on her back that Dari couldn’t identify. She got sick to her stomach seeing it, and so scared that she almost lost hope.

“Run,” Krool advised and started out sprinting.

Dari was so perplexed that she followed much too late. She tried to remember how to work the Axxeleratus spell but before she could, the black fool suddenly disappeared into thin air. It made a plopping sound and instead of him there was a particularly ugly nettle growing there, swaying dangerously with the momentum he had had. Dari came to a slithering halt on the damp ground.

“I know you,” said the girl behind her. “You didn’t sing for me. Are you my heroes?”

Dari turned with her heart beating inside her throat. She had so much of a belly full of this place and magic in general that she began to understand the sentiments of Praios priests.

The girl was indeed the one she had seen before, golden eyes and green-brown skin and so many leaves in her hair that it was impossible to tell the colour. But it was also dirty and slick now, that hair, and she had even more scabs on her body than Dari. She was limping as well, and of the wings on her back one was torn in half. She didn’t look very good, nor particularly powerful, but Dari still believed that attempting to throw a knife might get her turned into a nettle as well.

“I don’t know what any of that means, please,” she lifted her hands to show that she didn’t carry anything dangerous. “Please don’t turn me into a plant, I’m not here to hurt anyone!”

The fairy moved up, studying her, and Dari tried to turn her face as friendly as possible lest her lie be discovered.

From the tower, one of the guardsmen shouted, “Hey, who goes there so late in the dark?!”

“Who are you?” the fairy asked innocently.

Dari had to chew that question for a while.

“I’m Dari,” she finally tried to force a smile before nodding at the still swaying nettle. “This here is…well, was Krool. I don’t…I’m not…I mean, we’re not…here to…are you hurt? Is there some way I can help you?”

Plop.

Krool gasped for air, sitting in the mud there as he had been, swinging back and forth and awkwardly hugging himself. Dari considered this a victory even though her mind was still racing over what to do.

She stretched out her hand, “And who are you?”

The girl-fairy seemed strangely bemused, as if the notion that someone did not know her name was grotesque to her, “I’m Farindel, of course! How can you not know that when you walk so loudly through my woods?”

Dari swallowed hard before remembering to put her smile back up.

“It’s so nice to meet you!” she cheered. “I have heard so much about you!”

This hearsay was mostly that this almost godlike creature was the subject of worship around these parts, particularly the House of Fenwasian whose coat of arms was a thistle, and that people who wandered too deeply into her realm were never seen or heard of again. This was not the way Dari intended to die, but it might well be so at any moment.

The fairy seemed to take quite positively to flattery, however, because she smiled and her eyes lit up in a friendly manner. She looked, talked and behaved herself like a five- or six-year-old child, which made Dari a little uncomfortable. She had never been any good with children outside of making inconvenient ones disappear.

She was thinking of something else to say, well aware that her life and perhaps more than that was at stake, when that blasted idiot of watchman shouted again, “State your name and your business or we’ll be sending arrows your way!”

Dari snapped unbiddenly, “Shove your arrows up your bunghole, you lackwit, you don’t know what you are dealing with here!”

Her nerves were as taut as the bowstrings up on those walls, and in shock she looked to the fairy to see if it had doomed her. But the little girl’s face split in half with a bright smile, giggling generously.

“Hey, can you do this?” Dari followed her gut and crossed her eyes while simultaneously sticking out her tongue and touching the tip of her nose with it.

The fairy-girl exploded with laughter, almost falling over in the process.

“More!” she demanded, giggling.

Dari thought quickly but couldn’t come up with any other grimaces, so she did the same one again. The result this time was quite different.

“You already made that one!” Farindel complained, and it was as if a storm was brewing in the air.

Dari thought frantically, ultimately and helplessly sticking out her lower jaw to make herself look ugly and forming big ears with her hands. That earned her another row of giggling.

“Krool, help me here,” she murmured under her breath. “Just be silly!”

“I can do that!” the fool exclaimed. “Tada!”

He made it look as though he meant to jump to his feet but turned himself too far thus making half a summersault and landing on his head where he remained standing. He had to have an exceedingly strong neck for this sort of thing.

“Ow,” he complained then, his speech made strange by his own weight pressing on his jaws.

This time, Farindel genuinely fell over with laughter and the longer Krool remained so the longer she laughed. Ultimately, he made himself plummet hard into the mud, making the fairy even happier.

“What’s going on there?!” demanded another shouting voice from the battlements. “State your names and your business or we’ll lose arrows!”

Torches were burning on the battlements now, Dari saw, so it was safe to say that their cover was blown. The people in the castle were the last she was worrying about now, however, and yet when she looked there, she saw something that finally gave her a way out. A banner was flying over the gate, a black thistle on yellow.

Farindel stood up and shouted back, still laughing, “Stick your arrows up your, hah, bunghole, you, ha, ha, you lackwit!”

Dari stretched out her hand.

“Come, I’ll take you to the castle,” she said. “You’ll like it there.”

“Will he come too?” the fairy asked after Krool.

The fool had his legs stiff and outstretched in front of him in the air, walking about on his hands and making chicken noises.

“Of course!” Dari nodded, speaking as one would with such a young child. “We’ll all go together, you and me and him!”

Farindel nodded and took Dari’s hand. It felt no different than any common child’s. Krool walked after them on his hands.

“Stay your arrows!” Dari shouted to the walls. “We’re coming up! We’re bringing Farindel to you!”

That confused the men on the walls enough to shut up for the moment.

“How come he’s so dark?” the fairy asked about the mad fool. “Is he a bad man or just dirty?”

Krool was dark even for one from the Forest Isles, and in the red moonlight he looked almost pitch black. But perhaps the Fairy could see in the darkness.

“He was born that way,” she explained patiently. “His mother was like that and his father too, and everyone else down where he comes from.”

The girl wrinkled her nose, “But he’s an evil man too. He wasn’t, but now he is. He serves the darkness.”

‘And what about me?’ Dari wanted to ask but dared not.

She didn’t know what to say, and it would have been good if another shout from the battlements could have interrupted them, but it was strangely quiet up there. The men did not even speak when they neared the gate, and then the huge oaken portal swung suddenly open as if pushed by an invisible hand.

Inside, an army of men awaited them, bearing torches. A tall Fenwasian stood at the centre of it all, long, golden hair cascading down his broad shoulders. Two squires were still fitting pieces of inlaid armoured plate to him as if they expected a battle. It was a bit much for two people and an apparent child coming to their gate, speaking of the mistrust they held for whatever climbed out of these marshes.

The man stared at Farindel the entire time, and Dari and Krool decided it would be best for them to drop into the background. Then, without so much as a word, the tall man knelt, and the whole yard followed him. Dari felt very uncomfortable and knelt too, and so did Krool after she hissed at him softly.

Farindel seemed to like it because she spread her arms and two stars shot up from her palms into the air. High above then, the stars united for a split second before exploding into a hundred little sparks, raining down but guttering out before they could touch anything. A few ohs and ahs could be heard.

The tall man raised his head, still kneeling, “Thank you, Mistress of the Wood! We are grateful to receive your blessing!”

It was so silent in the yard that the opening of a door upon the main house was a great disturbance and a young woman stepped out in riding dress, running forward through the ranks at once.

“I am looking for my hero,” Farindel announced, absurd in her childish voice. “Can you help me?”

The tall lord swelled his chest, “Every man here is willing to die for you, my lady!”

Somehow, Dari sensed that this wasn't exactly what the fairy meant, even if she couldn’t spot any disagreement with the sentiment amongst the soldiers.

“Father, look, she's hurt!” the woman who had arrived next to the lord's side called, and Dari could identify her as Lady Devona Fenwasian whom she had seen before at Galahan Palace.

That would mean that the lord was Bragon Fenwasian, Count of Winhall, one of the most powerful people in Albernia. He had to be the reason Farindel came here, Dari surmised, to get help from those who worshipped her.

Devona ran to the fairy and knelt next to her, examining the broken wing. Dari used this time to look for a way to steal out of the situation but with everyone kneeling it was impossible to do anything. The scene in the middle of the courtyard developed to be a tad absurd as well because Devona evidently couldn’t do anything about Farindel's wing, Bragon Fenwasian didn’t know what the fairy wanted and she made no effort to let anybody know. The cold was starting to seep into Dari's knee before anyone said something.

“Did the Red Wyrm do this?” Lady Devona asked of the fairy.

Farindel nodded, “She grows very strong now. I cannot fight her off anymore.”

“You should have come here sooner, my lady!” Count Bragon started eagerly before being cut off.

“Must I come to you?!” the fairy snapped. “Does the tree come to the bark beetle, hm? You stupid creatures carry your noses so high in the air that you forget who you serve! I should turn you all into plants for a thousand years so you learn!”

It was a spoiled child's temper tantrum and the unbridled wrath of a goddess all in one. Dari decided that far as gods went Farindel was a shit one to cling to. She had never really thought about it but if someone had asked before, what she imagined this fabled fairy to be like, she would have said, 'wise.’

This couldn’t have been further from the truth, however. Instead, the fairy was evidently an arrogant, poisonous little cunt with the intellect of a child and strange magical powers. She wasn't that far removed from Pardona in that respect, coming to think of it. The world was full and getting fuller of powerful cunts, apparently.

Cries for clemency rang out amongst the men, none louder than Bragon himself, “We beg your forgiveness, mighty Mistress! We are worms, we mortal men, unworthy of your grace! Please, guide us! Give us wisdom that we may serve you!”

Farindel giggled, “That’s better, you stupid.”

She shot another one of her stars straight through the air to explode upon Bragon's head. It didn’t really do anything other than startle him a little, but it caused several of the men to lay themselves down into the dirt completely and even Devona cowered back. Dari found the whole thing distasteful and absurd.

“Tell us!” another Fenwasian next to Bragon shouted through rivers of tears. “Tell us what we should do, we beg you!”

“Have you mud in your ears?!” Farindel gestured, her voice a high-pitched squeal. “I want my heroes!”

“We...do not know what that means, my lady,” Bragon replied desperately. “Who, who do you speak of?”

The fairy balled her fists, shook them impotently and squeaked, “My heroes, you stupid! I want my heroes!”

Dari found it too absurd to follow.

“Let’s go, they’re not here,” she hissed at Krool who was looking as though he had lost control completely.

That morning, he had seemed to know everything, she recalled. Now he appeared to be nonplussed, backed against a wall. The lack of assurance she saw on him made her own morale waver.

Over in the middle of the courtyard, Count Bragon Fenwasian and his daughter Devona suddenly disappeared. Almost predictably, two thistles now stood in their places, a tall and handsome one with remarkably nasty pricks, and the most beautiful thistle that Dari had ever laid eyes on. It was time to go.

She stood and took Krool by the wrist, dragging him with her. They hadn’t taken more than three steps before her feet suddenly stopped against her will, and it was as though some force had taken possession of her from the neck down. She could see with her own eyes as her right leg hopped lightly even as her left foot turned upwards to meet with her right hand. Then her body repeated the motion the other way around, slowly at first but then faster and faster, again and again with no end in sight.

She was dancing a peculiar sort of dance such as was sometimes performed in a tavern, stomping one foot and slapping the sole of the other with the opposite hand, thereby creating some sort of rhythm not unlike a wheelbarrow going over cobblestones.

She understood Krool's initial sentiment now and cursed herself for having ignored it. He was dancing too, she saw, albeit to an entirely different tune.

In the yard, pandemonium broke out with some men starting to pray loudly, others trying to run away and everyone shouting over one another.

“Silence!” the fairy screeched and stomped her foot, and at once it looked as though everyone was in trance.

Only a single man could still be heard, young and of yellow hair, wearing huntsman's attire. Dari could hardly believe her eyes but it was Ardan Julian Galahan, Devona's young knight husband and the heir of Honingen.

“Devona, my love, no!” he moved all around that particularly pretty thistle, desperate to help but not quite daring to touch it.

“Ah!” Farindel made when she noticed him. “There is my hero!”

She was happy again, and at once all her curses were reversed, Dari and Krool stopped dancing and the Fenwasians turned back into their former selves. For half a heartbeat, everyone in the yard was making noises again. Then they all fell quiet.

“Hero?” Ardan echoed into the void. “What do you need me to do?”

It was a stupid thing to ask and Farindel's mood already started swinging again.

She screeched, “End the Red Curse!”

“Hero!” the other Fenwasian, much smaller and of less splendid stature than Bragon, suddenly called out into the night. “The giantess! The bigger one, she spoke of a hero on our way here!”

“Ah,” Krool made under his breath.

“Fetch her!” Bragon commanded. “Both of them, now!”

