Madrigal of the Everett Clan

This might offend the residents of Washington, Indiana, or those whom the description matches. This is a ballad or an epic of an ironic nature, given the lack of travel in the story, and the drama coming purely from the friction of the huge Everett clan, from which the narrator has found himself estranged in a city full of his family. Somewhat inspired by The Beans of Egypt, Maine.

The city of Washington, Indiana lurks like a hunchbacked stepchild in the corner of the state. Taking the two lane highway into the loose collection of dirty, rundown houses and a few dying businesses perched on the edges of cracked and eroded parking lots haunted by starveling cats feels akin to suffocation. The town has two restaurants to speak of: one is a family pizzeria that stays afloat through monopoly and the popularity of pizza, and the other is a breakfast joint that exists in a perpetual haze of airborne grease. The only thing the twisted and forgotten town has to offer is the single two story motel, designed to look like Mount Vernon or the White House.

            It is here that I will watch my grandfather’s corpse get carefully boxed up and dropped into the earth. It is here that my mother, recently divorced, harrowed by stress, and seeking the comforts her girlhood offered her, will happily inform us we are going to live with our great aunt Samantha. It is here that I will wage my war against my future.

            I’ve never met my aunt Samantha Everett before today. She is wrinkled, sort of brown from her Indian mother, and hates the clan she has adopted as a survival tactic. The Everett clan is a sprawling mass of relationships, feuds, old grudges, dying relatives, squabbling children, land disputes, marriage disputes, ancient debts, more ancient relatives, dementia, cancer, heart disease, dissension, sedition, and death, carefully knotted through southern Indiana and burled in places where the history is so marinated into the land and culture they may as well have rights of nobility, replete with the noble obligation.

            Until today, the only things I’ve seen of Washington are all I’ve needed to see: the inside of the insipid Mount Vernon motel, where they keep cheap bottles of tainted water and an out-of-date collection of apple juice in the mini-fridge; the inside of the Gruccio Family Pizzeria, run by the decidedly not Gruccio Alsop family; the inside of two of the town’s three funeral homes, in which I wandered freely, seeking food and respite from the hordes of family I didn’t know and hunted by my haggard mother.

Custodiet Ipsos Custodes

            Paranormal, probably a short story. The main character finally falls in love with a girl, the first person that knows about his compulsion. One day, he receives a premonition that she is going to kill someone. The story hinges on his decision of whether or not to kill her. 

           The first round took the priest high in the chest, severing his aorta and sending a long spray of blood against the brick wall. I racked the bolt and aimed down the scope. His t-shirt soaked with wine-dark arterial blood as he staggered back. The groceries he was carrying smashed against the ground.

            I guess this is the part where I have to say that he was raping choirboys or trafficking cocaine. He wasn’t. He didn’t have any prior arrests. He didn’t have any prior crimes. He entered the clergy at fifteen in a Catholic school, trained for years.

            He was leaning against the wall then. His mouth was moving. Sacrements, perhaps. His own last rites. Can priests do that? Administer their own last rites?

            I squeezed the trigger again and his brains evacuated.

           

           

            You know how detectives will show up to a crime scene, do the dirty work, find the bad guy, and put him in jail? Then sometimes there’s vigilantes, who hunt people down that have slipped through the cracks. Well, I’m a little different.

            I see things before they happen. Not things. Crimes. Murders, specifically. It is always a one hundred percent chance that it will happen. This started when I was thirteen.

            The first one was my neighbor. She was older, maybe fifty. Sexy, for an older lady. She asked me to water her garden. Standing in the heat, hose gripped in my right hand, I had a sudden vision. I watched her in my mind’s eye as she straddled a man in her bed and wrapped a curtain cord around his neck. I chalked it up to hormonal fantasy. Two weeks later, she drove away in the back of a squad car; past the ambulance where paramedics loaded a faceless corpse on a gurney.

            The second time it happened, I tried to stop the murder. A neighborhood kid, maybe two years older. He went by the name of Chow, good kid. I saw him in that vision swinging a bicycle chain, leaving little chubby Danny Goodwin bleeding in the arroyo in our neighborhood          .

