Chapter 44 The Road to Sylvet
The Cryptic lunged at Rolan with razor claws, swiping for his belly. With a yelp, Rolan twisted away, then channeled his momentum into a spin, his sword slashing.
“Are you going to kill the thing,” Luc called, “or dance with it?”
“Are you going to help me,” Rolan hollered back, “or just stand around scratching your—ugh!”
A wad of gooey Cryptic saliva splattered across his face. Goddess, he hated that.
The monster hissed, preparing to spit at him again.
It puffed up like a bird, ruffling scales instead of feathers, its bulk taking up most of the path.
It was a Rank Two, according to Luc, but if you asked Rolan, it was really a small Rank Three.
It had to be. It was the first Cryptic he’d met that could spit its venom.
Trees rose and bent overhead on both sides, creating a leafy green tunnel. This far from any city, deep in the forest, there would be no one to help them if things went south.
Still Luc leaned on his sword, arms folded, letting Rolan do all the work. Behind him Apple stamped a hoof and snorted, as if eager to lend his aid to the fight, but Luc kept the horse’s reins wrapped around his wrist.
The Cryptic spit again, a webby, slimy loogie of poison and stink. It struck Rolan on his chest.
“I really wish you would stop doing that,” Rolan snarled.
He charged the monster.
It slashed high with its fore claw, but Rolan threw himself into a controlled slide, one leg stretched ahead, the other bent beneath his hips. He jabbed his sword upward, missing the Cryptic’s aleth by a hair.
“Blast it!”
“Language, Rolan,” Evaine warned him.
Seriously? He was fighting for his life—for all their lives—and all the apothecary could do was scold his manners?
“Come on, Rolan!” Anaya called. “You can do it!”
She and Evaine stood well behind Luc, equally unhelpful. Supper baaed anxiously at the end of his leash, which Anaya held tightly in her hand.
“Calm your breathing,” Luc counseled as Rolan and the Cryptic circled one another.
“If you’d just let me—”
“No Arcana.” Luc had been firm on this. “If you rely on it to win your fights, what happens when you run out?”
Rolan growled, annoyed that Luc was right. He had to win this on his own merit.
“How do you beat a Cryptic with ranged attacks, Rolan?” Luc asked.
His thoughts flickered through all the hours of his training. “You close the distance and disable its primary attack.”
“And how do you spell attack?”
Through clenched teeth, Rolan muttered, “A!”
He rushed the Cryptic again, barely dodging its next glob of venomous spit.
“T!”
This time, instead of letting his momentum carry him past the monster, he stopped directly in front of it and whipped out a dagger.
“T!”
Slamming the dagger up through the creature’s vulpine muzzle, he drove the blade through its lower and upper jaws, pinning its maw shut. No more spitting for you, ugly.
“A!”
The Cryptic retaliated with a scrape of claws over Rolan’s dagger arm.
He hissed as pain scorched through his shoulder, but did not let go.
He rolled, gripping the dagger hard and pulling the Cryptic down with him, the creature’s weight momentarily crushing him.
But he continued the roll and popped up to his knee, with the Cryptic—its mouth still skewered by his dagger—now on its back.
Legs and claws flailed wildly, trying to take out Rolan’s eyes or throat.
“C!” Rolan yelled as he drove his sword into the Cryptic’s core and leaned on it with all his weight.
With a croak, the monster spasmed and went still.
Rolan fell back, panting and sweaty, his arm on fire. He couldn’t stop the grin of triumph that spread over his face as the Cryptic deliquesced, scales and claws and tough hide melting into blue smoke.
A tooth dropped onto the road, gleaming with Arcana.
Rolan picked it up, tossed it, and caught it again, smiling at Luc.
His master waited, one eyebrow raised.
“K,” Rolan finished. Then he gave an elaborate bow, drawing applause from Anaya. She beamed at him before reaching for her apothecary satchel and rushing to apply truth salve to his torn arm.
“That’ll do,” said Luc, sheathing his sword. “Once you’re patched up, we move. We can reach Sylvet by dusk if we push hard.”
Rolan’s wounds were not deep, and he sat on a log while Evaine talked Anaya through the bandaging and salves that would keep his arm from festering. When it was done, he grinned at Anaya, and she grinned back.
“Who’d have ever thought?” she murmured. “Us on the way to Sylvet. You an Arcanist’s apprentice. I an apothecary’s.”
“You saw it,” he replied. “Maybe not the details, but you always saw further than I could.”
She turned her face away, but not before he saw the blush in her cheeks. “Let’s go. And try not to get yourself killed again, will you?”
“Give me some credit.” He took Supper’s leash as Anaya walked away, following Luc and Evaine down the road. “Did you see how I did that slide attack? It was awesome. And then the trick with the dagger—”
“If you don’t stop bragging,” said Anaya calmly, “I will dose you with toadroot. It will make your tongue swell so much, you won’t be able to speak for a week.”
