“What are we doing here?” Royce asked Hadrian as the two sat on a partially burned tree trunk. They were just up the old village path from the well near where the Caswell’s two little wooden grave markers used to be. Like everything else, they were gone, nothing left to mark their passing. They could see Deacon Tomas sitting with Hilfred who still lay unconscious.
“This job has cost us two horses, over a week’s worth of provisions, and for what?” Royce went on, and with a sigh broke off a bit of charred bark and absently tossed it. “We should head out with the rest of them. The girl is likely dead already. I mean why would it keep her alive? The Gilarabrywn holds all the cards. It can kill us at will, but we can’t harm it. It has hostages, while all we have is half a sword that it doesn’t really need, but apparently would just like to have. If we had both parts of the sword Magnus could put them back together and we could at least bargain from a position of some strength. We could even have the dwarf make us all swords, and maybe even spears with the right name on it. Then we could have a go at the bastard, but right now, we have nothing. We are no threat to it at all. Theron thinks he’s going to bargain, but he doesn’t have anything to bargain with. The Gilarabrywn set this up only to save itself the tedium of hunting for that sword.”
“We don’t know that.”
“Sure we do. It won’t keep those girls alive. It probably had them for lunch already and when night comes, old Theron will be standing out there like a fool with exactly what it wants. He’ll die and that will be that. On the other hand, his stupidity will buy time for the rest of us to get away. Considering his whole family is gone and his daughter is most likely already dead, it’s probably for the best.”
“He won’t be standing there alone,” Hadrian said.
Royce turned with a sick look on his face. “Tell me you’re joking.”
Hadrian shook his head.
“Why?”
“Because you’re right, because everything you just said will happen if we leave.”
“And you think if we stay it will be different?”
“We’ve never quit a job before, Royce.”
“What are you talking about? What job?”
“She paid us to get the sword for her.”
“I got the sword. Her old man’s got it right now.”
“Only part of it and the job won’t be finished until he has both parts in his hands. That’s what we were hired to do.”
“Hadrian.” Royce ran a hand over his face and shook his head. “For the love of Maribor, she paid us ten silver!”
“You accepted it.”
“I hate it when you get like this.” Royce stood suddenly, picking up a charred piece of scrap. “Damn it,” he threw it into a pile of smoking wood that was once the Bothwick’s home. “You’re just going to get us killed, you know that, right?”
“You don’t have to stay. This is my decision.”
“And what are you going to do? Fight it when it comes? Are you going to stand there in the dark swinging at it with swords that can’t hurt it?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re insane,” Royce told him. “The rumors are all true; Hadrian Blackwater is a damn loon!”
Hadrian stood to face his friend. “I’m not going to abandon Theron, Thrace, and Arista. And what about Hilfred. Do you think he can travel? You try dragging him through the woods and he’ll be dead before nightfall, or do you want to try stuffing him in a well all night and think he’ll be just fine in the morning? And what about Tobis? How far do you think he’ll get on a broken leg? Or don’t you give a damn about them? Has your heart gotten so black you can just walk away and let them all die?”
“They will all die anyway,” Royce snapped at him. “That’s just my point. We can’t stop it from killing them. All we can do is decide whether to die with them or not, and I really don’t see the benefit in sympathy suicide.”
“We can do something,” Hadrian asserted. “We’re the ones who stole the treasure from the Crown Tower and put it back the very next night. The same two that broke into the invincible Drumindor, we put a human head in the Earl of Chadwick’s lap while he slept in his tower, and busted Esrahaddon out of Gutaria, the most secure prison ever built. I mean we can do something!”
“Like what?”
“Well…” Hadrian thought, “we can dig a pit, lure it there and trap it.”
“We’d have better luck asking Tomas to pray for Maribor to strike the Gilarabrywn dead. We really don’t have the time or the manpower for excavating a pit.”
“You have a better idea?”
“I’m sure I could come up with something better than luring it into a pit we can’t dig.”
“Like what?”
Royce began walking around the still smoldering stick forest, angrily kicking anything in his path. “I don’t know, you’re the one who thinks we can do something, but I know one thing; we can’t do squat unless we can get the other half of that sword. So the first thing I would do is steal it tonight while it’s gone.”
“It would kill Thrace and Arista for certain if you did that,” Hadrian pointed out.
“But then you could kill it. At least there would be the closure of revenge.”
Hadrian shook his head. “Not good enough.”
Royce smirked, “I could always steal the sword while you and Theron fool it with the blade Rufus was using.” Royce allowed himself a morbid chuckle. “There’s at least about a single chance in a million that might work.”
Hadrian’s brow furrowed in thought, and he sat down slowly.
“Oh no, I was joking,” Royce backpedaled. “If it could tell the blade was missing last night, it can tell the difference between the real thing and a copy.”
“But even if it doesn’t work,” Hadrian said, “it might give me time to get the girls away from it. Then we could dive in a hole—a small hole, that we do have time to dig.”
“And hope it doesn’t dig you out? I’ve seen its claws, it won’t be hard.”
Hadrian ignored him and went on with his train of thought. “Then you could bring the other half of the sword, have Magnus forge it and then I can kill it—see it was a good thing you didn’t kill him after all.”
“You realize how stupid this is, right? That thing decimated this whole village and the castle last night, and you are going to take it on with an old farmer, two women, and a broken sword?”
Hadrian said nothing.
Royce sighed and sat down beside his friend, shaking his head. He reached into his robe and pulled his dagger out. Still in its sheath, he held it out.
“Here,” he said, “take Alverstone.”
“Why?” Hadrian looked at him, puzzled.
“Well, I’m not saying Magnus is right, but, well, I’ve never found anything that this dagger can’t cut, and if Magnus is right, if the father of the gods did forge this, I would think it could come in handy even against an invincible beast.”
“So you’re leaving?”
“No.” Royce scowled and looked in the direction of the tower of Avempartha. “Apparently I have a job to finish.”
Hadrian smiled at his friend, took the dagger, and weighed it in his hand. “I’ll give it back to you tomorrow then.”
“Right,” Royce replied.
———