On the Lam

[Luned]

On the Lam
In which a scribe gets two unfortunate men caught up in shenanigans of sorts.

Closed to Etheryn.


Salvar wasn't being very kind to Luned. She rather disliked the nation as a whole, actually. She missed mild weather, familiar faces, and most of all, business. Who'd have thought a country with an abysmal literacy rate would have such little use for her services? The woman had only managed to sell one bottle of ink in the past week, and it was to a rather detestable squire she'd be glad never to meet again. The foppish fellow had looked down his nose at her with an air of utmost inbred self-importance, and as she bottled his order it was all she could do to contain the urge to shove a cork right up into one of those dreadfully regal nostrils.

In spite of her pride, Luned did have to admit her appearance was suffering a bit as of late, and even she might even be tempted to snub herself if the Luned from a year past could see what a state she was in. Once upon a time she'd been a stately scribe, but after such a lengthy journey with such variable resources, just about everything she owned was a bit worse for wear. When she was in traveling mode it was difficult to tell she was even a woman under all the layers she'd collected to fend against the harsh climate, her figure weighed down by the parcels that contained her belongings and completed the bag lady chic look she had going.

As of the moment the extra layers were wrapped into a bundle on Luned's back and she carried her polished case of supplies under her arm, readily available to perform a quick demonstration of her wares if needed. She had come upon a village inland from Tirel and figured it would be an opportunity to attempt some peddling, the town square bustling with a modest little market that drew her in, step by weary step. The woman had done her best to tidy up to better her chance for good first impressions, her golden brown hair braided meticulously and pinned up, and she brushed some dust off her gray-blue dress as she stepped up to the first shop. It was surely a blessing, what with BOOKS carved on a sign above the worn wooden frame in a manner that led her to believe someone inside might actually appreciate her services. She let herself in.

Inside it was a small, dark place, the air thick with dust and pungent smoke originating from the pipe of the man who resided behind a cramped little desk in the back corner. There were more knick-knacks and antiques than books, but lo and behold, there was in fact a row of shelves along one wall decorated with a sparse collection of poorly kept tomes. Luned inspected the battered spines as the shop owner watched on with diluted interest, her fingers resting on the cracked leather of a lone volume of an encyclopedia. She looked at it a bit sadly, homesickness settling in as she gave into her compulsion to organize and lifted it from its forlorn position on its side, placing it properly upright next to an outdated farmer's almanac. Come to think of it, not much on these shelves was anything of interest in the first place: journals containing obsolete information, or those which meant little outside a much larger series, or personal diaries that would be of little import to anyone but the original author. The small assortment was nothing but stacks of throwaways to make the shop appear intellectual in a place where that didn't really matter, and that realization made the weight of nostalgia even heavier on her already laden shoulders. The smallest of wistful sighs escaped her lungs to punctuate that trail of thought and a dislodged strand of cobweb tickled her nose.

Luned was about to give up on the sorry selection when something caught her eye. Crammed behind the books she'd rearranged, quite forgotten under years of grime, was a tiny journal in faded red leather. It stood out from the rest in the unique style it was bound; she immediately recognized the colorful threads, bare on the spine in a particular pattern of needlework, as an artistic work by an exceedingly talented scribe. She was hesitant to pick it up, knowing the shop owner certainly wasn't missing its mangled remains, but also knowing she couldn't afford it, whatever the price. That was, unless she could make a sale or trade.

It was with this thought that Luned turned to the older man, noting the raisin-like pucker of his aged face as he coaxed the last puffs from his pipe, sputtering as he inhaled ash. "Excuse me, sir, but might I interest you in some ink?"

"Some what, now?" He replied gruffly with a grimace, leaning forward in his armchair against the cluttered desk in front of him as if hard of hearing.

Luned presented her briefcase-like toolbox and set it on his desk, opening it to extract a small bottle of home-brewed product, its top sealed with blue wax and Bleddyn's insignia. It was quite a fine little presentation, if she did say so herself. Very official-like. She held it out the object for display in accordance with her sales pitch. "I've been trained by the best and have come offering my products, sir. Finest ink of the finest lampblack for the finest shop in town. I'll buy it back for twice the price if you manage to find something of better quality. Might seem like a steep warranty, but there haven't been any contenders as of yet."

"Save it for someone who's interested, girl. Get out of here." As if to emphasize his indifference, the man reached into his desk for a tin to refill his pipe.

"Ah, I see you aren't interested in the ordinary. Well enough." It wasn't that easy to get rid of Luned and she didn't budge, instead exchanging the blue-marked bottle out of her box for a palm-sized sheet of very thin vellum. She glanced up to him with a mischievous little grin. "Have ye any secrets, sir?"

This attempt to pry a reaction out of the man was unsuccessful. He had resorted to ignoring Luned until she left, but she certainly wasn't about to do that, so he was out of luck. The shop owner leaned back in his chair and lit his pipe with visible effort to be nonchalant, giving her just the right opening to catch his attention.

Luned leaned forward with the nigh-transparent square of vellum outstretched in one hand, earning the wrinkled quirk of an eyebrow as she placed the corner in the smoldering bowl of the pipe that hung from the man's mouth. It immediately caught flame and erupted into a flash of red right before his pale face, and as she drew her hand back the paper fell away into powdery ash, leaving an image inscribed in thin air. Black curls of smoke hung in suspended animation, outlining a dandy sketch she'd done of a bird several days ago in anticipation for this sort of performance. "Just imagine, sir. If you–– or any of your noble clientele–– wish to share sensitive information, truly private correspondence is possible with the use of my invisible inks. I even do custom orders, if flame is a bit much; a spoken password is common, or one woman even requested the application of blood to reveal the message. How positively morbid! I still wonder what… sir, are you feeling alright?"

Unfortunately for Luned, the man didn't take this dramatization particularly well. As a matter of fact, he sat so still and so ghastly pale in his chair that she was afraid he might swoon from the spectacle of it. She usually earned delighted gasps, soft applause, or obliging smiles, but––

"Witchcraft! What is this witchcraft you bring into my shop?" Oh. Well, then. Apparently this fellow's heart was not behind the legalization of magic in Salvar as of yet, though now that she thought of it, Luned wasn't quite sure her enchantments actually were lawful. That might be a real issue. The man's pinched face, swollen pink with rage, disappeared briefly as he stooped behind his desk in search of something.

Luned realized at this point that persistence was not going to earn her a sale, so she packed up her case and edged away from the desk. "Sorry to have disturbed you, perhaps I should just… Oh." The previously feeble-looking shop owner emerged with a similarly ancient-looking blade and rose from his seat to reveal a surprising stature and fierce moral ethic. This was rather unexpected.

The woman scurried hurriedly through the maze of dusty junk as efficiently as possible on her way toward the door but the man had no such delicacy in his infuriated state, carving his way through the stacks of valuables with the help of long legs and his newfound weapon. Exotic metal lanterns, elegantly carved wooden figures, a globe here, a chair there, all met the floor with an astounding level of noise that shook Luned from the inside out quite instantly. Something glass smashed and scattered under her feet and she dared a glance behind her as she passed the bookshelves, just in time to see a sword swung in the vicinity of her poor little head.

Luned ducked instinctively, hand braced on a shelf for support as she avoided the strike and the blade wedged itself with a thunk into the wooden frame. In the sparse seconds spared that it took the man to reclaim his weapon she spotted the little red book, grabbed it, and lurched for the door. She felt something snag the pack on her back on the way out but she did indeed make it to the street where she did not stop running until she suspected her form was lost in the crowded market, then headed in the general direction of the forest where she had camped last night. She opted for a roundabout route that circumvented the main roads just in case the shop owner knew, or was even one of, those fabled Salvic witch hunters. She wished she could inform him that she wasn't evil, really. Just desperate, and maybe a little stupid.

When Luned reached a quieter nook of the village she allowed herself to slow in pace, and that was when her body began to protest. The adrenaline wore off and it was suddenly difficult to breathe, the cool Northern air hot in her throat as she wheezed to catch her breath. Her arm ached from clenching her toolbox to her side for dear life, her shoulders felt pinched under the weight of the bundle strapped to her back, and in her free hand was a peculiar little book bound in faded red leather and colorful threads. She paused and stared at it accusingly for a moment, wondering if it was even worth the trouble, when her moment of rest was interrupted by a familiar voice.

"There. That's her. Can I go now?"

Luned looked up to see, not more than ten yards away, the squire who'd purchased a bottle of disappearing ink several days prior. She couldn't help but scowl a bit in distaste at the sight of that unbecoming nose, but her expression quickly turned to panic when she realized he was referring to herself, and the person with which he was so politely conversing was a rather large and intimidating brick wall of a man who was manhandling him in a most ungentlemanly fashion. She would have found some joy in that if his sharp face wasn't pointed in her direction with a merciless expression. Her heart was already pounding uncomfortably from her recent exertion, so with the addition of such villains, she feared it might leap straight out of her chest. She slipped the red book into her pocket and tried not to panic. What had she gotten herself into, now?

Instead of waiting around to find out she spun around to hightail it back to the market, only to find herself facing an equally intimidating individual. This one seemed to be in cahoots with the squire's manhandler and was a bit smaller, but had several pointy things strapped conspicuously to her person that urged Luned not to make her any grumpier than she already appeared.

"Milord has requested your presence," the woman greeted her, crossing her arms so casually that Luned was fairly certain she was going to die very shortly.

"And what if I have a previous engagement?" Somehow attempting to be witty felt like a good survival mechanism. It wasn't. Luned got a silent answer in the form of a strong hand gripped about her upper arm, turning her about-face and directing her roughly toward a trio of horses. Somehow she had imagined abduction by steed to be much more romantic back in the library in Radasanth. "And who is this 'milord'?" She inquired as she resisted, hoping to stall.

"Someone who was, shall I say, let down by a contract written with the help of your apparently unauthorized, perhaps illegal magic." The woman shoved Luned toward one of the obscenely tall horses where her male counterpart was waiting, the squire nowhere in sight. She hadn't seen in all the excitement, but he was sent off grumbling with a few bruises and a new label as nark.

"How unjust, that's like blaming the blacksmith for how someone uses his sword!" As she argued the large man grabbed Luned unceremoniously by the waist and tossed her up on the saddle, the girl grasping it for balance as the woman reached for her toolbox. She clutched the precious item protectively to her chest. "I don't think so. This belongs to me, thank you very much."

The weapon-beladen woman, increasingly exasperated, attempted to pry it from Luned using a different form of persuasion. She drew a small knife and held it in an unpleasantly threatening manner. "Perhaps we should turn you over to the officials instead? They don't seem to mind what condition witches are when they get them, as long as they'll still burn."

The threat was probably just for show, but it was enough to convince Luned she wanted nothing to do with them or their lord. She thrashed out with her feet, caught the surprised woman square in the jaw with a firm kick, and dismounted (or rather, fell off) the horse. She attempted to run but was clotheslined by a masculine arm that did, indeed, feel very much like a brick wall, and she stumbled back against the oversized steed to the pleasant surprise of multiple sharp objects pointed in her general direction, quarters close enough that she could already feel the ghost of what they could do to her flimsy human hide. With resourcefulness that surprised even herself she ducked underneath the horse, away from her would-be captors, and dashed off around the closest building.

[Etheryn]

Dan and Aaron sat on the outskirts of a market, atop a melting snowdrift opposite a ramshackle little place with “BOOKS” carved in semi-literate scrawl above the entranceway. Independently of the other, both thought of buying the shop out and burning the contents for warmth. It was absolutely frigid in the nameless village by Tirel. A stiff breeze blew over them and rattled the skeletal limbs of the gnarled native trees.

“How long since you’ve read one?” Dan said, pointing to the sign. He raised his voice to be heard.

Aaron shrugged and drew a mottled fur shawl tight around his shoulders. “Don’t know. Can’t rightly say I’ve done much relaxing in the past few months. If I’d known the trip here would’ve taken so long…”

Dan raised an eyebrow and pulled his own jacket tighter as well. “You wouldn’t have had time in between your perpetual state of vomiting, or being about to vomit.”

“You don’t know that,” Aaron argued. “I happen to feel better when I’m distracted. What about you?”

Dan looked around the grimness of the frosty village and thought how he’d never have known it’d existed until stumbling into it days ago. He didn’t expect anyone to speak the same language, let alone read books written with the same characters.

“Nope,” he answered. “I planned to keep a journal on my travels south. That didn’t quite eventuate.”

Aaron faced his brother, surprised. “Dan? The greatest arm wrestler of Old Horn Tavern? Saltiest sea dog to leave port from Baitman’s Bay? A writer?”

Dan pretended to be insulted. “I’d have plenty to write about it. Day 1—someone tried to kill me. Day 2—someone tried to kill me. Skip to day 39—someone tried to kill me. Oh, then I reunite with my long lost brother and become a fugitive.”

“Look at you,” Aaron rebutted. “Bald head, lined with scars, and two hundred pounds of brawn in a working man’s overalls and soldier’s camouflage suit. Knife and crossbow and murderous hammer and bag full of fireworks.”

Dan looked himself over. Aaron’s description was right, bar a few extra layers and additions for the cold climes. His worn out leather boots had kicked a few heads in their time. “What’re you getting at, big brother?”

Aaron shook his head and watched the sellers, stalls and customers at market. Simple people wrapped in furs and thick cloth and patchy hide gloves. They barely took notice of two strangers adding to the population. “I was going to say that someone who looks like doesn’t fit the vernacular of a written-word-whinger. A bruiser like you—you’re supposed to love battle, not sook into your journal about it.”

Dan punched Aaron in the arm. He winced away and pretended to be hurt. They laughed. “What would I write instead?” Dan asked.

Aaron hummed a thought and put a finger on his chin. “I’ve got it! Day 1—some sucker tried to kill me and I smashed him up. I am the man. Day 2—some other sucker tried to kill me, so I smashed him up too. The. Man. Day 39—a hundred guys tried to kill me, and I cast a spell and blew them all up. I AM THE MAN.”

Dan shook his head, pretending not to be amused. “Scratch that. I’d write about you.”

Aaron did a mini double-take. “Day 40—I meet Aaron James. His roguish good looks, dapper blonde hair, endless blue eyes, and narrow, exotic features, make me feel hideous in comparison.”

Dan barely registered Aaron’s waffle, his attention caught by a new thing in the scenery. A soft looking woman loaded down with coats and bags and plenty of brown hair. She wasn’t a local. Although a little worse for wear, she was missing the typical dreadlocks and ice-wrinkled skin of other women. She entered the bookstore and disappeared from sight.

“You see that?” Dan asked. “That girl?”

Aaron interrupted his own horribly unfunny joke and looked where Dan pointed. “Yeah. So?”

Dan blinked and rubbed his eye. The wind was drying them and he had to be sure. “I’ve seen her before.”

“There are plenty of females with brown hair that don’t look like mountain trolls, Dan,” Aaron reasoned. “Where was it?”

Dan trusted his memory. “Radasanth. Corone. Ages ago, but I don’t know when. She was writing or doing calligraphy or something in the street. Selling paper and ink.”

Aaron nodded and hummed contemplation. “Well, what else do we have to do? Go and ask her if she’s selling ink.”

Dan immediately went red in the cheeks. He berated himself for it; no matter how big and tough he could feign to be, women turned him timid as a teddy in almost every circumstance.

Aaron snorted a bit. “You want me to do it?” he offered.

Dan shot a look as if to say “please.” He stood up and dusted sleet from his backside, took a deep breath, and steeled himself. “You might be the good looking one, brother, but you’ve got no idea how to dress. You’ll embarrass us both.”

Gotcha, Dan thought. Sucker.

Shaking his head in mocked disbelief at the insult, Aaron hissed after Dan. “Says the guy in overalls and a one-sie!”

“You look like a sweat-stained bed sheet. White and off-yellow doesn’t match,” Dan said flippantly over his shoulder, and gave a cool two fingered wave.

Dan’s nerves were at ease as they could be. While he approached the bookshop, he detoured and idled about the market for a smooth approach. It’d be awkward to immediately stalk where the familiar woman entered, and then ask something so specific. “Have I seen you selling ink and parchment on an entirely different continent?” sounded like a cheap pick-up line when Dan practiced under his breath.

Dan considered different openers while he pretended to be interested in a bundle of salted fish heads. The staller eyed Dan up and down and didn’t say a word.

His reverie and pointless browsing came to an abrupt halt when the brown haired woman fled the bookstore being chased by a paunchy, red-faced old man with a dangerously overactive sword arm. Chips and splinters flew from the awning as he chopped wildly after her. Breaking glass and clattering furniture sounded out like someone unleashed a bull indoors. She ducked and ran well as someone could in a dress, and luckily enough, zipped around a corner and out of before her assailant could land a strike.

Before Dan could get press his belly button and activate Damsel-Saving-Mode, he heard a sharp whistle from Aaron who still hadn’t moved from the snowdrift. Dan turned his attention and saw a stern warning.

“No,” Aaron mouthed, and shook his head.

Dan understood. He crossed back slowly from the market proper to the outskirts, ears now pricked up and vigilant. His boots crunched in the mixture of gravel and slush, and his eyes darted about for signs of any more crazy. He analysed the old man with the sword, skin all wrinked shrivelled up like he’d sucked a lemon.

“Takes a bit to get old geezers all riled up like that,” Dan assumed. “She probably stole something.”

“You’d be right,” Aaron agreed. Dan resumed his seat next to him and sighed.

“What’s wrong?” Aaron asked.

Dan knew it was immature but he didn’t lie. “I’m getting…bored. We’ve been sitting here for a while now. What’re we actually doing?”

“You’re forgetful sometimes. We’re waiting for high-tide to move the cutter safely and anchor away from the rock shelves,” Aaron reminded. “You’re the sailor and fisherman, right?”

Dan nodded. “Right.”

Aaron set about mind reading. “It’s not that you’re bored. You’re too much of a trouble maker to just let it rest, are you? Too curious?”

Dan thought about all the strife he’d been in leading up to this point. The bounty on their heads was a presently unknown number, but it certainly was enough to attract attention and subsequently jail time or death. They’d come to Salvar—not really a holiday destination—to get away from all of that. It wouldn’t make sense to go stalking off and embroiling themselves on a whim into a whole new pot of danger.

“I get it, brother,” Dan conceded, nodding his head. He peeled his gaze from the bookstore and where the brown haired girl vanished into a separate nook of the voolage. “We lay low. Mind our own business.”

Aaron gave his brother a pat on the shoulder without intention to be condescending. Dan swatted it away, a little sulky-like.

“Don’t be a git. You’re like a scalded puppy.”

They sat and kept talking about journals and adventures and what they’d write about. Aaron prodded that Dan could be read like an open book himself. Dan rebutted that he’d fill chapters more in his future autobiography about his high-brow brother, only being six years elder, thinking himself full to the brim with more knowledge than any library. They even dare partook in a local dish—some kind of warm, milky jelly—that tasted of pepper and butter and potato all at once. A short while passed and Dan forgot all about the redolant female figure he'd seen flee from doom by the book vendor's steel.

That was only until she came careening around a corner, ran head on into Dan, bounced off his chest and belly and landed on her backside. Her hair was tousled and messy. Her cheeks were flushed, and her wide doe eyes were watery. Up close she was only a little thing, and Dan offered his calloused hand. She took it, scampered up and ran behind him like he was a shield, and shrank down a little as if to better conceal herself.

“Gents! I need assistance!” she said with urgency. “No time for introduction—there are thugs after me.”

Dan and Aaron looked at each other. Aaron was mortified. Dan had the biggest, most smarmy and satisfied smirk that he could possibly muster, and with a knowing wink, it was settled. Aaron looked at the ground and exhaled his defeat.

“Well then,” Aaron said. “Is it because you stole something from that bookshop?”

The woman stared daggers at him. “How could you—

Dan waved his hand and said, “Never mind my brother. What he meant to say was ‘is there any good reason these people have to take you’? Do they think you did something wrong?”

Dan spoke casually and calmly. He wasn’t looking at the woman, though. He focused on the corner the woman emerged from and what could be behind it. He considered the surrounding area, looked for escape points, and environmental hazards. It was possible they were already being watched.

Aaron returned the woman’s incredulous expression. “I saw you get chased out of the bookstore by the owner. He wouldn’t run that fast if the whole place went up in flames.”

She balled her fists and almost went to stomp a foot. She seethed, wanting to shout at the pompous looking blonde man in his silly white and sweaty yellow tunic. “He said I was a witch! He tried to cut my head off!”

Aaron looked to Dan with a pleading expression. He had both arms folded yet one hand close to the sword hilt. “These people after her could be like the police of region,” he reasoned. “You don’t know their customs. If people think she’s a witch and you step in to bat…”

Dan nodded once, still watching the space where the woman’s assailants would come from if they decided to chase. “Yeah, yeah. Whole town will turn on us and burn us all at the stake, yadda-yadda.”

Aaron frowned and turned his back to the point Dan monitored. He walked steps past and away from the frantic woman, still hiding behind the meat wall Dan offered. “Don’t be so blasé about this kind of—

“For someone with an elite level of training you’ve got zero backbone,” Dan snapped. “Shut up and pay attention. Someone’s coming.”

Aaron went quiet. The wind still sung an eerie note with gain enough to drown out the ambient noises in the village, but there was one pattern distinctly clear. Beating hooves. Dan lowered his body weight and relaxed his hands. Aaron half-drew his sword from scabbard and turned sideways to offer a smaller target. His weapon was hidden beneath his coat.

“That’s them,” the woman whispered. She peaked out from behind Dan.

As the hooves grew closer Dan could distinguish a triplet rhythm. Three riders. One of the beasts chortled and snorted, and the unmistakable jingle of steel drew the tension wire tight enough to snap.

“Easy, Dan” Aaron reminded.

Around the corner came three fully grown stallions of brown and black, seventeen hands high, thrown with rugs and saddle and manes all wild and fearsome. Their riders slowed the animals by command words and jabs from the stirrups, and in a short distance their gallop slowed to a stop. “You run fast, witch,” said a cool tongued woman at the head of the pack.

Aaron and Dan regarded the trio with wariness. Each rider dismounted and approached with their nose turned up just a little too far, carrying the particular arrogant aura of bullies who know how to fight and haven’t yet lost. The female rider stood at the head of her group and her two male companions stood behind and to the side.

The female rider dressed in black rider’s greaves, a brown pelt vest with a thick cotton long-sleeved undershirt. A wolf’s pelt crowned with fangs and jaw braced her shoulders, and caught the bottoms of her curling shocks of unkempt black hair. Her hip was belted with holstered knives, a coiled whip and an ornamentally gemmed rapier.

“Who are you?” Dan asked.

“My name is unimportant,” she said. “The name of who I work for, on the other hand, is.”

“What’s more important than that again is what’s going on here,” Dan said. “I don’t know you and I don’t know her. All I know is she’s scared and says you’re levelling threats at her.”