I walked Danny home every single day for two months. He didn’t understand why I carried a butterfly knife with me. My appendix ruptured one day and I went to the hospital. I saw Danny Goodwin’s body from a helicopter shot on the evening news.

The murders are unstoppable. They find a way, like weeds growing through a sidewalk. When I get the vision, it’s only a matter of time before every clue in the vision lines up like lock tumblers and the victim dies. There’s no way to stop it, so I kill the killer before he kills someone innocent.

Shaman

Tribal post-apocalypse? I don't know.

Fir, a young shaman and magical guide of a dying tribe must help their new leader, his brother Feral, guide them to Pantheon, the flying world that they had been taught was the heaven where their gods resided. The other members, Rory the outsider and wanderer, Jara the huntress, and Liss the captive, help them commit the ultimate heresy to find that the Lode is not heaven, but a tiny world filled with warring clans and struggling kings. As the beasts that roam the frozen darkness below grow bolder and begin to mount their assaults, Fir finds himself torn between justice, loyalty, and survival.

Sharvas died early in the morning; quietly, without waking me. He slipped away the way our dogs had left to die when the food grew scarce. I found his head turned at an odd angle in my lap, cold and crooked like a frozen tree branch.

            Feral woke next and saw me leaning my head against the wood-clad wall of our cavern. I flicked my eyes to see him and he seemed to understand intrinsically, instinctively, the way he always knew what to do. He stayed quiet, those wild golden eyes of his glittering through the darkness like an animal’s might. Without making a sound he rose and gently pulled the husk of what had been Sharvas off of me. I brushed my thick woolen overcoat as if death by old age was something that one could catch.

            Rory was crouched at the mouth of the cavern, just outside the thick leathers and furs we draped to keep the nail-sharp wind out. A pike leaned against the mouth of the cave nearby. He’d carried it with him since we found him broken at the foot of a bloody spire some of the outer tribes worshiped as sacred during the months-long night. He didn’t speak much, but when he did it was strangely accented and usually vitally important. I sat next to him and didn’t say anything.

            The sun was a russet globe lingering at the horizon. It would stay there for the next seventeen days, I knew.  I couldn’t say how I knew, any more than Sharvas had known I knew. He had always known things like that, and he trained me in the ways of the others like us: traditions reaching deep into the arcane past. It didn’t seem like dawn, but there wasn’t much way to tell either way. It was either dark or it was light, and that was about all there was to it.

            Pantheon wasn’t visible on the horizon. It had been a few days ago; a blue-green globe of stone and trees wickered with tunnels that glittered when the dying sun hit it. Heaven, I’d been taught, but no one had ever visited it, and no one had ever come from it. It flew like a vagrant moon over the mountains and through the tall spires of stone that decorated the hostile terrain we lived in, seemingly at random. If we followed the teachings of Sha-Serah; if we were kind, obedient, brave, honorable, and just, we’d go there when we died. Sharvas was there. Or his spirit. He’d been kind of fuzzy on the details about it.

            “Hey. Breakfast.” Jara’s voice cut through the silvered light. I turned and looked at her. She was lean and long, a panther-like woman only a year or so older than me. We were all young. The older, weaker ones had been killed or starved long ago. The children weren’t quick enough to keep up and were torn apart or lost in the darkness in any of our countless flights from cavern to cavern when the Bromidae had discovered us. We were all that were left.

            Liss was pulling salted salmon out of the leather packs that wilted against the wall. The ale and mead had run out a few months after we’d found the last grotto, so now there was only the water that we had to crack the ice on top to sip slowly. I took the piece she gave me and tore into the dry, pink flesh. Liss watched me the way she watched everyon, with those eyes the deep violet of hyacinths. She rarely smiled, but then again, few of us did. We’d taken her from the burned out shell of a Karth village deep in the south, but even years later she seemed to view us all with distrust, except for the fanatic, animal loyalty she showed Feral.

