1
Emony
"Where… where are we?" Emony asked, shocked, as his eyes adapted to the suddenly weaker light and he saw the pale moon rising above the endless fields of wheat spreading before him. "This isn't… There were no fields… Are we still in the north?"
His thoughts were suddenly interrupted by the sound of Aylard vomiting behind him, and Tiphaine, still wrapped up in her tail. For a moment, he thought he also saw a shiny door there next to them, but it was gone as soon as the thought crossed his mind.
"Gross," irked Lenah, running over and hiding behind Emony, watching the man puke. "But normal. Don't worry, Tiphaine. Humans have a weaker constitution than we do, it always happens."
She was eyeing Emony as she said that last bit. He almost took offense.
Luckily, though, he felt fine. He nodded. "So, where are we?"
"Just west of Terrena, in Hewlet's range. It's the closest spot I've got to Levara."
"Where is my horse?" grumbled Aylard hoarsely, struggling to free himself from Tiphaine's tail, standing up and abruptly tripping over nothing and falling again.
"You're screwed, Aylard. Just let Tiphaine carry you. The horse is a couple hundred miles away."
"Oh, no. Please, no."
"So, this is teleportation. I wasn't ready for it the first time, and it's no different the second," exclaimed Tiphaine, gingerly wrapping herself around the human again.
"Well, get used to it. I feel like hanging around you guys for a bit, but I have no intention of walking unnecessarily. And I hate hiking in heels," Lenah said.
"So, conjure up something else. You obviously can."
Lenah's face contorted as if Emony had just said something obscenely foolish. He decided to shrug it off and stay quiet – she knew what he thought, anyway.
"Yes, I do," she said. "Now carry me. I've brought us three quarters of the way there, the least you could do is cover the rest."
"You're kidding, right? What are you, a hundred and twelve?"
The witch grimaced and beckoned to him with her finger. In an instant, gravity began pulling in a different direction, and he was shooting toward her in freefall. Then he stopped, barely catching himself in front of her, crouching on the ground. She climbed onto his shoulders like she had planned it.
At least she wasn't heavy, Emony thought. She was certainly lighter than Tiphaine, what with her massive, long tail.
Lenah lightly punched the top of his head, apparently having heard the thought. He'd have to be careful, lest she tattle on him. She'd done so many times in the past.
"Fine, then. Let's go. Which way? Of course, you're going to squirm around. Come on, this is serious, Lenah. Lives depend on it.
You already said we can't save those people in Palehome – let's not add to the pile."
Hearing that thought, at least, she stopped messing around for a bit.
2
Aulduyen
He had waited long enough.
Three days were given to Verena's pets to report back any sign of the importance of the village of barbarians up on the mountain, and the man-siren had then said the only place of interest was Gull's Landing, five leagues away, by the frozen sea.
So why wait another day? His queen was waiting for him somewhere out there, and he knew what he had to do to get closer to retrieving her.
Verena had asked him to be patient, to wait for the pets to return from their trip, but that would be pointless. Who knew if they would return in the first place, fearful as they were of his power? Their voices had trembled when they spoke to him, as if he was some dreadful monster. He was not, of course. He had been forced into all of this. All he wanted was his queen.
But now was not the time for mercy. It was time to act. He'd gathered enough strength to bring forth rain again – and with it, the army could make their way to the snows of the mountain, where the solid water could likely sustain them just as the lake did.
Three days of a human march separated him from the nearest source of thralls – he and the puppets he already had could make it there in two. And it was time to do just that. It was bad enough that he couldn't start with Coldbarrow, but his queen would without a doubt be mournful if he did, caring as she was. She would pity even the cowards that had turned their backs on her as she was captured to be executed. No doubt she would pity those barbarians, too, but he still had to move forward.
After she'd return to him, he would right a hundred wrongs for every one that he committed. No, better a thousand. Perhaps that would appease her, if only a little – but thinking of such things now was pointless. Now he had to be cruel, he had to commit those wrongs.
