In species with lots of sexual dimorphism, physiological differences between males and females, female sexual preferences were usually the driving factor for this evolutionary development. In such species, for instance, in which the males were significantly larger and stronger than the females, females usually selected for strength, size and aggression. In species without sexual dimorphism, females sought males who were exactly like them, equipped with the best possible nurturing qualities.

So far, so good, the lecture went, only ogres had the reverse sexual dimorphism, with the males being significantly smaller and less aggressive than the females. That was truly fascinating.

There were species of fish and insects in which this was the case too, but one was generally unaware of any mammals to that effect - other than perhaps small, scrawny men who fetishized tall, strong or fat women, but they were not really the subject of any biological research, far as anyone knew.

The only explanation one could come up with for why ogres had evolved in this fashion, was that ogres and ogresses did not live together and practised very different lifestyles. Indeed, Ogresses were perhaps even not physically interested in male ogres at all. They were just greedy. Ogresses were a tad more risk-averse, while at the same time being cruel and murderous, and extremely destructive. Male ogres on the other hand were mostly common thieves and robbers, or even makers in some isolated incidents, accumulating all kinds of things the females wanted so that there could be a trade for sexual intercourse.

That was weird, but not entirely different to humans. Human women did not abhor men per se. They just found the vast majority of them physically unattractive. Other than mental qualities such as wit, which was mostly expressed through humour, wisdom, maturity and so on, human females were perfectly able to settle for exactly the same kind of trade off: a nice house, jewellery, a nice car, fancy food, the children well educated and provided for and so on. Whether social status was the point behind all this or just pure materialism remained on open question to this day.

For ogresses, though, it was certainly the latter. They received and they consumed, and they wanted new things, and best if there were lots of them. From this, Janna concluded in her head that ogresses most likely could not feel love for any male ogre ever, although, as Gun and Oga showed, they were absolutely capable of expressing love in general. This made sense because any species that could not feel love would not be likely to nurture their young.

“And then they'd go extinct.” The professorial-looking woman concluded, drawing a quick line under the list of bullet points on her blackboard.

Janna was in a lecture hall, front row, taking it all in. Other students were there too, some of whom she knew, others she had never seen before and still others who were something other than human.

She saw a white goat standing and walking upright on two legs as the lecture was over. It bickered over something a boy told her, a boy who turned out to be Steve. Tall and athletic he stood there, a bright, stupid smile on his face.

He said something to a gorilla wearing a blue and white football jacked with the emblem of Nostria on his chest. It was absurd.

“That was so racist.” Gundmalm complained in Janna’s lap.

She hadn’t known the ogress had been there. Ogarag was there as well, nodding fiercely.

The ogresses were still the size of Barbie dolls, even though Janna was just as large as any of the manifold people all around. Had she been her real size she would have flattened at least twenty of them under her rump.

“Not if it’s true, right?” She tried, feeling compelled to shrug.

She was still looking at Steve and did not have eyes for anything else. He was still talking to the Gorilla, jesting with him over something. If only he would see her.

Somewhere in her head she was dimly aware that none of this was real. She was on Saturn Seven, in the kingdom of Nostria, ill, feverish and cold in the woods. Whether she was dreaming or hallucinating she did not know. She had done both a lot over the last two days and had not eaten since ingesting the fateful Thorwallers who had gotten her into this mess.

It was her stupidity.

Gun and Oga had turned them up and they had thrown away their weapons, spread their arms and offered themselves for her food. She should have been suspicious enough to know that the gift was poisoned. She should have crushed them, but food was growing scarce in the Nostrian woods.

There was a large screen in the lecture hall, atop the blackboard, and just now it started to show old, black and white footage of World War Two. The perspective switched between shots taken on the ground, running soldiers, explosions and tanks to the aerial view from an American bomber, gently thundering through the clouds above the ruins of some German town.

Then, she saw herself, like something out of a shitty Godzilla remake, naked and roaring on the ground as bombs were pummelling the landscape all around her. Suddenly, there was a flash and a mushroom cloud that developed far too quickly, and when the dust settled, she could see her own carcass half blown to charred smithereens on the ruined ground.

That was an uncomfortable truth, to be sure. If help would come, and if it was military which was not unlikely, then they might as well end Janna’s life with a torpedo, seeing the way in which she behaved.

“I’m only trying to stay alive!” She shouted unintentionally as an unbearable panic gripped her.

Steve looked over to her, perplexed: “Then why are you dying?”

Heat crept up Janna’s neck and she lowered her gaze, finding Gundmalm and Ogarag looking up at her.

Gun bit her lip and looked sorrowful, but Ogarag frowned and repeated the sentence.

“Then why are you dying?”

‘Dying, dying, dying,’ the horrible word echoed in her head.

It had been Hjalmar Boyfucker, that dreadful, barbarous monster of a man who did this to her. She should have known it was him as well. He had to be gay, she figured, and also some sort of serial rapist, as well as a devout servant of the late Hetman of Hetmen. His beard was dyed like a rainbow, giving him a look somewhere between an absurd piece of candy and something out of a Love Parade gone awry.

He was also a crossdresser, wearing women’s skirts vastly too small for his frame, and he had cut off the bottom so that it covered barely more than his belly and his groin. From the last of his men she had eaten she had learned that he did not have a groin any longer, though. That was the problem.

“It’s a black, maggot-eaten hole, ha, ha, ha!” The ragingly mad warrior had spat. “He got it from some boy, somewhere, and then he gave it to all of us! Look at my arse if you don’t believe me, aha, ha, ha!”

She had done so, finding his cheeks in states of grey, blue or black and his bunghole enlarged, prolapsing and festering. It was obviously some sort of disease, and Hjalmar and his men had sacrificed themselves to get back at her as punishment for what she had done to Thorwal. She’d thrown the warrior away in disgust and proceeded to jam a finger down her throat until she was positive all of them were out of her.

But she was huge, she had thought, surely disease couldn’t touch her, as tiny as those germs and bacteria were. She had no idea, though, if the whole make of her body had changed with her growing, whether her white blood cells were huge now or if she just had way, way more of them. The way the disease presented itself it looked like some flesh-eating bacteria were causing it, which would be bad news because she knew next to nothing about how to treat it.

Soon after eating Hjalmar and his men she had come down with a wrenching pain in her gut that had made it impossible to move on. Now she was cold, feverish and did not even have her blanket with her, having left it at Joborn.

It was cold in the lecture hall too. Hoarfrost began creeping onto the screen from the edges while in the middle Janna’s dead, naked carcass was continued to be bombed.

“I have to wake up.” She said. “The fire must have gone out. I told you, you had to keep the fire going!”

Gundmalm winced in her lap: “We went away to find food. We smelled humans and horses and even hounds! Ogarag wanted to run away and leave you but I said we could not do that. I love you, Janna. Don’t die, please?”

A sob bubbled from Janna’s lips: “I don’t want to die!”

“Die, heh, heh!” Steve suddenly stood in front of her, poking her in the nose. “That’s what you get when you behave that way, don’t you know.”

“I am so sorry.” Janna tried her luck, but he just kept poking her and she could not even lift a hand to stop him so weak was she.

She wasn’t really sorry, though. It was the circumstances, she told herself not for the first time. That was how her mind rationalized it, still. She simply could not change the fact that she felt no remorse in her heart; none whatsoever.

“Is she dead?” Ogarag asked somewhere.

All was dark but she was still being poked in the nose.

“No, she is still mumbling. Maybe her eyes froze shut?”

She was awake now, she understood, and so she opened her eyelids.

Her world was pain. Pain was her world. She thought her gut was worst, all cramped up and feeling bitter, somehow, a testament to the horrors that were going on inside it. That wasn’t true, though. Her arms and legs were worse now, even if her gut was better than last she remembered being awake.

“We found food!” Gundmalm cheered and the poking in Janna’s nose stopped.

Her eyes did not adjust immediately. It was all somewhat white. Hoarfrost, she knew. It was getting cold quickly and at the worst possible moment too.

“I don’t know if I can eat.” She moaned, even though she was famished.

Her lungs hurt too. It was so cold. She would not have felt this way if she hadn’t been sick, she was certain, but the way it was it all came together. Her head felt split in the middle and her throat burned.

‘Food poisoning.’ She remembered her diagnosis from earlier.

But there was something else, too.

Gundmalm and Ogarag had blood on their hands and with them stood a group of seven bloodied men. There were fresh dead horses as well and things that looked like crushed dogs.

“I need warmth.” She said, pushing herself up on hands that barely had any feel left in them.

“Ah!” Lissandra’s sweet little voice made by the fire, a huge pile of smoking ash and some ambers and she was throwing sticks on there so small that Janna could barely see them.

She had burned all the trees in her reach already. It was quite remarkable how much she consumed even when she did not eat anything.

“Ow.” She winced when her gut made queer, gurgling noises again.

“I will get some.” Gundmalm promised. “You just eat these humans so that you can be strong again. We need you strong.”

Gun, Liss and Oga were wrapped in furs and raw hides. The seven men wore riding attire and some light armour. They were Horasian men.

“No!” One of them shouted at her. “Don’t do that! The Magister said you’d come with us to Joborn! The red wizard has woken up! You must go to into the empire! Turmoil there is! We need you there! He said to tell you and you’d come!”

“Silence, you worm!” Ogarag spat stomping the ground in the puny man’s direction.

It took a long moment ere the words had registered in Janna’s head.

“The red wizard?” She asked. “Furio? Do you mean master Furio has woken up?”

A wave of pain went through her, penance for the moment of euphoria she had felt.

“Aye!” The man replied, hat in hand. “The Magister…Master Hypperio, he…he said you would be coming. He said none of ogres, though. Are you hurt?”

“It’s a long story.” Janna said, chewing her tongue.

If only it hadn’t been so bloody cold. To warm up from the outside, the fire needed to be big, meaning she would have to burn trees. Setting a whole stem of fresh would on fire like this was hard, even impossible for the tiny humans, even for her ogresses. But for her, once she had something started and needed only to blow on it, it was relatively easy.

To warm from the inside, her body needed material to burn too, however, and there was nothing other than these seven men and the carcasses.

‘This is what you get.’ Steve had said in her head.

Nonsense, Janna made herself believe. There were no gods, no such thing as karma. There were only the brutal forces of Darwin. Dog eat dog, eat or die, the big fish eat the little fish.

“I’d never eat you.” She said. “Hardly any meat on you anyway.”

The last part was true, unfortunately. Seven men were a drop of water on a hot stone, famished as she was. But it was better than nothing.

“Climb on my hand if you would.” She laid in out for them. “We’re going now.”

“Really?!” Liss was jumping with joy by the fire. “Oh, Janna, how wonderful!”

The soldiers looked at the palm of her hand warily.

“Uh, beggin’ your pardon,” the speaker started, “I think I and the men will walk.”

“Wait.” Janna remembered something that had almost escaped her in her state. “You said Hypperio sent you? Why is he not with you? Was he slain?”

She shouldn’t talk so much, she realized. It hurt.

“Aye, uh, no.” The soldier replied, confused. “We were hunting for you, following your trail. But before we found you a strange man found us. He had black robes on and carried an hourglass. Ridden his horse half to death, he had, and it was stolen too, one of Ruckus’. Thought a Boron priest, he was, but that weren’t so. The Magister said we was to detain him, ‘n so we did, only as they came talking their wizard talk, all queer-like, the Magister suddenly said he was going to ride with the man and we were to continue on without him, n’ so we did.”

“Where did he go?”

“Uh, south-like.” The soldier frowned. “Can’t tell if he was afraid of you or something else. The man in the black robes, I think he was a black wizard, only why the Magister wouldn’t have him burned on the spot I can’t speak to. Faries and Farindel, the words were said, a gate and some strange forest in Albernia. That’s all I know.”

The Farindel Forest was in Albernia, Janna remembered. Maybe that was what he meant. The whole thing sounded strange, but if she was any judge, Hypperio would have welcomed any excuse so as not to talk to her. He was a very scared man in her presence, but then again, most men were.

In any case, she was in no fit state to investigate such things now. Neither would she be able to make it to Joborn.

“I need to get warm again.” She said. “Please step onto my hand so I can get going. I will not leave you out here without your horses. Did my friends leave you your weapons, at least?”

It was important not to swallow anything sharp, just now, she figured. She had to avoid any irritation to stomach or she might retch.

The man shook his head: “They did not, and they killed three of us, too.”

“We will go back and bury them.” Janna promised. “Just, please, step on.”

Hesitantly, and likely under suspicion that Janna would crush them like bugs if they didn’t do as she said, they made their way onto her palm. From there then, she put them directly into her mouth, chewing carefully until they all were a thin, sticky mush that her stomach would have the least possible trouble digesting.

Finally, she got up and dragged herself to the nearby river, drinking of the icy cold water that hurt worse than anything. Then she retched and drank some more. Dehydration was more dangerous than starvation, and a few nutrients would remain inside her. She could not keep anything down for long.

On her way back, she gathered trees and sat to restart the fire, blowing the ashes away and making the ambers catch flame again before tearing branches off the trees and tossing them on. Wet leaves and frozen wood produced an awful lot of smoke. It had to be visible for miles around, she judged. But it burned, thanks to her blowing, and after a while it started to give off warmth again.

“Why did you eat them?” Lissandra asked, driven away from the fire by the mounting heat. “Weren’t we going with them?”

“I needed the food.” Janna explained while she held her hands and feet to the flames.

At least she was not sweating any longer, as before she had. Out in the cold in T-shirt and jeans with cold sweats had been worse than ten Hjaldor Mountains. When the fever made her hallucinate it was almost a blessing, even though it ruined her sleep.

She impaled the dead animals on the trunk a younger tree and charred them, anything to make it easy on her tummy even if the resulting taste did rather underwhelm. She warmed her boots and socks as well to get her feet warm, so she could lie on her side with her belly to the warmth later. It was the best she could do in her situation.

The smoke was good as well, she judged. Laura had to come back eventually and, being the impatient person that she was, would surely go out looking for Janna.

“I want you to keep this fire going.” She instructed her ogresses. “I need to sleep. It is important.”

‘It is what you get.’ Steve said in her head again.

Then she was asleep once more, dreaming of a stone circle on a hill in some deep woods. Copious amounts of mushrooms grew there, set with naked snails that nibbled at them.

Two horses were bound up by the ruined remnants of a hovel in which a camp for two had been made.

This was apart from the stone circle itself, about twenty metres. Once more, Janna found herself at the level of a regular person, but she doubted that this was Earth because the shrubbery was simply too dense here.

“Hold still!” a voice said somewhere.

A black figure in robes and hood brandished a reddened blade, cutting and stabbing at a red one. To Janna, all of it was blurred and there was no way to recognize any faces.

“No!” The red man on the altar whimpered aloud.

“Hush now!” The other told him. “These rites must be carefully observed.”

Blood must have run from the red man’s body. Janna thought she had heard his whimpering before, but like her vision her hearing was blurred to doom and gloomy echoes in the bright sort if darkness all around.

The hooded man started chanting, or speaking in tongues, the echoes building up in Janna’s head until they sounded like thunder. Then a voice answered him like nothing human.

‘I want to wake up.’ She thought, shuddering.

At last, she was not in pain, but this was almost worse. It felt real.

“Tears,” the voice from somewhere, everywhere screeched, “from the eyes! Don’t go!”

It was insurmountably colder than before, she noted. The very effort of being alive in this environment was painful, and her breath frosted so much she could hardly see.

“Beware of the light! It can take you away!”

“Away,” the black hood screamed back, “to where not evil dwells!”

“To the Netherhells!”

“I want to wake up!” Janna shouted as loud as she possibly could with the air freezing her lungs.

The black hood turned: “What?! No! Go away! Shoo!”

He gestured and suddenly Janna was falling, straight through the hard-packed frozen ground that she had been standing on before. She landed on her feet at a different place, a village, not frozen at all. It was warm here, almost, by comparison a nice autumn day.

Memories flooded her mind, such as who she was, Bessa, the wheeler’s daughter in this minuscule village with no name. It was all her world, that village on the road where travellers sometimes stopped for the night, spending a few coins on this or that and bringing tales and wares alike. There was Alrik the smith, Edo the carter and his wagoners and apprentices with whom her father made a good business in their workshop, one-eyed Blain the old sellsword who had effectively retired in the Tavern that was run by Usha, Bessa’s aunt.

Bessa was smitten with Alrik the Younger, the blacksmith’s son, and he always blushed and stammered so sweetly when she came to buy nails from him.

There were others in Janna’s mind, or rather the mind within her mind, too many to remember, too few and too important somehow to forget them all.

‘I must bring this bread to father.’ Janna remembered when she looked down past her bosom to the basket she was carrying.

She had bought it from her aunt’s kitchen boy, Pate, who did this kind of thing in this village. The grain her aunt bought from Irwin the peddler who travelled the surrounding farmsteads and thus connected them with this place.

It was nice.

But as in all of Janna’s dreams something horrible was unfolding. She could feel it in her bones. Or maybe not. This place, to her, looked impervious, even though logically it looked near indefensible in case of attack.

Grief had struck here as well already, two years ago when her mother had died. She had birthed a stillborn boy and succumbed to the bleeding. Father had been so stricken that he had drunk away all their coin and they had to borrow from Usha to buy supplies.

