Refuge

“Nothing can ever be repaired. An object broken and mended is so made a different object.”

– Melete the Stern, Atalante philosopher

It all began going wrong when Constanza cured Uncle Tomas.

She’d not meant anything by it. Papa had… not been the same since Mama died. And Constanza had learned much at her mother’s knee, as much as a girl of eight could of alchemy, so she’d broken into the empty laboratory and spent half the night brewing while Papa slept off the liquor. Uncle Tomas, Papa’s older brother who came to check on them everyday, he had this cough. It looked painful and when she’d asked – after he’d called her a cocky little brat in a fond tone, just the way Mama used to – he’d said he couldn’t do hard labour because of it. So Constanza gave him the potion when he came the morning after, said it would take care of the cough, and though her uncle was just humouring her he drank every drop.

The morning after when he came back Uncle Tomas wasn’t coughing but he didn’t look happy: he looked scared. He shook awake Papa and the two of them had a loud argument, though Constanza was sent to her room so she didn’t know what about. Papa, that night, did not drink for the first time since Mama had died. She tried to ask what the shouting had been about, but he mussed her hair and told her not to worry.

“Your uncle thinks we should move to a smaller town, but he worries for nothing,” Papa said.

“What’s he worried about?” Constanza asked.

“Nothing, I told you,” Papa smiled, but then he grew serious. “But you have to stay out of your mother’s laboratory, corazon. It’s dangerous.”

She didn’t dare argue, not when he seemed better now and she might ruin it, so she didn’t even though he was being silly. Constanza wasn’t in danger in there. She felt safest of all in that small, cramped room where she had spent so many hours with her mother. Papa began going back to the shop and it seemed like things would get better, but odd things were happening. Priests, who had avoided the house when Mama still lived, visited several times. They always looked angry and asked a lot of questions. Uncle Tomas only looked pained when she asked him about it. And then one day, armed men came to the house and when Papa tried to resist they broke his arm. Constanza screamed and struggled, but they wrapped her in a bag and she fell unconscious.

She woke up in a beautiful room, her father nowhere in sight. Some of the thugs were there, but there was also a smiling man whose hair was turning white. She cringed away, even though he looked nice and she’d been put down on a comfortable chair.

“Do you know who I am, child?” the man asked.

She shook her head.

“I am Lord Gutierre,” he said. “I rule this town and some of the lands around it. I apologize for how roughly you were brought before me, my men… misunderstood my intentions.”

She bit her lip. It sounded fake to her, but her parents had always said to be wary of nobles. They were dangerous. Constanza nodded like she understood even though it was a lie.

“I am told, young Constanza, that you brewed a potion that cured your uncle’s cough,” Lord Gutierre said.

She nodded. His eyes turned cold.

“Use your words, girl,” Lord Gutierre snapped.

She flinched.

“I did,” she forced out.

“Good,” the lord smiled. “You do not understand quite what you did, child. Your uncle, he was not sick in a common way. He was born with it, so the priests could not cure his ill. Your potion did something Light could not. Did you learn this recipe from your mother?”

Constanza shook her head.

“I made it up,” she admitted, then bit her lip. “I used other recipes to put it together but I didn’t learn it from a book.”

The man was smiling widely, but it did not look friendly at all.

“What a miraculous child you are,” Lord Gutierre chuckled. “My own prodigious concocter.”

He rose to his feet.

“You’ll be staying in my mansion with your father,” the lord said. “Your possessions will be fetched.”

“What do you want from us?” Constanza asked.

“Potions,” Lord Gutierre smiled.

He wasn’t lying, but that didn’t make it better. She got books, those not even Mama had owned, and all the ingredients she asked for. But she had to make whatever Lord Gutierre asked, or she would not be allowed to see Papa. First he asked for little things, some way to turn his hair black again without dye or to remove a scar. Then it grew bigger. A cure for face creases, something that would keep men… vigorous, perfume that made people like you and eventually a poison that made death look like a spring fever. Constanza pretended she couldn’t make the last one, but it was a lie. Even if she hated the lord she loved the challengers, and with every success it was growing easier.

