6. Hiding Spot (KoS)

Yvon crouched low in a bush. Small leaves brushed against his face. Sharp-tipped internal branches poked at him from all angles. Birds sang, and the sunlight filtered through the thick canopy low overhead.

His legs shook from holding still for so long. His hand, pressed against the ground, stiffened, growing cold. Slow breaths shuddered in and out of his chest.

“Are you sure you haven’t seen him?”

Yvon held his breath. Sweat broke out down his back. Black droplets trickled down his arm.

No! Stop it! He closed his eyes and forced himself to relax.

The black droplets faded. Yvon shifted subtly, swaying his cuffs against the droplets to absorb them. His shirt faded darker, but didn’t disintegrate the way Luc’s had.

What happened? What did that? Did I—am I really…?

The Duke shook his head. “Absolutely sure. I last saw young Yvon when I stopped by the Institute a week ago to formally offer him employment. I was expecting him to come by today, but… not anymore, I suppose.”

The guard nodded. “If you do see him, please report him immediately.”

“Of course, of course. What a pity, though.”

“A pity? He’s an acolyte of a dark god.”

Duke Jerome shook his head. “It’s not as if he chose that. None of us mages get a choice in the matter, after all.”

The guard frowned at Duke Jerome. “Mind yourself. Even the King is not above our gods’ holy mandates, let alone a duke.”

Duke Jerome twirled his hand in the air over-dramatically and pressed it over his heart. “A truth I keep in mind every day.”

He shut the door. The guard stared at the dark wood for a moment, then muttered something to himself and walked away, kicking at rocks. He passed close by Yvon.

Yvon held his breath. His legs shuddered under him. He started to wobble. Desperate, he bit his lip and tried to force his legs to hold on, but they were too tired. Yvon started to fall.

Dammit, I should’ve done some of Luc’s crazy training!

At the last second, he threw himself forward and grabbed a branch. The branch shook loudly. Leaves drifted down from the bush.

The guard whipped around and stared directly at his bush. “Is someone there?”

Frozen, Yvon held the branch tight. His heart thundered in his chest. Don’t come. Don’t come!

Behind the guard, something heavy thundered through the forest. The guard whirled, drawing his sword. “You there! Stop!”

Yvon breathed a sigh of relief. He relaxed his hold on the branch and leaned back, slowly stretching his legs.

A voice, right in his ears. “Hello.”

Yvon jolted and clapped his hands over his mouth. He leaped forward, but a hand on his collar yanked him back. “Yvon, it’s me.”

“Luc?” He turned over his shoulder.

The blond grinned back at him, tossing his curls out of his face. He lifted a finger to his lips.

Yvon’s brows furrowed. He gestured at the opposite forest and the crashing sounds.

“A rock. Biggun. I gave it a good push. It should roll down that hill for a while. C’mon, let’s go!” Luc whispered.

He grabbed Yvon’s hand and leaped out of the belly of the peacock topiary. Startled, Yvon stumbled after him, then yanked his hand free. “Careful! It’s dangerous.”

“What’s dangerous? You’re still the same Yvon I’ve always known,” Luc replied. He gestured Yvon on in the opposite direction from the guard, down the hill and out toward the gates.

“Wait.” Yvon paused and turned toward the manor, hesitant. The hedges rose up before them, but the gates hung open, as always. Just around the bend, visible from the street, an ironclad carriage waited, ready with horses and all. He pointed. “Why don’t we take that?”

“Steal from the duke? Yvon…” Luc said, uncertain.

Yvon shook his head. “I don’t like it, either, but we have to survive. If we run out into the wilds alone, unprotected… I can’t control my magic or aim the crossbow. You have your sword, but you’re just one man. We’ll both end up dead. The only way to survive is to take the carriage.”

Luc paused one more second. He bit his lip. “I can…”

“You remember those centipedes we saw from the wall. If they swarmed you, Luc, even if you were ten times the swordsman you are… would you have a chance?”

Reluctantly, Luc shook his head. “Still, Duke Jerome practically raised us. After all that, to steal from him like ungrateful wretches?”

“Would he want us to die here?” Yvon returned.

Luc bit his lip. He looked at the carriage, then at the walls, so far below. “We take it, but we have to return it, somehow. Pay him back.”

Yvon nodded. “Agreed. I don’t want to do this, either, but…”

“But you want to live. I understand.” Luc took a deep breath. He nodded at Yvon.

Down below, temple bells clanged. Luc and Yvon both fell silent and turned, listening.

CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

“Three times. Danger,” Yvon murmured to himself. Am I danger? As dangerous as those centipedes outside the wall? A monster?

Luc clapped his shoulders. Startled, Yvon looked up directly into sky-clear blue eyes. “You’re not dangerous, Yvon. You’re not a monster. Don’t listen to them.”

