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Fish crouched over the campfire, not trusting the foggy wilderness around him.
There was sleep still in his eyes; Nico had shaken him awake without ceremony, then disappeared into the fog to tend to his ablutions. Fish had crawled out of the tent, blanket still around his shoulders, to find himself alone in a sea of fog.
The fire Nico had built during the night smouldered low, providing Fish with something solid to look at. He inched closer, concentrating on the boiling coffee pot that sat in the ashes. The way the fog billowed made him uneasy. It was so thick, so seemingly solid, but anything could force its way through there; anything could be waiting just beyond his severely limited field of vision. And out here in the wilds, on the tracks of a slave caravan, the thought of “anything” was a troubling one.
They had left civilization five days ago, when they had taken their leave of the town of Von Dharen. The journey there had been easy; the search for slave-traders had been moderately difficult. No-one in the town wanted to talk to a pair of strangers, and every one of the contacts they had been given to follow up had been impossible to track down. In the taverns, there were whispers of wrong-doings, of murders, of men who came ashore in the night and cloaked themselves in darkness before disappearing. They had languished in the town for more than a week before turning up a single hint: a nearby cove, once frequented by smugglers. The smugglers of Von Dharen had all vanished, no-one knew why nor where to, but the cove remained the safest landing for ships outside of the actual harbour.
Against the warnings of the townsfolk, Nico and Fish had visited the cove. Luck had been with them, and they had found exactly what they sought without running into danger. There were footprints in the cove, above the high-tide mark and leading due east; an entire caravan had disembarked here less than a week ago. There were about a dozen captives, according to Nico, all of them women and children. Their heavy-booted guards numbered at least twice as many. Up above the surf, out of reach from the wild windy sea, they had turned up more in the sand: a discarded shoe, child-size; a chunk of tangled black hair; a wrought-iron collar, rusted through and still attached to a link of disintegrating chain.
The slave caravan had made for the nearby forest to the south of Von Dharen, and by fear and force had driven their captives to make it under the tree cover within eight hours of their arrival on the beach. Then, they had taken the quickest and steepest possible path into the mountains. The slavers were travelling by night, so the assassins were travelling by day, and keeping watch all night. Fish always took the first watch, and once Nico awoke smartly at midnight, he took over. Every day, the weather and the wilderness reminded them that they were no longer in Ülhard. They were in the wilds, and nature was against them.
Daily they clawed their way up jagged boulders residing in steep ravines, slipped down partially frozen banks of mud, and drew their fur hoods up against the persistent sleet and rain. The tangled vegetation of the lower forests quickly gave way to heather-clad cliffs of basalt and sandstone, making the way easier, but detection more likely. They had left their horses behind in Von Dharen, taking only two sturdy donkeys to carry their gear. Fish’s sense of unease increased daily, although he could not have said why. This was not his first foray into wilderness nor danger, and he had always had complete trust in Nico before.
But now, the fog. It had been threatening to come down last night, but Fish would never have guessed how quickly and completely it had subsumed everything. There was no sign of the sun, only a sinister kind of ghost-dawn palely wavering through the white. Fish’s ears ached with the silence, as if dampers had been placed over them. He reached for a dagger that Nico had left next to the fire, feeling some comfort in holding it.
He was all alone in the midst of this white wilderness, and yet he felt so strongly that someone was nearby that he had to restrain himself from whipping around. Only muffled noises came to him, but he caught their edge: a twig snapping, a bush shaking, padding footsteps just outside his little circle of solitude. The whiteness of the fog made his eyes ache, and he imagined sights in the corner of his eye: long, whipping hair, fleeting sandals over last year’s leaves, a pair of dark eyes watching...
A twig snapped, just behind him. Fish was on his feet instantly, lunging with the silvered dagger towards his unseen enemy.
The blade of the dagger halted just below Nico’s unprotected chin, who slowly raised his hands, his eyes fixed on his partner. “What...”
Fish gave a loud curse and lowered the dagger. “What are you thinking, sneaking around like that?”
“By the sly eyes of Vermayn, Fish, I only went for a...” Nico hesitated. “Fish, did something happen?”