Father had since taken to painting his wagons, which sold well to certain kinds of customers because it was such an uncommon service.

Their house was an old daub and wattle one, with a barn gate for the wagons to roll in. Half the space was workshop, then a pen for their pig.

Their pig! She had entirely forgotten that Father wanted to butcher it today. It was always thus with winter coming. They needed the food and would have no kitchen waste to feed the animal with, as soon as fresh vegetables and fruit would be running short.

That meant that she had to take the last of the salmon out of the smokebox behind the chimney.

They would likely eat it today, which also meant that there was need for peas, butter and sorrel. The last wagon Father had fixed and painted for a travelling group of Norbards. They had paid with a handsome block of salt, more than enough to cure their pork and make it comfortably over the winter.

Life was good, even though she missed Mother.

“How much bread that boy give ye?” Father greeted her when she entered their home.

He had already butchered the pig on his own, she saw. The sow had not been very big, hardly a year old. Had they had enough coin they might have fed it through the winter, let it grow another year and maybe find a male to mate it with, so they could have piglets.

Father’s hands were bloody and there was a red knife in his hand.

“Three loaves.”

“Three loaves?!” He sighed with desperation. “For as many coppers?! Gods have mercy on me, girl, if you had the wits the gods gave a goat you would’ve gotten five! Everyone knows that is straw growing out your head, not hair!”

She felt herself redden.

“Don’t you blush at me!” He snapped. “You know your mother used to do that! You know…”

His voice broke and he turned stubbornly to his work, pulling the entrails out of their pig’s stomach to make sausages. They would fry the first ones tomorrow. The others would be smoked. The rest of the meat would be salted down or smoked to bacon, or they would brine some and make ham.

“I must…” She started but stopped herself.

When he was in grief, as he always was when he thought of Mother, there was no use talking to him, nor laying an arm around his shoulder. He had so yearned for a son, too. And the gods had taken both away from him.

She put the basket on the table and made for the vegetable garden behind the house. The peas were already bare, stored in a sack inside the kitchen, but there were carrots of which she plucked two and the sorrel she needed for the Salmon.

That left butter.

First, though, she walked around the house to the smokebox at the back of the chimney which was the only part of their house that was made of stone. The fish was not fresh, and Father was not very fond of Salmon, but it was prudent to use up the old stocks first.

After Mother’s death, Bessa had taken over all the womanly tasks in the household, practising what she had learned. She was pushing upon her seventeenth birthday, though, and should have performed these tasks for a husband. She would gladly do all these things for Alrik the Younger, and other things too such as her father thankfully did not demand of her.

“I ...I did not mean to shout.” He told her consolingly when she was back inside. “You remind me so much of her, is all.”

She smiled at him in turn: “Bacon or ham, father?”

He made a threatening face in jest: “Both.”

They would eat good this winter, if it wasn’t too long. Janna had never made sausages, but Bessa had. What either of them knew or did not know kept colliding in their one head together, which for the most part resolved itself in Janna doing, or feeling like doing, the things Bessa would have done.

It was a bloody and messy business, indeed, and washing the pig’s intestines meant having to go the long walk to the river and carry two large pales of water back to their house. Of course, there was no such thing as running water, and the river water needed to be given a boil first. Janna had sometimes wondered how the people she crushed spent their days. This was it – the making and preparing of food. Just the water to wash the intestines took about an hour and a half.

The curing of the meat itself was long-winded, complicated and tedious, but Janna did not find it dull. As far as dreams went this was the best one she had had in quite a while.

They used as much of the pig as they could, even going so far as using the blood to make black pudding, encased in the pig’s bladder to form another kind of sausage that looked more appalling than appetizing. The same was true of the jelly the pig’s brain was cooked to, with chunks of meat in it. With wood for their only fuel source, Janna had to go outside and chop some with a hatchet more than once.

When the meat was on hooks in the smokebox, she prepared the salmon. The peas and carrots were cooked mushy first, while she churned butter for frying, the most obvious source for cooking oil. The fish went in the pan without any seasoning, but Janna mixed some salt with the sorrel in a jar, crushed it with a pestle and then squeezed it onto the salmon through a linen cloth. Lastly, the fish came on a thick slice of bread for a trencher.

That was their dinner, and it was almost pitch dark by the time they ate.

Sleep never came easier to Janna, even though she knew she was already in a dream. Neither did it stop there. The next morning, she woke to the cockcrow and went about Bessa’s business as if forced by an invisible hand.

Hygiene was first on the list, even for commoners as them who were not rich. Then she had to build a fire while Father had a cup of ale to break his fast after his morning prayers, and even a bit of the freshly smoked bacon that had smoked all through the night.

Being a craftsman, Ingerimm was his god, but he kept Phex as well for good business. Bessa prayed for the same things, and to Peraine so that there would be enough food and that they would not grow ill, to Firun for a short and gentle winter, to Rahya so that she may find love, to Travia so that she might marry and have a family, to Efferd for fish in the rivers, and to Boron for Mother.

She had no breakfast because her labours were considered less physically demanding overall and as much as Janna rebelled against that, she could not change it.  

“We will eat at noon from now on, for the rest of the winter.” Father declared.

This was what they did when the days grew short as they did now. It was simply too dark in the evenings, and while the peasants had relatively little to do, a wheelwrights’s work life did not change so very much with the seasons.

“I will take one of our bacon haunches to Usha, see if there’s any business to be had at the inn.”

He pushed himself from the table and went, leaving his dishes for his daughter to clean. Janna took the better parts among the smoked meat items from the smokebox and stored them inside the house. Then she prepared the next meal, a porridge of rye, staple of their food supply, and fried sausages.

For the porridge, she first cooked some of the bones from yesterday’s butchering, another tedious task that demanded a lot of wood. It was strange too, because pork was generally so fat. Without refrigerators or even electricity, let alone trucks, trains, supermarkets and all that, nothing could go to waste that could be used, plus the resulting broth was actually quite high in nutrients and a source of gelatine, which was brilliant.

It was at this time that Janna sat and wondered for a moment when this dream would end, or if it ever would.

‘This is what you get.’ Steve’s voice echoed in her ears again.

Maybe she had died, she supposed, but did not find it in her to even feel for herself while she was so intimately connected with Bessa, the dream character she inhabited. Calling Father ‘father’ likewise did not feel strange to her at all, as did calling this place home or coming to terms with the fact that she was just some girl, somewhere.

She was aware of the fact that it should have been odd. But it simply wasn’t. She should have been discontent with the prospect of spending the majority of her remaining existence cleaning and preparing food. But she wasn’t.

Strange ideas about rebirth she dismissed. She had not been reborn but become Bessa at a time when the wheeler’s daughter had practically been a woman grown.

She had not very long to ponder any such things, in any case. There was always work to be done, things to clean, errands to run or water to be carried. She returned from the river with two fresh pales just as father returned with the shield of a knight, all excited.

“He stays at the inn, didn’t you hear?” He asked her as if it should have been writ upon the sky. “Promised me a silver, the good man, if I manage to fix the crack and repaint it by sundown.”

That was huge. Janna would have shrugged at it, some knight in an inn, but questions came bubbling out of Bessa’s mouth.

Where did he come from? Where did he go? Was he tall? Was he handsome? How did he come by the crack in his shield? Was he rich? Was he the king’s true and loyal servant or was he a knight errant who travelled to make a name for himself, winning tourneys, despoiling maidens and seeking the favour of the warrior goddess Rondra?

“Oh, you stay away from him!” Father warned when he heard the part about maidens. “Men such as that will take your virtue, but they do not commit for what comes afterwards. We’ll have no bastards in this house, do you hear?!”

Again, Bessa reddened. Abstinence for a young woman when she was at her most fertile was nothing short of biological torture. It simply did not work. It never had, all throughout history. The overarching conservatism only served to make a girl such as Bessa more easily excitable. Weird romantic fantasies coursed through her head and she was as wet between her legs as the water in her pales.

Alrik the Younger simply could not compete with a knight. But Father was right. The way things were, Bessa might be a toy for the nobleman for a day or two, only then to be discarded like the rotten half of a winter onion in spring. That was why conservatism, with all its shortfalls, was still the only option. One had to be sceptical of strangers, responsible with one’s wealth, sexually restrained and adhering to authority in this world.

Lots of ugliness bred from this, to be sure. But that was a fault of reality. It did not mean that Bessa couldn’t dream, though, while at the same time she fought and lost against those wants.

The knight’s sigil was blurred in Janna’s dream. She could not make out what it was, even while Father was working at it with his stinking bone glue.

“This will need a new iron rim.” He said, thinking. “I will need nails, small ones.”

That was all the input Janna needed and she was glad to be outside again. The paints really had a most foul odour, Father had acquired them from a travelling alchemist, and she would have to remember to air their house well before tonight.

When she walked down the road towards Alrik’s workshop, one of Edo’s wagons rumbled past, drawn by a perilously old warhorse that had outlived its battling days.

“Hey there!” She hollered. “Does your wagon needs mending?”

“Ney!” The wagoner shouted back and shook his head in passing, then turned again to his reins.

Wagons that were not broken were bad business for wheelers, but if Father really stood to earn a silver for the job on the knight’s shield they would be alright, plus Edo’s wagons were out and about most every day while their service cleverly connected a tin mine to the west with a town further to their east. They were bound to break wheels, splints, straps and other things, if not today then surely on the morrow.

Usha’s tavern was the largest and tallest building in the village. Janna could hear a horse whinny in the adjacent stable, most likely the knight’s. She could not stop thinking about him, somehow. Maybe because of her age, or because she was a maiden, or because she was repressed and her life consisted of cooking, cleaning and running errands for her father.

She walked past the smithy for the common room’s door through a heard of old Alrik’s chickens still agitated by the wagon that had just disturbed them. A cowbell hung over the door and made the same clunking noise as always when she entered. The room was dim, the ceiling low so as to allow for more guest rooms upstairs.

Usha emerged from her kitchen with bloody hands.

“Oi, it’s you!” She smiled, wiping her hands on her skirts. “Has your old fool of sire sent you?”

“Yes.” Janna replied before remembering that she was not supposed to be here. “I mean, no. I just…I heard a knight was in the village, staying here?”

“He is.” Her aunt nodded. “I hear your father is painting his shield. Not like Alrik couldn’t have done that better, eh? What does your father know about such things?”

Usha and Father did not like each other very much, just like old Alrik and Father, which was why Bessa was making any purchases from the smithy for him.

“He can work with wood and he paints wagons,” she gave a half-hearted defence, “and Alrik isn’t an armourer either.”

Usha gave her a reproachful look: “I always told your mother she married the wrong man, but she wouldn’t listen. Is he at the cider again? Does he need more?”

“He is…better now.” Janna replied meekly. “He didn’t send me here anyway. I was supposed to buy nails.”

“You better go buy them then.” Usha said briskly. “Sir knight has gone there as well to fix a shoe on his horse. Oh, and I will need you to serve here later, and on the morrow as well. He said there were sellswords on the road and they will be thirsty.”

Janna bit her lip: “Father told me not to mingle with men like that.”

She slapped her hand over her mouth for her stupidity. Usha shouldn’t know father had forbidden her to talk to the knight.

Her aunt only shrugged, however: “You are still in my debt for saving you when your Father was drinking the two of you to death. I suppose he does not intend to repay me with the silver he’s earning?”

That very much settled the issue for Usha, only it likely would not for Father, meaning Bessa was now torn apart. She helped in her aunt’s tavern whenever there was need, but since Father had borrowed the coin she did so without any compensation and the occasional free food and ale from Usha had stopped as well.

For the first time, really, Janna also learned what it meant to be afraid of men. Sellswords were oft an unsavoury lot, especially when they were drinking. They did not come through here often, but every time they did the village tensed.

Behind her, the door to the inn was shoved open and a grim, gruffy voice demanded: “Bring me wine!”

Usha made a gesture to Bessa, shooing her to make due.

She only caught a glimpse of the knight, a big man who’s frame nearly filled out the doorway, wearing mail, a sword on his belt and a grey sack crusted with blood. His face shattered all her romantic dreams at once. He wasn’t handsome. His brown beard was thick and coarse and his eyes cold and uncaring. The worst was his scar, though, deep and dark, running along the left side of his face and even over his mouth where a few teeth were missing.

“At once, milord.” Usha curtsied. “Some cheese, perhaps? Did you find the smith well?”

Bessa returned on quick feet with a flagon of Usha’s sour red and a cup for the patron.

The knight sat down heavy at a table, pounded with his fist and pointed: “Your smith is a buggering thief! Someone should cut his hand off! Maybe I will!”

He took the flagon from Bessa’s shaking hands and poured himself, uncaring of any spillage. Usha knew better than to interrupt his tirade.

“All I wanted was a bloody shoe for my horse!” He cursed after setting down the cup and refilling. “Now, he says he’ll only oblige me if I let him repaint my shield as well and give him the bloody silver I promised that wheelwright. I will have to go seek him and listen to his bloody whining as well.”

It was only a minute’s walk, but it seemed that this man was more discontent, if not downright disgusted, with the bother of having to haggle over anything at all. Bessa knew that hedge knights were notoriously short on coin because they tried to live like landed knights who were rich but quite open-handed with their money. That seemed to be where this strange behaviour was coming from.

Usha’s smile was dripping honey when she replied to him: “I’m so sorry to hear that, milord. Bessa here is the wheelwright’s daughter. Surely she can tell her father for you.”

The knight only seemed to notice Janna now and gave her a cursory glance: “Bessa, eh? Suppose you all have cows’ names out here. Are you calving, with those utters of yours? Who’s your bull?”

Bessa did not understand: “My…bull, milord, I…”

“Hah!” He made. “This wench is about as clever as a cow, too. I’m thinking this meadow just grew a whole lot merrier.”

“Go, tell your father.” Usha whispered urgently but Bessa had to stay.

Father had been so excited. Losing this business and pay would make him sour again, and she had to keep him in good humours.

Janna had an idea, albeit one that took some bravery, bravery, again, that Bessa was struggling to come up with.

“My father has already begun the work, milord,” she objected in a carefully sweet tone of voice so as to avoid giving offence, “and I’ve never seen our blacksmith paint anything.”

The knight was not accustomed to having his demands questioned by serving women. This much was clear from the scowl on his face.

“Your shield needs a new rim, though.” She went on. “Bet he can do that better than my father can.”

His lips pursed out from his mouth after taking another swallow of wine. Then his face grew friendlier.

“Suppose I cracked one too many a head with it. Heh, these outlaws.” He lifted the bloody sack and let it fall again while his eyes turned dreamy. “Had themselves helms, the lot. Got hold of my sword arm so I had to pound the living light out of them. Hope old Quincy Pepper is not too mushy for his Lordship when I get there, and I need to get there quick before he rots, or else they’ll say it wasn’t him, see?”

“For which you need a new horseshoe.” Janna added while Bessa was fighting memories of pig brain in their mind.

“Aye. You do me this favour and I’ll make it worth your while. How about that?”

The vanity of it was staggering, but the knight’s lazy unwillingness to deal with this petty squabble seemed to work in her favour or maybe it was only so easy because it was a dream. She nodded, turned on her heel and left, hearing the knight demand no less than two whole roasted chickens from Usha. He must have had coin, she thought, and he did not care so much about how he spent it. If this Quincy Pepper had been an outlaw with a bounty on his head, Janna and Bessa could only guess how much money he would make off of it, although it was certainly more than they made at any given point. Perhaps he would not care that he would have to pay Alrik the smith and Father both. She had not discussed this with him, though.

Janna had to go to the smithy next but found herself timid, shaking and sweating. It was as much or more excitement than Bessa had had, or would appreciate having, in any better part of a year. She wondered what madness was riding her and knew not that this madness was called Janna.

‘I’m not so terrible at being a normal-sized person,’ she thought for an enormously weird moment of clarity.

Alrik the Elder was a bald, sinewy man with a face marked by the same pocks that had claimed his wife. It seemed they were all widows and widowers in the centre of the settlement. Usha’s husband, the former innkeeper, had died as well. Edo’s wife had been kicked in the head by a horse and died while Bessa had still been a child. Usha’s husband, the former innkeeper, had succumbed to a fever, after which travellers referred to this place as the “Widow’s Inn”, something the villagers themselves tended to avoid.

Alrik the Younger was working the bellows, up and down, up and down, smeared with soot and glistening with sweat in the firelight. It was quite a sight, indeed. He had the same long arms and legs his father had, but a full head of blond hair and freckles on both of his sooty cheeks.

“You?!” Alrik the Elder shouted when he noticed her, looking up from the glowing piece of iron between his tongs. “What will you be wanting?!”

He wasn’t angry with her, far as she could tell. Alrik the Elder always shouted, for years of ringing hammers on steel had made him hard of hearing.

The younger Alrik stopped working and looked at her.

“H-hello, Bessa.” He said timidly ere remembering how dirty he was.

He blushed, then rushed to a basin of water to furiously scrub his face.

She had to muster some more courage before speaking: “The…the knight in the inn needs his horse shoed. He’s given the business about his shield to my father.”

“Huh?!” Alrik the Elder shouted.

She had to repeat what she said with more force so he could understand her, a thing that took even more courage.