“I know, I know,” Yvon muttered. He shoved his hair out of his face, then raked it back in.

“Ah, hurry! The Duke’ll be out in a second!” Luc called, running for the carriage.

The bells rang again, four times. Used to the bell codes, Yvon decoded it on instinct. Internal danger. Maybe the Duke won’t rush out. He followed after Luc, jogging for the carriage.

As they reached it, Andre stepped out from around the corner.

Luc pushed Yvon back and drew his sword in the same motion. “I’m sorry, old man, but we need the carriage.”

Andre sighed and scratched the back of his head. “I heard. Yvon’s awakened.”

“He’s still Yvon. Please. Don’t get in our way. I don’t want to fight you,” Luc said.

“I’m not going to get in your way. Heavens know I don’t want to see either of you hurt. But listen to me, Luc. Listen to this old man. This path you walk is rockier than you know. If you do this—if you take these steps, if you save your friend, there’s no going back. The entire world will turn against you.”

“I don’t care. I’m not going to give up on Yvon just because—”

“Not just Yvon. You, too. Your whole future is decided in this moment. If you go with him, everything changes,” Andre warned. Something glinted in his eye, a pain he wouldn’t put to words—or couldn’t, Yvon wondered, watching the older man.

Luc lowered his sword. He shook his head. “I don’t care. I’m not going to stand by and watch as they kill Yvon. Could you stand by if they asked you to step aside and let them take the Duke?”

Andre flinched. That old pain seared across his face, suddenly raw, brutal. For a moment, Yvon thought he saw guilt mix in with the pain, but it vanished too fast for him to catch. Andre took a deep breath and buried the pain again. He shook his head. “This isn’t about me, boy.”

“Well, I can’t. I won’t,” Luc declared.

The older man backed away, hands up. “Just remember. I warned you.”

Luc sheathed his sword and pivoted on his heel, all action. He flicked his eyes at Yvon, ignoring Andre. “Get in the back. I’ll drive.”

Yvon nodded. He clambered into the carriage. In the door, he paused and looked back. “Jerog, you…”

“Eh? Get out of here already,” Andre grumbled.

At the front of the carriage, the door creaked as Luc climbed inside, the undercarriage groaning as it shifted under its new weight.

“No, no, I was just thinking, you… look good for your age,” Yvon said. Just as he did when we were younger.

Andre blinked, then looked up at Yvon. His grizzled face broke into a smile. “Who’d’a thunk, the last thing I hear from the death god’s acolyte is a compliment.”

Yvon hesitated one more second, then nodded and ducked into the carriage.

Luc turned the carriage around. As it came even with Andre, he paused and sat up to peer out the view-slit. “Thanks for everything, old man. And tell the Duke, too.”

“You tell him yourself,” Andre muttered. “And who’s an old man, huh?”

Luc laughed. He snapped the reins, and the horses took off.

Bouncing in the back, Yvon sat up and peered out the narrow windows the iron carriage afforded him. Familiar sights blazed by, villagers and homes all blurring into a smear of color whenever he didn’t focus. A gaggle of guards hurried by, armor jostling. The carriage rattled past. They glanced up, but no one moved to stop it.

Yvon fell back against the carriage’s interior. He sniffed, then frowned. “Smells like tea.”

“Tea, or Madeline’s ‘tea?’” Luc replied, voice muffled through the wall. A small grate allowed communication and a glance at the cramped quarters of the driver’s box.

Yvon sniffed again. “Madeline’s.”

“Ugh.”

They sat in silence for a time. The village trundled by outside the carriage walls. Men and women went about their lives, bustling with bags on their hips or wandering with tools slung over their shoulders, ignorant of the fugitives inside.

In the tight, dark space of the driver’s cab, Luc held the reins tightly, knuckles white. He swallowed, hesitated, then swallowed again. “Will the Duke hate us?”

Silence. Yvon looked at his hands, then clenched them. To himself, he muttered, “Probably me.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing. I… I think the Duke will understand. He didn’t seem to blame me for… what happened. You, I think, he’ll definitely forgive you.”

More silence. The carriage rattled over the cobbles.

“You, too,” Luc protested.

Yvon grunted.

The wall’s shadow fell over the carriage long before the gates came into view past the forest. A line of  Staring up at the raw stone walls jutting out of the earth, edges of heavy stone still ragged and unpolished, spotted with jags and nooks holding bits of dirt and patches of greenery, Yvon took a deep breath. Is this the last time I’ll ever see these walls?

“Will the other towns have walls like these?” Luc asked suddenly.

Yvon blinked. “Huh?”

Luc gestured, just visible through the window between their compartments. “These walls were raised by the Duke. There’s been other Dukes of House Terre, and even our Duke could travel around and raise walls, but he’s lazy. He doesn’t like to leave Le-Voux. And when you think of it, our Duke had to raise these walls. No previous duke had.”