“Do you know she is a witch?” the woman asked.

“I don’t know if she is anything but a woman at this stage,” Dan said. Aaron looked sideways then back to the riders, surprised at Dan’s confidence and ability to parley.

The female rider offered a silvery, all-too-fake laugh. “I can most assuredly tell you she is a witch. You are not from here, and so I couldn't blame you for ignorance of how low our tolerance is for such creatures in Salvar.”

Dan shook his head. “Ignorant or not you miss the point. Where we’re from, who you are, the name of your boss; all of it is irrelevant. Tell me what's going on here before I have to take a guess.”

One of the male riders stepped forward. His was a rectangle of square shoulders and a neanderthal's jaw. His forehead was almost entirely flat, and the rear of it like he’d spent his life with a brick for a pillow. His small brown eyes, thick beard, and even thicker arms told of short fuses and explosive strength to go with it. Like the female rider, he was dressed in leathers and a wolf’s pelt coat, and carried more knives and weapons than he had limbs to wield them.

“One at a time,” Aaron warned. “Let’s just speak politely, eh?”

The block headed rider sneered, and said “Listen to Roxanna or we’ll slice your face off.” It came out in a slow drawl that suggested he wasn’t so quick of wit.

It was cruel to find enjoyment in it, and the nameless woman he protected probably didn’t appreciate it, but Dan couldn’t resist. “I dare you to try.”

Once more Roxanna offered that sly, silky laugh. “Don’t mind the twins,” she said. “Arl and Erl are a bit protective of me.”

Dan cursed his lack of attentiveness. He’d been so fixated upon Roxanna and trying to pry information from her that he’d not seen that Arl and Erl were twins down to the stitch of their clothing. The structure of the group was clear: two bruisers at two hundred and fifty pounds a piece, and one brain.

“I’m not minding anything,” Dan confirmed. “Except the lack of information. Once more, please. Would you tell me what you want with this woman and why I should hand her over?”

Dan's ward jabbed him in the ribs from behind. She had a pretty good right hand.

“She sells wares that could only be crafted by a witch. Paper and ink, specifically. The kind that is often used in valuable contracts and treaties and signatory documents, that my employer invests quite a bit of money in,” Roxanna explained.

Dan cast a sidelong “I-told-you-so” glance to Aaron. He’d been right in his recollection of seeing her in The Bazaar of Radasanth.

Aaron ignored it and instead said to the nameless brown haired woman, “Is this true?”

“Yes, but it’s not like it sounds!” she replied. “It’s not my fault what people do with my goods!”

Roxanna shook her head with a tisk, and waddled her finger like a reprimanding parent to child. “The point is you and your wares and your unauthorised magic have cost my employer quite a bit of money. He would like to speak with you.”

Unauthorised magic, Dan thought. He quickly shot a confirming touch to the leather pouch on his hip. What happens to me if I use this?

“This doesn’t seem like a cordial invite,” Aaron disagreed. “It seems like a forced abduction. Are you and your employer, your baron—are either of you the law in this land?”

Dan knew one thing about Salvar; whoever swung the biggest stick was the law whether they were badged as police or not. Especially in nameless villages that didn’t even warrant mention on any maps. Aaron knew it too, and the question was more or less a bluff. A test of Roxanna’s own about opinion on how highly she sat atop that horse, and how far she’d push to get what she wanted.

There was silence.

“I’ll say it again,” Aaron spoke with steel and conviction. “Are you or your employer the law?”

Roxanna pursed her lips and cocked her head aside. “No.”

The twin blockheads took half a step forward and flashed their meat-grinder teeth until veins bugged out of their temples. Dan withdrew his black combat knife and held it in plain sight. Aaron’s sword was a thin falcata affair and left it’s sheath with a dramatically threatening ring. At that moment, all the men drawn for bare and testosterone reaching critical heights, it went quiet. There weren't any witnesses to the brewing storm of murder in the nigh featureless sidestreet they stood on. Just a few crumbling dry walls, some rubbish, and a downward sloping hill to the thickets and chilly forest.

The pregnant silence was long. Aaron looked to Dan. “What’d I tell you about ten minutes ago?”

Dan sighed. “No badness, heads down, yep. Got it.”

“And here we are,” Aaron stated.

“Here we are. This is the right thing to do, right?”

“Of course it’s the right thing to do!” the woman piped from her behind her human shield.

Dan breathed deep and told his heart to slow down. “I don’t know your name, y’know. I’ll call you Witch until you decide to tell me. No offence.”

Roxanna was the only person present at the showdown with some brevity about her. Her hands hadn’t gone for a weapon, and in fact, she’d barely blinked since the flashes of steel and warning edges. In all her collectedness she stood there, arms folded, watching.

“This isn’t necessary,” she said. “But alright then. Kill them.”

And it was on. The three horses neighed and reared up and trotted back to make room for their riders to go to work. The twins Arl and Erl rushed forward like bipedal boulders and went for vicious hook daggers from the belt. Each seemed to mirror the action of the other, and in a moment they were on top of Dan and Aaron. It was ironic, really, to see brothers fight against brothers.

Dan kept his eyes on the target and shoved back the at the space where he thought Witch ought be to clear her from danger. Surprisingly, he moved air. There was no time to turn and check. He was bowled over and already cut once on the arm by Arl or Erl—he didn’t know which—before he could think worry about where Witch might be. Instead of trying to move the immovable, he rolled with it, and tumbled over backwards with a blockhead on top of him until they pitched away from each other.

Aaron defended against the same assault but with much surer footing and fluid grace. He simply stepped the bare minimum of distance aside, feinted once and delivered a thin carve to the blockhead’s back. The blockhead barely noticed it, kept running and tripped, rolled and slid into a collection of empty buckets and a wheelbarrow which broke apart in like he were a bowling ball scoring a ten-pin strike.

Any other time it would’ve been hilarious to see Aaron’s blockhead pick up with one the buckets, turn it upside down, and don it as a makeshift hardhat. This was no time to find amusement in their low intelligence; in fact it was threatening. Less neural activity probably meant less pain felt. Aaron stood his ground, maintaining an eye on Dan in his own struggle, and waited for the bucket-wearing blockhead to tire himself.

Dan was less efficient. He ducked and swiped back retaliation cuts of his own, catching two superficial lines on his blockhead’s chest and chin. Knowing that a knife fight was going to end badly for everyone, he swapped attention from flesh wounds to disarming. It was going to be futile in the end, considering the range of backup knives and other painful implements the blockheads had on their belts.

“A bit of breathing room would help!” Dan shouted to Aaron.

Aaron danced and Dan scrapped. Eventually Aaron’s bucketed blockhead overextended with a vicious two handed hammer-blow and was taken out with one long slice that began at the belly and finished at the chin. It wasn’t gory or particularly spectacular; just a neat red lined that formed gradually in the browns and blacks of the blockhead’s leather garment.

It remained a clean incision only for moments. When Dan stepped in to contribute a nasty mule’s kick to the staggered blockhead’s spine, all at once the innards seemed to dislodge and pool in a misty red heap. Arl or Erl, whoever he was, keeled over in a puddle of intestines.

Dan’s engine was running out of steam. He took a breather by grabbing on and riding the last remaining blockhead’s back like a brahma bull, hanging on by the neck and beard for dear life. All he needed was a cowboy’s hat and snake boots.

“Get off!” Aaron shouted. He circled the borders and was unwilling to close with Dan still in blockhead’s striking range.

“Then what am I supposed to—

The decision was made for both of them. The last blockhead faced his back to a mortar and brick wall and set into something of a backwards run. Before Dan could get his hands clear he was slammed into the wall and heard something crack. It was the wall or his ribs. Fractured lumps of mortar fell loose from the structure, and Dan gasped to control the spasm of his diaphragm. Had Aaron not been there to pick up the slack and cut red ribbons with fluid strokes of his falcata, Dan would’ve been gone for sure.

Dan’s vision stopped spinning and shaking soon enough for him to see both twins dispatched. In the nippy morning, their ragged breath blew vaporous clouds that told of the effort they’d put in to win. They sweat profusely and considered what wounds they'd suffered. Dan wasn't fussed by the laceration to his arm. At most, Aaron suffered a stubbed toe. Before they could cheer and high-five each other they knew something was off.

“We didn’t pay attention to Roxanna and Witch for even two seconds, did we?” Dan asked.

“Nope,” Aaron confirmed. “They’re gone.”

They felt a bit lame despite what should've been a sweet victory. Two riders lay in hot puddles of crimson and gore. Two horses stood without their riders. The third horse was missing.

[Luned]

Luned wasn't sure why she didn't feel quite as guilty as she should imposing on this pair of men, but there was an element of familiarity she couldn't quite place that somehow made it seem completely acceptable to hand off her captors to them. They were obviously not from Salvar and their accents were recognizably Coronian; perhaps she was just looking for a friend where there wasn't one in a fit of desperateness and foolishness. But that didn't seem to matter as it all seemed to be going quite well, her human shield apparently a touch more diplomatic than herself, until the brutish brothers advanced and the fate of the confrontation was suddenly set.

The Coronian brothers were obviously fixated on their Salvic counterparts, their numbers conveniently matched, but Luned couldn't take her eyes off Roxanna. She was fairly certain being manhandled by a couple 'bipedal boulders' would be preferable to whatever this broad was capable of. Restraint was a frightening virtue in this context, and for every ounce Luned obviously lacked, Roxanna compensated with the harsh whiteness that spread across those wickedly pursed lips.

Before the brothers had a chance to engage Luned was off around another corner, tossing the bulk of her possessions into a pen of goats who bleated out against her blatant rudeness. With her load lightened she was able to pick up an impressive amount of speed and realized how grateful she was for the forced exercise her travels brought about; back in Radasanth she'd carried some extra weight, the curse of someone who spent twelve hours a day toiling away at a desk, but since she left Corone most of that was quickly replaced with lean muscle. This happened at the cost of her clothing no longer fitting quite properly, but that seemed a minuscule issue in comparison to the ability to competently flee for one's life.

It wasn't long before Roxanna caught up on horseback and swooped over Luned like a bird of prey, her talons successfully finding their way into the scruff of her dress and the scribe suddenly found her feet parting the ground most alarmingly. She was hoisted smoothly up into the saddle in front of Roxanna and couldn't help but marvel at the woman's incredible strength, almost tempted to swoon in her villainous embrace –– what did this lady do, capture princesses on a daily basis? –– before twisting around and offering her a stout clout in the nose. Roxanna knew to expect some struggling and avoided the worst of the impact by moving her head, but what she didn't expect was for Luned to use this lapse in control to grab onto the woman's shoulder and throw her entire weight onto her, knocking them both out of the saddle and onto the ground. Roxanna tucked and rolled gracefully as the less experienced woman hit the dirt hard with her left shoulder and floundered in pain for a brief but agonizing moment. This sort of adventure wasn't exactly part of a scribe's usual job description and she wasn't ashamed to admit that she wasn't particularly good at it.

As Roxanna recovered, Luned scrambled to her feet and hied into a nearby stable. She wasn't quite sure what she was going to accomplish in there until she bumped into the squire from moments ago, in the midst of saddling up a borrowed horse for his journey home. For what would most likely be the only time in their lives she was happy to see him, though the same couldn't be said from his side of things. The young teenager glanced up at her, obviously confused by this turn of events. "You! You got me into this and you're sure as hell going to get me out," Luned growled at him. Roxanna was hot on her tracks and she could hear the quickened pace of boots rolling toward them.

"You had it coming," the loathsome boy scoffed with a haughty sniff, and that was the last straw. Luned kicked him sharply in the shin and drew a small dagger from her right boot. She didn't like carrying weapons, this reserve for dire situations only, but this was proving to be an emergency if there ever was one. As he cursed sourly and stooped to nurse his afflicted leg Luned grabbed him by the arm and stepped inside the stable so she wasn't visible, blocked partially by the wooden gate and partially by his slightly larger, lanky form.

"What do you think you're doing?" The maimed boy hissed, quickly shushing when he felt the point of her blade prod through his clothing and dangerously close to a kidney. She was a bit disappointed in herself for finding this position of power so gratifying after their first infelicitous meeting.

"Tell her I ran out that way or you're never going home," Luned threatened surprisingly convincingly. To punctuate that point, she jabbed him what she thought was gingerly with the blade, but the unmanly little shriek that erupted from his pale body said otherwise. She had to suppress the instinct to apologize and a dark cloud of guilt settled in over her head; alas, he had to remain convinced she might actually hurt him if this was going to work. Except she already had, accidentally. Who'd have thought knives were that sharp?

Roxanna arrived, her fury evident through her voice as Luned shrank invisibly back against the wooden frame of the stall. She made sure the squire could feel the pressure of the blade from behind as he faced the intimidating woman.

"Where is she?" Roxanna barked, and the boy the shied from her glare skittishly. "Don't just stand there like an imbecile. Did you see her?"

"She left out the other side, that way," he motioned down the far end of the stables. Several long faces peeked out from their shadowy stalls as silent spectators of the ruckus, munching grain as they looked down on the humans in pure indifference. Roxanne scowled and took off past them.

When the sound of running footsteps disappeared Luned let go of the squire's arm and he recoiled to his mount's side. "You'd make a terrible soldier," Luned complimented him as she stowed her dagger away. He simply stared at her darkly with cold, gray eyes from across the stall, hiding his dejected expression behind the nose of the large beast. His dirty blond hair matched the horse's mane. "What's your name?"

"Bernd." His voice was small, even amongst the mute creatures.

"Sorry, Bernd. Nothing personal. Go on home now before you get into anymore trouble." Luned backed out, catching a glimpse of the superficial wound she'd given him as it bled lightly through his forest green uniform, and rushed off with a heavy heart. She collected her things from the goat pen as efficiently as possible, her left shoulder throbbing under the returned weight of her pack. Ugh. She strapped the toolbox on under it to keep her hands free and hoped she wouldn't regret it later. Then she returned to the scene of her nigh-abduction to find Dan and Aaron standing amongst the disemboweled man and the slightly cleaner, but equally deceased remains of the second. "Oh, dear lord," she gasped.

"What did you expect?" Aaron looked to her accusingly, brow furrowed.

Luned knew any answer would make her sound like a moron, so she covered up her humiliation and guilt with the most polite introduction she could muster. "Thank you. Really. I'm Luned." She offered her hand to Dan first, figuring she owed him that for using him as a shield earlier, and he might be surprised to be caught up in a firm, business-like shake. She offered the same to Aaron afterwards.

"I'm Dan, and this is Aaron. Now––"

Luned motioned for Dan to hold on, her eyes shifting from him to his less enthused brother. "I know I owe you, both a better explanation and some sort of compensation for your help. Before we discuss that, though, we should probably skedaddle. The she-devil's still looking for me and it won't be long before she comes back around this way." She'd have added something about not wanting to contribute further to the mess of gore, but she didn't want to sound ungrateful, either. With that she directed her line of vision to the trees in the short distance, using a hand to shade her eyes from the glare of the overcast sky. It was eerily quiet in that direction, the evergreen boughs grayed out in the muted light. "Perhaps we should go for a walk?"

The men seemed to be in agreement and they trekked the close distance fairly quickly, Luned's little legs doing an admirable job of keeping her taller companions walking at a rapid pace to keep Roxanna at a safe proximity. "Just to make it clear," she explained as they went, "None of this was my fault, not really. I'm from Corone and was trained as a scribe there, including a little magic. News abroad is that after the war the laws on magic were eased considerably here in Salvar, but obviously I didn't read up quite as well as I ought and seem to have gotten myself into a conundrum of sorts. Now I suppose I'll have to lie low until I can catch a boat out of here, but I can't really do that unless I earn money for the fare; bit of a catch twenty-two, unfortunately. How about you two? You're from Corone too, aren't you? What brings you to a horrid place like this?"

[Etheryn]

“Spot on,” Dan said rhetorically. “Corone, born and bred. We might share a few reasons being here.”

“The war?” Luned assumed.

“Absolutely. There’s only a finite time I can tolerate being sandwiched in a bloodbath,” Dan said. He ducked an overhanging branch, gripped it and pulled it aside for Luned to pass with ease. “I’m not much for patriotism.”

“What about you, Aaron?” Luned called.

Aaron followed just a little bit behind. He watched Luned from the rear in no manner of rudeness; she was an unknown. As they stepped over brambles and ankle-rolling rocks just slightly submerged in melting snow and brush, he thought sourly on Dan’s behaviour. The gravity of the situation they were now involved in seemed to have no effect. Two men were dead and the escaped woman Roxanna would likely return with friends.

“Something like that,” Aaron said. “I think we all need to agree on something before we talk too much.”

Dan stood at the crest of a craggy downward slope, and looked to Luned for a confirmation. She nodded and turned to face Aaron while she adjusted her pack for better mobility. Aaron caught up, put one foot on an outcrop and tested his weight. A slab of rock broke loose and tumbled down, fragmenting into smaller pieces on the way.

Dan knew his brother’s view. It was obvious by the half-scowl and distant frustration on the lean lines of Aaron’s face. They’d been ashore less than a week and already involved in manslaughter and affray. It wasn’t as if things were uncommon in Salvar, such a lawless land as it were, but the brothers James seemed truly inexcusable from drama and trepidation.

They’d been silent for a moment. Luned broke it while she took the lead in beginning the descent. “Shall we make the agreement, then?”

Aaron went next. He wouldn’t let the woman from his sight, omen or not. Dan followed after quickly scanning the direction they’d come from for tails. It was clear.

“We’ll stop talking about things when other people could be listening out to—

Aaron slipped and skidded to a stop, leaning back on his hands to come steady.

“We don’t know you yet, Luned, and we don’t know who could be watching us. My brother and I need to discuss to what extent we’re going to help,” Dan finished off. He looked to his brother, who was busying himself with navigating a potential ankle-breaker section of sheared rock. Aaron used the preoccupation to hide the fury smeared on his face.

There I was thinking he might not blab secrets to the first stranger we meet, Aaron fumed. How many brothers that look like us have fled from Corone recently? How daft could he possibly be?

“Brothers?” Luned said. Although she carried a bulk of equipment of the three, the path was proving least difficult for her. “You don’t look related.”

“It’s the hair,” Dan said, gingerly following Aaron’s path. “And I’m not so scrawny.”

They were quiet for the time being. After a bizarrely people-friendly mountain goat overtook the amateurs and showed an easier route to the bottom of the slope, they took a breather. Dan crouched and steadied himself with one hand. Aaron leaned against a smooth boulder. Luned faced a dense thicket, interspersed with brush and stumps. There was a little path walked into it that stretched further into the forest.

Aaron raised a fist in a throwback to his soldiering days. Pebbles rolled down from the top of the rocky gradient. Dan looked up but the view was too obscured by glare and the irregular deformations of the land. He stood, and slowly stepped out of sight if someone were at the peak and spying down.

“In,” Aaron whispered. He motioned for Luned to take point, stepped in behind her, and Dan took up the rear. The column breached through the thicket and took care to move quickly.

It was only then that Dan, having forgotten his injured arm, noticed the slight trail of blood he left on leaves, branches, and droplets on the ground. The cold numbed his skin to the point of forgetting he’d been cut. “We’re leaving marks,” Dan passed up the line.

“I’ve been down here since yesterday,” Luned said. “Anyone who was interested might already know this path. It’s just that before now, I didn’t think anyone cared.”

Aaron glanced back at Dan, who already stymied the blood flow with a torn sleeve of his olive drab overalls. It was the first moment since the fight that Dan and Aaron really looked at each other.

Aaron’s displeasure with Dan was thinly veiled. “There’s nothing for it,” he said. “If anyone was close on our tail they would’ve dumped rocks on our head as we climbed down. We should be okay for a while.”

Dan stomached Aaron’s greasy stare and kept on. It was understandable. “Luned, I know I’ve seen you before at The Bazaar. You said you’re a scribe. Who do you work for?”

Luned swatted a cobweb aside and exaggerated her step over a root so her followers knew not to trip. “Myself,” she said. “Though many unsavoury types like to think otherwise.”

Dan looked up and was surprised at how the sky was now blocked out by a canopy of vegetation. The trees—whatever they were called Dan didn’t know—weren’t laden with leaves but so numerous of limb that they interlocked to conceal almost everything beneath them. Apart from ever-present wind, everything was grey and white and brown and unmoving. Most animals wouldn’t spend much time outside of their homes unless feeding. It gave the place an unforgiving, forbidden demeanour.

“So you work for yourself,” he said after a while. “And unsavoury types favour your work. Does that mean that some of your work is unsavoury too?”

Luned said, “I know I mentioned payment and I know what you’re meaning to ask, Dan. With all due courtesy I think we should speak about that when we’re at camp, given the manner of accusations by this ‘baron.’ Like your brother said—we don’t know who is listening.”

Aaron pointed a kind of furry marsupial out to Dan. It was watching intently from a high perch, all brown and intolerably cute. It nibbled some kind of nut in its tiny clawed hands. “See?”

Luned nodded, ducked down a little and pulled a scratchy twig free from her hair. “Exactly,” she said. “I think this site might’ve been his before I borrowed it. We’re getting close.”

It took a minute for the party to breach out of the narrow path and into a miniature valley of a clearing. Brown grass, starved from lack of sunlight and stunted by the frost, pitched down into a central campsite. There was a fire-pit with a ring of stones around it, a bushman’s tent for one with maintenance patches sewn in, and barebones cooking implements made of tin.

Dan stood over the fireplace and kicked some of the ash. Red embers and hot coals revealed themselves and offered warmth to his numb hands. He was impressed with how well the fire was built. “Where did you say you come from again?”

“Corone,” Luned repeated as she gratefully dumped the heavy contents of her pack. She emptied some of the contents, and Dan saw the age-worn tomes and rolls of vellum and bottled inks that belied her trade.

Aaron stood next to Dan over the coals. “And you’re a scribe,” he added.

Luned rummaged around a case for something and couldn’t find it. She didn’t answer Dan, seemingly distracted and impatient, but in a few moments retrieved a much smaller tome of perished red with some kind of emblem or pattern on its spine. She exhaled her relief and tucked it into a fold of her clothing, pinning it close.

“Sorry,” she said. “I am indeed. Bookworm by profession and bookworm by passion.”

Aaron and Dan exchanged looks. “And you can build a campfire and get by in a place harsh as this?” Dan said.

“Impressive, I know,” Luned said, stepping to a pile of splintered timber and arraying them in a tepee shape over the coal. From a fistful of kindling and flick from a tinderbox, a merrily crackling fire came to life. “I certainly didn’t start out this able, but I’ve discovered one learns things quickly if out of necessity.”

Dan sat on his backside, folded his legs, removed his gloves and showed his palms to welcome flame. “It’s more so that I wouldn’t expect there’s much reason for you to come here.”

