Death After Death PLUS 357-360

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Ch. 357 - Greater Insights

The leap from seeing nothing to seeing the auras around him was not a subtle thing. For a few months, Simon could only see them if he pushed himself to the limits of his endurance. After that, if he meditated for hours, he might benefit from expanded vision for a few minutes, but slowly but surely, it became a normal thing. 

One day, he just woke up, and he could see Aranna’s dark aura when he went downstairs one morning. He thought the room was just dark until he noticed that several of the still sleeping customers snoring near the still warm hearth were much brighter. 

“I did it,” he said to himself, “Finally.” 

“Did what?” Aranna asked, looking up from the tankard she was cleaning. 

Simon responded with a shake of his head. It didn’t matter. Even if he explained it to her, it would only confirm her suspicions that he really was a warlock. 

Of course, that jolt of surprise was enough to disrupt the effect completely, but Simon had expected that and didn’t get annoyed. Instead, he got to work making breakfast for his guests. His vision would come again in its own sweet time, but they would come all in a rush as soon as the smell of sausages reached them. 

One meal at a time, one conversation at a time, and one day at a time, his instincts sharpened. Even when he couldn’t see the glow of a stranger’s aura now, he got a feeling for whether they were trustworthy or not almost immediately. That gut instinct was enough to make him worry that his time at the Wayfarer was coming to an end. In fact, he spent a couple of days fretting about it before he remembered he didn’t have to end this life until he wanted to.

It was a much simpler decision than most of his recent lives, really. He was on level sixteen and couldn’t go much forward without running into the basilisk, and he was certain that his progress on this level was locked thanks to how he’d handled the orcs, so there were good reasons not to join the Unspoken this life. 

If I do that, there will be no redos if I fuck it up, he told himself. So the right answer was to do whatever he wanted until he died, leave the world better than he found it, and then go straight to the Broken Tower, or wherever he thought he might catch that strange cult's eye in his next life. 

Still, he couldn't decide what to do next, beyond whiling his life away studying, so he asked his friends. “If you could do anything you wanted with the rest of your life, what would you do?” He could find any quest to occupy a lifetime after all, but before he got sidetracked, he wanted to help those who had helped him so much.

They all had different answers, but Bessa’s was easiest. “About the same as I do every other day, really. Maybe with a softer bed, and a few more tarts instead of making naught but bread and roasts day in and day out, but it’s not such a bad life, you know?”

It wasn’t. He was certainly forced to agree with her there. Leon’s was only a little harder. “I want to apprentice to a carpenter,” he started, “I really do, but then I can’t abandon you after all you’ve done for me, now can I?”

That answer was endearing, though not entirely honest. Simon would have been sad to see the young man go, but he knew that eventually everyone had to leave to nest. It was the boy who was afraid to do so, but he understood that, too. Simon had never quite managed to leave his own nest in his first life. 

Aranna’s answer was the hardest. More than anything, she wanted to find out what had happened to her parents. That was something he could have probably accomplished pretty easily if he could’ve used a greater word of Distant Location. He’d tried using his dousing rod before for such things, but the distances were too great, and the trail was too cold. So, for now, he placed all his hopes on his sight. 

“One day we shall go and look for them,” he promised her. He meant it, too, but understood that it might not happen.

For now, he threw all of his efforts into granting the wishes of the other two. The first step to that was to hire a full-time carpenter and a small crew for the foreseeable future. That would effectively consume all of his profits until they were done with the jobs he had in mind, but that didn’t bother him. Simon had more saved than he really needed, and he would just squirrel it away for future lives. 

He couldn’t do all the repairs himself, though. Some jobs were too big for one man, and others were too complicated for a layman like him. “Plus, this way you can start your apprenticeship without leaving the inn,” he explained to Leon one night. That got Simon fervent thanks and a hug, which was as awkward as it was delightful. 

How many strays are you going to adopt just because you erased your son’s timeline? Simon asked himself. He hadn’t, of course, according to the Dragon Icefang, Simon's son Seyom, lived a long, happy life, and his world was still spinning along out there, but who could say? 

Simon didn’t worry about it right now. Instead, he focused on getting new beds made, not just for him and Bessa, but for every room in the inn. He also went out and found a new stableboy to replace Leon. Matteo wasn’t half as useful as Leon, but he was eager enough, and his aura glowed brightly enough that Simon didn’t care about the rest; he could be taught to take care of horses and be a bit bolder with customers, but teaching him to be a good person would be impossible. 

