“Alright you three, we’re here.”
As the false lid of the cart swings open, my eyelids shut on reflex. A blend of green-hued light and birdsong filled our compartment; I stand upright for the first time in 24 hours, and each of my joints snap back into place. Once my eyes adjust to the brightness, I can see that Wulfram has already disembarked onto a nearby cobblestone path, holding up Rum in his arms. Pollen sticks to the back of my throat, and a dense grove of trees extends in every direction. We’ve made it to Fleurand.
“Erland! The pouch?”
The moment is cut short by Wulfram’s voice. I jump off the cart, and hand him all our money – roughly 10 golds, seven of which we made from killing Fulgir. He shuffles Rum onto his right shoulder, and starts reluctantly retrieving 8 gold coins from our wallet. A premium, he said…
“This makes us square. Now, how are we getting to the Medicine Magus from here?”
The smuggler – an elderly man – calmly counts the payment, his eyes occasionally meandering off-center. In a hoarse voice, he speaks:
“A buddy of mine’ll be taking you in his carriage. Delivers vagrants and war refugees to and from the capital, but it don’t pay well, I figure.”
The man shambles over to a tree stump – the only stump in the vicinity, and looks at it longingly, as though it was an old friend. Then, he fishes out three cloaks from behind it, caked in loose dirt and earthworms.
“You’ll wanna look the part, though.”
Me and Wulfram work in tandem to get Rum’s head fitted into the smallest robe without waking her up, and whilst we do, an open-air carriage materializes in the near distance.
“Before you depart – some words of wisdom; consider it a bonus of your steep fee.”
The old man’s sinewy finger pointed to a patch of moss growing on a nearby cobblestone.
“I need to impress upon you the fact that you’re still wanted in Fleurand. Enough time has passed for your posters to have been buried beneath newer ones, but you still have all this to worry about.”
Me and Wulfram look at one another, confused.
“What do you mean, all this?” I ask.
The smuggler’s arms stretch out wide, almost like he’s showing off the size of a fish he’s caught.
“All of this. Everything from the blanket of tree canopies cutting us off from the sky, to the tiny hairs of a moss patch growing on that stone.”
He grins, revealing a row of tobacco-tinted teeth, each worn down to the nub.
“D’you have any idea how many years it took to build this stone path? We didn’t do it for flair, and flair ain’t the reason you’re paying through the nose…”
All three of us have put on the cloaks. Our new ride has already arrived.
“As long as the Queen of Fleurand lives, the greenery here is watching. It is more cunning than you, it is smarter than you, and it is biding its time until you forget that it’s there.”
Without exchanging any words, Wulfram and Rum join our new coachman on the open-air carriage. I’m still standing on the path, rooted in place. A question leaves my lips without permission.
“What is she – the Queen?”
His skittering eyes finally focus, and meet mine.
“The Magus of Flora, and not a human."
It doesn’t take long for us to depart after that. As we’re taken deeper into the seemingly endless copse, a nauseating odor made up of hundreds of flowers becomes impossible to ignore. I push my shirt up to my nose, while Wulfram chooses to deal with it by smoking. For the first time in what must’ve felt like a long time, he’s able to calmly refill, and smoke his pipe.
In between puffs, he reaches his hands out to mine.
“Be careful not to wake Rum – I just need to reapply the dressing on your hand, so don’t groan too loud.”
“Why would I need to gro–”
MOTHER of GOD!
The tattooist unwraps the makeshift bandage, which has somehow managed to fuse with the raw flesh on my palm. The dressing smells rancid, and once it’s removed, my festering wound becomes exposed to the brisk, Fleurand air. The tattooist uncorks his canteen of boiled water.
“I’m going to need to clean this, so it’d be best for the both of us if you just focus on my voice.”
I nod, clenching my teeth so as not to howl in pain.
“So, what exactly did you tell Rum this morning? Something that ended up making her cry?”
“Wait, were you awa-iiiiiiiiiiiiii…”
I keep telling myself it’s just water, but the sensation is not much different from when the arrow actually pierced my hand.
“I was sleeping – but I did wake up to my pant-leg covered in tears and snot.”
“Then you should ask her once she wakes up. I don’t think I should share.”
He chuckles.
“I’m not mad, Erland. We talked for a while last night, while you were asleep. I could tell something was gnawing away at her – her injury, most likely – but she didn’t want to talk about it.”
The pain in my hand subsides as Wulfram carefully dabs up the water and pus off of the gash. Briefly, I remember my argument with the tattooist over leaving Rum back in Cupram, and immediately try burying it away. I steer the conversation in a different direction.
“And what did she talk about with you?”
He shoots me a look as if to say ‘really?’.
“Anything she could come up with to change the topic – sort of like what you’re doing now.” He starts biting his tongue, probably from burning it with pipe steam. “Although, she did seem genuinely curious about how we killed the lightning magus.”
The comment lights up another memory I had stored away for later.
“You never did tell me how you managed to spread ink out on the fishing line!”
In response, Wulfram points to one of his many tattoos. On the lower half of his torso, the large silhouette of a sun has noticeably lost a few of its details.