“No.” Fish slumped back down, running his hands through his hair. His eyes felt weary, dry from staring. “Nico, I’m not used to this. I didn’t grow up in this land like you did.”
Nico took a seat beside him. “We had more trees around where I grew up,” he said brusquely. “Give me some coffee, will you?”
Fish began to feel calmer, now that his partner was here to distract him. “How are we going to get anywhere in this fog?” he asked.
Nico shrugged. “I’m not sure we can. We might be better served waiting up for a day. Give me that map.” Fish passed the wax-paper map to him, and he scrutinized it.
“Here’s the way we’ve come,” he said, taking a square of paper from the pocket of his jerkin and comparing it to the map. “We’ve started to turn south. We crossed this stream yesterday, see?”
“Where’s that mountain pass?”
Nico pointed out the Peak of Beerstana. “Around this peak. It’s the only way back to the lowland. If we keep heading south, we’ll run into this range over here. These peaks are impassable; the only way to get around them is to head east towards the pass.”
“What if they turn back towards the coast?”
Nico shook his head. “They might reach the sea, but there is no place to moor a ship. The mountains continue almost into the sea; see the cliffs here?”
“Then they have got to be bribing someone to let them through the pass.” Fish gulped down a mouthful of coffee. “It’s the only way.”
“You’re probably right,” Nico said. “We can be reasonably certain they’re making for the pass, which means that we might be able to head them off before they get there.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
“Oh, I don’t mean to fight them; only to find out for sure how many there are, and in what state the captives are. There’s a chance we can free the captives, if we have a safehold for them to take refuge in.”
Fish furrowed his brows. “And we have such a safehold?”
“Here.” Nico tapped the map, indicating a nearby valley. “There’s a settlement here, according to this. It must be a tiny hamlet, but it’s likely to have enough defenders to keep the captives safe at least. Depending exactly how many those slavers are, we could even get the villagers to help us hunt them.”
“They might be willing,” Fish agreed. “But what if we can’t get to the pass in time?”
“If we go down to the village, we can loop around this peak here. It’s a high road, but it’ll get us to the pass faster. The slavers have been slowing down, too. They can’t afford to walk their captives to death, and there’s no reason for them to believe they need to hurry.”
“One thing, though,” Fish said, as Nico rolled up the map. “How are we going to move anywhere in this fog?”
“We’ll just have to be careful,” Nico replied. “We can’t stay here long anyway; it’s getting colder. We’ll be going in the opposite direction from the slave caravan, so we won’t have to be as cautious.” He reached for his coffee. “How about you pack up the tent, and I’ll get the donkeys ready?”
They packed up their campsite quickly, eager to move from that cold spot on the edge of the mountain. It was indeed getting colder as they worked, and the fog, against all expectation, seemed to be thickening. Even the donkeys were more subdued than usual.
They flipped a coin to determine who would take the lead, and Fish lost. Quietly hoping that his sanity would last, he put a rope around his waist and tied himself to his partner, who attached himself in turn to the lead donkey. They were to move in single file, all tied together to prevent anyone or anything disappearing in the fog. Fish carried a long stick. Nico, as the rearguard, was responsible for marking their path as they went.
It proved to be a long morning. They had intended to head directly to the northeast, but they had not gone far when they came to a sheer cliff. They might have walked straight off into thin air were it not for their precautions; they had no warning of the drop except when Fish suddenly faltered, his stick giving way right in front of his feet. Luckily Nico was able to pull him back before he fell. They threw a rock into the fog, and the length of time that passed before they heard a faint thud at the cliff’s bottom made both of them fidget uneasily.
They soon discovered that there was only one way down: southeast. It was steep, muddy, icy and slippery. Fish lost his footing and fell into the mud more times than he could count. Nico saved himself every time by leaning on the donkey’s neck for support. But when at last they reached the bottom, a reward was waiting for all their effort. There was a path.
“This’ll lead us to the hamlet,” Nico said with conviction. “They’ve rolled logs down here. Recently. See how the edges are all scuffed up?”