The months that followed those decisions were busy times. So much construction, coupled with so many changes, should have trashed the fragile peace that Simon had been building, but they barely dented it. He was wrapped in a serenity that he hadn’t felt in a long time, and aside from the fact that he felt less and less like studying magic for fear he would do something to damage what he was building, it had no downsides that he could tell. 

He could see whether someone was going to be trouble from the first moment they entered his establishment, and as time passed, he could see more than that. He could spot not just the bad apples who already had rotten souls, but those who might have a soft spot that could lead them down a dark road in the future. 

Over the next two years, before the inn’s extended renovations were complete, Simon had to kill two men whose souls were too dark to let them continue breathing. However, surprisingly, each of those encounters only set him back by weeks, in his estimation, not months.

The first one was a rapist; Simon barely needed to look at the man to catch a whiff of his depravity, and caught him alone. He’d told himself he’d do it if he got the chance, but the minute Simon had seen the way he flirted with Aranna, he made it a priority.

The man just went out for a piss and never came back, and though his friends looked for him, they had no way of knowing that Simon had cast his body over the cliffs and into the sea.  

The second one was a little messier, but the worst part about it was that Simon had to use one of the kitchen knives. He’d made that body disappear along with the murder weapon, but Bessa complained about that knife going missing forever after that. Still, it wasn’t like Simon would let her use it again after he’d used it to gut a murderer, and he didn’t exactly carry his sword on his belt these days. 

The world had been a safe place for years now, and only his returned sight had let him see the monsters among them. Really, murder should have set me back farther than this, Simon thought, noting that they’d only made things hazier and hadn’t even washed away the colors he’d come to rely on so completely.

It’s probably because I’m glad they’re dead, Simon noted as he studied his experience point total in the mirror. Murder seemed to knock that number down a little bit, regardless, but the penalty was a lot lower when he was proud to have done it. 

Simon didn’t exactly plan to become the arbiter of good and evil and wait for all the miscreants of the world to try to pass by at some crowded crossroads, but sometimes something had to be done. If a man walked into his common room with so much blood on his hands that Simon could taste the copper in the air, then he wasn’t going to be allowed to keep breathing. That was his line, as things currently stood. 

Though a life where I just wander around killing evil doers sounds like fun, Simon told himself now and then. Maybe that was what he would do when he’d learned all he could from the white cloaks: he’d travel around the continent and just kill whoever needed killing. 

If it goes well, I can always take out the Lizardmen and lock it in too, he reminded himself; it won’t even be a frivolous waste of time then. 

Even with those setbacks, though, Simon’s perception of the world around him continued to grow, and when he reached the point where he could see the threads that connected husbands and wives, as well as those that connected strangers destined to meet, he knew that a long-awaited task was about to start. 

Still, he didn’t bring it up until the carpenters were finished with the addition they’d been working so hard on that would double the number of rooms in the old place. When all of that was done, and Leon beamed with pride at Simon’s praise, he finally approached Aranna and said, “What say we go on a little trip to find your parents?”

“I—” she started. “How? Where?”

Simon shrugged. “I don’t know how long the road will be, or if they will be alive when we reach the end of it, but I can tell you we will find them or die trying.”

Aranna looked at him with less distrust than confusion before she finally nodded. She clearly had no idea how such a thing was possible, but she also knew better than to ask at this point. Simon had a way of making things happen that was hard to miss these days. 

“When do we leave?” she asked. 

“As soon as we get some supplies together and hire someone to replace you,” he smiled. “Bessa will be upset enough when she finds out we’re off on a trip for months without—”

“Months?” his Barmaid asked. “Why so long?”

“I have no idea how long this will take,” Simon admitted, “But even when I focus, the threads are faint. Wherever we’re going, it isn’t close.”

“Threads?” she asked, but Simon ignored her. He could tell Aranna about it on the road. Technically, this was his last loose end before he started his next chapter, whatever that was, but it felt like an adventure, too, so for now, he opted to look at it as a beginning, not an end. 

Ch. 358 - A Familiar City

They spent another day getting ready to travel, and the two days more helping Bessa get everything squared away. Simon was in no real hurry, but he could see Aranna’s eagerness growing by the hour. At first, her blank expression did a good job of hiding that, but he could see the blues of curiosity and the golds of eagerness creeping through her aura. 

By the time they left, she didn’t even bother to hide it. She just waited until they were alone, fifty yards down the trail, before she started to pepper him with questions. Were they really going to find her parents? Was he actually a warlock? How far would they have to go?