“I’m very intimate with how tattoos are actually inked into the skin. I tried visualizing the process of a needle piercing my body, depositing the Iron Gall solution… and then picturing how the process would look in reverse.”
Unintentionally, I scoff.
“Magick really is just that convenient.”
“Well, there was always a chance it wouldn’t work. Generally, you can improve your magick in two different ways…”
He holds up two hands up above his head, one still holding the pipe.
“The more efficient way is the most obvious – casting magick is a skill, so the more you do it, the better you can get at it.”
His left hand drops down lower.
“But weirdly enough, being in physical contact with your dominium can actually improve your magick skill. Normally, that’s neither feasible, nor worth the return, but…”
In his case, the tattoos aren’t ever going to leave his body. In other words, Wulfram’s magick is always improving itself. His left hand starts climbing up, until it’s surpassed the right.
“So, it was a gamble, and it paid off.”
The tattooist tears a scrap off the white shirt we still had on person, and wraps my wound. Intoxicating smoke rises up into the sky from his pipe. The word ‘gamble’ feels like it’s digging into my skin, even more so than the gash in my hand. I look at Rum who, despite Wulfram’s medical care, is already starting to look feverish, and realize that under any other circumstances than the one we’ve lived through, she could’ve been turned to a smear on the gravel. Fulgir could’ve ran across the bay instead of the village gate. He could’ve fried her then and there. The pit in my stomach returns, like an obedient dog called back home by the irresistible smell of guilt. Suddenly, my inner monologue synchronizes with what I’m saying, perfectly.
“She made it out unharmed, and all she needed to do was just keep running…”
“…What do you mean by that?”
Wulfram’s question throws me off a little bit.
“Oh, well, she just, told me about it when you were asleep. She made it to relative safety is all; I’m just contemplating.”
“…Uh huh.” he responds, giving a small nod.
The silence doesn’t last before Wulfram asks another question.
“Safety as in what, exactly? Safety as in she found someone who could dispel contract magick? Because as far as Rum and I were concerned, that scrap of paper was the only thing binding us into that fight.”
He’s unusually sharp all of a sudden. Is it the tobacco massaging his head inside-out?
“Wulfram, I just let my thoughts slip for a bit, relax – thinking how this could’ve been avoided, you know?”
The tattooist sticks his thumb into the pipe’s bowl, smothering out any fire still burning therein. Our eye contact does not waver.
“Then tell me this: after Rum resuscitated me and ran away, I was panicking. In my mind, I had thousands of ideas and explanations for her decision, but for some reason, when I told you Rum was missing, you didn’t even entertain the idea that she would come back.”
“Wulfram–”
“At first, I thought you came up with some contingency maybe – that you knew what she was doing, or knew of some loophole in the contract that you told her about…”
“If you would just let me–”
“But you didn’t know. You couldn’t have.” He stops to catch his breath, and raises his hand when I’m about to talk myself. “That only leaves a very strong assumption, for which you would’ve had good reason.”
This time, my mind couldn’t think of anything to interject with.
“So, Erland, tell me, what reason was it? Why were you so sure that Rum would ignore the contract–”
And then, Wulfram stopped. The tumult of different ideas and facts his mind has been bombarding him with took on a new perspective. A solitary answer formed. The puzzle clicked.
“You never signed our names under that contract, did you?”
At this point, even the most well-crafted lie would raise his eyebrow.
“…You really ought to stop smoking – it makes you too sharp.”
The tattooist’s expression is torn between satisfaction, and scorn. It’s clear he wants to ask ‘why?’, but doesn’t get the chance to verbalize it.
“I was originally planning to exclude you two from the battle outright. I was going to tell you that I signed my name at the inn, but when Rum started preparing to leave, I just…”
The pit in my stomach starts rolling around the organ’s lining.
“I don’t need you to tell me how selfish it was of me. I’ve thought about it a lot.”
The make-shift bandages on Rum’s face seem to sharpen in my periphery.
“Wulfram, don’t tell Rum. I need to be the one to let her know.”
“And when will that be?”
“…Before we leave Fleurand.”
He mulls this over for a while, but eventually nods. As he tosses the resin and burnt residue out from his pipe, the tattooist asks another question.
“Speaking of Rum, any ideas on how we’re going to be paying for her treatment?”
“You’re speaking as though the medicine magus won’t immediately recognize us.”
He shrugs.
“I trust you to come up with something. Seriously though – 2 gold coins are not going to cut it.”
“Actually, I might have something we can use instead…”
I take the giant diamond I got off of Fulgir’s corpse out from a pocket in my vest. Even Wulfram, with all his stoicism, can’t hide his shock.
“Where the hell did you…”
“The lightning magus had this little number stored away in his armor.”
He cocks his eyebrow.
“And where did he get this?”
“That’s… a fair question actually.” I try thinking back to what little conversation I had with Fulgir; some things stick out.
“Actually, did I ever mention that he seemed to have been expecting us? Kept mentioning some benefactor – never by name – and that he was getting paid for doing these terror runs in Ferroth.”
Wulfram stores the diamond away for later, realizing that letting the coachman see it would probably end badly for everyone.
“Good thing he’s dead then…”
He leans in closer.
“Now, how do you propose we trick the medicine magus a second time?”
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