Chapter 21
They departed Turnbuckle nearly as they’d entered it—in the middle of the night, under a shedload of rain.
There were a few key differences, however.
This time, Fern was the one driving the cart, alone—after almost foundering in Fuckery Wallow—hunched in her cloak with the hood up, and wet to the whiskers. Every other instant, she anticipated Quillin’s voice calling out and asking her where in all eight hells she was going in such a hurry.
Worryingly, she wasn’t positive she wouldn’t answer if he did.
“Beats shaving pencils,” chirped Breadlee from her cloak pocket. “Back on the thrilling road to adventure, am I right? Cold, wet, thrilling adventure!”
Fern peered into the moonless darkness as they slogged out of the village and up a muddy rise into a birch grove.
She’d never driven a cart in her life, but Bucket didn’t seem to need a lot of leadership, thank gods.
Checking over her shoulder to reassure herself that nobody was following, she unshrouded the lantern on the buckboard beside her and blinked in the sudden light.
When they’d passed over the peak of the hill and the glowing windows behind them were no longer visible, she pulled awkwardly on the reins, and Bucket dutifully came to a sloppy halt, the wheels of the cart slithering through the muck.
“Come on, come on,” muttered Fern, seizing the lantern and holding it high. The birch trunks cast twitching bars of shadow into the night. The rain pattered on her hood and splashed on Bucket’s flanks, the only sound she could hear.
She thought of the cozy room in the inn. Of sitting beside Quillin in the stable, of the warmth of his fingers on hers. Of running away from something safe and good and possible.
Then, from the emptiness beyond her lantern’s reach, Astryx threaded her way through the birches, her oilskin cloak bulging awkwardly on one side. In her hand, Nigel’s bare blade glimmered in the yellow glow.
She slipped and skidded down a slope, and then dashed up the near side of the gully through long grass slicked down by the rain. She produced Zyll from within the cloak. The goblin blinked in the sudden light.
“No followers?” asked Astryx.
“Not that I could tell, but—” Fern shrugged helplessly at the rain.
“I don’t like it, my lady,” groused Nigel. “Absconding in the night? You should be marching proudly in the day’s light, and let the hells welcome any who dare to hinder you!”
Fern held the lantern higher. “Oh, that’s a fabulous idea,” she hissed.
“Then she can either kill or injure anybody in the way, and every bounty hunter within a hundred leagues will know exactly where Zyll is, which direction she’s heading, and who has her.
It’ll make it so much easier for them to ambush us. ”
“Hush,” said Astryx, sheathing Nigel even as he squawked about how damp he was. She leapt easily up onto the buckboard next to Fern and deposited Zyll between them both.
Before the elf could reach for them, Zyll snatched up the reins, snapped the leather briskly, and hollered, “Hup hup, Buckley boy!”
Bucket got moving again, as bewildered as anybody.
Astryx and Fern shared a look over the top of Zyll’s sodden mop of hair. The Oathmaiden nodded, a strange expression on her face.
Fern couldn’t help but think that a lot of things were packed into that expression and that nod. Acknowledgment? Gratefulness, maybe.
Respect?
Soggy as hells, cold to the marrow, her tailbone aching, Fern felt something straighten inside her that had been more than a little bit bent.
They disappeared into the night, leaving Turnbuckle behind.
And Quillin, too.
“Merciful Eight, what a relief. Profoundest thanks, my lady. What miserable weather.” Nigel sighed with contentment as Astryx polished him dry with a wad of cotton rag.
They camped beneath an overhang of black basalt beside the road, outside of which the rain poured in a perfect silvery curtain. Smoke fled in tendrils from a small campfire, feeling its way across the rock above them until it escaped into the sodden darkness.
The way had steepened throughout their nighttime flight, the air growing colder until pebbles of sleet sometimes joined the rain.
Fern rubbed her paws together before the welcome light and heat, which reflected off the black stone at her back.
The three of them sat in a half circle, dripping and steaming, while Bucket dozed on his feet under the overhang alongside them.
The cart remained parked out in the downpour, rain sheeting off the waxed tarpaulin.
She couldn’t stop thinking about Quillin. About whether at this very moment she should be traveling in the opposite direction.
About not feeling alone, notwithstanding the company she kept.
Because what did she really know about her companions? How had Quillin put it? Something about what people did being nothing but the nails that held the house together?
She glanced at Astryx, absorbed in oiling Nigel’s gleaming length while Zyll wriggled her toes dangerously close to the flames.
After days on the road, they were still practically strangers. What did she know about them—either of them? Anything at all?
That might not have been fair, since she’d done her part to avoid the looming talk after leaving Bycross. At this point, Fern could only sense a misty silhouette of the person that she thought Astryx was, obscured by her legend and her reticence. She knew a few details, but . . .
“Mostly nails,” murmured Fern.
“What’s that?” the Oathmaiden asked, idly.
Then Fern decided that if she was going to turn fleeing into something more productive, she was going to have to take some fucking action.