There was no fear in her questions, even when she talked about warlocks, which amused Simon, so he gave her the short version. “I know magic, but I don’t really use it these days, but sometimes I make things that do,” he explained. “It clouds the soul, you see?”

She nodded at that. “Poisons the soul more like,” she muttered.

“That’s not the magic, generally,” Simon answered, “That’s the person corrupted by it. There’s no word of power that turns people into maniacal monsters; they do that on their own.”

Technically, the word Zyvon probably did the heavy lifting there, but he saw no need to explain that to her. Instead, he went on to explain how he could see the world more clearly with an unclouded soul. 

“I’ve never seen anything like that,” she answered as he explained the auras he saw around people. “It sounds like magic to me.”

“You can’t see beyond the clouds of your own soul,” he explained, suddenly feeling very much like the Oracle. “That darkness the witch mentioned? That’s all the terrible things you’ve been through. You need to find a way to push that aside if you want to see what I see.”

Aranna didn’t like that answer at all and sulked quietly on the far side of the mule that carried their supplies for almost a minute before she said, “How do you know what you’re seeing is even real? How do you know you aren’t imagining it?”

Simon nodded thoughtfully, then instructed her to pick up a stone. She seemed befuddled, but did as he instructed. Then, after she studied it enough that she was confident she remembered every detail, he turned his back and had her throw it down the trail.

Then, as soon as Aranna said, “Alright, you can turn around,” he focused. 

Every human was connected to hundreds, or even thousands, of other things in their lives. In a village, those threads were a tangle, but out here, Simon could see only a few from both of them extending off into the distance. He had more than Aranna, but then, he’d been a lot more places than she had. 

“Do you remember when the white cloaks used magic to look for you?” he asked. “They were doing the same thing I’m doing now, on some level. Every person you contact, every place you go, you build a tiny connection and…”

She’d thrown the small rock only twenty or thirty feet in front of them, just off the trail, and as Simon followed that thread to its source, he found it almost immediately, in the tall grass. It was a plain stone, and other than the fact that Aranna had touched it, there was nothing special about it. Still, her expression when he handed it back to her was priceless. 

She spent a few minutes arguing there had to be some trick to it, and then, when she finally believed it, she wanted to know more. No, she wanted to see more. She wanted proof that magic was real, but he refused to give it to her. He couldn’t. Once upon a time, he would have blown a few months of his life on pretty colored pyrotechnics, but now even if he’d been able to do that without muddying his soul, he wouldn’t have. There was no point.

His pretty, dark-haired companion had a long history with people who used magic, and he could see the colors of fear and elation surging through her in a way that he didn’t like. The last thing he wanted was for her to see him in the same way that she saw the witch Esmella. 

The closest he came to showing off more magic tricks was to talk about some of the people that they passed by. He would tell her which ones were good people and bad ones. Over those first few days, they made a game out of it. Every time a group of people would pass them traveling away from Abresse, Aranna would study them carefully, and then, when they were out of earshot, she would guess who the best or the worst of them was. 

She was often right, too. After serving people from every walk of life in his tavern for the last couple of years, she had good instincts and a keen eye for such things. She was only able to judge the strangers by the way they dressed, or the way they looked at her, though; Simon could stare into their souls, and tell her what he found. 

Sometimes those skeletons were minor. Drunks and philanderers were nearly as common as liars and men who cheated at dice. Sometimes they passed by cutpurses, or even cutthroats, too, of course. The road was a hard place. Still, at least this close to the city, they were spared any bandits, which was a small mercy. 

When they arrived in Abresse, Simon rented the two of them a small room in a nice inn for a few days so that they could explore the city together and unravel the tangle of ghostly lines that connected Aranna to the trade hub. Given the amount of time that wasn’t necessarily going to be the quickest or easiest task, but until Simon found and understood most of the connections, they were not likely to find the strands that connected her to her parents.

Dead or alive, those connections would exist as long as the woman did, so Simon had no worries there. It was just a matter of getting the tangled loom that was her soul in order and understanding the pattern. 

Unfortunately, being in a proper city for the first time in a long time dulled his supernatural senses. It was hard to follow a single thread in a city that was already crawling with them. Simon often had to take breaks to deal with the strain of it all. 

As they wandered the city and even took a ride on some of the gondolas that filled its canals, they found a few of Aranna’s happier memories to start. As a slave and later bait for a witch that feasted on men, those were few and far between, of course, but she took every chance she could to avoid the dark snarl that was Esmella’s home. 