He had her beaten for her ‘failure’. That same night her door was opened and though she was terrified for a moment, it was Papa that came in. He told her to get dressed and they fled through the mansion’s backdoor. Outside waited Uncle Tomas and his family, on a large wagon pulled by two horses. They fled town in the night, but things didn’t get better. Lord Gutierre sent men after them but others began to hunt the families too. Their pursuers had drawn attention to them and now other lords looked for the wagon. Worse, too: some men working for the Royal Conjurer of Helike and a magistrate in the service of the Princess of Tenerife. They travelled east, towards the Waning Woods, and it in the end it was bandits that caught them.

The ambush hit everyone save for Constanza and her cousin Jafet in the first volley. Some men began looting the wagon, as she and her cousin ran. An arrow took Jafet in the back just as they reached the edge of the woods and Constanza was just too slow dragging him. She left him behind, laughing bandits coming after her. There was a fire ahead, the young girl saw. Someone sitting by it, looking at the slaughter through an opening between trees. She ran towards it, tripping on a root and falling to the feet of slender woman with strange skin and smiling eyes. The bandits followed, one letting out a whistle.

“Lucky night,” he said. “Two for one.”

The woman by the fire seemed amused, ignoring the killers and turning to look at Constanza.

“And who would you be, little Named?”

“I’m not Named,” she denied.

“Hey,” the same bandit as earlier said, “I was talkin’ to-”

There was a spurt of blood and his head went flying.

“Don’t interrupt me,” the stranger said. “What do you do, child?”

The other man bandit backed away, but he was already calling for help. Constanza worried her lip.

“I make a, I…” she stumbled, then a knot came undone in her belly.

The words came naturally to her, along with a shiver.

“I’m a concocter.”

“Concocter,” the stranger mulled.

“Please,” Constanza said. “Please help my family. They’re-”

“Dead, except for the boy,” the woman said. “The last man in the cart just bled out.”

She met the stranger’s eyes.

“Could you have stopped it?”

“Yes.”

Anger surged, but she was powerless. A nothing hunted by many.

“Can you protect me?” Constanza asked.

The woman considered that.

“I have been thinking of settling down,” she mused. “Somewhere in the Woods. So I suppose I could.”

Left unspoken was a question: why should I? The stranger was not moved to protect others, else Constanza’s family would still be alive.

“I’ll work for you,” she said.

“I have no use for subordinates,” the stranger said, then snorted. “Though I suppose I could use a pupil.”

“Then I’ll be that,” Constanza swore. “Until I no longer need you.”

The woman smiled for the first time that night.

“Your name?”

You did not save them, Constanza thought. You get nothing from me, save what you have bought.

“Concocter,” she said, and the monster laughed.

—

The Brocelian loomed ahead, dark and deep and full of terrors. Alexis backed away from Elderman Xavier as he approached. He looked at her with irritating.

“Don’t blame me, girl, blame the Gods,” Elderman Xavier said. “You drew the lot, your fate is in their hands.”

Already they had painted her face silver and rubbed chalk powder into her clothes, but now the old man pressed the last part of it into her hands: a shoddy hunting bow painted silver, along with eight arrows. Behind the elderman the rest of the villagers stood with torches and spears, waiting for the hunt to begin. None looked pleased, but this was old ritual. Their ancestors had brought it from Atalante with them, though Alexis’ father had said it’d grown more savage out here in the west. The Brocelian drew out the best and worst of men.

“You know the rules,” Elderman Xavier said. “You have to keep going deeper until dawn. If you turn back before that we’ll have to kill you, the Gods will take offence otherwise. After dawn you can return, Alexis, but only then.”

“They always die,” Alexis bitterly said. “Father said it’s just a blood sacrifice, sending a girl into the woods for monsters to eat so that the crops grow better, that you’re all-”

The slap rang against her cheek and but she bit down on the whimper, gritting her teeth. The elderman glared down at her.