Aulduyen clutched the pearl-laced locket that Imarah had worn on their wedding day. A vision appeared before him – her face, breaking the clear water's surface in that beautiful moment when she said "I do". It was distorted only by the minute flaws of his memory. She was perfect, he knew. She was gazing into his eyes with such happiness she could fill the world with it.
If only time had stopped in that moment.
"I do this for you!" he shouted, staring at her empty spot on the sandy bed they used to share. "Oh, I know… You were afraid of this part of me, I know it! That's why you sang to me so beautifully, to shine a light upon my blackened soul! But without you, my queen… I'm sorry. Black is the only color I know."
He carefully put down the locket upon the spot where she'd laid her head, filling his own with songs of love, the songs he'd been so desperate to hear.
Black tears streaming out of his eyes and tainting the water, he kneeled before the bed one last time before he went to war. "But the black, too, must serve its purpose. You understand, don't you? Love must prevail, my queen. I must have you back."
Two sunsets later, it was the children playing with their dogs outside the wooden village palisade that were the first to spot them. They were dressed in thick furs to keep the cold at bay, happily running around with their pets to keep warm.
Aulduyen imagined they must have been a truly horrific sight, a thousand skeletons and rotting corpses barreling up the snowy mountain towards them with swords in their hands.
The kids began running, their short legs barely taller than the snow, their dogs barking wildly in fear ahead of them, trying to drag them away. Only two out of the fourteen made it behind the frozen walls. The brave men at the gate, fearfully shouting as they were, had waited for them, at least, before closing it.
But it brought no safety.
Aulduyen called forth his power, and from the churning, dark sky above the mountain, a burst of lightning descended to the ground, smashing through the frosted wood and throwing the men who guarded it to the ground, clutching their burned limbs and howling in the pain.
But such pain is nothing, compared to what I endure, he thought. Still, pain was pain, and his queen would not want him to inflict it without purpose. With a swing of his great sword, he struck the ground and launched himself into the air, soaring towards them like a comet. He sliced apart the men and the huts behind them as he landed, and then, only moments later, the puppets were all around them.
Streaming over the collapsed gate, the corpses surged in all directions, as per his orders, attacking every living thing in sight, overpowering them with the strength that was brought to them by strings of magic and water.
Walls, houses and barricades were being shattered everywhere he looked, the shields of warriors falling as the men died, blood staining the snow. Panicked screaming of every variety sounded over the thralls' rampage, overpowered only by the rolling of the thunder overhead.
Chaos quickly consumed the battlefield. After surveying the carnage for a few minutes, Aulduyen noticed the living held strong in a single spot, destroying his thralls with battleaxes and hammers when they came close. Aulduyen had them stay away and finish off the other survivors instead. He'd not lose his queen's soldiers for nothing.
Seeing the dead stop charging towards them for a moment, the three men, protecting a woman and child, ran towards a small building by the palisade. A stable, by the look of it. They trembled in fear as they noticed him approach. One of them grabbed a bow from the ground and loosed arrow after arrow in his direction. Four, he avoided, as it was no trouble to do so, another two he swatted away with his hand, the last, he let pierce his heart.
The men continued gazing upon him in terror as he approached them.
"Dad!" the child screamed, already up on the horse with the woman. That one word, he understood. One of the men was shouting something back in that foreign language of theirs. Aulduyen stopped and stood patiently before them in the snow, grasping his sword and planting it in the ground before taking the arrow out of his heart, letting them have their precious moment.
The apparent father, seeing him, turned to face him suddenly after shouting something to the woman and child. "Please," he begged in Aulduyen's tongue, in a harsh accent his mind found distasteful. "Please. Them… Free."
Then, as the two other men joined the first with hammers and axes in hand, the woman and child attempted to gallop away. Aulduyen took up his sword again.
The village had been completely consumed by his puppets within a half-hour. A fire had started, spilling forth from the fallen torches and cooking pots strewn about the settlement before reaching the huts. The frosted wood was crackling and hissing, blackening with every passing second. The thatch roofs and tents threw flames high in the air, warming the cold mountain. The screaming had stopped. He had the thralls bring the dead to him, laying them to rest on the snow for a few moments before their bodies could be used.
