Meek

Eli stood at the open window of their inn room, facing the empty street.

One spark hovered outside the closed door behind him, watching the hallway and the stairs. The other drifted just above the inn's roof. He tasted the crisp night air through that one, and heard the gates slam shut when the last, heavily-laden villagers returned from the bandit camp.

In the room behind him, Lara bathed. She'd gone first because she'd leave nothing worse than sweat and trail dust in the bathwater. He'd leave it pink with gore.

"There aren't enough people," she said.

"Hm?"

"You want to ask how I know something's off," she told him. "It's because there aren't enough people. Empty houses, overgrown gardens. There are maybe a half-hundred people here. In a village big enough for three times that?"

He hadn't wanted to ask, because he'd noticed the same thing. "It's hard to tell, in place like this. Seasonal labor changes things."

"Seasonal labor lives near the crops."

"Oh, good point," he said.

A shock of cold water splashed his back. He yelped and spun. "Oy!"

"Are you patronizing me?" she demanded, glaring at him. "You already thought of that, didn't you?"

"I wasn't patronizing you." He leaned against the wall, enjoying the sight of her in the bath. "I was humoring you, there's a difference."

Her eyes slitted. "I took you by surprise."

"Huh?"

"Just now. When I splashed you."

"Yeah?"

"You're such a prickle."

"And you're not making sense," he said. "Go to sleep."

She opened her mouth to respond, but yawned instead. "Yeah."

He sometimes forgot that she didn't have troll blood. She'd kept up with him in the forest, but they left the forest a five-day ago. And today had been long. Crossing Ehrat, getting abducted by bandits. Threatened by a bloated brood-ferret. And then ... everything else.

She'd dropped a lot of the bandits herself, even if the only one she'd killed was Bo. And that had been a mercy.

After she fell asleep, Eli soaked in the cold water for too long, then stood in the tub and poured the rinse buckets over his head until he looked mostly human. He stretched out on the bed beside Lara, enjoying the luxuriant plushness of an actual mattress. Listening to the sounds of the sleepy streets. Murmured conversations, the chunk of a gravedigger's shovel into the earth, the nicker and stomp of the bandits' horses, now in the town's stables.

The spark outside the window showed him the rust moon, a pale orange half-circle. Too pale to present a threat. Thank the Dreamers. He had enough problems, and--

Lara thrashed in her sleep. She whimpered then said, "No, don't!"

"Shhh," he murmured. "It's okay. You're having a nightmare."

Her gray eyes sprung open. When she saw him watching her, she gasped in fear. "No, no!" She clumsily flailed at him, trying to shove him away in her sleep. "No, not the no!"

"It's okay, Lara." He retreated to the edge of the bed. "Shhhh, go back to sleep."

A glimmer of recognition showed in her eyes. She paused, then half-smiled, a shaky sort of midnight smile. After a moment, she laid her head in the pillow and fell back asleep.

Eli stood beside the bed with his heart pounding like he'd run up a mountain. That look of dread on her face had cut him deeply. The fact that that was her most truthful response to him. That in the middle of the night, with every scrap of politeness and charity stripped away, she saw him as a horror.

Meek.

Huh. He'd figured she'd called him that from 'Cloaked-in-Meekness,' but maybe in some secret byway of her heart, the name also revealed her dearest wish for who he'd become. Someone gentle, calm. Harmless. Perhaps even dryn.

Poor girl. Doomed to another disappointment. She should've brought him to the trolls.

A feast greeted them the next morning, when Lara finally woke and finished her hair. Not a huge feast, but a nice spread: a steaming pot of cracked wheat boiled in honeywater, a platter of minced mutton and beans, loaves of olive bread with bowls of olive oil for dipping.

Eli stayed away from the mutton while gorging himself on everything else. He didn't know when his appetite for meat would return but ... not yet.

"Morning, Meek," Winina said, as she sat beside him. "Don't fancy mutton?"