“If your father had been less of a fool, he wouldn’t have gotten himself killed playing fantassin and you wouldn’t have had to draw,” Elderman Xavier said. “You’ve had enough kindnesses from the village, you and your mother. Now you whine when the village asks in turn? I’ll not have it.”

“I hope you all fucking starve,” Alexis hissed, “every last one of you.”

And then she ran into the woods. It was better than getting slapped again. The villagers shouted angrily, because she hadn’t stayed and played out the play they’d made her learn the lines to, but burn them all. Torches followed her as she ran into the dark but they wouldn’t go far. Everyone was scared of what prowled the Brocelian Forest at night, they wouldn’t dare wander out of sight of the fields. She wanted to stay just out of their sight, maybe find a hiding place to sleep in and pretend she’d done their stupid ritual come dawn, but there were… things moving above in the trees. It was moving slowly, coiling around the branches, but it looked large. Heart pounding in fear, clutching her useless bow and stupid arrows, she began to run deeper in. Deeper into the nightmare.

It was like there was something about her scent that was drawing monsters to her. Things crawled and flew and ran, wolves larges as horses and little critters chittering false promises in eerie voices. Alexis ran through the dark woods, knees bleeding from where she had fallen and shivering in cold from when she had jumped into a river to escape a massive snake. Her clothes were torn and something that looked like a fox but with malevolent red eyes had clawed her side – the wound was bleeding black, ugly and painful – but she forced herself to keep moving. If she stopped, even for a moment, they would catch up to her. She had to keep running through the nightmare until she reached dawn.

And as the moon began to descend, she began to think she might have. The monsters weren’t following her anymore. She’d gone through another river and fallen down a rocky slope – her cheek was bruised and she had a black eye – but she couldn’t hear anything behind her anymore. She slowed, risking a look back, and there was nothing. Nothing at all, she finally realized. The woods were eerily silent. Stumbling forward, Alexis found a clearing where tall raised stones stood under moonlight. Instinct told her to stay clear of them and she was glad to follow it. They felt… sad. So deeply sad someone might drown in it. The sensation distracted her long enough she didn’t hear the breathing until it was close.

Something massive stepped out from between the trees. Tall as two men and bristling with anger, the monster looked like a boar. Its tusks were pale, but touched with red: it had killed tonight, and its cruel eyes said it would again. That was why the monsters had stopped, Alexis thought. Something that even they feared waited ahead. She tried to flee back the way she’d come, but the boar was so large there could be no contest. It broke through trees as she ran back up the rocky slope she’d hurt herself slipping on, but her heart seized in her throat as she saw what waited ahead. By the river, rows and rows of small creatures were waiting with cruel pale smiles.

“Safe, safe,” they chittered. “Come, come.”

“Fuck,” Alexis wept.

Was this how she died? Devoured by scavengers or gore by a boar? At the bottom of the slope the boar was waiting for her, huffing mockingly. Alexis has run for so long and now she was just going to die having done nothing?

“No,” she hissed. “No. You want me, you fucking animals? Come and earn it.”

It was a shoddy bow but it was strung, and she nocked the arrow. The boar let out a loud porcine screech but she loosed an arrow, blindly and in a panic. It sunk into an eye in a streak of silver – how, if the arrows weren’t painted? – but the monster only grew furious, smashing rocks as if it meant to destroy the very slope she stood on. Alexis let out a sobbing breath, but it got caught in her throat when a hand was laid on her shoulder. A woman was standing besides her, lovely and cold in the light of the moon.

“So you’re why they’re so riled up,” the stranger said.

“I,” Alexis choked. “You- who are you?”

The question was ignored, the woman withdrawing the hand and looking her up and down.

“Who are you meant to be?” she asked.

Alexis swallowed. The tone had been calm, but something in it warned against refusing to answer the question.

“The silver huntress,” she said, “who founded the city of-”

“-Atalante by hunting all the monsters that lived there over a single night,” the stranger finished, sounding amused. “It has been a whilesince I’ve seen this ritual. And longer since it’s been anything but a harvest fair.”

“It still is,” Alexis tiredly said. “They sent me because the crops have been getting worse for years.”