While she was fretting over what action meant, however, Astryx surprised her.
“That was well done, by the way.”
“What?”
Astryx held Nigel’s hilt to her eye and peered along his blade, scuffing at his edge. “It was quick thinking on your part. You didn’t freeze up. You were careful. Observant. You guarded your tongue.” She nodded at Fern. “And now we’ve skirted trouble best avoided. It was well done.”
“Oh. Thanks?”
For a wild, ridiculous instant she considered asking Astryx if anything made her laugh or roll her eyes, then came to her senses.
Astryx had just thanked her. She had been useful. If there was a time to press her luck, it was now. And to forget about running off in the rain with handsome strangers, Fern promised herself.
“After Bycross, I was pretty sure you wanted to talk about something,” she said, with elaborate casualness.
The elf stopped attending to Nigel and slowly laid him athwart her crossed legs. She looked about to say something and then didn’t.
“You don’t talk to people very much, do you?” ventured Fern.
A long pause.
“I don’t. Not so much anymore,” said Astryx at last. Then, almost defiantly, “After enough time, it feels like you’ve had all the conversations.”
Fern forged onward. “That must make it more comfortable to avoid them. Have you had this one before?”
The elf blinked, taken aback. Then she surprised Fern again by answering, “Yes.”
“How long ago was that?”
Astryx returned her attention to Nigel. “Before you were born, I’m sure,” she answered, with a hint of something like bitterness. Or regret?
“Is that the last time you traveled with anybody else?”
The elf snorted. “Hardly.” Then, quieter, “Possibly the last time it mattered, though.”
“Ahem. She had me to accompany her, of course,” declared Nigel. “Hardly lacking for fellowship, eh, my lady?”
“That sounds pretty lonely,” said Fern. She ignored the shocked noises of indignation that followed.
Astryx’s smile was bitter now. “That’s the inevitability of a very long life. People come and go, and you remain.”
“It seems a lot more inevitable when you’re traveling alone in the wilderness most of the time,” observed Fern.
“And it’s not like you’re the only elf in the Territory.
Why do you still do it, after all these years?
It doesn’t seem like it’s for glory or songs.
Why not do something else? You’ve got the time. ”
“You suddenly have a lot of questions,” said Astryx, sharply.
Zyll glanced avidly between them.
Fern spread her hands. “I told you every embarrassing thing that’s happened to me in the past few weeks as part of my very stupid crisis of middle age.
Maybe it’s fair I know one or two things about you, too, apart from the fact that you hate being damp?
So, why do you still do it? I sure as hells can’t tell if you like it.
Who could blame you if you didn’t? It’s wet, and lonely, and cold, and the two swordfights I’ve seen you in so far didn’t even seem to elevate your heart rate. So . . . why?”
Astryx’s mouth thinned. “Here you are with me in the cold, wet, darkness. You could have gone home. Somebody’s even interested enough in you to slip a note under your door. So why aren’t you back there?”
Sudden ire prickled Fern. What had begun as an earnest effort to unearth some of Astryx’s character had turned into a wrestling match with a trout.
“Because I can’t go back to the same old thing.
I can hardly breathe thinking about it. That’s what I want to understand.
How can you still be doing it after all this time? ”
Astryx looked equally annoyed, stabbing one knee with a finger.
“This life is like a sword. It’s the tool I know how to use.
I have sharpened it to a keen edge, and it accomplishes the tasks I set it to.
It may cut me from time to time, but I know its value.
If I put it down, what other tool is there to hand? ”
“Oh, hey, can I make a suggestion here?” cried Breadlee, his voice piping from Fern’s cloak pocket. “It’s just when you put it that way, I can’t help but think this clearly rhetorical question has a brilliant answer that maybe you haven’t fully considered yet—”
Fern yanked him from her pocket and hissed, “This is not the time!”
“Indeed! M’lady is right—she has selected precisely the instrument that best suits her life’s work and calling!” Nigel’s voice vibrated with indignation.
“Oh my gods. You don’t know what rhetorical means, do you? Sad.” Breadlee affected unconvincing woe. “Probably the effects of Elder-rust on the mind. I’ve seen it before. Absolutely tragic.”
Zyll leapt to her feet and produced fistfuls of gleaming cutlery. “More shanklings!”
And then the conversation-turned-argument went careening off a bluff and shattered to matchwood on the metaphorical rocks below.
When the Elder Blades had at last been silenced—Nigel in his sheath and Breadlee at the bottom of Fern’s satchel—Astryx glanced around their tiny camp with both hands on her hips, as though looking for something else to set right.
“I think that’s enough conversation for one night,” she said.
Fern sighed and prodded the coals, filled with a foggy regret she couldn’t put a paw on. “I’m sorry.”
Astryx surprised her a third time. “Don’t be. It’s . . . Perhaps we’ll talk about it . . . another time.”
Zyll’s head rose sleepily from the patchwork nest of her coat. “Daylight words.”
She commenced snoring immediately.