            Feral wasn’t one for speeches but he spoke the most. My older brother was harnessed in muscle and stood taller than the rest of us. His shaggy black hair was bound back in hemp twine, the ends touching his shoulders, and his beard sometimes betrayed the sharp white flash of his teeth when he spoke, which was often, or laughed, which was seldom. My own hair was shorn close to my head and my face beardless, my arms lacked the strength his possessed and my eyes were the green of cave moss.

            “Sharvas, as you noticed, has left us.” Feral took a bite of the salmon

            Unbidden, we each glanced to where the body lay near the wall.

            “What now? Sharvas was the one keeping us here but we can’t stay. Night’s coming and when it does the Bromidae will move again.” I fiddled with the bone charms hanging from the end of my staff to avoid looking Feral in the eye. I felt Feral read the group.

            “You’re right, Fir. We can’t stay.”

            “We can’t go either,” Jara said. “We’ll starve. Fir said night’s coming, how can you think we should run into the world only to be slaughtered by Bromidae when night comes?”

            “Or starve here until the Bromidae find us?” Rory’s blue gaze was unblinking.

            “I have a plan.” Feral took a bite of his salmon in that irritatingly unbothered way he had.

            “Well?” Jara spat.

            “Fir won’t like it.”

            “If I stay alive, I’ll like it.”

            “Oh?” Feral’s eyes glittered with something like malice. “We’re going to invade Pantheon."

           

           

           

           

            

Cilantro and Highway Robbery in the Form of Avocados

This is a somewhat mocking and satirical take on second person, post-modern and nihilistic novels about life and philosophy and masturbatory self-deprecation. It'll probably never go anywhere but is darkly funny and in way, kind of emotional. I'm in the throes of applying to grad school and this might get farther than what I'm submitting. Who knows?

            It is at moments like these where you find yourself amazed at your nihilistic existence, brought to tears by the sight of an earring back on your counter as you stand on a kitchen chair, pissing into your sink while the pest control guy blows up your upstairs bathroom. You didn’t fall in love with her until after she left, and she didn’t accept that love until she no longer wanted it. Specificity, you tell yourself. Specificity is what your life needs, not more of this ridiculous and unfocused existing you do an awful lot of.

            You bought yourself a cactus after she left. You named it too, but you forgot the name on three consecutive days of blind stupor courtesy of Ketel One and just called it Plant. It sat on your dresser and looked vaguely disapproving, if plants could look disapproving, and you remembered the Dmitri Martin bit about being less nurturing than a desert and tried to water the thing.

            You remember your mother, the poor fragile thing, throwing caution to the wind when she screamed at you. You told her you wanted to be a concert pianist, she said you might as well be a crack addict. “It’ll only be a matter of days,” she had muttered angrily at you, scrubbing her hands with surgical precision in a kitchen sink filled with tepid, chalkboard colored water. “It’ll only be a matter of days and you’ll be rolling bums for eight balls and stealing comforters out of Laundromats for warmth on the streets of Seattle.”

            “Why Seattle?” you always asked. She never answered. In her mind, Seattle may as well have been the world capital of squalor, the Timbuktu of downtrodden vagrants.

            She’d never been to Seattle but her uncle had choked to death on his own vomit outside Spokane in a heroin fugue after failing to sell even a single set of cutlery to an urban center of three million and a handful which I supposed in her mind was evidence enough for the validity of her prejudice. “You’ll be murmuring to yourself in the second person,” she said, “you’ll be fantasizing about strangling Anglican priests and trying to make some sense of life you’re Kierkegaard or Marx.”

            The closest my mother ever came to swearing was when she screamed tamales, very loudly and very seriously. The bus had broken down and she was on her way to an interview for a job putting stickers that said “grown in the USA” on oranges coming off Barbadian freighters. You were small and easily frightened and the word burned into your memories because in your New Jersey upbringing you hadn’t ever heard of a tamale and the first time you saw a roach coach helmed by a Mexican man named Salvador called “The Tamale Town” you sniggered to yourself in a worldly way.