“Oh?!” He scowled. “No! That knight will have me do it, or he can walk on foot till he finds himself another smith! Hah! Your father has no rights taking this business from me. Arms and armour are mine to mend. It’s worse enough with all the work he takes off my hands from the carters!”

“But…”

Bessa was lost. It wasn’t as easy as she had expected. But what had she expected, anyway? That he would just consent? No. Alrik needed a reason.

“But we buy many supplies from you!” She said, speaking loud and clearly, “Iron is your business, whereas my father’s is wood! The shield needs a new rim too! You can do that better than anyone! And have you not your hands full with tools to mend from the peasants?!”

‘Not with winter coming on.’ She remembered.

Peasants hardly did any work in winter, meaning less business for the smith.

“No!” He settled bluntly, fully aware that he held all the power in this.

Bessa wanted to run away and cry while Janna was shocked to find herself surrendering so easily. It was another fight between them.

“Do you paint?” She asked, her voice cracking and breaking with the beginnings of tears.

All she thought of was Father. He had been so excited to do this work.

“Huh?! What else, now?! Go away, girl! Bring me that shield! Needs a new rim, too, I heard.”

Alrik the Younger looked between them with large, blue eyes full of sadness. The whole affair, in fact, the whole thing of Father not getting along with the smith was unfortunate.

Janna would have scoffed at the simple, mundane pettiness of this squabble, but to Bessa it was a large part of her world. It was all amazingly simple. Perhaps that was what made it beautiful.

“Do you paint?!”

“Paint?!” He made the word a curse. “Yes, I will paint that man’s shield! How hard can it be?!”

“You need paints for paintin’ shields, father!” His son hollered into his ear. “We do not have paints!”

“Pah!” The smith flung his hammer down on his iron so hard that sparks flew everywhere, frightening Bessa near to death. “Finish this, boy!”

He handed the tongs to his son and went through the door to their house, a log cabin, whereas the adjacent smithy was built of stone.

Bessa was breathing heavily. All this unpleasantness unnerved her.

“Can…can you shoe a horse?” She asked Alrik the Younger when they were alone.

The young smith looked to the door after his father, then scratched himself behind the head.

“I…uh, I…mh, I…” He stammered, studying the ground. “I can. I mean, yes, I can…that, but…I mean, father, he…maybe you should go.”

Those words cut deep by virtue of the crush Bessa had on him. She had thought he liked her too.

“Do you want me to go?” Janna made her ask.

He looked up from his feet turning beet-red on his freckly face. Oh, how she loved those freckles, and those eyes and those arms too. Bessa was old enough. It was time to do something about this situation, all of it, and now.

Bessa, however, was feeling herself growing scarlet-red as well. She did not know how.

“Your father will have his hands full.” Janna remembered something from the inn. “There are sellswords coming up the road and I’ll be damned if they do not have something needs mending.”

“I don’t know…” He scratched his head once more, averting his eyes to the wall, then finding hers again.

She could see him drowning on dry land and in real time.

“Two coppers?” She asked. “How about two coppers for the shoeing?”

“A f-fair price, but…”

“They are coming today. You better get going. And your father will have whatever the knight gives him for the rim.”

“I, uh…I shouldn’t…” He started and stopped, torn apart by it all.

Janna walked up to him, around the anvil with the glowing hot piece of iron on it. It was shaping into a horseshoe, she saw, luck, only here a fox tail or something like that would have been more culturally appropriate.

“Um…”

She grabbed his free hand with hers. It was large, hard and calloused. Smith’s hands, these were, but she could tell he’d be gentle. She lifted it, as heavy as a jug of water, and placed it over her left breast all the while praying to the Twelve that Alrik the Elder would not barge back out of his door. He couldn’t hear them, though, and there wasn’t much to be heard anyway.

His lips were dry and cracked from working by the fire, and now they formed a large, big O. Janna had seen that in people before, before she squelched them.

He was tall, so she had to grasp his collar with her other hand to pull his head down and place a soft, sensual kiss on his cheek. His skin was warm, again, from the fire.

He blinked and swallowed, looking at her with those big, blue eyes like icy pools.

‘Such warm ice, though.’

Now she was drowning as well. They might have kissed, or more, but he didn’t know what to do. Janna did not know how much longer this dream would go, but she would show Bessa if she could. Not now, though.

“Will you do it?”

He withdrew his hand as if struck by lightning, considered and gave a nod all the same.

“You better finish this horseshoe then.”

She left him with a smile and a thousand butterflies starting a ruckus in her tummy. For a moment Janna remembered that she had been sick and feared that it would catch up with her. But it was only love. Somehow, though, in her head when she thought on their encounter, his face kept changing into Steve’s.

“Alrik will mend the rim.” She told her father who was already at painting, the odours in their cabin near unbearable. “And Usha needs me. There are sellswords on the road.”

He looked like he couldn’t decide which part displeased him more. He started with the former.

“Will he now.” He growled. “And being the straw-headed girl you are I’m sure you brought the nails anyway. Is that the way of it?”

It was really little wonder people did not get along with Father. He was always blunt and rash at first and often came to rue the things that tumbled off his tongue. He was a gentle soul, in truth. Only by time of this side of him to show he had already affronted whoever he was angry with in the moment.

Bessa had all but forgotten about the nails, though.

“I have not.” She said with a confidence she did not know she had. “And I will go serve at the inn. We are in Usha’s debt. If we don’t repay her somehow she will call the sheriff and have you locked in the debtor’s.”

The debtor’s tower or debtor’s prison was where those went who did not repay what they borrowed. It couldn’t be pleasant just by simple logic and came with a set of scorn that Father had better done without.

“So you say.” He grumbled in reply. “Just pray they keep their fingers to themselves.”

She had a reply for that as well: “You forget there’s a knight at the inn.”

If there was someone who would defend her virtue against touchy sellswords, surely, it was a knight.

“Yes, that one as well.” He replied before turning back to his stinking paints.

The sellswords arrived at the inn within the hour, twenty men, one more scary-looking than the next. They were clad mostly in ringmail, some of it rusty, but also leather, padded tunics and some strange and scary hats on their two bow- and crossbowmen.

The knight was drunk asleep at his table with the remnants of a half-eaten chicken in front of him. An extremely large man went over and claimed it for his own before making for a place in the far corner of the common room, never saying a word.

Usha was quite overwhelmed with so many patrons at once, and such dangerous ones at that.

“That does not belong to you!” She tried to assert in order to establish whose word counted here. “That man is a knight! Stealing is bad enough. Stealing from one high-born is…”

He looked as if he wanted to murder her on the spot, silencing her. His nose had been broken more than once and deep shadows lay under his eyes. Unblinking he unclenched his teeth and bit off half the bird on the platter, bones and all. Then he went for his table, thankfully leaning his huge battle axe against the wall without using it on her.

Bessa regretted coming.

“Jost the Giant is a knight as well.” A red-bearded man with an eyepatch smiled consolingly. “Uh, to hear him tell it, anyway, and he never tells anyone very much. We’ll have ale. Him too.”

The group was about to settle on the benches in the centre of the common room when another large man with a poleaxe puffed himself up: “The wench speaks it right. To steal from one high-born is more grievous than stealing from a common man already is. Speaking of which, how come as one of gentle birth I am still not making the same as some much…”

“Will you shut up about it.” A beardless man wearing a blue sash cut him off. “We pay for tenure and skill. You’ll get yours when you’ve proven either, or else you can run back home. Ah, wait. You can’t go home no more, can you, after what you did.”

That seemed to settle the issue and served to frighten Bessa some more. Their helmets came off one by one revealing a troupe of mongrels, locals and foreigners alike. There were notably many of them with red hair, two of whom, one wearing the eyepatch, had shaved it off at the sides as if to make themselves look more troublesome.

Jost the Giant kept his helmet on, and only one man had grey hair even though the heads of all those with black hair were starting to show salt in their pepper.

“You there, girl,” one such with black hair and a luxurious beard addressed her, “will you stand there all day or are we getting served?!”

The ends of his moustache were so long that they dangled about his collarbone where he had capped them with ornate bronze fastenings. His speech had a queer accent.

Bessa ran at her aunt emerging from the kitchens, her arms filled with tankards. Men such as this had a thirst, so she filled four large jugs from the barrel and made back quickly, already seeing that she had to pour.

“To the company!” The man with the sash proposed and emptied his cup, not paying much attention to the men at all.

Jost the Giant, alone at his table, took two jugs from her when she went to pour for him. Then he gave her a look that chased her away from him quicker than a frightened hen.

He wasn’t the only large man. One of the bowmen was an ogre of a man as well, the one who had worn a green hunter’s hat before taking it off. The one who had called himself noble was also huge, as was a beardless, blond man with a scar on his face.

When she poured for the man with the eyepatch, he caught her arm: “Looks at you like he wants to eat ye, but the sarge keeps him well in line for now.” He let go. “Heard the lord he served wanted him kill someone. He did. And the women and children, and anyone in that place. Then the lord wouldn’t pay, so he killed him too. Now he’s with us.”

He took a sip off his ale and turned to her again ere she could move on, making her awkward.

“Good ale ‘tis you got ‘ere. What’s this place called?”

She swallowed: “Widow’s Inn, some name it, milord.”

He grinned and chuckled: “Milord?! Eh, lads! Have ye heard this one? Little ol’ me is some lord now! Ha, ha! And some lord I am!”

Janna cursed herself for her foolishness and the way the whole band laughed at her. It was just that she was so afraid.

The one-eyed man looked at her warmly, though: “I was a cripple before I joined this bunch. Heh! And then I lost an eye!”

“A cripple?” She mustered him, more out of reflex and the felt need to reply. “How can it be that you were a cripple but you’re not now?”

He laughed heartily, and some men of the company as well: “I wasn’t really crippled, though, see? Was just that I figured folk were more like to spare some for a beggar with crutches!”

“Heh, you’re the last beggar we have.” The sergeant put in, studying his ale. “Hard times. The others all fell, everyone.”

He drank as if it were a silent toast to the dead, and most at the table echoed him. There were older and newer members of this group, Janna figured, and the older ones had grown emotionally attached to it whereas the newer ones saw it only as employment.

She understood that these men were far less scary when she talked to them, so she went on.

“And what men did you hire then?”

The sergeant had salt and pepper hair and a serious look about him. He was the most handsome by a combination of his face and the fact that he had no scars. It was a shame he had only one ear, even though he almost managed to hide this fact under his hair.

He looked up at her, thoughtfully, before he shrugged: “Whoever would join us and whoever we could pay. Our company was almost wiped out in a fight a few years ago, and we had to build ourselves back up from the ground. We hired peasants, thieves, daytallers and beggars when we could not afford otherwise. Donbert over there was a miner, Hakon a huntsman somewhere. Liebwin the Rock was a brawler who beat up other men for coin even before joining us and Hartwig killed men for their women and food.”

At mention of his name, Hartwig looked up, an orange-haired, gruffy-looking man with a scraggly beard and ill-patched armour.

“Eh, not to worry. He’s sworn off the rapin’ part.” The eye-patched beggar offered. “I’m Haribert Goodman, but most call me Harry for short.”

Janna was still chewing on the fact that there was at least one rapist at this table she was serving, as well as the possibly that all of these men had killed people. It should have stuck with her when she heard the story of Jost the Giant, but that one was frightening her onto death even without the background.

Being small was terrible. If these people collectively decided to go rogue there was absolutely nothing she might do about it. She might have stopped it when she was big, when she was herself, only then she would likely have turned the village into a ruin, its inhabitants into smears and Bessa into a plaything, if she had cared long enough to look.

They looked somewhat alike, Janna and Bessa, a thing she realized only now. She had felt so natural being Bessa in this dream that she had never stopped to notice or care.

“Will you let the poor girl pour?!” A yellow-haired man complained. “I’ll die of thirst here, listening to you talking.”

“Ah, that is Winrich the Hammer.” The sergeant said, smiling knowingly at the man. “We call him that because he is a brute.”

“I was a squire, bound to be a knight!” The man roused to defend his honour.

He didn’t look the part, at all.

“What happened?” Janna asked in a bid to keep them entertained.

They were as diverse a bunch as she could hope for, and their tales were fascinating once one got over the dire and grim parts of it. And they all seemed to have grim parts.

“Pah, I cleaned latrines, fed dogs and got far too much use of the shine box.” He complained while she poured for him. “Then, someday, Thorwallers fell on our keep. I released some prisoners hoping they would help with the defending, only they slew his Lordship and run off.”

“Maybe you should call him Winrich the Whiner.” Janna quipped, much to Bessa’s shock.

Janna wasn’t as good at parties as Laura was, nowhere near, but she was still a great deal better at socialising than Bessa. The roaring laughter in the room proved her right and Usha seemed a deal more relaxed than before.

Winrich the Hammer turned as red as a coxcomb, leading to a man with yellow beard and hair only over his forehead to jeer: “Hah! Now he’s the Red! That’s my name!”

“We should call you the Hammer.” Another suggested into the merriment. “Seeing as you got the hammer ‘n all.”

That he did, having put it down on the table, a thick, crude thing that would be impossible to wield one-handed even for Jost the Giant still brooding silently over his ale. It was notable that the man originally wearing the title of the Red did not have red hair either.

“Why is Harry called Goodman?” Janna asked next to keep going when no more jeers were following.

“Why, because I’m a good man!” The one-eyed beggar grinned, resurrecting the merriment once more.

Janna was getting exhausted already and it would be a long night to be sure, and it wasn’t even evening.

“You serve well, girl.” The tall, apparently disowned nobleman said. “But this ale does not. How about something else? Wine, mayhaps?”

“If you lot are willing and able to pay the coin.” Usha answered in Janna’s stead from the door to the kitchens.

“Maybe not wine,” the sergeant replied, “but something stronger than this. Whatever he had.”

He pointed his cup at the knight, fast asleep at his table and seemingly no ruckus able to wake him up.

“It was wine that did him in.” Usha replied. “But if you want stronger I have dark Angbarer, cider and mead as well.”

“No mead.” The sergeant frowned. “Nothing that tastes of honey on its way out, I beg you.” The other sellswords laughed. “We will need food as well. The ham we had these past days has started to grow eyes.”

“I can cut them out and have my boy throw the good parts into our stew for you.” Usha offered. “Though I might first have him give the meat a boil.”

“That would be welcome.” The sergeant inclined his head. “You wouldn’t have any work for us as well, would you?”

“The twenty of you? No, I’m just one widow.”

“No man in here, eh?” Asked the cocky sellsword with the luxurious black beard.

Something blinked in his eye that Janna did not like. The knight was there, only he was stone-drunk and sleeping, and the sellsword hedge knight was vastly more terrifying.

“We have our Blain.” Usha replied curtly. “And he has himself a crossbow too so don’t get any ideas.”

That was a bold lie. Blain had himself a heavy wooden club tipped with steel, with a spike on top of it for some stabbing. He also did not have any armour and was very old besides, all grey, brittle hair. Only one of these sellswords had a grey hair, a strange fellow, short, gaunt and with haunted eyes staring into his ale.

As Bessa inspected him he suddenly jerked up, bared his teeth and drew his dagger. A screech broke from her throat, even though he remained as still as ice for the moment. Then he drew the point of his blade over the bandage on the palm of his other hand.

“Aye.” The Sergeant nodded. “Blood for the blood god.”

He had the same bandage, she saw, and a third sellsword as well. They too drew daggers and cut themselves before squeezing their fists over their cups. It seemed as though they were counting the drops falling down. Then they raised their cups, slammed them together and upended them into their mouths.

Haribert Goodman leaned over to grasp Bessa’s hand: “First time you saw men of Kor do their thing? He’s the god of sellswords, he is. A bloody god, and all things nine.”

Nine drops of blood, she understood.

“To strike down a man with nine blows is a holy thing!” The grey-haired man insisted through teeth still clenched.

Bessa was frightened all over again. Her heart thumped in her chest. If something ill befell Father she knew that opening an inn would not be something worth wanting.

She knew Kor, though, or had at least heard the name before. He was a half god, a demigod, Rondra’s irascible son with a mortal or some such. That was the more favourable tale she’d heard. The other version named him a demon, or an evil god, undecided at the very least whilst waiting at the abyss of the Netherhells.

‘Was I an undecided goddess, too?’ Janna reflected. ‘No. I was just a monster.’

She wondered if this was the point of her dream, if dreams ever could have points. To teach her humility, regret over all the things she had done, and to teach her what it meant to be powerless. She was afraid, afraid to get hurt, raped, despoiled. Afraid to die. Afraid that she mightn’t be with Alrik the Younger.

Most of all, though, she was yearning for her size. Then she’d teach this lot a thing or two about frightening innocent girls.

“Where is this Blain, that you speak of,” inquired the black beard while theatrically looking around the common room, “and how come we are twenty men and you only have one wench? Your cook boy might serve for some, aye, but you are old, and this one will be plenty worn out when we’re done with her.”

He gave Bessa a nod while and the blood froze in her veins.

“Where is Blain?” She whispered, entirely forgetting that the man had just asked the same question.

She should have noted earlier that he wasn’t here. He sat in the common room at most any time, waiting for travellers with whom to share a cup and a story. A few days ago she had heard him complain of catching a chill. Perhaps he was abed.

Usha gave the slightest shake of her head. It were the three of them, two women and a boy, against twenty armoured men.