If his short existence as a thistle had perturbed him, he did not show any signs of it, much unlike his daughter who was crawling so deep into Ardan's embrace that it seemed the two meant to melt into each other.

Dari exchanged a glimpse with Krool at the mention of the giantesses even though her mind could not fathom from whence they should appear. When they were brought, her jaw went down all the way to her breastbone and stayed there for a considerable time.

They were small. It was hard to recognize them by anything other than their clothing, but it was definitely them. Laura was Dari's size, roughly speaking, and Janna wasn't much larger. Both looked to be in dire condition too, mud- and blood-spattered and their eyes red and crusted with old tears.

When Krool saw them, he started to laugh so hard that he lost his stand. It took Dari a moment to realize why. Whatever Borbarad's big plans for Laura and Janna were, he would have to bake considerably smaller loaves now. The two of them together couldn’t have overpowered a single able-bodied man, let alone a kingdom.

It was an almost epic sense of justice Dari felt, reliving in her head all the mistreatment she had suffered at those giant hands. They would still have to die, of course. And just now seemed to be the perfect time to facilitate it, right after the Fenwasians were done with them. That they were still breathing truly seemed like a wondrous leniency in light of what the two former behemoths had done to the County of Winhall, Bragon Fenwasian's home.

In the yard, many seemed to feel the same as new eruptions of shouting indicated. The men prayed directly and loudly for Farindel to kill the former giantesses, or alternatively to allow for them to be killed. The latter raised Dari’s suspicion, like a human finger bone in a bowl of pork stew. One needed to take only one look at the count of Winhall to conclude that he was not a merciful man. His appearance might have been deceitful, but even the warmest, most kind-hearted sort of lord would have condemned Laura and Janna to die, if only to mitigate the possibility that they might grow again.

‘Perhaps he’s saving them for a larger audience,’ Dari thought.

But that would be stupid.

“Are they saying they can’t be killed?!” she hissed at Krool.

The black man in his shredded motley had trouble stifling himself.

“Mh, hm, hm, transformation magic,” he grinned. “You think you could've killed me underfoot when I was a nettle? No, you couldn’t have snapped my stem! You'd have needed a knife or an axe, just as you would now, and it wouldn’t be quick neither. To kill those two lot you'd need to hack at their necks till your arms fall off, heh, heh, heh!”

“But they're not plants,” Dari pointed out in desperation. “They're just...small, like us!”

“Like us, correctly,” Krool giggled. “She's made them human! Ah, ha, ha, ha! Don’t you see?!”

Once again, his madness got the better of him and she understood nothing. If it took until her arms fell off then she would be perfectly willing to make that sacrifice, but she sensed she wouldn’t be afforded that opportunity. Life was cruel that way.

“Silence!” Bragon Fenwasian roared, and the entire yard turned as silent as a grave again, all but for Krool who couldn’t stop laughing.

The unbridled cackles were echoing off the castle walls and created a very awkward situation. The Albernian count gave an irritated look and whatever he wanted to say stuck in his throat. He must have assumed Krool and Dari to be companions of some sort to the magical, childish fairy or else he might have had Krool’s head. The moment of absurdity and tension lasted too shortly to be resolved, however, because just then Dari heard noises behind her. The gate was open, and from thence came moaning and scratching sounds, and the horrible squishing of mud and water.

“Things in the moor!” the call came from the high tower like a hailstorm smashing into a field of grain. “Red Things! Rising in the moor!”

“To arms!”

‘Red things,’ Dari thought when she saw what was marching upon the open gate. ‘Dead things.’

Like everyone else, the watchers had their eyes upon the yard, and saw the approaching danger much too late. Evidently, whatever had ever drowned or otherwise died in this misty, terrible bog was now crawling back out again, red and screaming for vengeance. She had seen bad things in the red woods. This was worse. Some of these things had clearly been human once. They were walking on two legs, for the most part, and flailed around their arms, if they still had them. But there was many a beast as well, some looking partially eaten while others looked as though they had been eaten twice.

Horrible mutations were visible here too. One man, presuming from his height, had an additional arm growing straight out of his chest, red and mud spattered and grabbing blindly at the air. And the moonlight made everything even more terrifying to look upon.

“Close the gate!”

“Bring me my armour!”

“Archers!”

“Defend Farindel!”

“Sally out!”

“Shield wall!”

Everyone was screaming, sergeants and noblemen gave conflicting commands, men ran into each other in their haste to obey or get away.

Dari didn't want to get into contact with anything out there. She ran for the gate instead, helping the few smart men at work to shut it.

Krool grabbed her by the shoulder and pulled her back, “What are you doing?! Get your friends and we're out of here! Come!”

‘They're not my friends!’ she would have liked to scream, but in light of things it seemed pointless.

“We're surrounded, my lord!” a runner reported screaming from the walls. “They're coming from all sides!”

Farindel, all but lost in the sea of running men, screeched at the top of her little lungs, “Protect me!”

She could turn people into plants and make them dance against their will, but against an army she was apparently powerless.

The men at the gate were struggling, screaming for help. A red creature made it through, a hairless, two-headed dog with a vicious speed to it, running straight for the fairy. It was so quick that no one could stop it, and Dari watched in astonishment as it bypassed man after ineffectual man until it almost reached its destination. Then, with a slash and a whimper, the beast lay dead with both its heads struck off, Ardan Galahan standing with the blade in his hand and a look of iron determination.

“Well struck, lad!” Bragon Fenwasian acknowledged, himself uselessly being clasped in more plate by his squires, there in the middle of the yard. “Archers, to the walls! Bring arrows and torches! Everyone else, hold the gate! Don’t let anymore of these pests inside!”

Something was finally being done to restore order and Dari tore herself loose from Krool.

“Where are we going to go, we're surrounded,” she hissed at him. “Make yourself useful. I don't want to die in this bog!”

“Should I sing a song for morale?” he suggested, not serious. “Two headed dog! Two headed dog, I am stuck here in the castle with a two headed dog!”

Some men turned to look at them, irritation and disgust in their eyes.

“Shut up!” Dari hissed. “If you keep this up, these red things will be the least of our problems!”

Instead, Krool launched into a sailors' song, “under wind and rain, why bemoan a bit of pain? It’s as bad as it seems, but somehow we still have dreams!”

She left him standing there, turning to the gate to help hold it. From atop the gatehouse, stones and arrows were thinning the horrors without, while from inside, men were pushing against the beasts that tried to squeeze through the gap of the closing doors. Spears were invaluable against such a rabid foe, and the men wielding them stuck theirs into anything trying to crawl through, pushing it back.

With combined efforts, they were finally able to push the doors shut so they could bar them. The last red beast, a living moor body that was so decayed it hardly looked human anymore, was crushed in between the wooden doors.

The sight produced unwelcome memories.

Dari looked around for something to do, seeing Janna and Laura being questioned by Bragon in the middle of the yard. Farindel was screeching something she could not comprehend while Devona was keeping the fairy company.

Then, the scene changed very suddenly. It was as though someone had lit a giant red lantern in the sky. There was considerably more red light now, she saw, a huge, glowing pillar of it coming from somewhere deep in the Farindel Woods and piercing into the clouds like the eye of a storm. These very clouds turned red too and began to twist and whirl around that pillar. Red flashes started to chase each other in the sky. And it began to rain blood.

Lord Bragon, now finally armoured fully but for a helm, spoke briefly with the fairy before turning to the yard at large, “Keep your mouths shut! Do not drink the rain! It will give you madness!”

Krool laughed somewhere in the distance. Then, people started to go rogue.

It was as if some seed had planted itself in their minds, and now watered with blood it burst open and released its fateful spawn. Men froze where they stood as though awoken from a very long slumber. They took a moment to take in their surroundings before raising whatever they had in hand against the man at their side.

A tingle in Dari’s neck saved her from being skewered by a spear thrust. She dodged out of the way and jumped forward, drawing her blade and burying it in her attacker’s neck. He died gurgling. The need of self-defence obscured what was what in the red terror. Between two men killing each other it was hard to tell who the original assailant was.

A man next to her slew his brother in arms and she jumped on his back with her blade entering his throat just after he shouted, “Wait!”

It was too late, however. That man died too and yet another man looked at her and raised his spear point.

He thrust and she dodged, shouting, “I’m not mad!”

The man withdrew a pace, “Then what did you kill him for?!”

They were helpless, aimless, trapped. In the middle of the yard, Laura and Janna were affected as well. They were struggling madly but two Fenwasians, the count and the other, wrestled them bodily away. Devona carried Farindel like a child and Ardan stood amongst those sane men who guarded them.

“Into the keep!” Bragon Fenwasian shouted. “Any man who’s got his wits about him, go to the keep!”

Those who were affected by the madness did not speak. They made sounds like animals, snarling, growling and howling. By these means, there was a way to tell which was which. Like everyone else who could, Dari started to run through the mayhem to the hexagonal tower.

There was a stable full of screaming horses next to the entrance of the keep. That entrance itself was elevated at least two paces off the ground, reachable by a flimsy wooden stair that could be removed quickly so that any attackers would have a harder time ramming down the door. Those men affected by madness did not seem capable of much more than blind aggression, so the keep seemed indeed like the best place to be, provided anyone inside had not turned madman.

She arrived just in time with the Fenwasian group, and the door was not barred, so they all made it inside as quickly as possible.

“What are we going to do?” The smaller Fenwasian asked of Count Bragon. “There’s no way out of this!”

Janna and Laura were kicking and screaming, contained only because the men who carried them were hardened fighters and infinitely stronger than them. Their skin was turning red, Dari saw, though if it were from curse or exhaustion, she could not tell.

“You big stupids drank the water!” Farindel complained. “How many times must I tell you, do not drink the water!”

Bragon Fenwasian transferred Janna to two of his men who held her down, “Bind them up! There are shackles below in the cellar. Remove all weapons you find there.” He turned to answer the question, “Defend the keep. Rally our men here. Kill all the madmen. Where is Rodowan?”

“I am here, my liege,” a tall old man answered from the round stair that led to the upper stories of the keep. “We have cleared the tower. All our bowmen up top are dead. I have replaced them with men who are still loyal.”

He had long grey hair and was not a Fenwasian, but other than this, Dari knew nothing of the man.

“Always ahead of me,” the count smiled mildly. “I wish to hear your counsel. What shall we do?”

Farindel answered instead, “You have to kill the Red Wyrm! Urgh, why are all humans so stupid!”

“We humbly beg your forgiveness, Mistress of the Woods,” the old man Rodowan said. “We pray you share your wisdom with us. Guide us, that your will be done!”

Once again, Dari was struck by how useless the fairy was. She had to serve some function other than terrorizing people by turning them into plants or making them act foolish against their will. If not, there was no reason to pray to her, but then again, Dari had seen men pray to Laura and Janna for merely the reason that they were powerful too.

“Oh, I know!” The fairy proclaimed like a child at play. “Let me down so I can put all the red men to sleep!”

Said and done. Devona put Farindel on the ground, and the little, winged snot nose waddled out of the tower, everyone else on her heels. In the yard, she raised a fist and made a puff of golden sparks explode, upon which everyone fighting suddenly yawned, dropped their weapons and laid themselves down where they were, curling up and starting to snore in a heartbeat.

Dari decided she didn't like fairies.

Of course, Farindel had put everyone to sleep, not only the madmen. And the beasts outside the castle could still be heard raging, shoving and scratching at the wooden gate. The red rain had already stopped at this time. Dari had hardly noticed in the chaos as many of the torches in the yard had guttered out. Everything was muddy and steeped in the red water, doused in the red light, all red and black in this nightmare.

“Secure the gate!” Bragon Fenwasian ordered. “And sift through the sleepers. Anyone with red skin, you kill.”

He drew his sword as an example and went to stab the nearest reddening man to death, but Rodowan stopped him.

“My liege!” the old man hollered. “Wouldn’t it be wiser just to wake those who are not red?”

Bragon was a born commander, clearly, and willing to make even painful decisions. A wise man, however, he was not. They tried the old man's plan and it worked, checking the sleepers’ skin with a torch and waking those who showed no signs of reddening. Those who were rudely woken looked like they might nod off again at any moment, but at least an even greater bloodbath was prevented this way.

Then followed the next problem.

“My lord!” two men came from the keep, leading Krool by his collar. “We found this one hiding below. What shall be done with him?”

The count of Winhall looked with a mix of distaste and annoyance at the black fool before tossing a glance at Farindel.

“He's not ours to hang,” he declared briskly. “Let him go.”

Dari would have welcomed it if Krool hadn’t smiled the way he did. It made it impossible not to think ill of him.