Looking over the corpses, he saw that one – the woman, the one that had tried to escape with her child, had not yet been taken by oblivion. She was gurgling blood, her stomach split open where his sword had slashed through her. She was in pain – but it would only be seconds now.
He knelt beside her and gently brushed away her hair from her eyes, attempting to comfort her in her last moments.
"Imarah?! Is that you?!" he suddenly shouted, seeing her eyes.
Her eyes – they had that color. But no… No. The shape was wrong, and everything else was too. She was not his queen. Still – she had her eyes.
"Rest, woman," he said softly, calming himself. "Worry not, death comes for you all. With your sacrifice, a queen without compare shall be freed from her gilded cage. Now go. Go and join your son."
Her eyes were starting to flitter shut. He did not know if she had understood him. Probably not – but in any case, she was gone. Aulduyen stood up and walked away, towards the center of the pile of corpses. He lifted his hands towards the stormy sky.
"Arise!"
3
Tiphaine
The world had become a pale shade of white. It was an empty void as far as Tiphaine's mind could see. There was nothing there, no smells, no wind, nor any sort of presence at all, except her and the vipers on her head.
A pool of black slowly appeared before her, though, staining the white ground.
Strange tendrils of magic corrupted the white nothingness she stood on, and began to spread, gain shape, and become three-dimensional.
They rose from the ground, shaping themselves into a human form. The black made way to blue, and after a minute, it was Lenah she saw standing before her.
While she was frozen, not knowing how to move through the nothingness, the witch finished gaining her pretty form, and her blue lips stretched into a smile as she walked closer.
"Beautiful mind you've got here," she said. "It's just how I remember it. I hope you don't mind, I thought we might spend some time together while we sleep."
"We're… in my mind?" she asked, forming the words. She couldn't feel her mouth move at all.
"Yes. We've been here quite a few times before, don't you remember?"
"No."
Lenah shrugged. "Well, I can't blame you. For you, dreams fade quickly after they are dreamt. It's quite tragic, really. We can do so many things in here, but soon after you wake up, you'll forget all about them. Or even if you remember, you'll think – it was just a dream…"
"I do forget dreams pretty quickly. Unless I hold on to them deliberately, or write them down…"
"That's good! But you know, it may be best if you don't hold on to this one. I thought we might take another look through your memories. I remembered something from the last time we did this, and I need to have another look. You might not like it."
"Have we really done this before?"
"Yes. Many times, over the years. And I've done it with Emony, too, but you don't want to know what we were doing in his mind…"
"Hey."
The next moment, she felt something distinctly wrong. Like something really, really… bad… was clawing through the inside of her head, pulling something out. A second later, however, the feeling was gone, and a giant bookcase stood in front of her, reaching for the sky, thousands of tomes littering it and filling in the white expanses of the emptiness.
"Hm… where to start…"
As Lenah took one of the books off a shelf and looked through it, the whiteness of the world flashed in its entirety to life, revealing a scene Tiphaine had witnessed many cycles ago. It was flickering, fading out for moments at a time before coming back and flickering again. She recognized it. She saw her mother's face smiling down at her as she wrapped herself around her arm. She was so small, she barely made it from her hand to her elbow. Her vision was blurry. There were tears in her eyes – the sound of crying filled her mind, and then a male voice – her dad, comforting her.
"I've seen this one before. It was a few years before you inherited the Eyes," Lenah said. "You were so cute. You still are, of course, but back then..."
"You don't know what I look like now," Tiphaine murmured. She'd heard it before, that she was beautiful, from many nervous humans trying to curry favor with her so she wouldn't "eat" them. "You haven't seen my face in months, Lenah."
"Do you think your veil followed you here? I can see your face right now, dummy.
Tiphaine's hand shot up to her head, making sure it wasn't true. She had no ravenwood on her. If her face really was exposed, her friend, looking at her, would be stuck petrified, but…but that wasn't happening. The witch wasn't turning to stone. She stared over at her, confused.
"Like I said, this is just a dream. They're not your real eyes."