“Ah, ha, ha!” The man gave a raspy laugh that shattered the quiet. “I’m only teasin’ ye! Girl, you are as pale as milk. Come here! Sit on my lap so I can show you I’m also a good man!”

She realised that Harry the beggar was still holding her hand. When she looked at him in turn he gave her a grin, and whereas before he had taken care to keep his rotten teeth hidden they were on full display now.

A pet name could sometimes imply the opposite of its meaning, she knew, as with Boronian the Clever, a fabled, funny hero who always fell asleep when he tried to think.

She yanked her hand away.

“Leave her be, Hugo.” The sergeant declared to the black beard. “It seems this is not that sort of inn.”

Janna looked at the weapon in front of the man with a queasy feeling. It was a mace of steel with a thick wooden hilt. It’s head was made up of a metal chunk with wings. She counted, but it were only eight wings, not nine, and the man had no bandage on his hand.

“I wasn’t implying any rape!” He raised his hands. “Gods, I just thought…”

The sergeant interrupted him: “Let’s leave the thinking to cleverer men, shall we. Much as we leave our ham with this woman here. Don, go and fetch it.”

Beardless Donbert the Miner pushed himself from the table: “Why is it always I that’s doin’ the fetchin’, eh? You know I have a weak heart since that one time I all but died.”

He went all the same, and no one thought the remark worthy of responding.

Then a game of dice started between two of the mercenaries, and the others occupied themselves by making bets. Janna stood by, filling any just-emptied cup with strong ale or cider while Usha was in the kitchens doing the stew with pate.

When it came it was past time that Bessa went and fixed supper for Father, but Usha had planned for that in advance.

“I wouldn’t mind him coming to get fed when you work here, you know.” Usha offered. “Just not with this lot in here.”

Two bowls of steaming stew with carrots, turnips and chunks of boiled ham she carried home.

“There you are.” Father greeted her inside. “Is it just food you bring or bastard too, I wonder?”

Anger flared in Janna’s chest. She wanted to strike him, or at least throw the thrice-damned stew at his head. She had handled herself well in every respect, only to be questioned by the one person who should know her better.

Before she could frame a response, a sting of pain erupted with a snap across her face. It took her a moment to realize that he had struck her, and hard too.

“Answer me!” He cried, eyes wide open and his jowls quivering.

He was quick to anger and always rued his wroth. That wasn’t worth a whole lot, though, Janna saw now.

She did not have any reply for him, not a good one anyhow.

“No.” She sniffed, wiping blood off her lip. “No bastard, Father, only stew with ham.”

She felt like crying but could not well do that either. Father breathed and hugged her. He just wanted to protect her, in his own stupid, angry and powerless way.

The dream started to annoy Janna, but Bessa wouldn’t let the displeasure show. Instead, she broached the subject of marriage.

“That boy?” Father shrank away in disgust when she had laid out her ambitions.

She could see the word hanging from his lips: ‘No.’

It was horrible.

“But he’s a smith!” She pleaded. “He’ll always find work and we’ll never have to starve. And he likes me!”

“I like that boy well enough too,” Father shook his head, “if not for his wretched father! Who will take care of me when you are over there taking care of him, huh?! Not to mention what that greedy iron bender will try to wriggle out of me for a dowry! Hah!”

He was angry again, and there was no reasoning with him when he was angry.

“Bessa, no.” He told her finally. “I need you. Put me in the ground next to your mother, and then marry whomever you will have.”

She did cry then, big bitter tears from eyes swollen almost shut. She could not stand their home any moment longer and wanted nothing more than to run off. But there was nowhere to go in her small, unjust world.

“I’m done with that man’s shield.” Father sat down to spoon stew in his mouth. “You will take it to Alrik and have him fix the rim. Then you’ll bring it to the inn and bring me back the silver. Don’t give it to your aunt, that grasping harridan, do you hear me?! And stop crying, for Ingerimm’s sake, you are not marrying that boy!”

She had been hungry, but not anymore. It was all so unfair. If only something bad happened to shake them all awake. If only Janna came while she was awake. A few digested villagers would surely remind them of the need to stick together. But not even their dead spouses had been able to do that.

Janna wondered if this place was real. It felt real, even the pain, both emotional and physical.

“When you die, I’ll be old.” Her voice cracked when she was speaking. “No one will have me. I’ll die poor and alone, pouring ale in Usha’s inn for strangers. I will never have children. Don’t you want a grandson, Father?”

He gaped at her over his food. It had not come from Janna, what she said, at least not consciously. But it was a bloody brilliant thing to say.

Thwack!

The sound of his hand cracking across her cheek again echoed in the room. It stung so bad that she couldn’t see for a moment.

“Get out of my house.” Father growled at her. “Don’t you hear me?! Get out!”

She pushed from the table and ran. Father roared after her, but she was quick and uncaring for where she went. Had one of Edo’s carts been coming on the road at that time, it might have run over her and ended all her grief.

Janna had finally enough of this dream. Not only did she feel Bessa’s silly woes as strongly as her host, but likewise was she painfully aware of its mundane nature. It was heart-wrenching, but unimportant. She only cared because she was forced to by the dream.

Her feet carried her across the road and through the adjacent trees and into the fields. There was an earthen dyke separating a stubble field and one that was yet to be cropped, next to the shed, henhouse and smokebox behind Usha’s inn. On the dyke was a small, overgrown path leading to an abandoned farmhouse where Bessa sometimes went to be alone.

On the way she could not help but feel watched, somehow, a spooky feeling in her lower back. She turned for the sellswords’ donkey cart, thinking that maybe it was Donbert the Miner fetching the ham, but there was no one there, just the donkey munching grass that grew from the inn’s foundation in the pre-dusk gloom.

Life wasn’t so good anymore, she noted while moving on. This was a forlorn place, a prison without walls. Freedom was an illusion, but it was palpable enough when getting what one aspired to. When not, that was a different tale.

The farmhouse had burned out once, blackened wood and rotted straw. The rushes had withered to earth under the caved-in roof. The air smelled mossy. It was there she fell to her knees and prayed to Boron for her mother, and for her unborn brother too. Oddly enough she could picture him better than her, a toddler running around and making Father happy.

If only they were still here.

But they weren’t. Bessa was alone, even though it did not quite feel that way at the moment. Maybe it was the gloom that scared her, or any number of other things. Alrik the Younger was her chance to fix it all, a strong man to protect her, put food on her table and a child in her belly that she could occupy herself with and grow happy by.

If it weren’t for Father.

A caterpillar crawled on a broken piece of charred wood. It was oddly late in the year for that kind of thing. It should have cocooned and turned into a butterfly long ago. Just like Bessa.

“You belong in spring.” She sniffed, extending her hand to flick it into the bushes.

Something made her stop, though.

“That’s kind of you, not to do that.” A female voice said behind her.

Bessa almost shrieked.

A woman stood in the empty doorway of the ruin, red of hair and naked, scalp to heel. Janna knew her, just not quite from where.

“Who are you?!” Bessa asked, crawling backwards.

“You know I’m Lissandra, Janna.” The witch cocked her head, blinking with innocent eyes. “But you can call me Liss.”

“What are you doing here?”

“You were in pain,” Liss replied amiably, “so I brought you here.”

“You brought me here? You?”

“Mh hm!” The witch smiled her perfect smile. “So much time passing. And it’s cold! Men came. More men. You were not awake to eat them. Gun and Oga ran away. Gun cried. You know she likes you.”

“What men?!” Janna asked aghast. “Liss, I’m not playing, you have to wake me up!”

She pictured herself on her back in the forest with tiny men at arms sawing through her veins and arteries with their blades.

“But they are feeding you. If you wake up now you will be in pain again.”

“I can live with that!” Janna pushed on. “Are they Horasians, these men? What colours do they wear?!”

Liss looked at the ground: “I don’t know what a Horasian is. Are they different than a Novadi or the boatmen? They wear white and green and the colour of stars and gold and black and red and yellow. Oh, and blue and black and something that’s like a flower that is not red and not yellow but a little of both! And purple!”

Janna sighed, trying to concentrate: “What do you think is their favourite colour?”

Liss pressed her lips together: “Mhh…green!”

That at least was good news.

“I’d like to speak with them.” Janna said. “I want to wake up. Can you help me with that? I promise I won’t stick you anywhere you don’t want to go if you do.”

She wondered if this pleading was any use in the first place. It might be that this Liss was just a part of her dream. The thought came to her belatedly, however.

Liss tip-toed from one foot to the other. She was clearly awkward, and not because of her nakedness.

“I don’t know how.” She confessed. “This is so much different than I thought it would be.”

Janna felt her suspicion confirmed. This was just part of this stupid dream, even though in Liss’ presence she felt more like herself and less like Bessa, which was nice for a change. She spent a thought on Alrik the Younger, as he had been working the bellows in the shop. In her mind, Steve stood there instead, smiling his oafish smile at her.

‘This is what you get.’

She had to take her mind off him.

“Well,” she said, “you could at least have made it more fun than this. This dream drags on like…like a…”

Lissandra could not know what chewing gum was.

“This all is you.” The witch shrugged innocently. “Like that other place, the strange place with the moving shadow wall.”

‘The one with the guilt,’ Janna remembered. ‘The lecture hall.’

So that had been her doing too.

Lissandra went on: “I wanted to take you somewhere nice. My old home. Only men were there, doing…things. It was strange. I do not know this place. What is it?”

Janna found that strange too, the black figure and the red one.

“I do not know this place either, not that I recall, anyway.”

Maybe it was a village she had ploughed under. Maybe this what came before, or what might have been if she hadn’t. The pangs of guilt were certainly hers, suppressed and locked up deep within her subconscious.

Had she stumbled on this village, she would have found it rather unremarkable, done her thing with any inhabitants and moved on, never caring of the complicated intricacies, the aspirations unresolved that she crushed under her feet with those who carried them.

It was a possibility that this was designed to make her sad. But it was farfetched, not to mention not very effective on the face of it.

Lissandra laughed: “Is there someone else in here? It is coming from somewhere. I wanted to take you some place else. My home.” Her face became thoughtful very suddenly, like the face of a little child. “But why were the men in my home? They should not have been there.”

“I could not see properly.” Janna said. “What were they doing?”

Lissandra frowned: “A ritual. Magic.”

Of course, this had nothing to do with the real Lissandra, Janna remembered. Magic was dead. She said as much but Liss only continued frowning.

“Well, then how am I here?”

“You are part of my dream.” Janna sighed. “I could kill you right now and it wouldn’t even matter.”

“Why are you always so mean?!”

Lissandra’s voice was a shriek so shrill and loud that Janna was certain they would hear it at the inn. That was her thought as she was travelling through the air, only to smash up against and through the daub and wattle wall of the burned-out farmstead.

She was on her back with the wind knocked out of her.

“Oooh, I’m so sorry, Janna!” Liss came tripling through the hole she’d made. “I didn’t mean to do that!”

It didn’t hurt, not really, anyway. This was just a dream.

“Wait till I’m awake and I’ll pay you back.” Janna groaned as she climbed back to her feet.

She didn’t really mean it. An invisible force had taken her and smashed her through the wall. This had to be what magic felt like, which was a little excitement at last, if a little daunting.

“Can you do it again?”

Liss did her awkward thing again, showing she could not.

“You know, you’re not very useful far as witches go. But magic is still dead.”

“Not really.” Liss remarked, guiltily chewing her lip.

Janna thought about saying something but thought better of it. The Bessa in her was still confused, not knowing this woman and wanting to go back to the tavern, since she could not be alone here and drown her grief in tears.

“I saw you were crying.” Lissandra mentioned as if she could read Janna’s mind. “Were you sad?”

Janna nodded: “This girl I am is. Father…I mean, her father, he won’t let her marry the boy she likes. It’s sad, truly. Couldn’t you fix that? I mean, you are a witch.”

She was just grasping for anything to make the dream more engaging at this point. She wanted to see Lissandra use magic again, too.

The witch gave a sceptical look: “I do not know what any of this means. And I wouldn’t know how.”

Then she shrugged for emphasis, as if to tell she never had much of any idea what she was doing.

Janna sighed: “Meh, I just wish that I was big so I could crush them all.”

“Why?” Lissandra asked desperately.

She shrugged: “Just for fun.”

There was a bang that made Janna’s ears ring and whipped up so much dirt that she had to close her eyes. When she came back up blinkingly to examine her surroundings the old ruin was gone, smashed to splinters, tiny pieces of charcoal and dust.

“Woa!”

Liss stood in the middle of it, naked and ashamed.

“You are powerful when you get angry!” Janna told her, full of admiration and Bessa’s fear.

It was only comfortable to know for Janna that she could squish the witch like a mite in the real world.

“I have an idea.” She said. “You have to come to the inn with me. There are a few men that I mean to introduce you to.”

Not naked, though. Janna did not fail to recognize that Lissandra was attractive. If she showed up naked at the inn, there was no telling what the sellswords might do, other than start drooling on themselves.

On the other hand, maybe that was just the thing.

She took the witch by the hand and dragged her along before she could frame a reply.

The objections followed on the way: “Janna, I really don’t…I’m not sure about this. I do not know this place. Its otherness scares me. If I did not make it and you did not make it this way, then…”

“Nonsense!” Janna cut her off. “It will be amazing! Have you ever had cider?”

If anger could make Lissandra blow up houses, then perhaps so could other strong emotions, and few ever had stronger emotions than drunk, young girls not used to alcohol. It did not matter, anyway. This was a dream. Now that Janna was more herself than Bessa, she was finally able to manipulate it.

“Janna, I don’t want to go!” Lissandra squealed as another shockwave sent her smashing into the ground and shook the trees around them.

Then the witch dissolved into a puff of smoke, only to show up a heartbeat later, awkwardly biting her lip.

“It will be fun!” Janna promised, grabbing Liss’ hand again.

It took long and entailed enduring a few more magical mishaps, but ultimately Janna managed to get her to the inn.

“Where have you been?” Usha rounded on her when she made through the door, clanking the cowbell noisily.

The sellswords looked up from their bowls of stew, many visibly happy to see her.

“I am so sorry, aunt.” Janna replied. “I found this girl on the road. She is naked and cold!”

“What in Travia’s name is that?!” Usha gaped when Janna pulled Lissandra through the door.

Once her first shock was overcome, the feisty middle-age woman sprung into action immediately, taking off the big old scarf around her shoulders and handing it to Lissandra to cover herself with.

Meanwhile, at the table, there had first been a big ‘Oh’, then cheers and now there were half-jested complaints erupting.

“The goddess Rahya sent her to us, brothers!” The cocky black beard announced. “We should honour this gift from her, one after the other!”

Usha gave him a look that could have curdled milk and the sergeant was on his case once more.

“Why do you think a girl like that would be out in the fields naked?” He asked curtly. “Are you trying that thinking thing again?”

“Pah!” The other spat. “You make it sound like there’s not a decent man in this world, or rather like you’re the only one?!”

The sergeant only laughed.

“Come here.” Usha took Lissandra’s hand from Janna. “We’ll get you some clothes and something warm in your belly.”

If Father’s beating had left a mark on Bessa’s face no one even noticed.

“Oh, I got something right here!” Another sellsword jeered happily. “A nice, hard sausage!”

“Oh, me too!” Another one joined. “And I’m warm as a hearth, no one warmer!”

“We can tell by the sweat on your brow, oaf.” The man next to him chortled.

Janna could not decide how dangerous they were after all. They were men, armed killers for hire, but equally forced to live in a world that depended upon rules without which it would fall out of its hinges. Sometimes she was certain it was just banter. Other times, she was not.

She rushed to the kitchens to give Lissandra some cider and see what would happen, giddy and full of mischief as she felt. It was a sort of revenge on the dream itself, whatever it was or meant.

Lissandra was naked and did not have any coin, but Usha wasn’t looking and seemed to already have taken the witch into her heart.

“Oh, what wonderful bastards we could make.” One of the red-haired sellswords rasped dreamily, staring after the girl.

“Here, here.” Usha led Lissandra through the room to a table near Jost the Giant. “This man will keep you save. Have no fear, he’s a priest.”

“What’s that?” Liss asked innocently as Janna’s head spun around.

There was a new patron, she only saw now, a man in black robes faded almost to grey. His hair was full and grey too, like the fur of a mouse. He did look mousey, the hint of cuteness stemming from his decidedly young face.

On the table in front of him were a burning taper, a brown cup and an hourglass. He turned it as Lissandra approached.

“Have no fear.” He smiled at the witch. “Far as priests go, I’m not a good one at any rate.”

Liss did not know how to answer, but at least she seemed to understand how chairs worked. Janna rushed for the cider.

“Why do you give her to the Boron preacher?!” A sellsword complained to Usha, meanwhile. “He’ll put the fear of death in her before he puts her to sleep!”

Usha retorted by threatening to get her spoon and whack him with it, which made the other men laugh.

“Well, this is what common people do in inns.” The priest told Lissandra when Janna came. “They drink and talk. Ah, and here comes your drink, and without even having to ask for it too.” He turned to Janna. “Being served by you is something I could quite get used to. Bring me one as well, if you would. I feel a crushing thirst all of a sudden!”

Janna raised a brow, suspiciously: “A gigantic thirst, would you say?”