The muddy road led them north up a low bluff, turned east to round a sheer cliff, and then headed north again, leading them sharply downhill. Though Fish knew that this must be the valley in which the hamlet resided, he felt further away from civilization than ever. The fog seemed heavier in the valley, and every strange muffled sound inside it made him prickly with unease. Fish wondered if the sun was setting; he could hardly remember how much time had passed. It felt as though they had been walking forever, and would continue to do so for all eternity, swallowed up by the endless fog. When at last he found his path blocked by a high wooden wall, he stopped so suddenly that Nico walked right into him.
“We’re here,” Fish announced with relief.
“Thank the gods,” Nico muttered. Drawing one of his daggers, he strode forward and thumped its hilt upon the sturdy gate.
There was dead silence for a moment, and then a sudden muttering from the other side of the gate. A peephole opened in the wood, and the face of a middle-aged man, lit up by a guttering oil lantern, peered through.
“Strangers,” he said to someone beside him, then squinted at Nico and Fish. “What brings you here?”
“We seek shelter,” Fish said. “Is there an inn in your village? We will pay well.”
“Is that so?” The man’s tone was suspicious. “And how would we be knowing that you won’t murder us all in our beds whilst we sleep, eh?”
Nico took a folded piece of paper from his pocket. “This is the crest of the Trade Guilds,” he said, passing it through the peephole.
“We mean no harm; in fact, we will help if we may,” Fish said.
There was much back-and-forth over the scrap of paper on the other side. Fish folded his cloak around himself, shivering. A thin rain had begun to fall, showering them both with the icy kisses of the snow goddess. Fish turned his face up to the rain, seeing nothing but greyness, and hoped that they were not in her bad books.
“Alright,” someone finally announced, and there came the sound of the gate-bolts being drawn back. Two men pushed on the gate to open it just wide enough to admit the two assassins and their donkeys. There was a wooden guardhouse to the left, with several men gathered around near the doorway.
A burly man with a grey beard came forward. In one hand he held an enormous axe; in the other, Nico’s Guild letter. He was cloaked and hooded in a great bearskin, with stiff deerhide boots on his feet.
“This here letter,” he announced to the rest of the men, “says that the bearer is to be treated as a Guild representative, given all the luxuries and respects due to them.” He folded the paper carefully and handed it back to Nico. “We have no Guild here,” he continued, but not rudely, Fish noted. “You’ll have to pay your way here, like anyone else.”
“Not a problem,” Nico said, stepping forward. He was actually taller than the bear-skin man, Fish noticed absent-mindedly, but Nico would need about thirty more years of eating and drinking and fighting to equal the bear-skin man’s bulk.
“Is there an inn here?” Nico was asking. “Or someone who could put us up?”
“I will take you to the house of Friedma Smit,” the bear-skin man said. “In the summer, she provides housing for young wood-cutters who come up here to assist us, but the season has not yet begun. I am Harold Velman, the elder of this village.” He shook both Nico and then Fish’s hands as they introduced themselves.
“One moment,” one of the assembled men said, a red-faced fellow with even redder bushy whiskers under his woollen cap. “What do them Guilds want here? And what did you mean when you said, you will help if you may?”
Nico drew himself up and glanced around. “We are hunting slavers,” he said proudly.
There was an animated whispering around the circle of men, and one called out: “Ain’t no slavers here! You’re wasting your time, ain’t you?”
“Are you sure?” Nico retorted. “No strangers hanging around here the past winter? None of your people suddenly going missing?”
At that, the whispering intensified and several men shuffled their feet, looking uncomfortable.
“We don’t like to talk of it,” Harold said in a low voice, stepping forward again, “but this has been a strange winter. Two young girls’ve disappeared, and some of the men who went to find them too.”
“Monsters took ’em, not slavers,” a younger man spoke up. “I saw one of ’em with my own eyes, I swear. A grey creature with the limbs of a man and the savage teeth of a wolf.”
“A goblin, I told you,” an old greybeard said, as the men around him scoffed.
“Well, I can’t speak for whatever you saw,” Nico said levelly, “but I do know that there is a band of slave-traders not two days away from this village, and that my partner and I are bound to destroy them. With a little help from you, we could ambush them at the Peak of Beerstana, and get rid of them for good.”
It seemed that everyone suddenly had something to say, until Harold stepped forward to stand beside Nico. “Our guests are tired and hungry,” he announced. “We will speak no more of this until the morning. Come on.” He beckoned for them to follow, and Nico and Fish did so gratefully.
Harold led them down the rutted, potholed track that passed for a village road. “You’ll get the lads to go with you to the Peak of Beerstana,” he said in a low voice. “I don’t believe in monsters or dark creatures, any more than what I believe in the goblins the old wives tell stories about. Give me this night, and I’ll have you thirty ready fighters in the morning. Including a few of our women, if I don’t mistake myself.”
“That’s good!” Nico said in surprise.
“Very good!” Fish echoed him. “With thirty behind us, those slavers won’t stand a chance.”
Harold led them to the far end of the village, where a large log house loomed up out of the fog. The front door was raised off the ground, reached by a flight of wooden steps almost as high as Nico’s head. Harold ascended these steps to knock on the door, which was opened by a young woman with brown hair.
“Liezl,” he said, making a short bow. “Where is your mother?”
Fish turned his head. To the right of the wooden house, there was a bit of scrub forest, stunted chestnut and poison oak brooding silently in the gloom of the fog. The uneasiness that had been with him all day intensified when he stared into the trees. Movement flickered on the edge of his vision, but he turned sharply to see nothing.
“What’s wrong?” Nico asked. Harold was still talking with Liezl and a young man who had come up to the door.
“Nothing,” Fish forced himself to say.
It was impossible to dwell on whatever the feeling was, for Friedma Smit, a short middle-aged woman, came bustling out of the house then, introducing herself, her daughter and her son Rudolf.
“Now, usually I put the young men in the cabin out there,” she said, pointing somewhere into the woods, “but I’ve not been up there all winter, and only the gods know what might’ve made its home in there since. I can’t in good conscience ask anyone to sleep up there in the damp, not until I’ve gone and aired it out, so you’ll have a room in the house. I trust you don’t mind sharing a bedroom?” She paused no longer than it took to briefly acknowledge their shaken heads, and continued. “We’ll put your donkeys up in the stable with my mules.” She eyed the obvious swords and other weaponry attached to their packs. “I’ll ask you not to take weapons into my house, please.”
“Not a problem,” Nico said amiably.
“Liezl, take their donkeys to the stable. Rudolf, go and fetch more firewood.”
“I’ll go with Liezl and take care of our packs,” Fish said, thinking that he would rather not take the chance of some unaware country girl poking through any of their gear.
“I’ll show you to your room,” Friedma said to Nico.
The girl chattered freely as Fish followed her to the stables and helped her groom and feed the little donkeys. His mind was elsewhere. There was a patch of mud near the stables, nothing but mud as far as he could see, that kept catching his eye. Fish’s uneasiness intensified sharply, and there was a sudden tingling in his fingertips, making him clench his fist in response.
And with that, Fish suddenly knew what he had been sensing all along, all day, and why it made his blood run cold as ice.
It was magic. Magic he had not felt in years. The sorcery taught to him by his father. The power he had sworn to give up when he had run away, and which he had hoped to never feel again. Shadows of the past, of another life. The long reach of his father. The hand of that dark tyrant, Arran Sylvaissen.
––––––––
It was many hours before Fish could be alone with Nico. The old woman and her children were eager to hear news of the outside world, stories from Ülhard; she cooked a generous meal that night, with boar stew and freshly-baked bread; and at the end of it all there was haggling over the cost of their meal and board, which was eventually settled for the price of a bag of ground coffee and a few boxes of certain medicinal herbs they had brought along.
By the time they retired to their room for the night, Fish had settled it in his mind that he would not tell Nico about the magic. There was no reason to believe that it had anything to do with his father; Arran Sylvaissen was not the only Mage-Gifted person in the world. And telling Nico would only invite questions that Fish was not prepared to answer. For all that he had idly imagined sharing his deepest secrets with his partner, Fish did not know how to even start that conversation.