“The Red Wyrm is coming,” he said through his yellowed teeth. “What will you do, my lord? We will all die.”

Contempt was written plainly on Bragon’s face. He looked like he was perfectly willing to ignore the issue until his eyes found his daughter.

“We will stand and fight,” he said then. “Make everyone ready. Take this creature below and shackle him well.”

Dari didn't know what the Red Wyrm was. It had to be some monster, she thought, some demon. But she had killed a demon before, even without magic. Krool did not seem so sure about the whole issue, however. The two strong men were pulling at his motley, but he did not move a single inch, strong and stubborn as an ox.

He addressed the fairy, “You know they don't stand a chance. You have lost. You are all lost. Your last hope died when the giantesses turned red. They were your only way out.”

“Help!” a shout came from the gate. “Milord, they’re breaking through!”

There was a crash and a scream that sounded like it came from a mad cow. A red, beastly head with two horns stuck through the wood. Dari mistook it for another actual demon before recognizing the creature for a hairless wisent, driven savage by the Red Curse.

She saw a spear on the ground and took it, just in case.

The wisent was promptly stabbed to death by the soldiers, but that didn’t alleviate the problem. The gate cracked and creaked dangerously under the pressure from outside.

“There is always hope,” Farindel told Krool. “Hope dies last.”

The fool rolled his eyes and let the men lead him away, which made the great Albernian count turn to Dari.

His cold eyes pierced her, nailing her to an imaginary wall, “And who would you be?”

The verbal altercation between Krool and Farindel, as well as the fairy’s lack of intervention in the arrest must have told Bragon that she and Krool weren't as close to Farindel after all. Something told her that she might follow Krool into the cellar at any moment. And she hated getting caught.

“My lord, you would do well to let the fool fight by our side,” she pleaded. “He is quicker than anyone. I've seen him. I will fight by your side as well, as I have done since I brought Farindel to you.”

Mentioning the useless god-fairy softened his expression a bit, although on this stone-faced man it meant preciously little. Nevertheless, he seemed to consider for a moment.

“I am loathe to let women and fools fight in my battles,” he declared before a shout came from the tower again.

“Watch out at the gate!”

Wood crashed and splintered, shards of the gate went flying all through the yard. Farindel squeaked and Devona shrieked and Dari frowned at what came through.

It wasn't a mass of red beasts this time but a giant foot, clad in red scales and wearing long black claws for nails. The giant toes had trapped two men beneath them as they curled downward, digging into the mud and crushing the bodies beneath them until they stopped screaming.

“I like this,” a great voice filled with evil lisped in the sky.

There was a gargantuan shadow. How exactly anyone could have missed a foe of this size approaching, Dari could not tell. But things had just turned from worse to insurmountable.

“Into the keep!” Bragon, Rodowan and others shouted.

Farindel and Devona were deemed most important as everyone who was still able fell in around them. A set of glowing, red eyes looked at them from above.

“Kill her!” Farindel screamed. “You have to kill her! You have to kill the Red Wyrm!”

‘No one ever said she would be so big,’ Dari justified herself in her mind.

She would rather face three Grakvaloths blind instead of whatever this was. She also figured that the giant monster would either step on or reach for the big group around the fairy, so she kept away from the others and stopped for the moment.

Farindel then gave a grunt and shot a big, golden spark into the sky, whizzing loudly and exploding with a glare so bright it made the very yard glow. The big, red thing screamed and reared back, blinded by this blessed spark of light.

When Dari risked a peek below the canopy of her hand, she saw that the monster had the scales and claws, hands and feet, head, skin and tail of a dragon, but otherwise the physique of a slender maid, even the hint of breasts upon its chest. It was also huge as it stood there, as tall as Janna and Laura had been, perhaps.

‘Wyvern,’ she understood, ‘a Wyrm is a wyvern.’

There was only the keep. Even without it's claws and terrifying teeth, this gargantuan dragon lady could stomp them all like bugs if they remained in the open.

‘Krool was right,’ Dari thought. ‘We're all lost.’

On second thought, she knew how scarcely little walls and towers had served their occupants against giantesses, being more trap than defence. Dispersion might be the only hope after all.

“Halt!” she shouted at the others. “You are running into your doom! Spread yourselves out and hide!”

What she said was even truer than she knew, she realized, for the entrance of the keep was now barred by a fine net of...

‘Spider web?’

On the hexagonal tower, a black shadow stirred, revealing it to be not a shadow at all but a giant spider, larger than an ox, black and long-legged and shining like onyx in places. Dari stopped in complete shock upon her discovery, and there was something more to this new beast that gave her pause.

The head of the spider was the upper body of a woman, the colour of stone, stark naked, black-eyed, and gritting long, venomous teeth.

‘More evil, mighty cunts.’

Predictably, Bragon and his posse did not heed her words. They recognized the web and drew steel, but among them only young Ardan seemed to see the threat looming above them.

When the spider jumped right in front of the group, Ardan gave a shout and slashed with his sword in a wide, savage arc. One of the eight, black legs was sheered clean off and the monster screamed, retreating, turning and crawling lightning-fast up and over the wall. Swords hacked through the web with ease and the group vanished in the tower, the heavy oaken door falling shut behind them.

As the wood and metal rattled, the light in the sky guttered out and Dari found herself alone and night-blind in the yard. Her neck was tingling like a disease and it was all she could do to lie herself down and play dead.

She found herself next to an old man with snow-white hair and his face turning red, one of the mad sleepers, slumbering peacefully. Then a shadow passed overhead and he was gone, replaced by a wall of pink scale. The dragon lady’s foot sank horribly into the ground, accompanied by the bodies she was crushing.

“Oh, that’s what that feels like,” the lisping, female voice said above.

Dari suppressed a whimper.

Several men who had been thrown from the gate when it crashed open were moaning all around. Dari could feel the huge beast lower itself to pick up a few of them. Their voices rose horribly into the darkness before the slobbering sound of the dragoness eating could be heard.

“Mh, tasty!”

A bit of dragon-spit rained down on Dari at the lisping word, and where it touched her skin it started to itch abominably. It wasn’t hot, however, only disgustingly lukewarm.

“Lissandra!” a new female voice hissed, further away and evil. “Are you done playing?! Bring me Farindel, now!”

“You shouldn’t have made me so big!” the dragoness complained. “How will I go in there? I'm too big!”

“Tear it apart!” what must have been the spider answered. “Use those sharp claws I gave you!”

The foot next to Dari lifted and settled further away in the yard. Standing next to the tower against the returning moonlight, it became clear that this beast was not quite equal to the former size of Janna and Laura. One third, perhaps, Dari thought, and against all odds it seemed that the keep might be able to withstand her.

The only problem was that Dari wasn’t inside.

-

When Furio Montane awoke, he thought that he was surely in some Netherhell. It was cold, dark and earthy. His body felt strange, every movement strained him. Some demon sat not far from him, huffing and puffing, breath misting in the air.

But as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he recognized a number of things he had missed before. He was sitting in a box at the bottom of an earthy pit. And the demon was not a demon at all but some turban wearer, covered in dirt and whimpering at his bloody hands. The man had lost all his fingernails by digging.

“Retoban?” Furio’s own voice sounded strange to him. “What are you doing here?”

For the life of him, he couldn’t piece any of it together.

“Rest, friend,” the alchemist replied. “Put yourself at ease. You are a dead man.”

“Dead?” Furio echoed. “Truly? Am I a ghost, like Ilmenview?”

He didn’t know whether he particularly liked that prospect.

“Hah!” the other smiled and threw back his head. “No, not like that. I told them that would happen if they burned you.”

“Burned me?” Furio asked and looked at his hands.

They did not look burned at all.

“No, they didn’t burn you!” Retoban insisted. “They didn’t want you to turn into a ghost and take vengeance! They had to bury you with rites and all. The provost of the Boron temple himself spoke you a sermon! Oho, but they buried you deep, too. And a strong box in case your body rose as those not long ago in the city. I didn’t think about that. I almost wasn’t able to open your coffin.”

He pointed a bloody finger at the twisted and mangled padlock that had closed the steel-reinforced box in which Furio sat. It dawned upon him.

“I was buried?” he asked. “Why?”

Retoban grinned, “Because you died! Not really, though. But your murderers didn’t know that.”

“You are speaking in bloody riddles,” Furio declared and decided he would rather stand up now. The night was cold and it froze him, he was hungry and his throat was very dry. “Let us go,” he urged. “I have a hunger. What hour is it?”

“Go, where?” Retoban asked. “I have brought food, just...my hands, could you...Balsam, perhaps?”

Balsam Salabunde, Furio remembered, a healing spell. Quite simple but nevertheless powerful. The greater the injury, the greater the cost. He took Retoban's fingertips in his hands, closed his eyes and mumbled the formula.

The alchemist bowed his head in gratitude, “Nine and ninety blessings upon you. Now, I hope you enjoy cold capon. No wine, I fear, but I have milk of this morning.”

‘Capon,’ Furio thought, ‘Capon, yes. Wine and pipe weed. The Galahans.’

“I was poisoned!” he declared, more to himself than by way of conversation.

Retoban met his gaze but did not react as shocked as Furio had hoped or expected.

“Yes, that is quite true, relatively speaking,” the alchemist replied. “A wonderful sleeping concoction so created as to produce the appearance of death, aye. There was some wonder as to the lack of stiffness in your limbs, but it does not seem to have mattered.”

“Who was it?” Furio asked feverishly. “Who wanted me to  appear dead?!”

It didn’t make any sense.

“I did,” Retoban the Blue admitted freely before finally explaining in more detail.

Janna and Laura hadn’t come back. Countess Franka Salva Galahan had tried to kill him, framing the noble girl with the ogresses for the murder. Retoban had cleverly seen through Franka's plans and exchanged the poison for a different sort of brew that would put Furio to sleep and make him appear dead rather than killing him.

“But,” Furio noted with a mouth full of cold capon and milk while they were eating, “mh, how did you make it out of the palace?”

The alchemist smiled, “I had to jump into ice-cold water with the girl they blamed for murdering you. Do not worry, I let her believe you are dead.”

Furio shook his head, “But why?”

“Because she loves you not!” Retoban replied meaningfully. “None of them do!”

“They blame me for all the giantesses did,” Furio conceded. “They do not know.”

‘Did I ever really have a choice?’ he tried to remember. ‘Did I go wrong?’

“It matters little now,” Retoban smiled. “You are dead to them and to the world, free to do as...well, if we get rid of the evidence, that is.”

He was referring to the opened grave, an ugly sore upon the meadow. Retoban was a curious sort of fellow. He had brought food and drink for both of them, but not even a spade with which to dig.

But what he said was true. Furio might have been still in danger here, but if he kept his head low and slipped through to the sea, he might just be able to go home again. Ship travel in winter was far from safe or being an enjoyable experience, however. And besides, someone had to investigate what had happened. If the black wizard had something to do with it...

“I am bound by duty,” he declared. “One such as me is never free.”

There was a sort of pain reflecting from Retoban’s eyes. The alchemist had hoped the two of them might run away together.

“I know this,” the Tulamidian lowered his turbaned head. “North then. Will you take a night’s rest, at least? We can stay in the home of the hanged chicken man.”

After filling the hole, they went to a small cottage not far from the grave. The capon had come from here, Furio recognized, a pair of giant feet had torn through crofts and fields, and four loose ends of rope hung from a tree not far from the only building.

Whoever had hanged the farmers had taken care to dispose of their bodies but never bothered to burn down the house or even loot it. It must have happened recently or else others would have come and taken the stores, to say nothing of the chickens and the cow.

But as nice as the accommodation was under the circumstances, Furio could not find sleep.

“Of course not,” Retoban informed him. “The draft I gave you to wake you up will not wear off for a few days.”

He had slept enough, Furio recognized. He sat in the darkness, pondering what he might do, all the while peppering Retoban with questions.

They were not far from Honingen, but the alchemist did not believe it would be an issue.

“The old countess has much more substantial problems than us,” he said lightly. “It seems there will be another revolt, one much bigger and, um, ogrish, heh, heh.”

‘Another revolt in Honingen?’

One would have believed the people might grow tired of it, given that after each time, the city seemed to have a couple hundred fewer inhabitants.

“A good time to buy a house,” Retoban quipped. “If you can defend it.”

Furio did not think the subject fit for humour. He needed to go north and find out where Janna and Laura had gone. To do so, he thought, he would merely have to follow their footsteps each of which left a shallow pond-sized hole in the grass. It couldn’t be very difficult.

After Retoban drifted off to sleep next to him, the night was sheer torture. There was nothing to do, not even a book to read. He had no writing utensils and only his thoughts and the breathing of the cow to keep him company.