            She choked back tears when you left and instead handed you a bundle of what turned out to be two hundred and forty-seven dollars in crumpled fives and ones and a hallmark card with a kitten on it that said “You’re a failure” and on the inside it said “Just Kitten” and she had written her name in careful, tight script. No “love”, no “best wishes” just “Just Kitten” and then “Elaine.” You pinned that card up on the mottled and broken wall when you reached Atlanta and cried so hard your throat hurt and your stomach roiled and then the first thing you did when you left your rank and musty room was to use some of that two hundred some-odd to buy a loaf of bread and some hard salami at a price your mother would have called piracy.

            

The Butcher and the Alchemist

       This is a little something I'm working on. The endgame is to get this particular piece published; where it finds a home I am less than picky about, save for the twin qualities of being in print and getting a little something for it. I am not sure where this is going, but the style reminded me half of a Xanth novel (By the peerless Piers Anthony) and half of The Witcher series (written by Andrzej Sapkowski). Wherever this leads, I like the two main characters and there is enough chemistry there to carry a short story.

           The Alchemist was known as Rah Gaffer Gospode, to some, but to most he went only by “Frith,” for reasons long since forgotten. The “Rah” was a sign of nobility, but he didn’t seem to have a family, or much of anything else, really. He drifted through the forest, mostly alone, occasionally popping into a town to buy or sell a few trifles. Sometimes strange fungi that seemed to twist towards the moon or little glass bulbs filled with blue liquid appeared in the markets after he had gone, but few could say whether he had brought them or not. He was a tallish, strangeish fellow with eyes that shifted color with the phases of the moon and a strong, angular jaw like a stone in a stream.

            He carried a bamboo pack tight-bound with iron bands and locked with two brass padlocks that clinked when he walked. A sword as long as a short man’s leg hung in a scabbard from the side of his pack, a long blue tassel affixed to the hilt. In winter he grew a beard, knotted and black and rambunctious like a briar thicket. Sometimes he did small favors for people in the town of Silverbone, blessing a gate so it never rusted, or creating some elixir that swelled pumpkins three times their normal size until they looked like fat orange sows in their furrows in back gardens. He never slept in a normal house, only in barns or hedgerows  or propped in the crook of a leaning tree eight paces from the road. He spoke little but smiled brightly and often, even if that smile was a touch too wide and a hair too sharp at times.

            Bufo DeLivre, the butcher, was completely different. Short and fat in the strong, sturdy manner of a boar or bulldog, he was loud and as often jovial as he was enraged, and he had thick brown arms like summer hams that he swung in great arcs when he talked. A broad cleaver swung on a leather thong at his belt, the handle polished from three generations of DeLivre hands. He swore it could slash a maple leaf as it fell but chop through a steer’s neck with one blow. No one ever saw him use it. No one ever saw him work, honestly. He sat in front of his shop and shouted orders through the open door at his niece or the orphan boy who was madly in love with his niece and did all the work she was supposed to. Bufo and Frith got along in the bickeringly friendly way fast friends did, with Bufo roaring insults between laughs punctuated by Frith’s quiet, sharp retorts and flashing smile.

            

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The Orphan, the Fool and the Alchemist

Hey guys, sorry it's been a while. Here's the first chapter of my latest thing. Let me know if you like it or not. 

The legend of Frith

Or, the Orphan, the Fool and the Alchemist

Lowell J. Stevens

“Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster. When you stare into the abyss, the abyss also stares into you.”

~Friederich Nietzsche

            1.

            “The one known as Frith, a son of the Aridoc Clan, was slain on the field of battle. As a captain of the elite guard he acquitted himself with honor in destroying the threat of the Glassmen and their horde of ravagers. His body was not recovered from their unholy Third Citadel. His men will mourn his loss.” ~Excerpt from death notice sent to Aridoc Clan from King Jarus Stolenbrow.

The silence pressed in on Theo like a weight as the rest of the town slowly fell asleep. Beyond the walls of the tiny shack that he had built for himself out of the ruins of his parents’ cottage the townspeople were ready for the execution of the murderer.