Better, Fish told himself, to investigate the source of the magic first. There was a possibility that it meant no harm to them, and that all his fears were unfounded. He could but hope.
Nico seated himself on the low bed with a sigh, stretching out his long legs. The bed was the same kind they had shared back in Ülhard. There was a crackling fire in the room, and the lulling patter of rain upon the eaves outside. Fish was halfway through undressing when he saw his partner give a wince and a grimace of pain, clutching his right arm with the other.
“What happened?” he asked, coming over towards Nico solicitously.
“I think I must’ve wrenched it sometime today.” Nico looked up at him. “Maybe the last time I fell. I half landed on the donkey.” Slowly, he picked at the lacings of his leather vambrace, and began to remove his jerkin.
Fish rummaged in his pack, looking for the ointment they used to numb sprains and muscle aches. By the time he found it, Nico had removed vambrace, jerkin, blouse and woollen undershirts, and was trying to assess the extent of the injury for himself. His shoulder was swollen bright red, and Fish winced internally in sympathy.
“You should’ve said something earlier,” he said to Nico.
“There wasn’t any time, and besides, it was so cold it didn’t hurt.”
“Well, all right. Give me your hand, and I’ll help you up. The other hand, Nic.” Fish helped his partner to his feet, led him over to the fire, and helped him down again. “The heat will help. Sit.”
Obediently, Nico eased himself into a sitting position on the straw-covered floor, his long legs stretched out in front of him and his left shoulder leaning against the stone pillar of their wash-basin. Fish dropped down cross-legged beside him and began to rub the ointment gently into his shoulder. For a long time neither of them moved nor spoke, Nico seemingly mesmerized by the glowing logs in the fireplace and Fish fascinated by his partner’s well-muscled arms and the way the firelight reflected in his eyes.
“You know what I’d really like now?” Nico murmured, closing his eyes. “A smoke.”
“Or some chocolate,” Fish said longingly.
“Didn’t we bring any?”
“We finished it, remember?”
Nico groaned. Fish chuckled at him. “Don’t tell me you’ve gone all city-soft,” he teased.
Nico smiled for a moment, then his face turned serious again. “It’s a long time since I’ve been out this far into the sticks,” he said softly.
Fish said nothing, reaching for his partner’s shoulder again. Nico caught his hand.
The solid ground seemed to shift underneath him as Nico moved closer, his eyes like pools of dark water Fish could drown in, his lips slightly parted and only a very short distance away. If only he could bridge that gap, Fish thought desperately, but he was frozen. He could hear no sound but his own heart, which had begun to beat very loudly.
Then just as suddenly as he had approached, Nico drew back, clearing his throat and letting go of Fish’s hand, his gaze receding towards the floor. Fish sat back, feeling the blood rush to his cheeks, beset with a sudden panic, barely knowing why. He had always wanted to be close to Nico, a desire that went beyond the simple, secret physical attraction he felt towards his partner. He wanted to know Nico better, to be known himself. He wanted to bring him back to where they had been only a moment ago. He asked the first question that came into his mind.
“Nic—what happened in the mountains, in the place where you grew up? Why did you leave?”
His partner looked up, and all the warmth in his eyes was absent. Nico’s icy glare turned Fish’s stomach, and he sat frozen, pinned to the floor.
“Remember, if you will, what makes us work so well together,” Nico said quietly, dangerously.
“W-what?”
“We don’t ask questions,” Nico said with emphasis, “about each other’s past.”
He got to his feet, pulling himself up by the basin with his good arm, and turned his back on his partner.
Fish could have bitten off his stupid tongue. Wordlessly, he did up the lid on the tin of ointment and waited until Nico was in bed before moving from the fire.
It can never be the way you want it to be, he told himself angrily. People like us don’t have love stories. What if you did—that—with Nico, what then? You’d go right back to being partners in the morning? He’s been too long without a woman to chase, that’s why he looked at you that way. Don’t imagine reasons that aren’t there.
Fish swallowed his own rebuke like the bitterest of medicines and put himself quietly to bed.