“Evaine,” Rolan said, “your apprentice is bullying me again. Are you just gonna let her get away with it?”
Evaine snorted. “I’ll grind the toadroot and hand it to her myself.”
Rolan tugged Supper’s leash and took the lead, keeping a wary eye on the trees. As the day wound on, their path traced uphill until they reached a bald jut of rock that gave them one final view of Crisanth. They paused to drink water and eat the baguette Evaine had packed.
“Hey, Evaine,” Rolan said as he chewed, “this isn’t one of Finkface’s breads, is it?”
“The man does bake a divine loaf,” she replied.
He chuckled, picking crumbs off his shirt to eat and remembering too late the Cryptic slobber smeared on his clothes. Gagging and retching, he spit the bread out into the bushes while Anaya rolled her eyes.
After he caught his breath and rinsed his mouth with water, he gazed back at Crisanth, wondering if this would be the last time he saw his birthplace.
His pa was somewhere in that city, probably holed up for a while.
Rolan had broken with his pa once and for all, and there would be no going back to him now.
Whatever the future held for Rolan, Rabb Strider would not be in it.
Rolan searched himself, gingerly probing his own heart for any lingering regret.
He found none.
After the battle with the Cryptic, Luc had gone off on his own to scour the city for Rabb, Hoff, or any of their cohorts.
He’d found none of them, and Rolan knew the Arcanist was worried.
Rolan suspected this had something to do with the way his pa’s crew had used Arcana, eating the relics to draw on their power.
But Luc would speak no more of it, saying only that he needed to consult with someone who knew more of the subject.
“Who do you think will be the next duke?” Rolan asked.
“The king will send someone,” said Evaine with a shrug.
“I still think it should have been Luc,” said Anaya.
“An Arcanist can’t be a duke,” said Rolan. “It’s part of our oaths, you know. We can’t hold any kind of office.”
Our. We. The words still felt strange on his tongue. At night he lay and whispered the truth into the dark, trying to make it feel true: I am an Arcanist.
Technically, Luc had pointed out, Rolan wasn’t an Arcanist yet.
Though his oaths bound him, he hadn’t officially graduated from his apprenticeship or taken some sort of test the Arcane Council made all apprentices take.
If Luc had any say in the matter, which of course he did, Rolan wouldn’t be a full-fledged Arcanist for many years to come.
As Luc liked to remind him in his customary growl, “Oaths alone do not make an Arcanist.”
Barely visible in the distance, like a fleck of black against the green hills, stood Luc’s old house.
Rolan felt a pang. Crisanth he could leave behind without regrets, but the crooked little house had come to feel like home to him.
He resented whatever Arcanist the Council would send to live there next, even as he pitied them.
They would not be welcomed to Crisanth, that was for sure.
Despite the duke’s abdication, and Luc and Rolan’s heroic battle against the giant Cryptic, the truth was no match for the city’s rumor mill.
By the time night had fallen and the dust had settled, half the city believed Luc had lured the Cryptic to the palace to dethrone the duke, while the other half believed Luc had been the Cryptic and had destroyed half the city to punish the people for their secrets.
Hoff and Rabb Strider’s attempts to discredit Luc had been thorough and effective, and there was no love for the Arcanist in Crisanth, nor for his apprentice.
The decision to leave Crisanth for good had been an easy one for them all.
Evaine and Anaya were headed to Sylvet to enroll Anaya in apothecary school.
And Luc had heard the city was in need of an Arcanist. It made sense for them to go together.
And it put them closer to the Arcane Council’s mysterious headquarters, where Luc wanted to consult with the Council about Rabb and Hoff.
Whatever it was they’d done, Rolan knew it worried Luc even more than the man would let on.
As much as Rolan wanted to leave that terrible day in the past, he feared it would not be as simple as that.
He could only hope some other Arcanist would deal with Hoff, Rabb, and the rest, and leave him and Luc out of it.
And the Council headquarters was where Rolan would need to go if he wanted to pass the Arcane Trials—the tests that determined whether an apprentice was ready to advance in his training. He felt uneasy about that, wondering if the tests might include math.
But he also suspected that this wasn’t the only reason Luc had decided to leave Crisanth.
When Rolan had asked his master if his decision had anything to do with going wherever Evaine went, the man had turned red and growled at him to go muck out Apple’s stall one last time. The look on the man’s face had been entirely worth the extra chore, in Rolan’s opinion.
“Do you think we’ll stay in Sylvet forever?” he asked, staring off toward the east. The opposite direction of Crisanth, a land as strange and mysterious to him as the stars.
“Maybe,” said Luc. “Maybe not. Arcanists often wander from post to post.”
“Because they get driven out, like we did?”
“Because wherever there are people, there are secrets,” Luc replied.
Rolan nodded, knowing where that led.
Where humans kept secrets, Cryptics grew legs.
And somebody had to stop them.