"Can I… can I see my face, then? I haven't seen it in a while, either."
The feeling of undivided wrongness overcame her again. The next moment, a mirror stood before her, and she was gazing, still afraid that she might turn to stone, into her own green eyes. It was the first time in about a decade since she'd seen their color, since she'd only been able to see them when they were stone. Emony had told her about them, but… they really were the same shade of green as her tail and hair-vipers.
"I'll leave you to it," Lenah laughed. "Unfortunately, there's no use using makeup here, it won't follow you to the real world. But that really is what you look like, Tiphaine, minus any dirt and foreign elements."
She eyed the eyebrows and nose she'd always been afraid to look at and made a few different facial expressions. She felt that maybe, just maybe, she might really have been able to compare to mermaid Emony, though that was a weird comparison to make.
The whiteness of the world flittered to life again. Lenah was watching another scene from her childhood. It was far clearer and in more detail, with much less flickering. She recognized it instantly, though she wished she hadn't. If only the memory had been less familiar. But it was one she remembered every day.
She was slithering across tall stones with her human father, still just a little girl of nine cycles. Her tiny fangs were freely poking out of her mouth, her hair-vipers biting the air in excitement. Her dad was unwrapping a large piece of cloth onto a warm boulder and letting her sun herself on it as he unpacked their lunch.
And then… the vision violently flickered. A single flash of lightning covered the sky.
"The Eyes," said Lenah, looking at young Tiphaine with pity.
She was reaching for that piece of bread her dad was holding out to her, laughing, when his hands turned gray. Slowly, her happiness turned to confusion and fear as she began crying in front of her suddenly deathly still dad, hugging him desperately, pleading with him to move. But he couldn't.
And she couldn't move him. She was far too small, so, still crying, she sobbed to him that she'd get help, before scampering through the forest as quickly as she could to find her mom. All around her, wherever she looked, birds were falling out of the sky, turned to stone.
And when she finally reached her mother, who was hanging up a sheepskin onto a string beside their little house, unaware of what was happening… it happened to her, too.
The older Tiphaine, watching the scene unfold in front of her, got goosebumps all over her cold skin and looked away. She couldn't watch any more. The scene stopped moving forward.
"I'm sorry," said Lenah, hurrying towards her and pulling her into an embrace. "I don't want to make you relive this. It's just… What comes next, it may be important."
"You mean Westmire?" Tiphaine asked. "You know what I did there. Just the name says it all, it's the city of statues!"
"I know even more than you do about what happened in Westmire, Tiphaine, but no, not that. I meant right after this. I'm so sorry."
"Then... then go on. Memory, go on," Tiphaine sobbed, her voice shaking. The scene began to move forward again.
She was still wailing on her mother's tail, hours later, when a group of soldiers came marching along the road with a carriage rolling behind them.
One of them ran forward towards her, asking her what was wrong. She recognized the voice – it was a friend of her father's.
He was the first of them to turn to stone. She still didn't understand what was happening, but then, as the tears started streaming out of her eyes again, the carriage abruptly stopped moving and the soldiers' talking ended in sudden silence. A single terrified man that had been in the carriage managed not to look into her eyes before he ran, screaming, into the woods.
And then the young her cried –
Standing beside the current Tiphaine, Lenah swung her hand, and the vision broke, shattering all around the two of them and revealing white nothingness in its stead. She tightened her embrace. Tiphaine just sobbed on her shoulder.
"You know what the funny bit is, about it all?" Tiphaine asked a few minutes later, still horrified. "Every one of those trees was a ravenwood oak. Every single one. If I had tried even for a moment to help them, I could have brought them back. I could have saved them all."
"You couldn't have known. Nobody told you. It's not your fault."
"If it wasn't for me, it wouldn't have happened. It is my fault."
Quietly, she turned away from Lenah, looking towards the empty ground, the giant bookcase stretching towards the nothingness in front of her.
"Though someone did tell me something similar, once," Tiphaine said.
The nothingness gained color again, revealing a memory from another time. It was a little less than a year later, in a different place, on the edge of a tall cliff above a frozen forest. A full moon hung in the dark sky. She was standing at the edge, still surrounded by living beings she had petrified. She had already decided, they would be the last.