The witch was dead, thankfully. He was certain of that, because they visited the ossuary where the Unspoken interred her ashes after they’d burned her corpse. Even so, a pall persisted on the home, which surprised Simon. He hadn’t seen anything quite like it, and while it was common enough for people to have auras, it was vanishingly rare for places to have one. 

When they visited the place, they found that it was still a functioning brothel. This time at least, there wasn’t anything darker than drug dealing and prostitution going on, but even so, it saddened Simon. 

Where there are people, there will be vices, he told himself. There was drinking in Hepollyon. Even the saints are no saints. 

That was proven true that night when Aranna tried to sleep with him. It was Simon’s fault. He should have seen that it was coming. She wasn’t any more attracted to him than she’d been an hour before, or a day before, but after they got to drinking and talking, the need to blot out all of those awful memories with lust became too great for her to resist. 

Simon let her down as gently as he could. Even if he was interested in having sex, his mind was filled with thoughts about the witch’s methods, which was about as big a turn-off as he could imagine. 

The witches of Charia had been monstrous enough, with the way that they parasitized members of their towns and clanholds with witchmarks, and used unborn infants to power large rituals, but drain men with sex? That was worse than the blood magic rituals of the Magi. 

Fortunately, it seemed to be a relatively rare practice. In all the days they’d been in Abresse, he hadn’t seen anyone he thought likely to be a witch, and the only suspected witchmark he noticed belonged to a northerner, so he’d probably gotten it very far away. 

Every witch is going to be different, unless they start a coven to spread their methods, he told himself. It was more than that, though. 

Warlocks, often as not, were almost like tinkerers or scholars. They often researched magic for its own sake as much as the power it granted them. Every witch he’d encountered to date focused on draining some kind of power into themselves. The reasons and the methods varied, but the fact that it kept them young and pretty far longer than they would be normally probably meant that they lived longer than the mages and warlocks he found on average. 

Which makes them a bigger threat, he decided, and that wasn’t just because they were so subtle, either. The longer any magic user lived, the more they learned. He was living proof of that. Back on Earth, people might have said knowledge was power, but that was largely a figure of speech. Here it was literally true. 

Some day soon, a version of him would be entering Abresse, with little more than words of healing and curing to deal with a plague, but as he was today, well, Simon could accomplish almost anything with a few simple words. He could command the forces of nature or the minds of men, and he lay awake that night wondering what would happen if he really ever did turn to the dark side. 

Simon visited Emella’s brothel two more times before he left the city, though he didn’t force Aranna to accompany him. That would have been needless torture. He just wanted to study the cursed grounds of the place before they left. He already knew where they were going, which was to the east. Now that they were in the city, he could see that Aranna had only a few connections to the rest of the world. 

Ironically, most of those went back to the inn they’d come from, and one led across the sea to the land of her birth. The handful that were left went to the east and north east, which meant they would too, as soon as he’d finished learning everything he could. 

Ch. 359 - Unraveling Her Threads

Aranna was quieter when they left than she had been when they arrived. That concerned Simon, but only a little. Still, he made no effort to force the issue. Instead, he enjoyed the sound of songbirds until she had something to say. 

As the din of the city died away behind them, and the other small groups on the road in front of them began to spread out, forming their own bubble of quiet conversation, Simon was not surprised to find that he missed more than just the birdsong. 

Though he had learned a great deal from their time in Abresse, what he’d learned more than anything was that the more powerful his sight was, the harder it was to be around so many people. The difference between being around thousands of people instead of hundreds was more than an order of magnitude worse.

Even as the presence of so many shouting, discordant souls deafened him, he couldn’t get through a bowl of soup without a glimpse that was deeper into someone's personal life than he ever wanted to see. Maybe I’m just not cut out for cities like this, he thought to himself as he went.

White cloaks went to cities, of course. He’d met them in several large communities. The difference, he supposed, was that they did a lot more killing than he tried to do these days. Negative emotions and murder didn’t screw up his vision nearly as bad as casting a spell, but they definitely had an effect, so it was probably easier to move among the people you were protecting if you couldn’t see every little detail of the things they were most ashamed of. 

Out here, though, he didn’t have to worry about people. Beyond his brightening glow and his companions' little storm cloud of trauma, there were only the colors of nature mingling together. On quiet mornings, when the campfire was cold and Aranna was still curled in her bedroll, Simon could sit there and see the web of life extending out in all directions. It was so vivid, as it stretched from the ants to the oaks through a hundred intermediaries, that he was surprised that the morning dew wasn’t clinging to it the way it did to everything else. 

