Fractures 2.6

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

 

Hasburg was exactly what I had expected it to be, an ordinary enough city with no particularly impressive qualities. To Rose–and, I expected, to many of the villagers of Branson’s Ford, had they lived to see it–it was an awe-inspiring sight. They had never seen a city before, never in their lives seen such an enormous congregation of people in a single place.

 

I had seen a number of cities, the large cities of northern Skelland. And before that, I had lived in the Whitewood. I was a child of the city, raised in the urban wilderness rather than the literal one, and Hasburg had little to surprise me with.

 

Konrad chose to stop over for the night at an inn, one that he was clearly familiar with. I was, too, though I’d never seen it before. I’d seen plenty of inns on my way south, and I’d worked in one for years with Corbin. I knew what to look for, and I could see that this one was the worst kind of dive. It was an ugly place, small and dirty. But it was cheap.

 

Heinz left us when we got to the city, taking Mathias’s body with him. He hadn’t invited any of us to the burial ceremony, which would presumably be carried out under the eyes of a local priest, with appropriate offerings to gods both black and white. It seemed a bit rude of him to so deliberately not invite us to the burial when we had been the ones who cared for the boy in his final hours, while his father sat out with the other humans. But I couldn’t blame him, not really. He probably couldn’t help but blame us for his son’s death, and he would never know how right he was.

 

I would have preferred to stay out of the inn, eat our usual trail rations and sleep in the wagon. But Rose looked at me imploringly, and I gave in. The poor girl was clearly exhausted. She’d seen far too much death on the road, and that wasn’t even counting what had happened in Branson’s Ford. Between that and the simple fatigue of the road–she’d never traveled before–it was no wonder that she was tired.

 

Inside, the inn was everything I hadn’t wanted it to be. It was tight and close, the ceiling too low for comfort. There was a crowd, a busy one, but it didn’t have a good feeling to it the way inn crowds sometimes did. The people here were clearly locals, for the most part, and they weren’t from the good part of town. The taproom stank of spilled beer and unwashed bodies, with a hint of burning meat. The innkeeper was, it seemed, not a particularly good cook.

 

The fees we had paid to Konrad for the privilege of traveling with this caravan didn’t cover this, and we were left to negotiate our own food and lodging for the night. The innkeeper was more pleasant than the rest of his establishment, a large man with Skellish features and a scar on his throat that suggested he’d had a brush or two with death himself. Despite the imposing appearance, he was nice enough in a gruff sort of way. Rooms were cheap, and food wasn’t much more. I paid for them in Corbin’s coin, purchasing a jug of chilled tea with lemon and hibiscus to go with the stew. It was a very Tsuran drink, suggesting that this inn might get more travelers than I had thought.

 

I took the food and drink and carried them to where Rose was sitting at a table in the corner of the room. It was the same table I’d have taken myself by preference, tucked into a dark corner out of the main action of the inn. The girl looked overwhelmed, and I couldn’t blame her. She hadn’t, I thought, been in an establishment like this one. It was a hard sort of place to be comfortable if you weren’t accustomed to this environment.

 

The food was about as good as I’d expected, which wasn’t very. The stew was too salty and the bread was a touch burned. Rose and I devoured it with the kind of enthusiasm you can only muster after living on trail rations for eleven days.

 

We finished the food quickly, wiping the bowls clean with the bread. It was only a few minutes before I settled back in my rickety wooden chair. Rose was looking less uncomfortable, and even had a tentative smile on her face like she was trying it on to see how it felt.

 

“Thank you, Silf,” she said softly. “For everything.” Her tone suggested she didn’t just mean the food and drink.

 

“Of course,” I said. I watched her take a drink of the tea, and there was an odd sort of satisfaction in it. Something in me was happy that I was giving her something she needed. It was a feeling I hadn’t had often; I’d usually been too poorly off myself to do anything to help other people. “Would you like some more to eat?”

 

Rose hesitated, and then nodded shyly. I smiled, enjoying that novel sort of happiness, and went to order more stew and bread from the innkeeper.

 

It was edging into evening now, and people were crowding at the bar more than they had been, wanting dinner. I considered slipping between them, but decided it was better to wait, and stood at the back of the crowd.

 

I couldn’t see who said it, but I clearly heard someone say, “Changed freak.”

 

I ducked my head, hoping that it was just a drunken whim and the drunk in question would move on to something else.

