A snore gets caught up in my throat. I jolt awake, and hit my head against the ceiling of the smuggler’s wagon. Ow, right…

By the time we made it back to the village where I signed our contract, the local Lord and his posse were nowhere to be found – the inn proprietress mentioned they all marched out somewhere the previous night. An absence of law-keepers was actually quite serendipitous, since it meant that the local taverns teemed with vendors of illicit services, including, of course, smuggling. The overwhelming majority specialized in crossing to, and from Czarnia, sailing across the very same bay we just came from. I could only find two people that regularly smuggled people into Fleurand, and only one who was willing to take wanted criminals into the nation, for a sizeable fee, of course.

There’s a warm sunlight seeping in through the cart’s breathing-holes, which means I must’ve slept for at least a couple of hours. The fervor of our fight with Fulgir has long-worn off, leaving me with pains all over. I try flexing individual fingers on the hand with an arrow-shaped hole punched through it, but even lifting my fingertips off the cart’s floor is excruciating. I look over at Rum – half her face wrapped tightly in translucent, white shirts – and feel an uncomfortable kind of relief.

And then, our eyes meet. Rum is awake.

“…Hey.”

The girl’s head is resting on Wulfram’s lap. She’s awake, but deliberately motionless – even the slightest movement runs the risk of chafing her injury. For a moment, she maintains eye contact, and says nothing.

“Should I wake Wulfram to tell him? He seemed worried about whether you’d even wake–”

“Wulfram knows,” she interrupts, “I finished speaking with him just before you woke up.”

The relief must’ve knocked the tattooist out cold. I can’t get a read on Rum’s expression at all – the makeshift bandages and lack of light obfuscate her entirely, but her voice comes off indifferent; apathetic perhaps?

The both of us fall silent once again. The quiet doesn’t feel tranquil – it’s as if a full stop has snuck its way to a place it wasn’t supposed to. Small talk is off the table. For a second, the idea to have a dig at her expense invades my mind, albeit with the intention of bringing us slightly closer to normalcy. Still, there are things I want to ask her, social conventions aside.

“What happened during your fight with Fulgir?”

My God that sounded obtuse, and Rum seems to agree.

“Go to hell.”

“I just want to know what–”

Rum mumbles back a retort, careful not to wake Wulfram.

“Erland. I don’t want to talk about that.”

Her voice hangs on that last word, almost as if it were shaking. I hesitate, but press on nevertheless.

“Rum, we’ve fought together on many separate occasions. Against blackjack swindlers, army reserves, bandits – each of them you’ve dealt with in a different manner…”

Carefully, the girl starts to turn onto her back. She winces in pain while I continue.

“…Sometimes you act like a military captain, and other times, like a wife beating up on her drunk husband…”

We’ve completely broken eye contact now.

“And yet, you always take one thing into account, if nothing else: self-preservation.”

The wooden wheels of the cart begin to creak even louder.

“Rum, I know from experience that you run from fights you can’t win.” I’ve softened my tone of voice without even realizing. “Fulgir was an immovable object for us, and yet, you put yourself in the frontlines against someone who didn’t seem interested in a fight. It doesn’t fit.”

For an instant, the girl’s mouth opens, and shuts again.

“Rum. What happened?”

Finally, her silence breaks.

“Erland, why don’t you care about magick?”

The question comes completely out of left field. Does she mean magick in general? My magick? I stammer trying to find the right words, before Rum picks up the conversation again.

“Then, do you know what a corta is?”

“I don’t recognize the word, no.”

Corta. The word doesn’t sound like much in my head, but Rum’s pronunciation of it makes the five letters seem almost malicious.

“It’s a contraction. The full phrase is Cornu Curta, which translates to–”

“Clipped wings.” I finish.

“Since when can you speak Latin?”

“I only tried to learn, but the expression was underlined with colored ink in the book I was using. I figured it was important.”

There’s a pause, and Rum continues her line of thought.

“When children turn of age, their magick is inspected at the nation’s capital – it’s a way to see what dominium that child was born able to control.”

She turns her head slightly in my direction.

“The test is just a crystal ball. You touch it, and it displays the object your magick can be used on; your birthright as it were…”

The word ‘birthright’ spills out from her lips as if it were bitter.

“…And if the crystal ball stays transparent, then you’re a Corta. Simple as.”

She doesn’t explicitly say she’s a Corta, and I doubt she wants me to bring it into the foreground. Instead, her original question flashes through my head.

“Is there a reason I should care about magick?”

The response seemed to have hit a sore spot for Rum, who suddenly became far more animated.

“Erland, Cortas are rare. Unlike me, you’ve never even taken the test – you could be the magus of something special! Gemstones, wool, sunlight, written text – anything!” Her voice has gotten considerably louder.

“So, if you had to choose, what kind of magus would you be?”

Rum reclines back against Wulfram’s lap. She opens her mouth, but no sound comes out. We stay silent for a few seconds, until eventually, she answers:

“If I could be a magus, it wouldn’t matter.”

“That’s a weak-ass answer.”

“You never even answered my original question, so there.”

“You never gave me ample opportunity to answer, so there.”

“Ugh, fine. Why don’t you care about magick?”