He wasn’t, that much Theo was absolutely sure of. He wore the armor of the Alchemist’s guild, carried a sword like the rest of them, despite the fact that only very rich families and the Named clans were allowed to carry those weapons. His leather traveling pack was filled with the items that he needed to create his elixirs and essences, and he wore the bamboo plates of armor fortified with elestrum that only a great knight would be able to afford. His arms were covered in the ranking tattoos of the Sovereignty’s secret warriors; tattoos that denoted kills, great deeds and feats of valor. They had found him confused and covered in blood, both his own and others, wandering in the forest outside of Silverbone, a puzzled look in his sad brown eyes. A courier reached them only hours later, both describing the man they had fed and clothed in the council hall and the death of Aolir, the oldest of the heirs.

            The man was even now in the stocks, and in the morning he would be dragged to the bluff that overlooked the choppy, charcoal sea and beheaded. His head would be put in a box and sent to the heirs for a reward, his body stripped of valuables and then thrown to the brinedevils.

            Theo knew the man was innocent. There wasn’t a way that he knew, but ever since he was a child he had known things before they happened, or when there was no way that he could have known them. He knew when he smelled smoke that night that his parents would not survive. It did not stop him from trying to save them, to wake them, but he knew it was futile. He knew when he saw the Meister bumble out of his house in a knotted mass of fur coats and gold chains, staring at the inferno with a mixture of surprise and greed that the Meister was somewhat responsible. No one believed Theo, though. Not even Wat, the shipbuilder and his father’s best friend.

            So at sixteen, Theo dug through a charred pile of lumber, carried his parents’ half-torched remains to a secluded meadow where he felled two strong pines and made their coffins, with the tall stumps as headstones. He stripped the bark from the pale wood and chiseled their names carefully and buried them there. Then he went back into the town, dragged the more useable struts and plates of shingled roofing to make himself a hut in the corner of town, over the gutter that drained out the corner of the walls. There he had lived for the last three years, biding his time.

            Theo carefully packed his few belongings into a traveling pack. A slender bamboo fishing pole and string with a steel hook, a sharp filet knife that he sheathed in his right boot. A half loaf of bread and some cheese wrapped in a cotton kerchief and a small leather bottle of wine. The harvest moon hung overhead, swollen and orange.

            The Meister, in his perennial short-sightedness, hadn’t bothered to place a guard at the square where the weary man now sagged in the stocks. The cobblestone streets were empty, save for a wandering cat or raccoon here and there. Theo moved to the shadows and squatted on his haunches, watching the man. Either he had chosen not to struggle, or he had exhausted himself earlier. He wasn’t even bothering to examine the flimsy pin that locked him into place, just out of his reach. Rather than immediately free him, Theo stashed his belongings near a rain barrel and then silently moved across the square. The man didn’t notice him, which was better. The guard shack stood near the main gates, and while it was always locked at night, no one had bothered to fix the leaky roof, which had subsequently softened with the constant rains that kept the forests lush. Theo climbed up to the roof and with a strong kick, the roof of the little building caved in amidst a shower of rotten wood and startled beetles, dropping Theo to the dirt floor. On a shelf, the traveler’s wooden pack and neatly folded traveling garments sat. Theo grabbed them, slinging the traveling pack over his shoulders and grabbing the clothes and tossing them over the wall to the ground outside. He didn’t see the armor, so Theo stood on the table and clambered out of the ruined shack, dropping to the ground outside. For a moment he stayed in the shadows that the moon cast down on the sleeping town, watching for activity. Satisfied that no one had heard, he crept to the stocks.

            Theo waited for the man to notice him, but the prisoner appeared lost in thought. Theo slowly moved to the side until he was directly in front of the man. Still, he didn’t appear to notice Theo.