"Uh," Eli said.

"Dryn men abstain from meat after battle," Lara explained.

"Is true?" Eli asked her in dryn.

"No," she said in the same language, then in Iolian she continued: "But apparently they eat entire loaves of olive rye."

"It's good," Eli said, to smiles from the handful of people who'd joined them.

Reserved smiles, that soon disappeared. Whatever was wrong with the village, they couldn't keep the worry from their eyes.

So he set aside his second bowl and said, "Tell us about the mercenaries."

"Tell us about you." Arcuro brought him another tankard of ale. "Passing though on the way where?"

"We wanted to see the olive trees," he said, then gave a little shrug. "We're interested in trees. We heard they're remarkable."

"That they are. My mother's one of the first to find them. Going back almost thirty years now. She and some old Ehratians found them during pilgrimage to see their homeland."

"You do that?" Eli asked.

"Young idiots," Gertrud said, around a mouthful of beans. "We were drunk on history and second-hand pride."

"Well, this particular batch of young idiots," Arcuro said, putting his hand on his mother's shoulder, "stumbled onto the first of the olive groves."

"Trees like nobody'd seen," she said.

Arcuro nodded. "Nobody knew why they grew that big or fruitful--to this day, nobody knows. Something in the soil. Took years to test they were safe. The olives, not the province. The province still gets hit four, five times a year, with broodfall. The ward is weak here."

"Took more years," Gertrud said, "for my wife to convince the capitol that Eraht oil is a delicacy, not a curse. Of course, one taste was enough to sell you on that, Meek."

"I'd best check again," Eli said, soaking a slab of his bread in the bowl of oil.

"Ha. Yeah. My wife--Angel rest her--could charm the cold outta snow, that woman. She turned our oil into a luxury commodity."

Arcuro patted her shoulder, then told Eli and Lara, "In the twenty years since then, we've kept the oil flowing."

"What about the moons?" Lara asked.

"We ... take precautions. Every new town is built around an old Dreamer shrine. The biggest of them."

"The dome in the center of town?"

He nodded. "It's dangerous, but this is our homeland. We hunker down and wait it out. At least, that's what we did until she came."

"The Bloodwitch," Lara said.

"I'm surprised you've heard of her," Winina said. "People don't like saying her name in case one her 'risen' overhears."

"The bandits talked pretty freely." Lara set her tankard aside. "And one of them--Bo--he told Meek that she's gone silent. That's why he sent them riding to the Weep, to look for her." She shifted her gaze to Eli. "How long ago since he heard from her?"

"Three days," Eli said. "Four, now."

Nobody spoke.

"He got nervous," Eli continued. "She's never left her pets in his keeping that long. She needs to touch them to raise them, he told me, and to give them orders. But they remember her commands, at least for a time. Such as the one to obey him. He worried they'd forget that, if enough time passed. 'I'm like them,' he told me. 'I follow her commands till she gives me a new one.' And the last command she gave him was, she wanted every one of you dead. You made common cause with the mercenaries, and you needed to pay the price."

"Tell us about the mercenaries," Lara said, echoing Eli's words.

"There's no need to burden you with that," Arcuro said. "You've done so much already. You just came here to look at the trees and you ... you've done so much."

"There's that pride again," Gertrud said. "Ehratians, we'll starve smiling before we ask for a crust of bread."

"A lady from Leotide City hired the mercs," Winina told Lara. "Lady Brazinka. Fine-looking woman. Proper noble, you know? The kind that, she knows she's better than you, so she doesn't worry about proving it. She'll get her hands dirty in a kitchen because she ain't afraid it'll make her look common."

"Why'd she come?" Eli asked.

"To get rid of the witch, that's what we reckon. She--she must've heard the witch attacked one of our caravans. Sent half the town fleeing."

Eli and Lara exchanged a look: that explained the missing people. Though maybe not the oppressive feeling.