You don’t need to go back there. Fragments are enough. Remember the pillars of fire erupting in the skyline. Remember the stomachache you got after drinking from that canteen. Remember the swarms of insects. Remember target practice. Remember that pit in your stomach that doesn’t dissolve. Remember why you settled on indifference, not hatred.

The thought passes as quickly as it came. Rum is still looking at me, expectantly – I can’t tell whether her interest is feigned, or genuine. The damp, white shirt tied around her wound has started to take on a red color. There’s still something I need to know.

“Rum, why didn’t you keep running?”

Her curiosity vanishes instantly. Rum’s facial features have all misaligned, visibly conflicted on how to approach the question. Her eyebrows are outraged, her lopsided smile feigns ignorance, and her pupils withdraw from the performance entirely.

“That has nothing to do with my question,” she deflects. Rum hasn’t even refuted the fact that I called it ‘running’.

“Ever since we’ve had a moment to breathe, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Wulfram told me you ran in the opposite direction as soon as he woke up, and you obviously made it all the way to another village. You were off-the-hook, scot-free. Contract or no contract, you were alive, so tell me, why did you come back?”

She answers almost immediately, as if she’s reading off a script.

“When the magus ignited all of those people, my first thought was that we can use the fuel against him somehow. If I could just get–”

“Rum, all three of us knew that Cupram village had access to whale oil. Stop bullshitting me.”

Her facial features all stutter. Tiny strands of sunlight seeping into the cart illuminate her eyes, which are darting around in search of a better lie. Perhaps, a half-truth.

“Well, we couldn’t have known for sure that the magus came alone – so I ran ahead to do some reconnaissance.” Rum’s voice trailed off near the end, perhaps realizing how far-fetched this sounded.

I don’t say anything in response. I don’t think I need to. Finally, Rum lets out a long sigh.

“That one villager… the one Wulfram tried to shoot down. Did you hear what he said before getting turned to tinder?”

“Something about the lightning magus checking for corpses…”

She supplements the gaps in my knowledge.

“He was holding their families hostage. The ultimatum was: get immolated by me in battle, or burn to death here, along with your family.”

Rum’s voice had long lost its apathetic tone, but now, she sounded agitated.

“I figured I could find the village they were all herded in. If I freed their wives and children, it would be child’s play to coax them into giving me a horse – maybe even some supplies.”

Wait, so she really was planning to abandon us?

“Weren’t you worried about the contract kicking in?”

A sound resembling a chuckle escapes Rum’s body.

“Do you think I just enjoyed working as a porter for The Five Thousand?” Her voice continues to get more emotive. “If I was going to be turned into a serf, or a slave, then at least I had experience…”

Pieces of the puzzle I thought I’d figured out suddenly stopped fitting in.

“Then… why did you come back?”

Rum briefly stops her recounting. Her eyes close, presumably visualizing something.

“By the time I got there, there wasn’t even smoke left.”

Fulgir’s face flashes across my mind’s eye, and I shiver.

“Each house was reduced to ash. Every body I found had charred beyond the point of recognition – charcoal statues that died trying to shield their–”

Unconsciously, my hand reached out to hold hers. Both of us know how out of character this is for the other. Neither of us stop.

“He couldn’t live after doing something like that,” she stammers, “it wouldn’t have been right…”

Unexpectedly, Rum squeezes my hand tighter.

“I kept trying to explain it to myself: that it was necessary, that it was honorable…”

She stifles a sob.

“And all it got me was an eye to match my stub.”

I put my injured hand onto Rum’s. She stops trying to stifle the sound, and for a while, we stay completely still.

A few thousand paces north from Cupram fishing village, the local Lord watches anxiously as the sun continues to rise up from the horizon, unimpeded. Currently, he’s pacing around the village chief’s personal cottage, wondering why none of his men have reported the lightning magus’ arrival. The mercenaries he was instructed to hire were supposed to be cannon fodder – the time they bought was well-spent reinforcing the external defenses of Stannum Village, which should’ve been Fulgir’s next target.

Just then, Völl, the contract magus, entered the cottage without knocking.

“Well?! Where the hell is the lightning magus? And the mercenaries, for that matter?”

“Fulgir is dead. That rag-tag trio we hired actually pulled it off.” Paradoxically, he sounded more upset than his employer.

A mixture of pleasure, confusion, and foreboding emulsified in the Lord’s mind.

“…They killed him? You told me they were useless – magickless, even – so how does that…”

“I don’t know – you’re not the only one this royally fucks over.”

A harsh realization washes over the large man.

“My 7 golds..?”

For a second, Völl was too stunned to speak.

“Golds? Golds?!”

The contract magus pushed the Lord up against the wall in a blind rage.

“Listen close – the man who lent me to help you has spent a lot of money trying to get ahold of that mercenary trio. It takes a lot of funds to smuggle someone out from Helvia into Ferroth, and now, I have to tell him that those three nobodies just wasted the lightning magus after he’s finally made it here.”

The Lord doesn’t understand – Fulgir had been terrorizing his territory for weeks… but if he was hired..? The man tries to call out for help, but Völl’s hands suffocate his voice into an incoherent mumble.

“I have to leave as soon as possible to report this, but before I do…”

The magus’ grip tightens.

“…you’ll be signing some contracts for me.”