Meek

Eli followed his spark into the bandit chief's tent. Woven carpets on the floor, a bed with a frame and headboard. A table with the remains of a meal, a standing cabinet, a stack of crates and cartons-- including one with the lid ajar.

Oh, and birdcage with a dead kestrel inside.

"Who the halo do you work for?" the brother demanded, raising his daggers.

"This isn't work," Eli told him, feeling the muscles knit together in his right forearm. "This is play."

"What do you want? What do you want?"

"Ask your brother."

"Bo," the brother said, without looking behind himself. "Talk to me."

"I made him a guarantee," Eli said.

"Kill," Bo said, and the dead ferret leaped for Eli's throat.

The thing sprung at him like an arrow but he'd spent days warding off dryn darts. And he'd been tracking the ferret since before he stepped into the tent.

He flicked a spark into the ferret's open mouth--which poured a geyser of repulsive sensory information into his mind--and shoved upward. His link still wasn't strong enough to do much, but he managed to lift the ferret's head a few inches.

Just enough for Eli to take it by the neck, then drop to one knee and whip it against the floor.

Bones snapped, an eye burst, and the creature's pelt ripped open to reveal a slurry of cold congealed organs. Yet claws still ripped at his arm. How do you kill something that's already dead? He slammed it against the floor again--then blocked the brother's dagger with his right arm.

A stripe of agony burned across his skin, and he threw the broken ferret at the brother's face.

The brother recoiled as the creature's innards splashed his eyes.

Eli rose and snapped the brother's left wrist and shoved the dagger from that hand into his belly and twisted. The brother fell panting, his chest heaving, his eyes dimming.

"No," Bo whimpered. "Oh, no. No ..."

As Eli started toward Bo, the spark showed him the ferret pulling itself after him by its single intact forelimb. Scraping across the carpet. So he paused a moment to crush its skull under his boot heel. A bubble of bright red blood popped, then trickled across rotting, jellied brain matter.

The stench was so strong he could taste it, but the ferret finally stopped moving.

"There's this voice in my head," he said to Bo, ambling closer, "that's telling me to question you. To find out what you know. Isn't that strange?"

Bo circled with his sword high. "What in the godless heights are you?"

"The voice says I should ask you about the Bloodwitch." When Eli paused, the only sound was the brother's panting getting softer. "Ask you about the mercenaries. Oh, and did you happen to see a noble lady pass through?"

"I'll tell you anything you want to know."

"Oh, don't bother. I know better than to listen to the voice inside my head."

"W-what are you?"

"I'm a man," Eli told him, "who keeps his promises."

Then he jammed both of Bo's eyes with his sparks and stepped inside the sword's reach, ignoring a slice along his ribs, and smashed the dome of his forehead into Bo's face.

The impact brought stars to his eyes but of course that didn't matter.

Bo's nose and one of his eye sockets broke--and talons ripped at the back of Eli's neck.

The kestrel, free from the cage. Which hurt a little and disgusted him a lot, but which presented no real danger. So he let the dead bird peck chunks from his shoulder as he kicked Bo's sword away and knelt on his neck.

Not hard enough to kill him. Just hard enough to make every breath a challenge.

He showed him the dagger and said, "Breaking bread's nice, but breaking spirits ..."

His hands were slippery when the kestrel finally tumbled off him. He'd watched Lara shove inside the tent, too fast for caution--worried for him. He'd watched her grab Bo's sword from the carpet and slash at the bird, slicing one wing off.

"What are you doing?" Lara demanded. "By the Mother Glade, what are you doing?"

"Turns out," he told her, "that strangling someone with their own intestines is really hard."

"Stop. Enough. Stop!"

"I'm not--"

She stepped forward and finished Bo with a single thrust . Then she chopped the damaged kestrel into pieces. It didn't stop moving until she burst another pocket of red blood. Then she collected the pieces, and the remains of the ferret, and said, "We need to burn these."

"Okay," he said.

"Come with me."

"Why?"

"Look at yourself."

"I'm fine."

"That's what scares me. You need to climb out of whatever hole you're in. Come. Please."

He wiped his hands on his filthy tunic. "Okay."

"Because I don't trust you here alone," she told him.

"I said okay."

She took a steadying breath then she led him to the campfire, to burn the witch's pets. Gasps and thuds and brief screams sounded in the darkness as the prisoners finished off the injured bandits.

After the fire flared around the ferret and kestrel, Lara led him to a trough where he sluiced the worst of the filth off himself. The spark hovering above the tents saw the village gate open a crack and a handful of people--armed, but not warriors--sidle warily through.

When he told Lara, she said, "We need to get the prisoners safe behind the town wall before the rest of the bandits return."

"They're not coming back anytime soon," he told her.

"The ones who rode off?"

"Yeah. The Bloodwitch fell silent three days ago. That's why both her pets were with Bo instead of ... I don't know where. That's why they weren't launching her 'risen' into the village. Because she hadn't given them any. She went quiet after giving her last orders. So Bo sent his people into the Weep to check in."

She frowned. "You questioned him?"

"No."

"Then how do you know?" she asked in dryn.

"I didn't ask, but he kept confessing anyway."

There was a pause.

"Killing is sometimes necessary," she told him, "but cruelty is never justified."

He dumped another ladle of water on himself, washing blood from his healing shoulder. He wasn't sure he felt the need to justify his cruelty. He wasn't sure if the definition of 'cruelty' didn't involve an absolute lack of justification.

"Say something," she told him.

"I don't know what to say." He sat at one of the tree-stump stools. "Everything clicked. All the practice, all the training. With the trolls, with your darts. I knew how to move, I knew how to use the sparks. I knew which blows to take and which to avoid. And--" he ventured a slight smile. "--I never fought fair."

She rubbed her eyes. "Yeah."

"You helped, too. Dropping them with your darts."

"I need to carve more, I'm almost out."

"They're coming," he said, watching with a spark. "The people from the town. Coming here."

"They look angry?"

"Scared."

She nodded and stepped behind Eli, wiping at his blood-smeared neck with a wet cloth, lowering her head like a demure servant.

A moment later, three people stepped inside. Two of them looked about Eli's age: an olive-skinned man with a wild head of curly hair, and a lanky woman with a grain flail. The third was the grizzled older woman who'd been strapped on the catapult, though her face was swollen now.

"I'm--my name is Arcuro," the man said.

"The mayor of West Town," Eli said.

"That's what he called me, but no. My mother owns the inn. I keep the bar, that's all, but I guess I'm the closest thing to a town speaker. And what I want to say, what I need to say, is thank you. We're in your debt."

"There's no debt," Lara said, softly and more-accented than usual.

"Oh! Are you the ones that Lady Brazinka sent for?" Arcuro asked. "She sent a pigeon but we worried the kestrel took it down."

"No," Eli said. "We're just passing through."

"Let's talk behind the walls," the lanky woman said. "Come to town. You're welcome to join us. If you'd like. Before they come back."

Eli frowned in surprise at the invitation. He didn't answer, and Lara kept silently dabbing at his neck. Because she wanted to soothe them, he guessed, to present a gentle domestic image after the violence. He wondered if she'd learned Chivat Lo's lessons of manipulation too well. On that other hand, he was hardly in a position to complain about ugly lessons from the violent past.

"Ha," the older woman said, at his hesitation, her voice slurred from her swollen face. "That's what I told them. You don't ask a killer to come home with you."

"If he was Lady Brazinka's killer--" Arcuro started.

"He's not. He just said he's not."

"Come to town," the lanky woman told Eli again. "And fast. There's worse than bandits in the night."

"Overruled again," the old woman muttered.

"My mother is Gertrud," Arcuro told Eli, then gestured to the lanky woman. "This is Winina. Uh, may I ask your names?"

"And may I ask what in the vale you are?" the mother said. "Sitting there without a scratch on you. I saw at least one arrow in your leg."

"We're dryn," Lara told her. "My husband is a mage of the Palm but dryn mages are different to grasslanders. He can only heal himself." She switched to dryn: "We need to explain you. Speak dryn to me."

"Tree is good," he told her. "Donkey, beware, you, me, hungry. Up, down, left, right."

"We--" She used a few words he didn't understand. "--the town?"

"Go town? Yes. Learn."

She bowed her head to the townsfolk. "We'd be honored to join you."

"Good," Arturo said. "Good, I'm glad."

"My name is Lara," she told him. "And my husband's name is Meek."