Sometimes he got carried away in those silences, exploring the subtle currents of the world. In those moments, Simon often wished he could see someone else cast a spell to understand how it impacted all the currents that he would never be able to see if he used his powers. The only thing that occurred to him more often was a fervent wish that he had the ability to paint the beauty that he could see in those flashes, as everything blended together into a watercolor mosaic of color and meaning, but even if he spent three more lifetimes as an artist, he doubted he’d be able to. 

There’s no harm in trying, though, he thought. Maybe that’s what I’ll do for the rest of this life. Become a hermit artist that gets mentioned in the history books hundreds of years from now. 

Those moments were fragile soap bubbles of solitude, though, and it only took a word from his companion to shatter them. “Are we getting closer?” “When will we make camp for the night?” “What are you thinking about?”

Any of those statements was enough to bring him back to the present as the two of them walked along the road together, not that he minded. He needed someone to anchor him, or he might drift away entirely. 

They were not yet close to their next goal, but they were getting closer every day. Simon could feel that, even if he didn’t know where it was leading him. It wove around bends and through fields. It didn’t follow the roads of the area, so they occasionally had to backtrack when it reached terrain that was too steep or crossed rivers that had no fords. 

Still, eventually, almost a week later, they found the end of the strand at the ruins of a large farmstead. It had been abandoned long enough that the fields had gone wild, and trees were starting to grow up in them, but few clues about the place remained. 

Unfortunately, it wasn’t what either of them hoped it would be. “It’s your father's,” he said, pointing to the small grave. The headstone was simple and featureless, but Simon could feel the details of the spiritual bond now that they’d arrived. 

“Can you say how, or when?” She asked haltingly as she lay one hand on the gravestone. 

Simon shook his head. “Years ago, but probably not decades. As to how, I see no trace.”

“At least it was long ago, then,” she said, mostly to herself as she sat down next to the grave. “I would hate it if we’d only missed him by a few days.”

Sitting there, she spent the next couple of hours by her father’s grave telling him everything that had happened in her life so far. Well, maybe not everything. Simon tried to give her some privacy, but even from hundreds of feet away, the conversation reached him as he investigated the ruins of the nearby buildings. 

He noted that she left out the worst bits, but she went on at length about her time at the Wayfarer and how happy she was there. That made him smile, and when she was done, because of the lateness of the day, they camped against the wall of a collapsed building, using its half-rotten, but still dry beams as firewood. 

Aranna didn’t talk much about it or express disappointment that night. Instead, she just asked him to hold her and stared into the fire. Then, in the morning, after they’d eaten the last of their now stale bread with a little porridge, she asked, “Who are we off to next? My mother? I’m not sure I could handle seeing her grave so soon.”

“I think the fact that they aren’t buried together is a good sign, actually,” Simon said, trying to be optimistic. “If she were dead, wouldn’t it make sense that something terrible happened, and they’d died together?”

He had no way of proving that, but it mollified her, and they set out again. This time, they reached their destination in only a couple of days, but it still took longer than he would have thought. Every day they seemed close, and every day it was like their target moved a little further away. 

It turned out there was a good reason for that. What they found, though, wasn’t a settlement, or even a farm; it was a small caravan. Even if Simon hadn’t been able to see the darkness that clung to it before they reached it, he would have known what it was they sold just based on the smell. For a moment, his heart sank as he worried he was about to break Aranna’s heart wide open by letting her see her mother like this, but it turned out that the thread that connected her to this place didn’t lead to one of the slave filled wagons. It led to one of the men around the campfire. 

Simon only needed to look at him for a moment to figure out the connection. The man had dark smoke for a soul and had done nearly every vile thing one could do. Though Simon supposed that was to be expected for a slave master. 

“Is this where we’re stopping for the night?” Aranna asked, confused. Normally, they avoided other groups on the road unless they were looking for news or directions. 

“Aranna, I’d like you to meet someone,” he said as they walked toward the knot of men. “This is the man who stole your life and sold your family into bondage.”

Her eyes flashed with shock, but before she could respond, the man closest to them noticed their presence and said, “So, who’s this pretty bit, then? Are you buying or selling? I’d give you a good price for the girl. She—”

Aranna snarled and drew her knife, but Simon was faster and kicked the man in the chest before he stepped over his gasping body to stand in front of the aging leader of this little crew. The man’s eyes flashed with anger, but he was a canny sort and didn’t react immediately. Instead, he smiled an oily smile and said, “Peace, friend. My associate didn’t mean to disrespect your woman. If you’ve come here to buy someone new, you’re in luck. We’ve got plenty of pretty faces in stock.”