She was gathering her courage.
That was when she heard something snarling behind her, and there, in the clearing, prowled a giant black wolf.
She had turned to it without covering her face, a mistake she had made a million times by then, but it didn't turn to stone. It avoided looking at her eyes. Then, noticing where she stood and the tears dripping down her cheeks, its vicious, murderous growl suddenly died in its throat.
The scene changed.
"This kind of wood drinks up dark magic," a young Emony said the next morning, in his human form. "It concentrates it, and it turns it into life for the tree."
Tiphaine hadn't believed him for a moment, though she'd desperately wanted to. But Emony kept stuffing the tree bark into the little rabbit's mouth, and then suddenly, the little thing began struggling in his grip.
It was alive again. She'd never seen a thing as beautiful.
"A witch told me about it. It can help if you haven't been petrified for too long. A month is too much, but…"
It worked on him, too, the day after. He couldn't remain on guard all the time. Careless as she was, she had petrified him over a hundred times before they arrived at their destination much, much later. It was back at her home; outside that little house she grew up in. The seasons had changed by then, the leaves had fallen onto her mom and dad's statues. The soldiers and the old carriage they had been in were gone. Someone must have moved them, maybe buried them. They hadn't honored her mother or her father, a little further away, with the same. She'd been relieved, really – she and Emony were carrying large sacks on their backs. But no matter how much they tried to give her parents, just as Emony had told her it wouldn't, the ravenwood did not work.
Lenah glanced over at the real her, worriedly. "You don't need to see this, I'm sure you have happier memories. But you're forcing the scene, I can't change it."
She ignored her. The next memory was inescapable.
"I'm so sorry, Tiphaine. I tried to tell you…" Emony was saying.
Young Tiphaine began crying again, wrapping herself around her stone parents.
A few hours later, the sun was starting to go down, and Emony started a fire for her right there beside them.
"Whenever you've done it to me, I've been conscious in the stone," he said quietly, his hand laid gently over her shoulder. "I couldn't move, but I was still there. I don't know if it's still like that after all this time, but… they might hear you. And if ravenwood doesn't work, and nothing else would either, apart from… from… And if nothing else does either, then maybe you should say goodbye."
And so, there she sat, wrapped around her mom and dad, her eyes tightly closed as the tears flooded down her face. Emony had positioned the two to look into each other's eyes. She kissed them both, one last time, as he changed his form and became a wolf.
The scene faded away. The void that it had filled was not white anymore. It was darker than any night she'd ever awoken in.
All she could see were Lenah's blue eyes, glowing in front of her.
"I'm sorry," she said quietly. "Even if I needed to do it, I'm so sorry for making you go through that again, I can see the pain drowning you. I'm sorry, Tiphaine. But here. Here, look at me. Let me at least give you this one thing."
She awoke to a dull yellow sunrise shining through the window into the small wooden shack they had stayed the night in. The place was warm. Aylard and Emony were already awake, and they had started a fire right in the middle of the wooden floor. Her tail had instinctively wrapped itself around Emony again.
"Good morning," he whispered, glancing in her direction with a little smile. "You're leaving me breathless again, with how tight you're holding me."
"But you're so warm," she yawned, easing up her tail's grip around his chest.
Lenah was also just slowly waking up beside her. "Morning," she said, leaning back away from her groggy hair-vipers, which were trying to bite her. "You sleep well?"
Tiphaine numbly shook her head and readjusted her veil so she could see better through the crystals. For some reason, everything was blurry. "I don't know. I guess."
Emony was still staring at her, a curiously gentle expression on his face.
"Hey, Tiphaine? You're crying."
4
Yperian
"So, the scouts were not mistaken? They really left? The men of the lake – they left?"
"It would seem so, knight commander. Nobody has reported any sign of them in the past three days. The last word we got were those of the forward observers, saying they were on the move, headed north."
Yperian laid his head in his hands. "Argh, and I didn't believe them! What are they doing?! What goes on in the minds of those corpses?!"
