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Demodus shared a horse with Cyrus and kept up idle chatter all the way out of Dol-Makjar, up the King’s Highway, and through the first bottleneck that forced their caravan into a single file line. He could feel himself being annoying. Demodus didn’t have a good enough sense of how Cyrus expressed anger or boredom to tell how tired of him he was yet, and druids had more patience and stiller faces than most of the people Demodus knew, but he could feel himself being an annoying little wordspring.
Okay. He spent the last week cooped up in his number one patron’s extremely nice, extremely small apartment, extremely alone. It was the most alone Demodus had ever been in his entire life. Before he left home he shared a bedroom. At the Penteveral he was in the dorms, the cheap dorms, doubled up or more when someone tossed him a couple silver for a place to crash. The few times he traveled he stayed in hostels.
Master Lathalia’s apartment was the single most alone Demodus had ever been, and he had a week’s worth of thoughts to share built up inside him. He could feel in the bottom of his gut that he was making a nuisance of himself.
Cyrus didn’t talk much. He answered direct questions and made appreciative noises sometimes. He hadn’t told Demodus to shut his cake receptacle yet, but to say Demodus was monopolizing the conversation was the kind of understatement that got a paper marked for academic malpractice.
Cyrus got off the horse to help guide it through a tricky bit of the narrow pass. Demodus started to follow, but he stopped him with a hand on his thigh.
“Stay there,” he said.
Demodus stayed in the saddle and watched the back of his head while he guided their— his horse down an incline that had started to wash out and was turning into stone steps. He murmured not quite words that Demodus could almost hear, and the horse was as sure-footed as if it were crossing a paved street.
After the stretch, when the caravan had all grouped back up and ground back into motion, Cyrus climbed back onto the horse behind Demodus and settled into a saddle that was a little too big for gnome legs.
Demodus wanted to pick back up where he left off, but he could feel the empty space without jabber draped over them like a cloak. There was something in storytelling, the breath before the explosion, that made the explosion matter.
The quiet lasted half an hour.
“Did I say something wrong?” Cyrus asked after a solid, uninterrupted half hour of neither of them talking.
“No? No. What? What would you have said that’s wrong?”
“You stopped talking. I thought I might have said something.”
“You. Um. You’ve hardly said anything all day? I was worried you were annoyed with me, because, you know, I couldn’t shut up if you paid me to! Man, what a world that would be, getting paid to shut up. I’d still be about as broke as I am now, because, see figure one, can’t shut up to save my life.” He swallowed the hot, embarrassed lump in his throat. “Sorry. I’ll try to be quiet.”
“I like listening to you,” Cyrus said.
“Oh. You. You do?”
“I didn’t want to interrupt. If you want to keep talking, I would like listening.”
Demodus tried to find a place to pick up the conversation that had been lying dead on the ground for half an hour, to talk to someone who specifically wanted him to talk. “Ohhhh. Leave it to me to get tongue tied the second I find someone who likes listening to me ramble. Oh fuck. Okay. Do you mind if I use you as a sounding board for what my thesis was going to be?”
“I don’t mind,” he said.
Demodus launched into an explanation of his experiments. He was working on a theory about illusion and perception and the use of illusion to overcome perception disabilities, blindness and deafness mostly. Cyrus guided the horse, answered direct questions, and made appreciative noises sometimes.
“Do you know where you’re sleeping tonight?” Cyrus asked, when they were dismounting for the evening.
“I was in the process of figuring that out,” Demodus said. King Augustus had been busy all day, but room and board were part of their contract. He ate lunch with everyone when they stopped for it, no trouble, no questions, so there must have been somewhere for him to sleep.
“You can share my cart if you want.”
“If no one else offers.” Demodus realized as soon as he said it how that sounded. “I mean. That’s very generous, but I wouldn’t want to impose or wear out my welcome, and I’m sure you like some time to yourself at the end of a long day of travel.”
Cyrus helped him off the horse and held an arm low for him to hang onto while he found his balance again, after hours of riding. “You can share my cart. If you want.”
Cyrus’s cart was a small, windowless wooden block stuffed with animal skins and bags of herbs, hitched behind one of the supply carts. It was only useful for sleeping. Having someone in it while it was being pulled risked making it too heavy for the horses, and it wasn’t really comfortable while it was moving.
He shoved all the bags to the head of the cart and fussed with the skins some, trying to lay them out evenly.
The inside of the cart smelled musty and herbal and incredibly foreign to someone who lived their entire life in the city. It wasn’t good the way a street cart full of hot, greasy spiced meat was, or a nice perfume, or clean laundry. But it wasn’t as bad as most of what scanned as a bad smell to Demodus.
He didn’t comment on the smell or the fact that it was just a little cramped for two. The bags were definitely supposed to go in the space that had been cleared for him. A very nice selection of animal skins had been moved to what was going to be his side of the cart. Demodus made absolutely no comment.
Cyrus shimmied out of his trousers and shirt and wrapped an animal pelt around himself. It was dark and velvety, with spots like eyes as black as night. Also a little old and worn after clearly being a favorite blanket for years of travel. He curled up on his side facing the wall, to give Demodus privacy to do the same.
Getting his binder off felt incredible. There was a rabbit fur that Demodus held against his sore chest while he searched for something to cover himself with. Sheep skin came to the rescue, and he buried himself under it, with another thick, undefined pelt under him and the rabbit fur protecting him from any rough edges.
He lay in the dark and quiet and tried to make himself used to it. No campus lanterns. No loud, drunk groups walking past. No tap from the guard when he passed the lamp post on the corner. There was one that had the Penteveral square four nights a week, who double-tapped his sword scabbard on the base of the lamp every time he passed, same time every night.
There was a fire burning, two men talking next to it, horses snorting sometimes, snores in the middle distance. The only other sound was Cyrus breathing, definitely still awake. Demodus had no doubt he could hear him too. He shifted slightly, up onto his elbows to adjust the rabbit fur where it was starting to stick to his underarms.
“Thank you for talking to me today,” Cyrus said quietly. He was still facing the opposite wall of the cart.
“I still feel kind of bad that I didn’t give you room to get a word in edgewise. Mouth goes a mile a minute. Always has. If you want, you can interrupt me, or put a hand over my mouth, or just tell me to cram it if you have something you want to say. I won’t be offended.”
There was a long stretch of silence.
“Can I speak, and be understood?” Cyrus asked.
A million things flitted through Demodus’s mind. Some of them were witty, or funny, or twisty and cruel in a way that would take hours to untangle, if Cyrus ever did. “I can try,” he said honestly.
Another stretch of silence passed. Demodus tried to count it, but lost track of how fast he was pacing seconds, in the tension of waiting.
“I take time and care to say exactly what I mean. I don’t speak much, because I don’t care to. People don’t usually like that.”
“People are assholes. Too much, don’t like it. Not enough, don’t like it. Goldilocks herself couldn’t find a conversation that suited her.” Demodus realized he was interrupting when no one jumped back in on top of him, and bit his lips to stop himself. It turned out there was one way to shut him up. Incredible. Cyrus had known him for less than a day and figured out the long sought after off switch to Demodus Blix.
“I like listening to you. I don’t want you to stop talking because you think I don’t.”
Demodus wasn’t going to cry. He was just a little sore, and his head hurt, and he was maybe more tired than he thought. “Okay,” he said thickly. “Okay. I’ll keep that in mind.”
Somewhere in the night, the worst sleep of Demodus’s life turned into the best, and he woke up from a gorgeous dream about starlight-clad warriors of legend into a slow and syrupy couple minutes of rubbing his face on a rabbit pelt and stretching in a warm, dark, funky smelling bed.
Not a bed. Pile of furs in a druid’s cart in a caravan where he was running for his life from the Crowkeepers and some creepy fairies and probably the Tachonis if they ever found out he didn’t get got in any of the… three or four places he should have, in the last week and a half.
The door to the cart was cracked enough to let in a little sunlight and fresh air. Demodus shuffled toward it and opened it the rest of the way, try to get his bearings, see how late he slept. He held his lambskin over himself and looked down at the back of King Augustus’s head. He was sitting on the ground with Cyrus, looking at a spread of herbs and talking in low voices.
Cyrus looked up at Demodus briefly, then back down to the herbs. King Augustus started to turn, to see what he saw. Cyrus’s hand snapped out and grabbed his ear. Not hard, but hard enough to make him stop.
“Demodus would like some privacy,” he said.
“Right. Right, lad needs some privacy, first thing. What were you saying, about the horse?”
“Mayven’s dun mare will want a stallion soon. See that Jeb has money to find her one, or she’ll find her own.”
“You think?”
“Horses aren’t stupid,” Cyrus said.
Demodus shut the door enough to block their view and spent a moment prestidigitating his clothes clean, getting dressed, trying to make himself smell like something other than animal fur, and then gave up and hopped down out of the cart.
King Augustus was sitting cross legged on the ground, holding an empty wooden bowl and gesturing at the herbs laid out. “While we’re this close to the Dahapshanee Wood, we should see if there’s any growing fresh. It’s a little before season, but it’s been cool this summer.”
“Good morning, your majesty,” Demodus said, trying to be polite and courteous and not ask why a king was sitting on bare dirt with someone who grabbed his ear.
“Morning. Just wanted to check in on my archmage, see how you were holding up. Sleep okay?”
“Yes. Uh. Lllllord Cyrus was… very accommodating.”
Cyrus snorted and made a choking noise.
“Who the fuck gave you a title?” King Augustus asked him. “It wasn’t me, was it?”
He whinnied like a horse and waved at Demodus.
“Can archmages give titles? I didn’t get that memo. Lad, can you give out titles? I’ve never had an archmage before.”
“I thought Cyrus was your… archdruid?” Demodus tried.
Augustus guffawed like the idea was worth laughing at. He sounded like a hayseed in a country bar. Cyrus made a soft, distressed sound.
“Take a walk, brother. I’ll figure out some breakfast for the boy. C’mlong now.” His words blurred into a grunt when he got to his feet.
Demodus walked with him, away from Cyrus and the herbs he was shoving back into a pouch.
“Is he alright?” Demodus asked.
“Hmm? He’s fine. He’s damned awkward, half the time when he opens his mouth he barks, but he’s fine. ‘S why we get along so well. I don’t know what’s gonna come out when I open my mouth either. D’you like bacon?”
“…Bacon?”
“N grits. Breakfast.” He waved ahead of them, toward the cook tent that had a line wrapped around it. King Augustus breezed past the line, clapped a couple people on the back in passing, and got two bowls full from the people manning the fires.
He was back with Demodus before he was able to find the end of the line, handed one of the bowls down to him, and kept walking.
“They won’t let me stand in line with my men, so I’m in and out as fast as I can, since they want me in and out, fast as I can.” He said it like it was an affront, that he didn’t have half an hour of standing around in the cold and damp before he could eat.
Demodus tried the bacon and grits. They were, in fact, bacon and grits. He didn’t have many expectations for a campground breakfast, and something edible and hot exceeded all of them. “We were talking about something.” He tried to backtrack through a few minutes. “Cyrus isn’t an archdruid?”
“He’s skilled, but not that skilled. Solid healer. Great with herbs and poisons and the like. He’s got a long way to go before he can call himself an arch-anything and not get laughed out of his circle.”
There were so many things Demodus wanted to ask.
“He’s going off today to find something for a headache cure. Said it was going to be important.”
“I get headaches,” Demodus said. Another understatement worthy of academic malpractice. “I spent all of yesterday with him. I thought it was because he was your other archmage and we were going to be in court together and that sort of… stuff?”
“I stuck you with him so no one would bother you. I know the way some people treat small folks. Don’t think I have any of those in my guard, but people give Cyrus a wide berth, so, easiest way to be sure you had your space was to stick you in his space.”
He ate more bacon and grits so he wouldn’t say something stupid. King Augustus threw them together for a reason. The reason was almost reasonable, if you didn’t know what a wizard could do when he wasn’t in danger of getting arrested for doing it. Then, he didn’t know he wouldn’t get arrested for firebolting King Augustus’s men if they kicked him.
Cyrus appeared on Augustus’s other side, walking silently. “I’ll be back after nightfall. Ask Demodus about the art of arcane copy.” He leaned forward, past the king’s bulk, to look at Demodus. His gaze was piercing. He looked away again, just as fast. “He can sleep in my cart again tonight, if he wants.”
“Thank you for letting me know,” King Augustus told Cyrus’s retreating back.
Cyrus walked straight for the edge of the clearing. At the tree line he grabbed a branch and hefted himself into the canopy as smoothly as walking up a flight of stairs. Two more branches and he was gone.
“He likes you,” King Augustus said.
“I can tell,” Demodus answered. He wasn’t sure if he was being facetious or not. He didn’t fully know if either of them were joking.
“Arcane copy? Something about arcane copies?” the king asked.
“Right.” Demodus said. The reason he was here, to introduce Timmony and the Timmish court to the contemporary understanding of magic. “How much do you know about arcane magic and words of power?”
“That they exist,” King Augustus said in an intensely pragmatic tone. “I’ve never had the gift so I never bothered with it.”
Demodus rode with King Augustus in his carriage while they traveled and taught him the basics of arcane magic. Augustus didn’t like sitting in a carriage, but Demodus couldn’t lecture on a horse, and the goal was to learn.
They were starting from zero, zero. Demodus taught first semester students, but he was used to an audience who had an awareness of the basic functions of magical energy flowing through a shaped intent, and arcane glyphs and words being used to mold the shape, instead of the inherent ability sorcerers had.
A deep furrow grew between King Augustus’s brows while he explained. Demodus kept glancing back at it, at the warning sign he was confusing or upsetting the man who was supposed to pay his bills for the next while. In the back of his mind, he started making plans to find a nice gnomish family in Timmon’s rock to bum off of until he could busk enough to afford a room somewhere. Magic wasn’t banned in the marketplace there, as far as he knew. No one had seen his shows before. Fresh audience, he would make good money, at least in the beginning.
“Pardon, I have to interrupt.”
Demodus’s next sentence died mid-word.
“It would follow, anyone could learn wizard magic. Doesn’t need the inborn sorcery, doesn’t need the lifelong devotion druids give themselves to, doesn’t need servitude to a higher power.”
“…Well. Yes.” Demodus said.
“What does it need?”
“High quality paper and ink, to study and refresh regularly. A mind that can memorize. Someone to teach you.”
“That’s all?” King Augustus asked.
“That’s all.” All felt like another of those understatements. One school in the known world was doing any meaningful research into wizardry. Demodus spent more on paper and ink than most people spent on food and housing. He’d studied himself into starvation more than once, not even including the tuition Professor Magneson kept magicking away for him and the components he sourced from mysteriously unlocked cabinets around the Penteveral.
“Could you teach me,” he asked in a low, serious voice, leaned forward on his elbows.
“I’m game to try.”
Demodus woke up in so much pain his stomach roiled and his muscles tremored. There was a piercing bolt of it through his right eye, all the way to the back of his skull. He got himself upright and nearly fell out of the cart he was sleeping in. He needed water, painkillers if he could find them. Anything. He would take a shot of whiskey if nothing else came up.
There was a fire with people. Demodus stumbled toward it, half blind, dizzy with pain. Cyrus’s mohawk was outlined against its light. He was working on headache cures. Just having the herbs to chew would do more than almost anything else. The light felt like being stabbed in the head. Demodus groaned and held his hand up to block the light.
Cyrus moved like a snake striking. He was holding something in his lap, and in an instant he had flipped over and was crouched over it on all fours, snarling at Demodus. His eyes flashed like a wolf’s in the dark.
“Brother.” King Augustus reached up and patted his ribs. He’d been sitting with him near the fire. “It’s just Demodus. Calm yourself.”
Demodus had fallen back into the dirt when Cyrus snarled like that. He was in too much pain to run. If he was killed by a crazy druid, at least his head wouldn’t hurt anymore. The fire flared and he dry-heaved at the wave of pain that rolled through him.
Cyrus crept toward him, still on all fours. When he was close enough to see for himself he sat. “You have a headache.”
Demodus nodded.
“Stay here.” He stood up and walked into the dark.
The idea that he was going anywhere was laughable. If laughing didn’t make Demodus’s spine feel like it was scraping against his brain he would have. He lay on his back and pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes, trying pressure and heat. He prestidigitated his shirt cold and held that over his face. Casting made him throw up in his mouth.
A wad of herbs was held to his lips. He didn’t care if it was the right thing, the wrong thing, deadly poison, powerful hallucinogens, anything was better than lying in the dirt half-vomiting from pain.
The first mouthful he got was bitter and full of stems. The more he worked it in his teeth the better it tasted, and the warmer and more relaxed he felt. He picked woody bits out of his teeth, chewed, rested, and when he felt good enough to sit up gave that a try.
“I’ll have a tincture soon,” Cyrus said.
Demodus nodded.
“I should go back to Gus. Will you come with me? You shouldn’t sleep with the herbs in your mouth.”
Demodus was picked up and half carried to the fire. Pain and relief made him too worn out to fight it or even complain. His feet stayed on the ground, anyway, and an arm wrapped around him more dragged than carried him.
King Augustus was lying on his side, watching the fire. He was conspicuously keeping his back to where Demodus had lain shivering and crying until the painkillers got there. Cyrus nudged his back with his toe and they adjusted back together, roughly how they were. Augustus laid his head on Cyrus’s thigh and Cyrus rested his hand on Augustus’s temple, brushing his fingers back and forth like a parent, or a lover.
“Are you two a… thing?”
Augustus snorted derisively.
“I don’t know. Are we a thing, brother?” Cyrus asked.
“If you would stop making it fuckin’ weird.” He swatted Cyrus’s side again.
“We were in battle together. I saved his life after an axe cleaved his face in half.”
“He followed me home and wouldn’t leave,” King Augustus grumbled. “Said we had spilled blood and bled together and it made us brothers. Years later, he still won’t leave.”
“How badly do you want me gone?” Cyrus asked in the tone of an argument so old it had become its own joke. He was still stroking the scar on King Augustus’s head.
King Augustus sighed and slumped more heavily in his lap.
Demodus was tired. He’d been having rough dreams, dark and reeking sewers that went on forever. Every time he tried to climb up out of them the ladders broke or he slipped. He could see light and hear fighting one tunnel over, but it never got closer.
The herbs made his limbs feel heavy. Good heavy. He might sleep here, since it was dry and not too cold. If King Augustus was going to stay by the fire it wouldn’t be allowed to burn down.
Cyrus nudged Augustus. “Make someone bring me a cloak.”
“You don’t use a cloak.”
Cyrus smacked Augustus’s bald head.
“Fine. Ass.”
Demodus started to drift. He played his hands through somatics, to make sure he still could if there was an attack while he was drugged. The fire blurred into two, then back into one. It turned blue for as long as he could hold one color, then he let it flicker through shades and pulled shapes out of the flames. Dancing green women. A dragon that turned into sparks. A cloak was put over him while he was blooming different flowers and making them burst into little silent fireworks.
Other people joined them, watching the light show. Demodus was too tired to do more than make pretty lights and pictures. No story, no artistry, but the little crowd, maybe a half dozen, hmmed and ahhed at the nice things he made for them.
He had a new audience who had never seen a real illusionist. That was incredible. As soon as he could think clearly he was going to start writing new material. The same flower bloomed over and over, sparkling into fireworks, falling apart into shattered glass, spinning into thread that wove itself into letters, just the alphabet, basic practice. When he couldn’t focus on letters he did loop-de-loops.
Something tapped the side of his face. Demodus shook it off. It tapped harder.
“Spit,” Cyrus ordered.
Demodus grumbled.
“Spit,” he snarled in Demodus’s ear.
Demodus spat the chewed up wad of herbs onto the ground and rolled over, asleep before he laid his head down.
Demodus rode with Cyrus again the next morning. King Augustus had business among the caravan and wanted to ride his damned horse, so Demodus and Cyrus rode together and chatted. Demodus chatted and Cyrus listened and made his usual noises.
They passed through a valley of sweeping farmland and back into mountains and forests while Demodus explained the concept of an internal illusion versus an extant illusion. One rooted in the recipients brain and could adjust their thoughts and emotions. The other was shaped light and noise in the real world, and was only convincing if you knew how to make it convincing. He made little blond rabbits leap alongside them, and had them hop just a little too far, too fast.
Cyrus snorted when one bounded up higher than the horses shoulder. He got it. He thought Demodus’s illusions were silly tricks, but he got the point.
Twenty minutes, maybe half an hour into the shaded woods, his hand came up to cover Demodus’s mouth. Demodus fell quiet and listened for whatever Cyrus heard. It just sounded like woodland to him. Underbrush noises, caravan noises. If he knew what he was listening for he would have a better shot.
Cyrus tapped his horses flank and she trotted forward alongside King Augustus’s.
“Sire,” he said quietly.
“The hounds have already warned me. How many do you need?”
“Three to follow. Another two in reserve.”
The hounds trotting around his horse shared looks and nods. Three went to one side of the horse and two stayed on the other.
“I’m very sorry,” Cyrus said. He lifted Demodus under his arms and passed him to King Augustus. Augustus took him and set him in his saddle.
Demodus had stiffened and was ready to fight, but he was put down as quickly as he was picked up and no one bothered him more than a rumpled shirt.
“Keep him safe,” Cyrus said.
Before Demodus could ask who he meant, a hare kicked out of Cyrus’s saddle and darted into the forest. Hounds followed it at a sprint, baying on the hunt.
“There’s something in the woods waiting to ambush us,” King Augustus said.
“Smells like highwaymen,” said one of the hounds that had stayed by the horse. “If they’re dead, they haven’t been dead for long.”
Demodus shivered. That didn’t necessarily mean they weren’t. The Tachonis loomed large in the back of his mind all week. Master Lathalia’s apartment was safe because no one knew he made it out of the sewer alive. He was on record speaking to the Einfasen. Lieutenant Nayar was doing something, but end of the day, Tachonis and Einfasen would work together against an annoying gnome and an Arcane Marshal with plans too big for his boots.
Demodus left before Lieutenant Nayar came out of the estate. For all he knew, he had been Einfasen’d and his brains were cleaned off the tile before Demodus was out of the city.
King Augustus’s heavy hand rested on Demodus’s shoulder. “Lad, he’ll be fine. He knows what he’s doing.”
“Does he?” Demodus asked desperately. He didn’t know if anyone knew what they were doing anymore. Arcane Marshals and famous playwrights were teaming up and getting in street fights in the sewers. Demodus got stiffed for 200 gold and offered a lifelong position because he took a job that was a little outside his skill set. Fairies were hiring mercenaries. Museum curators were moonlighting as murderers.
“Cyrus grew up in the circle of the hunt. He knows how to flip an ambush.”
Right. The thing happening immediately around them. Demodus took a deep breath and curled down over the saddle horn. He tensed his entire body and released, one muscle at a time.
“Am I keeping you safe or are you keeping me safe?” Demodus asked when he had forced his body to relax.
“D’you know how to fight?”
“I have a few tricks up my sleeves,” he said. He flexed his hands compulsively. The hounds crashing through the brush had faded and all Demodus could hear was the odd bark in the distance.
The caravan kept moving, but it was quieter. People weren’t talking except to shout the occasional order. Horse hooves and wagons creaking were the only sounds. Even the woods seemed to be holding their breath.
A piercing howl split the air. It sounded like it was coming from everywhere, all at once. Things moved faster than Demodus could follow. The horse he was on reared up and started galloping into the trees. Augustus was shouting, people were yelling back. Demodus held onto the saddle for dear life and hoped not to be dropped and trampled.
He smelled blood and sewage before they got to the source of the noise. One body lay against a tree, guts rent out of it. Another was prone, headless, over a fallen log.
Five men with crossbows had a wolf and the three hounds pinned against a rock wall. The wolf was enormous, almost as big as a wagon, and was shielding the dogs with its body. It was a pincushion full of arrows, snarling and snapping, dripping blood where it stood.
Demodus’s mind was static. Too many cruel people surrounded a beautiful nightmare. The smell of shit and blood was choking. His chest hurt. His head throbbed. He cast.
Thunder struck between the wolf and the crossbow men. A warrior of legend knelt in the after-flash. He stood, made a noise halfway between a groan and a growl, and drew his sword.
“Who wakes me?” his voice rumbled. The ground shook in cadence.
Three of the bowmen backed up a step, to the safety of not being clustered.
There were hoofbeats and people running after them. King Augustus was the first off the mark, but his guards were coming, armed. They only needed a few seconds.
Four of the bowmen shot the new target. Their arrows hit his armor and burst into light bright enough to hide the real arrows hitting the rock wall behind him. The fifth noticed King Augustus on his horse and aimed at him. Augustus caught the bolt out of the air and snapped it in half in one hand.
“You fools.” The glowing knight cracked his neck.
The rest of their group arrived. It was a slaughter. Forty armed fighters and twenty dogs, against five already injured highwaymen, it was over almost before it started.
King Augustus kept his arm around Demodus until the fighting was done. Things were still sort of staticky. He kept track of images and sounds, to use later, the way he practiced. The wolf turned back into Cyrus. He took the form off like a cloak and it faded into his clothes. Some of the arrows came off with it, some stayed in and stained his left side red.
“It looks worse than it is,” he told King Augustus.
“It looks like you’re half dead where you stand.”
Cyrus grumbled and yipped.
“Oh shut up,” said one of the hounds. She had an arrow in her flank and was being carried like a puppy in a soldier’s arms.
He barked back at her.
“Cyrus. Heal yourself.”
Demodus was shaking, just a little. King Augustus gave him a gentle squeeze.
“Everyone lived. You did well. Heal yourself and get cleaned up.”
They reached an inn in the early afternoon. It had been a few hours since the slaughter in the woods. The air in the group was tense. Everyone was on guard. None of the injuries that they didn’t have magic to heal were deadly or even that painful, but it left them down two hounds and short on magic.
A small council gathered and discussed. One of the hounds, The caravan’s quartermaster, King Augustus, and the head of the guard circled up. Demodus was waved over to join in, like his opinion mattered.
He was an archmage now. His opinion did matter. He should be part of big meetings.
“We’ll make it to Sloak just after nightfall, if there’s no more trouble.”
“We don’t know what we’ll find in Sloak.”
“How terrible can it be? It’s Sloak. Nothing happens in Sloak.”
“We have two injured who could use a day to recover.”
“Are we in a hurry?”
“This is the best inn we’ll find between here and Timmon’s Rock.”
“We’ll stay the night and be ready to leave at first light,” King Augustus decided.
Demodus secured a room, a bath, a hot meal, and a smallbeer before he let himself think about anything else. The mood in the inn was a little too serious. The fight hadn’t been bad, but the sight of blood never did anyone favors. Their injured were resting. Their horses and soldiers were being fed and watered. Everything bloody was being laundered. No one died.
Demodus was full of a restless circling energy. If he were at school and not a crowded tavern he would pace and talk himself through the feeling. Instead he drank his beer and swirled his glass, tracking the froth around and thinking about how he would recreate it as an illusion.
“First battle?” the guard sitting next to him asked.
It took him long enough to answer that the guard started to look at him with pity instead of curiosity.
Demodus coughed a frog out into his hand. “Sorry. Frog in my throat. What did you say?”
“Hey bud, I’m not happy about it either,” the frog said.
“No one asked you.” Demodus tossed the frog over his shoulder and it disappeared as soon as it was out of sight.
The guard burst out laughing. “The fuck? Garret, come get a load of this.”
His friend came to see what was worth laughing so hard at.
“I’ve got a cold,” Demodus complained. “I don’t see what’s so funny.” He sneezed and snow blasted out onto the bar top.
“A cold!”
“You know. A stomach bug.” He pulled a fat, colorful beetle off of his tongue and held it up until it flew away.
A few other people had noticed and there were delighted, disgusted sounds. The snow vanished while everyone was looking at the beetle.
Demodus did his ready set, the easy, fun jokes and illusions he could do with no preparation and only a couple low level spells. It was wildly different with an audience who had never seen his act before. They were awed by simple tricks and he barely had to perform.
The biggest difference was not having to pass a hat around. He stumbled a couple times over when he would normally remind people he accepted tips and had improv a kind of esoteric bit about imaginary meat, the rarest steak, with his familiar instead of the usual “If you won’t do it for me, do it for Figment.”
He saw Cyrus slip out the door and clocked when the top of his head passed the back window. Demodus finished up his set with his favorite stupid joke.
“This last one is for any psychics in the audience.” He put his fingers to his temples and screwed his face up in concentration.
Exactly one person got it and barked a single, loud “HA!” that made the rest of the bar turn to look. Demodus took the moment to turn invisible and climb out the window. Clean exit. No standing ovation. Leave ‘em wanting more.
Cyrus was sitting on the ground with his head in his hands. Demodus crouched next to him. He just took a bath. He wasn’t sitting directly back into the dirt.
“Are you alright?”
“I’m very drunk. Just needed to breathe.”
There were a pair of horses in the paddock next to the bar chasing each other around.
“Nothing like watching animals fuck to clear your head,” Demodus said.
“Why are you so funny?” Cyrus asked.
“Well, you didn’t laugh, so.”
He looked down at his feet. “Can I give you something?”
Demodus turned off the part of him that made jokes before it got him in trouble. Cyrus said what he meant. If he meant more than that he would have said it. “Yeah. Sure.”
Cyrus held out a little charm on a leather chord. “It’s for hair.”
“I… have hair.”
“Beard hair,” he said, not looking at Demodus.
“Oh,” he said. “Thank you.” He took the charm and turned it over in his hands a couple times. The chord was necklace length. He put it around his neck and tucked it into the collar of his shirt. He knew enough about druids to know that this wasn’t cheap or easy magic. Cyrus put a lot of time and work into it. Demodus didn’t imagine he kept a lot of spare beard growing charms in his cart.
They sat and watched the horses fuck for a few minutes. Demodus’s face started to itch. He scraped at it with the pads of his fingers, trying not to give himself a zit if he was going to be performing again tonight.
The first hair was an oddity. The second was a coincidence. When he pulled a third ingrown hair out of a blemish in skin that had never grown a beard before, Demodus had to sniffle back feelings and tears.
“Please don’t cry,” Cyrus said desperately.
Demodus sneezed out a strand of hay that he pulled the rest of the way out, three and a half feet of it, exactly as long as he was tall. “Hay fever,” he said with a shrug.