“Your point?” Yvon asked, lost.

“Do the Dukes of House Terre go around raising walls? Or is it just Le-Voux that was lucky the Duke chose it as his country home?”

“I don’t know,” Yvon sighed.

Luc laughed. “Guess we’ll find out!”

“Aren’t you afraid? We’ll never be able to come back. We’ll be on the run from now on. Both you, and me,” Yvon said. His hands trembled faintly. Yvon curled them into fists.

“I was planning to leave this tiny town forever, anyways. Now I’ve got an excuse,” Luc replied. He turned over his shoulder and beamed at Yvon.

Yvon shook his head. “You madman.”

Turning back front, Luc shook his head. “I am afraid. But I’ve got to laugh at it. If I don’t laugh at what scares me, it might actually defeat me.”

“You are crazy,” Yvon repeated.

Luc waved his hand.

They slowed. Yvon sat up, grabbing the edge of the window. “What’s going on?”

“There’s a line,” Luc said, gesturing out the window ahead of them.

A long line of villagers stretched ahead of them. Most carried farming tools, baskets, or hunting bows, heading out to gather food in the mostly-safe areas just outside the walls, where the guards and the Duke still had a chance of protecting them from danger. One or two ironclad carriages stood in line ahead of them, most of them merchants. Unlike theirs, the merchants’ carriages were wide and tall, big metal boxes with goods monsters didn’t care for strapped to their exteriors. One boasted a heavy box atop it, about as long and wide as Yvon’s forearm, and about as tall as his handspan. Wire poked out of the box and descended into a hole in the roof of the carriage.

“A spellbox?” Yvon asked, leaning forward.

“Eh?” Luc asked.

“That carriage. If I’m not mistaken, that’s a spellbox.”

“A what?”

Yvon sighed. “A spellbox. They’re enchantment arrays that—”

Luc let out an exaggeratedly loud yawn.

Yvon sighed deeper. “They store magic and a spell inside them and allow non-mages to repeatedly use a single spell, or two or three simpler spells, depending on how expensive and large they are. It’s a risk to have one—on one hand, it allows non-mages to hold off monsters and bandits, or even appear invisible to the monsters, but on the other hand, it makes the carriage a target for human bandits, especially if those bandits have a spellcaster of their own. Usually merchants will only use them in safer zones where few bandits exist, or hire Chassers alongside the spellbox.”

“So… this is a safe area?” Luc asked.

Yvon shrugged. “Few bandits, I imagine. Little out here but Le-Voux and even smaller hamlets, until the wilds. There’ll be little worth stealing, and the Duke to contend with if they overreach.”

“No wonder the Duke picked you as a scholar,” Luc praised him.

“For all the good that did me,” Yvon muttered darkly. He clenched his teeth and glared out at the horizon, eyes narrowed. Black welled up in his palms. He wiped them on his shirt. Disgusting.

Why me? Why now? Just when everything was going well, the world has to steal it out from under me.

Always, always, ever since my parents abandoned me.

No wonder they did. A Death mage? Disgusting.

But then, my very birth that means House Décès hasn’t been wiped out. Though the country has been trying to eradicate the dark gods’ houses for centuries with little effect, Décès is meant to be the one House they succeeded in eradicating.

What else is Domaine-des-Deux lying about? What else has our King covered up?

“…von. Yvon!” Luc called.

“Eh—what?” Yvon startled back to reality.

“Get down. Under the bench. We’re up next.”

Yvon peered forward. A guard gestured them up to a checkpoint. Ahead, a pair of guards, one slender, one heavy, slowly dragged a wooden barrier over the road. One paused and dropped it to stretch his back, breathing heavily.

Hurriedly, Yvon dropped to the floor

“We’re searching for a couple of kids. Have you seen—” The guard looked up and made eye contact with Luc. His eyes widened.

“Go, go!” Yvon shouted, eyes locked on the barrier ahead. If they get that across the road—

Luc snapped the reins. “Yah!”

The horses bolted ahead, as if waiting for the command. The guards grabbed the barrier and started to run in front of them, then jumped out of the way as the carriage bore down on them.

“Dammit. I didn’t figure they’d be looking for me!” Luc grumbled.

“Why didn’t you?” Yvon muttered, climbing out from under the bench.

“Fair point.” Luc snapped the reins again. The horses whinnied and charged ahead.

They bore down on the gates. The doors closed slowly, cutting off the light. Yvon clutched the window, whole body taut, powerless to help. “Go, go, faster!”

Wordlessly, Luc snapped the reins. The horses whinnied and leaped forward. Massive legs churned. Sweat wicked off their flanks. Cropped tails and short manes waved in the wind, ears pinned back. Hooves ate up the ground, and still the doors closed too fast. Twenty feet, ten, and the gap steadily closed, blocking their path ahead.