“I’ve come for your head,” Simon answered matter-of-factly. “Well, she has. I’d tell you why, but you wouldn’t care.”

Simon watched the surprise from his words ripple through the group. Only Aranna wasn’t surprised; she might not have said as much, but he could see it was true. The graying slave monger sneered at that, but Simon stepped past him to regard his men. 

“You can die with him, or you can flee,” Simon said, drawing his weapon as the commotion his pronouncement caused intensified. 

Everyone who hadn’t drawn their weapons in that first moment did then, but they didn’t move. Instead, they regarded Simon warily. He made for a strange warrior. He wasn’t wearing armor, and he didn’t seem especially fit. There wasn’t a single detail about him that told anyone why they should be afraid of them, and yet they hesitated. 

Simon showed them that was the right answer seconds later when the closest two raised their weapons to attack. Those decisions were like two drops of still water on the pool of tension that was this scene, and as they rippled through him, he moved. 

He’d never fought anyone like this from a moment of stillness, and he moved even as they made the decision to act. The men had only just started to act themselves when Simon struck. He disarmed the first man, sending his sword flying, and then cut the tendons on the hand of the second man, crippling him and forcing him to drop his sword in a single fluid motion that happened before anyone could react. He could have killed both men just as easily, but he chose not to, and instead stood there with his sword inches from the neck of a third man, who had been trying to decide whether or not to attack. 

He decided against it. In fact, all of them did. Even the one that clutched at his bleeding wrist backed away at that. They didn’t know quite what had happened, but it was clear that they were completely unmatched. So, they left their boss to his own fate and retreated. 

When that was done, Simon lowered his blade and asked, “Well, do you want his head or shall we torture him first?”

“Torture?” the slaver and the woman asked in entirely different tones. 

Simon shrugged. “I’d advise against it, but only for the damage it will do to your own soul.”

I’d advise against the murder, too, but I know you won’t listen to that, he said silently. Nor should she have to. No one would ever be able to tell him that he shouldn’t kill Varten, and have him take it seriously, and he’d already killed that hateful man several times now. 

Aranna thought about it for a few more seconds while the man begged for his life, but she still slit his throat with her knife and then watched him bleed out. For a soul that dark, Simon wasn’t going to shed a tear. The man deserved death and whatever torments he found in the afterlife. Simon still didn’t know a lot about hell, but he knew enough that he was sure he didn’t want to end up there.

Ch. 360 - A Ray of Hope

Before they left, they freed the slaves the men had, and burned the wagons that had held them to the ground. That wouldn’t stop all of them from returning to their trade, but it would make it that much harder.

Some of the newly freed slaves fled immediately, fearful that they were only switching to a new and more violent master. Simon couldn’t blame them for that. The rest that lingered, uncertain of what to do, he shepherded back to the outskirts of Abresse. That took a few days that were largely spent foraging for herbs and food for twenty hungry mouths, and took them off their current search for days, but Aranna didn’t complain. Helping the freed slaves did her far more good than killing the slaver had. 

Simon still saw blue whispers of regret drift through her soul, but it was hard to pay too much attention to those when they were dealing with people who were so clearly traumatized; he didn’t need the sight for that. 

When they reached an inn, Simon took a few days more to make sure everyone was fed and had a place to sleep, even if more of those places were in the barn. The Lost Horse Shoe was a run down place, and more than a few people were sick, but then he had just brought a bunch of people here who were in terrible shape, so that was probably his fault. He paid out nearly a third of his silver to pay for even that much, and then helped everyone try to figure out where it was they were going next. 

Most decided quickly that they were going back to the city; some saw safety there, and others wanted to earn enough to cross the sea and return home. Others planned to go north and follow the trade roads back to their home, wherever that home was. Simon respected both choices and bought some weapons for the latter group so they wouldn’t be defenseless.

For the small group that remained, he gave them a letter of introduction and sent them on to the Wayfarer. He couldn’t solve all the world's problems, but he could take in a few strays, and Bessa could use the help. 

Once that detour was done, they started northeast again, toward the most powerful thread that still tugged at Aranna’s soul. She didn’t ask about it, though. She was more comfortable talking about the men and women they’d left behind. 

“Will they be okay?” she asked, “Eventually, I mean?”

“You were,” Simon answered. “Eventually, I mean.” He didn’t smile when he said it, but she did. That got them into a half-day conversation about whether or not she would have been okay without his intervention. The answer to that was almost certainly no, but he spent half a day dancing around that issue because it made for a great distraction from what they’d find on the road ahead. 