"I don't know, sir. But the observers said they marched in formation."
Shaking his head, he dismissed the captain. He was so confused. He'd been assured that the men of the lake were tied to it, unable to move far from it. That they couldn't live on dry land.
It was true that it was raining the day that they got the report of them leaving, but surely the rain could not last forever. There were no lakes north of Coldbarrow – where could those monsters go?!
Slamming his desk in frustration, he got up from his chair, taking his sword, and made his way out of the tent. The guard on duty got up from the stump he'd been sitting on just outside, sharpening his blade.
"Leynor, follow me. We're going to talk to the forward observers."
"Huh? Those madmen?"
"Yes, those madmen. But we'll call them brave to their faces."
They strolled through the camp, observing the salutes of soldiers running past them on errands. They were having trouble rebuilding the barricades around their camp, almost as much trouble as they had convincing the villagers to run for the hills when it looked like it was about to rain.
The locals seemed to lack a healthy fear for their lives. Still, if they did die, they would become soldiers in the army of the dead. He couldn't afford to be too kind to them. He'd had to fight one of the retired fishermen already, a corpse that had been missing half its head. He did not want to relive that.
"We need to end this war, somehow, before winter," he said, half to himself, half to Leynor. "If the men of the lake come back. Right now, it's fine, while the people have crops to eat, but once those are gone, they'll want to start fishing again."
"The lake will freeze over," said his adjutant.
"That won't stop them. The northerners have their ways. They have to survive in this frigid back end of Evaria somehow, and they aren't sent provisions from Terrena as we are. No… Once there is hunger, the men will set out and start fishing again – the danger be damned. Hunger always overcomes fear. They will walk over that frozen lake. And then they will die and become our enemies."
"Perhaps we'd be wise to enforce a curfew, then, to keep people in their homes when rain is on the horizon, and only let them close to the lake when surrounded by soldiers."
Yperian snorted. "And become known as tyrants? That will only embolden the youths. A better choice might be to evacuate the village altogether… If the men of the lake come back, that is."
"I'm afraid King Raynardt might have your head if you propose that."
"Yes, well, the king, his lords, and the idiots on the council don't know what we're really facing here, do they? I send them reports of dead people attacking us and they think I've found religion!"
"Ha. Well, bringing people back from the dead is something normally reserved for the divines. Perhaps it's one of them we're fighting."
"An ugly divine, if so. No, those corpses aren't alive. They're just fodder, controlled by someone else. The seers did say the lake was a hotspot of dark magic. They mentioned something might be under it, according to the old fishwives' tales. Yeah, I know. I felt the same way. But you know what? I am starting to believe it."
"Knight commander! Knight commander!" shouted a young man, darting into the encampment with his sword at his belt and his armor only half-on. A watchman.
"You're in a hurry, young man. You've left half your armor behind you – I'd reprimand you if you didn't save us a trip. We were just heading over to talk to you."
"Knight commander, I'd like to report the latest status from the forward line on the lake!"
The boy looked terrified as he saluted. That was a bad sign.
"What is it?"
The boy gulped down spit and straightened his shoulders, speaking loud and clear: "The men of the lake have returned! And there's more than twice as many as there were before!"
5
Emony
"I'd help you if I could! But I can't, so stop complaining and pull! Put your backs into it!"
The trout's ugly head was being pulled onto the surface, and dragged forward towards the air while it splashed around and furiously swam circles in the water.
"You still haven't said why you can't help us!" growled Aylard, tugging on the rope beside Tiphaine with all his might. "Are you actually afraid of water?!"
"Yes! I am! Now you tell me, why are you so weak?!" he retorted, "I thought you lived in a fishing village! You're ten times its size, now get it out of the water!"
Lenah chuckled, sitting on the rock beside him. She could have helped if she wanted to. Getting wet wouldn't turn her into a fish.
"Careful," she warned, a smile on her face. "Loosen the line now, or it might break!"
"This fish is a monster!" shouted Aylard, obviously not listening. Luckily, Tiphaine was. The line held.