"And started making demands," Winina continued. "Serve her alive or serve her dead. Shimyn, uh, that's the witch's given name, she's turned into something worse than brood."

"You know her," Lara said.

"Aye," Gertrud said. "She was one of us, once."

Silence fell. Eli ate another olive, and across the room someone rattled a handful of tiles then threw them on the board.

"Thirty years ago," Gertrud finally continued, "she was one of us who found the trees. She always had a touch of the mage in her, you know? I figured she Flared young, and nobody noticed. Happens more often than you'd think."

"You'll have to excuse my mother," Arcuro said, with an apologetic grimace. "She has this idea--"

"Shut your curly head!" Gertrud snapped. "Shimyn was a sister to me. Sweet, dreamy girl. Then we--we ventured too close to the Weep and a fever took her. The Weep bleeds magic, you understand?"

Eli nodded politely.

"No you do not," Gertrud said. "And for three weeks, we forced water in Shimyn's mouth, keeping her alive while she shivered and ranted. When she recovered, we thought we'd beaten the Celestials themselves. We drank and screwed and sang. She never was the same though. Never was right, after that. Took ten years before she disappeared. Into the night. Gone."

"Into the Weep," Winina said.

"Aye, and another ten before she started sending things out of it. Her 'risen.'"

"And that's why the lady brought mercenaries?" Eli asked. "To clear out the Bloodwitch?"

"That's right," Winina said.

"No it ain't," Gertrud said.

"Sure it is. Look what she done."

"Not why she came though."

"Then why else did she come? To watch the harvest?"

"I don't know why, but it wasn't that."

"She came with a mercenary company, " Winina told Eli. "Stopped here for a handful of days. Sending out scouts. Making preparations. Including, once they saw the rumors were true, they sent for, uh, irregulars. Another ten, fifteen fighters. Then they advanced to the forward camp."

Eli sipped his ale. So there was only a single company of mercenaries, and they'd all be protecting the lady.

"What happened next?" Lara asked.

"This isn't their burden," Arcuro told Winina, grabbing an empty bowl. "They've done enough. We've asked strangers to sacrifice enough. They're dryn, for vale's sake."

Gertrud raised a hand, and the others fell silent. "They haven't come back," she told Lara. "Two dozen hard-eyed soldiers, along with a mage who my gut tells me walks three of the paths. They haven't come back."

"But what--"

"The lady sent her pigeon for help," Gertrud interrupted. "And it will come."

"It will come," a few of the others repeated, like a prayer.

"You take your man," Gertrud told Lara, "and you bring him home. I saw what he did to the bandits. There's something sleeping inside him that shouldn't be roused. You give him a dozen little bark-skinned babies, girl. You keep him close, you keep him safe, and you make sure he never has to stay away from meat again."

Ten minutes later, Eli found Fern standing untethered outside the stable, enthusiastically chomping her way through a pile of what looked like dead thorn-bush.

"Godsdamned old woman," he grumbled to Fern. "Something sleeping inside me. What does she know?"

"Everything?" Lara suggested, stepping forward to join him.

"Oh, so dryn babies have bark skin?"

"Almost everything."

"Why won't they just tell us what happened here? This isn't just that more than half the town fled."

"They're trying to protect us."

"Yeah. Why?"

Sh started to answer when his spark caught sight of a figure in the little town square, the one with the olive tree. Sitting on a bench, looking at the ground.

"What is it?" Lara asked, seeing his expression change.

"That man," he said. "The one who lost his son."

Eli went and sat next to him and didn't say anything for a time.

Then he said, "I'm sorry. I should've been faster, I should've stopped them, I should've ..." He swallowed the lump in his throat. "I'm sorry."

"The witch took the children," the man told, still looking at the ground. "After the mercs left, her bandits stole our children and brought them to her."

"No," Eli heard himself whisper.

"They said we'd see them again," the man told him. "After she killed them, we'd see them again."