“Oh, aye!” He downed his cup and grinned. “Mh, a ginormous thirst, indeed. And a hunger! Blimey, I think I could devour a town!”

Something was definitely off here, but Usha called, and the Bessa in Janna made her go back to the kitchens at once. Coins and dice lay forgotten on the sellsword table while the stew was being wolfed down, but that did not mean they needed any less drink. Janna wanted to hear what the stranger wanted off Lissandra.

When she came back with food and drink, however, Lissandra was nowhere to be seen.

“Your aunt took her.” The grey-haired man with the young, smooth face gave to report. “Seems it’s prudent to have her dressed, with so many hungry eyes about.”

That gave Janna time to pour for the other patrons, but she wanted to look more into the priest as well.

On such short notice, she could only come up with: “Are you truly a priest?”

It was a glancing hit.

“No.” He grinned sheepishly. “Not in the sense of your meaning. I suppose some would name me priest, but none would name them godly men in turn.”

That could mean a ton of things, or nothing. He was meandering to distract her, she sensed.

“Do you have a name?”

The question was useless, but she was out of ideas. She couldn’t well ask directly. Or maybe she could. The truth was that she expected him to lie. But that meant that any answer she might receive would have been the same, whether he lied or not. This wasn’t the case, though.

Rather, his answers were weird: “No. But I have a riddle for you. If I was dead and came back here from an earlier point in time, did I ever die?”

Some mercenaries started barking angrily for ale and she was able to leave him without having to come up with a retort.

When Lissandra was dressed, she was looking like a slimmer, slightly taller version of Bessa’s aunt, at least from the neck downward. She had to be larger here than she was in real life, Janna thought, remembering the witch as little more than a red-haired speck, minuscule even among bug-sized people.

The new clothes hung loose on her and her skirts were too short, exposing her ankles. She moved awkward in them, as if she had not worn any clothes in some time.

“Ah, you came back to me.” The priest gestured at the chair. “Which is precisely what I wanted to beg you do.”

Janna grabbed a fresh pitcher of cider and made her way over to them, pouring for them both and leaving the rest with Jost.

“Come back where?” Lissandra cocked her head, looking back at him.

He reached for her hand on the table: “To where you belong!”

The witch chewed her lower lip for a moment: “You mean, my hill? My hill with the stones and the mushrooms?”

Janna remembered the place that she had seen briefly before ending up as Bessa. The place where the ritual had taken place, the two men, one of them wearing black robes.

She shuddered, frozen stiff as she stood there.

“Yes.” The priest’s face turned dark and eerie. “Those damned stones. Do you know what they do?”

Lissandra nodded: “Nothing can pass them, not even a bird or a fly unless I say so. That was before, though. Then Oga and Gun could pass them and they took me.”

“Aye. I could pass them too whilst magic was dead. Now that it’s not I can’t get back out.”

He laughed, a motion that did not extend to his eyes. Lissandra laughed belatedly and in a way that foretold ignorance over why she did it.

“The moment you come back, I can go out, see?” The priest added with a sense of urgency.

Lissandra frowned: “I don’t think I can go. I am with Oga and Gun now and they won’t let me.”

“They will have to let you.” He shook his head. “Nothing can stand between that place and you. Don’t you hear it calling?”

“I only hear Longleg.” Lissandra’s face grew somber and sad. “But she is dead. Gun stepped on her and she didn’t even notice.”

“Aw, no!” The priest pushed back in his seat. “Longleg isn’t dead! She’s with me, see?”

He raised his right hand from the table and from his sleeve crawled a fat, black spider, stopping on the back of his hand. Lissandra lit up.

“Longleg?!” She squealed, so loud that everyone turned their heads. “Oooh!”

She was hyperventilating, crying, hopping up and down and smiling all at once.

The priest held his hand against hers and the arachnoid pest moved over to run up on Lissandra’s arm. Somewhere at the mercenary table, Janna heard the word ‘witch’ being uttered, but that did not seem to matter anymore.

“She will not be with you when you leave this place.” The priest warned. “But she will wait for you…where you belong.”

Lissandra gingerly caressed the spider that had now come to perch on her head. Far as Janna could see it was a mundane creature, a simple house spider and nothing more, even if it was fat and ugly. There was no doubt that there was some sort of magical connection between it and the witch, though.

“Liss, I think that’s a bad idea.” She whispered, stepping close.

The redhead turned her head in shock: “Why?”

“I think this man is bad. He frightens me.”

That much was true, but Liss’ face darkened: “You just want to keep me as a toy! I do not belong in your body, Janna! I do not belong to you!”

A cold wind rose out of nowhere, accompanying her words. Janna thought it was magic, like the shockwaves from earlier, only then the cowbell rattled and it might have come from the door just the same.

Alrik the Younger stood there, carrying the knight’s finished shield, new rim and all. He smiled at her.

That damned smile. It kicked Bessa back into motion and she took the helm, turning herself and Janna on their heel and making towards him. Then she stopped, remembering that she couldn’t marry him, and she had to fight tears.

“Janna, is everything alright?” The strange, red-haired girl asked after her. “I just said it because, well, you are so bad yourself, sometimes. You shouldn’t judge.”

Alrik’s smile faded and he made his way to the sleeping knight instead.

“Ah, there’s a strapping lad!” A sellsword hollered at him. “Care to join us, boy? With us you can see the world and make love to girls of all stripes and shapes there are!”

Alrik shook his head, and another sellsword swayed to tell a tale about how he had fucked a whore with painted stripes in some southern place once.

The young smith shook the knight by the shoulder. Bessa feared he’d be wroth, so she sprinted to get some ale and stew to ward against the eventuality.

“Oh, you can leave any time you want.” Janna overheard the priest tell Lissandra when Bessa came back out. “But I won’t let Janna out of here unless you promise to free me.”

Liss was biting her lip, Janna saw from the corner of Bessa’s eye, before nodding and giving a happy: “Mh hm, I promise!”

“Ah!” The sergeant exclaimed when the knight raised his drunken head under Alrik’s shaking. “Our gracious host is awake! Many thanks for the food and drink, Sir!”

That was irritating, a thing that Usha noted as well. Something was going bad.

“You will not be paying for yourselves?!” The innkeeper asked angrily.

The knight squinted just as Bessa arrived with his food that he immediately found more interesting and took a spoon of. He did not look well.

“Never claimed to.” The sergeant shrugged. “This good man promised to feast us in the next inn when we met him on the road.”

Haribert Goodman chuckled: “Woe is him! Don’t think he meant for us to catch up.”

Bessa had a feeling as well that this was the real reason the knight had been so hasty to be gone.

“I won’t be paying for nothing!” The knight spat thickly with a mouthful of stew, spraying it everywhere. “You lot can pay for your own gruel!”

“You made us a promise.” The sergeant rose from his seat. “Now, if you have any honour-“

“What’s a sellsword know of honour?!” The knight spat. “And you, eh, boy?!” He scowled at Alrik. “How come you are carrying my shield?!”

He wrenched it away before setting it down on the bench beside him.

“I, uh…I fixed the rim, milord.” Alrik stammered. “I shoed your horse too, the price…”

“Weren’t you listening, boy?!” The knight stood and roared down on him, rocking the table with his leg and knocking the cup to the floor. “I won’t be paying for nothing! All this wretched inn gives me is headaches! And what’s this, huh?!”

He slapped the bowl with stew off the table.

“Time to go, brothers.” The sellsword sergeant said. “We’ll not be needin’ rooms. It’s tents by the road for us.”

“It’ll be a butcher’s cleaver unless you pay for your fare!” Usha put her hands on her hips. “I’ll go to town myself if I have to and have you all branded as outlaws and thieves!”

The sergeant rolled his eyes before downing the rest from his cup: “We were modest enough, I’d say. We ate and drank nothing more or less than this man promised us. All that is good and proper.”

Their group stood at once, reaching for their weapons. That shut Usha up properly, but not that drunk oaf of a knight.

“I’ll not be paying anything!” He roared. “By rights, I should cut you all down like the robbers you are!”

The sergeant turned, icy-cold foreboding on his face: “Well, in that case…Jost, take the head he’s carrying. I understand it’s worth quite a sum in gold.”

“You wha-“

The knight started to protest, but in a heartbeat Jost the Giant was on him, pushing him down on the bench. With the two hedge knights next to each other, the drunk one looked almost small. Jost took the sack and went, never so much as grunting.

“I will go to the town, I swear it!” Usha tried again.

She stood to lose a lot of coin here, not for food, but the sellswords had drunk heftily. They were not extremely drunk, Bessa had judged, only now that they stood some were swaying rather dangerously.

The sergeant gave another shrug: “We’re bound to town too. They need any man they can get, hunting ogres in the hills. Think they will chop our hands off? Heh, nah.” He frowned and seemed to consider for a moment, then reached into his purse and tossed a handful of coppers on the floor. “Here’s for the excellent company.” He gave Bessa a nod. “Take it, or we will lay waste to your inn.”

The pay was nothing short of an insult but at the same time a dozen glances were shot at Bessa and Lissandra, hopeful glances that spoke nothing good. Usha swallowed hard, then lowered her head. It was over.

Bessa was shaking when she realized how bad this was for her. Alrik the Elder would make Father pay for the rim, and maybe the horse too, since she had instigated that triangular arrangement with the knight. Father would be boiling with rage, and everyone would hate her.

“A silver!” She threw herself at the knight at once. “Sir, please, you promised!”

With a grunt he shoved her off of him. He was hungover, drunk, had lost his prize and was decidedly not in the mood for any of this. She hit her head on a chair and saw stars for a moment.

Then a voice cut through all of it, a voice like a thousand fingernails scratching on equally as many blackboards at once.

“Why is everyone so mean!?”

There was that gust of wind again, strong this time, even moving a few of the chairs.

“Witch.” A sellsword muttered once more.

Lissandra’s clothes had torn off somehow and she stood there in all her naked glory. The stranger was gone.

Shyly, with all eyes on her, the witch bit her lip and awkwardly shifted on her feet.

“I mean,” she said, softly and innocently, “what’s so unnerving about coins that you want them so much? Can…can you eat them? Wouldn’t it be nicer if you wouldn’t worry about them so much?”

“Banshee.” Someone else said, louder this time.

Lissandra didn’t understand, but Janna did.

“Get her.” The sergeant snarled. “Might be worth a coin or two to the right man.”

The mercenaries seemed scared stiff, though, which in light of Lissandra’s naïve innocence seemed almost comical. Jost the Giant was not afraid, through. He shouldered back through his brothers with a grim face, drew the dagger from his belt and made for the girl.

Janna acted without thinking.

“No!” She shouted and slammed into the huge knight’s back.

Then Lissandra shrieked.

Jost half turned and looked at her as might look upon a roach in his rushes. The dagger was in Bessa’s belly before she even knew.

In a flash of red, Jost disintegrated. It seemed as if he had dissolved, only a heartbeat later Janna saw Lissandra staying there, shock and hate both mixed in her eyes, and her hands, scary, black claws that were dripping blood. She had clawed the huge man in two, somehow.

‘Just a dream.’ Janna tried to tell herself, her belly throbbing with agony. ‘This is just a dream, nothing like this is happening.’

‘This is what you get.’ Steve’s voice echoed for a final time.

They were both on the floor, she and Lissandra, all and everyone else leaving the scene. The witch cried big bitter tears over Janna, dying in Bessa’s body.

She moved her face over Janna’s as if to whisper something.

Then she shouted: “Janna, do not move your head!”

That was weird.

She sounded almost like Laura.

-

General Scalia had struck Dari as a bit of an armchair general while she had seen him at Joborn. He was big on looking authoritative, frightening people with those cold, hard eyes of his, but there was nothing that would have legitimized his fearsome reputation as a strategist and tactician.

That had changed, beginning with a blunder.

The Bloody Brotherhood, a famed, expensive band of Horasian sellswords under Condottiere Travian di Faffarallo, had turned coats as soon as Joborn was under their control. They did not burn the city or butcher its inhabitants as ordered, but rather closed the gates, manned the walls and grinned down at their former employers, none other than Sir Ruckus standing next to them. It had to be Sly’s work, certain as sunrise.

They were with the ogres now who stormed over the river in force as soon as the Horasian army was moving. Scalia’s hands were tied, his column bogged down by wagons, supplies and artillery. The smaller fieldpieces had been put on wagons, however, allowing them to fire on the move. There had been a brief, brutal skirmish with the ogres, proving that even while moving as a big, slow, circular heap, the Horasians could and would defend themselves, giving as good as they got.

Outriders from the west came back soon after with word of the approaching Albernian host under Count Arlan Stepahan, Marshal of a large part of King Finnian’s troops that had crossed into Nostria from Havena, destroyed the capital and now sought to bring more vengeance upon those who sent Laura and Janna into their lands. Scalia had passed them by during the night, cleverly fooled them into attacking a decoy portion of his force and thus led them to clash with the Varg the Impaler, fooled by the same bait at exactly the right point in time.

Scalia was a cold, brutal genius, Dari now understood.

It had been a horrible battle if she was any judge, which wasn’t really true as far as battles went. The ogres had developed a tactic that involved flails, large, long shafts of wood with chains on the end of them and oft as not something heavy tied to it, inspired by the tools peasants used for threshing. A line of human foot could thus be threshed to pulp by a line of ogresses, which wasn’t anything she cared to ever witness again.

The Albernian bow- and crossbowmen had pummelled the monsters well, however, and the charge of heavy Albernian horse frightened the ogres enough to make them rout and run for Joborn. It would have been a victory for Count Arlan Stepahan, if it hadn’t been for General Scalia.

The Horasians descended on the Albernian force just as the latter settled down to lick their wounds. The count tried to cut through the encirclement with his best knights, a plan that went awry in the Horasian pike wall.

Thus, the Count of Bredenhag was now a prisoner of the Horasians, for all the good it did them. He did not talk much, rather preferring to look grim and grind his teeth together. When he and Scalia had faced off it had been a parley of barely three sentences.

“Count Arlan.”

The other had given a nod.

“You are now our prisoner.”

“Aye.”

The Count’s teeth had ground so hard then that Dari feared they might snap.

This had been the episode of the road from Joborn to Nostria’s capital. Master Furio had still been a sick case back then, on his bed in his wheelhouse, resting for his recovery. An enormous plume of smoke had led them to Janna, who they discovered was sick as well.

She had been hunting ogres, and there were ogre tracks on the ground where she had yanked out all the trees root and stem to warm herself with a gargantuan fire. How or why she had gotten sick was a mystery, and Janna was in no condition to answer them. She had been cold as ice to the touch when they found her, and unresponsive to any call.

Now and then she would wake, move slightly, blink a few times, only to drift right off again.

“End it!” Dari had pleaded with Léon. “This is a gift from Phex! Saw through her throat, let her bleed out, feed her whatever vile disgusting filth we find, but make sure she is dead! An opportunity like this might never come again!”

Dari relished in Janna’s moans and cries when they came babbling out of her. She was in pain, which was just two steps short of justice, the next one being death, followed by an eternal damnation in the freezing depths of the Netherhells.

But Léon had dampened her hopes.

“You know we dare not.” He said. “She is too important, too powerful, now that I look on her.”

Seeing a living thing so large and so seemingly human for the first time had to be quite breath-taking, Dari had to admit. Janna stretched a hundred steps long, probably twenty wide at her shoulders. One of her hairs was a rope of almost similar length, her fingers thick as the trunks of stoneoaks. The brown leather boots on her feet were houses, and not little hovels at that. How many lives those giant feet snuffed out, how many more they would snuff out yet if they ever walked again.

The beast’s belly was rumbling and making noises like thunder. That belly had cost a lot of lives as well.

Even though her symptoms were much different, Horasian command staff decided that they should treat her as they had come to treat those soldiers afflicted with the Bloody Diffar. It went back to something Janna had told the Bloody Brotherhood, confirmed by the Maraskan’s seeming imperviousness to the disease.

The Maraskans were an island people off the east coast of the continent, driven from their home by demon worshippers. Much like the seafaring Thorwalsh, they could be met all over the inhabited world, only the Horasian Empire had made an exalted effort to take as many of them in as possible. Not much of ale or wine drinkers, they had a penchant for a certain clear, exceedingly strong liquor, as well as tea that they brewed from dried, bitter herbs.

They did not come down with the Diffar of either kind, and they were industrious, fearsomely loyal, as well as stunningly brave, even while the continental people found their ways odd and bewildering. The army had picked up a score of wagon columns on the road and Scalia had sent the Horasian cavalry to divert any other surviving caravans to the army’s new location.

Fort Janna, everyone called it, a wall of logs, a ditch and a dyke around the fallen tower of monstrous flesh. Pitfalls had been dug and hidden in the surrounding wasteland, should the ogres attack them. For Janna’s treatment, a scaffold had been raised around her head to feed and water her, complete with a treadwheel crane that had formerly been an enormous trebuchet.  

Horasians were nothing if not ingenious engineers.

The giant fire Janna had built could not be maintained, however, so there was a ring of smaller ones all around the giantess. They required lots of wood, but Scalia had several thousand men at his disposal, as well as a plethora of draft horses, oxen and tools.

A city of tents had been erected around Fort Janna, and they were currently erecting a second palisade wall around it to replace the wall of wagons in its place before. Inside, life was busy. Next to the building process, able men burned the cheap soldiers’ wine rations to brandy, foul stuff that tasted of sulphur and copper but got the job done far as Bloody Diffar and camp fatigue were concerned.

