The Wizard And The Dragon (34 page)

“Really? And what’s that?”

Kate looked from him and to the farms
they passed as they continued to walk. He didn’t answer immediately, taking the
time to formulate his answer. She raced for some possible counter if he accused
her of not remembering anything, or preparing for how he might take advantage
of it. She saw that his eyes twitched when he was deep in thought. Several
times he opened his mouth and then closed it.

“You’re punishing me,” Calder said
finally, in a small voice. “You’re proving that you don’t need me, as if I have
ever doubted that for a second. It explains everything. I understand it but
it’s cruel, you know. You could have just said that you didn’t want to work
together in addition to,” he paused, closed his eyes, and let out a breath
through his teeth, “you know, everything else.”

“I’m not,” she said reflexively.

Dancing around saying anything permanent
was beginning to tire her. She looked ahead and saw the path diverge again.
Calder turned off the road and up to the house it led to. She guessed it was
the Rakestrow farm and she only needed to buy a little more time. If she could
get through finding the troll and killing it without exposing herself, she
would have time to read through all of her own history before making a
decision. She could decide then if she wanted to banish this man from her life.
She didn’t even know what he had done.

“Really?” he said bitterly. “Why else
would you be wearing that shoddy armor and that sword? They don’t even fit you
right. Hell, Kate, you didn’t even put it on properly. What else is that but a
deliberate display that you don’t need me? The great slayer Kate doesn’t even
need the right armor or a good blade to kill her targets! You didn’t bring any
potions or oil to burn the body! You don’t need them! If you don’t need them
then why the fuck do you need me? It’s your cruel way of showing me that I’m
not wanted.”

The road continued upward into the
hills. There was a fence on either side of them. There were a few goats to the
left and many more sheep to the right. The smell was foul and the sound of them
bleating grew louder as they walked farther up. There was a higher
concentration of the animals closer to the farmhouse. She could see a man near
the house in the distance. She stopped and turned to Calder.

“Maybe, but I’m not,” she hesitated,
trying to grasp at any other explanation that wasn’t either the truth or
something to alienate him permanently. “I’m not,” she repeated and then a
scream came from the road ahead of them.

They both turned in unison. The troll
was visible in the field and let out another scream. It sounded like something
being violently torn to pieces. The monster was massive, made larger by
Calder’s insistence that a lone troll was a simple job for her. She had
expected something no larger than the sheep around her, a nuisance like a wolf
that was sneaking in on all fours during the night and feeding on the flock.
The troll was no such thing.

The creature stood on two legs like a
human. Even hunched forward it was over three meters tall and she couldn’t
accurately guess its size if it were to stand up straight. Its muscles were
long and thin, stretched over its skeleton like its bones had grown faster than
the rest of it. She saw no weapons in its hands, but she quickly saw her error
in that assessment: its hands were its weapons, long meaty fingers that ended
in thick claws.

The sheep scattered away from it and
bolted toward the farmhouse. The troll moved faster than any of them, taking
long strides and snatching up the slowest of the animals. Its claws pincered
around the sheep’s sides and it was lifted up easily. The monster snapped its
head down quickly on the sheep’s neck, tearing out its throat and spitting it
onto the grass.

“Kate,” Calder said. “Kate!”

She stood still and watched as the
creature tossed the dead animal to the ground. It hadn’t noticed the two of
them on the road but it had seen the farmer standing near the house. It resumed
its chase, picking up speed faster than Kate would have guessed for something
so large. It was on the farmer in seconds. He was holding a pitchfork and gave
the monster a brief fight, stabbing forward with the tool and forcing the troll
to back away for a moment. It tilted its head at him, regarding him as a curiosity
rather than a threat.

The farmer lunged forward and impaled
the monster with the pitchfork, all three prongs deeply embedded into its
stomach. Kate felt a wave of relief before once again feeling sick, watching
the troll continue to move forward like it had suffered no injury at all. It
pulled the tool from out of its torso, snapped it with one hand, and then
tossed it aside. It pierced forward with its own claws, skewering the farmer
and then ripping out its throat like it had done to the sheep.

“Fuck!” Calder shouted. “Fuck, fuck!”

The troll heard him. It sniffed the air
in their direction before turning. It looked over them and then behind itself
at the cluster of sheep that were cowering against the fence as far away from
the monster as they possibly could. It shrugged then, throwing the farmer’s
body over its shoulder and walking back to the sheep it had killed. It did the
same thing to the animal’s body, draping it over its other shoulder and then
strolling casually over the field, stepping over the fence without stopping and
disappearing into the trees farther up in the hills.

“That wasn’t a small troll,” Calder
spoke rapidly. “That wasn’t small at all, right? That was a big one. The
biggest I’ve ever seen on its own. Oh fuck Thomas Rakestrow is dead. Fuck,
fuck.”

Kate’s hand was holding the sword so
tightly that her hand was beginning to hurt. She looked down and saw her
knuckles were white from the strain of it. It was enough for her to realize
that she had been holding her breath. She exhaled and felt her heart race. She
closed her eyes and inhaled quickly.

“You’ve made your point,” he went on. “You’ve
made your point, see? I noticed the armor and no potions and the wrong sword.
Message received, Kate, now go home and get the proper things. No need to go
and try to fight that fucking thing without the proper gear.”

She opened her eyes and took a step
toward the farm.

“You’ve made your point!” he repeated.

She didn’t stop until she had vaulted
over the fence and was standing on the grass. The sheep were still huddled on
the other side of the field even though the troll was out of sight. There was
blood on the grass, a trail leading from the house and to where the sheep’s
corpse had been. There was a chunk of something in the blood, like a mixture of
flesh and bone, a piece of the man’s esophagus that she couldn’t discern from
the blood.