“You’re beautiful and hardworking,” Simon insisted, “You would have landed on your feet somewhere else, even if you’d never met me.”

That might have been true, if not for the white cloaks, but he ignored that inconvenient fact as he followed the thread that led from Aranna’s soul to someone else's. At this point, he was certain it led to a person. He was fairly certain it led to her mother. While Simon couldn’t be sure she was alive, he prayed that she was. 

Aranna can’t take too many more blows, he thought, regretting his decision to help her find closure. He’d thought that the trip would have been a happier thing, but so far, she’d gotten the most joy from salving the open wounds of strangers. She needed a win. 

A few days later, she finally got it. When they reached a small village, they found that the viscount who ran the small community and the surrounding valley was wealthy enough to afford a few slaves, and after they walked into the large house, and led the guard they encountered to believe that they had business with the noble, they found the older woman in the kitchen preparing dinner. 

The reunion was awkward but joyous, and though neither of them knew who the other was for sure, there was a hope in their eyes as they asked a few probing questions, followed by hugging and a lot of crying. Simon stepped away and left them to their joyous, impossible reunion.

He made quiet conversation with the guard in the dining room, who was slowly putting the pieces together. “You’re not really here to see the Viscount, are you?” he asked, putting his hand on his hilt. 

“I mean, I’ll have to see him eventually before we take Aranna’s mother with us, I suppose,” Simon admitted, not bothering to reach for his weapons. The guard seemed like a good kid, and Simon had no intention of hurting him. 

There was a tense moment then, but it was interrupted by the man himself entering the room. It was almost like he’d heard his name and come running. “Don’t worry, I won’t make this your problem,” Simon said, enjoying the look of confusion that crossed his face. 

“And who might this be?” the noble asked his man, ignoring Simon entirely, and making him smile. He’d been through this drill enough times to find these perfunctory slights amusing. 

The guard sputtered and seemed like he was about to explain everything, but before he could throw himself under the bus with his employer, Simon stepped in. “I’m the man that’s here to rescue the free woman that you’ve wrongly imprisoned as a slave,” Simon answered. “I’m afraid that I had to lie to your guard to gain entrance to your fine home, but you see, I plan to marry my fiancée soon, and it was quite important to her that her mother attend the ceremony.”

“Fiancée? Mother? You mean Lorinda? You aren’t going anywhere with my cook,” the young man scowled. “If you do not leave immediately, I will be forced to call my guards.”

“I would hope that we can settle things with words, or perhaps coin,” Simon answered, trying to be reasonable. He hadn’t expected his attempt to play on the man’s emotions to work, but it was as good a story as any to start with. “I’m sure that I could provide some service that would—”

The man responded by shouting for more of his men. This brought the women from the kitchen, as well as two more guards who were dressed in the same livery as the first. All three of them might have worn red, but it was clear they were as green as they came, and he was more annoyed that the viscount was interrupting Aranna’s reunion than he was afraid of what would happen next. 

“If you don’t leave now, then my men shall be forced to—” the noble yelled, confident in his authority. 

“Can we do this outside?” Simon asked, interrupting. “These are some lovely chairs, and I don’t wish to break them when the fighting starts.” 

As he spoke, he nodded toward the dining table. The man might be an ass, but he had decorated the room very tastefully, and once the swords came out, well… it would take a craftsman dozens of hours to replace everything that would get broken, and given all the wood working he’d done this life, he had no wish to be the cause of such destruction. 

The fact that he seemed more concerned about the furniture than the men arrayed against him obviously unnerved the guards.  He could see the yellow of fear and the muddy brown of uncertainty drifting through their otherwise clear auras. Simon might not look like a warrior, but he certainly acted like one, and it was putting everyone who could see it on edge, which was a shame, because none of these were bad people. 

Even the viscount wasn’t awful. He had slaves, of course, but in the South, that wasn’t uncommon. A few households in Ionia even had them. That didn’t automatically make him a villain, but he was clearly used to being obeyed, and this time he wasn’t going to get his way.

Everyone tried to speak at once then. The noble yelled in outrage, one of the guards tried to diffuse things, and Aranna’s mother insisted she didn’t want to be the cause of any trouble. Only Simon and Aranna were silent. He’d already said what he needed to say, and she trusted him enough not to interfere. 

When they were all done. Simon said, “She’s coming with me. I’ll pay for her if you’ll let me, but I’ll draw blood if I have to. But in the yard, not here.”