Luned sat on an uprooted log and warmed her hands as well. “Well, there’s only so much life one can experience from inside a library,” she explained. “And like you said—the war hasn’t been very good for business. I spent a lot of time penning propaganda and state sponsored bounties and missing person flyers. It was very…grim. When I finished my apprenticeship I was offered two options: remain and establish my own business, or do some traveling to update the archives. It was an easy choice.”

Aaron was detached, walking the perimeter of the clearing and trying to peak through gaps in the scrub for more understanding of the surrounding. It was necessary, but also a diversion from having to sit and listen to the simple banter between Dan and Luned. He resented the friendliness of it and he resented her too. It was a bitter thing to accept; the words of pact with his brother were useless when spoken.

“So here you are,” Dan said. “It’s a long way to go. We’re all pretty far from home.”

It was too quiet for Aaron. He was tense and it showed in the abruptness by which he pulled aside branches and snapped twigs to contribute to the fire. If there was going to be time to speak in private it would be now. It wouldn’t be long before the ‘baron,’ whoever he was, dispatched another squad of goons to nab his target.

“Let’s talk on this ‘conundrum,’ as you’d call it.” He stoked and prodded the flames and stood back to consider them, both hands on his head like he were breathing out a stitch from running too long.

Luned wasn’t sure what to make of Aaron. He spoke without facing her, distant and cold like the land itself. She wasn’t in a position to complain about bad manners. The man just saved her life. “Let’s talk,” she agreed.

“First of all—I think Dan agrees with me on this one—we aren’t looking for strife,” Aaron said. He snapped a few more twigs and tossed them in, and pulled a stubborn branch against the sole of his boot to twain it.

Luned look to Dan, who returned an honest nod. “I don’t think any of us are,” she said.

“Perhaps I should’ve said we aren’t looking for anyone else’s strife either,” Aaron added. He turned to face her now. His expression was not what she expected; it was almost sorrowful. Vivid blue eyes downcast and unable to meet hers. “I killed men today. Was it right that we stepped in for you?”

Luned was silent. Dan certainly wasn’t and he stood in protest. “Are you a flipping idiot, brother? Of course it was! That’s not even a question!”

Aaron shook his head. “I don’t think it was. Luned, what could you have possibly done to make someone want to kill you?”

Dan clenched his fist and scowled. “Roxanna said her wares were part of some deal gone wrong. Doesn’t mean she’s done something so terrible to deserve getting killed. Besides, I don’t think that—

“Exactly,” Aaron interrupted. He raised his palm at Dan to quiet him. “I don’t think Luned would’ve been too worse for wear if she just played along and found out what grievance this baron has with her.”

Luned wasn’t exactly impressed. “That’s easy for you to say. I’ve been here long enough to understand the label ‘witch’ is used less out of sincerity and more as an excuse to make someone disappear in a socially acceptable manner. And regardless, I don’t trust this country’s bloodthirsty barons any further than I could throw one.”

Aaron locked eyes with Luned now and scoffed. “It’s not easy for me to say? It’s not easy for Dan and I to murder in the street because someone dragged me into it!”

Luned said, “Well, what was I to do? Ignore you and fend for myself because it’s somehow my fault that strangers want to abduct me for an imagined slight?”

Dan kept his mouth firmly zipped closed. His blood ran hot at his brother’s words, but he tempered to calm the thud in his veins because he knew why Aaron said such things.

“Do you not think I am grateful?” Luned continued. “I truly am. You’re brave and good—you are good—for doing what you did."

Aaron turned away. It was plain to all that not even he truly believed his own words. The simple thanks from Luned sapped his overwhelmingly practical need to regret his own illusions of good nature.

Dan walked around the fire, placed himself in front of Aaron and gripped him by both shoulders. “Look at me, man. Don’t tell me you honestly think we could’ve walked away from her. I know that you couldn’t.”

Luned turned away to give them some privacy in their moment. She busied herself with unfolding some dried meat from a cloth and pouring a kind of powdered soup into a saucepan.

Aaron sighed, defeated. “We couldn’t.”

“I know this sucks but lots of things have sucked recently. So we need to just deal with it,” Dan said. “I’m not volunteering to become this woman’s personal bodyguard. But we can’t let someone get unjustifiably hurt when we could’ve prevented it, just because we’re scared of a little mischief.”

“All I know, Dan, is that today I killed two men. That brings repercussions,” Aaron said. “I don’t know what they’ll be.”

“They went for us first,” Dan said. “No one could fault us for how we handled that.”

Aaron said, “I would’ve changed the ‘I-dare-you-to-try’ one-liner. But yeah.”

Luned did the best she could to make a hot meal for the men as they debated their obligations. She couldn’t help but overhear. Truly, she couldn’t ask for a second more of their time and had little to pay them with that would be of use. She did remember, though, that on their approach to camp Dan started on the topic of “unsavoury” works.

“Dan, Aaron,” Luned started, looking at each in kind to show her sincerity. “I can’t say it enough. Thank you. I’m grateful. I can’t pay you with much but my skills.”

Dan and Aaron were quiet now, both stuck in indecision about what they’d say next if anything at all. They were on opposite sides of the fire to give Luned a wide berth to array the constituents of a traveller's meal. She wrapped a towel on the handle of the saucepan and removed it from the fire, carefully pouring into two battered bowls, adding the dried meat and passing each to her guests.

Dan bowed his head in thanks, and shot a look to Aaron to prompt him to do the same.

“Your skills?” Dan asked.

Luned pointed to her piles of ink, scrolls and books. “If there is any particular, uh, ‘cover story’ you’d like to use in your travels through this land…” she started.

“You could prepare documents to back it up,” Aaron finished. He took a long slurp of the soup and wiped his lip with the sleeve of his tunic.

“What makes you think we need a cover story?” Dan asked.

Luned tore hunks of stale bread and passed it around. “Who doesn’t?” she said.

“Cheers to that,” Aaron said, and raised the bread like a salute.

Luned was showing her best brave face, stalwart as her freckled femininity would allow. She urged to ask for their protection for the night, for the day, and longer. She watched as they ate and stoked the fire and spoke about what kind of person would come to Salvar. On what business, and what kinds of seals and stamps might prove the authenticity of their paperwork? Luned knew that burly, bald Dan and wry, reasonable Aaron had cause past “escaping the war” to have travelled so far. They could’ve chosen other lands that were closer but were now in one of the most difficult and inhospitable places on the face of Althanas. The purpose of the brothers was clear. Vanishment. Luned’s musing on the word must’ve been contagious, it seemed.

“We’re skipping town. You can come with us but once we get clear of this baron’s reach... You’re on your own,” Aaron said.

“We have a boat,” Dan added. “Half a day’s walk from here. Too late to set out now, so we’ll stay the night and go at sunrise.”

Luned could’ve hugged them both and kissed the tops of their grubby heads. “Thank you,” she said, and packed Dan’s bowl away. It was a temporary friendship, a contract to be forgotten on completion, and it better to remain professional. She couldn’t hide her smile.

Aaron quirked an eyebrow when he realised something. He’d been too mired by thought to develop a real appetite, and he’d barely had much of the soup. “You didn’t eat,” he said to Luned.

“I thought it was more important for you both to have what’s left considering all the fighting you did," Luned said. She couldn’t deny the rumble of her belly.

Aaron stood up clicked his tongue, saying “nonsense” by the sound. He handed the bowl to Luned. “There’s more of us to waste away than there is of you,” he said. “You eat. Please.”

Dan would ordinarily cringe. Instead, he smiled with a degree of pride at the thought that men like he and his brother—chivalrous to a fault, even when the dame brought headaches beyond belief—still existed in the world.

[Luned]

Luned cooperated and ate gratefully while the brothers discussed their paperwork needs further. The wheels were turning in Aaron's head; if anything she could create something to make their ownership of that boat appear legal, but to request such documents would also require they trust her with an uncomfortable amount of information concerning their origins and troubles. Would it be worth it to risk it and trust her?

Meanwhile, the woman sat in silence. There was something inherently sketchy about sharing camp with a couple strangers, but it seemed so far that Luned had made the right decision. As she finished her soup the chill settled in, a shiver that started at the base of her spine wracking her body most unpleasantly. It had been tolerable enough in the sun to abandon her usual layers in the village, but under the canopy of skeletal branches, any hint of solar warmth was effectively blocked out. She set down her bowl and turned to the bundle she'd carried with her to town, unrolling it to reveal its original, wrinkled shape as a sweater. It was obviously a hand-me-down, homemade piece of clothing, but in spite of its poor dye job and coarseness, it was made specifically for this climate and was inviting in all of its hideous itchiness. As she pulled it on her arm stuck through a new hole in the sleeve and she cursed, re-navigating the oversized article until it was properly assumed, only to find another larger cut down the side. So that was where the sword had snagged. She cursed again, brushing off some grass. "That blasted shop, I never should have…" Luned grumbled quietly, trailing off as she collected the bowls and cooking implements, then strolled off a short way into the woods, where from a small distance she looked more like a splotchy blue beast than a lady. She knelt at a little clear-running stream to clean everything in the frigid water and the brothers found themselves with a short-lived modicum of privacy.

“There’s one thing I’ll tell you now,� said Aaron, keeping watch on Luned to make sure she wouldn’t overhear.

Dan paid attention.

“Neither of us are dying for this woman,� Aaron hushed. “This is the reality you and I live in. We’ll do what we can, but I’m not going to make the things we did to get here unjustified by throwing our lives away for a stranger.�

Dan leaned back on his palms and conceded. “I get it.�

Aaron glowered with severity. “Don’t just ‘get it.’ Do it, little brother. This is no knight’s tale. Don’t forget what we’ve done and where we’ve come from.�

As the brothers conversed Luned was deep in thought, taking her time by the stream to allow them a couple minutes to themselves. She could tell Aaron wasn't particularly enthused by this new arrangement, though the fact that he readily, albeit begrudgingly, accepted the situation told her that at least a small part of him was interested in helping. She certainly hadn't expected anything from either of them after the unfortunate series of events earlier that day so the offer was a pleasant surprise, but it was also a bit concerning. She'd defended herself in their brief argument, but considering how much it haunted her that she'd drawn that insufferable boy's blood, she couldn't let herself take their act for granted.

Dan was more of a problem than Aaron. He was the sort who couldn't say no even when he should, which was good for her, bad for him. Luned didn't want to take advantage of that but she knew it was likely to happen. She was human, after all, and being one of the inherently selfish creatures they were, she wasn't above admitting her own tendency toward self-preservation that sometimes happened at the cost of others, intentionally or not. She made a pact with herself that she would try to avoid imposing on them further, but that was likely to be broken considering the messes she usually found herself in. If extrapolating from past experience, this lull was just the eye of the storm. She crossed her chilly toes inside her boots to ward against that probability.

If there was anything she could do, Luned decided, it was at least contribute. She didn't like resorting to Bleddyn's purse to fund her misadventures, but this particular occasion involved others and she wasn't going to add unnecessary strain on top of what she'd already caused.

The water on her hands bit harder than the wind at her back and it wasn't long before Luned's fingers were numb, so as soon as she was finished washing, she filled the pot again and hastened back to the fireside. She set it over the coals, dug a small silver ball studded with holes out of a bag, and dropped it in. "Don't let me interrupt," she said to the men as their conversation reached a lull upon her return, then held herself precariously close to the flames as she waited for her digits to warm enough that she could write.

Within a few minutes the scent of exotic spices raised with the first whisps of steam and the water inside the vessel had turned a deep mahogany red. Luned lifted it from the coals just shy of boiling and poured it into tin mugs, handing one each to Dan and Aaron. "Tea. I save it for special occasions." She wasn't sure if she was being sarcastic in that last comment or not.

The brothers accepted their portions. Aaron peered at his tentatively as Dan took a quick swig, an action immediately followed by sputtering. He'd been a bit congested from the dry, arctic air, but after a dose of whatever was in that his sinuses found themselves completely refreshed, even in spite of the burning sensation that clawed behind his eyeballs. "What the hell is this?"

Luned had hers in one of the bowls –– she hadn't planned on entertaining, so her place settings were a bit short –– and took a long sip, holding it under her chin afterward so her face and fingers could absorb some of the heat. Her elbows were propped on her knees, legs crossed under her, and she looked right classy, taking her tea like the refined barbarian she appeared to be. "Clears you up, doesn't it? It's from Fallien." There was a small amount of pride she took in her fortitude for spice; in an arbitrary way it balanced out the toughness amongst this motley crew.

Aaron couldn't help but smirk and tried his own beverage, having to suppress a sneeze, but altogether fared much better than his brother. He took a deep breath and remained silent as the pair resumed their small talk, still disinterested in participating.

"You've been to Fallien, as well?" Dan asked, pacing himself with the rest of his tea. He didn't imagine scribing as a particularly adventurous career path, but obviously she wasn't a typical specimen.

"Oh, no. Well, not yet." Luned downed the rest of her refreshment like a pro and set aside the bowl so she could rummage around for her journal. "Bleddyn introduced it to me. He's been there several times."

This name piqued Dan's interest and he tried to remember where he'd heard it before. "Your teacher."

"Yeah." The young woman extracted a small black book from a bag and set it out in front of her with her toolbox, which she opened to reveal a meticulously organized stock of pens, inks, papers, and other supplies. She selected a quill and took a small blade to it, clipping the end.

"Already starting?� Dan pried, though more to fill the silence than anything. He sipped the last of his tea with poise.

Aaron finally felt inspired to contribute as well, looking sideways at the asininity of Dan’s statement. “I would’ve thought you needed some reference documents first.�

"Ah, well…" Luned was a bit hesitant to reply. In her time as apprentice Bleddyn had considered modern conveniences as blasphemy to their art, spending a rather overindulgent amount of time on practicing the mediative process of preparing a quill. He'd know right away if she used the fountain pen she'd bartered for a few weeks back, rather new and spectacular Aleran technology that she was ready to embrace but her teacher shunned. And if she was guilty of scribe heresy, he certainly wasn't going to give her any money.

"Bleddyn insists on upholding tradition. If I'm to contribute to the archives, I must show respect in not cutting any corners." At least if she phrased it like that, it wasn't really a lie. She looked up to Aaron and shook her head. "I'm not that good. I'm just, uh…" She covered up her falter by feigning concentration on the quill. "Recording a few things before I forget."

Luned's usual speech was casual but smooth so these hesitations caught Aaron's attention, who wasn't sure what to make of it at the moment. His thought was interrupted by Dan, who had suddenly placed the name of the master scribe. The larger of the two men cleared his throat and stood, picking up the empty cups and bowl and sauntering slowly in the direction of the stream.

"I'll rinse these," Dan announced, glancing to Aaron who stood and followed.

"Oh, thanks," Luned replied, but her nose was already buried in her journal, pen moving quickly as she jotted a quick note to Bleddyn. The pages soaked up the ink and, across the world, the letters bled into existence in an identical journal on her teacher's desk. She hoped he'd be prompt in responding; the old man liked to take his time in correspondence he deemed uninteresting, or as she liked to pretend, he'd simply forget to check.


––––––––––––––––†“––––––––––––––––⠀“––––––––––


Dearest teacher,
I am sorry to impose, but I would like to request an advance on my allowance. Might such be possible?
Eternally grateful,
Luned

Much to the young scribe's surprise, an answer was sent with astounding timing. Bleddyn's arthritic chicken scratch coaxed a pleased smile to her lips as she read it, lines scrawling across the page as he inscribed them.


Why do you ask?

Luned should've known he'd know better. She never directly asked for money and he immediately knew something was up. She crafted her response with a sigh.


Two brothers assisted me in an unfortunate situation this morning. They're fine fellows from Radasanth and I'd like to repay them.

This next response was jotted alarmingly fast. Bleddyn was not a wordy man.


Names?

Luned did think twice about sharing that information, but she'd lived under Bleddyn's roof for a decade with no cause for suspicion. To reveal the brothers' names didn't feel particularly incriminating, and so she did. Who could she trust, if not her teacher?


Dan and Aaron. Please?

This time no response seemed to be coming forthwith, no matter how intensely Luned stared at the half-filled page. She frowned down at the journal in her lap until she heard the brothers returning from their short field trip, when she snapped it shut so they wouldn't catch a glimpse and assume she had some bizarre multiple personality disorder.


––––––––––––––––†“––––––––––––––––⠀“––––––––––

Aaron followed Dan to the stream and looked to him expectantly.

"Bleddyn. He oversees the record keeping and archives for the capitol. He's also known for his neutrality in the war," Dan explained as he stooped to rinse the cups. Bleddyn was also known for staying on that honorary position long past retirement age and was rumored to be quite a curmudgeon as well as suspect of taking bribes, though his approach at senility fended the mar of corruption from his reputation.

Aaron knew what he was getting at. "And why would he help us?"

Dan shrugged, standing back up. "I don't know. It's just a thought. If he has any attachment to his apprentice, there might be some way to influence things."

Both of the brothers stood in silent thought for a long moment, the only sounds the crackle of the fire in the distance and the scratchy rustle of an icy breeze as it mingled through dry branches and nipped at their ears. By the time they got back to the campsite Luned had put away her writing supplies was glaringly strangely at her journal, which she then chucked spitefully against her pile of scrolls. The rolled parchment scattered and something fell from the pages of the book she seemed to be having an argument with: a gold coin. No, two! The money, considerably more than expected, hit the ground with a couple faint clinks and suddenly the scribe seemed quite embarrassed by this. She reached over and collected Bleddyn's donation; apparently he'd decided the brothers were worth compensating, after all. She'd save it as a parting gift.

[Etheryn]

The afternoon dwindled while they marched from Luned’s camp and through the countryside. By the gradual decline of the sun, Dan knew the tide would’ve lowered in sympathy, and so they could unmoor their stolen vessel and sail to another port of Salvar. It’d been several quiet hours of cawing birds and idle chatter about the origins of each member in the party of Dan, Aaron and Luned. The banter was soothing balm their tight-strung nerves; walking without cover brought paranoia of attack. Every so often Aaron raised his fist and they dropped low to avoid detection.

“Beyond that brush is the beach,” Dan said. He pointed to a thorny hedge that’d been divided by a path he'd already trampled on arrival. Red, itching marks on his hand reminded him of the labour.

“I don’t think the word describes it best,” Aaron interjected. “When I think of a ‘beach,’ well…”

Dan waved his brother’s comment off and stepped off the rocky trail they’d been walking. He drew his knife and hacked a wider path in the thicket, then pressed it aside with protection from his coat. “After you.”

Luned smiled and nodded thanks. She breached the thicket and savoured a panoramic view of metallic shades. Grey dover cliffs and an endless stretch of deep oceans that locked secrets of men it swallowed beneath the iron chest lid of its surface. The beach was no more than a bay of round pebbles and bookended by impassable formations of rock and shallow pools populated by bearded muscles and crabs.

“That’s yours?” Luned asked of Aaron, pointing to the white sailed cutter, one side of the hull patched up and worse for wear. It bobbed far enough out for her to wonder how they’d reach it. There was only a rusted anchor at the water’s edge, connected to a fraying braid rope which ran all the way out to the vessel.

“That’s ours,” Aaron confirmed. “You’re going to get some wet feet.”

Together the brothers set about heaving the on the tie and drawing the cutter in. It was hard work, and brief gusts caught folds and acted against their effort despite the tacked sails. When Dan released his grip to stretch further up the rope, Aaron took up slack with a lithe strength of his own. Their synchronised haul brought the cutter close enough for Dan to put hand on its bow and steady it for boarding.

“Just jump in quick,” Dan said to Luned, offering his hand to help her vault over the gunnel and to the deck. “We’ve got an oil lantern to warm up by. It’ll be cramped.”

“I’ll be fine,” Luned said. She wasn’t used to such consideration offered by men. Still, she hesitated, and winced at the sting in her toes as she stepped into the water.

In times to come Luned would bless her intolerance for the elements. It was only that brief moment of hesitation that saved her life. The streaking whistle of an arrow meant for her neck preceded the thud of an arrow nailing into the cutter’s hull and only inches before her face. Dan dived and pushed her down to cover from another that hit the water, and Aaron scattered to shelter on the opposite side of the vessel. Dan saw the sniper perched on an elevation of the cliff face and shouted their only option. “Trees!”

More and more arrows loosed and narrowly missed the mark. Inevitably, the attacker would solve for trajectory and skewer his prey. Dan, Aaron and Luned moved as quickly as they could, unable to quite get traction in the soft bedding of pebbles which rolled against each other like rubber balls in a child's play pit. It took a perceived eternity to slide behind the protection of a twisted stump, and they huddled close, each breathing heavily in mists before their eyes.

“Crossbow,” Aaron said, and motioned for Dan to hand his over. Dan nodded and unclipped the weapon from his belt, priming its gas cylinder and retrieving a bolt from the quiver. Aaron took it and loaded without looking. A button on the stock activated the pneumatics to draw tension on its lathe, and the bolt simply slid into place with a click.

“What now?” Dan said with quiet urgency.

“Break cover and draw him out,” Aaron said, scanning and checking their immediate surrounds. They’d run doubled back to the narrow trail they’d walked for hours.

“You better be a better shot than I am,” Dan said with thin humour. He knew what to do. "And I'm a better target. Right?"

Luned covered her hand to stifle the gasp as Dan returned with a kamikaze death wish. On the way, he leaned down to take something up from the ground, and tumbled in a roll only to keep moving toward the general direction of the arcing arrows. In moments he’d likely be stuck and bleeding out, yet he moved with confidence of someone who didn’t really care that much about the risk.

An arrow grazed Dan’s shoulder. Luned watched on in horror. A bizarre sound that seemed to come from inside her own head distracted her, like the deepest note of a church organ, and Dan retaliated to the archer with…something. Pebbles started flying against all logic from the beach, soaring in a cloud like buckshot at a break and bounce of a rising slab at the cliff's precipice.

“There!” Dan said, and stopped running. He simply stood still with his eyes closed, intensely focused, and the pebbles kept soaring.

It was Aaron’s turn now. He shimmied from the tree stump in prone position, once again leaving Luned vulnerable. Crawling on his knees and elbows, he made it to a vantage point from where he could see the impact of Dan’s projectiles. A painted target. With a half-exhaled breath and one squinted eye, he took aim at a point some fifty metres away, compensated for windage and elevation, and pulled the trigger.

A single bolt was all it took to bring their assailant toppling from his blind on the cliff top and down to split open on the crags below. The arrows stopped flying. Dan and Aaron both nodded to each other, passing the agreement that it wasn’t needed to check the corpse, and returned to Luned.

“What was that?” she asked. It was puzzling; without a turn of Dan’s shoulder he’d hurled uncountable stones to show Aaron where to aim and make time available to do so.

“That was my, uh…mojo,” he said. It was awkward to call it “magic” without wearing a pointy hat and beard to complete the image.

“No time,” Aaron said, continuing past the stump and dragged Luned up by the shoulder. “We’ve got to—

“Stand still or die,” purred a smug, familiar voice. “You’re surrounded.”

A multitude of sharp edges scraping their scabbards surrounded Dan, Aaron and Luned. The very bushes themselves rose up to reveal ghillie suited men with painted faces, all covered in brambles for disguise. Roxanna stood out from behind a tree and pointed her index finger at Dan and Aaron.

“Surrender,” she warned.

There wasn’t time for a dramatic exchange and smooth one-liners. Dan and Aaron simply set to their task and lashed violence on whoever was closest to them in a flurry of vicious elbows and slices and scrappy wrestles. Dan threw a weedy looking fighter, made even weedier by the vines he wore for cover, clean over his head and into a mess of hedged thorns. Aaron ducked a hatchet’s cleave and barely flicked his wrist to counter and sever a femoral artery with his falcata. Hot spurts followed.

Once again, Luned locked eyes with Roxanna—who was weaving through the fight and closing in with a grudge—and steeled herself.

“Round two,” Roxanna said. It was poignant, really, until Dan broke free of a rear naked choke from a faceless ghillie suit and punched her square in the face. She hit the dirt in a spectacular heap and twitched.

Luned capitalised on the opportunity and retreated to a point furthest from the centre of combat. She figured that Dan and Aaron needed room to effectively defeat their attackers without catching her in the thick of it, and additionally gave her some time to think and make herself useful. Luned wasn’t by any means a coward, having braved situations a somewhat petite lone woman may have otherwise gone to pieces in, but she knew when the odds were stacked against her and knew even better when to fold up.

Finding respite with her back pressed against a hump in the earth, crowned by an awning of brambles, she raced with thoughts of how to assist Dan. Although outnumbered, they weren’t overwhelmed and did will for themselves given the fight came from all sides. It was unknown whether reinforcements would arrive, and more unknown still if their energy—already depleted by a round with the formidable Arl and Erl—would be enough to finish the job.

It was too late to shout for help when the very flora she hid under came to life and pressed mercenary steel against her neck. A sudden cold sweat erupted from her skin and with every fibre of her being she prayed not to die.

“Stop!” the man said. “I’ve got her!”

All at once the wild melee ceased. Dan froze, one hand full of a ghillie suit’s collar and the other raised in a menacing fist, ready to knock him flat. Aaron stood still with his falcata deep in another’s gullet, and his victim gurgled like a stuck pig until collapsing further down the blade and going limp. Roxanna rose and wiped her already swollen lip and bloody nose. Men groaned and rolled in the dirt in feeble attempts to stand upright, only to find their legs were jelly and could only flop to their knees at best.

“Move and she’s dead.”

No one moved except Roxanna, who sidled over to the hostage and stared with pure, unadulterated malice. Luned’s entire world was filled with poisonous red lipstick, raccon's eyeliner and the furrow of a meticulously plucked brow. It was a disconcerting image of wicked beauty, made somewhat inhuman by the little care Roxanna paid to her muddied and bloodied face.

“Well done,” Roxanna said, both to Luned and the goon who’d caught her out. “Your wage is doubled this week.”

Dan blew a fuse and slammed the ragdoll figure in his grip to the earth with a single punch. “If you hurt her I will fuck you up beyond all recognition, bitch.” It wasn't that he was personally involved. He just hated losing.

Aaron pried the corpse from his sword with a kick and quick jerk. He stared at his brother with disbelief at the lack of tact. “Excuse him,” he said with cause to damage control. “He’s not very bright.”

“Do you mean to quit?” Roxanna said, taking over from her goon and turning up Luned’s wrists in a painful lock. With practiced movement she bound her hostage with an inescapable knot of tight bungee cord.

“We do,” Aaron volunteered. He sheathed his sword, unbuckled the scabbard from his belt, and tossed it aside.

Dan found himself forced to do the same. He unstrapped his knife, pitched the hammer, and bundled his quiver next to the gas-drawn crossbow in the dirt. Their plan for escape was scattered like a deck of cards. In what outwardly seemed as submission, but secretly was a method of retention for his most potent weapon, Dan removed the unassuming leather pouch from his hip and pulled it over his head. He could barely breathe, but kneeled—as much as it rent his spirit to do so—and put his hands behind his back. He still had an ace in the hole.

“Fine,” he said. “But I can’t promise that I won’t play up later.”

All Roxanna heard was a defeated mumble. She clapped her gloved hands, removed one of them, put two fingers to her lips and whistled shrill. Shod hooves clattered on the stone and armoured horses followed the call. In moments, they found themselves slung awkwardly or saddled backwards.

“The baron will be pleased to meet you,” Roxanna teased.

[Luned]

And so Luned's prediction proved true; Roxanna hadn't made her last appearance in their lives, and Luned had yet again taken advantage of the brothers' kindness by dragging them into a trap. Wonderful. She tried to ignore the way her shoulder flared up as her wrists were tied, glaring at the evil woman with a sour look as her protectors were forced to submit and were bound along with her.

"Let them go and I'll cooperate," Luned said, attempting to bargain.

Roxanna's perfect, devilish eyebrows lifted in mockery. "After they killed my men?"

"Just tell the baron I did it. Witches do that kind of thing all the time, right?"

The villain just shook her head with a smirk and made her way to Luned's bundle of possessions that had been abandoned on the shore where they'd pulled up the boat. It was apparent that she did not particularly care about the church-warned dangers of witches, and at this point she considered the brothers to have some sort of more personal score to be settled. Roxanna knelt and cut the cords that held it together then sorted through the contents, tossing aside stray cookware and clothing until she found a scroll, which she unrolled, skimmed, and left on the dirt in disinterest. Luned bit her lip to reduce the temptation to lecture her on how to treat others' belongings.

Eventually Roxanna found Luned's journal. She picked it up and flipped through it, apparently finding little interesting in the contents, until a folded piece of paper slipped out from between some pages and onto the ground. She picked it up, unfolded it, and read it. As she did so her expression, previously knit in concentration, relaxed into an ominous smirk.

Roxanna's eyes lifted to the brothers. "Dan and Aaron James, I presume?"

Both of the men knew they hadn't told Luned their last name, but had enough sense not to betray their identities that easily. "Who?" Dan replied, grasping at straws.

Luned, on the other hand, just looked confused. "What is that? I need to see it." Bleddyn had apparently sent her something, but the enchantment on the book wasn't obvious to others at first glance.

"Before you play dumb, gentlemen, you might be interested in the fact that your friend had this in her possession." She passed it off to one of her men, who in turn held it up where Dan and Aaron could see it.

It was still out of Luned's line of vision and she tried to move so she could see it, but was held in place by someone who had deemed himself her keeper for the moment. "What is it?"

As the brothers could now see, it was a wanted notice –– their wanted notice, from all the way back in Corone. It provided their names, physical descriptions, a scant amount of background information, and a bounty that even a baron might not snub his nose at. It was rather fishy that Luned would be in possession of a copy of this document, but not knowing the properties of her magic journal, it would be easy to jump to the conclusion that she knew who they were all along and might have even been planning to turn them in eventually.

This was Aaron's approximate train of thought, and needless to say, he was seething. Dan wasn't one to make assumptions, but this discovery did mean something to him: it was a betrayal of trust. He looked to Luned with an expression of mixed anger and surprise while Aaron simply glared at the document, his unconsciously tense arms causing the rope to bite into his skin. He had a bone to pick with everyone at this point and there he was, bound and on his knees. It was not his day.

"Well, well," Roxanna said with a little laugh, having finally obtained Luned's toolbox from the dissected bundle. After checking its contents she left everything on the ground except that and the journal, into which she'd tucked the document and which was now kept under her arm. "Such drama."

Luned could tell the brothers weren't happy with her and she sent them a pleading expression, still not quite sure what was all the fuss and rather irritated that she apparently wasn't going to be let in on it. But she would have to deal, as it was time to head to the barony and the trio was shown to their transportation –– they got their own horses, Roxanna satisfied they wouldn't attempt an escape under the watchful eye of the men she had left –– and they were off to whatever fate had in store for them.

The trip was surprisingly short, only a few hours long to the North-West, and before evening they approached the foot of a small mountain that held down the edge of the greater chain that spanned much of Salvar's Northern region. In a valley, amongst a great deal of surprisingly fertile farmland, was the modest but well-kept castle of Lord Essen, a name the trio overheard in conversation on their little voyage. He wasn't particularly powerful but made up for any lack of influence with ambition, and with the ruthless methods of his neighbors, his name was gradually growing in renown. And of course, like all the other lords, he deemed himself a lawmaker and ruler of his own accord, and the James brothers and Luned were on their way to sentencing.

Luned, being unused to horseback, was quite saddlesore by the time they approached the castle. A rider had been sent ahead and there was a small gathering waiting for them on the expanse of yellow-green grass that made a sadly majestic front lawn and she found herself homesick again, tired of the overall lack of green that most of Salvar suffered. She attempted to twist in her saddle to get a glimpse of how Dan and Aaron were doing, but having her hands tied made for poor balance and she gave up pretty quickly. The brothers had been silent the entire way, Dan's small talk abandoned for a look of frustration that was much more at home on Aaron's face.

When they fully arrived it was obvious who Lord Essen was: at the front of the dozen-or-so men and women, a combination of heavily armed guards and curious officials of sorts, was a broad, middle-aged man of fair complexion and medium height. He wore an expression that insinuated this was fairly routine.

The trio were helped off their horses, bindings checked, and placed on their knees in front of the procession. Luned would've used this opportunity to somehow communicate her most sincere apologies to the brothers, but she was distracted by something else: out from behind the baron stepped Bernd, no longer in his previous employer's colors but the maroon of the Essen family.

"I was concerned in how much effort it took to fetch a single scribe, but I think I understand now," Lord Essen spoke, his voice somewhat weak. It was apparent he compensated with violence for the charisma he was born lacking. He appeared strong, but his presence was rather underwhelming. "You'll be glad to know passage is being arranged for you both to return home," he informed the brothers. "I hope we will not see each other again. What you did to the twins was most unforgivable. You should be grateful Corone wants you so badly, or you'd currently be a mere feast for seagulls."

There wasn't much Dan or Aaron could do to argue with that. All in all their acquaintance with the scribe had been a regrettable one, and apparently Salvar wasn't as safe and remote as they'd hoped. The men settled for intense expressions of hatred as they sized up Essen's guards. Most of the men they'd traveled with had been sent to other duties at this point, leaving them with an arrogantly lean group to keep them under control. But of course, they were assumed to be completely unarmed.

Lord Essen turned to Luned. "You will teach my scribe whatever it is you do. If you do not, you will have the pleasure of this beautiful view suspended from a tree. If you do, I'll be generous and hand you off to my son for appropriate punishment. I believe you know each other already." He was obviously referring to Bernd who didn't look Luned in the eye, simply staring off next to her with a frown. He'd been working for another lord as squire like many younger children of the privileged did and she'd caused him to lose his position, as well as a minute amount of blood. It wasn't his avoidance to acknowledge her that concerned Luned; it was the fact that he probably had something to prove at this point to regain worth after such humiliation, and she didn't want that to come down on her head.

[Etheryn]

“Just one question,” Dan started in an outwardly gagged mumble. He heard the dulcet tone of arrogance that could only belong to a noble of Lord Essen's ilk, but couldn’t see through the leather blind to know how many men of the vanguard he addressed. He tested the rearward binding of his hands by drawing his shoulders forward and flailing a little, until he overbalanced and dropped to a knee, and even then couldn’t recover before flopping onto his belly. He propped on an elbow, grazed by gravel, and couldn't wrap lips around a single syllable before a guardsman shoved him face down again.

Lord Essen heard only a mumble. “Let him speak,” he ordered.

The guardsman lifted their visored helmet with a tin can's clink, and Dan smelled the oiled links of chainmail in disrepair. With a sharp tug, the blind came up far enough to allow his words exposure to the audience. He still couldn’t see, and was reckless to the guardsman patiently preparing an iron greaved kick to the jaw. “I wanted to know when dinner is,” Dan said.

A silvery laugh preceded Lord Essen’s reply. “Usually served after a hundred lashes.”

“Sir, if you’d allow me the pleasure instead,” Roxanna interjected. She must’ve been standing close. Her perfume was a cloying mixture of exotic herbs and sweat, and Dan visualised the confident, catlike stance she'd take to emphasis her point, her pleated leathers folding in a low taper to show her bosom and sway any warm-blooded man to her opinion. Dan couldn't stand women who used their looks for influence; it'd brought him unstuck too often.

“Oh, you beautiful woman. How I admire your enthusiasm,” Lord Essen drawled with laden sarcasm. “But you’ve scraped through to the completion of your duty by using far too many of my limited resources and even more of my time. No, Dan and Aaron James will be handed to The Warden for safe keeping.”

Dan tried to return to his feet, and made no progress before he felt a stiletto heel jab the nape of his neck and shove him maliciously back to his place in the frosty mud and patchy yellow grass. The threatening nail of Roxanna's boot pressed against the temple like a carpenter poising for the drive. With only the least bit of effort Roxanna could pierce his skull by its tip. Dan winced and went still.

“They are captured by my hand. I will keep them and have my satisfaction for a day,” Roxanna continued. She pointed a violent painted nail at Dan, at Luned, and Aaron, each in turn. "Each one of them."

"Satisfaction?" Lord Essen scoffed. "What is this? You pose like a trophy hunter above the source of so very many of my expenses and worry, and demand your lord the right to heap more violence upon them and thus compound the problem further?"

"No, my lord," Roxanna replied cooly with the right balance of sarcasm and respect. She forgave Dan of her stilleto heel. "I don't demand anything but fair treatment in reply to the unwarranted trouble they have caused you."

Dan quirked an eyebrow. The relationship between Lord Essen and Roxanna was atypical of usual hierarchy. Lord Essen paused and swept his cloak over the shoulder against a frigid gust that carried specks of sleet, tapped his chin and hummed considerations. "They will remain with The Warden until transport is arranged for Corone," Lord Essen finalised.

“That shouldn't be necessary,” Aaron added. “I’m certain this can be settled with some mutual co-operation.”

The diplomacy was welcomed with a cracking jab of a tomahawk hilt followed by a limp thud. A bearded, plump warrior who’d been part of Lord Essen’s hunting party, was standing over Aaron’s newly stilled figure. The warrior was nursing a freshly patched gash on the cheek and arm. The knockout blow was satisfying revenge, it seemed, and he smirked with pride. The pinch of his cheeks left cracks in camouflage paint. “They ain’t to be messed with, Boss,” he added. “Dangerous. Best kept quiet.”

Lord Essen stepped slowly toward the second of his prisoners to be bludgeoned horizontal before him. The viciousness of his troop was testament to the effort of their work. Lord Essen cast a look of disdain down and over the bridge of his crooked nose, half-tempted to lay a kick as well. In better thought he shook his head with and sighed remembrance of his elevated stature. It was beneath him. “Separate them. And whose idea was it to gag one yet not the others?”

Dan couldn’t hear a thing through the furious pounding of blood in his ears. Luned squeaked her surprise as something swept over her head. Her worldview was suddenly occupied by the inside of a potato sack, and a forceful gloved hand yanked her to her feet. Aaron moaned as he briefly returned to consciousness, only to slip away again by the ferocity of his developing concussion.

One by one, the truly dominated party of escapees and undesirables was dragged by the arms and pushed by the warning edges of nicked Salvar steel through the ill maintained courtyards of Lord Essen’s hold. Chickens clucked about the discarded sheet metal and wooden slats and ladders and planks of a place in constant need of repair. The ground was soggy and trampled by hooves and wagon ruts, all part of a place yet unimportant enough to justify the spending of coin to pave it. A harem of peasants lifted their wet dresses over the clag and hurried to lay a carpet of thatch in Lord Essen’s path in the place of red velvet. Apart from that particular extravagance, Lord Essen wasn’t surrounded by the expected bustle of a nobleman’s army of retainers and domestic servants. There should’ve been a caucus array of "m'lord" and "sir" and other empty greetings doled out in haughty accents and punctuated by the jangle of expensive jewelery. Instead, there was nothing but fearful whispers and the suck of boots in mud.

Arrogant prick thinks he’s King and is actually far from it, Dan fumed. Everyone else lives in poverty while he plays out his fantasy of grandeur.

Lord Essen, all pompous in his manner and self-important by the following of the vanguard of heavies that towed his newly indentured prisoners—and newly found wealth—strode to the base of a battlement wall. He ushered for a peasant to lay an extra length of thatch to spare his boots of the filth.

“Open up,” Lord Essen called, and a guardsman leapfrogged from the back to hook his fingers in a hefty rusty knocker and heave at its baseplate. It clattered loud and ominously, ringing out like a worship bell, and in moments the weather-worn, moulded wood scraped out of its mortared archway frame.

“You should've been my treat. But knowing where you're going is good enough,” Roxanna whispered primly to Dan. Her breath was hot on his neck and warmed his anger by degrees closer to boiling. He kept silent, unwilling to donate the pleasure of his reaction. His attention remained on discretely fiddling with the poorly applied constrictor knot that bound his hands. He’d find a weakness to exploit and soften the knot’s friction. Later, he’d escape.

Luned’s sensibility wasn’t so gathered. Her mind was awash with flashing images of horrible things that waited in a lightless pit of cracking whips and cackling madmen. She hyperventilated and was unable to get enough oxygen through the claustrophobic and scratchy interior of her gag. It exasperated the issue. She was a doe in a bushfire; all panicked and springy with nowhere to flee but the flames ahead. The magnitude of her situation was sinking in further with each forced step to the doors. She dug her heels in to resist, and the only result was two trailing curls of carved mud.

“Stop your blubbering,” Lord Essen chastised. “Did you forget what I told you minutes ago? You’ll not teach Bernd from the inside of a dungeon.”

Luned was oblivious to her own tears until she tasted salt. It was a selfish thing, but she gushed with relief that her place wasn’t in shackles. At least while she played tutor for Bernd, despite the revulsion of it, she could find room to manoeuvre for…something. She’d like to use the word escape but was afraid of the consequences for thinking about it.

Dan heard Lord Essen’s words to Luned and couldn’t decide if he was pleased. From Roxanna’s discovery of their bounty poster, their reason for being in Salvar was clear to all. Dan caught a glimpse of it, a promissory of sixty-five thousand gold coins, and assumed it was enough to evaporate any potential for lasting friendship beyond its collection. It wouldn’t be unheard of for someone timid as Luned to betray the goodwill of a helpful stranger for such payment. The main point, before he returned attention to hypothesising the best moment to break out—sometime before the ropes became iron—was that Luned was now out of his hands.

It didn’t sit right with Aaron as he blinked in and out of consciousness, seemingly floating over the ground when in reality he was being dragged by a oafish henchman wearing the casts off remnants of a ghillie suit, all revelled in vengeance for the cuts and bruises he’d suffered by the brothers James. A sound picture to explain Luned’s betrayal swam in tendrils of smoke in Aaron's barely lucid mind. Someone hauled him to his feet and he swayed unsteadily. He grunted at the peen of a war hammer prodding his ribs and edging him towards the jailhouse entrance and the reasoning evaporated. Perhaps it was the focus it took to walk, or perhaps it was the subdued fear of once again returning to confinement; either way his mind couldn’t be put to task. He knew well enough to pick the cues of a liar, and in all his reluctance to help Luned’s cause, he found nothing but tokens of sincerity and truth.

A foul, snaggle-toothed man of towering height and hunched shoulders and countless warts, skin pallid from weeks underground, his hair wispy like cobwebs and draping over his bulldog's neck in a loose ponytail, threw open the last minute of the one hundred and eighty degree arc of the dungeon's door. A waft of sickly cold and sourness followed him out. He clapped his hands and oozed a yellow smirk of butter and halitosis. “For execution?” he asked of Lord Essen, in a deep booming voice that gargled like emphysema and phlegm.

“Not quite,” Lord Essen answered, and motioned for a guard to yank Dan about by the neck and position him for admittal to The Warden's custody by a kick in the backside. With a self-indulgent forward thrust of Lord Essen’s boot, Dan staggered and tripped fast about The Warden's feet. He could feel hot breath bearing down like the steaming snorts of a worked draught horse.

The absent grace of his landing sacked the breath from him, and he gasped like a landed fish in effort to spit a reply. He wasn’t capable of retaliation or anything more than submission, and as such, he played dead and waited for someone to either stand him up again or simply drag him inside.

“I see. And will they offer me trouble?” The Warden asked, leaning over and poking a dirty, hook nailed finger at Dan’s prostrate figure as if to consider him like a poisonous addition to an insect collection.

“They may,” Lord Essen said. “Perhaps you will change that soon enough.”

“I can.”

“That is good, Warden,” Lord Essen said. He removed his hand of a fine leather glove and waved to Aaron’s sagging shape and a brute that held him. Aaron’s head mask lifted like a curtain to expose the cheek, and with malice Lord Essen whipped the glove horizontally across it. Aaron didn't flinch.

The Warden laughed a deep rumble like a troll from children's stories. Dan couldn't help but shiver at the immense presence, and to ward it off he savoured the little things. The penultimate breath of the outside world and held it in as he was pulled toward the unknown dark. He clung to that ending moment above ground, the distant scent of salt, the dwindling warmth of a lone sunbeam breaching the cloud to bathe his aching body in comfort, and the intagible sensation of being surrounded by open space and sky and circulating air and people that weren't scrappy and malnourised and insane by captivity. He packaged them as sustenance, as rations of pure memory upon which he would survive and strive to return to during the invevitable incarceration.

“You won’t be slaying these two. They’re worth too much money. Be careful but don't coddle,” Lord Essen instructed. "And no trouble from you, Aaron James. I hear you're the better duelist."

Aaron’s head throbbed and he altogether didn’t register the warm sting of Lord Essen’s slaps. It took another two or three for Aaron to feebly nod acknowledgement and black out once more. It was enough, and the baron turned heel on the spot with nose upturned and left with the retainers. Roxanna delivered a parting sucker punch to Dan’s kidneys and shoved Luned ahead.

Dan’s better half urged to send Luned reassurance. A promise of rescue or a reminder that she wouldn’t be hurt. His rationale interjected and made it starkly clear that the chances for heroics were gone. Friendship was gone. Trust was gone. When the warden closed their door and engulfed the James brothers in a sewer of dark and isolation, it was a game Dan knew well. Survival. He parcelled the good nature he couldn’t help but exude to the world. He toggled the lever of his usual persona and made the decision to live, everyone else but his brother be damned and forgot and thrown as bait if need be.

The door closed with a final creak and a scrape of a deadbolt lug. Like dunking head under water, it drowned out the unnoticed sounds of a free man's world and filled his eardrum's with sounds of burbling drains and a submerging cold draught of a place that never saw day. Not even a sliver of light peeked through the crack.

The unmistakable anxiety of someone standing behind preceded a sharp jerk about Dan's head. The leather blind came off. He closed his eyes involuntarily, flinching from an assault, and every moment it didn't come tensed his body. The bunch of his shoulders drew his numb arms apart and torqued the knot of rope on his wrists. Easy as a child's shoelace it untied. The snick of a blade against flint and crackle of lit tinder masked The Warden's amused chuckle.

"What do you think?" he said. "I didn't notice?"

Dan could've thrown up. His disguised restraints and outlet for magic in the thaumaturgic pouch were the first things to be taken from him. He looked upon a descending spiral staircase, all stone and disrepair and collapsing support pailings and rusted braziers that were unlit to trip anyone who didn't know their misfootings like The Warden did. The Warden shoved Dan to the flight's peak and he teetered over the first step. It was a deep well with a bottom too far to be seen, and he was a child about to fall into the pit to be remembered in rumours alone.

The Warden stepped ahead of and loomed over Dan. He was a gnarled thing, a victim of gigantism's disproportion, made barely human only by the wearing of a lambskin overcoat and butcher's apron atop a stained tunic that looked closer to a soiled bedsheet than garment . The maim of his nose crowned the curl of a snake's lips, and in one hand he held Dan's thaumaturgic pouch and in the other a stick wrapped with accelerant doused rags, lit up to cast a pallid orange over the damp walls and show the unsettled dust like grey snowflakes.

"Well? Did you think I wouldn't notice?" The Warden boomed. Dan could've been deaf and still understood the message in garlic stench; the rot of breath was that strong.

"Notice what?" Dan said lamely, fighting desperately to keep the fear from quivering his voice. He turned on the spot to look at the limp coil of rope behind. "Oh. That. Your goons probably couldn't tie their own boots up. Probably shouldn't have been left to that job right there."

"Always the same," The Warden said, and swatted the thaumaturgic pouch like a net over the head of the bug he saw in place of Dan. "Full of bluster and confidence. Humour to lie to yourself and smother that slowly swelling sick in the belly."

The Warden palmed Dan in the back and sent him bouncing and folding down the staircase in a flailing mess of shouts and clawing hands that couldn't quite make purchase on the walls to stop the fall. "This is my world, Dan James! You'll bend like reed! I will break you no matter how hard you dream otherwise!"

Aaron, barely able to process the input of his senses through the jarring fog of his swollen head, was brought to attention. He was slumped against a wall, steadying himself by leaning into the cold stone, and the burlap cloth balooned and deflated like a lung at the doubling of his breath. "Dan!" he called out feebly. "Be strong, brother!"

The Warden snatched away Aaron's mask so he could suffer the visage of his doom and devoured liberty. Bleary eyed, Aaron saw a demon's face all skewed and stretched long by the undercast shadows of torchlight, reflecting subtly from surfaces wettened by cracked iron pipes with moss spreading from the fissures. The warts on his chin almost seemed to move and swarm like they were living parasites stuck to the skin and leeching off the sheer toxicity of their host.

"He can't hear you," The Warden said. "No one can. Except for me."

With strength to be expected of someone who cleared seven feet tall, The Warden clasped Aaron under the chin and tossed him like an empty flagon against the wall. Something popped out of place and an acute stitch in his ribs flared up. Aaron was upside down and his whole weight pushed on the crane of his neck. He tipped over and both knees stubbed hard on the angle of a stair. The sag of his spirit consumed his vision, and inkly blankness creeped in from the sides. Aaron's tried to call his brother's name but the muffling boot of The Warden interrupted with a callous shove.

Aaron followed his brother in cascading down the staircase like a boiled candy in a vendor's machine. He slipped into welcome unconsciousness by the first revolution.

Dan tried to move. He lay at on the bottom landing, blowing bubbles in his own spittle and seeing his own breath in vapour. He raised a hand to nothing and saw bloody knuckles and shaking fingertips. A long hall of cobblestones and iron gates stretched on before him, some populated by solemnent, garish men in loincloths with month long beards and cataract eyes. Yellowed skeletons occupied the remainder. Pillars of melted candlewax, topped with a flame perfectly still in the stagnant air, shone weak globes to breach the oppressive dark. The shambling, mammoth gait of The Warden's descent to the cells followed the whump of Aaron's limp figure next to Dan.

In some indeterminate time Dan woke to, or maybe dreamed of, an instance of deja vu. Dangling by the arms in shackles, both feet dipped in the searing buoyancy of ice water instead of peddling air. In the dark. Dominated. This time, no different to the last, he was a rat in a cage.

Never again, Dan thought. I said it. I swore it. Said I'd never be in a place like this. Never again.

He swung and kicked and every measure of moment tore skin from his forearms and hands. He screamed and punted the bucket hard, numbed feet spared of the pain of a stubbed toe, and it broke on the wall to splash its contents back at him. Dan felt the sobering shock of hypothermic water on bare skin; he was naked. He continued to flail and bounce on the rusty chain links and wailed his anger in futility until he paused for breath.

"Quiet," someone hushed. "It's me."

Dan saw a figure in the opposite rank of cells, through the black mullion gate of his own. It was bound in the same manner yet more composed.

"Brother?" Dan said. It was too dark to see clearly, but the profile of the figure matched.

"Yeah," Aaron said. "We'll get out of here. Promise."

[Luned]

Luned heard the shuffle of the brothers being ushered to the dungeon and the closing of a heavy door. She felt their separation deeply even if it was already hopeless, and even if she had betrayed them and had no expectations of moral support or otherwise. There was no use in blaming it on Bleddyn; she shouldn't have written about them in the first place.

Roxanna pulled Luned further down the hallway until they reached a room, and the prisoner soon found herself pushed down into a chair. Her wrists were tied to the arms, roughly at that, though she didn't blame Roxanna for treating her gruffly, considering all the trouble she'd caused for her. Without so much as a word the villainess left and Luned sat for what seemed like hours. Every so often she heard the shuffle of feet –– she assumed there were one or two men outside the doorway –– and the vaguely window-shaped beam of light that filtered through the coarse weave of the sack over her head dimmed, signaling the approach of dusk. Her tears dried and the air inside the hood went stale. She wondered if she might suffocate before someone came to find her.

It hadn't really been hours when Bernd finally showed up, strutting in with an air of believing himself to be fashionably late, and Luned heard something thump down on the table: her tool box.

"I owe you, you know," he said as he pulled the bag off Luned's head and dropped it on the floor. Through hair that had fallen in front of her face she could see she was in a small room containing not much more than a desk, a couple old chairs, a sparsely populated bookshelf, and a set of cabinets. It didn't appear to be much lived in; unbeknownst to Luned it was The Warden's office but, of course, he rarely spent time in there when there was so much work to be done down below.

Luned blinked and squinted up at him as Bernd lit a couple candles on the desk. They glowed gold against the dark gray of the walls, and the familiar contrast reminded her how much she missed the library. "For…?" In spite of Bernd's position of power, she couldn't help but see him as the very uncourageous, unintimidating failure of a squire that he was.

It appeared that he wasn't going to play superior. "For that humiliation," he replied as he opened her toolbox. It was clear he hadn't the faintest where to start. He obviously wasn't a scribe. This offended Luned as a professional, as she'd apprenticed for almost a decade before even considering starting her own practice, and Lord Essen just threw him such a title! But, at the same time, this was an advantage, combined with the average Salvic's unfamiliarity with magic. She was going to make the baron regret putting such a duty on the shoulders of his son. "It better not leave a scar," Bernd continued.

Luned could've rolled her eyes at that, but she thought better of it. "If we're going to do this, you need to untie me."

"No."

"It's not like I have a sword hidden up my skirt," Luned retorted. "Have you ever done a spell before? I need my hands to show you how it's done."

Bernd frowned down at her for a long moment, considering how daunting she really looked with her wild hair and diminished figure that was made childlike by the oversized sweater she wore. That was… not very. "Fine." He made short work of the knotted rope and soon Luned was smoothing her hair and rubbing her wrists, suddenly feeling quite liberated.

"Sit," she instructed him. In readily volunteering to "teach" she was now in charge of the exchange and that suited her quite well. "Have you been trained at all?"

"Yes," Bernd replied defensively as he sat across from her. "I've only ever had the best teachers."

"No, I mean scribe training." Luned busied herself by setting up a workspace for them consisting of some scratch paper for practice, pre-prepared quills, and an assortment of inks.

Bernd shook his head.

"How will you manage this skill if you can't properly put it to use? Assuming m'Lord already has plans to make use of this knowledge. Can you convincingly imitate others' handwriting? Do you know how to forge a stamp?"

Bernd gave in and shrugged.

"You tell your father that I can teach you some magic, but there's much more you need to know for it to be of any help. I can teach you that, too, but obviously it can't be done if… well, you know." This would be insurance in case things didn't go as planned.

Bernd nodded.

"Good. Now, drink this." Luned had set up their workspace with two bottles: one contained a bright violet liquid and the other, sepia. She held up the former to Bernd.

He eyed it suspiciously. "You think I'm going to fall for that?"

Luned rolled her eyes as she pried out the cork. "I'm not stupid." She then took a small swig. It stained her lips purple and tasted something awful, but what else was she to do?

This seemed to convince Bernd and he accepted it for a sip. His nose wrinkled at the musky flavor, but he took it like a man. He set it down on the table and looked to her expectantly. "And?"

"That potion holds the enchantment. Now, here's some ink. Try writing or drawing something." Luned pushed the sepia bottle and a piece of scrap paper toward the boy and he took up a quill, soon setting to work on some masterpiece. He didn't need to work so hard on this test run, but Luned allowed him some time for her plan to kick in.

"It's disappearing," he announced as he scribbled, his tone almost delighted, as if he didn't expect it to actually work. "Now what?" He held up his masterpiece, a blank piece of paper now that the ink had dried.

"Good. Light it." Luned pointed to the closest candle.

With baited breath Bernd cooperated and it was obviously he had to suppress a squeal of glee when the paper burned away to leave the geometric design he drew suspended in the air as curls of black smoke. They dissipated as he waved a curious hand through the image.

"Would you like to try again?" Luned asked as she held the potion out, which Bernd immediately accepted.

"You can make more, right?"

"Of course."

Bernd burned through the rest of it right quick, positively delighted by the illusions he was able to create. Luned was impressed by his drawing abilities, particularly the buxom maiden on which he spent quite a bit of effort. She worked on her own piece as he had his fun. And, soon enough, her plan began to work.

Bernd, who had been drawing quite feverishly for almost an hour now, had paused to inspect his hands. He looked at them as if he had never seen them before. "Lines," he mumbled, "So many lines."

"Are you alright?" Luned asked, suppressing a smirk.

"Oh, yeah, I'm fine," he replied quickly, then went back to drawing. He was now going at a much slower pace and seemed to marvel as each line flowed from his pen, soon making marks not for representational drawing, but for the sole sake of subconscious pleasure. What was going to be a gallant knight was now a collection of fading spirals and zig zags. It was perfect; the sepia ink continued to disappear as he drew, giving him a continually refreshing canvas.

Luned knew it was time when he began to giggle.

"Hey, Bernd… do you think we could be friends?" She asked cautiously.

Her question was returned with an intense stare. "Yes!" Bernd's comically wide grin was stained a brilliant purple and he reached across the table to take Luned's hands. "We shall be the best of friends!" His fingers rubbed at the skin of her knuckles equally intensely as he marveled at the tactile sensation. "Your skin is so soft."

"I'm glad, and, uh… thanks?" Alright. Now how was she going to convince him––

"We should go for a walk, I want to show off my trick. Man, Ma would just faint if I make her a spider when she gets home. You know, this one time––"

"–– Oh! Yes. Yes, we should. Perhaps we should find someone to test your new trick on. You know, before we show your family."

"Oh, corking idea! But who?"

Luned knew she was probably pushing it, but she had to try. "Do you know where they sent my friends? I bet they'd love to see."

Bernd frowned. "I don't know…"

Luned stood, pocketed her journal and a couple other small supplies just in case, and then marched around the desk to pull on his arm playfully. "Come on, they're such pleasant fellows! The whole thing with your father is all just a big misunderstanding. You'll see." She placed his newest drawing in his hands as encouragement.

Bernd reluctantly gave in and Luned pulled his arm around her shoulders before they walked out of the room, then quickly wrapped some of the discarded rope around her wrists and held them behind her back. It wasn't enough to trick anyone if they bothered to really look, but it was better than nothing. The guards watched on as they left without argument, but would undoubtedly inform Lord Essen of the strange development very shortly. Luned struggled to keep Bernd on task as they rounded the corner out of sight.

"Magic is amazing, look at all this detail," Bernd rambled on, pausing to feel up the bricks on the wall. Luned urged him along in the general direction she remembered coming from earlier.

"Come on, my friends are waiting," Luned insisted. "I think we split up somewhere down this hall. Do you know where?"

"Oh, they're in the dungeon," Bernd said matter-of-factly, looking around. "Uh oh. It's dark in here, we're lost!" He grabbed onto Luned and started absent-mindedly stroking her hair.

"We have to keep walking. Come onnn, Bernd," Luned sighed with exasperation as she continued to shuffle down the hall with her new parasitic attachment. He wouldn't let go of her hair and she let it be.

"Oh, no we're not. There it is," Bernd announced proudly. The heavy door that served as an entrance to The Warden's pit was just a little further down, as well as bolted fast.

"We need to be clever about this," Luned said in a little pep talk to the excitable boy. "Can you get us in?"

"Of course I can." Bernd seemed composed for a moment, but a moth flitted past his face and his lanky form was soon wracked with giggles and snorts.

"Let go of my hair. Be serious."

Bernd cooperated and used the large metal ring on the door to clang for The Warden's attention. They waited with little patience, and when Bernd started snickering at something else, Luned found herself chuckling along with him. Uh oh. She thought she'd taken little enough of the "potion" to avoid its effects, but now that she had a quiet moment, she realized that was not the case. The rope tickled her wrists, her hair tickled her neck, and she had a sudden urge to rub up against the intriguing texture of the stone walls. Damn!

You see, her trick went as such: the sepia ink was already enchanted, with or without consumption of the purple potion. The "potion" was actually just violet ink, rather expensive, made from a rare fungus found only in the Red Forest of Raiaera. Said fungus was also famous for its psychedelic properties. As anticipated, it brought Bernd into a conveniently malleable state of mind, and she'd hoped to make use of it.

Fortunately, before she lost all control, there was the sound of a deadbolt being moved and the door flew open. Unfortunately, the person behind that door was the most terrifying creature she'd ever seen firsthand. The sight of The Warden, in all his revolting glory made worse by her intoxication, almost brought her to her knees, and she couldn't help but gasp in surprised horror.

Bernd was familiar with The Warden and so was less terrified, though he didn't seem particularly comfortable, either. "We need to speak to the prisoners." Luned was impressed by his composure and figured the frightening man's appearance (and stench) had knocked the silly out of him.

The Warden eyed them strangely, but seemed satisfied with Luned's adequate look of utter terror (what did she think she was getting herself into?) and let them in. He locked the deadbolt on the landing, grabbed his torch from the wall, and led the way down the stairs.

Bernd's good trip went to a bad one very quickly. The claustrophobic space, coupled with the monstrous visage of their attendant, got his limbs shaking with anxiety and his breath jagged. He stumbled on a step and The Warden looked around to eye him oddly, seemingly in slow motion from Luned's altered point of view. She shook in her boots.

Luned couldn't imagine what horrendous hallucination Bernd must have had to incite such a reaction, but she supposed it must have been beyond her own limits of imagination as he drew a knife from his belt and buried it deep into the back of the rotating Warden with a violent cry. The Warden knew sober, meek Bernd well enough to never have expected this and thus was caught off guard, but had advantage in his size. As he reeled around Bernd withdrew his knife once more and maimed the giant again, this time near the armpit. There was blood. A lot of blood. It flowed black against the stained fabric of the creature's shirt and he dropped the torch as he grimaced with pain, wood clanking as it tumbled down the steps and to the ground below.

In a moment of panic and a strange sense of companionship with her new partner in crime, Luned attempted to push The Warden down the stairs with hers and Bernd's combined weight in the brief moment of vulnerability when he stood in surprised shock. This was a terrible idea. She didn't have time to think as a huge hand reached out, grabbed her by the arm, and sent her flying down first. The Warden took much more care in suppressing Bernd, most likely as seriously injuring his employer's son was unlikely to turn out well. He wrestled with the squirming, shrieking, crying boy on the stairs as Luned hit the bottom roughly, glad her wrists weren't really tied as she was able to protect her head from the worst of it. She laid at the bottom limply next to The Warden's dropped torch, the world spinning and her entire body aching. But she couldn't stop. That was a lot of blood. If she could keep The Warden moving, he might bleed out. She couldn't believe she wanted that to happen, but she did. She wanted him dead, and then maybe she could save face and release the men she betrayed. Maybe.

It was difficult to stand. Luned's chest ached and it was hard to catch her breath. The struggling up in the dark had become quiet, only the shuffle of forced, heavy steps and Bernd's sobs audible. She had to get up. Some other noises rose above the eerie quiet of the dungeon: that of curiosity. She hadn't realized it, but she'd rolled right into the corridor between cells. Prisoners lucky enough to be free of manacles peered out at her from their dark corners, hollow eyes glinting like rats in the torchlight. There was a rickety old chair against one side of the hall and not much else; the interior designer was apparently a minimalist.

"There's nowhere to run," The Warden informed her menacingly as she staggered to her feet. Her legs trembled as she kicked the torch into a puddle of murky water, ground it into the dirt with her foot, and darkness fell over the dungeon. The Warden's voice was still confident. "Nice try, miss, but you and your friends aren't going anywhere."

Apparently Bernd hadn't given up. He struggled in the black and The Warden groaned as he tried to keep him under control; he was starting to feel the loss of blood and their balance on the steps was precarious at best. The putrid man cursed, his eyes used to the dark, but the sudden loss of light was temporarily blinding. Luned heard him recover from a misstep, and she had an idea.

Luned felt around on her knees for the rope she'd fallen with and found it quickly. She crawled over to the first set of bars and knotted the end around one, her fingers shaking as she hoped whoever was in that cell didn't interfere. They didn't. She resisted a sigh of relief. She then crawled silently to the other side, looped the other end around another bar, and held the rope taught at what level she hoped was mid-shin. It was difficult to estimate with The Warden's unusual size. Waiting was the hardest part and it took everything she had not to echo Bernd's sobs as they got closer. She could tell from the slow pace that things weren't going well on their end.

Luned's eyes began to adjust and she knew The Warden's would be, too. When he finally reached the bottom of the stairs with Bernd in tow she could see their combined silhouette, an amorphous blob of darkness against the scarce globes of candlelight that softened the appearance of the more privileged cells. It seemed his eyes hadn't adjusted in time to spot the rope, however, and she was eternally grateful.

She had held the rope as tight as she could and it was yanked from her grasp as it caught The Warden in mid-gait, enough to cause him to stumble. Luned couldn't see where Bernd ended up in this equation; she had to act fast to make sure he stayed down. She grabbed the old wooden chair next to her, stepped up to the large man who was now floundering in the dizzy dark on his knees, and hit him with it as hard as her little arms could manage. It broke into several pieces over his flailing arms.

"Bitch!" The Warden growled, his voice lacking the strength it had before. Luned scrambled on the ground to find a piece of the chair but underestimated what The Warden had left in him and suddenly found herself dragged down to the ground. She screamed and clawed where she thought his face might be with her fingers, but was easily overpowered. "It's beyond me how much trouble you've caused. The more you struggle, the worse it will be for you later." The Warden's breath was hot on her face and it was all Luned could do not to gag.

It was then a flash of shadow moved over The Warden and Luned watched wide-eyed from her position pinned on the damp floor as a glint of metal disappeared into the hulk's back. It reappeared and disappeared several more times, until The Warden's body went limp and fell heavy with a sigh on top of her. Again, she hadn't realized she'd started crying. She hiccuped and called out. "Bernd?"

He didn't answer, but she knew it was him. He receded into the darkness and she heard him lose the contents of his stomach somewhere in the distance.

"It's okay, Bernd. Just… wait just a minute, okay? I need––" Luned groaned as she shoved The Warden's body to the side and squirmed out from under it–– "To find my friends." Still gasping and holding back sobs, she climbed to her feet. It was all she could do not to crumple in on herself, give into the vertigo, let the filth crawl all over her. No, that was the ink talking, don't listen. She took a deep breath, then called out.

"Dan? Aaron? Are you here?"

[Etheryn]

Aaron shook his head slowly and sternly, speaking without words through a deliberate stare. "No." The brothers' eyes adjusted well enough to the trace amounts of ambient light given by the candles to see shades of each other across the dungeon strip.

Dan caught the meaning. Too much happened too quick with too little explanation for them to jeopardise their situation by bringing attention to themselves. It was counter-intuitive but Dan's lips zipped shut. Instead, he listened intently; the shuffling of feet and hands like a blind man's cane in the dark; the hot wheeze of The Warden's great lung oozing from punctures; cackles and giggles and mumbling chatter from an unfamiliar voice that'd come down the stairs with Luned; the scrape of manacles as other prisoner strained against the taught lengths of their binding to see the spectacle.

"It's me," Luned said. "I'm here to help." She repeated words to the same effect at every few steps, shying away from spindly, liver-spotted hands reaching out for her through the gratings as she checked each cell.

Her voice came closer to Dan. He raced with thoughts of why and how and what next. She was carrying their advertised bounty and conveniently evaded irons after Dan and Aaron were brought in with her. They'd instantly turned to Luned as a focal point for blame but in the hours spent locked up with nothing to do but think and suffer, Dan couldn't come up with a solid reason.

So what if she had our notices with her? Dan mused. She came from Corone where they were plastered up everywhere. She didn't mention it. She could've even forgot they were in her pack; she carried enough rolls of parchment to forget another two in the mess.

Aaron saw the deliberation dawn on Dan's features when Luned was two cells away from finding them. Again, he shook his head. "No." Things were too sensitive and volatile to disagree.

And what've we got to lose? Dan continued internally. She just busted in and took someone out. She's been involved all the way while we cut up Essen's men until we got caught. She isn't cold enough to break us out and then backstab us for the bounty. Even if she plans for it we've got a chance to manouvre between now and then. What good can Aaron see in us waiting here next to The Warden's corpse for Lord Essen to find us and decide we're not worth the trouble to be kept alive?

Aaron sighed. He could see it in Dan's expression now that Luned stood in front of him holding a candle stub in a copper pan unhooked from the fingernail scraped wall. There was a twinkle in the eyes, a subtle invigoration of features, and a calmness that belied a made decision. The firm, stubborn set of grit teeth in Dan's jaw contradicted his brother.

"Are you okay?" Luned asked.

It was a good change from the routine of threats and warnings and badness dished out by Lord Essen and his goons. "Well enough," Dan said, catching the track of Luned's stare south over his naked body. "Eyes up, please."