            “Please don’t say anything.” Theo whispered. The man started, viciously banging his chin against the bottom of the yoke. He remained silent, though blood started to drip from his chin. He watched Theo warily as Theo stepped onto the platform and yanked the rusty pin out of the loop and dropped it into his pocket before lifting the top of the yoke. The man straightened slowly, putting his hands to his lower back to straighten it as it popped. Theo lifted a finger to his lips, and then handed the man his leather pack and clothes. They had stripped him to only a dirty loincloth, and Theo turned as the man discarded it and quickly dressed. When he was finished, he whispered “Where’s my armor?”

            “It’s probably in the Meister’s house.”

            The man pursed his lips in a silent oath.

            “I can get it, but there’s no way to silently get out of town,” Theo said. “Wait by the guard shack. I’ll need your help to open the gates.

            “Are there guards?”

            “Two, but they’re brothers, and old. They can’t give chase for long.”

            “Horses?”

            “None.” Theo silently pointed to the gate, and then crept off in the direction of the Meister’s house.

            The back door was slightly ajar: the Meister’s lone maid was prone to midnight wanders spent with any of her many lovers. Theo slipped inside, quiet as a shadow, and quickly found the armor in the huge wardrobe that dominated the sitting room. He pulled it out as quietly as he could. Upstairs, he heard a floorboard creak and froze, heart thudding in his chest. No other sounds followed, so Theo started to leave. He suddenly realized that the sword wasn’t with the armor. He crushed his frustration with practiced control and started to make his way upstairs.

            The Meister was a bulbous lump in the shuttered darkness, his wife a stick. A slat of moonlight illuminated the sapphire encrusted crest on the pommel of the sword, leaning against the wall between the nightstand and the bed, opposite the door and directly next to the fat hand of the Meister. Theo crept on all fours across the floor, testing each board for sound before putting his weight on it. Without warning, the Meister snuffled and rolled, the bed creaking like a ship before he settled again into the down mattress. Theo moved suddenly towards the handle of the sword, carefully extricated from the confined space that it occupied, threading it around the Meister’s outflung arm and then clutching it to his chest. He hadn’t held a sword before, and he resisted the urge to stare at the weapon. They were incredibly rare and incredibly illegal to possess if one was not a knight or a landed Gentry. A boy in another town had fashioned a crude one from a broken plowshare and half an axe handle and was beheaded the next day.

            Theo turned to leave when suddenly the Meister sat up in bed, nightclothes flowing around him like a fat ghost. Theo didn’t wait, dashing out the door full tilt. Down the stairs three at a time, halfway down his ankle turned in the darkness and Theo tripped forward, suddenly airborne as behind him he heard the lumbering sounds of the Meister waking his wife and stumbling sleepily from the bed. Theo hit the planking heavily, letting the sword fly from his hands rather than come free of the sheath and skewer him. Theo heard the sword shatter the china cabinet as he hit the ground. Pain was radiating up his right leg, but he forced himself to his feet and limped as quickly as he could to the ruined hulk of the Meister’s prized possession, yanked the blade out of the mass of shattered porcelain and glass and then stumbled to the door, snatching the armor from where he had laid it before. Upstairs, the Meister had opened the window and was shouting for the guards. As Theo yanked the back door open he was met with the startled maid standing on the doorstep. He pushed his way past her, feeling starting to come back to his ankle as he broke into a shambling run toward the main gates. He reached it in a few minutes and handed the sword and armor to the man, then began to push on the doors. He looked behind to see the two old guards, Jancy and Marko, confusedly wandering out of their house at the far end of the street, carrying clubs and still dressed in their dressing gowns and nightcaps. The man shoved with Theo, and the heavy gates slowly swung open, revealing the dark forest beyond. The commotion was bringing out more of the townspeople, and Theo knew it wouldn’t be long before crossbow bolts started flying. He and the man started to run down the road when Theo stopped.