Below them the monster screeched but somehow she still felt calm.

“What they send you for is never as important as they think,” the woman said. “It’s what you do with it that matters. And what is it you’re going do to, child? Survive the night and return to them?”

“No,” Alexis snarled. “Fuck them. I’ll make my own way.”

The stranger considered her. Stones shook and shattered. The boar would soon be upon them.

“There is a way,” the woman said. “For you to be the victor of this hunt. To kill your beast.”

“And you’ll teach me?” Alexis asked, hope stuck in her throat.

“It would make you my pupil,” the woman said.

“Then I’ll be that,” Alexis replied, fingers tight around her silver bow.

The stranger smiled.

—

Lysander was a slave.

He’d not been born one. He had his feckless mother to thank for that, who’d gotten them all so deeply in debt to a magister that the entire family had been forced to sell themselves into slavery to avoid execution. Lysander didn’t hold much of a grudge for that, in truth. Hardly seemed to be a point when he’d seen her fed to a ravenous chimera. His father and siblings had taken it badly, two speaking unwisely enough they got sent to the fighting pits for it, but Lysander’s own silence had seen Magister Laskaris take a shine to him. Not so much that the man had refrained from what he must consider a jest at the boy’s expense, however: Lysander was now tending to the same beasts that had eaten his mother.

His sisters had been made servants instead, which was a position both lesser and safer. Being one of the slaves who tended to the beasts of the Menagerie was a prestigious position, for it gave rights that slaves in other stations could only dream of, but that came at a cost. Usually, at least on slave a sennight was eaten by one of the more aggressive beasts trying to either feed or wash it. Being the youngest attendant and completely without allies, Lysander found himself given the most dangerous of the assignments repeatedly: the chimeras, the fae, the Praesi tigers and worst of all the drake.

Old Beggar, so named for the white markings that made him looked like he had white beard and hair and his tendency to ask for food even moments after being fed, was the single most vicious creature in all of the Menagerie. It killed on a whim, not just to eat, and whatever sorceries the magisters had used on it to let it survive so far from Levant had made it double in size. It had to be fed five times a day, three if it was a fighting one, and the latter were the days that got people killed. Old Beggar was not above venting its frustrations by impaling servants come to wash its scales before the fight. Which was why, for ten weeks in a row, Lysander was given that assignment.

The first time he had, he’d thought he was going to die. The drake was furious before he ever entered and did not like to be washed besides, so it’d been only moments before he tore through the bucket and slammed Lysander against the wall. Knowing there was nothing he could do, the boy stayed down. Better the poisoned stinger than being ripped apart and eaten still alive. He looked up at the sky through the grid, tiredly waiting for the sting, but it did not come. Old Beggar instead loomed over him, sniffing at his neck. Then it hissed and Lysander, past caring, pushed its head away. The drake chortled, then shuffled away and began wrecking his pen to vent his anger.

Lysander dipped out, picked up another bucket under the baffled stares of his fellow slaves and returned to wash the damned drake. More baffling still, it let him. Magister Laskaris summoned him that night, another few magisters with him. They cast spells on him until a strange-looking woman began to chuckle.

“It’s not a special ability,” she said. “You broke the child, Anandos. Lack of fear pheromones did the trick, Old Beggar did not recognize him as prey.”

Magister Laskaris, fond of his little ironies, made him the designated minder for the drake. Now that’d he proved to have some use, the other slaves began speaking with him. He was not just another corpse-in-waiting, not anymore. Most of it was gossip which he cared little for, but an old woman called Phocia liked to trade his honeycakes for stories of far away. Most of what she knew was from where the beasts of the Menagerie had come from, but that was interesting enough.

“We didn’t catch the fae ourselves,” Phocia told him one day. “They’re from the Waning Woods, originally, but the Magisterium bought them in Mercantis.”

“The fat crooks captured a fairy?” Lysander replied, skeptical.

Phocia shook her head.