“Dammit!” Yvon bit.

“It’s not too late yet! It’s not too late!” Luc insisted.

“We’ll never make it!” Yvon replied.

Halfway shut, the doors abruptly caught. They struggled to close, mechanisms straining and creaking. High up the walls, guards hauled on the giant wheels that operated the doors with all their might.

“Hyah!” Luc shouted, eyes wide with glee.

Yvon held his breath.

They hurtled through the gap. The doors’ edges scraped against the carriage’s walls, and then they burst out the other side. Almost in the same instant, the doors powered past whatever had blocked their way and slammed shut.

“Go, go!” Yvon shouted, unable to hold himself back.

Luc laughed wildly and steered the carriage down the path ahead of them. “We did it! We did it, lads!”

Yvon reached out to grab Luc, then stopped himself at the last second and slapped the carriage wall instead, wary of his own powers. “We did it!”

Arrows pinged off the carriage’s roof, useless. The carriage rattled down the path, hurtling away from the walls and the archers, making a beeline for the distant forest. They passed the wallowing merchants’ carriages and blasted by into the distance. Lightning zipped off the top of the spellbox, but the energy missed, grounding into the earth instead. The carriage became a cloud of dust, until even that faded away into the forests’ impenetrable interior.

--

High atop Le-Voux, the Duke gazed out a picture window at the rear of his manor and slowly lowered his hand. The earth below the gate receded and closed over the stones that had risen to block the doors as though they had never existed.

Silently, he watched the carriage rattle away, tucking his hands behind his back. Soft footsteps sounded behind him. He didn’t turn.

“Madeline.”

“Here, milord.”

“Did I do the right thing?”

A long pause.

Madeline curtseyed to her lord. “With all due curtesy, milord, is now the time to question your plan?”

Duke Jerome laughed at that, suddenly, vigorously, his chest shaking with the sound. Shaking his head, he took half a step, and his leg crumpled under him.

Madeline caught him and settled him upright. “Mind yourself, please.”

“Of course, of course, I… forgot myself, for a moment. You’re right. As ever, you’re right, Madeline. The bow was strung long ago, the arrow slotted, the target aligned. It is too late to regret the tree I cut to shape the bow when the arrow is already loosed.”

“As it pleases milord,” Madeline responded, curtseying again. “Speaking of bows, why gift Yvon a crossbow?”

The Duke smiled, a touch of sadness in his eyes. “He took the path of the scholar, not the warrior. A sword or a bow would be too heavy for him. No, not for him.

“And most importantly… it’s easy to kill accidentally with a weapon like that. One way or another, the boy had to awaken.”

“I warned them.”

Neither jumped at the crotchety, rough voice that echoed through the room, though neither had heard Andre coming. He hung to the rear of the room, well secluded from the late evening light that poured through the window. “I warned them. That this path was rocky. It was the least I could do.”

Duke Jerome bowed his head. “Thank you, Andre. It… perhaps it should not, but it eases my mind some to hear that.”

Andre coughed. “It should not. What you’ve done to those boys… setting them off on this path… even laying the entire plan before them would be little consolation.”

The Duke’s head bowed deeper. Silhouetted against the window, the sun cut a frail figure, for a moment, leg bent, propped on a cane, his athletic form suddenly thinning.

He looked up and met Andre’s eyes. His chest expanded and his shoulders squared. Though his leg remained twisted, and he still leaned on the cane, he did so with a presence, a power and a strength that had nothing at all to do with his disfigured leg. “But it must be done. To let things stand as they are would be a yet worse crime.”

Andre shook his head. “As you say, milord. Though I pity the boys, I am here at your side, am I not?”

Duke Jerome inclined his head once more. “And we will see it through to the end, thieves three as we are.”

Madeline curtseyed. “The second carriage is readied. Do we head out tonight?”

He shook his head. “No. Give them a day’s head start. If we leave immediately, people may question how we were able to ready a second carriage so quickly. Tomorrow, put out a call for a replacement carriage, and I want you both to be seen scrambling to fill it when it arrives.”

“But… we already have…” Andre started.

The Duke smiled. “It is always good to have a back door, especially one our friends on high do not know about, no?”

Madeline curtseyed again. Andre shook his head, muttering under his breath.

“If we have no need for it, it can vanish into a merchant’s caravan, and no one any the wiser. But if we do…”

The Duke turned back to the window. The boys’ carriage was gone. No more than a few remnant traces of dust remained. The guards raced after it on horseback, but he already knew their journey would be futile. A particularly vicious nest of dire rats lived at the forest’s edge—vicious enough to take down an unarmored horse, though skittish enough to shy before an ironclad carriage.

He knew. He’d had Andre raise them specifically.