            “My pack!” he hissed. “Go, I’ll catch up.” Theo turned and dashed back towards Silverbone and its enraged citizens. Jancy and Marko had reached the gates when Theo bulled into them, throwing them to the sides as he ran as quickly as his tender ankle would allow. The dewy cobblestones were as slick as soap and his boots lost traction. Theo slid into the rain barrel, tipping it as he grabbed his satchel and pole. Then, hands full, Theo rose and ran back towards the gate. Marko grabbed ahold of Theo as he passed, trying to keep a grip on his shirt, but Theo threw his knee hard into the old man’s groin and Marko fell back, squalling. Theo dashed into the darkness as the Meister lumbered to the gate, and then Silverbone was behind him.

            2.

“’What do you want of me, Fox?’ Frith asked. ‘I have no money and your brother the Wolf will soon be here to empty my belly of its guts. Let us be away.’ ‘Ah, but what he does not know will not hurt him,’ Fox said. ‘for I have a plan that may make us both wealthy men…’” ~From Frith and the Fox’s Daughter

            The man had stopped a few hundred feet down the road and had put on his armor. He was standing next to the sigil-stone that signified the beginning of the Silverbone territory with his sword naked in his hand. When he saw that Theo was not being chased, he sheathed the sword at his side. Theo slowed from a run to a walk and then stopped, breathing heavily, hands on his knees. He smiled, and then laughed.

            “I wasn’t expecting to leave that noisily,” he admitted.

            “Why did you rescue me?” The man asked.

            Theo was quiet for a minute before straightening and putting the strap of his satchel over his shoulder and running the pole through the twine loops he had sewed onto it.

            “Because you’re innocent,” Theo said at last, “and too many innocent people die already for one more to die.”

            “But why do you care?”

            Theo looked him in the eyes, and then looked away. “Few deserve to die, let alone someone who is innocent.”

            “I could be guilty.” The man’s puzzled expression matched the one that he had worn when dragged into the stocks.

            “You’re apparently stupid,” Theo said, “questioning why I saved you when I could have let you die.”

            “You’re a cheeky bastard.” The man almost looked offended.

            “I’m Theo,” Theo said, extending his hand.

            “I am Caeth of Avonlea, third son of Varien.”

            “So you are gentry.”

            “I was.” Caeth turned. “We should go. I owe you my life and for that I am grateful. I’ll help you find a safe place to live and be on my way.”

            “I’m sorry, but that’s not going to happen.”

            “Excuse me?”

            “You’re an alchemist, correct? And none of that ‘was’ rubbish.”

            “True,” Caeth admitted.

            “You’ve had the murder of Aolir blamed on you and now everyone wants the two million noble reward that’s on your head.”

            Caeth pursed his lips and nodded once.

            “We’re now both being hunted as equals because I assisted you in your escape, which means anyone who captures me is entitled to a reward equal to a quarter of the bounty on you.”

            “Where did you learn magisterial law?” Caeth asked.

            “Never mind that. We have a better chance of surviving together. The country’s a big place, but the Sovereignty has eyes and ears around every corner.”

            Caeth laughed. “You’ve got heart.”

            “I’ve got purpose.” Theo said. “I need to find out why my parents were killed and who paid the Meister to have it done.”

            “I hate to say this, boy, but it was probably a spite killing. How did they die?”

            “You’re just a ball of tenderness,” Theo snapped. “House fire.”

            “Your mother left a lantern lit.”

            “She didn’t, and that’s not important. What is important is that the Meister had my parents killed and I want to know why.”

            “What makes you so sure that he had it done?”

            Theo struggled to find the words and finally settled on “I just know.”

            “’I just know’ isn’t good enough for a magistrate, Theo.”

            “Don’t talk to me like I’m a child.” Theo crossed his arms. “I’m the only reason that your skull isn’t a dice cup on the Heir’s gaming tables.”

            “Okay, okay.” Caeth held up his hands. “You’re right, I’ve been unthankful. You don’t even know me, though. Why would you want to travel with me? I don’t even know where I’m going.”

            “I have a feeling you do know where you’re going.” Theo said. “You are someone who can get things done, and that is the kind of person that I need helping me. I want to avenge my parent’s death and find out why they were killed and I wasn’t. There’s a reason I’m here, and I think this is it.”

            “Revenge is a purpose that destroys the life it guides.”