“There’s some mad Named who set up shop in the woods,” she said. “Made a settlement she named Refuge near a gate into Arcadia. Calls herself the Lady of the Lake, apparently, and she traded a few favours with the Consortium so they’d help her set up her place. One of them was capturing a few fae for them.”

“What did she make a settlement for?” Lysander asked.

“That’s the funny part,” Phocia said. “Some sort of school for Named and fools, they say. Apparently she teaches anyone who comes if they’ve got the stuff. Overheard some magister who was surprised how many people were taking her up on it.”

“Named and fools, huh,” Lysander murmured.

The seed was planted, though he struggled to burn it out. The idea would not leave him. There were few animals who troubled him in the Menagerie these days, as he’d found he had a knack with them, but it was Old Beggar that he spent most time with. He’d begun to teach the drake tricks when other slaves weren’t looking. Picking up a bucket, walking around in a circle, playing dead. A girl called Axia had seen him, once, but pushing her into the pen had taken care of that. The drake was no less vicious than before with people other than him. It wouldn’t be enough, though. Old Beggar did not obey the young slave, not really. It was more like indulgence in exchange for treats.

There had to be a way, Lysander thought, to convince the drake to help him. Did it not also want to leave this place, to be freed of chains? Except they weren’t the same, not really. Old Beggar was prized, pampered and gloried. Used only to slaughter fighters for the glory of the Magisterium. Lysander was the kind of thing the Magisterium stepped on without noticing while going through its day. Not all slaves were equal. And that, that angered him. In a way he’d not felt in years. The pit should be the same for everyone: rats one and all, writhing in the same dark. That even in Below’s chamber pot there would be favourites rankled. So when Lysander entered the pen and Old Beggar hissed in displeasure at his nap being interrupted, the boy went still.

He left the pen, abandoning the bucket on the ground, and headed for the stables. There he grabbed an instrument from the racks and returned to the drake. No, Lysander had never learned how to convince others to help him. That was not the lesson of the Menagerie. But down here, he had learned much of the nature of chains. The whip he’d taken trailed against the floor, Old Beggar eyeing it warily. Lysander might not know how to convince this beast, but he knew how to be its master. The whip cracked, the drake screamed, and the same day the two of them broke out of the Menagerie and the entire cursed city hosting it. They flew north.

The Beastmaster figured that if he kept heading that way long enough, he was bound to run into Refuge.

—

Refuge was a nowhere place, but it was a paradise compared to Mercantis. Indrani might own nothing but clothes on her back, but right now she was still the richest she’d ever been: for the first time in her life she owned herself. The Lady had cut her loose not long after bringing her here, indifferent to Indrani’s worries.

“There’s a shed downhill with tents and supplies that everyone can take from,” Ranger said.

Indrani nodded.

“And what are the rules here?” she asked.

The Lady of the Lake flicked her nose.

“Don’t piss me off,” she said. “What else would there be?”

There must have been maybe a hundred people in Refuge, laid out haphazardly in clumps where people had dug fire pits and raised tents or shacks, and Indrani learned after finally finding the damned supply shed that few of them were friendly- except for the few merchants from Mercantis, which were a little too friendly. Indrani kept her hand on her knife whenever she saw them. She wasn’t going back to the city, she wasn’t. She dragged her tent as far away from them as possible, heading out in the direction she’d seen Ranger disappear in. A dozen tents were already there, most with fires of their own. There seemed to be an unspoken division. One side a girl with orange hair was reading a book, another was glaring at everyone while she fletched arrows and two dark-haired boys were talking quietly as they skinned rabbits from a pile. On the other side, a dozen youths from the Free Cities were talking quickly to each other in Aenian-peppered tradertongue.

Hesitating, Indrani pitched her tent on the side with fewer people. Or tried to, at least. For some reason it insisted on staying crooked even when she hammered in the stakes just right. The two girls were laughing at her, but one of the boys rose to his feet with a sigh. Her hand dropped to her knife when he came close.

“No need for that,” the boy snorted. “You’re the Lady’s latest, right? I’m the Nightingale.”

Indrani stared blankly at him.