Aranna escorted her mother out, despite the viscount’s protests, and Simon followed her. His hand was on his hilt now, so all three guards stayed at least one sword length away. In the time it took them to leave the building, that number increased to five guards, but there was nothing he could do about that. 

I'd probably have to kill a few to stop them with this many, he thought with resignation. Arranna’s mother certainly wouldn’t like to be the object of bloodshed. He could see that; her aura was as bright as her daughter’s was dark.

Fortunately, that changed when they got outside and found a sixth guard. This one was wearing the same boiled leather and red tabard as the rest, but even without studying his aura, Simon could see that he was actually experienced enough to be trouble. The mere presence of the guard captain changed everything in an instant. Suddenly, it wasn’t a question of how the other guards were going to stop him; they became observers, waiting to see how their leader was going to handle this, which made everything much cleaner. 

“This brigand is attempting to steal our cook!” the noble insisted.

It spoke well of the newcomer that he didn’t immediately draw his weapon and instead sought to figure out what was going on. For a moment, the scene reminded Simon of interactions he’d had with Gregor once upon a time. Gregor had never been this petulant, of course, and Simon had never been as handsome as this new guard, but the relationship was certainly similar. 

“I can’t let you take my lord’s property, no matter who she is,” he said finally, drawing his own blade for the first time. “I—”

“What about a bet?” Aranna asked, cutting off the guard captain. “If Simon wins, then she goes free.”

The guard captain paused and looked to the viscount, who responded, “Why should I agree to that? What’s in it for me?”

Simon suppressed a smile. Everyone knew what she was proposing, with the possible exception of her mother. He just wanted her to say it. 

“If he wins, I take her with us, and if he loses, then I’ll stay here with her,” Aranna answered stoically, even as her mother protested. “What, it’s fine, mother, either way we’ll be together.” Simon certainly appreciated her faith in him.

“You okay with this?” Simon’s opponent asked, “Gambling away a pretty young fiancée for an old woman? Not a bet I’d make.”

“Gambling requires that you have a chance of losing,” Simon answered, as he stepped back from the group, shed his pack, and unlimbered his shield before doing some deep knee bends and stretching his arms. “And while you seem very accomplished, I don’t think your odds are good enough to call this gambling.”

The guard laughed out loud at that, but gave Simon the time he needed to get ready. He didn’t bother to get his armor from their mule. In a war, it was helpful, and when fighting monsters, it was a necessity, but against a single man in a duel, it would only slow him down. Instead of worrying about getting stabbed, Simon studied the man while he pretended to stare off into space. 

He looked at not just the way he held his blade, and the shape and style of the weapon, but the wear of his boots, and even his aura, for hints about what he was going to face. The Viscounts’ guard captain was more than a match for Simon. He’d worked out very little in the last year, and it had been even longer since he’d fought with his sword in a serious way, but he was as clear and focused as he’d ever been, and he felt like he could see right through the other man. It didn’t matter how well someone fought when you knew what they were going to do next.  

The battle that followed was brief and decisive. Quite a crowd gathered by the time the two of them squared off twenty feet apart from each other, but Simon barely saw any of them. He was too busy studying the wispy possibilities of what would come next as the man’s phantom preceded his physical form by half a second.

Simon didn’t try to embarrass the man, nor did he fight dirty, but he gave him no quarter either. He couldn’t with Aranna’s future on the line. The guard captain started with a couple of probing thrusts that were no doubt meant to give him an idea of Simon’s fighting style, but quickly became heavy two-handed swings. This fight wasn’t meant to be to the death, but neither of them held back. 

At the start, Simon lulled the man into a series of false moves meant to hide his real strength. He stepped back when he should have parried, and when he swung, it was not at his full reach. Steadily, he let the younger man press his advantage, even cutting Simon twice on the hip and thigh.

That was as much as he was prepared to give him, though, because when the guard captain tried to move forward and end it, Simon did the same. They hammered each other with blows then, but as long as Simon stayed close, his two-handed style gave him the advantage. After a short exchange, his opponent was on his back, and Simon’s blade was at his neck. Some people cheered, earning a scowl from the viscount, who went back into his house without a word. 

His opponent lingered longer after Simon helped him to his feet. “You’re not bad, for an old man,” he commented. “Will you be staying the night? I’d love to buy you a drink and find out how you learned to do that.”

Simon nodded and chatted with him for a bit, but that was a lie. He had no intention of staying. 

Once Simon’s wounds were bandaged, they left the village. While he wasn’t worried that the noble would renege on his agreement, he didn’t want to give him the chance to, either. So, rather than recuperating there, he decided that it would be best if he did his resting in Abresse.