            “I don’t need your wisdom,” Theo snarled. “I need your knowledge and your assistance. Since we’re running together now, you may as well be my guide and my companion.”

            Caeth was silent, and then began to walk. Theo walked after him, adjusting his pack.

            “You’ve got no purpose. You’re on the run, and I’ve finally found my path. I need your help. I need your skill and I need your knowledge. You owe me your life, and I will consider that debt repaid if you help me.”

            “I owe you my life, but I have no obligation to help you.” Caeth turned and seeing Theo’s expression, laughed. “Don’t take it so hard. You’d just get in my way and I’d spend all my time convincing you that you don’t want to do what you are doing. I hope I don’t see you around.” Caeth turned, waved without looking, and started to stride down the road and into the lightening dawn.

            “I didn’t want to do this,” Theo called. “But you’re forcing me. I invoke the creed of Elegy.”

            “What?” Caeth whirled to face Theo. You can’t…how do…you’re not…what?”

            Elegy’s creed was something that Theo had heard his father discuss. If a debt was owed and was not repaid, the offended had a right to petition at the Shrine of Elegy, deep in the forests of Orlis. The petition would ensure that the one who owed the debt would fall back into the same trouble that the favor had rescued him from, but this time the consequences would be tenfold. While some dismissed this as superstition, the hundreds of stories surrounding the isolated shrine and petitioners gave many reason to believe. Caeth among them, it would appear.

            “You little…” Caeth drew his sword and advanced on Theo. Theo held his hands up.

            “It’s already been invoked: if you slay me now you’ll be dead before dawn.”

            Caeth spat a curse and slid the blade into his sheath. “Once the debt has been fulfilled, I will kill you for this.”

            “Do what you like. When your debt has been fulfilled I will die willingly.”

            “You’ll die regardless, and I’ll be fortunate if you don’t get me slain as well.”

            “We shall see.” Theo said. “It all depends on what happens now.”

            They walked for most of the morning. Silverbone was set in a hollow amidst huge hills covered in pine and fir trees. The forest bled across the northern coast and down to the central plains, where it opened up to the capital city, Bel Falthorn. There, the Sovereignty was seated, the Six Thrones of the Heirs ruled the Sovereignty from there. Farther east, the barbaric Glass Ects and their mortal enemies, the thirteen dwarven clans, remained in a state of perpetual warfare. Any attempts to subjugate either race had been met with utter slaughter in the rough terrain of the mountain. The Sleithr lived there too, mysterious beings that some said were the hungry undead and some said were the Glass Ects’ distant cousins, foul creatures that wore the skulls of giant wolves as helmets and rode saddled cave bears, swinging macanas made from the bones of their kills. Even the Glass Ects didn’t molest them, letting them live in their warrens deep below the earth at the heart of volcanoes. The Glass Ects themselves lived in the swamps that filled the valleys of the Steel Mountains

            On the plains, humans lived at peace with fisher-folk, the peaceful rivermen that spent as much time in the water as out of it. Pale blue skin and luminous eyes made them more frightening than was warranted, but they spent much of their time living in their deep lake-villages and only coming out to trade their crafts and catches, or living on circular ships the size of a town that stayed in the middle of the huge lakes that mottled the land.

            Caeth was stubbornly silent as they walked; not responding to Theo’s few questions with word or action. In fact, he rarely acknowledged Theo’s presence. As the day wore on, Theo grew hungry and took out the food he had brought. The closest to actually acknowledging Theo’s existence came when he offered Caeth his food, but after a moment’s hesitation only visible with the flicker of Caeth’s eyes, Caeth looked obstinately forward once again. Theo shrugged and finished off half the loaf and cheese, stowing the rest carefully in his pack for later. Streams were few and far between, despite the constant rains, and until they reached the Fairth river in a few dozen miles, there wouldn’t be a place to fish. Food needed to be conserved. Theo wished that he had more money, he only had a few marks to buy food with, which wouldn’t last long. For the first time since their haphazard escape a few hours earlier, Theo began to wonder if he had done the right thing.