Dari held it with Hippocras and mulled wine, instead, as did Horasian high command. It had been five or six days she spent this way. She wasn’t really certain. She did not engage in any digging or tree felling and was uninvolved in any of the other ventures as well.

Master Hypperio, Furio Montane’s wispy, little colleague, had strangely gone missing from his mission to find Janna, not very far from here. His party had apparently been attacked by the same ogresses whose tracks they had found here, so Scalia had Léon and some men hunting after them. That was the only thing that even marginally interested Dari, though. Watching over Master Furio was a duty she had turned over back to the Horasian field doctors as soon as they were no longer on the march.  

Most of her days were spent drunk. She had tried to find poison in the camp and slip it into Janna’s provisions, but there was nothing to be had. And even if there had been, a large body required large dose, and Janna was nothing if not enormous. A good assassin should be able to make a few poisons by themselves, so as to be independent from having to buy them. Dari, however, had always been so good at climbing, picking locks and fooling people that stealing whatever substance she required from one of Gareth’s manifold alchemists had been a much easier affair, a circumstance she regretted now.

In Léon’s absence, she had an officer’s tent all to herself, with a guard outside it. That was her life for now.

She got up in the morning, washing herself in a basin of water and drinking whatever was left of last night’s wine while she waited for food. Provisions were tight, but not for the officers, and breaking through to the many caravans on the road had relieved their situation a great deal.

“My lady, please put on some dress to break your fast!” A boy would call from outside. “I don’t want to get hit again!”

He had seen her naked the first time she had slept in the tent alone, and she had thrown her wine cup at his head for that. The boy who brought her meals was a fourteen-year-old Maraskan, too young to remember his homeland.  

“Come in!” She called back, taking a seat at her table.

Today, the morning’s fare was pickled radishes and pickled eggs. She knew the vinegar would mix with the wine to give her a tummy ache later. That reminded her of Janna.

“Don’t you have something else?” She asked. “Some bacon, perhaps, and bread fried in grease?”

The radishes would go splendidly with some beef too, had they had any that wasn’t dry as leather or salty as dried cod.

“They opened a barrel of sardines.” The boy frowned. “I didn’t bring them because the fishermen never thought to cut their heads off and you Horasians don’t seem to like fish heads at all. My father says the head is best part of the fish, but if you Horasians don’t like them you should tell your fishermen to cut them off and leave them for him.”

He was always talking, this boy, but he rarely had anything to say.

“I’m not Horasian.” She had him know. “And I’d appreciate something oily with this, thank you.”

“You drink an awful lot of wine for not a Horasian, begging pardon, my lady.” He still frowned. “My father says wine is a woman’s drink, but I don’t see women drink it, our women, I mean. Yours, I couldn’t say.”

“A woman like me, you mean?” She asked.

It was the same thing most every morning.

“Oh!” He did the sheepish grin he did every time when he was embarrassed, a distinctly Maraskan trait. “That makes a lot of sense, my lady.”

“So, will you bring me wine as well?” She asked, seeing he had neglected to bring her a fresh flagon today.

“Uh,” he licked his lips, “pardon, my lady, but the sorcerer has asked after you, the one with the beard and the cane. I never thought he looked much like a sorcerer, that one, but neither did any of the others. When I was little, there was a house full of sorcerers but only the ones with beards looked a proper wizard.”

“Master Furio Montane asked for me?” She had to remind him of what he was telling her.

He nodded: “Yes, my lady. I thought it’d be hard for you to talk to him if you were sleeping all day again, and you always sleep when you aren’t drinking.”

‘You make me sound like some sot.’ Dari thought angrily, although she had to admit that her drinking had gotten a little out of hand.

With Janna nearby, though, it was all she could do to drink and forget. She couldn’t stand the tent for very long when she was not drunk, and when she went wandering there was always this giant, murderous behemoth, reminding her of all the horrors she’d lived through.

“I will…” She started, only to see that the boy had gone.

He did come back shortly after with a platter of sardines and a flagon of wine, but when she drank she felt guilty, all the while the fish on the platter were staring at her with their eyes.

‘I am to them what Janna is to me.’ She kept thinking. ‘A giant, devouring monster with no explanation for my cruelty.’

That was wrong, of course. The sardines were long dead, pickled in olive oil and mustard seed. Still, their eyes seemed to accuse her. It turned her stomach.

With a breakfast unfulfilling, she made her way out to find Furio Montane.

Smoke hung heavy over the camp today. There was no wind. Soldiers were already shovelling, hauling baskets of half-frozen mud and lifting logs into place for the palisade. A passing Lieutenant tipped his morion helmet at her, and a few waiting soldiers were throwing her looks.

A few camp followers had made it out of Joborn, somehow, and attached themselves to their track. Scalia had not extended his protection to them, however, and so the ogres had found them defenceless in their way. Sometimes, Dari thought the orgy of violence that followed had delayed the ogre attack just long enough for the Horasians to mount up their moving defence.

She couldn’t be certain, though, and she had not seen much of the skirmish, too busy with Furio’s wheelhouse at the time. But it was certainly possible.

It was also possible for humans to defend themselves against ogres, especially with their new tactics and technology. Leon had held a veritable treatise about it to Horasian command.

The Bosparan Empire had had pikes, but it was the ancient kind, one-handed in combination with a shield, a counterweight at the end of the shaft to make it feasible. The old empire also had and employed artillery.

Any army not having such was in dire peril, whereas the Horasian army had to be the best equipped to deal with this threat.

The Albernians had beaten the ogresses in the field, but not actually slain very many of them all the while taking heavy losses. It was just that the ogresses were unaccustomed to battle at such a scale, much as they were unaccustomed to getting wounded or humans mounting any sort of meaningful resistance at all.

It was more likely that they would stay away from the Horasian army for now, although it was noted that their new flail tactic had to be specifically designed to break pike walls.

Surely, this was Sly’s doing as well.

They did not need Janna, though. That was the point, and still they held onto her.

‘And little wonder. She deals with us as easily as we deal with sardines.’

It was no good. She had to overcome her fear, not to mention that the wizard’s hut on wheels was on the other side of the inner circle.

A bridge spanned over the ditch to Fort Janna, ending in a big, rough-hewn gatehouse. The gates were open.

It was a long walk next to Janna’s body, with the smoke from the fires biting at Dari’s eyes.

‘We don’t need you, you monster.’ She thought in her mind.

It almost made her proud. Sick and asleep, Janna wasn’t so terrible, only huge. Her belly rumbled when Dari walked past.

Food had been hauled into the fort on carts. The feeding was in procession. Men on the scaffold used long poles to shove Janna’s lips apart. The giantess swallowed anything they tossed into her maw. A few days past, a man had fallen in and she had gulped him down just the same. The boy who brought the food had told Dari all about it.

“They give parchments to the widows of those who died.” He had wondered. “And they write the thing that killed him, too, if they know. Ridden down by a knight, slain by an arrow or some such. What does my lady reckon his will say, mh? Digested like a fig?”

It had been dried figs that day for breakfast, a rare treat anywhere north of the desert.

Two men were squabbling at the wagons as she approached, seemingly over cages of rabbits.

“I’m telling you,” the first one said, aggrieved, “we must kill them and pull their hides off first!”

The other shrugged: “Why not toss them in living? She swallows it all, doesn’t she? Surely it makes no difference to her?”

How anyone had gotten rabbits through this war in the first place was a much more interesting question, albeit one Dari judged unanswerable for now. The furry, little creatures would go down Janna’s gullet either way, and her body would do with them what it tended to do with all littler things.

She shouldn’t ponder such, she stopped to catch her breath for a moment, wiping away memories of Janna’s mouth.

“But please tell me you intend to butcher the horse first!”

Dari’s ears pricked up. The speaker gestured to a haggard mare that had clearly outlived its useful days. It was a tattered creature, even though it was still alive.

She forced herself to remember, in spite of everything. Janna’s mouth was cavernous and huge, but horses were large animals. By scale, a horse this size would be as large as a small mouse was to Dari, a little, naked pinky, nothing more. But Janna was not present of mind. Gotten in the wrong throat, so to speak…

It was a mad idea, but if this was a chance then she had to take it.

“Oh, she can swallow it whole.” She interjected unbiddenly into the conversation. “I have been with her a long time and I know she prefers it that way. In fact, I think, if she woke up and found out you killed the horse first, she might be rather wroth with you.”

“Hah, what did I say?” The second man grinned triumphantly after a moment.

The men from the scaffold were in need of new cargo and shouted down, so the first man only shrugged and walked away.

Dari could not believe her luck.

‘Phex, make her choke.’ She prayed in her mind. ‘Make her choke to death and let me be here to watch it.’

They put leather straps around the horse’s belly, then hoisted it up with the strength of the crane. Five men moved in each of the two wheels, Dari saw. The animal lifted off the ground as if by magic. Once high enough, the men climbed out to turn the crane and swing the cargo directly over Janna’s mouth.

“Are we certain about this?” The man on the scaffold taking measurement asked.

“Aye!” The other man shouted from below.

The one atop looked sceptical but gave a shrug and proceeded all the same. Over Janna’s mouth, they released the straps holding the old, useless horse. Then it seemed to be stuck between Janna’s teeth, though.

“In you go, you old nag!” The man atop the scaffold pushed the horse with his pole until it fell in. “He, he, that one reminded me of my wife!”

There was a gale of laughter from the workers, before it suddenly, eerily stopped, along with Janna’s breathing.

Dari’s heart almost jumped out of her chest. There was a wheezing sound coming from the giantess’ maw, as if one tried to force much too much wind through much too small a hole. A spasm went through her, shook her, erupting shouts of alarm from the scaffolding.

The man with the pole almost fell. He was peering down inside to see what the problem was.

‘I did it.’ Dari thought to herself, tears of joy welling up in her eyes. ‘I killed her! Gods, do you see me? I killed the monster!’

But then, a throaty cough erupted from Janna’s mouth and the man peering inside was doused with the spray of blood and horse guts.

Dari almost fell to her knees.

‘She coughed?’ She thought, praying. ‘She coughed the animal to pieces?’

Janna was simply too big, too strong for her. If she had lots of poison, a very potent kind, then perhaps. But not with a horse that was half dead anyway.

“Whose bloody idea was this?!” A red and furious man roared from the scaffold.

Dari weaselled away before she could get in trouble.

Master Furio’s wagon was guarded, but she was admitted to it with wave. The inside was unlike her tent, very crammed. Garlic hung from the ceiling, but if for storage purposes or medical ones she could not tell. It was a house on wheels, the wizard’s bed in the middle, a table and two stools by the door.

To her surprise, she found the wizard not in his bed, but sitting at the table, stuffing pipe weed into a long and slender pipe by the lantern light.

“Close the door if you would.” He greeted her. “The light hurts my eyes.”

“You should be resting,” she scolded him, “and not be sucking smoke into your lungs.”

Unexpectedly, he smiled: “You sound just like Janna.”

He looked better, somehow. His hair had finally made the transition to grey, so quickly that his hair and beard now had two colours, brown at the bottom, silver at the top.

He did look a proper wizard for once. He was wearing robes too, dark red ones with black velvet slash.

“What do you want from me?” She asked briskly. “Does your wound trouble you?”

“Aye.” He gave a ponderous nod, then shoved open his robes to show her.

It was gone. There was nothing there, just skin, a bit of hair and his navel, not even a scar. He closed his robes again.

“How?!”

The wizard pursed his lips: “This, I thought, you might tell me.”

He flicked the lantern open with his hand, then went to touch the flame with his finger. A puff of black smoke come out from the top of the lamp, but when he removed his hand a flame was burning, just atop his fingernail.

‘This is a trick.’ Her first thought was.

But that was wrong.

Master Furio proceeded to calmly insert his finger into his pipe while sucking on the other end like a hungry babe on a teat. A few times the fire licked in and out, then he took a long drag and shook out the flame on his finger.

“You know naught of this?” He studied her over his pipe.

A cough rocked him after a moment, ruining the wise, wizardly appearance somewhat.

She shook her head.

Did it make a difference? To be sure. But what difference, that was the question.

“This is good, no?” She studied him back. “When Janna wakes, you can tame her?”

The second part had not been supposed to sound like a question. She just hoped with every fibre of her body that he’d say yes.

“I suppose.” He lowered his head. “First there is something else I must do, however.”

“Does it involve me?” Dari asked too quickly.

She wondered what had made him think that she would know about the resurgence of magics. It was queer. The less she could have to do with this man, and Janna as well, the better.

He looked at her for an uncomfortably long moment, then shook his head.

“No.” He said. “Even though with the right training at the right time you might have. You have the gift, don’t you know.”

“What gift?” She asked perplexed. “You mean…”

“The arcane.” He specified. “It’s in you, deny it or not. It was just never cultivated.”

That struck her as odd.

“So, you are saying I could be sorceress?”

Again, he shook his head: “Too late. When the gift is undiscovered prior to a certain age there is little use teaching you spells.”

Dari wondered what her life might have been like had she not been an orphan in Gareth’s gutters, but an acolyte at a wizards’ college instead.

“So what use is it, what you just told me?”

He drew on his pipe and puffed: “Well, in people such as you the gift is manifest much weaker and in differing form. Some craftsmen of your kind are exceptional at their trade. Others have a certain sixth sense. There are recordings of a man who could find hidden air pockets and hollow spaces in rock and walls or wherever they occurred. Some say he was a miner. Others say he was a thief and no secret stash was safe from him.”

“In my trade, that one’s called a burglar.” She told him in the slurry accent of Garethian streets. “And I am excellent at my trade.”

He chuckled, small puffs of smoke escaping from his beard. He was in need of a razor.

“What of a sense of danger, though?” She asked. “Is that possible?”

“Oh, certainly!” He allowed. “There was a woman, uh…is ought amiss?”

A shiver went down Dari’s spine when she felt it. It had been a while since, but now it made sense. Her neck tingled, unbearably so.

“Something is wrong!” She said, rushing for the door.

It could be any number of things; an ogre attack, a mass of Thorwalsh, more Albernians, a mutiny amongst the men or Janna waking up and raging. Outside, lookouts blew their trumpets, two short blasts and a long one.

Then a voice tore through it all: “Janna!”

Dari knew that voice. She hated it, just as, or perhaps more even than Janna’s.

“Laura has come!” She shouted at the wizard before making outside.

Furio shouted after her to wait, but she had to see first. Laura was still far off but approaching rapidly, at a staggering speed that seemed to defy everything normal. Her face was torn with terror, her eyes fixed on Janna on the ground.

Dari ran, trying to avert a catastrophe. Laura did not look like someone who would come to a rational decision. What she saw was her fellow, monstrous friend, her female lover, imprisoned in a stockade of logs with armed men all around. She might have recognized the banners and standards, but even if she did would the state she found Janna in lead her to make rash and terrible decisions.

She might just trample and crush all of them, just to be safe. Dari had to stop it.

“Laura!” She shouted, running. “Halt, it’s us!”

She heard something clanking behind her, the wizard coming down the wooden steps from his wheelhouse, leaning on a cane. His legs were no good after not using them for so long, even if he had magically healed his belly wound like Xardas had once healed Dari’s face.

Everything in this world came with its own limitations.

“Laura!” She shouted again.

Men were running and shouting too. Trumpets blew, horses whinnied. Laura couldn’t hear her. She waved her arms to no avail.

Dari was a quick runner, always had been. She sprinted past Janna’s body, waving and screaming.

“Laura!”

So much might concentrated in one gigantically stupid girl. She could be the end of them.

“No! Laura! Look at me! We are friends!”

‘So wrong,’ she thought in her head, despairing.

It occurred to her that she should have run the other way, out of the camp. Trees came flying from where Laura ran, crashing onto the bare earth where Janna and Horasian axes had removed the forest.

“Janna!”

The giantess’ eyes were glistening. Perhaps Laura did not even see.

“Laura!” Dari shouted again, running in between the tents while having to avoid panicking men. “Laura, stop! Halt! Stay your feet, it’s us! We are feeding her! Janna is sick!”

A blink, then another, just two giant steps left now. Her foot would come to land square on top of Dari at this rate. Then Laura’s eyes looked down and there was a flicker of recognition.

She stopped, her feet sliding over the earthen ground. Her chest was heaving.

“We are Horasians!” Dari shouted up desperately. “We found Janna like this! We are taking care of her, she is alive!”

Laura breathed. Janna wasn’t so terrible whilst she was on her back. Standing upright, slender and pretty in her own, evil way, Laura was precisely as awful as Dari remembered.

The giant girl mumbled something in that queer tongue of hers. Then she went down for Dari.

“Woo, I almost…” She wheezed. “I was gonna…”

‘Kill all of you.’ Dari knew.

“Janna is sick!” She shouted up again.

Was there anything better to say?

“What’s wrong with her? Tell your men to move the fuck out of the way or I will step on them.”

Dari shouted to clear a path and saw Furio limping over the wooden bridge.

“Laura!” He waved up.

The giantess’ face was not friendly or amiable by any stretch of the imagination. She disliked this a lot. When Dari looked back up at her, however, she could see her gleam at the red wizard as if recognizing and old, trusty partner in crime.