She caught herself gawking and flushed red. "Sorry, I...keys. Yes," she stammered, and hurried back to the still mound of The Warden.

The walls breathed and stretched high above her, only to narrow impossibly behind like the world distorted through a convex lense. Her sensory input was heightened and reactions to them skewed. Some sounds, like the patter of her own footstep, were soothing and musical, while any metallic timbre or rattle was repulsive like scraped chalkboard and frightening at the same time. It was difficult to keep focus on being quick and quiet about her business. The chemical lathering her brain made reality surreal and colours began to filter in where they ought be shades alone. She'd almost forgotten Bernd existed until seeing him crouched in a corner, rocking back and forth on his heels, staring blankly and biting his thumbnail to the cuticle.

Aaron hissed. "Trust me," he urged. "Don't do it."

Dan would've shrugged his shoulders were they not bunched about his ears. "Why not?"

"Because if you...Luned! Stop!"

She had the gnarled black skeleton key half-turned in a hefty padlock on Dan's cage before Aaron finished. The communal mumbling of the prisoners, barely sentient from the confinement, instantly erupted into a cacophony of rasping shouts and clattering fists on loosely bolted bars. They cried and howled their jealously in a mixture of common tongue and foreign dialects.

"Let me out!" one moaned. "I'll do anything!" wailed another. It was a lynch mob's chant. "Grab her! She's got the keys!"

Dan understood now and cursed his own stupidity. While Luned, The Warden, and Berned scuffled and fought they were plainly out of sight. The prisoners heard someone expire and bleed out on the stone, but given how severely The Warden dominated them all, they couldn't believe the notion that someone was him, and as such didn't see the figure of Luned probing each cell as anything but a visitor under The Warden's permission. She was easy on the eyes but nothing more of interest, their sex drive was long since evaporated, and so Lord Essen's captives let her be.

Now they'd seen Luned open Dan's cell it was different. They knew The Warden was no longer in control. They flashed from ambling shells of former people to a hollering horde. It wasn't a woman's supple body they reached for; it was freedom. She recoiled from one lashing, desperate hand and staggered into the choke hold of another. She screamed, wriggling about and kicking as corpse-grey fingers combed her for The Warden's keys. She bit and scratched as best she could, spitting a flake of someone's skin and pushing away with a mule's kick that broke digits in a pained yelp.

"This way!" Dan shouted over the din, cocking his head backward to usher her into his cell. She dropped the candle to extinguish in the mouldy, moist residue that coated the cobbled floor, and crawled through the cover of dark toward Dan's voice. The prisoners kept moaning and shouting out like a swarm of undead.

"Closer," Dan said again. "You need to get me down quick."

Luned was free of the range of their prying grips but that wasn't the risk now. Discovery was imminent if the noise continued. Someone would hear it carry up the stairway and echo by the door.

Luned was clumsy about reaching up to try each key on the ring in Dan's wrist bindings, slowed by the frantic shaking of her fingers. She shuddered with each droning wail until eventually there was a click and Dan flopped heavily to his feet.

"Finally," he said, rubbing the mottled bangles of bruising on both wrists and shaking his arms to renew circulation. He hurried upright, bare skin cold by the draught, and put both hands on Luned's shoulder. "Hush," he said. "It's okay."

Following that, something vibrated and unravelled quickly, like a long spring being stretched out and flicked back to coil. The sound came from the bolt plate above to which his chains were secured. Some kind of pin had been set into it and was pulled loose by the undoing of his bindings, and that pin was attached to a wire that ran from the bolt plate to a hole drilled into the wall. The wire and pin retreated into the crevice as if the other end was tied to a dropping weight. An alert was tripped. The echo of a bell chime sounded somewhere nearby.

"Sounds like it's not okay, actually," Aaron said. "We need to find our gear. Someone's going to be down here to see the fuss and I don't want to know how soon."

Dan slid the keyring over his finger and hurried across to Aaron's cell, the lacking tactile response of his cold and bloodless fingers also proving difficult in getting the job done. Luned stayed in the protection of Dan's cell and watched him swat away the sad, sour limbs of those who yearned for release. Shortly thereafter Aaron was free, too. She found herself staring unabashedly at the pair of nude men, inhibitions reduced, and appreciating the hardness of their physiques.

Aaron picked up on the oddness of Luned's behavior. In one instant she was petrified of everything around her and by the next was oblivious to her surroundings through distraction of the James' brothers and their bare buttocks. It was flattering of course, but the lack of attentiveness was out of character given the circumstances. "What happened to you?" he asked.

Luned's pupils were like dinnerplates in the waxy, weak candle flame which Aaron inspected her by. She felt bizarre as she locked with those vivid periwinkle marbles which bore into her very soul, until a pinch on one cheek and a gentle slap on the other brought her back.

"I, uh, I...don't feel so good," she said.

"Why is he with you?" Dan asked, pointing down to Bernd's cowed figure.

"He's fine," Luned said. "He knifed that big ogre for you! He's fiiine."

Dan and Aaron exchanged glances. What was an indecipherable situation became all the more awkward by not wearing pants.

"We gotta move," Aaron said. Without a word more he breached the confines of his cell and struck off down the dungeon strip, moving quick to brush off wandering hands with Luned behind him and Dan behind her. They ignored Bernd and let him finishing masticating the other thumbnail before beginning on the other digits for dessert.

They paused by the heaped figure of The Warden, motionless yet imposing like a sleeping bull elephant. Long gouges of stab wounds and lacerations perforated the rags on his wide shoulders and back, and three men's volume of blood pooled around him and drained into rivulets formed by the cobblestone in a grid pattern. They had no choice but to step through it and track warm red footsteps behind.

They arrived at the base of the stairway. "If you were a four hundred pound foul smelling freak, where would you keep your stuff?" Dan asked.

Aaron pointed down a branching tunnel that swept around a long right hand bend and continued out of sight. It was a wide arch with thin walkways either side of a miniature tributary, beginning by two drains leaking a steady stream of stagnant runoff. "That looks filthy enough," he said, discarding his candle to free a hand because there was some distant source of ambient light to guide their stepping.

They crept along its path in single file on the left side, going far enough that the ruckus of prisoners they'd left behind settled to a faint sound and then quiet. It was replaced by dripping pipes and boiler vents and pebbles of walkway crumbling beneath their raw, blistered feet and thunking into the flowing water. Moving shadows outlined in the grimy walls, looming and unsettling, of rats grown monstrous then proved false when the tiny culprit scurried across their path. The opposite side of the walkway opened to a door half ajar and leaking ambience from the dying red embers of a coal pit. Dan spotted a ruffled pile of clothes, the frayed laces of his boots, and signature woodlands camouflage of a Ranger sneak suit.

"There," he said, and splashed across the muck to his dignity.

Luned paused at imagined fins and dark shadows surging through the shallow run-off creek, standing with Aaron until she built up courage to follow. They piled into a deceivingly spacious of simple hand carved furniture thrown with lambskin, all greatly oversized to suit the girth of he who usually occupied their frame. The Warden's room smelled pungent and sour, and apart from the fire pit, was dark to match the rest of his dank realm. A desk that stood high as the middle of Dan's chest was piled with books penned in foreign letters and bones enough to assemble the carcasses a half dozen chickens. While Dan and Aaron dressed as quick as they could and strapped their weaponry on, leaning down to tie double bows and adjust the sitting of their blade sheaths, Luned rifled through the pages of documents no longer needed by a dead owner.

"Hey!" she said with surprise, sweeping an assortment of vellums to the side to reveal a spread canvas of concentric topographical lines and distance keys. "A map!"

Dan hopped over on one foot while the other struggled with the tongue of a boot. "Can you read it?" he said while stomping into the sole.

She blinked twice and three times, inhaling deeply and focusing away the blur. The characters stopped spinning in alphabet soup and settled into place as she knew they should. "Yeah."

"So where's the best route for us to run the Hell away?" Aaron said after the metallic rasp of his falcata entering its scabbard.

"I don't think that's the best idea," Dan said.

Aaron shrugged, now dressed and ready to go, and held his hands over the fire pit to look over a shoulder back at Dan. "Why not?"

"Let me rephrase. We'll do plenty of running away, but only once we make sure no one runs after us," Dan explained. "We've got to call Lord Essen and his goons off somehow. Give 'em a scare, make 'em forget they ever saw us or knew who we were."

They were interrupted by a sharply chiming bell dangling from an iron arm drilled into the wall atop a wooden shelf. It rang by a hammer, moved by a mechanism of a rotating cog, remotely driven by a set of gears and axle connected to a miniature steamer's paddle in the contant flow of the sewer drain.

"So there it is," Dan said, slamming a balled fist down onto the thing to stop its alarm. "So that's how he knows if anyone escapes the binds."

Aaron was impressed at the sophistication of the contraption, and at the same time relieved Dan was there to do what he did best; break things. "At least we've got a chance of being undiscovered," he said. "How long have you been gone Luned?"

"Not too long. I sat down for an hour or so with Bernd to show him some things, then talked him in to coming here. You know, I'm so very sorry that all of this—

"Save it," Aaron interrupted. "I don't trust you but this isn't the time or place to talk about it. Was anyone planning to see you? Or were you left alone with him for the afternoon?"

Luned was dejected. She spoke slowly and dreamily, and all of a sudden, a kind of fatigue rolled over her. "Not that I'm aware. Please, understand... I didn't mean this."

Dan raised his eyebrows at Aaron, who was now scowling with concentration at the forming of a plan. "What're you thinking?"

"I'm thinking that Luned can get out of here with Bernd and close the door behind her with no one the wiser. I'm thinking if you want to convince Essen to do anything you'll need to get him alone. He doesn't go anywhere without his posse, excluding bed."

Aaron's gaze lingered on Luned a little too long at the last word. She felt uneasy. He flicked a cigarette from his softback and leaned dangerously close to the coals to light its tip. He savoured it and the tip flared. He exhaled slowly and spoke the beginning of a daring scheme in puffs and curling clouds. "Here's what we do..."

[Luned]

Getting Bernd to stand up and go back upstairs was a job for multiple men in itself, but Luned managed. She dragged his sorry carcass up the steps, helped him recompose in the better light in the hall outside the dungeon door, and walked with him back to the original room. They earned some strange looks from the guards, especially with Bernd's face that was flushed and swollen from weeping, but no one said a thing as they reentered and closed the door. The boy slumped down into a chair and stared into blank space.

"It's all just a bad dream," Luned said in an effort to comfort him, rubbing his back gently as she tidied his hair and clothing. There was blood on his sleeve, but luckily the fabric was dark and it might go unnoticed. "Why don't you go up to bed? When you wake up everything will be back to normal. You'll see."

Guilt weighed heavily on Luned's shoulders. She knew she was comforting him with empty lies, but what was she to do? She'd known him for a week and was already responsible for irreversible emotional scarring. Maybe she was the villain in this situation, after all, and no one realized it. Lord Essen was just trying to protect his holding. Bernd was just being a good son. Dan and Aaron were just… doing whatever they were doing.

But, either way, she owed them. She didn't like the plan –– as a matter of fact, she was skeptical she could even pull it off –– but she couldn't argue. And so she'd give it her best shot.

Bernd seemed to agree it was bedtime. He rubbed his eyes and ran his hands through his hair, mussing it all over again. She left it and checked the inventory of her pockets, making sure her journal and the new book were in there. "I just need one little favor, okay? Wait just a minute."

Okay. Time to get seductive. That was easy, right? Just bare some skin? Luned pulled off her scratchy wool sweater to reveal the faded and rumpled blue-gray dress underneath. It wasn't particularly flattering; she'd lost weight since starting her continental adventure and the cloth was a bit loose now. She had curves in there somewhere, but that wasn't going to help her now. She made do by situating herself in her chair with the skirt of her dress hiked up a bit to bare some of her legs, her posture upright so she could arch her back or do whatever unnatural pose Bernd drew for a pinup earlier.

"Come here. TIe my wrist. Tighter. No, ow, don't block my circulation –– there. That's better." The second length of rope was in the dungeon at this point, but she figured the knot Bernd made was convincing enough. She was good with her hands, but not enough to pry that apart single-handedly. Once she was situated she patted Bernd on the hand and offered a little smile. "Go get some sleep, alright? It's all just a dream."

He looked down to her with a frown, turned, and left through the door behind her. And then she waited.

Waiting wasn't so bad without a sack over her head, but being left alone for an indeterminate amount of time did nothing to help her fend off the effects of the ink. She willed herself to relax and avoid reflecting on the dark events of the dungeon, but that was no use. She relived it again and again through an increasingly twisted perspective, The Warden's face more monstrous each time she recollected it, his blood hot and sticky like tar on the bottoms of her boots. She scraped them on the floor and broke out into a cold sweat, the clawing fingers of the prisoners still pulling at her hair and clothing, their desperate shouts ringing incoherently in her ears.

Then she heard a door open. The real door. With a deep breath she fixed her posture, put on her most pitiful face, and turned her head to greet…

Roxanna. Damn!

The woman didn't seem particularly taken with this display of seduction, if it could be called that. Luned stared at her with wide eyes as she waited to learn her fate. Roxanna crossed her arms and looked down at the desk, populated by low-burning candles, jars of ink, quills, and blank pieces of paper.

"It appears you accomplished nothing," she speculated, then glanced to Luned.

"Ah, but we did," Luned replied, nodding to the drawing she'd made earlier. It had disappeared since, but that was the point of the whole trick. "Light it."

Roxanna seemed skeptical but cooperated. She stepped back when the parchment took flame and disappeared into the line drawing of a flower consisting of black curls of smoke, same as ever. She didn't seem particularly pleased by this as Bernd had been, however. She almost seemed to suppress some emotional response. Was the villainess superstitious? Was she genuinely frightened of magic as Salvic children were raised to be? This thought amused Luned and with her relaxed inhibitions she almost giggled, but fortunately caught herself at an awkward smirk and oppressed the chuckle in her chest where it came out more as a sob. Roxanna looked to her with a strange, unreadable expression.

"Where is Bernd?"

"Ah… he said he was tired. This sort of thing takes a lot of energy to practice."

"Well, then. If he has already retired, the choice of what to do with you for tonight is left to me." This seemed to please Roxanna, and Luned realized her mistake in sending Bernd away. It was probably for the best, he was in no state for a real conversation, but still… Roxanna didn't appear to be planning a guest room.

"A-actually, I was hoping to speak with his lordship," Luned ventured.

Roxanna's brow quirked. "He is a busy man. Why do you think he'd take anymore time out of his schedule for you?"

"Because… I'm worth money, too. Lots of it." Luned did her best to make this admission appear reluctant, cautious.

"Who would pay up for a scrawny scribe?" Roxanna laughed, leaning against the desk. "Nice try."

"You are aware of the troubles in Corone, right? Why do you think such a reward was offered for those two? They kidnapped me." Luned didn't know if she was good at lying or not. This would be her test. "My uncle is Emien Harthworth. He's on The Assembly. You do know what that is, don't you?"

This twist seemed almost plausible to Roxanna. The woman seemed to be thinking as a dark expression swept over her face. She had no reason to know what this Assembly was, but it was worth investigating. "Do you have proof of this identity?"

"Why would kidnappers keep proof of their crime? Here, pass me some paper. Please."

Roxanna did, and Luned drew a crest with her free hand. She'd done plenty of work for Harthworth in the past as Bleddyn's apprentice; he did work for most of the big names of the Empire. "This is my family seal. If you know anyone from Corone, they'd recognize it."

Roxanna picked it up, eyed it suspiciously, and left the room without a word. Again, Luned played the waiting game.

Lord Essen came to handle the situation himself. He didn't appear convinced when he entered the room with Roxanna, but the very fact that he had come himself showed that he believed in the possibility. Perhaps he just wanted to believe. This could mean all sorts of things for him and his little barony if it was true. He stood before Luned with his hands sternly on his hips and she corrected her posture. She was glad that sitting still kept her senses calm enough not to be too affected by her influenced state of mind and she could concentrate on conversation.

"What is your name?" He demanded.

"Scarlett Harthworth," Luned replied. That was the most seductive name she could think of.

"Do you have proof of this?"

"No."

"Then why should we believe you?"

"I've been raised to be a diplomat," Luned said, switching from Tradespeak to Salvic and spinning her web of lies further. She needed to justify why someone as close to royalty as Corone had would actually have a trade and access to the magics she was accused of using. "I sincerely regret what happened to you concerning my inks. The brothers forced me to make some for quick money and it ended up in the wrong hands. It's meant for covert communication only."

The change in languages seemed to impress the baron. There were three possibilities: she was telling the truth, she was lying to save her skin, or she was lying because she had something even more intriguing to hide. Two of three were interesting and potentially beneficial enough to convince Lord Essen that it was worth the trouble finding out which it was.

"Would you take a late dinner?" He asked, much to Luned's surprise. She didn't know what she expected, but it wasn't this. She'd only hoped not to be sent to that miserable dungeon.

"Thank you," Luned sighed in relief, both at the fact that her plan was working and that she'd have something to eat. She hadn't even considered her appetite, but even after the events of the day, she could probably stomach something. Come to think of it, even if she wasn't hungry, she should eat anyhow; it might help her metabolize the substance that was wreaking havoc on her senses.

"You're still a prisoner, so don't expect special treatment. I just don't want to deliver damaged goods if this tale turns out to be true."

"Yes, of course."

With that Lord Essen left, leaving Roxanna behind with Luned. The woman untied Luned's wrist and pulled her up out of the chair by her arm. When the baron was out of earshot, she made her threat. "If you're being dishonest in the slightest, Miss Harthworth, you will regret ever setting foot in Salvar when The Warden has his way with you."

Luned didn't need to feign panic at this, and for several reasons at that. The Warden was terrifying, The Warden was dead, and if anyone went searching for him, everything would be ruined. That was a lot of terror struck into her inebriated little skull at once and she shuddered as Roxanna tied her hands behind her back and replaced the hood over her head.

They wove through many halls and stairs and Luned felt the air get warmer as they entered the baron's living space. The scent of something much more delicious than instant soup hit her nose through the rough fabric and she was struck with equal weights of guilt and hunger, her steps growing heavy as they crossed an echoey room. There she felt the blissful warmth of a fire and was pushed down into a chair, one much larger and more comfortable than the last. Eventually her hands were untied and the sack was removed from her head, and the modest grandeur of Lord Essen's rustic dining hall was revealed, a dazzling blend of warm wood tones and hunting trophies and a small but decadent offering of homemade Salvic specialties just out of reach on the massive table before her.

Lord Essen sat at the end, several places away from Luned. His chair was more like a throne and bore antlers as decoration, his silhouette dramatic from the golden fire that burned bright behind him. She had to admit, it was impressive. And also a little terrifying, if she didn't keep her mental state in check, as it strongly reminded her of the fabled horned king of nightmares. But mostly impressive.

"I trust you will behave yourself," the baron said through a mouthful of meat.

Luned nodded.

There were servants and guards enough in the room to fill the dozens of chairs that surrounded the nigh empty table but instead they populated the shadowy corners, emerging only to serve their impromptu guest and lord. Luned had never partaken of such an extravagant place setting but she did her best to look at home, figuring that's what Harthworth's fictional niece would feel, and sampled some food. It was good. She almost started deliberating how to stash some away for Dan and Aaron, both likely famished at this point, but knew it wasn't worth trying.

Dinner was long, awkward, and silent until the end. Roxanna left the room and Luned realized this was her open to make a proposition. The very thought of such a thing was almost as terrible as The Warden, but as long as everything went as planned, nothing would happen. She took a deep breath, reassured herself, and spoke up.

"Your son speaks highly of you, your subjects respect you. That is the sign of a good baron." Luned figured flattery was an easy place to start.

The sudden words were unexpected and Lord Essen took a moment to respond, rinsing down the last of his meal with a swig of ale. "Glad you've noticed." Ah, so he wasn't a modest one. That would make this easier.

"Corone looks for allies everywhere, my Lord. One can never underestimate the value of friendship, even abroad. We are aware of your rising strength in this region. When I am returned home unharmed, along with my captors, you will have the confidence of the Empire."

At this point Essen had caught onto the blatant flattery, but wasn't about to brush it off. She seemed to be offering him something. He raised his cup in a toast. "To the start of a beautiful friendship, then."

Luned returned the motion with a polite smile and took a sip, then another deep breath. Okay. Time to pull out the big guns.

"My training has been quite in-depth, as you can imagine. I've studied languages, calligraphy, history, politics…" Luned paused for dramatic effect. She also paused because she couldn't believe what she was about to say. "And the art of establishing healthy relations." She emphasized her words in a way so that there was no doubt what she meant by that.

This truly did surprise Lord Essen and he nearly choked on his drink, but he covered it up by clearing his throat. Luned tried not to think of the nightmare king as the antlers loomed over her, ominous of her quickly approaching doom. She was pretty sure it was going to be doom, anyway. What else was going to happen when she ended up in his bedroom, had to stall until the James brothers showed up, and the baron quickly realized she knew no fancy arts of relations?

And now to Luned's surprise, the man got up out of his chair and strolled right over. She almost flinched when he boldly reached out and grabbed her chin, raising her face seemingly to get a better look. He inspected her and she did her best to appear confident, though the awkwardness of the entire situation was beginning to wear her thin. His fingers felt strange on her face, skin crawling against skin until she felt itchy and irritated at the point of contact, and she wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it all. His green eyes were stern beneath a strong brow and after a long, humiliating moment, his hand moved to touch her hair. He extracted a leaf, mostly likely from the adventures earlier in the day, looked at it, and then dropped it on the floor.

"Well, then. That settles where to put you tonight." Lord Essen was less subtle in his choice of words than Luned had tried to be, inciting a hot blush across her freckled cheeks. He was also apparently done with dinner and made an unceremonious exit, halting Roxanna as she entered the door on his way out. He whispered something to her and she sent Luned a glare far more foreboding than anything her overactive imagination could have conjured. Apparently their relationship was complicated, Luned mused, speculating all sorts of soap opera twists and turns in the forbidden love between a lord and his… hot lady soldier? Did all Salvic barons have one of those? Luned covered her face with her hands to muffle a snort.

Lord Essen was gone and Roxanna was once again at Luned's side, grabbing her upper arm to pull her out of the chair in a bout of deja vu. Within seconds Luned was tied and blinded as befitting of her prisoner status and was led through new hallways and staircases to yet another surprise location.

Unhooded and unbound yet again, Luned found herself in a dressing room with two doors, some chairs, a vanity, and a large mirror. Servants delivered a tub of steaming perfumed water and some items for later primping. Though she knew it was a completely inappropriate emotion at that moment, she couldn't help but be incredibly stoked for her first real bath in weeks. At least something good, if small, came of this epic mess.