“The famous singer and duellist?” the boy said. “The greatest lover in Procer?”

Indrani looked him up and down, noting the scrawny shoulders, and the stare turned distinctly skeptical.

“Look,” the boy sighed, “just call me Raymond. Do you want help with your tent or not?”

“What’d you want in exchange?” Indrani bluntly asked.

“Well, someone learned the lay of this place real quick,” Raymond snorted. “Nothing onerous. Just your story, how you got here.”

Indrani bit her lip.

“Tell me about the camp too,” she said, “and it’s a deal.”

She insisted he pay up front, which was just good sense, and they sat on a log afterwards after he’d gone for parchment and a quill. Deciding to start simply, Indrani asked about the youths from the Free Cities first.

“Oh, them?” Raymond said with disdain. “Just a few enterprising souls from Helike. Rumour has it one of them is a prince in disguise, but I’ve my doubts. Now and then we get their like, noble’s children who stick it out here a few weeks so they can gloat about surviving the Lady’s training when they go back to their cushy homes.”

“So the people on our side are different,” Indrani said.

“Well spotted,” the boy cheerfully said. “Your truly is known as the Nightingale, of course-”

“It sounds like a girl’s name,” Indrani mused.

“It is a singer’s Name,” Raymond stiffly insisted. “With a hallowed history, which just happens to have been mostly held by women as a matter of pure coinci-”

“So who’re the others?” Indrani cheerfully interrupted.

The boy sighed.

“My good friend over there grimly ignoring us is the Beastmaster,” Raymond said. “Taciturn fellow, not much use for us. The glaring beauty over there is the Silver Huntress – the Lady’s favourite, but also a girl of… strong opinions. I would not suggest approaching her without reason.”

Raymond sounded like someone who’d already got socked in the stomach for trying that, Indrani decided. Her eyes flicked to the last of them, the girl with the wildly coloured hair. Her eyes were the same orange, Indrani realized with the start. Was it fae blood?

“And last is the Concocter,” the Nightingale said. “She’s good for trades but she doesn’t fight. Good person to ask when you’re getting started – she’ll loan you in exchange for a favour down the line.”

“Loan what?”

“Everything,” the boy grinned. “That’s the beauty of this place, Indrani. You get what you earn or what you trade for. What is it you’re good at?”

Singing and dancing, Indrani almost replied. The Three Dances and Seven Tongues they’d been teaching her. But that’d been the slave, not her.

“I’m learning to use a bow,” she said instead.

Raymond hummed.

“I’d advise learning to hunt,” he said. “Fresh meat is always prized. And Lysander will teach you how to skin animals in exchange for the first set of skins, I’d imagine. He did with me.”

She eyed him curiously.

“Why are you here, anyway?” Indrani asked. “You don’t seem like the sort.”

“I am a man of the world, I go where the wind takes me,” the Nightingale airily replied, then wilted under her unimpressed stare.

He cleared his throat.

“I am learning the sword,” Raymond admitted. “It so happens that there are several ten-sun duellists after my life for… various reasons. I will learn all I can from the Lady of the Lake and return to meet my fate when I am a better match for it.”

Indrani considered that.

“Good luck,” she said, and found she meant it.

“Pshaw to luck,” the Nightingale dismissed. “Give me a story instead, yours! I am in dire need of a tale worth penning a song for.”

He was enthusiastic about writing down what she thought was a rather boring story, though he was particularly interested in how Ranger had taken her from the city and the Consortium. He was muttering to himself as he flounced away, disappearing into his tent from which the sounds of a harp being plucked at began to waft. Some of the fires around had food roasting on them but no one seemed inclined to share, so Indrani wandered back down into the larger camp. There were some nuts and berries in the supply shed, which she helped herself to. It filled her stomach, but she needed to find a way to eat better soon. To her relief, though, the Lady of the Lake emerged from the woods in the afternoon. Raymond had told her Ranger had a hidden mansion somewhere further in where no one but her and her foreign lover who infrequently visited ever went.

The Ranger sat by a fire and everyone gathered to her, Indrani included. It was not a lesson she offered, though, but something more pragmatic.