“Furio!” She greeted him, leaning closer. “You are on your feet again! Thank god! I am so sorry about what happened. Oh, and…”

She seemed to realize something that distressed her a lot, which was more than distressing to Dari. It was also dubious which god she was speaking of.

“Furio, I am so sorry.” She went on in a sombre voice. “Graham is dead.”

“I see.” The wizard slowed his pace and took a breather. “Did you kill him?”

“No!” Laura broke out. “It was just…he…I mean…”

She seemed to have to think for a moment.

“He fell off a tower, away from Albernian soldiers trying to kill him. I jumped, but my hand did not reach him in time. I am so sorry.” She pressed her eyes together and bit her lip. “It was my fault. I know he meant a lot to you. Oh, Fuio I was such an idiot!”

Something queer was going on and the whole camp was witness to it. Laura, the terrible giantess who killed people for a pastime, sounded like some damsel, hysterical over some minor, negligible transgression. She had gotten someone killed, apparently, but she had killed hundreds in all manner of different places.

Even the wizard seemed a little uncomfortable by her display: “It’s, uh…It’s alright, Laura! Men die in the line of duty all the time! For now, let us see to Janna! It is good that you are here!”

Dari sauntered over to him, carefully.

“Did you bewitch her?” She asked, whispering.

He gave her a sharp look to shut her up. It was the only explanation. Far as Dari knew, Laura was never friendly with anybody, unless doing so enabled her to set up an even crueller play.

“Do not torture yourself!” The wizard called. “It is good that you are here! Where-“

Laura cut him off, apologizing. She wanted to see after Janna. Her giant, shoe-clad foot came into view, settling unsteadily between two tents. Her next step overlooked a smaller soldier’s tent and flattened it. Then she was already in the fort.

It didn’t help, though. None of her shaking and smooth talking woke Janna up, not even when she shouted.

“What is wrong with her?” She turned back to Furio after a while.

“We do not know.” The wizard confessed. “Though, we suspect some sort of illness.”

“I should have been with her.” Laura gingerly caressed Janna’s brow under the scaffolding that was now void of any men. “I took too long with Albernia. I am so sorry.”

The grief was genuine, Dari had no doubt. That was almost too much for her. She was on the ground, her head spinning, cursing herself for having got caught in this situation again.

“What have you been doing?” The wizard asked pointedly.

The inside of the camp was too crammed for Laura, so she came back out, but not to answer the question. Instead, she went away, returning shortly after with two of the giant blankets. Janna had one and Laura had one, far as Dari recalled, and Janna had left hers at Joborn.

She moved back into the camp, scaring everyone, before she stepped on each of their fires one by one. Then she wrapped Janna in one of the blankets.

“I have conquered Albernia.” She finally said when she was done. “I thought it was a good idea. I was so stupid. It’s easy to get caught up in all manner of things over there. I assumed Janna was going to wait for your recovery, which I believed would take very, very long. Should you be on your feet so soon, Furio?”

“I am healed, worry not about me!” He answered her. “Did you know King Finnian sacked the Nostrian capital and sent a host against us?”

Laura nodded: “I took Havena without any effort at all. There were no defences, no meaningful ones anyway. I heard Arlan Stepahan was marching against you. Bragon Fenwasian has lots of men, too, but he’s missing.”

“What of King Finnian? Is he slain?”

Laura’s face turned grimmer: “He would be, had I crossed paths with him. The little bugger was a tad too smart, though. Whatever men are not with Fenwasian or Stepahan are with him, aboard ships joining the civil war that is looming in your homeland.”

Furio’s eyes widened meaningfully. This was bad news. Dari had already known that King Finnian, though young, was not a fool. Marching against Laura was a reckless notion if one did not want to end up crushed beyond recognition in one of her footprints. He was hitting her where he assumed it hurt, and more importantly where she could not hit him back.

“We heard the Duke of Nordmarken was at Honingen.” A gruff voice said loudly. “What did you do with him?”

It was General Scalia, coming slowly on the back of his white, splendid mare.  

Laura seemed to redden: “He had occupied the city and Franka Galahan implored me not to destroy it too much. She lured Hagrobald back into his duchy with false news. Then I crushed a few of his remaining garrison and told them I’d kill them all if they didn’t leave. Meanwhile, I went to Abilacht to bring back the Galahan forces so they would serve as a shield against Nordmarken while I walked back north, looking for Janna. I did not crush him, if that’s what you had hoped.”

Scalia’s face did not move any which way, as ever, but something told Dari this was bad too.

“Did you happen to see ogres on your way here?” The general asked next.

“Yes!” Laura seemed aghast and turned her eyes toward Furio to answer. “They were at Joborn! I saw their camp! They attacked me with weapons so I ran away, but I was able to get Janna’s sleeping bag! Oh, Furio, I was so scared! There were so many of them, I think they could have killed me!”

After that, the smoke must have led her here, Dari thought, same as the army. What Sly had said was right, and her doubts had been wrong. Perhaps the amiable brigand was actually making the same calculation, now that it seemed as though the ogres were beatable. Use Varg against Laura and Janna, then unite humanity against the ogres in turn. He had never articulated the second part to her, and back then things had seemed different.

Dari didn’t know what to think.

“We have relinquished Nostria to them.” Furio explained. “With neither Janna nor you by our side, we thought this course wisest.”

“You heard of the trouble brewing in our Empire.” Scalia observed in tow. “Then you must know that we need you there! You should have come at once, but now you must go immediately!”

Then he turned his head and shouted for someone to bring Léon back as soon as possible.

Laura blinked at him, startled.

“Oh, no!” She gasped. “No, no, no, no, no. I’m not going anywhere without Janna, and I’ll not abandon Albernia or everything I did there will have been for naught. There aren’t so many fighting men left there, you see.”

“You were ordered to destroy Havena.” Scalia continued to observe. “But you have failed at that as well.”

His icy, cool eyes were looking up at her, where her brownish-flecked ones looked down on him. In a certain light, Scalia’s looked green, in another light grey, and his were flecked as well. Dari was starting to find eyes eerie.

An angry furrow dug into the space between Laura’s brows. Dari prayed Scalia knew what he was doing.

“I did what I thought was right.” She said, slowly but with force. “Far as I’m concerned, you got Janna into this. What was she doing out here anyway? This is your fault, I will not go! Write that down behind your little ears, so you won’t forget it, old man!”

A terrifying silence fell onto the camp. Nothing moved and all that spoke were stares. Dari wondered if Léon would be susceptible to the idea of accumulating a few barrels worth of poison if she broached it to him now.

‘Fools.’ She thought, as ever so often.

“There is something I must do!” Furio Montane broke the silence. “For Janna!”

-

“It is as I thought!” He proclaimed after his diagnosis or whatever he was doing was complete.

Laura eyed him suspiciously. Until a moment ago, she could have sworn that they were friends, good friends, the bestest friends forever. But not anymore. Perhaps the sudden coldness had changed things, she thought. He had certainly undertaken no effort to stand up for her against General Scalia.

It wasn’t like she needed standing up for, given how she could have made the general disappear just like everybody else. But it was what a real friend would have done.

Instead, Janna’s little pet wizard changed the subject. He had Laura heave him atop Janna’s chest and remove the blanket and lift the green cotton shirt far enough so he could touch her skin. Janna had lost flesh, certainly, but her tits were still hill-like threatening boulders to the little guy, as if they could spill free and roll over him like an avalanche at any moment.

Laura saw how desperate Janna’s situation must have been, though. She hadn’t even removed her bra. Once she woke up she’d feel miserable, to be sure. Apparently, she had been like this for days too, her hair oily with cold sweat and deep, dark rings under her sleeping eyes.

The Horasians did deserve some credit for not letting her die, she supposed, but that didn’t mean she’d abandon her just acquired kingdom, or her friend whom she loved.

Janna just had to wake up. They had to fix her. Laura shuddered at the idea of being alone in this world. It just wouldn’t work, proven by the fact that anytime they split up at least one of them got into dire trouble.

“So, enlighten us.” She urged the ponderous wizard on. “What did you think?”

“Witchcraft!” His answer came heavily. “And mayhaps something worse!”

He stood perilously close to Janna’s breasts. If Laura gave him a little shove and them a squeeze just now and shoved them a little bit together, maybe she might be rid of him.

“I think it has rather more to do with her belly.” She said instead of doing what she imagined. “You’ve been feeding her, but what goes in must also go out again, does it not?”

She hadn’t shat herself yet, though, which was good or the Horasian logisticians would have had more than a handful to deal with.

“It’s not that!” He objected. “I implore you, Laura, help me in this!”

She sighed. Magic was real. She knew that. Except it supposedly wasn’t anymore. Some things still seemed supernatural, though, like the trees still afflicted by the Red Curse, or the unnatural howling and wind that had one night seemed to come from the Farindel woods.

Besides, she had no idea what to do for Janna, other than putting her in a blanket which she already did.

“Fine then.” She said. “What do you need?”

It turned out to be mud, which was weird to say the least. He instructed her to draw a large, five-pointed star on Janna’s belly with each point interconnected with the others. It ended up looking like something goth nerds would wear on their T-shirts in highschool.

He made sure that there were no gaps in the lines before telling her to step aside.

Laura thought it was some sort of mumbo jumbo, some kind of attempt to pray Janna back to health. It did look like prayer, the way he knelt there on his weakened legs, mumbling and fumbling at the air.

She decided to have a snack whilst she waited, from the provisions she had brought over from Albernia. Honingen had been a revelation, even though Franka Salva Galahan, the countess, was every bit as sharp-tongued as the tales that preceded her foretold.

She had some cheese and casks of honeyed mustard to go with it. The cheese was orange, wrought in wheels so large that they reached up to a man’s chest. To her, one wheel was roughly the size of a quarter, and thicker by half. They made almost for convenient eating, even if the dip was packaged annoyingly small.

“How have you been feeding her?” She asked the entire camp at once, nodding at Janna.

She should have taken some of her more unimportant subjects with her, she thought, so she could remind her Horasian allies that she ate people.

No one answered her, although it was very much self-evident. They had built a crane and a scaffold.

“Did you just toss it in or did one of you little buggers climb in there?”

Again, no answer. She was just looking for a victim, in truth, which always happened when she got bored. It wasn’t clever to do it with the Horasians, but she couldn’t help herself. The grim Generalissimo had beaten a retreat to the other side of camp. Their alliance seemed somewhat in limbo, anyway.

There had been the girl she recognized from her village, the one she’d left with instructions on that fateful day she had seen Lauraville for the last time.

Those had been less troubled times. Steve and Christina had still been with them. She had just killed Valerie and she and Janna had gone out for food. Actually, those times had been just as troubled as these now.

Eating Branwyn ni Bennain had felt sort of the same as eating Valerie, even though the former pestering bitch had been dipped in Honinger honey before being devoured. She’d tasted sweeter than anything and begged the entire time.

That kill had been glorious.

Franka Salva Galahan had derided her, exposed her scheming. They had brought the pretty girl out on a wagon after applying the sugary coating to her. Reo Conchobair, the sword king’s son, had met his end with sigh. It was the last thing she saw of him before her shoe ground him into a smear.

He had actually won a tiny but important victory against the forces of some other Fenwasian in her absence. Garvin had made a song of it. He had made another song as well, a very sad but brilliant one. Man at Arms, he called it, and Laura had instructed Ilaen Albenblood to give him his weight in gold as a prize.

She noticed her mind was wandering. Joborn had rattled her. Varg the Impaler, if she had been who Laura thought she was, was a tall, ugly creature with wiry red hair and a hideous horse face, even though she looked as girly as Pipi Longstocking in a way.

‘Because of that hair.’

Laura had surprised them, and them being there had surprised Laura. It was all she could do to grasp Janna’s sleeping bag and run while they chased her with tiny hammers, spears, blades on sticks and whatnot.

Maybe she would have stood a chance. They were Barbie dolls, after all. When dozens of them came at her at once, though, her courage had left her.

She had only understood that something must have gone horribly wrong. Afterwards, she had wandered through Nostria, making towards the west where she had eventually seen the smoke.

It took pressing her eyes together to get rid of the memories. The ogres were a real problem, one she and Janna would have to deal with eventually. But at a later date.

“Err, we just toss it.” A broad-shouldered man in britches and stained white shirt addressed her.

It was the answer to her question, finally.

“So, you toss it in and she just…”

“She just gulps it down is how it works. Can’t be too big, though. Today, someone had the idea of tossing a whole horse in there alive. Coughed the bloody nag to bits, she did!”

He allowed himself a careful dullard’s smile that he probably hoped would be endearing.

“Is that so?”

Laura couldn’t do anything against the evil ideas that came into her head. Her eyes scanned for the girl. She couldn’t feed a Horasian to Janna, not after the altercation with the general, but that girl was not a Horasian.

She found her, lingering uncertainly by a tent, and leaned in to grasp her.

The girl was quick, though, almost like an animal. She dodged Laura’s pinching fingers, ducked under another attempt and finally vanished beneath a tent flap, quick as a cat.

But she had not taken Laura’s ruthlessness into account, who went ahead to pinch the entirety of the tent between her fingers along with anything inside. No one else had been in, she found out upon further investigation, but the girl was now firmly in her grasp, along with some stools and a table.

She grinned down at her prey while she crushed the furniture.

“Laura, no!” Came the pleads, tears running down smooth, pale cheeks in rivers. “Don’t feed me to Janna! Please!”

Laura chuckled. The girl pinned beneath a finger against her palm was pretty to boot. Tiny and slender built, the only thing off about her was her short hair.

That she had foreseen Laura’s design meant that going through with it was a bit dull, but that didn’t mean Laura couldn’t scare her.

“Why not? You’re not a Horasian. I remember you from my village. I’ll just drop you in and, gulp, down you go. Watch this.”

She grabbed one of her cheeses but judged the wheel to big, so she crushed it in half first. Back at Janna’s head she inserted it like into a coin slot. Sure enough, Janna’s throat moved, swallowing without so much as a cough.

“Why does this always happen to me?!” The girl cursed to the sky, crying.

That was unexpected.

“Aw, did I pick on you before?” Laura asked with a grin. “You wouldn’t be one of those trained girls, would you?”

The girl did not answer but something told her that there was at least some truth to it. That was good to remember. Laura had never really gotten around to try the trained sex slaves Birsel had been supposed to make for her, not nearly as much as she had planned to, anyway.

“It’s really sad.” She winked at the girl. “I should enjoy you more than I am going to.”

Furio was still mumbling nonsense in his pentagram but she paid him no mind, instead lifting the squirming girl to Janna’s mouth. Tiny hands and arms hugged her finger so tight she could already loosen her grip as if the girl were a gecko, or some enormously small monkey, clinging on with a desperate strength that by virtue of the ginormous size difference was nothing short of enchanting.

Laura could never get enough of stuff like this. It made her crotch tickle.

She revealed the twist: “Oh, the look on your face! Ha, ha, little idiot, did you really think I’d do it?”

Dari did, clearly, as did the rest of the camp judging by their looks and the stone-dead silence that lay over it all. It made sense, Laura supposed. They probably all knew the girl from sight, seeing as she appeared to be the only female in camp.

“I’m just teasing an old friend here, people.” She explained, laughing. “If I fed you to Janna you couldn’t tell me what became of Lauraville, and my friends.”

She lifted the girl onto the scaffold, away from Janna’s mouth.

“What’s your name?”

Laura remembered hearing it before, but she had forgotten. There were so many names to keep track of.

“Dari.” The girl said through tears, steadying herself on the railing.

“What happened to my village?”

It was a muddled, confusing tale, interrupted with sobs and shaking. Nagash, the ogress Laura had left in charge, was killed in the night by Andergastians who took over the village first. Then a male ogre and a druid showed up at the top of the ship, rescuing Vengyr with the help of birds. This culminated in the Andergastians battling with the druids, winning somewhat narrowly. Vengyr was killed for good, which Dari believed was why there was no magic. Albino, the ogre king at the time, showed up and was banished beneath the earth by some sort of ritual.

The last thing was that Lauraville got conquered by ogresses, with the Andergastians hardly even attempting to fight. That was how Steve and Christina got captured.

“It wasn’t my fault!” Dari pleaded toward the end. “They were more than us, and so much bigger! We couldn’t do anything!”

It would have been an easy thing to feign mistrust and kill the girl for fun, but Laura felt like that was stupid. Not only had Dari been second in line in Lauraville, she had also survived through a lot, seen a lot, and might harbour more useful information about the ogres, maybe without even knowing so.

“I believe you.” She therefore said. “You can wipe those tears off now.”

The ogres had scared her away too. She couldn’t really blame someone so tiny for feeling the same.

The little girl Dari broke down on the scaffold, convulsing as if she had a stroke. Then she leaned over the edge and retched.

“I’m sorry I scared you-” Laura began, when suddenly Janna’s eyes flicked open.

“Janna, do not move your head!” She shouted in alarm, reaching for Dari on the scaffold.

It all went reasonably well, all things considered. Janna breathed, then moved upward, scared by the things suddenly so close to her face. The wooden scaffold fell to pieces when her head went through. A wooden beam crashed onto the crane nearby, breaking it as well.

Dari hugged Laura’s finger again, barely escaping a fall. Furio shouted in alarm as Janna rose, reminding Laura that she had to save him too.