He thought of the note he had found in the rubble of Honingen’s city hall. The black wizard. Clearly, some shenanigans were afoot. He didn’t like it. He thought about his dream and the gods. His duty.

‘Are you Rohal reborn?’

His breath faltered for a second.

“Retoban!” he whispered feverishly in the dark, shaking his colleague with one hand. “Reto!”

The alchemist stirred, as did the cow, “Uh, is someone coming?”

“No!” Furio breathed. “I just had a thought. Borbarad! What if he is back, back in this world?! Would that be possible?”

He sounded silly, he realized, like a child afraid of its own shadow. But Retoban humoured him.

“Mh, there is a mad theorem I once read,” the alchemist said, yawning. “The musings of some armchair sorcerer who lost his wits, to be sure. He was hypothesizing that time was a flat circle. That which happened, happened again, and again, and forever again. This meant, according to him, that if one left the circle and re-entered it at a different point, one could skip time or go back and forth, even though in the end all this would avail one nothing. I must confess, I thought it vile blasphemy at the time, and I do not think different now. Say, what has you so spooked?”

“Just a thought,” Furio conceded. “Go back to sleep.”

‘Truly he, indeed?’

It was hard to tell, but nevertheless something churned in his stomach at the thought, a kind of foreboding intuition. He kept that to himself, however, not wanting to appear more superstitious or cowardly than he already did.

The next morning saw Furio already up and about, trying to make breakfast. He could restart the fire easily enough, but a lifetime of studying the arcane and other such elaborate pursuits had left him sadly unskilled at catching chickens. The blasted little creatures squawked and gawked but whenever he came near them they simply scurried away.

“You have to throw a basket on one,” Retoban suggested when he woke up and saw.

The Tulamid in his sapphire-blue kaftan was immaculately clean whereas Furio looked as earthy as the hole from which he had crawled. Retoban knew a spell to clean himself head to heel, as well as another one that kept roaches, fleas and other critters away from his bed in the night. Those were simple, almost trivial spells with little use for one like him, but Furio envied his colleague nonetheless.

What made him happy was that his body appeared to be in a much better state than he had remembered. He wasn't strong or particularly dexterous. In fact, after waking in his coffin, he had felt rather rusty in the joints. But those constant dull aches and that strong urge to sit had subsided. When he moved now, his muscles were encouraging him to test them more.

Besides, Retoban made for just as comical a figure at catching chickens. He tried to catch one under a basket, which wouldn’t have been a bad idea if the alchemist had dared to move a little quicker. When he ultimately did, and the basket finally contained the desired animal, he slipped and fell, arms flailing, butt-first into the muck.

It made Furio laugh like he hadn’t laughed in months.

“I haven’t thanked you, yet,” he noted when they plucked the bird together. “For, uh, saving my life.”

Retoban seemed embarrassed and shook his head, “A common courtesy, not worth mentioning. One hand washes the other.”

‘Yes,’ Furio thought, ‘but how do I wash yours?’

Furio had had two companions thus far, Rondria and Graham, both of whom died gruesomely. But then again, this Retoban seemed more like a man who could handle himself.

“I have to find out what happened,” he explained himself. “There are men who need to know.”

Who those men were, he didn't know exactly, other than the emperor and his wise advisors at court. He didn’t even know how much, if anything, the Praios Church's inquisition had left of Horasian wizards.

Retoban stopped plucking for a moment, “All I know is that your gargantuan maids have not returned. Their absence seems to have been the spawn of all this trouble. And then, after the countess' heir and his wife ran off, I wasn't called upon often.”

Furio sat up on his stool, “They ran away? Why?”

The alchemist shrugged and resumed plucking, “I do not think even the countess knew. She was walking up the walls with fury, as the northerners say.”

Furio couldn’t tell whether or not this was important. It might have been just two young hearts enflamed with passion, fleeing from the clutches of seniority.

‘I would have like to do that once,’ he thought and smiled.

Although, with the state Albernia was in after Janna and Laura entered, it was certainly a reckless undertaking. Small wonder old Franka became so enraged.

“I should go and pluck a chicken with that countess,” he said. “She has a deal to answer for and might know more of what happened.”

She had knights and soldiers, to be sure. But he was a wizard, and he felt strong again.

“I am afraid that won’t be possible,” Retoban replied. “You are not the only one wishing to redress past wrongs with her. The girl I told you about, if those ogres still heed her call then Franka Salva Galahan’s fortunes will not last much longer.”

“Oh!” Furio made.

He was angry that Franka had tried to kill him, but he didn’t know if the news of her apparent demise made him feel any better.

“I go north then,” he determined. “Follow wherever those footsteps lead. It may be my end, truly this time. But I must. If you are wise, you will not follow me there.”

The alchemist sighed and stared at the dead, almost naked bird for a long moment.

Then he said, “They were burning wizards everywhere I went, my friend. And unlike you I lack the spells with which burn them back. I must come with you. Otherwise, my only choice is to remain here.”

He gestured around the hovel. It wasn’t bad by peasant standards, but still Furio judged it would only be a question of time before someone with ill intent came knocking. Like as not, this had been the farm where that fateful capon had been raised on which they had supped when the countess tried to poison him. And the hangings were likely connected to that as well.

That having Retoban around might prove useful became apparent after they had cooked the bird and were eating it, letting the soup cool and congeal outside to take along on their travel. Alchemists, apparently, made for astounding cooks, and Furio ate better than even at his own noble father’s table.

“Horses would be good,” he noted with the bone he was gnawing on still in his mouth.

Retoban stroked his goatish beard, “Difficult beasts to come by, I am afraid. The countess sent out riders in all directions of the heavens to look for her heir. We may well run into some of these on the road. We had best move quietly.”

Furio frowned. He didn’t intend to rush from shadow to shadow on his way north. Travelling on foot during the midst of winter was bad enough as it was, to say nothing of all the other perils.

“It would be best to disguise ourselves,” Retoban added. “Remember, my friend, you are a dead man. It is in both our interest to keep it that way.”

“Heh, and what,” Furio chortled, absurd pictures of the two of them chasing through his head. “A Horasian and a Tulamid, begging alms in the winterly Albernian countryside, asking after two female monstrosities who have trampled whole kingdoms out of existence?!”

“A little dirt goes a long way,” the alchemist replied. “As for the rest, we needn’t say much, and best if we mumble when we do. We can be peasants fleeing the turmoil at Honingen. Do you have any coin?”

Furio shook his head. Of what money he had, he had been completely and utterly robbed. He didn’t have his staff, no potions, no bedding or change of smallclothes either. A bad feeling was spreading in his stomach when he realized that but for the muddy robes upon his back he truly was a beggar.

Retoban was right, he saw. Their only hope of survival outside of this cabin was the generosity of good and godly folk, unless they wished to betray all moral sense and turn brigand. The thought of incinerating a peasant family for a heel of bread made him sick to his stomach.

“Peasants it is,” he concede grudgingly.

Having to wear robes or at least some sort of insignia marking one as a wizard was a requirement imposed by the guilds. Over the course of his life, any sorcerer would become so accustomed to them that any other sort of dress felt queer to the point of irritation. The former occupants of this cabin had also been hanged and burned with their winter garments on, leaving the two arcane colleagues scarcely little to choose from.

“Dress like an onion,” Retoban advised smartly. “If you get hot upon the way, you can always peel off another layer.”

Thus, Furio ended up with a set of old and moth-eaten hoses over newer ones, two stained shirts over his shift, a hood over a hat, and a queerly festive-looking jacket on top. The family had been wealthy, at least, undoubtedly owing to the fact that they supplied capons to the Galahans.

They brought as many provisions as they could carry and took the pot and a good blanket each in case they had to sleep outside. The prospect of it was dreadful, sure enough, but there was no way around it. As they set out on their journey, it began to snow and before long, the cold was seeping into Furio’s feet through his boots.

Despite the circumstances, things didn’t seem to be going horribly wrong at all. They passed the village of Storkrock at a distance and found the road north easily enough, and of the riders they dreaded meeting, they saw not even so much as a trace. Their own trail would vanish in the snow as well, which was welcome. At the same time, it was simply impossible to tell the age of any giant footprint they came across, which filled Furio with a sense of uncertainty.

It was also a testament to the might of the monsters he was seeking, how they could so casually leave their mark permanently upon the land. Retoban, when pointed to the observation, disagreed.

“Think how sad,” the alchemist said. “They soil the great creation wherever they walk.”

The desert peoples of the Novadi and in large parts the Tulamids as well, despite the latter’s allegiance to the Garethian Empire, believed in a single god whom they named Rashtullah. This god had supposedly made everything, and he could do everything and guided everything somehow, which sounded appealing only on the surface. It left the faith open to a myriad of contradictions of which the pantheon of the Twelve did not suffer. It would be horridly discourteous to point this out, however.

Interestingly, there were the sectarian believers in the One God amongst the Garethians and Horasians as well, but those were hunted and burned at the stake for heretics.

The two travellers reached Arran in the evening of their first day, and the tanners there were happy to have some company, even if it be refugees. Retoban was wary of talking to anyone but had to concede that having shelter was a thing they couldn’t do without.

“Few ever talk to tanners,” Furio argued. “The stench that clings to them spreads many ailments.”

It was the work with rotting skins and meat, plus the disgusting concoction of urine, dog faeces and other such things used to turn skin into leather that was to blame for this circumstance, and indeed the odours that surrounded Arran were little short of appalling even though only minor tanning could be done during the frost.

“This is known,” Retoban agreed. “Although, I wonder, how come those self-same tanners are rarely afflicted?”

Furio did not have an answer to that question, and the tanners did not look like they would be able to provide one either. Their work was of a hardy nature that did not involve a lot of thinking. On the question of the giantesses’ whereabouts, on the other hand, they were very happy to provide an answer, stating that the two had trampled past the village some two weeks ago. This startled Furio somewhat, making him wonder how long exactly he had been dead, or respectively asleep.

To Boron, the god of death and sleep, that might make little matter, but he wondered how long his would-be murderers had him lying in a room before putting him into the ground.

‘Somewhere, between the sacred silence and sleep,’ was a line from a prayer he remembered, little use as it was.

He couldn’t well start a conversation about it with Retoban while in the presence of simple folk. But simple as they were, they knew their craft very well, and Retoban the alchemist proved very adept at whittling the secrets of their trade out of the smelly men and women.

“Isn’t that marvellous?” The curious Tulamid said after a while when Furio had begun to find the depths of the dancing flames on which he was thawing out his feet to be more interesting. “To think that bark makes leather soft?”

“Oak bark works best,” the old, almost toothless tanner with whom he had done most of the talking added.

“Why though, I wonder?” Retoban pondered. “What is in oak bark that makes it so?”

The alchemist had become very interested in the profane side of his profession after discovering that during the brief period when magic had left the world some of his formulas would no longer work the way they used to. He suspected that there was a way in which substances interacted with each other that had nothing to do with the arcane. And if he was able to formulate and establish rules according to which this happened, he might be able to open up a whole new field of alchemy far beyond boiling soap and making perfume.

That was what he had told Furio to make the march a little more interesting, anyhow. It was as good conversation as any, even though Furio admittedly cared little about why bread rose and why oil and water did not mix unless pot ash or soap were added. Such knowledge, in his mind, was more quaint than useful, especially with so many sorrows looming.

With confirmation that they were on the right trail, they continued on the next day well-warmed, fed and rested but nevertheless glad to be breathing fresh air again.

Their next stop, some time after noon, was the castle of Feyrenwall further up the river and sitting upon a rock they had to climb via a serpentine path. Looking up at the archers between the merlons, Furio had a bad feeling in the pit of his belly which wasn't improved by the dark and terrible banners flying there. Finally arriving before a raised drawbridge over an impassable gulch with sharpened stakes at the bottom they were greeted by at least a dozen loaded crossbows pointed at them.

A man with a face so leathered that it would have made a tanner proud addressed them roughly, “That's close enough! Keep those beggar hands where we can see them and state your purpose!”

Furio loosened the blanket he had draped around himself to reveal his good jacket, but when he opened his mouth nothing would come out. He wasn’t good at sounding like a peasant, and even worse at sounding like an Albernian. With the tanners, it hadn’t really mattered because they had been much too eager to have someone new to talk to, and a little drunk besides. It was winter, after all.

But this was different, the hostility grave and unwarranted.

“Let us go,” Retoban urged under his breath.

Furio gritted his teeth. It wasn’t terribly late in the day, but the cold and the endless walking didn’t go as easy as it had yesterday. True to Retoban’s threat, he hadn’t been able to sleep, and the smells at Arran seemed even worse when everyone was snoring.