 

No such luck. He pushed himself to his feet, moving in front of me. I could see the group of men he’d been sitting with, none of whom looked bothered by what he was doing. Likely they’d been egging him on.

 

“Changed bitch,” he said, staring at me. He was a large man, with the heavy muscles of someone who spent his time on hard physical labor. “Get out of here, you freak. Don’t want your kind here.”

 

I felt the old, familiar spike of pain go through me at the words. It was hard to say precisely what it was, hard to put a finger on it; it was too tied into tangles of old emotion and association.

 

I’d spent so much time around people like Corbin that I’d almost forgotten he was the exception rather than the rule.

 

Some of the Changed got aggressive when they were confronted like that. They tried to push back, or lashed out in anger and frustration. I could understand that. When you were singled out and targeted for something you had no control over, when you were hurt that way, it was easy to want to fight back.

 

But I’d been Changed for a long time, now. I’d learned that trying to fight back never worked. You couldn’t fix them. You couldn’t even make them see that what they were doing was wrong. Pushing back just made it work.

 

So I just ducked my head. “Not staying,” I muttered, edging further into the crowd around the bar. “Just hungry.”

 

He backhanded me hard across the mouth. “Don’t think you heard me, freak,” he said. “Get the fuck out.”

 

I stumbled back with the taste of blood in my mouth. It hadn’t been that hard of a blow, on a relative scale, and it hadn’t caught me by surprise. He hadn’t done any serious damage. But I could taste blood in my mouth from a lip that had been cut on one of my own too-sharp teeth, and it stung. Before I had experienced real pain, I might even have said that it hurt. It was enough of a hit to leave me stumbling backward, off balance.

 

I was steadied by a sudden hand on my shoulder. Erik was standing behind me, though I was sure he hadn’t been there a moment before. The Dierkhlani didn’t have most of his weapons on him but his sword was visible on his back.

 

“I think you owe my friend here an apology,” he said. His voice was calm, quiet, and deathly cold.

 

“What’s it to you?” the man asked. He sounded less drunk than I had expected. “This isn’t your business.”

 

I didn’t see Erik move. Not really. I could see him moving, but I couldn’t follow the movement. It was like watching a striking snake, an explosion of motion so fast it was hard to believe it had come out of that coiled stillness. One moment, he was standing loosely at my side.

 

The next, he had one hand around the throat of the man who had been causing trouble. The rest of his body had hardly moved.

 

The group at the table he had been sitting at stood, pushing themselves to their feet with surprised shouts. Erik didn’t even look at them. “I suggest you think carefully before you do anything stupid,” he said, his tone just as calm and cold as before. Without any apparent effort, he forced the man who had hit me to his knees.

 

The man’s cronies looked at each other, then at the man on his knees with Erik’s hand clamped on his throat. I could almost see them sizing him up, looking at the sword on his back, considering the ease with which he’d overpowered their friend.

 

Then they sat back down.

 

“Now,” Erik said, still in that quietly dangerous voice. “I’m about to let you go. You’re going to apologize to my friend, and then you’re going to get out. And you aren’t going to cause any more trouble for her. Because if you do, I will know, and I will find you.”

 

As suddenly as he’d grabbed the man, he let go. The man collapsed to the floor, then pushed himself back to his feet. He opened his mouth, and I could tell that whatever he was about to say, it wasn’t any kind of apology.

 

Erik just smiled. Whatever the drunk saw in that smile, it made him go pale. “S-sorry,” he stammered, sounding so insincere it was almost charming, and then staggered for the door.

 

“My apologies,” Erik said, walking towards the bar with me. The crowd was in a great hurry not to be in his way. “I would have stepped in sooner, but I didn’t expect him to get violent.”

 

“It’s fine,” I said. “He’ll come after you.” There wasn’t a doubt in my mind about it. He wasn’t the sort of man to take humiliation well, especially when it was delivered on his own home turf.

 

Erik just shrugged. There was no hint of concern in his demeanor, no indication that he cared at all. Maybe he didn’t consider the drunk to be a meaningful threat, or maybe he just had so many enemies that one more or less meant little to him. Given he was Dierkhlani, it was probably both.

 

I took the food back to the table where Rose was watching. All of the ease and comfort which she had developed while eating was gone, and her face was far from a smile. She didn’t say anything about what had happened, and neither did I.

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

2 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized

2 Responses to Fractures 2.6

  1. exidor

    I’m liking Erik more and more! Lets see what this larger city has in store for them…

  2. Aster

    Each chapter leaves me wanting to see what happens next.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *