The Pilgrims

one had to like it.

The doomed hall and its museum of death had done the expected bad things to Anfen’s mind. Only Sharfy’s face, Sharfy with whom he’d travelled most out of this group, was free of being split and cracked open in his eyes. Lalie and the Pilgrims he tried not to look at. Lalie especially was the stuff of nightmares, not helped, he guessed, by the dried blood that had caked her real face for so long. And these trees, these fucking trees, how he hated them, more than the old Pilgrim Case did, no matter who complained and who didn’t. When he came close to one he had a strong lust to hack into it with his blade. It didn’t matter that they’d come through the haunted part of the woods unscathed.

Anfen also knew Case was battling to keep pace with the group, and seemed on the brink of a one-man mutiny. It would be a challenge, when the peevish complaints ceased being quietly muttered and began being grumbled aloud, to keep from cuffing the old man’s head, or screaming at him, or more. He didn’t want things tense with both Pilgrims. But it was too late now — they would not avoid another night in these woods, and largely because of that one old man’s lagging legs.

‘We’ll be safe if we’re quiet,’ said Loup as they set up camp for the night on a rise in the ground, away from the mist. ‘Could be that the noise and whooping and hollering was what drew the beasties from the ground.’

‘Maybe so. Lalie, what time did they attack? During your ritual?’

She answered, to Anfen’s surprise. ‘After. Late.’

‘Go on,’ he said, deciding to press her. ‘You’ve been fed. Earn it.’

She shut her eyes and spoke hesitantly: ‘We had collapsed, spent, around the fire, when they came. They … they stood by our sleeping bodies, we didn’t know for how long. Hours or minutes. They were perfectly still, in our midst. Watching us. Someone woke and saw them. She screamed. We others woke and ran. They didn’t follow. They stayed still, perfectly still.’ She swallowed and her voice quavered. ‘We went to the hall. Barricaded it. They didn’t come, not for a while. Morning was not far. We began to wonder if … we had imagined them. Then, out the window. I was the one who saw it. Right outside, peering in. It moved strangely. We didn’t hear them come. It looked right at me.’ She was shivering.

‘What then, Lalie?’ said Anfen, but she fell quiet and he let her stay that way.

They had a small fire with carefully treated wood but after their broth was heated that was all, cold night or not. ‘And we’ll have two on watch, all night. Siel and Eric first. Case and myself second. Sharfy and Loup third.’ Eric’s possible link to Siel was one way to nip in the bud any potential mutiny …

Lalie tossed and turned, whimpering in her sleep. Loup crouched by her, laid a hand on her forehead and murmured a few words. She soon lay quiet. Whatever Loup had done caused a drop of blood to trickle from his ear. ‘Another thankless deed,’ he muttered, holding his head in pain. ‘But she needs it. Us too, with that moaning. Dreaming of beasties and blood. Silly girl.’

Who needs thanks and praise? They’re just accusations of what good you haven’t done, Anfen thought before drifting to oblivion, where colourless dreams awaited, the kind mercifully overlooked by his memory each morning.

Eric sat by the dead fire and Siel — to his surprise — sat behind him with her back pressed against his. The night woods were quiet around them, save the odd scuffling noise as a small creature lingered now and then at the edge of their camp, sniffing them out.

‘You aren’t a prince,’ said Siel after a few quiet minutes. ‘Or nobility.’

To lie or not to lie … ‘No, I’m not. But I’m the next closest thing, an unpublished novelist. That’s a joke. How could you tell anyway?’

‘At the hilltop. You know of my talent?’

‘At the hilltop, I discovered your talent, yes.’

She laughed quietly, which was fine music to his ears. ‘I see things,’ she said. ‘Glimpse through windows into the past. I don’t like it. Here where bad things have happened, it’s awful. I walked into a room at our old house and one day saw a man strangling an old woman. That was the first time it happened. I was five. Sometimes I can block it out, sometimes I can’t. When they found I had talent, they tried to make me a mage in Happenstance. But my tutor was killed by bounty hunters. I’m not glad about that; she was nice. But I’m glad not to be a mage. Glimpses are bad enough.’

‘Happenstance … that’s what your magic’s called?’

‘It’s Wisdom’s school. Or it was, before they destroyed all the temples and burned the books.’

‘Wisdom — another Great Spirit?’

She sighed as if annoyed to be drawn onto an objectionable subject of discussion. ‘Yes, but it’s misleading. She doesn’t really have much to do with their spell craft, though they thought otherwise at first. She’s connected to the raw kind of magic they use, but not to the ways they use it. It’s complicated to explain.’ She waved a hand to brush the subject away. ‘Anyway. When we mated, I learned things about you. One is that you lied about yourself.’

Mated. That word seemed a fitting description of their encounter on the hilltop. He nodded. ‘Is that why you did it, to learn about me?’

‘The main reason. I also like it, sometimes.’

‘Ouch.’

‘Though it is different for me, I think, from how it is for most women.’

‘Did you learn also that I’m scared to death here? I was marched to your camp at knife-point, for fuck’s sake. I thought this group was likely to kill me, unless maybe they thought I was important.’

‘Yes, I knew that too. But you are important. You are a Pilgrim.’

‘What does that mean? What’s going to become of me?’

She paused so long before answering he wasn’t sure she’d heard him. ‘You’ll decide what becomes of you,’ she said. ‘I don’t know. I can’t see the future. Almost no one can, not clearly, or the magic schools would still be here and Vous would never have taken the castle. And I don’t know what it means that you’re a Pilgrim. Only that it’s important.’

‘Are you going to tell Anfen I lied?’

‘Not if you massage my shoulders.’ She wasn’t joking, he saw, as she planted herself in front of him and loosed the shirt about her neck.

He worked his thumbs into the knots and tension of her shoulders and neck. He took it no further, not here while they were on watch duty, though he itched to reach around and squeeze her to him, and had an odd feeling she would allow that much, at least.

‘I also know you have a weapon,’ she whispered. ‘I learned it at the hilltop and I think I’ve seen it. What is it?’

‘It’s called a gun.’ He took it out of its holster and showed her.

She held it. ‘But this is small. Is it powerful?’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘How is it enchanted?’

‘It’s not. It shoots out a small piece of metal very, very fast. Much faster than your arrows. Don’t tell them about it please, not yet.’

‘If you carry it to protect us, I won’t.’

‘Of course I do. I have a feeling it would take care even of a war mage, if it had to.’

When his hands were too tired to go on kneading her shoulders, she turned to face him with her legs apart, reached into his pants, took hold of his penis with no ceremony at all and tugged it until he came, which didn’t take long. She did it with about as much passion as a farmer milking a cow. ‘You can perhaps relax a little, now,’ she said, ‘and think more of the dangers around us, less about me.’

He laughed. ‘It’s a deal.’

They said little more for the rest of the watch. He jumped every time something scuttled through undergrowth or flew with swooping wings from a high branch, but soon enough it was time to wake Case and Anfen, then, all too soon, time to rise and set out again.

As they put some distance behind them, the forest floor gave way like a balding scalp to the dark grey rock beneath. Ridges of it battled with the forest for turf. The place felt like distant, remote wilderness, the middle of nowhere; there was no sign of human habitation, no ruins or beaten paths.

Loup, who’d been in a foul mood all morning since they’d asked him to bless the biscuits they had for