Then there was also the story of the missing dragon bones. The tanners had removed the skin of the dragon Laura had slain, and also stripped the flesh off the carcass to reveal the impressive dragon skeleton. The problem was that these bones had somehow gone missing. The tanners blamed bears which sometimes came from the other side of the river, but Furio had a different, more sinister suspicion.

In any event, he had been hoping strongly for a hot bowl of soup by a fire at Feyrenwall, and he saw no good reason why it should be denied to him. Furthermore, there were supposedly no more populated places between here and the Farindel. There might be farmsteads, true enough, but one never knew if what was lurking inside was truly so innocent.

He stepped forward and worked the Bannbaladin in his mind. It wasn’t entirely moral nor according to guidance, but neither was the way the men opposite conducted themselves. The leather-faced captain leaned over the side of the wall, squinting. Then he gave the command to open the gate.

“A sudden change of heart,” Retoban noted in a voice that sounded almost like criticism.

The grizzled warrior was standing at the other end of the drawbridge when it came down, sword by his side and confused soldiers behind him, but a smile on his face that could have melted butter. Further, he embraced Furio in the middle of the bridge and even gave him a kiss upon a bearded cheek. This Bannbaladin had apparently come out particularly strong, or else this man was just exceptionally gullible.

“I know this man!” he roared amiably with his raspy battle voice. “Don’t remember from where, though. Tell me again, how was it we knew each other, and who is your companion?”

Furio had to think quickly, and an idea came into his head that explained away everything well enough. The spell would wear off eventually, so it would pay off to leave the gate with some ambiguity too.

“We must have been drinking,” Furio smiled his warmest lie. “I remember you too, though not from whence, exactly.” He gestured to Retoban, “This man here is my master. He is a healer from the south, come to see the Holy Jar at Honingen.”

“Ah,” the loud man chuckled. “Terrible time for a pilgrimage, eh? Does he have a name?”

Names were customary as well as dangerous, of course, and the two wizards had failed to agree upon false ones. But Retoban simply smiled, bowed and rattled off a Tulamidian name that was so long no person unfamiliar with Tulamidya could be expected to remember.

As for Furio’s name, the gatekeeper clearly did not know it either but was too embarrassed to say so, much as Furio couldn’t reveal he didn’t truly know with whom he was dealing.

“We do have need of a healer,” the man wiped his mouth with a leathery hand. “Our lord is dying, and our own healer says he cannot save him. Took a traitor’s quarrel, the poor lad. You do not look much like a healer, though.”

“We, uh, had to flee Honingen in some haste,” Furio explained quickly. “It’s bad there. Quite bad.”

“Oh?” the man pursed his lips, laying his entire stubbled jaw in wrinkles. “Thought things had started to calm down over there, now that the giant queen has gone away. What’s it this time?”

Furio swallowed and debated whether or not to tell the truth. He didn’t really know the full extent of that truth anyhow, so giving a believable answer was challenging.

“Ogres,” Retoban said after a moment, saving Furio from his predicament again.

“Ah,” the man nodded fiercely. “Aye, that had to go wrong, hadn’t it? Will you take a look at our lord then?”

It seemed quite trusting and forthcoming, but between the spell, the desperate state in which things seemed to be and the general welcomeness with which healers were regarded, it was only logical. In fact, this welcomeness had been the very reason Furio had turned Retoban into a healer. The notion wasn’t extremely farfetched either, because many alchemists knew how to make poultices, ointments and other medicines from herbs with healing properties. Only that there was such a high-status and apparently severe case to treat was something he hadn’t expected and the only thing that made him a little bit uneasy.

“Take me to him at once,” Retoban inclined with another bow.

The man swiftly commandeered one of his men to facilitate the request, but beckoned Furio to stay back. He spoke in a hushed voice, still friendly but also somewhat stricken.

“Have you heard of my son Cathal?” he asked so that his other men could not hear. “Young lad, looks nothing like his old man, plays the lute and drinks too much wine on most days? He was a squire to our lord, but he never came back with them from Honingen. Heard he took up with that Blaithin singer whose children now sit at my lord’s table as orphans. Perhaps you have heard of their mother, too, Elia Talvinyr?”

Furio shook his head twice, having no memory of any of them.

“Aye, like as not he’s dead,” the leathery man concluded sullenly. “And perhaps we’ll all be dead soon. If running away from peril was what you came here for, you’ve come to the wrong place. The Red Curse is at our doorstep.”

Furio craned his neck to look at the terrible colours blowing in the wind atop the gatehouse, “Is that the same curse I see upon your banners?”

“Aye,” the other said, following his gaze. “Our lord’s mother, she picked it. Now, Muriadh, our lord’s father, he replaced the family crest with the Red Wyrm on white. He was mad like that. Caused much bloodshed under that banner.”

Furio had heard the story before.

“Aye,” he agreed. “But he was betrayed and brought to justice with the help of his wife, was he not?”

The leathered man nodded, “Ah, she was a sweet woman. I owe her my post. Niamor blossomed under her...till she too went mad, that was.”

“Oh?” Furio raised a brow, now genuinely interested.

He hadn’t heard that part before.

“Aye, not a catching story, that one,” the man lowered his voice again. “Killed herself, in the end. Threw herself into the moat at Aiwall, she and her men cornered. Hadn’t she made me castellan here, mayhaps I would have died there too.”

“How horrible for your lord,” Furio replied. “I shudder to think of the day I have to bury mine own parents.”

That day would inevitably come, sooner or later. He had written to his parents when he had been with the army, but recently he just hadn’t thought of them at all. Most wizards lived very estranged from their families.

The castellan shook his head, “Ah, he didn’t get to bury either of them. Muriadh was executed by them Fenwasians up at Iauncyll. And they never found Laille’s body, pour soul.”

“Stonebreaker!” someone hollered from inside the castle at that moment. “Alrik Stonebreaker, your master calls for you!”

It was a soldier, and Alrik Stonebreaker had to be the name Retoban invented for Furio. It was a tad obvious, because it was a common jest that half the world was named so, even though in truth he did not feel as though that was strictly true.

The leathery castellan smiled and shooed him on, but not without extracting the promise of coming back another time if circumstances allowed. The soldier led him wordlessly through the remarkably ordinary castle and into the main house where they went straight away to the lordly chambers. There, the stench of death awaited.

The room was dim, hot and dusty, the air smothered. A ring of concerned figures stood around the bed, some whispering grave things and resting their hands on the shoulders of four glum children. A little girl was crying quietly. Retoban stood at a table against the wall, the rapid tick, tick, tick of mortar and pestle awfully loud.

“The flesh has mortified,” the alchemist said softly when Furio went to him. “I can make a strong poultice, try and draw out the bad humours, but what Lord Ilaen really needs is surgery.”

“I cannot explain it!” an old woman wept from the ring of bystanders, loud and shrill. “My nephew did everything right, and the wound was getting better!”

That nephew had to be the Peraine acolyte standing next to her, clothed in a plain green shift.

“His Lordship wouldn’t rest well, she says,” Retoban went on under his breath. “Apparently, he kept tearing the wound back open. He is burning with fever. Have a look.”

Furio didn’t feel well as he moved into the concerned circle, but he had made them into healers and healers they had to be. A simple spell of Balsam would seem like a miracle to these people, or else they would know it to be witchcraft. In any event, the spell could only prevent, not cure infections far as he knew.

The lordly patient lay atop his covers, naked above the waist, his body shiny with sweat. He had his eyes closed and was mumbling feverishly, and every now and then a jolt of pain made him flinch. He was still a strong man, Furio could see, very muscular and showing battle scars here and there. Beneath his left side, where the corrupted wound was, they had put a white linen that was stained in all manner of colours, mostly brown and black.

It had long been customary for a medicus to probe and explore a flesh wound with fingers and metal instruments, but in the Horasian Empire there had since been prominent voices rallying against this practice. Pus, likewise, was a contentious issue.

“He has a lot of the laudable atter,” the Peraine acolyte announced. “But he doesn’t get better. We know not why.”

Medici during Bospharan times said that pus was a sign of infection and should be removed whereas according to more modern traditions it was a sign of good healing. The newest ideas Furio had heard of again doubled back. He didn’t know these matters well enough to be of any true assistance.

For his disguise, this wasn’t really a grave concern. Retoban could make a poultice for Lord Ilaen and they could be on their way. But that wouldn’t save him. Cutting away the corruption with a hot knife and closing the wound with Balsam might not work either, because the infection had spread in and between the ribs.

“Was this wound cleaned and dressed when he sustained it?” Furio inquired of the castle healer.

The man nodded fiercely, “boiling wine and vinegar, a good poultice against infection and clean bandages. The wound wasn’t very deep to begin with because his chainmail stopped the quarrel short. I’ve never known a wound to get so much better and then so much worse.”

That was indeed noteworthy, Furio thought. It had to be the pus. It was the only logical explanation.

“It might be advantageous to remove the atter,” he declared. “Give the flesh room to close. Forgive me, my master and I are not surgeons. We make poultices and medicines, strictly.”

The acolyte rushed forward and tended to the task. While stepping back, Furio knocked against a wooden bowl on the floor, spilling some of its contents. It was blood, drained from the body to help balance of liquids. This practice was highly contested as well. Healing was a field fraught with uncertainty.

The Peraine acolyte was older than Furio and knew his craft evidently well. With nimble hands he pushed and shoved at the swollen flesh, squeezing out a flood of stinking discharge. The lord screamed with pain and threatened to wreathe himself out of his bed, necessitating Furio to hold him down.

“Give him some wine,” the acolyte urged, and Furio helped the lord drink.

The amount of discharge could not be contained by the linen cloth any longer and started dripping onto the floor, a sea of dark yellow with red streaks of fresh blood in it, but also dark black ones. Towards the end, what came out was mostly black, and he thought that it looked queer, more like pitch than old blood.

When Retoban came with the poultice and a bowl of something he said would help lower the fever, Furio showed him the strange substance.

“It isn't blood,” the alchemist agreed softly.

The two of them had to mumble to each other so as not to be overheard.

“What do you think?” Furio asked. “Poison?”

It was a dangerous question but Retoban pursed his lips and shook his head, “Yes and no. It is poison, clearly, but I do not think it has been given to him.”

“Perhaps the fire in his heart has guttered out so that his blood is no longer cleaned,” Furio suggested.

The raging fire in the left chamber of the heart was yet another contested issue, but it seemed to explain the phenomenon. Against all reason and sense, Retoban dipped his finger into the black substance, dabbed it against the tip of his tongue and tasted it. A groan of revulsion went through the room and Furio felt sick. Retoban, likewise, immediately regretted his madness and spat violently onto the floor, once, twice, thrice.

His wide, almond-shaped eyes foretold that this was no ordinary matter. Furio had felt that it looked unnatural from the start. He cast the analysis spell and the arcane structures of the world began to reveal themselves to him while everything else turned grey and moved into the background. There wasn’t a sliver of magic in the room but for him and Retoban, and the bright, red crystalline structure that was Ilaen Albenblood's quarrel wound. He had never seen anything like it before, neither this shade of red nor magic of this nature.

“It's a curse,” he mumbled and went on to describe it to Retoban.

Being a member of the White Guild, Furio knew a number of spells to reverse curses. Which of these to choose usually depended upon the nature of the curse. In this case, he was unsure, however. It had to be some influence spell, he surmised, because it didn’t appear to be demonic nor an illusion. Influence magic was close to druids and witches, who in turn were closest to fairies. It seemed to fit.

His counter spell, cast wordlessly with his hand upon the wound while Retoban provided a distraction, did not alleviate the curse, however. He tried the spell for reversing a transformation for good measure, but that one failed too.

It felt strange, casting spells while dressed like this. He was getting uncomfortable. Additionally, somewhere at the gate, the leathery castellan had to experience a drastic change in disposition just about now. This might or might not spell danger, but if too heavily in doubt, Furio could always cast the spell again and make his and Retoban’s escape.

“A...curse?” The old woman from before echoed while Furio was trying his spells.

“This is no natural wound any longer,” explained Retoban. “You did the right things, but the wound will not heal unless the main cause has been removed.”

The acolyte was at a loss, “But...who might have...is it the Red Curse?”

“That is difficult to say,” the alchemist replied when Furio noted something.

“Look!” he pointed Retoban to a dark, black line that slowly emerged from the wound and up the patient’s body under his skin.

It was inching forward, sliding like a snake, and the colour frightened him.

“If that is not stopped, he might be in greater peril,” the alchemist noted at once before turning to the acolyte. “Do you have leeches?”