Janna made a whoo noise and crawled backwards with eyes wide and scared.

It took a shout and a hug to calm her.

“I’m here, it’s okay.” Laura soothed her, rubbing her friend’s back with the fist she had enclosed Dari in.

Janna did not return the hug immediately, and when Laura made to kiss her mouth she averted it onto her cheek.

Laura worried that she’d be blamed for this situation, because it was her fault that Janna had had to go back to Nostria. Maybe it was just the illness, though. Janna might fear that it was contagious.

“What happened to you, how long have you been here?” She eventually asked to get talking.

It was a bit more awkward than she expected it to be.

“Days.” Janna replied darkly when they disentangled. “I made ogre friends, believe it or not. They were really good at finding Thorwalsh, only the last ones I found had infected themselves with bacteria or something gross. We gotta watch out in future. We are not as immune or anything as I thought.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Imagine if you were tiny and you drank like a whole bottle of soy sauce in one go. Then I came and sat on you for two days. That’s how I’m feeling.”

Laura hugged her again, biting her lip. She should be apologizing, only that might rub it in, the fact that she was responsible.

Them both together in the crammed, tiny camp created some problems. Part of the fresh log wall had already been rolled over and flattened by Laura’s carelessness, and a number of empty tents followed when she lowered her rump to the ground. The soldiers knew better than to be close to her, not to mention that their health and safety was presently not quite among her primary concerns.

“Look who’s here!” She said cheerfully, revealing Furio on her palm. “You almost threw him off to his death.”

‘But I saved him.’

Maybe that would work.

Seeing Furio seemed to perform a miracle on Janna’s mood, even though the wizard started off with a scolding.

“I freed you from the bondage of an evil spell!” He proclaimed as if that was Janna’s fault. “But there were two different origins to the curses I found!”

Janna shook her head in bewilderment: “What do you mean?”

“He means,” Laura intervened, “hey, Janna, I am so happy to see you are awake, and look, I’m on my feet again, it wasn’t all so bad as we thought!”

The tiny man gave her a sharp look: “No, Laura. At Thorwal I had to free your mind from the bondage of evildoers as well! Open your eyes to the danger! Your minds! They are the chinks in your plate!”

“Our what in what, please?” Janna asked perplexed.

“Achilles heel.” Laura mumbled in English, half amused, even though there was truth to his words.

Vengyr had been more scary and dangerous, even. But if Dari told it true then he was finally gone.

“Two sources, you say?” Janna asked warily.

That was queer. She seemed to understand more about it than Laura, even though she had been asleep for who knew how long.

“I sensed black magic.” Furio went on. “And something of druidic origin.”

The way Janna’s eyes went wide again was frightening.

“I understand.” She said. “One was a witch, my friend, the other was a man in black robes, carrying an hourglass.”

Laura remembered the little black figure she had spared outside Joborn. A black wizard, an evildoer he said he was.

“A man of young face, and with grey hair?” She asked.

The look on Janna’s face grew even scarier.

“But that’s nonsense.” Laura shook her head. “Magic is dead.”

“It is not.” Janna and Furio protested.

Janna talked about what she remembered of the man, what he was doing, what she had seen in that strange dream she had.

“There was something else, too.” She said at one point. “A group of riders arrived here while I was awake. They said Hypperio had been with them, only he had for some weird reason gone with a man in black robes. They said something about going to the Farindel in Albernia.”

“I heard a strange noise from there recently.” Laura added into the mix. “And outside Joborn, before we went to Albernia, I helped a man of that description get into the city. You thought he was a Boron priest. He was the one who told me about Steve and Christina, and he also said he was looking for somebody, somebody who could help him bring magic back, Windric Yelzin, or something like that, I think.”

“Jindrich Welzelin.” Furio offered, still dark and ominous. “The man who was there when Vengyr died, as did magic.”

Dari moved in Laura’s hand, reminding Laura of her presence.

“Oh!” She opened her fist. “Dari here, she was there too! She told me about it.”

When the girl was exposed to the light and saw Janna, however, she panicked, fell and almost crawled backwards over the edge.

“Calm down, you little nerve ball.” Laura derided her, nudging her upright with her thumb. “Dari is from my village. She gets a little angsty around us.”

“The man you speak of was taken captive in Joborn!” The tiny thing was horridly out of breath. “But he escaped! They told me the jailer hanged himself!”

“So, he went, still looking for that Yelzin guy?” Janna asked. “Then he ran into Hypperio and, whoop-di-do? Or was the man with Hypperio in the first place?”

“Welzelin is dead.” Furio replied. “Except, before...this happened, Hypperio questioned him. I have suspicions that whatever knowledge Welzelin had is now with Hypperio.”

“So that’s why!” Dari squeaked on Laura’s other hand. “The way he was captured in Joborn seemed…strange!”

“You think he did it intentionally?” Laura asked. “Why?”

“So that Hypperio would question him.” Furio concluded. “Only, my colleague had already left to look for you, Janna.”

There was a moment of silence during which Laura puzzled in her mind. It was hard to keep track of, for her anyway. She wasn’t very smart, which was why she was here in the first place.

“We heard there was like a gate to the world of Fairies or something in the Farindel, right?” Janna turned to Laura. “I think my friend the witch was guarding it before magic died. What if that man brought it back? What if that ritual he performed was there to…do something for the purpose of that?”

“The red guy in one of your dreams was probably Hypperio, right, with his white robes drenched in blood?” Laura reasoned. “I literally don’t know about any of this stuff, but sacrificing one wizard to get magic back just sounds a little too cheap.”

Janna nodded with a frown, but Furio’s eyes glanced up at.

“A gate, you said?” He inserted, stroking his beard.

Bit by bit, they were piecing it together. According to Furio, there were two tales of how magic came into the world. Common legend had it that it was given to the mortals by Mada, daughter of Hesinde, an affront for which Praios had chained her to the moon. When the moon rose, that was an expression of her fight against the chains. When it fell, she got tired.

The other version was older.

“Magic was given to man by the fairies, or else they gave it to the elves who then gave it to the druids. Either way, it seems to have been tied to Vengyr in some capacity. He was said to be the eldest of the druids. If that gate led to the world of fairies…”

The intricacies of how that dubious man had done it were impossible to know.

“This explains why it went away the moment I cut Vengyr’s throat.” Dari said, strangely apart from her fear. “But if there was some sort of arrangement struck the last time, for magic to be in mortal hands, then...why would it be given a second time, and to a black wizard at that?”

“Given?” Tiny Furio raised a meaningful brow on Laura’s hand. “Or taken?”

“We have to go to the Farindel.” Janna said suddenly and with iron determination. “That man is there, I just know it. Lissandra is going there to set him free. It’s either go there or we wander through Nostria, looking for my friends.”

‘When we meet the next time.’ He had said at Joborn, Laura recalled.

It was scary how it all fell into place now.

She shook her head: “I don’t think that’s a good idea. Are you even able to walk? What if that man messes with our heads?”

The whole time, Janna had both her hands on her belly, rubbing it. It was clear that she was in pain, so much so that she didn’t even think of taking Furio away from Laura. Now and then, she grimaced, and strange gurgling noises came from her gut.

“I’m getting better.” Janna insisted. “It was worse than this before. It just hurts so much.”

“Janna!” A gruff voice shouted in the camp. “You are awake!”

It was General Scalia again, interrupting the decidedly weird reunion.

“She’s in no condition to travel to your empire.” Laura cut him off before he could even begin.

Then she filled Janna in about the situation there, how the nobility was rebelling against its emperor and civil war seemed looming. Franka Salva Galahan had kept good track of this situation, even though she was a Honinger Galahan and not a Kusliker one, like Finnian ui and Branwyn ni Bennain, who’s father had been Romin Galahan of Kuslik.

“Horas is a little far, my Lord General.” Janna told Scalia with a frown. “I cannot walk for days on end in my condition, I cannot!”

“Then Laura must go.” He said matter-of-factly.

Laura rolled her eyes at the brazenness: “No! I told you, I am not leaving Albernia undefended! I am its Queen now, but if I go away, Nordmarken will devour it like a wedge of cheese! And I’m not leaving Janna alone again, not with magic being back and all that! And we need Furio with us as well, at all times. If you have to save your Empire from itself, then go! We will fight for you again, once things have calmed down and Janna is better!”

“Then this is the end of our cooperation.” The tiny general concluded, no emotion betraying the potential gravity of it at all.  

“No, it’s not!” Laura snapped at him. “I conquered Albernia for you! I will bring Janna there, step by step if I have to! If you want us for enemies then I might as well just stomp all of you here and now!”

She rose to show them how tiny they were. Their trebuchets were not aimed at her, and she would avoid most of the fire from hornets and scorpions if she moved quickly. There were a few thousand of them, some outside the camp to harvest lumber. Once the artillery pieces were crushed under her heel, it would be a slaughter the kind if which the world hadn’t seen since Thorwal.

“Laura!” Furio addressed her harshly.

She looked down on him, and in a moment she realized how important he was, how much she liked him despite everything, and how deep she was in his debt. Her heart softened considerably.

“I didn’t mean that, Furio.” She gave in, crouching down again feebly, her anger collapsing like a fractal tower. “You are Horasian and we need you. It’s just that, with Janna ill and all, I can’t go to Horas now. I just can’t. Can you forgive me for that?”

The wizard stroked his beard: “Let me speak to the Generalissimo. I am certain there is a solution to this.”

While Laura’s hands were in front of her and close enough to each other, Dari suddenly ran and jumped over to Furio, coming to a rolling halt that looked as routine as if performed by a judo master.

“Nostria was burned.” The tiny girl said nonchalantly after her stunt. “It stands to reason that the docks were damaged as well. You did not destroy Havena as you were ordered, though, did you?”

It was a question for Laura, and the possible solution to their qualm.

Scalia consented grimly when the proposal was put to him by Furio. Someone had to go, clearly, especially now where Finnian ui Bennain was apparently sailing for Horas.

Only Janna was not satisfied yet.

“We have to go to the Farindel!” She insisted. “It’s important, somehow, I just know it is! You haven’t seen what I have seen.”

She wanted the ogresses captured and her friend the witch caught, if still possible. Then she wanted to go to the Farindel, find the man from her dream and crush him. Something seemed to scare her about him, and if he had been able to invade her mind, albeit only in her dream, then that was probably justified.

That magic was back now, apparently, was a bad circumstance for them, but it was something they might be able to deal with so long as Furio was their protector.

And the Farindel was not so far away from where they were, and Honingen was close to it where Laura had to be in order to ward against Nordmarken. Franka Salva Galahan had enough food laid by to host two armies, more than enough for Janna to rest up and get to full strength again in relative safety.

“I have no idea how long that thing at the Farindel will take.” Janna said in English while they watched the Horasian army break camp. “But once that’s done, we absolutely have to free Steve and Christina. We got them into the mess they are in. They must be terrified.”

When questioned, Dari knew surprisingly lots to add to that. Steve and Christina were kept healthy, she gave to report, but the men Horas had sent to free them had been discovered and killed. They were still the very valuable hostages they had been from the beginning, so the chances of the ogres being cruel to them were slim.

“That’s good.” Janna told the tiny girl. “But I would sleep better if they were with us once again. We have to get them back. I just don’t know how.”

The ogres presented a threat to Albernia as well. The eastern border with Nordmarken was defensible, so long as Laura was there, but the border with Nostria was not. There just hadn’t been any conflict between the two kingdoms up until recently.

“They might try and press it from you.” Janna suggested with a frown. “So long as they have Steve and Christina in their hands, they can basically demand from us anything they want.”

“No.” Laura shook her head. “Even in a hostage situation, the demands have to be reasonable. I will not give them my kingdom. Period. No matter what they do to our friends.”

They weren’t friends, exactly, anyway, far as she was concerned. If anything, the two had been a bother, and only the fact that they were from Earth and classmates from their university had established any sort of sentimental connection.

Janna reacted badly, though.

“We are not letting them be harmed!” She insisted. “If they ask us for that stupid kingdom, we should give it to them and ask that Steve and Christina be turned over to us in exchange, or at least one of them, like only Steve. If you want Albernia so bad we can wrestle it back from them afterwards. They smush just like everything else when we step on them.”

“Oh, you haven’t seen them at Joborn.” Laura replied sourly. “They are scary as heck with their weapons. One or two aren’t the problem, but imagine, like, two hundred of them running at you. They can kill us.”

Janna only shrugged: “We’re gonna have to deal with them too, then. Or what were you gonna do? Sit around in Albernia and act like Nostria doesn’t exist?!”

“Or run far, far away.” Laura suggested. “We wanted to go south, remember?”

“Not without Steve.” Janna turned away. “And Christina.”

They were fighting again, Laura discovered to her dread.

“Let’s get you back to strength first and then decide what we do, hm?” She suggested desperately.

“Fine, after we go to the Farindel.”

Laura didn’t know why it was so bloody important, and neither did Janna, by the looks of it. She couldn’t give a reason.

“Help me understand this.” She tried. “This guy we’re afraid of now, he can’t leave that place we think is in the Farindel Forest unless your little witch friend shows up and lets him out? What if we find the witch and smush her, wouldn’t that solve it till, like, forever?”

“I don’t want her harmed!” Janna snapped, surprisingly quickly. “If we got our hands on her then that would be good. I just…in my dream, the man said nothing could keep her from that place. I have a feeling she’s already not with my ogre friends anymore.”

“Furio said they got men after them, right? They just have to follow their footprints.”

Janna disagreed: “They go over terrain that horses can’t run on, and those tiny guys are gonna have no way to catch up. When they smell a large group of men, they run. If it’s a small one, they’ll kill them. You might have a chance. But I don’t know if this way we miss something deeply important down south.”

“Like what?”

Janna sighed: “I don’t know, Laura. But this man, as we concluded before the interruption, may have literally brought magic back to life. And he is evil. That combination makes me think it might probably be a good idea to stomp him while we still can or whatever.”

To Laura, it sounded more like they should stay away from him, but she didn’t want to fight again.

 “So, do you want me to go look for those ogresses then?” She asked. “I’m allowed to kill them, though, right, just not that witch?”

Janna bit her lip, making Laura flare with desperation.

“They were actually quite fun.” Janna said while making puppy eyes, a move that was more typical for Laura than for her. “I swear I think the one with dreads had a crush on me.”

Laura couldn’t help but chuckle: “Was she into being your slave, or what?”

“We were more like friends with benefits.” Janna shrugged. “It was weird. But fun.”

Laura did not know how to feel about that.

It was in that moment, that a rumbling shook the ground, starting as a tiny vibration that would have been dismissible, but building into something Laura knew was an earth quake even if she had never experienced one before.

“Do you feel that?” Janna asked, just as Laura wanted to ask jokingly if she farted.

Then the real thing hit, which wasn’t so bad as it might have been. There weren’t any concrete structures around that could collapse, and even if there had been all would have remained standing unless there were major flaws in their design. Some tents collapsed in the camp, but most remained upright. And after the frost, there weren’t even any leaves on the trees around that could have been shaken off.

“That was an earthquake.” Janna noted when it ended as quickly as it had come.

Laura met her stare: “You think it means something? Probably not, right?”

“I don’t bloody know.” Janna shook her head in bewilderment.

There was a general sense of unease among the Horasians, most of whom now scrambled to put the tents back up and fight the fires that had started from wax cloth plummeting into braziers. Laura leaned over to any within her reach to help them out.

It was probably best not to get spooked too much and keep her mind on the things at hand. Thinking about them was not a pleasurable affair, though.

“So, you want to go to the Farindel.” She began. “I have to go to Honingen to keep watch against Nordmarken. That means we want to go in the same direction. You want to free Steve and Christina somehow, and I have to figure out a way to keep those god-damn ogres from attacking my kingdom. You also have to take it easy for a while until you are better. And you should probably take a bath, which is gonna suck because there’s just not enough warm water in these parts.”

Janna rolled her eyes: “Yeah, we got ninety nine problems and no fucking solutions right now.”

Then she rubbed her belly and groaned.

Laura thought and thought to no avail, making the pause an awkward and strained one before she finally spoke: “Well, we still have each other. And we know where we want to go.”

Janna’s tongue poked through her cheek in a way that foretold nothing good.

Her eyes were icy cold: “We knew where we wanted to go, what we wanted to do, and everything. You had to fuck it all up, first by going AWOL on that lion bitch, and then you leave me all alone up here while you play your dumbass games in Albernia.”

There it was, the accusation, the truth that Laura had feared. Janna didn’t even shout or sound overly emotional, just cold, which made it all so much worse.

“I’m sorry about that.” She said earnestly. “If I could undo any of that then I would.”

Janna only scoffed and turned away again.

“You have to look at the bright side of it.” Laura went on. “Furio seems healthy again, right, and, I mean, having Albernia for ourselves isn’t so bad. It’s certainly better than Andergast, and I’m sure you are going to get better in Honingen real soon. We just have to get there.”

It didn’t seem to help, though, so she tried something else.

“If we want to arrive before your little witch, we better get going. With magic back, who knows, maybe she’ll right a fucking broom and be there before us.”

Janna’s head turned back at her, but her eyes flicked upward following something seemingly in the sky.

“What the hell?” She breathed. “Is that a spaceship?”