“Tomorrow I’ll lead a hunt,” Ranger said. “Southeast, where the hydra’s been lairing. Anyone with a bow and a blade can come, but we’ll be going to my pace and everyone who falls behind gets left behind.”

None even tried to argue with that.

“Do well and you get taught,” Ranger said, eyes sweeping everyone. “Same terms as always.”

Indrani did not know these terms, but already knew the answer she’d get if she asked about them. What did she have to give in exchange? Not much, that was the trouble, but she needed to go on that hunt. The Lady had barely glanced at her since bringing her to camp and hadn’t Indrani just been warned? If she fell behind she would be left behind. She knew better than to try to follow as she was, though. She had a sum of three arrows, a bow with a single string and a knife that hadn’t been sharpened in a week. She didn’t even have a cloak.

Indrani decided to approach the only other archer she’d seen, the Silver Huntress, and request a loan for a favour. The girl glanced at her and, before she could even speak, tossed one of the arrows she’d just fletched her way. Indrani caught it.

“That’s all you get from me,” the Silver Huntress said. “Keep at this and the next one will come through my bow.”

The Beasthunter – no, Beastmaster wasn’t it? – was only slightly more friendly. At his feet a large hound with odd-coloured eyes loyally sat.

“You’re not Named,” the boy said. “Raymond says you’re getting there, but he’s been wrong before and I don’t trade with… visitors. Come back when you have more than a beggar’s bowl to offer.”

Swallowing her pride, she went back to Raymond. The Nightingale was apologetic but firm.

“I’ve only been able to trade supplies for myself,” he said. “I can’t spare any, Indrani, and I need to be on that hunt. It’s the way to get sword lessons without relying on the Lady’s mood.”

He let her use his whetstone out of what she knew to be pity, but she was not in a position to be proud. Her knife would be sharp, at least. At last Indrani followed the advice Raymond had given her and sought the Concocter. With that orange hair, she was hard to miss. Supposedly she had a shack of her own deeper in the woods, for brewing, but she spent much of her time in camp. It was safer here. The other girl closed the book when Indrani approached, face polite but eyes flat.

“You’re not a known quantity, so you don’t get to trade favours,” the Concocter immediately said. “If you need food or advice I’ll take labour for it. I’ve need of firewood and water from the lake.”

“It’s arrows I want,” Indrani admitted. “And a cloak to borrow. Maybe some better boots if there are any to have.”

The other girl studied her a moment.

“You’re trying to follow on the hunt tomorrow,” she said.

Indrani nodded. The book opened again, a sharp sound of dismissal.

“Come back when you’ve found more reasonable expectations,” the Concocter said. “This is a waste of my time.”

“I-“

“I said,” the Concocter sharply interrupted, “you should leave.”

Indrani was itching to punch her in the face, but… No, she thought. But what? Indrani had asked what the rules were here, and she’d gotten little more than a shrug. What was stopping her from taking a swing if she wanted to? Always, in Mercantis, there had been something above her. If she stepped out of line she would be beaten or scolded or starved, and so she did not step out of line. Now though, there was nothing except in the way except a question. Back then, when she’d stopped, had the consequences just been an excuse? A lie she told herself about why she didn’t fight back. A reason to stay at the bottom, where you didn’t have to live with your decisions because you made none.

Indrani breathed out, closed her fist, and punched the Concocter in the face.

She wasn’t a great fighter but neither was the other girl and she had surprise on her side. Indrani got bruises and a black eye but she beat the other girl until she stopped fighting back, bruised and bleeding. Then she limped up somehow feeling the Lady’s gaze on her and took the Concocter’s stuff. Everything except her clothes, and then she went in the girl’s tent and took the potions there too. She went down in the camp and traded books for arrows, a cloak and new pair of boots. The potions she kept, stashing them in her tent. What was the Concocter do, fight her and lose again? She learned the answer to that just after sundown, when two people came into her tent.