In her excitement she didn't even notice Roxanna leave without a word and soon she was left alone. Luned tried to enjoy a luxurious bath but instead kept thinking to hungry and abused Dan and Aaron in the dungeon, and poor bewildered Bernd who was likely having the most vivid, unsettling dreams of his short life thus far. That was, if he could even fall asleep. Luned was quite sure she couldn't as she attempted to relax, but the texture of water against her skin was fascinating in an amusing sort of way that soon had her utterly distracted for an embarrassing length of time. Her beverage with Bernd earlier was doing her no favors.

After the longest bath of her entire life, Luned dried and looked to what had been offered for clean clothing. She discovered, to her dismay, that it didn't amount to much. She supposed that didn't matter considering what the baron expected to happen, but the linen of the dressing gown was so flimsy that she'd be almost even with the brothers after how she found them earlier.

Soon enough she was dressed and she did what she could with her long hair, brushing it out and arranging it artfully so it preserved at least some of her modesty. After a minimal amount of fussing Luned realized no one had checked on her and that perhaps she was in charge of the next development. She smoothed out her carefully folded pile of clothing on the vanity, hoping it (and the precious items within) would go untouched, and took some deep breaths to prepare herself. It was going to be fine. They had the map, they would find her.

After a silent pep talk, Luned creaked open the second door. It opened into a much larger, grander chamber, though it seemed a bit empty compared to the grandeur of the dining hall and the trophies that lined the walls. It was surprisingly minimalist but comfortable, populated by plush chairs, a roaring fireplace, a small writing desk, and an oversized bed, inside which Lord Essen was waiting. He was leaned back against the pillows with a book, appearing to have waited quite some time. His top half was bare, bottom half covered by the sheets.

Luned could've just died right then and there. If she was wearing boots, she'd be shaking in them.

"Took you long enough," he said, taking his time in finishing the page he was on. Didn't want to appear over eager, of course.

Luned wasn't about to apologize, but she did need to stall –– stall hard. "It's quite warm in here!" She announced, strolling over to one of the three large windows. It took some effort to pry it open and she felt herself being watched the entire time. She didn't like it. After a long, awkward struggle she got the tall latch unhitched and pulled open the large panes to let in a draft of chilly air. It bit her skin and reminded her of Berevar. She thought that was the lowest low of her adventures yet, but this was beating it on almost all counts. Oh, to be in the frozen tundra again!

When she turned back around Essen had put his book away and remained lounging in the bed, looking to her expectantly. She wasn't quite sure what he expected at all. She'd spent enough time with Resolve and her scandalous confidante Madame Rose to understand a thing or two about how professionals went about things, but she wasn't a professional, and felt any attempt to imitate the strange tales she'd overheard at Moody's would be humiliating for both parties. Time to improvise. She took a couple slow steps toward the bed.

"So? Get on with it," the baron urged, apparently expecting to put no effort into the exchange at all. Luned had supposed she might be dodging advances all over the place and had concocted a few diversions in preparation; however, she was not prepared for this at all.

"Uh, well…" Luned sputtered, heart thumping in her chest. "First we must… stimulate. Mentally."

His expectant stare didn't change.

"Do you have any, er, intellectual activities? Chess, perhaps?" Luned poked around a bit, but alas, found very little in the line of board games. There went her attempt to turn it into one of Resolve's slumber parties. She needed to recover from this fumble. "You look like you need a drink," she said as flirtatiously as possible, and shuffled over to the table where some sort of wine was waiting with a pair of glasses. There was lipstick on one, the same color as Roxanna's. It was gross and she tried not to notice, pouring a single glass and delivering it bedside to the man she was doing a very poor job of enticing.

Lord Essen accepted it, set it down on the side table next to his book, and took Luned by the wrist. "I think you're newer at this than you made yourself out to be," he smirked. Luned didn't like this development at all.

"Well, what with the kidnapping and all, I'm a bit rusty," Luned tried to recover ineffectively. She'd had beaus back in Radasanth, of course, but she'd never been put in a life or death situation attempting to lure someone before. That, combined with the rest of the situation's complications, had put a damper on what little innate temptation she had in her to start.

"Maybe I can help."

"No, that's alr––" Luned started, then cut herself off with a shriek as she was pulled down into the bed. Out of instinct, she elbowed him square in the nose. Oops.

Lord Essen skipped defensive mode and immediately went into the offensive. At this point Luned wasn't fooling anyone; she was obviously no diplomat of the sexy arts. And the baron didn't care. They'd had dinner and now it was time for him to have his fashionably late, compulsively lying dessert.

[Etheryn]

A leaking pipe set into the ceiling of The Warden’s den dripped a deafening rhythm in the weighty silence. It was an irritating measure of the slow passage of time, and stretched the seconds to minutes to hours like the ticking clock above a loved one’s sickbed. The burbling flow of the storm drain outside softened the sound. Dan leaned against one wall den and Aaron the other, each with folded arms and one foot crossed over. An unfurled map lay on the desk with Luned’s impeccable cursive ink still glistening wet by the wan light emanated from embers beneath the mantelpiece.

“What do you think?” Dan said.

“I already told you. It’s either this or run headlong into a troop of guards,” Aaron replied.

“Not that. About Luned. About us,” Dan said, now idly thumbing the lip of his pouch. “All this.”

“You know the answer.”

“But I want to hear it from you. I can see it in your eyes, bro. You’ve had enough,” Dan pushed.

“You haven’t? Are you inhuman or something? Or, are you implying that I ought not have a low threshold for being hunted all day long?” Aaron said with icy chill. “Better yet. Do you enjoy it?”

Dan sighed. “As much as I know what you’re thinking, you know just as well that I don’t—I couldn’t possibly—enjoy any single part of this.”

“Then why is it that each time we inevitably get sucked into a shitstorm you find a reason to justify it? Like it was supposed to happen, like we’re on some righteous path?”

“I wouldn’t call it righteous,” Dan countered. “I would call it our path. Mine. Yours. Don’t let guilt take over you and make you think you deserve it.”

“Oh, I’m not guilty,” Aaron scoffed. “I’m just so unlucky it defies belief. There’s no more room for good nature or doing good or doing anything but looking after number one. Us.”

“Why no room?”

“You’re being daft,” Aaron said. He paused to pat his pockets, produced a small, strong smelling tin container and made a frustrated sound on its inspection. “Cut it out with these lures to hear what you already know. We should have looked the other way when Roxanna turned up for Luned. If you disagree you’re an idiot.”

Dan propped off the wall and spun The Warden’s oversized chair around to sit on it legs apart, arms folded and rested on the low spine. He poured over Luned’s annotated map of Lord Essen’s hold once more. It was vital to commit every corner, every door, and every step to memory to maximise their chances of survival. “I’m not an idiot. I just see things differently to you.”

“I know, Dan,” Aaron said. He licked the seam of a rolled cigarette that was more paper than the skerrick remainders of his tobacco. “You see the inside of your ass, only briefly removing it for a look at what I see. The world. Althanas, from Corone to here to anywhere else, is rotten. There’s no good that comes of standing up for anyone. Why?” Aaron finished with rhetoric.

“Because we get chased around everywhere and get in fights all the time. We piss off the wrong people ten times out of ten. Have we lost yet?”

“We’re freezing and hungry in one dungeon after months ago being freezing and hungry in another. The only difference is you’re not half-dead and I’m not patching you up. We’ve lost.”

Dan shook his head. He could understand Aaron’s perspective. There’d been strife at every turn since he left his life as a wandering labourer dodging the hotspots of Corone’s civil war, and decided to set out to reunite with his last known blood relative. Sometimes he doubted himself too, and whether or not the whole seemingly endless quest would ever be worth it.

“What is it, Dan? What were you really looking for when you came to find me?” Aaron said with frustration. “Forgiveness for skipping town? Something you thought was wrong only because of your goddamn moral watermark is set higher than you're capable of climbing?”

“I wasn’t looking for anything but you, brother,” Dan affirmed. “I figured it was a good purpose. What’s so wrong—no, so silly—about that?”

“What’s silly is you thought it was your obligation. When you told me about that blind girl Isabelle on the way here… I remembered,” Aaron said. He couldn’t help the sharpness of his tongue. “I remembered I bailed out on you and Ma both. She was sick, you were too young, and I was too selfish to forget chasing glory that I’d imagined I could get because I read too many storybooks.”

“So doesn’t that make us even?” Dan said.

“No! I shouldn’t have left. I should have stayed and looked after us. We would be fine and there’d never be any of this. I wouldn’t have gotten fed up with the Empire and swapped to the Rangers. You wouldn’t have come looking for me. We both wouldn’t have gotten tangled up in this, and we both wouldn’t be here!”

“Shoulda, woulda, coulda…didn’t. Is that it?”

“Is what it?”

“You’re guilty about that, and you’re tired and sore, too weak to fight back,” Dan summarised. He eyed his brother with an infuriating casualness, like all the complication of their situation was simple. Like it was his lot. “You think it’s there’s nothing but gloom because you’re too short sighted to look a little further than what’s in front of you now.”

“Drop the act, Dan! You carry on like your only purpose is to be a justicar for strangers who wouldn’t piss on you if were you on fire! You play the nice guy and you forget how many people you and I killed on the way! How many can you count?”

Dan went silent.

“That’s right. You’ve lost track. You’ve got no damn idea of the wreckage that is our wake. How many people you cut open or exploded or punched into comas and set on fire. What good has come of it? That we’re still alive? What else? What’ve we done apart from destroy and fight since we found each other again?”

It was Dan’s turn to get mad. “But they were clearly the bad guys, man. Example one being those freaking goons that—

“Wrong! They were clearly just guys! You’re so goddamn maladjusted and naïve to think that anyone who comes against you is some crook that deserves nothing more but death served up by you, and that your justification is in the rare times you’re not swinging knives and haymakers and making rocks float like feathers in fucking wind—in those rare times, you’re shaking hands and making jokes and doing favours and carting some grandma’s groceries so you feel warm and fuzzy!” Aaron spat all at once without taking a breath. He was shouting and red in the face by the end of it.

Dan had no rebuttal. He had nothing but a bad taste in his mouth and a knot in the belly. One by one, slowly, as if each plank was a piece of truth to be stacked in the brazier beneath the mantel and burned to ashes so it could scatter and disappear, Dan loaded up the extinguished fireplace. The heat repellent hide of his gloves made it easy to pinch an ember and flow magic through it to ignite the chopped pine. Nothing of the past burned away. There was no cauterization, no hygienic cleansing; only shadows looming higher behind him.

The pipe dripped.

“I’m sorry,” Aaron said after a long while. “That was uncalled for.”

“You honestly believe we’re just killers,” Dan said sombrely. “That’s all there is to us. Because we won’t just hand ourselves in for crimes we didn’t commit.”

Aaron inhaled deeply, carefully choosing his least offensive tone. “We did commit those crimes.”

“I never had any choice but to fight back when grenades were going off over my god damn head because I decided to hitch a ride with some two-faced crook down through Concordia. Or when some drunken mongrel guardsmen in Radasanth were chasing me out of town with eyes rolling in their heads, swinging axes and screaming bloody murder. Or when we had to bust our way out of that freaking salt mine,” Dan retorted with a snap.

“That’s not the point. You and I are worth sixty-five thousand coins each. Not because of our justification for fighting back. It’s because we fought back at all,” Aaron said. “It’s unfair but it is what it is. Our crime is cutting down the men of the Empire and there’s nothing more to it.”

Once more Dan couldn’t think of a reply. He was stung by truth and lapsed from the world, retreating into a shadow realm of mounting guilty thoughts.

If I could wind back the years, and see myself from the perspective I had then… What would I see? My scars—he rolled ups his sleeves to reveal a myriad of pink lines against his deep bronze skin, some thin and some thick, all reminders of men who’d tried and failed to slay Dan—would they be marks of victory or shame? If I told myself what I’d done, would I be revolted or agreeable?

“Dan?”

He was entranced by the palms of his hands. When did I change? When did I stop being me, and when did I start being what I am now? Why can I still sleep like a baby after all that happened? After all I’ve done?

“It’s time.”

A brief rise in the mournful wailing of the trapped prisoners interrupted Dan’s reverie. Aaron looked cautiously to the exterior passage, half-cocked to draw steel and start swinging, and was eased by its passing. Dan barely looked up. The prisoners may as well be ghosts already, their haunting sound no different to what may linger once they perished and rotted to bones. It unsettled the brothers and they felt no less captive.

Why haven’t I even considered letting them out? Offering some water? I’ve got the keys. Why not?

“Dan,” Aaron reminded. He shook him by the shoulder. “It’s time. We’ve got to go.”

“If we’re just killers, does that make us evil?”

“It makes us men who live and do what must be done to keep living. It makes us big fish eating little fish. We’re no more evil than a bushfire, or more wicked than a flood,” Aaron explained and rolled up Luned’s map. “You need to remember that. I'm sorry for getting so mad but you need perspective.”

“But you said…”

“No. You were right. I am tired and I am sore and I’m probably too weak to fight back,” Aaron interrupted, touching gingerly to the lump on his head and stretching out the aches of his limbs. “And I’m damn fed up. But I’m not too short sighted like you said I was. I can see something on the other side of all this.”

“What?”

“Luned. Don’t forget the risk she’s taking—the risks she took—for us to have this little chance. Get your shit together, get up and get moving,” Aaron said with gusto. He tightened the strap of his falcata. “She’s gonna need our help.”

“We’re coming back,” Dan said adamantly. He loaded a bolt to his crossbow, and the whirring hiss of its gas piston pulling the string taught, the bending lathe, the weight and balance of it in his hands; it was comforting.

“What for?” Aaron asked. They walked to the bottom of the spiral stairs and Dan surveyed the strip of cells and those interned, all pallid and gaunt.

“Them. When it’s safe and we can let them free.”

"That's what I mean. Don't look for some noble cause. What we're about to do, and what we have to do, little brother... It may be the way of the world but that doesn't make it good. We can't forget our own wrongs by chasing down the wrongs of others. If you get too fixated you'll lose sight of what it means to take lives along the way. When you don't know what it means, you don't care. When you don't care... That's when you're evil."

***

The night was a spangled mist of stars and settled fog that curled a wake behind the brothers' careful steps. They moved in tandem, one checking the path ahead on the ramparts was safe the other to leapfrog ahead. Dan crept low and kept one hand prepped on his knife while Aaron's falcata was already drawn. They knew the routine and inattentiveness of three guards that kept watch during the graveyard shift, having spied from the jailhouse door prior to closing it behind them.

Lord Essen's hold was little more than an outer perimeter of high battlement walls with ramshackle huts and housing for his servants around a central, multi-tiered complex. One guardsman sat dozing on a stool at wide saloon doors on ground level; the barracks. South of that was an iron portcullis that blocked the exit to Salvar's frosty waste manned by a guard equally careless. To the north was a rope footbridge spanning the gap between the ramparts and the second level veranda, which terminated on the east side to a staircase ascending to the penthouse. It was ventilated by paned windows, each coloured by stain glass murals of saints and beasts, backlit with a gentle fire’s glow. The occupants were still awake.

Dan ducked in shadows behind an ill repaired ballista and unravelled the map Luned marked for them. A cross showed which window she'd open. Aaron peaked through an archer's venetian. "It's closed," he whispered.

"Wait or go?"

"Go," Aaron said as he crept ahead with alertness, low and lithe. This was his element. His years of service in an elite assassination squad of the Corone Rangers taught him all the methods of stealth there were to know.

Soon, they were at the northern rise of the walls, looking up at a crow's nest tower. Rickety ladder rungs climbed to the third guard's post, from whose vantage there would be a clear view of the outlands and any escapees skulking about the grounds. It was unfortunate for Dan, set with the task of neutralising him, that the guard with the most difficult position would be the only one of the three to be vigilant during the cold, still silence of his duty.

Dan passed his loaded crossbow to Aaron, who crouched some fifteen metres away from the tower's base and covered with aim levelled from the bench rest of an empty barrel. Dan paused, hesitant to reveal himself from shadow and make the dash. He hoped something would offer distraction; the hoot of an owl, a shooting star, anything. He looked back to Aaron who waved an impatient shoo.

This sucks, he thought. He moved his bulk as quick as he could on tiptoe.

If the guardsman turned to look his way there'd be nowhere to weave away from an incoming hail of arrows. He thankfully made it to the ladder undetected. Aaron loosed a plynt-tipped bolt overhead and Dan pulsed magic through a scrap of the same metal in his pouch. The bolt lit up to a trail blue-green flames, sailed through the guardsman's window and erupted a shower of sparks. A flailing silhouette could be seen trying to make sense of it, and Dan was now hanging one-handed from the ladder's crest. He reached out and latched on the guardsman's muddy boot, and with a mighty pull dragged him out and flung him from the tower to fall. There were no cries or grunts of combat; only a wet crunch when the chain mailed crony landed spine first on a buttress, bent at an impossible, fatal angle, and fell dead the rest of the way to the long grass at the hold's exterior.

Dan shimmied down, unimpressed with himself and waited for Aaron to catch up. "Nice," he hushed.

"No other way to this, is there?"

Aaron shook his head. "No." They crossed the footbridge and it groaned and strained under their combined weight. The other guardsmen didn't notice. Their focus was on the inside of their eyelids and finding the most comfortable position to slack off.

An open penthouse windowpane at the top floor was their opening, signalling itself by the flapping extravagance of patterned curtains. It wasn't where it should be according to the plan and the deviation dislodged Dan's confidence. They were too close to discuss if Luned just got her directions mixed up or if she was in trouble. Aaron pointed to his chest then up at the window, then to Dan and the staircase leading to the third level and the door. It would be an impromptu assault from two sides.

Dan brushed the anxiety from his face and replaced it with steel. Aaron flashed ten fingers twice, marking the count by which they'd breach. The twenty second countdown began with a fist bump. Dan edged up the stairs, checking over his shoulder halfway, and paused at the thick door. Muffled sounds came from inside. He shaved a splinter from it with his knife, swapped it to his pouch, and tossed the still smouldering plynt husk to the muddy ground below. Barely restrained will swelled up in his belly. Dan's imagination formed a battering ram.

Five.

Half-awake shambling footsteps and a mumble floated up to his pinprick his ears.

Three.

"What the...what's this crap?"

Two.

"Oi! Roger! Somethin's burnin'! Shit's fallin' on me!"

One.

Another voice joined in. "Oh, for the love of... Oi! You! Stop there or I'll shoot! Stop!"

An arrow chipped the wall next Dan's left and showered him in grout chips. No time to be sneaky, he thought. He unleashed his magic and it punched a foot-wide hole clean through the door, showering the other side in a cloud of jagged timbers. The sound cracked out and echoed like a blunderbuss shot. Someone yelped in pain on the other side. Dan reached through and fumbled at a sliding deadbolt. He couldn't quite get it open, so he leaned back and booted it the door in. It came loose of its hinges and clattered and bounced to rest like a welcome mat on the velvet carpet floor.

He surged into a foyer and smashed an elbow into the face of a shield bearing guard who was preoccupied by pulling a piece of wooden shrapnel from an oozing belly wound. The guard staggered back, dislodging a porcelain vase from its display stand at the same time retaliating with an uppercut of a short sword that barely missed Dan's disembowellment. Dan sidestepped and issued a flurry of blows from the claw of his hammer. They wrestled and crashed into each of the four walls decorated with expensive china and crystal figurines. Eventually the guard dropped, red mush dripping from the fractures of his helmet.

Dan’s element of surprise was gone. He had seconds to get where needed to go before a torrent of guards fell on him. Two doors led from the foyer; Roxanna's to the left; Essen's on the right. Both were shut. Dan stepped over the twitching mess he'd left of the guard and pressed his ear to Essen's keyhole. Stifled, feminine screams came from within. Dan beat on the door while wrenching its knob. It was locked. "Luned!"

Aaron's voice filtered rang out in indistinguishable shouts. It would've been simple for Dan to blast the door open like he'd done the first, but he couldn't risk catching anyone with the resulting fragmentation. Dan flogged his hammer at the lock over and over again until his arm was lead and burning with lactic acid. He swapped hands and continued pounding until the tumblers shattered in the barrel. Dan stepped through the door before seeing what was on the other side.

He froze. Aaron stood on the mattress of Essen's four poster bed, hovering over the tangled mess of Essen and Luned wrapped in sheets. For the second time in as many days she winced at the threat of hot breath on the nape of her neck and cold steel at the front. The shaking tip of Aaron's falcata pointed warily at Essen, who sneered up at him. It was a stand-off, two blades aimed at two necks and only inches apart.

"H-h-help...me!" Luned squeaked.

Dan made half a step before Essen drew his grip tighter and the knife's jagged tip closer. "Shut your mouth you little slut," he snarled. "And if either of you so much as blink without my say so, you'll be ankle-deep in her blood. No matter how fast you cut me, Aaron, I'll open up her throat before I die."

Dan blurred over the room's open spacing; there was one way in out, which he currently blocked; overturned furniture and oil paintings knocked sideways from their hangings, both signs of a struggle. There was nothing of use, no avenue of advantage, no environmental hazard to be capitalised on to free Essen's hostage.

What was already hopeless became impossible when Roxanna arrived in full battle dress, rubbing mascara and sleep from her tired eyes and flanked by a troop of guards who each looked terrified at their inevitable punishment for letting Dan and Aaron slip through.

"Really, Father?" she drawled, nonplussed. "This is what happens when you can't keep it in your pants. You get people all riled up for all wrong reasons and I lose my beauty sleep. I could hear all the ruckus right through the wall."

Dan spun around in dismay at her voice. She waited on the other side of the threshold, still in the foyer. She shook her leg like a dog at a tree and ribbons of cranial flesh slopped from her stilettos. "And you, Dan. You're good at making a mess."

Dan didn't reply. He counted six soldiers plus Roxanna, and more queued up at the top of the stairs. Not a chance, he thought. There was nothing to do but step aside when Roxanna entered the bedroom.

"Do you mind if I come in, Father?" Roxanna asked innocently. "We can talk this out like adults."

"I'll tell you what I mind! These two fuckwits who are dead set on butchering me! Get them out!"

Roxanna nodded and whispered something to the guardsman closest to her. The command was hidden behind the cup of her hand, and was bizarre enough to elicit disobedience. She backhanded him into line, and closed the door behind her when the troops turned about face and marched down the stairs to some other apparently more important duty that dare not be questioned. Dan was relieved.

"Settle," she said, and reclined on the soft down of a gold wreathed sofa, legs folded all lady-like and pulling tight the short pleats of her studded leather skirt tight in all the right places. "I think we can resolve this without your drunkard employees involved. I sent them to watch the perimeter for backup from whatever cohorts Dan and Aaron might have coming this way."

"I wish," Aaron said.

"Keep wishing," Essen spat. "In the mean time I suggest you back off."

"You first."

Roxanna cooed from her comfort on the sofa. "Gentlemen, there's no need for this. Especially from you, Father. I would suggest you let the girl go. I'm feeling this nigh-irresistible urge to let a little 'secret' slip."