The trout dived back into the water, jerking them forward towards the riverbank.
"Pull!" shouted Aylard.
"No, don't pull now! You'll lose it!"
Emony was truly disgusted, watching the pathetic display. He'd always done his and Tiphaine's fishing, he'd have had the thing out of the water twenty minutes ago. Being a mermaid was the worst.
Aylard dug his heels into the pebbles and pulled again. The line jerked around in the water, scattering droplets of water into the air. Emony took a quick step back.
"Careful… now pull!" shouted Lenah, still far too happy.
Aylard and Tiphaine hunched up and heaved with all their might. They quickly started to get closer to the end of the line.
"Pull!" struggled Aylard. "Let's reel it in!"
And then the line snapped. The human and the lamia fell with their backs right onto the ground. Emony shook his head, disappointed.
Then Lenah chuckled and raised a hand, and while they could only watch, half of the water in the stream flung itself into the air and floated above them.
"By the divines," gasped Aylard. The trout, confused, swam right out of the mass of water and fell at their feet, flopping around on the pebbles.
"Couldn't you have done that sooner?" he asked.
Lenah spared Emony a glance, giving him a moment to move away, then dropped the water back into the stream with a flick of her wrist.
"You all make terrible fishermen," she said. "You could all stand to learn something from me."
"As if that would help…" he muttered.
"More black magic," gasped Aylard. "The number of crimes sanctionable by death I've seen in the past few days…"
"Haha. I've got the king's seal. I've got permission to do this. By the way, you call this black magic? You really know nothing, Aylard. Let's just cook the fish and go."
Levara was just as the knight commander had said. The clear stream they had followed for the past three leagues soon adapted to the flatlands, slowing down and growing wider, before splitting up into many smaller streams, which, in turn, ended in huge puddles that were covered with tall grass.
Soon enough, the dirt on either side of the path, laid with rotting wood, became soft, wet, and full of life.
The croaking of frogs was the only thing that overpowered the endless buzz of mosquitos and dragonflies. The pools of messy water were the ideal habitat for their kind.
A town stood in the middle of that marsh, standing on a bed of wooden poles that held it aloft. Steps led down to the path from the houses, welcoming them, away from the stench below, onto the raised platform that was only slowly sinking into the mud.
"I can't imagine why people don't like coming here," said Lenah, pinching her nose. "I can't even think of all the diseases I would find if I dissected one of these frogs."
A small, dark shape flew over them silently, swiftly dodging the men and women walking by but being suddenly struck out of the air and caught by one of the vipers on Tiphaine's head.
"A bat!" Lenah shrieked. "Tiphaine, your hair is eating a bat!"
As the witch was screaming, an amused Emony watched Tiphaine race through her mind to find out which emotional reaction would be most appropriate before cycling through all of them one after the other.
Funnily enough, she ended up not being able to snatch the bat away from the vipers, and they ended up fighting over it atop her head while she could only rub her arms together where they had bit her for trying to steal it from them.
"This is a seriously rotten day," she mumbled as they made their way towards the bank.
Emony smiled. That was ironic, considering the stench all around them.
Guards shouted at them and threatened them with death after the townspeople had complained that a giant snake was roaming the streets, but this time, the knight commander's note was enough to quell any bigoted complaints they might have had. The men, their hands never leaving the hilts of their swords, led them to the Bank of Trouwts with an escort, to show the people that the situation was under control.
Of course, inside the bank, the whole process started again.
"We only want the ledger with the information about Garrick's dealings. Garrick of Coldbarrow, the merchant. He used to come here often. Give it to us, and we will be on our way," Emony repeated for the third time, rolling his eyes. He'd thought bankers were supposed to be smart.
"Yes, we know you're not supposed to give out your client's information," added Lenah, reading the man's mind. "But look, Garrick is dead. He was my lover, and he – Aylard, here, is his brother. We want to take over the business."
"What?"
The banker looked thoughtful for a moment. "Well, if that is true, we might be able to make an exception… but how do we know you are who you say? This is highly unusual."