Furio pressed down his thumb to stop the black line from advancing while leeches were brought up to suck out whatever this was. The removal of the pus must have ruptured some blockage in the wound, leading to this result. Furio half regretted not having applied the poultice and leaving Lord Ilaen to the inevitable.

Leeches were swiftly at hand, however, and the Peraine acolyte used a pair of iron pincers to grab one and guide it to the spot. The lord gave another whimper of pain when the animal attached itself to his person, and they could see the method seemingly bear fruits as the leech drank whatever had been traveling underneath the skin there.

“It’s working!” the acolyte cheered.

It was a small victory and short-lived.

Regrettably, Furio’s analysis spell had outrun while waiting for the leeches, so he was not able to observe everything that was happening on an arcane level. To his profane eyes, the leech first detached itself before curling up and apparently dying in agony. Before a new one could be applied, a notable change in colour occurred on the leech’s body. It had started out black and glistening, but now it turned first brown like a slug and then redder and redder until it seemed to glow.

Furio wrenched the pincers from the frightened acolyte, but when he tried to grab the queer thing it made a sound like hissing steam before exploding into something that bore no resemblance to its former self.

It was a red mass of goo that sprouted tentacles on all sides, like a headless squid. And it was moving quickly.

Without delaying for another second, Furio reached for it with the pinchers again, grabbing it tightly and pulling it off Lord Ilaen’s skin. It behaved like half-solidified pitch, dragging itself in a long line while its tentacle arms wreathed and curled around the pincers.

He ran like a haunted dog to the hearth and tossed everything inside, creature and pincers. He watched the thing hiss and squeal before it burst in the heat of flame, and finally its body caught on fire.

“What was that?” several people asked.

“Ilaen!”

Next to the dying lord, Retoban frantically tried to stop the advancing black line. But it was too late.

“It turned red, like the Red Curse,” Furio said, no longer bothering to whisper while he watched for any changes in Ilaen.

The line had went up his throat, the side of his face and into his hair line where it disappeared. But other than that, there did not seem to be further horrors. Moreover, once the observation was made the line seemed to pale and vanish. It was as though it had never been there in the first place.

“What does it mean?” Retoban asked, whispering.

Furio did not know. The three healers watched over Ilaen for some more time and Retoban finally administered the poultice and fever medicine. The patient did not die, but neither did he appear to be in pain any longer. He did not move nor make a sound but for his breathing. It looked as though he were only slumbering peacefully now.

They had his sweat cleaned off and dried and put him under his covers so that the room could be aired. Retoban said that this would be advantageous. When they were done, the lord did not look as though anything was wrong with him but for his unwashed hair. This gave his wife, the lady of the castle, so much hope that she kissed both of them.

“The gratitude and hospitality of Feyrenwall are yours!” she declared through eyes so pink and swollen that they could no longer weep.

It was already getting dark at that time, and Furio and Retoban were exhausted. Nevertheless, the lady put out a sizeable feast for them and insisted that they at least stay the night. Furio welcomed it. If truth be told, what he had seen in the lordly bedchamber had made him wary of sleeping outside unprotected so close to the source of vile evil. And the hardest part of this voyage was still ahead of them.

When Reodred Ardwain, the leathery castellan, entered the hall to eat, he did not seek Furio’s company. He did not touch any wine nor spoke unless spoken to, and the entire time he fixed Furio with a stare that spoke of deep suspicion.

The food was much more pleasant. Furio made sure he only swallowed after having seen others eat off the same platter. It couldn’t hurt to be careful. Their disguise meant that during conversation at table they had to lie constantly about what they had done, where they had been and so forth.

Retoban tried to remain as vague as possible, presumably so as not to burden his soul too much. But they were all lies anyway, and if truth be told, it was exhausting having to keep up the charade.

There weren’t any musicians in the hall either, but some of the younger ladies in attendance as well as one of the children could sing well enough to pass for entertainment.

“Have you taken some holy vow, Stonebreaker?” one of the ladies asked Furio at one point in a rather heavy-handed attempt of flirting with him. “You have such a handsome face but you hide it behind all that filthy hair.”

The lady of the castle, Moraine of Niamor, admonished the younger lady for the insult, but Furio was not offended. Instead, he apologized for the dishevelled way he looked and vowed to have his hair and beard trimmed at the earliest opportunity. This in turn led Moraine to another act of generosity, arranging for both bath and grooming as soon as the eating was done. They had lost a little bit of time by staying the night at Feyrenwall, but all in all it was good that they had come. Saving a life, much more a noble one, had to please the gods.

Alas, despite the wine he had drunk, Furio could not find sleep. He became drowsy and uncomfortable, but sleep would not come. Retoban, on the other hand, had caused mild irritation by refusing to drink wine. He would neither touch ale nor beer, either. The milk had already been poured in with the old to let it sour and be preserved as cheese later. So, he had asked for boiled water from the well. While everyone else became rather drunk, a thing for which apparently there hadn’t been proper cause or opportunity for some time at the castle, he kept his mind sharp and was able to save the two of them whenever Furio gaffed. Having him along paid off in ways that were ever new and surprising.

And despite not drinking, the alchemist appeared to be asleep even before his head sunk into the pillow. This, Furio grudged him a little bit. Perhaps on the morrow he would ask Retoban for a sleeping draft. Not being able to sleep was sheer torture, the hours upon hours of excruciating boredom. He should have asked for a book or writing materials, he reflected. He couldn’t even think of how to use his time productively otherwise.

That was when he heard the strange noises.

There was the shuffle of footsteps somewhere outside their room. Wood creaked, somewhere. Then a giggle, like a flock of hens or else a particularly frightening madman, high-pitched and unhinged. Furio stiffened in his bed and swallowed, thinking whether or not he should wake his friend.

‘Caution is the mother of fine porcelain,’ they said in the Lovely Meadows.

There was some kind of scraping at the door.

The fire in the hearth had not even begun to burn down, so the light in the room was still sufficient. Furio decided that he would act alone. After all, between the two of them it was declaredly his responsibility to wield the combat spells. Retoban, for all his other uses and abilities, would only get in the way.

When he rose and looked, there was dancing light shining through from underneath the door now, a candle or taper in very close proximity.

As quietly as he could, Furio hopped out of bed, straightened his shift and tiptoed to the door, a hand already on his shoulder and a devastating Ignifaxius on his lips, ready to be spoken. Then he wrenched the door open with his left hand, putting all his strength into it. The hinges screamed and the door ring on the opposite side rattled noisily, and a cacophony of female screeching greeted him, almost deafening his ears.

It were the ladies, Ceara of Jasalin, Erin Morganyr and Talia of Albenblood-Lighthouse, who was by far the sweetest of them. They were screeching first and then laughing too as they ran away as quickly as they could back to their chambers. A stone fell from Furio’s heart as he was able to breathe again. It was all innocent after all, or as innocent as things like this ever got. The unmarried ladies of low Albernian nobility had already been unbecomingly flirtatious at table. Furio had welcomed their advances in the beginning, in spite of knowing better. He felt reinvigorated, like a new man. He craved neither his crutch nor the Stoerrebrandt’s. These women had not seen men that were unfamiliar to them for some time, and with them being lesser nobility and the duo of Furio and Retoban apparently being accomplished healers, it wasn’t too far-fetched that their interest would be raised. It was unspeakable in many ways, but undoable or unheard-of it was certainly not. Among the urban moneyed nobility, it was quite a common saying that a man in need of a woman should seek the country. There was value in scarcity, and on the land, far off the centres of society, new faces could be a rare enough occurrence to entice a lady to do things she would later come to regret. Lowborn boys supposedly said the same thing, albeit less eloquently.

Furio certainly regretted having scared young, handsome Talia with her dark-brown hair and captivating, green eyes. She was a bit on the tall side for a woman, but not to him. Furthermore, she was slender and strong, graceful, and had a pleasant-enough face to look upon. He would have enjoyed the company of either of the other ladies as well, to be sure. He just felt so much more alive since his death.

He debated going after them when another figure entered the hall, coming from upstairs. This one, with the silhouette of a man, did not carry a light, hiding any further details in shadow. It had to be a servant on his way to the privy, or else a guardsman making his rounds in the night. The figure stopped to look at him for a brief moment, then turned its head and walked away into the darkness.

Furio turned away to look after the ladies again, the wine making him dream immoral things. The very fact that they had come to his door at this hour was elevating his confidence. They had hoped that the prude Retoban was already asleep, he told himself, trying to build upon the positive responses he had given them during supper. But if he was caught in bed with one of them on the morrow, it might well spell bad for him, so he turned around and…had to stifle a screech of his own when he was staring square into Retoban’s face.

“What’s the matter?” the alchemist inquired, tired but pointedly.

“Err,” Furio made, feeling himself redden. “A flock of young hens. You know, young women folk.”

He would have expected the Tulamid to admonish him and stifle a yawn, but instead Retoban seemed to widen his almond-shaped eyes and try to peer past him into the dark.

“There are strange lights coming from the kitchens,” he said. “Is that a fire?”

Furio turned. Indeed, from where the stairs led down to the kitchens, for that had been from whence the dishes came during the feast, there were reflections of orange light dancing on the walls. The servant from earlier had also vanished in that direction, however, so it was probably just the fulfilment of a request for food from upstairs.

Like as not, it were the ladies who had become hungry again while sharing a flagon of wine and discussing his manliness, he envisioned. But that was vanity.

“Perhaps we should go take a look,” Retoban suggested.

Prima facie, the suggestion seemed pointless. However, at second glance, if one were to go upstairs and seek out the ladies, the light of fire in the middle of the night would be a very reasonable excuse. And one could feign worry, particularly as a healer, to seek the ladies out, concerned for their health and wellbeing. That wouldn’t quite save one if caught abed with them, or in the act, as it were, but one could take other precautions to deal with that in turn.

Furio felt as giddy as a young man again.

But after they slipped into their ill-fitting clothes and advanced upon the stairs, they saw smoke emerging, and it became clear quite quickly that the source of the light was not a fire for the purpose of some peaceful nuncheon. Only Furio dared to go downstairs, and what he saw made him run right back up immediately. He couldn’t see how it had started, but somehow a large, bunched-up cloth had caught fire, then setting alight the table on which it stood and all other items upon it, all set in some room between the bottom of the stairs and the kitchens.

They called out at once. Retoban went upstairs to wake everyone there while Furio took charge of the lower stories. It was Phex’s wish that they had discovered the fire early, and his blessing too, for there was still time to save everyone and try and put out the flames before they destroyed the building. When he stepped outside, Furio saw a lone figure standing in the yard, so he was not the only one who had noticed it, but it fell to him to find the outside entrance to the cellars and wake the servants sleeping in the kitchens that way, which wasn’t particularly easy in the darkness.

When he had brought them outside, Retoban was emerging from the main entrance with the ladies, children and upstairs servants, and the guardsmen from the gate and walls were joining them as well.

Moraine of Niamor was screaming, “My husband, we have to save Ilaen!”

The servants and soldiers were quickly forming a line from the building to the well where all available vessels were hastily filled with water. At that time, the flames were already starting to lick out of one of the windows of the main building.

Furio pulled the shoulders of two water carriers and burdened them with the task of rescuing the injured lord. He would have gone himself but experience had showed him that some things were better left to stronger men, particularly if they were of this nature.

It was very surprising then, when the two came back and reported that the lord was not to be found in his bed, and a man under a blanket in the middle of the bucket chain announced, “I am here.”

Retoban had a torch and shun the light upon the speaker, and indeed it was Ilaen Albenblood, handing buckets along as though nothing had ever happened, as though there wasn’t a corrupted, pus-leaking wound in his side.

“Oh!” Moraine of Niamor threw herself at him, necessitating the buckets to be handed around them. “Oh, my lord of Praios! Oh, Phex!”

She buried herself so deep in his arms that it made Furio jealous, but the lord himself seemed rather unperturbed.

In spite of all, he nodded at the burning building and said, “It’s my fault, this. I was hungry and wanted to warm myself a meal. When I realised I wasn’t in the kitchens it was already too late. Everything was burning!”

“The fever!” his lady threw in at once, explaining his behaviour. “Oh, you should have spoken to someone! What if your negligence gets someone killed?!”

“Everyone is well accounted for, my lady,” the grizzly, leathery castellan said with a sharp look at Furio.

In the dim light of torches and housefire, he looked as though someone had formed him from pure clay and then burned him in the fire of a smelting furnace. The man wasn’t even particularly old as Furio had learned much to his surprise during the feast. He had just kept in the sun for too long and his skin did not thank him for it.