Dan's brain whirled at a hundred miles an hour. Unexpectedly, against all odds and sense, Roxanna manoeuvred the conversation in their favour, as well as revealing her blood relation to the baron. He thought hard. What the Hell could she be playing at?

"Are you fucked in the head? Kill 'em! Take ‘em down! Do whatever you're supposed to do to get this prick away from me!" Essen barked. Roxanna's reply was a tut-tut-tut and condescending finger waggle.

"I don't think so," she said, and swaggered on her curvy hips to the scatter of the bedside wine table. She picked up a fragment. "You had her drink from it too, yes?"

Essen shouted a volley of curses. While he repeated himself, commanding his daughter to rescue him from the looming threat of Aaron's sword only to be ignored, Roxanna turned the glass in her hands and studied it.

"This is mine," she said. "This is my lipstick. And you had her drink from it. Should I be jealous? That you’d share the vessel from which you forced me to drink each night as a child? To soften me up before you’d fuck me until you got bored and found some other whore to entertain yourself with?"

Dan edged from where he'd been a transfixed spectator to the door. He pressed his back against it to prevent the arrival of reinforcements, should Roxanna or Essen somehow summon them. There was little more he could do to help. He stepped back and lowered the point of his weapon. They were caught out, plain and simple.

"Mmm... Yes. This temptation is quite strong, Father," Roxanna purred. She tossed the shard in with the rest. It crunched to glittering dust beneath her heel. "What would happen if my secret—my desire—spread to these two vicious men who so easily slayed The Warden? And came for you?"

Essen spluttered. "What the Hell are you talking about? Stop babbling nonsense and do you're told, you ingrate child! Get them out of here! Guards! Guards!"

"They certainly won't hear you," Roxanna said as she pulled the window of Aaron's entry all the way closed. "So I think it's safe to indulge. Oh, how I've longed to share this secret, Father... How I've longed."

Aaron was a statute ready to spring to life the moment arose. Dan looked on helplessly. Luned sobbed her salty tears and they pooled on Essen's blade like dew on a green leaf. Each reflected Roxanna's dangerous image as she leaned in and whispered hate dipped in honey.

"I want you dead. You're an arrogant, wasteful, stupid, useless, incestuous sack of filth. I will do a better job. I will raise this squalor we live in above anything you could ever achieve."

In a deft jab, quicker than anyone could react to or even see, she wrapped both palms around the blunt side of Aaron's falcata and tore it down her father’s open mouth, all the way into the feathered pillow. He gagged and choked, whole body panicked to survive, and tossed his weapon aside to pry at the blade. The only result was palms carved to the bone.

"And these men will be my alibi."

Dan was stunned. Aaron left the blade and helped Luned up from the quickly staining sheets, covering her in a throw rug while she righted her clothes. He swept her away from Roxanna, who was morbidly fascinated by the stillness of her predecessor and her new station as a baroness.

"Might've been an idea to ask us if we agree or not," Dan said, edging hungry steel from forearm sheath and tossing it between both hands. He didn't like being tricked. "You know, before condemning us in another country. We're gonna run out of places to hide."

Roxanna waltzed to Dan. She trailed a finger down his chest, eyeing him coyly, reckless of the Dan's knife. "Might've been an idea to remain in the dungeon where you belonged. Really, what did you hope to achieve? You'd rescue your friend and just walk out?"

Aaron left Luned for a moment to retrieve his gored blade from Essen's corpse. He marched up behind Roxanna, too distracted by the elation of her victory, before she knew to turn. "Pretty much. We were gonna use your daddy as a meat shield. Although, seeing as you're the new boss 'round here…”

Mercilessly Aaron exposed her throat to his already tainted blade by a rip of her neatly tousled hair, quickly soothing her need to struggle back. "You'll have to do. Tie her hands behind her back, Dan. We're leaving."

[Luned]

Luned had a feeling most people would feel relieved to have emerged from such a debacle relatively unscathed, but panic had set in and she couldn't stop the incessant trembling that originated in her very core. As the Essen family's sorry story unfolded she barely followed, fingers clenched desperately at the throw rug that had appeared over her shoulders.

Before long the situation seemed to finally be going in the right direction. A hostage, albeit different than the one originally intended, was obtained, and as Dan finished binding her wrists, Luned crept silently back to the side room for her things. Between tear-blurred eyes, unsteady fingers, and the overwhelming sense of urgency, she opted to speed up the process of dressing by simply pulling her clothes on over the gown. She tucked her laces into her boots, figuring she shouldn't hold them up further in a miserable attempt to tie them, and quickly checked that the few items she'd retrieved were secure in her pockets.

The lord's chambers were clear of guards for the moment, but there was a sound that alerted that someone was there. Luned looked up to see the hallway door to the dressing room cracked open to dimly lit space, the tip of a nose and glints of glassy eyes watching her.

"Bernd," Luned's voice cracked as she greeted him, the weight of guilt pushing her already quaking knees to the limit.

"I heard noise," his voice replied weakly, seemingly disembodied as his ghostly face wavered in and out of sight behind the door. He was like a child inspecting a closet for monsters, and as far as Luned was concerned, he'd found them.

"Shh, go back to bed," Luned urged quietly, but it was too late. The door into Essen's bedroom was open and the witness didn't go unnoticed. Dan appeared in the opposite doorway, brows furrowed as he inspected the troubled boy.

Aaron piped up behind him. "What luck. Two are better than one."

That insinuation coaxed a steady frown across Luned's face. "No." She straightened her posture, projecting her voice in effort to find strength she wasn't sure she had at the moment. "Please, let him be. He's had enough happen to him tonight."

Dan was close enough to register Bernd's dilated pupils and emotional disconnection from the situation, what with the escalating situation obvious to any eavesdropper. He wondered what happened to him and Luned to incite such strange behavior, but now wasn't the time to investigate. He saw how troubled the boy was, as well, and was inclined to agree with Luned in this case, though he knew Aaron wouldn't be too pleased with either of them for letting him go.

Aaron noticed his brother's empathy and spoke first. "He's coming. Dan," he nodded to his brother, directing him to bind Bernd as well.

Luned moved between them, backing up toward where Bernd stood in bleak confusion in the doorway. "Please, no," she requested again. "If you're worried about him somehow making things worse if we leave him, it won't happen. He can't, not in this state." She'd already scarred him deeply; she wasn't going to parade him as hostage as icing on the cake. If she could do one decent thing tonight, it would be to protect what little dignity the boy had left.

Roxanna seemed disturbingly unconcerned about her brother's well-being. She glared at him through the doorways, crimson lips curled into a scowl so harsh it might have become permanent if held too long. Luned took half a second to be grateful that her own family dynamics were simple and, well, nothing like this.

Dan took initiative and, thanks to the skeleton key on the ring displayed proudly on Roxanna's belt, Bernd was soon locked into the dressing room, leaving the quartet clear for exit. Well, kind of clear. There was still the whole issue of getting out to safety, and from the glare Dan received from Aaron as they prodded Roxanna down the hall it was not expected to be easy, and they'd just left the only other thing that might help behind. Luned lingered closely, and obvious from her expression, guiltily. Roxanna continued to scowl in silent hatred under the pressure of Aaron's blade, though oddly enough, it didn't seem to be in respect to her treatment. After all, this was her dominion, and she was a cocky sonuva.

Soon they reached the door that led into the main hallway, behind the fragments of which they'd no longer have the protection of the family's private chambers and Roxanna's earlier threat to the guard that had bought them a clear thus far. Dan hesitated, reaching out to tap Aaron's forearm with a serious expression. Aaron didn't like that expression.

"Don't forget. We have to go back."

Aaron grimaced. He'd hoped Dan had forgotten about the dungeon and the prisoners within, but no, here he was, tripping up what would already be a difficult escape. "And how are we supposed to manage a prison break? You're not some pied piper of the poor and downtrodden. Some might not even have the sense to find safety at this point."

Dan almost winced at his brother's harsh words. Aaron was losing patience after indulging Luned's wish and leaving Bernd behind. "We can't leave them," Dan replied, standing his ground.

Aaron took this opportunity to bargain and his stance relaxed, Roxanna keenly listening in. "Fine. But if we're going to take that risk, we need another hostage."

There was a moment of tense silence, broken by Luned. "You have to promise he'll be okay." Luned's protectiveness over Bernd was becoming a bit baffling to the other three in the party, particularly businesslike Aaron, but she didn't have time to explain the guilt that was already piling up. Before anyone could respond, Luned snatched the keys from Dan and turned to walk back to crime scene. "I'll get him."

This change of plans changed something in Roxanna's expression, minute and unreadable. They waited, listening to the echoes of the empty hallway. The scribe's voice sounded low and muffled from the dressing room, where she was undoubtedly offering the boy some sort of instructional pep talk.

"We don't split up," Dan spoke in a hushed voice to his brother. "We get down there as quietly as possible, release the prisoners, and then make a straight break for it."

Aaron barely acknowledged Dan's plan with a nod, his own mind at work. They'd thought along the same lines as far as that, but there was a lot to piece together. How would they guarantee they wouldn't be followed, if they did make it out? How far were they going to take it with their prisoners? He wasn't a bleeding heart like his brother, but he wasn't unnecessarily cruel, either. Roxanna might deserve what was coming to her, but her brother was another story.

Soon enough Luned returned with Bernd and nearly protested when Dan went to bind him but the warning glance from Aaron, who was currently preoccupied with a newly besmirkened Roxanna, kept her lips clamped tight. Bernd was docile and cooperative, and within moments they were on their way to certain danger and hopeful freedom.

Meanwhile, the gears turned in Luned's brain. She didn't care for Roxanna's renewed confidence, and this was when she realized the danger Bernd was in –– not from her, not from the James brothers, but from his own family. Salvar was a traditional region, where it was preferential for males to inherit titles. In spite of the obvious age and maturity gap, Bernd was a real threat to Roxanna's potential power. Knowing his personality he would make an easy puppet, but it was only a matter of time before his own death would be plotted by his treasonous sister. Her stomach sank sickeningly as she walked in hurried steps between Aaron and Roxanna in the front, Dan and Bernd bringing up the rear.

She wanted to do something, but she didn't know what. All she knew was she'd have to keep a keen eye on Roxanna.

More trouble had been anticipated on their way to the dungeon, but it appeared Roxanna's earlier command to the guard had calmed any concern that the brothers' journey up to the Lord's chambers had caused. Several individuals fell victim to their need for stealth, several bodies tucked away in corners to be discovered later, but all in all, the trip below was uneventful. The hostages played along as well as one might expect.

Aaron's hands were significantly more full with Roxanna than Dan's with Bernd, or so it seemed, so it was Dan who had the pleasure of liberation. Outside the heavy dungeon door, the group conspired briefly. Bernd seemed to suppress a level of panic at the thought of going back down into the darkness. The events of the evening were as clear as mud in his mind, but the trauma was a raw wound and his breath seized in his throat as he glanced to Luned, grasping for reassurance. She couldn't bring herself to offer comfort.

"We don't know how they'll react, but it can be assumed there will be no stealth after this. We need to know exactly where we're going," Aaron attempted to formulate something quietly as Dan consulted their map. They chose their exit, something nearby and away from the heavily guarded main gate, which gave opportunity for a clear break for nearby forest that Luned recalled.

Roxanna snorted, knowing it would be useless to volunteer herself as a guide for such a thing. She had already been ruled out as any level of trustworthy. Bernd, on the other hand...

"I can help," the boy spoke up, surprisingly lucid. His sister blinked. "H-horses. You'll need horses, right?"

None of them knew quite what to make of this offer. "That might help," Dan concurred.

Luned caught on. "If it's just Bernd and myself, we could get some and meet you outside. Who would question the Baron's son taking a lady friend for, erm, a moonlit jaunt?"

Neither of the brothers were enthused by this idea, nor Roxanna, for some secret reason. "Why trust him?" She pondered aloud, her voice harsh after her long silence.

Inclined to disagree with any insinuation the woman made by default but also realizing this was an opportunity to separate the siblings, Luned was quick to reply. "All of this was my fault. We'll try. If I'm not there when you guys finish here, just go. I'll manage."

Dan frowned. "We shouldn't separate." Aaron nodded, though his sentiments were largely just to keep both hostages within arm's length. Luned was already untying Bernd's wrists, however, and it seemed she was convinced this was going to work. The brothers wished they had such confidence in that plan, but at the same time, they had to think of their own skins. There was one upside to this from Aaron's perspective: it'd be one less hostage, but with Luned managing her own escape, also one less body to worry about.

Dan seemed to be torn, his brows furrowed in thought as he tried to piece together an equally advantageous alternative, so Aaron spoke, owning up to his own underestimation of her mettle. "She did get us out of the dungeon. I think she can manage just herself."

Dan frowned, then nodded. He still had a job to do in the dungeon. "Alright."

Luned and Bernd disappeared around the corner before any minds were changed, and Roxanna's face soured just a bit more.

Once they were out of earshot, Luned brought up her own concerns. "Why are you helping?" She spoke in a near-whisper, afraid someone would hear. Bernd responded by grabbing her roughly by the upper arm and quickening his pace, causing her to stumble. "Wh––"

Then she saw why. A member of Essen's staff scuttled past without question, recognizing the Baron's son.

Once the coast was clear, Luned began again. "Your father's dead, Bernd. You're in trouble, your sister––"

At this, Bernd's grasp tightened and Luned writhed from the discomfort. He hesitated in their trek and glared down at her, obviously taking some effort to focus properly, but on his way to sobering. All of a sudden Luned realized this could have been a mistake. "I know very well what happened," he said, smugness resurfacing. "Do you think I'm stupid?"

"No, I just..." Luned started, then realized she wasn't sure how to finish. She was silent for several minutes, not sure what she was supposed to be feeling. Embarrassed? Frightened?

It was comforting to know that they were indeed on their way to the stables, at least as far as her memory of the map approximated. She wasn't going to be whisked away to some dark corner for vengeful slaughter. In the hallway near the stables Bernd stopped, his grip finally loosening. Luned rubbed her arm and looked up to him, concern visible in the expression on her face.

She wanted to also take comfort in the fact that he was just a kid, a traumatized, miserable little boy, but his combined height and current position of power chased those hopes away. Luned admitted to herself that she was kind of scared.

"From here I can do two things," Bernd explained. "I can alert the guards, or I can help. That depends on you."

Luned thought he might have expected a response to this, but she was at a loss for words.

"Roxanna can not live," he stated with coldness befitting of a junior baron.

"Why?" Luned asked in a panicked whisper, but she only earned a roll of eyes. He knew she wasn't stupid, either. "I… I can't make any promises. But what if I say I'll do what I can?"

Bernd looked skeptical. Obviously he was asking the wrong person and should've posed this issue to the James brothers somehow, but he was at a loss and not reasoning at full capacity. The haze in his mind was frustrating and he rubbed his temples. "Fine. Come on."

The two made a show of being somewhat enthusiastic, albeit awkward, lovers of sorts, and the stable staff gave them breathing room to saddle up a couple horses. As they finished, however, the peaceful intermission ended. Howls and shouts erupted from the main building as the prisoners clawed their way out tooth and nail, no doubt impressing the guards with the enthusiasm that fully compensated for their diminished physical abilities.

It was a horrific sight for the brothers inside. Aaron had convinced Dan to let them fend for themselves as they broke for freedom and for every one that made it to the cover of the forest, at least two were cut down by disgruntled soldiers.

It took Dan every ounce of will not to look back as they dragged Roxanna out their chosen exit, now clear of obstructions as Essen's men tried to contain the prisoners. At this point he realized all he'd done was create an excellent decoy, and though that was a relief to Aaron, he couldn't bring himself to be glad about it. This was a sorry situation for everyone involved. They reached the edge of the forest and pulled Roxanna in just out of sight, then gagged her and tied her to a tree.

As the brothers reached the meeting point Luned and Bernd arrived with the horses, no doubt garnering attention, but everything was moving impossibly fast now. There was no point in sneaking at this point. It was their last chance.

Luned dismounted, along with Bernd, and they offered the reins to each of the brothers. "Alright. We're off," Dan announced as he accepted them from Luned, then moved to help her back up.

Bernd interrupted and grabbed Luned's arm. "You promised."

Luned frowned, then looked to Dan and Aaron. "Go, don't worry about me. Thanks for everything, just please, get the hell out of here!"

Aaron sent her a look that betrayed how baffled he was by her action, but he wasn't about to argue. Before Dan could argue he nodded and took off, knowing his brother would be close behind. Dan hesitated, frowning, but he knew there wasn't time to negotiate or find out what was going on between Bernd and Luned. "Bye," he said as he hoisted himself up into the saddle, and he glanced over his shoulder as he followed his brother out of sight.

"Go back," Luned ordered Bernd through clenched teeth, her gaze settling on Roxanna's bound figure. "Make sure no one is coming after us."

The boy nodded and left.

Once alone with Roxanna, Luned began to break down. She had no weapons. Roxanna had no weapons. Was she supposed to strangle her with her bare hands? Was she even capable of that?

Luned took a couple steps forward, her feet crackling over branches in the relative quiet of the forest, the crazed yelling of prisoners who'd obtained their freedom ringing through the trees from afar. Roxanna, who had been surprisingly quiet through this part of the ordeal, convulsed a bit under the ropes. She snorted against the gag. Luned thought for a moment that she might have sobbed, but when she looked her in the eyes, she saw something completely different.

Roxanna's eyes were smiling. She was laughing. She knew Luned couldn't do it.

Luned frowned, chin trembling. "I'm sorry for what happened to you," she started saying, as if Roxanna was interested in hearing her righteous speech. "But you can't hurt him. Please, don't hurt your brother. He's just a kid, and you could do good together. You could be better than your father."

Her monologue was interrupted by the sound of running and shouting getting closer. Some prisoners had looped around in the forest in an effort to lose the soldiers and were gaining on her position. "I-I have to go. Please," she pleaded one last time with the woman, then she turned to run as stumbling, laughing, and crying figures came into view between the trees.

Recklessly aimed arrows whistled through the air as the soldiers continued their chase, hitting nothing but air. Luned was grateful for a split second, but just before she got out of range, she looked back.

Roxanna was slumped against the tree now, her previously proud posture now limp against the ropes that held her there. It was hard to see from this distance, but Luned thought she might've seen the shaft of an arrow protruding from her chest. Luned's heart caught in her throat and she choked on air, already gasping from her sprint.

"I'm sorry," she croaked helplessly before turning to run again.

So sorry.






[[Spoils Request: The book Luned stole from the shop. It is the only known copy of the work of infamous scholar and occultist Antyr Aneised and is part memoir, part grimoire. It details his experiments in an effort to learn how to bend reality with the stroke of a pen.

It is likely worth money and should not get into the wrong hands, as it teaches a lost art that more honorable folk would consider better off being lost.

I'd like Luned (and any reader) to be able to cast a small reality-warping spell directly from the text, but I'm not sure what a reasonable version of that would be.

Thanks!]]

[Dissinger]

Thread: On the Lam
Song: Flagpole Sitta – Harvey Danger
Mood: Sick…ugh

Plot 22 / 30

Story 7 / 10 – The story here is one of an attempted kidnapping gone awry. We have the usual trials and tribulations with getting out of a hostile situation, then we hit a twist, failure and capture. This is interesting for a couple of reasons. I often put forth that we love to see the heroes win at the end of the day, its quite another to see the hero fail. The weakest links in this story was perhaps the dealing with the warden. The hallucinogen certainly helped in getting you into the situation, but I find it increasingly difficult to believe someone in squire training, who hasn’t truly learned to wield a blade could cause enough damage to cause the Warden to bleed out like that. Other than that you were good to go, its just that little lynchpin.

Setting 8 / 10 – Setting played a part in this story. Perhaps it was the constantly use of things around you, but it was well done. I got a good clear and vivid picture of what was going on. You don’t get the prefect score, because while you are not in set it and forget it, there are a few things you could do to incorporate setting as well. Showing while not telling is a good one. I got the feeling Luned’s camp was chilly because you told me, but breathe fogs in cold air, I should know. It’s the little touches that would have netted you a higher score.

Pacing ~ 7 / 10 – Other than the hurried pace at which the Warden is dealt with, you did a good job of keeping it going. Longer stories tend to get bogged down, but you guys avoided the trap and here you are proudly standing at the higher pacing score for it. Again Warden beating by a little boy and a dramatically malnourished young lady just seems a bit of deus ex machina.

Character 22 / 30

Communication 7 / 10 – Communication falls into many categories, body language and verbal are the two big ones. You guys did well for the most part, and even the use of it with Roxanna helped with the ideas, that smirk still gets me. Was she smirking because she felt she had won, or was it because she knew she had something to spring on them. Is there one last trick in her arsenal? That helps so much. You guys are literally a good read and I wished that this could have concluded naturally. I just feel that I had no sense of the NPCs and again that hurts you.

Action 9/ 10 – Normally, I’m averse to giving such a high score, but with the exception of the warden getting beaten by what equates to two halflings, you don’t get the perfect score. And believe me I almost put down the ten.

Persona 6 / 10 - Luned here plays the part of the damsel in distress while Aaron and Dan play the part of the anti-heroes. Luned creates our new age damsel in distress, where its not necessarily that she’s this air headed bimbo, its that she’s out of her league. While not being so over the top in the “we’re bad men we just do good things” category, Etheryn, you do present an interesting deviation from the standard hero template. For that you guys get kudos points. However the NPC’s fall a bit flat. It was interesting the twist with Bernd, and while I could see that you guys were trying to do something different with Roxanna, I felt she fell flat as a character. Baron Essen on the other hand, was quite literally old man pervert. There wasn’t a lot of effort to characterize him other than showing how he had destroyed his home through careful use of senility and incest. This is a trap that often leads to lowered Persona scores because NPCs are character too! They live, breathe, and die for your stories.

Prose 23 / 30

Mechanics 8 / 10 – Solidly written. That said there were a few times where Etheryn wrote a sentence and looked like he changed his mind, but forgot to take the words from the previous version out. Mistakes that a simple read through would have caught and fixed.

Clarity 7 / 10 – …which in turn hurt your clarity. I also had to reread Luned’s posts once or twice to get a feel and the Warden’s death was the biggest culprit. I get she wasn’t fully present but I was trying to find that magical explanation that would make everything understandable.

Technique 8 / 10 – Well written and with the exceptions of a few mechanical errors that hurt the pacing and hence the technique it was well done. I feel like I could write with you guys and see things better. Well done guys.

Wildcard: 8 / 10 Good story to read and the length didn’t detract? Check. Hawt chick who’s an amazon lamp shaded by the mousy little adventurer? Check. Attempts at subtle fourth wall humor? Double check.

Total 75 / 100

Luned: 1125 exp and 230 gold

Etheryn: 1171 exp and 215 gold

[Letho]

EXP/GP added.