"Do you know what Garrick looked like? He and Aylard are practically identical. They're twins. Come on, I'm sure you've got the man's description written down somewhere, how else could you deal with these sorts of situations?"
"Actually, no. Parchment is far too valuable to be wasted on every single serf that wants to take on a meager debt."
"Ah, speaking of parchment. Here, I've got some. This was his."
"A letter of notice. Twenty-seven pieces. I'll have to take a look at the books to confirm this. So – would you like to pay off the debt, young man?"
"Not me. Him," Emony said, pointing at Aylard.
Aylard, dropped into the central role of the act, stared at the banker, rattled. "Yes… Sure. I'll pay off my brother's debt. That's why we came."
"Ah. Well, I don't see why anyone would come to give money back for someone else… Excellent, early returns are always very welcome. Of course, it doesn't mean we can reduce the rate."
"Of course not."
The banker turned and got up from his chair, walking away, looking for something. As soon as his back was turned, Aylard whirled around to the three of them standing behind him.
"I don't have that kind of money!" he hissed. "I don't make that much in a year!"
Emony shrugged. He still had some that was given to him by the knight commander, but he didn't want to part with it. He'd treated Tiphaine to some exotic meat earlier since she'd been traumatized by the bat, and he wanted to do something similar again later.
"He was your brother," he shrugged simply.
"No, he wasn't!"
Tiphaine couldn't help the human, either.
"Hide me," whispered Lenah, once all eyes were on her. "I don't want to become known as a criminal." Glancing around, they all huddled around her. After a few moments of muttering some hushed words and drawing circles in the air, a fist full of gold appeared in her hand.
"I can't do silver. Even the disappearing kind is bad for us witches. Here, take it, Aylard. Oh? Yes, you can keep the ring, Tiphaine. I don't care if it was meant for me. It's hideous."
She handed the conjured gold to Aylard.
"Wait, are you saying this is going to disappear?!" the human gasped.
"Yes, but not today, so go on and use it! No complaints! Quiet! He's coming!"
The banker walked back over to his chair, not noticing their chatter. He was holding three roles of parchment tightly bound by strings of tied grass.
"These are the ledgers written for a… Garrick of Coldbarrow. A merchant, by trade – and a frequent client. The last amount written… is indeed twenty-seven silvers."
"I'm afraid I only have gold," Aylard said. "I'm sorry, I can't demand of my clients that they pay in a currency of my choosing."
A well-placed lie, and perfectly delivered, Emony thought, a hint of paranoia creeping in. Lenah smiled at his side and glanced his way, obviously hearing it.
"No matter. We offer exchange services as well, as it is a frequent problem."
The banker took the gold from Aylard's hands and tested every coin separately against his teeth. None of them bent in the slightest. Apparently satisfied, he put them on a scale, and then finally began writing something down in the ledger.
"Thank you, I'll go get your change. With this, your debt is settled. Thank you for doing business with us – Aylard, is it? Also of Coldbarrow?"
"Yes. But before you go – I'd still like that look at my brother's book. There are a few things I need to check up on."
"Certainly. The ledger cannot leave the premises of the bank, unfortunately, but while you are here, feel free to browse it. Now, about that change."
Aylard took the parchment from the desk and stared at it.
"Soon, I'm going to become known as a criminal. Anyway, I can't read," he said. "What am I looking at?"
Again, Emony got the feeling he was lying. His eyes were gazing at the parchment far too knowingly, though he seemed to be trying to hide it.
"Give it to me," he said, taking it from him and looking it over.
"You know how to read?" Aylard asked.
"Despite appearances, I'm a noble," he answered.
But there was nothing in the ledger that would be useful to them. The accounts were far too new. The banker was slowly making his way back towards them, silver coins in his hands. Lenah cringed at the sight of them.
"Sorry, could you get us any of the older records?" Aylard asked the banker. "What we are interested in, specifically, are those from the time of the rebellion in Coldbarrow. Ten years ago."
"Ten years ago? Oh, my, that will be some trouble. I'm afraid we will have to charge you for a service of that nature. Archiving is difficult—"
"Keep the change, then," Aylard said.
The man bowed again and left.