Furio leaned into Retoban’s ear and murmured, “We should leave.”

But a look thrown back across the yard revealed that the gates to the outer ward had been closed. The earliest time for their departure would be on the morrow, as planned. They would do well to turn their backs on this place.

“My lord, your wound,” Retoban imparted helplessly. “You should not be out here!”

“Oh, this?” Ilaen Albenblood looked down at his open side after disentangling himself from his woman. “I’ve had good care.”

That could not be argued with, so everyone was ushered to night under more modest accommodations in the keep when it became clear that the fire would be kept under control. The main building needed airing out from all the smoke, and there was some anxiety over the fire restarting from undiscovered ambers in the structure.

Perversely, this time, despite his best efforts to stay awake, Furio fell asleep like a stone, and he awoke with sunlight already shining through the arrow slit within their small new chamber. He grabbed his things at once, the pot, the supplies, the blanket and his robes, and he shook Retoban awake with a boot.

That was rather strange, though. He had heard that the followers of Rashtullah, such as abhorred pork and fermented drinks as well as their derivatives, prayed fervently and at length several times during the day, starting in the early morning. Yet, Retoban never did any such thing, and still would not touch pork or alcohol except for alchemical purposes. Religion was a selective game, to be sure, and fraught with hypocrisy. The same was true for many believers in the Twelve.

‘If I had a copper for every priest who shags whores,’ he thought merrily before returning to the seriousness as hand.

“Hurry,” he urged Retoban on, “we must go!”

It came out perhaps a tad more urgently than was warranted on the factual basis.

The alchemist froze while packing his things, “Do you think Lord Ilaen may have started the fire with intention?”

It was unthinkable, and yet it was precisely what was on his mind. There was nothing to gain from it, it was just…madness. Just like late Lord Muriadh Albenblood’s wife, according to the castellan.

“I fear his lordship may not be of sound mind,” he explained. “Something is wrong here, clearly.”

He could not stop thinking about his talk with Reodred Ardwain, the castellan, of how the mother had become mad too in the end. True enough, there appeared to be explanations for everything, but that was not the direction of Retoban's reasoning.

“If that is true,” the Tulamid alchemist argued, “then everyone here is in danger, particularly the children.”

The children. It was ever the innocent who suffered most. That sentiment was wrong, of course. It was just that reactions were felt most strongly for them. He felt it too, despite the absurdity of it. There had been children in every village in Thorwal and Janna and Laura had destroyed them all before his very eyes. Just like all the rest.

“Perhaps it was just the fever,” he conceded, his guts churning in shame. “Let us see if there is anything we can do.”

If it was just an accident, then everything would be fine. If Ilaen was mad there was nothing they could do anyway.

‘Well, perhaps a word of warning.’

But when they climbed down from the tower and came into the yard, they could see Lord Ilaen up and about, tending to his horse before the entrance to the main house. A crowd of people stood around him, stable boys, men, and the castellan, all watching in distress. The lord was wearing hunting attire and seemed to be in very high spirits.

Lord Ilaen as a man looked rather unremarkable. His chestnut-brown hair was becoming scarce at the top of his head, but it was shorn so much that it looked like an extension of his stubbly beard. His grey-green eyes looked friendly and awake, as appeared to be the essence of his nature.

“My healers!” he exclaimed happily when he saw Furio and Retoban coming. “I must apologize for not having thanked you for your service yesterday. I was in a bad way and confused.”

“Aye, that is quite understandable, my lord,” Furio evaded the courtesy as he stepped around the beautiful brown mare. “But if you want your recovery to be of long duration then you should take back to your bed and rest, else all our hard work will be in vain.”

“Hah!” Lord Ilaen grinned and slapped his horse. “I cannot lay down. I feel so much better. I was hoping the both of you would join me. I have a mind to go hunting!”

‘Hunting?’ Furio thought, despairing. ‘Has he entirely lost his wits?’

At least this would make any sort of explanation obsolete. He was about to caution the lord some more when his wife came angrily shouting from the main house.

“Ilaen!” she screamed in distress. “Why are you not in your bed? What in Praios’ name are you doing?!”

“My love!” He cheered, grinning even wider. “I am all better, look!”

He lifted his clothes to show her. The wound was a great deal better than it had been, the swelling subsided somewhat, but it was still partially open and leaking.

“My lord, you should…” Furio started before the lady cut him off.

“Do you intend to go riding?” She screeched. “You will undo yourself! Do you mean to die, you stupid fool?!”

The lord laughed in her face before turning to Furio, “Hah, with a wife like that, who wouldn’t, eh?”

The slap she dealt him echoed across the yard. He froze and held his cheek, and Furio dared hope that she had slapped some sense back into him. But when the initial shock was overcome he made a boyish face and assaulted her, right there before all the people in attendance. He took her face in his hands and forced his mouth on hers, kissing her violently and in spite of her struggles, only leaving off her after a long moment. He was strong, still, Furio could see. Alas, madmen with power were the most dangerous of all.

“Has your fever subsided, your lordship?” Retoban inquired cleverly.

Ilaen looked at him as if he were drunk.

“No,” he declared happily. “I have a fever in my blood, and only the cold wind in my face can cure it!” He looked at the men standing around with grief on their faces, “Eh?! What are you lot waiting for, quick, get the hounds and ready yourselves, your lord means to go hunting!”

“Ilaen, you can’t go hunting now!” Lady Moraine pleaded with him.

His reaction was even starker than before. In the blink of an eye, his dagger was drawn from its sheath and at her throat, and he grabbed her neck with his off hand, staring into her eyes.

Spittle flew from his mouth and into her face when he screamed at her, “Do not presume to tell me what I can do, woman!”

It remained like this for a moment ere he let go of her and the lady collapsed, crying and shaking profusely. Furio was shaking too.

“Ah, stop your whinging,” Ilaen cursed down at her before looking to the main house. “Now, where are my children? Bring my beautiful children to me!”

He sheathed his blade then, but still nobody thought it was a good idea to comply. When no one would move, the castellan proved most loyal, setting himself into motion and calling out names. He also spurred on the stable boys to make do on his lordship’s orders to which they reluctantly acquiesced.

“My lord,” Furio pleaded, “your wife has the truth of it. If you do this, you may well die.”

“Ah,” Ilaen waved off without looking, “I’ll hear no more of this. Best ready your bow arm…uh, what is your name again? We have not yet properly met, have we?”

If Furio had seen Ilaen at Honingen before, back when Laura had played her courtly games, then he did not recall it. The two of them had never bandied words, and Ilaen did not seem to recognize him either, perhaps because he was so much more kempt now.

“Stonebreaker, my lord,” he replied. “Alrik Stonebreaker.”

Retoban’s name had the word ‘Ibn’ in it several times for in Tulamidya it meant as much as ‘the son of’. Ilaen laughed at the ridiculously long name and called the alchemist exactly that.

“Ah, there are my children!” the apparent madman exclaimed when the little ones were brought out. “Thalian, my son! Come, your father takes you on the hunt today!”

“No!” Lady Moraine cried out on the ground. “Ilaen, he’s six! You’ll kill him too!”

“Rubbish!” Ilaen laughed and marched upon the boy, lifting him up and throwing him before catching him again.

The child was scared and started crying, and the girl saw her mother dissolving in the dirt and started crying too.

“By the gods, why is everyone so glum in this castle?” the lord asked all around.

Then Furio and Moraine started shouting in unison when Lord Ilaen unceremoniously tossed his son into the saddle of his horse and slapped the mare over her hind to send her into a gallop.

The noble steed had not made three steps before the screaming child fell off, his little head hitting the cobbles so hard that it bounced back up before coming to rest again. The lady screamed, the lord whistled after his horse and the little girl started crying out for her brother.

Furio felt tears burning at the edges of his eyes. He had heard the stories. With the Red Curse, it wasn’t only that the plants turned red and the animals rabid, but it was common to hear of strange things occurring without specification. It was harsh to see for oneself what these things entailed. Sure enough, an over-eager father getting his son injured or even killed was not unheard of. These things happened, just like the crops failed and the cattle stopped breeding every now and again without that a curse had to be at fault, no matter what the people suspected in their superstition.

And indeed, while Lady Moraine crawled to her son and cradled him in her arms, screaming all the while, Lord Ilaen seemed to only have eyes for his horse at first but then seemed to come around to realising what he had done. He stood at his wife’s shoulder with an ashen face. When he tried to reach for the child, the lady screamed at him so viciously that he backed off and his hat fell off the back of his head without him noticing.

“Don’t just stand there, healers!” the castellan growled then. “Do something!”

Retoban and Furio rushed to the boy. It was hard to get a look for the lady was clutching young Thalian so tightly that she was like to smother him. When finally they were able to get the boy free they could see that he was still breathing.

Young bones bend well, it was said, and it did not appear as if the boy’s skull had been shattered. It was also not uncommon, on the other hand, for death to occur a couple of days or weeks hence in the case of an injury like this. The skin had broken and a flap partially torn off, and blood was pouring out in worrying quantities. It did not look promising, especially since the boy was no longer conscious. Had he had to bet, Furio would have put his coin on death, without question.

“Will…” Lord Ilaen cried out, now mortified. “Will he live?”

It was hard to hear him over Lady Moraine’s crying.

“Pray, my lord,” Furio said loudly before mumbling to Retoban. “Balsam Salabunde. Or the boy will die.”

He put his hand on the injury and mumbled the formula as quickly and discretely as he could, acting as though he himself was praying. Then, he called for bandages.

It worked out remarkably well, somehow. The boy’s head injury was under his hair, so blood and dirt disguised the lack of an actual wound there so long as one did not look for it explicitly. Then, Retoban wrapped so many thick bandages around Thalian’s head that the boy looked like a little camel driver, adding instructions for the cloths not to be removed before a week hence. The accident had also left the rest of the boy quite green and blue, so the one spell did not grant him a suspiciously full recovery. He would not be doing cartwheels up and down the yard any time soon.

But when he opened his eyes again and spoke, the glee that flowed from both parents was palpable. It was the right spell in the right place at the right time, precisely as Furio had been taught. A wizard’s use to the world was maximized that way, and the common people not unnecessarily antagonized.

“It’s like I said,” Ilaen finally conceded, “I have a fever in my blood. I should rest…rest until I am better.”

He also apologized to his wife at quite some length, although he did it so far apart from everyone that Furio could not hear what he was saying. Was it enough to declare a man mad if he put a knife to his wife’s throat? Judging from what one could hear from men in their cups, the notion, at least, was not that uncommon. And she had slapped him, publicly humiliating him. For a lord, such a thing was intolerable and warranted a strong reaction, although slapping her back would probably have sufficed.

It was also unknown how the lady took his apology for she went back to the keep with her injured son to watch and pray over him at his bedside. Ilaen, meanwhile, resolved not to take himself to bed but assess the fire damage, already diverting from his promises.

“My lord, you should rest,” Furio intreated upon him yet again, climbing after him through the wreckage of the kitchens.

The building was made of mortared stone or else the results may have been calamitous, but even so the floors atop had burned and partially caved in, feeding the fire a bed with cloth hangings, straw, sheets and blankets.

“Those were my children’s rooms,” Ilaen observed with a look at the damage. “If you had not seen the fire and acted the way you did, all four of them would have died screaming.”

Two of the noble children in the castle were his lordship’s own, Furio had learned during the feast, and two others had been given to him as wards so that they may learn the ways of a proper court. There was some dark shadow hanging over that whole issue, or at least he could not shed the feeling that there was something he wasn’t told.

“My lord,” Furio said, trying to choose his words carefully, “when we treated you, some bad humour may have escaped from your wound. We cannot rule out the possibility that it has affected your mind.”

Ilaen laughed, “Ah, hah! That would be a fine excuse, wouldn’t it? No, healer, I fear I have only myself to blame. Me and my own recklessness. It has ever been this way.”

“Your lordship,” Retoban chimed in from behind Furio, pressing forward. “We put a leech on you to drain the bad blood. It exploded, my lord! The leech exploded with red blood!”

“It probably overdrank itself,” Ilaen offered, shrugging. He wasn’t really paying attention to them anymore, focusing instead on the damage. “We’ll need wood,” he concluded. “I’ll send a boy up on the roof to see about things there. Let’s pray we don’t need to rebuild the whole place.”

“My lord,” Furio tried, but Ilaen waved off.

“Stop bleating!” he snapped. “You two are worse than my wife! I will pay you for your services and release you after my son’s recovery. Now get out of my sight before I have you whipped!”