The Silver Huntress and the Beastmaster beat her bloody, stopping shy of breaking bone but nothing else, and took everything back. Indrani was left moaning on the floor of her tent, without even the boots she’d traded for. When morning came she could barely move, much less go on the hunt, but somehow Indrani did not despair. She felt, if anything, invigorated. Choices and consequences, huh.

She could get used to living this way.

—

John wasn’t sure when it’d begun.

When he’d found the book, he figured. He could barely read but the drawings had been beautiful and one name had drawn his attention: Sir Erland Halls, the Hunter. That was his name too! Halls. His family barely used it anymore, said it was a bad time to make that sort of claim, but it was engraved on the threshold of their house. Erland Halls, he learned, had been a famous knight in the old days. He’d slain great beasts and a dragon, ridden out to the gates of faraway Aksum and dared its rulers to send their worst at him. For a whole day he’d slain one monster after another and returned home unbeaten. He’d died, the book said, killing a villain called the Diabolist during some ancient invasion of the Dread Empire.

John asked his parents about it, but they told him to forget he’d ever seen the book before putting it away in mother’s locked office. It just wouldn’t leave his mind, though, the story. So he waited until father came back from having a few drinks with friends one night and asked again, all subtle-like.

“We’re descended from him,” Father proudly said. “From his third son. Our line’s never been noble, but blood is blood.”

He then grimaced.

“Mind you, Johnny, don’t go talking about it,” he said. “The Marquess might rule but the Eyes are everywhere. The last thing we need is for them to think we have… sympathies.”

That should have been the end of it, but somehow it wasn’t. The story stayed with him, like a stone in his boot. John hated cloth and hated selling, which boded ill for the only child of drapiers. Most of his days he spent with other restless youths in the streets, avoiding his lessons, but even that was losing its satisfaction. Wasn’t there more to do? Sir Erland had been a knight and John couldn’t even ride a horse, but that wasn’t the part of the story that’d mattered. Erland had been a hunter. He’d slain beasts, done deeds worthy of being done. So John decided to try the same.

He was no good with a bow and kind of middling with a sword – Mother thought he might try for a position in the Marquess’ service so she encouraged him at first – but John found that he could make a spear sing. All he needed now was something to hunt. Vale was deplorably bereft of anything that could even remotely qualify as an adventure, so he went outside. Hunting game at first, paying huntsmen with his pocket money so they’d take him. When he got good enough he wandered off on his own, looking further and further. Boars. Wolves. Bears.

He brought home the prizes and even got himself tattooed to celebrate. Ancient Levantine tribal marks, the artist assured him. They looked pretty sick. Still, something was missing. The hunts were starting to lose their allure even as he kept at them fervently, until one day he found strange tracks. Like a wolf’s but larger, and… erratic. The creature did not avoid villages the way a wolf would. He went off in pursuit, through a thunderstorm and in the wake of what looked like a fight between the Legions and bandits, only to find his quarry: it was a greatwolf, those massive beasts orcish wolf riders used for battle.

This one was alone and half mad with grief, its rider nowhere in sight, and it attacked viciously. The fight was brutal but John prevailed by the skin of his teeth, taking hard wounds over his torso. Strangely enough, though, they weren’t paining him all that much. So it was on his feet that he stood when another young man found him in the hills where he’d made camp after skinning his prize. The other boy looked at the dead great wolf angrily, pulling at his furs.

“You did this?”

“I did,” John proudly said.

“Why?”

He considered that, for a long moment.

“Because I am a hunter,” John finally replied.

Simple but no less true for it. The air shivered with the weight of what he’d just said, and John wondered if his perseverance had somehow reached the Heavens. The other young man only looked more pissed, before suddenly sighing.

“I wanted it, but you got to it first,” he said. “I am the Beastmaster, Hunter.”

John had no bloody idea what was going on, so he smiled as amicably as he could.

“A pleasure to meet you, Beastmaster,” he said.

The other boy snorted, as if doubting it.

“Slim pickings out here,” he said. “You ever been to Refuge?”

This, John Halls decided, had the ring of fate to it.

“Tell me more,” the Hunter smiled.