-

Linbirg sat at her desk in front of the countinghouse that currently served as the improvised city hall of Honingen. The city was hers. There hadn’t been any meaningful resistance. Her ogres could overwhelm them all. But if she went inside, she would be at the mercy of whoever was stronger than her, just as she had been at the mercy of the Galahans. So, she had to do her work outside, which was far from ideal in this weather.

Her wardrobe had changed completely. She had a nice, thick dress, a brocade jacket, and the city magistrate’s chain of office draped around her shoulders over a fur shawl. She liked these clothes most of all. But she didn’t get to enjoy them.

Running a city was a chaotic business and she wasn’t cut from an administrator’s cloth. She could kill Belisa Tibradan well enough and wear her chain of office. But she couldn’t really replace the woman. At least that was what Linbirg believed.

Perhaps it had been another mistake to kill Belisa. She lay squashed before Mara’s feet not far off, her blood freezing to red ice on the cobblestones. But what was done was done, as ever, and Linbirg could not ask her help to make sense of the parchments before her on the table.

The council of guild masters were having a discussion she hardly understood a word of. She had also heard the names of each and everyone of the people present, and yet she couldn’t remember a single one except for Bran Braelghan the Elder, guild master of butchers and father of Bran Braelghan the Younger, her red-haired, gap-toothed butcher’s boy. When she had entered the city, sitting on Mara’s hand, she had sent ogresses to block all the gates. Mara had then caught people at random and held them upside down until someone finally divulged where Lin could find him, but it came to pass that Bran’s father had already heard of his deeds when they met again. Bran’s face still bore the marks of his father’s temper, cuts and bruises, but he had not wanted his father killed, nor even punished. He wanted the guilds to rule the city. Unfortunately, it wasn’t entirely clear where Linbirg’s place was in all this.

He had insulted her as well, before. But that had been while in the process of rescuing her, so she was ready to forgive him.

“Having a market is the most important thing,” a bald, burly guild master reiterated for the tenth time or so. “It’s the lifeblood of our city, bringing in coin from elsewhere. We cannot subsist without it!”

Just like the nine times before, everyone nodded in agreement. Discontent existed over how often a market should be held, however, and how the right to erect stalls should be handled, and whether there should be separate markets for different goods or just for livestock.

“And what of them?” a smaller guild master raised a new item of debate, nodding at the ogress closest to him. The gargantuan women, between ten and twelve paces tall, stood between Linbirg’s council and the crowd that had gathered to learn what was being done with their city now. “Peasant or merchant, I wouldn’t take my goods anywhere these things might step on me.”

A frightened whisper went through the circle a few furtive glances were cast at Linbirg.

She pulled at Bran’s sleeve and leaned to whisper to him, “Should we have that one squashed? I find him insolent.”

Bran shook his pretty head, “That’s Tamlin Ceol, master of the saddlers. And he has a point.”

She didn’t agree at all. It would probably be best to remember his name and have Mara remove him at the earliest opportunity. Just to be sure, she took a quill, dipped it into the inkpot and scribbled the name Tamlin Ceol on a corner of parchment before ripping it off and shoving it into her bosom as soon as the ink was dry.

“You’ve torn a piece off our imperial reform bill,” Bran noted disapprovingly.

There was another set of words she didn’t understand.

“Is it important?” she asked sheepishly, eying the large document that contained so much minuscule writing that it made her dizzy.

She could identify the words Mersingen Castle at a glance, and singular words here or there, but nothing appeared to make broader sense.

“Well, it’s only a copy, of course, but it recognizes the League of Imperial Towns, among other things,” he replied in a way that suggested great importance. “If we’re lucky, mayhaps we can join the League! Can you imagine that?”

She couldn’t.

“They may scare the pilgrims away as well,” another guild master agreed with Tamlin Ceol. “Perhaps it would be best if they, um, retired from Honingen? I am sure we could find some sort of arrangement.”

“We owe the ogres our freedom!” Bran the Elder declared with a cautious glance at Linbirg. “We do not have soldiers and of our able-bodied men few and fewer are left to defend the city. What if Nordmarken comes, or the Stepahans or the Fenwasians, or a band of brigands or mercenaries? We need them!”

“Bollocks!” Another guild master objected, one wearing scissors on his belt next to a dagger. “We’re their prisoners now, just as we were the giantesses’ before them! All this Vulture shite has poisoned your brains! We need King Finnian back, and I for one pray daily for his swift return!”

Linbirg sighed and pulled Bran’s sleeve again, “And what’s that one’s name?”

“What’s she writing?” yet another one of the guild masters asked in alarm when Linbirg took a fresh sheet of parchment and started to write down the name of everyone she wanted to be flat by morning.

The list was expanding rapidly as the discussion progressed.

“She’s, uh, taking notes, I believe,” Bran the Younger explained with a look over her shoulder. “We have Lady Linbirg’s assurance that her ogres will not only obey our laws but will help uphold them. That includes all new laws we are passing here.”

Bran had indeed requested that assurance from Linbirg, and she had agreed without thinking about it. Perhaps he thought himself awfully clever, or elsewise he placed a lot of importance in the contents of parchments even though he could evidently not read very well. Whatever the case, his scheme swung back like a quintain and clobbered him over the head.

“I call for a vote to banish the ogres from our city!” Fann Cailin, the smaller man, shouted at once, stepping forward and raising his fist into the air.

His name was already on Linbirg’s list.

She could hear Bran Braelghan the Younger suck in air through his missing front tooth but it was his father who really let flare his temper.

“Oh, call a vote! Oh!” he made, imitating a chicken. “When did you grow a fucking spine, Cailin?! Usually, you let Karjelin speak for you first and then it’s tweet, tweet, whatever you say, master!”

There were greater and lesser guilds, according to membership and importance for the city, Linbirg recalled Bran the Younger explain. Cailin’s guild had to be one of the less important for despite looking deeply insulted he remained quiet.

A tall, lanky guild master in exceptionally fine dress looked disapprovingly at Braelghan, however, so he had to be Karjelin. Linbirg wrestled with herself whether or not she should put his name down. She noted that how well the men were dressed could tell her how important they were, for Bran the Elder, despite being merely a fat butcher, was exceptionally well dressed for a commoner as well. The Braelghans prided themselves in having invented the renowned Honinger Crackers, the loudest sausage in all the world, and their family led the guild of butchers.

“A vote has been called,” Karjelin finally noted thinly. “I would hear Vialligh and Mandibel on the matter.”

There were two more of those well-dressed men, one who was even fatter than Braelghan and one who was very young and looked as though he had inherited his position only recently, along his forebear’s ill-fitting wardrobe. Everyone looked to the young boy first but he only shook his head a few times and professed to have no opinion on the matter.

So, it fell to the fat man.

“You all know me,” he began heavily, revealing a mouth full of rotten teeth. “You all know my family has been in Honingen from the very beginning, making our living in the very trade that gave our city its name. You all knew my daughter, Boron rest her soul. She was in the service of our beloved city magistrate Belisa Tibradan, who lies there, trampled to mud beneath another giant beast’s foot!”

“If I had my cleaver, I would cut your fucking head off, Vialligh!” Bran the Elder blustered when it became clear where the little speech was going.

A shouting match ensued and only few things could be understood clearly, which was mostly insults, but Vialligh roared over them all, “What laws were being followed there, I wonder? What trial did Belisa stand before her death was decided, and who voted on it? I know I didn’t!”

Lin could feel Bran the Younger’s fingers dig into her shoulder. It made her sublimely happy and she put a cheek against the back of his hand, feeling his skin. But it lasted only briefly.

“Masters!” He called out to restore order. “Masters!” It wasn’t enough so he took away his hand, put the lid back on the tin inkpot and banged it loudly upon the table until everyone quieted down. “You can’t chop wood without dropping a few splinters! You all know this! Our problem is simple! The ogres are lending us a hand! Would you slap it away?!”

“You do that, who can blame them if they give us their foot instead?!” Bran the Elder added hastily. “And they’ll put it right up our arses!”

“I lost three members to those helping hands!” Cailin objected before the shouting resumed.

Linbirg couldn’t take it any longer. She took Bran’s hand and held it against her cheek, looking up at him from her chair. He was so beautiful. She felt all fluttery inside.

He seemed rather perturbed by what was going on, however, his great plan unravelling before his eyes. He couldn’t understand why the guild masters were objecting, but Lin had already come up with a plan to make it work.

“If you vote upon the morrow, you will win,” she smiled at him. “I can have Mara kill all the stubborn ones. Or we can do it right now, if you want?”

She didn’t like the smug, satisfied faces of most of them anyway. If it hadn’t been for Bran she would have had Mara and the others turn them all into carpets. She knew Mara was just waiting for the order.

“What?” Bran took his hand away and looked at her in disgust. “No!”

She pressed her lips together, fearing that he might think her cruel.

“Well, hostages then,” she offered. “Nobles always take hostages to compel others. Where you chop wood, there will be splinters?”

She felt clever for quoting his own words back to him, but it didn’t have the desired effect. Instead, he turned his head away from her, denying her the feeling she received when basking in the gaze of his green eyes.

“So your boy’s bitch will let us make our own laws so long as we make the laws she likes? What kind of freedom is that?!” Vialligh spat in the middle of the circle, again the only man with the lungs to drown out all the shouting.

It was the last thing he said before Mara’s foot slammed into him and pressed him down, compressing his fat body like a fluffy pillow.

“You worm!” the ogress growled angrily from above.

The quarrelling circle was silent at once. Men ducked and cast their eyes upward to look for more giant feet dropping out of the sky. Meanwhile, Mara’s toes wiggled playfully. They had enjoyed playing with Belisa Tibradan’s hapless form as well.

But Bran the Younger was not happy at all with this development.

“No,” He shouted. “No, don’t do it!”

Pleading seemed to intrigue Mara only more and they could hear Vialligh whimper and groan as she increased the weight upon him. It was only because he was so fat that he was still alive, Linbirg had no doubt.

She made her decision and stood, “Off him, Mara!” She gestured for the ogress to lift her foot too, just so everyone could see who was truly in power. “Young Bran said it right!” she declared as soon as the ogrish foot ascended. “I agree to be your guardian in all this and abide by your rules but if you cast me out then I am no longer bound by these rules!”

She looked at Vialligh slowly clawing himself forward over the cobblestones, every move untold agony. She wanted to see Mara smash him to pieces even though his insult hadn’t really offended her. She rather liked the picture, in fact. Bran had a dog, a little Therengar-Terrier that was brown and white and was called Hot Sausage. If she could be loved by Bran the way he loved his dog then this would make her the happiest girl in Honingen.

She went on, “I am the only thing that prevents these ogres from killing you all! I am what constrains them. But, if you don’t want me...”

She smiled and showed them her cold shoulder while turning her thumb down at Mara. The ogress understood perfectly, her foot coming back a moment later and crushing Master Vialligh into the stony ground. He squealed like a pig before the air left his body.

“There’s this one thing you can’t do,” she sniffed at them. “And you lose your heads over it.”

“I-I-I withdraw!” Fann Cailin screamed before kneeling down next to Vialligh. “No vote, as you wish! For Ingerimm’s sake, don’t kill the man! We’ve had so much death here already!”

“You are quite good at it,” Bran the Younger told Lin when they were more on their own, strolling along the outside of the city walls after the council meeting.

Mara and another ogress walked behind them for protection while in front of them, Hot Sausage was chasing after the stick they took turns throwing. Lin had a wonderful time.

Guild Master Vialligh, conversely, had been so gravely injured that he needed to be loaded onto a cart to be sent off, and without him it hadn’t really made sense to continue the meeting. Karjelin had left in quite a dark mood and many others as well. Lin still carried the list of their names in her sleeve.

“Liar,” she grinned at the compliment. “I hardly know what a law is, much less how to make one.”

She had told Bran earlier that she feared making a poor figure of city magistrate compared to Belisa Tibradan.

“Exactly,” he smiled at her. “Belisa did not know these things well either. A city magistrate should not make laws. But Belisa was the countess’ puppet. You are not.” He sighed, “But you shouldn’t have killed her. They were right about that.”

She bit her lip awkwardly, torn between not wanting to appear cruel and wanting him to understand how much easier life was with the power to flatten one’s enemies.

“We can’t keep all of them alive or they will bond together and destroy us,” she said. “What if they vote to oust me again on the morrow? What if they win?”

‘What if I have to let Marag’s Children loose on you all?’

He would never love her then, to be sure. Perhaps her best bet in such a circumstance would be to have Mara force him. If he could get hard, somehow, then perhaps he could make a woman of her, even if not by law.

It was a shame the laws of Honingen did not apply in all of Albernia. But then again, just now it seemed that the kingdom didn’t have a ruler. Maybe someone should step up and remedy that lack.