Calder was behind her. She was feeling
something different rush through her now, something close to when she would
have details of a room or a person blaze into her eyes. The man was dead. She
closed her eyes and saw it again. The troll’s claws through his chest, probably
killing him then, and then the monster’s jaws through the man’s neck and the
spray of blood that came with the stretching skin and sinew.

The man was dead and she had stood there
and let it happen, after she was the one that the town had gone to solve the
problem. The one that the town had thought so skilled and experienced that the
job was beneath her, a routine extermination like it was mundane vermin. The
Kate she had been before wouldn’t have stood and watched the man be killed. She
knew that for certain, not from remembering, but from now deducing why Calder
looked at her like she was the one in charge, the one to be respected.

And how when she turned to him now, he
was looking like he didn’t recognize her.

“I’m going after it now, before it can
kill anyone else,” she said firmly, and only then learned it was true. Someone
was dead because of her, because she drank the poison and wasn’t able to live
up to her role in the town. They thought her capable of this task and she would
prove whether she was or not in the attempt.

Kate once beat up an ogre with her bare
hands.

I had forgotten how to use a blade.

“It’s injured” she spoke again, more to
herself than to Calder. “It couldn’t have gotten far. I just need to finish
what the farmer started.”

“Farmer?” Calder blurted out. “The troll
will have regenerated by now.”

She turned and looked at him.

“I remember what you taught me, even if
you don’t want to hunt with me anymore,” he said defensively.

She walked forward without answering
him. He followed behind her. The trail of blood lessened until they neared
where the sheep had been killed, where it stopped in a large pool and then
continued on thicker than before. She followed it to the far fence and jumped
over where she had seen the troll effortlessly stride over the barrier. The
blood continued for a few more steps until it diminished around the first trees
of the forest that the farm land had been built toward.

Tracking the troll wasn’t difficult for
her, but she wasn’t sure if it was a skill she had retained or that the troll
was simply easy to track. She guessed the creature was at least three hundred
kilograms and that wasn’t including the fully grown man and sheep it had over
its shoulders. The indentations its feet left in the earth were deep and well
defined, not to mention the plethora of broken branches and disturbed foliage
it had thoughtlessly barged its way through.

She continued to loosen and tighten her
grip on her sword as she walked, trying to coax out some measure of familiarity
of using the blade. When none of her muscle memories were stimulated, she tried
to remind herself that writing had been impossible to do when she made
conscious effort. She hadn’t thought of how to read or walk or talk or
interpret Calder’s expressions, she had just done it. As she gripped the sword,
she somehow doubted the same would hold true for using the weapon.

Calder remained silent as he followed
her. He stopped often, seeing something in the trees and bushes that she walked
passed. She looked back at him each time and only slowed, not stopped, until he
resumed following her.

“You must be determined if you’re
passing all of this,” he muttered, barely loud enough for her to hear.

The trees receded for a few paces before
the ground began to decline. There was a gentle slope that became more severe
near the bottom where the ground leveled out and continued. Kate saw where the
soil had been scraped clean as something large had slid down it and then turned
after landing, walking to the immediate left instead of continuing forward. She
followed the tracks before sliding down, tracing them with her eyes until they
stopped at a rock formation to the left at the bottom of the slope.

She kept her balance easily as she
descended, hopping the final meter or so and landing comfortably on her feet.
Calder stumbled behind her but didn’t fall, bracing himself with his hands when
he hit the ground. She walked farther away from where she landed before turning
to face the rocks, not wanting to walk in front of them if the troll was
waiting. There was an opening, a cave, and the trail led down into it.

“That’s odd,” Calder remarked. “Trolls
can’t see well in the dark.”

“I know that.”

“Of course you do,” he said genuinely.
“I’ll come in with you.”

“No,” she said. If she was about to find
out she had forgotten how to fight, it would be without endangering another.
“Wait out here.”

He made a noise, something like a grunt,
but Kate ignored it and moved forward. The cave abruptly turned a few steps in
and she was quickly out of his sight but also in complete darkness. She stopped
and grabbed the sword from her belt and pulled it out. The handle came up with
her hand but so did the strap; she had lodged it in too firmly when she had
forced the blade through the opening. The blunt part of the blade stayed
stubbornly inside until she held the belt down firmly with her other hand. She twisted
the blade awkwardly and then yanked it free, causing her to lash out wildly in
the dark when it suddenly gave to her strength. The sword smacked into the wall
next to her and a violent ringing echoed through the cave, buzzing her ears and
she froze in place.  She held her breath and could hear only her heart beat as
she waited for some reaction from the troll, a screech at hearing the noise.
Nothing.

You’re fine. No fatal mistakes yet.
Don’t think, just do. Don’t think.

Kate continued forward. Her eyes had
adjusted to the little light the cave had but it was still difficult to make out
where she was going. She stopped every few steps and listened for anything like
breathing, hearing nothing each time. A few more steps and she stopped again.
She heard trickling water but nothing else. A few more steps and she flinched
as a gust of air brushed passed her, thinking it was the monster’s breath
exhaling directly into her face. She stepped forward and saw light. She turned
her head back the way she came, foolishly thinking she could somehow see if she
had been turned around.

The sound of running water was louder as
she neared the light. She hadn’t been able to hear that at the cave’s entrance.
Instinctively, she crouched down and continued forward as close to the cave’s
floor as she could. She crept slowly closer to the light until she could see
where it was coming from, staying as cloaked as possible in the dark. The cave
opened up, she saw, into a section without a roof. She couldn’t tell if it had
collapsed a long time ago, but she could see trees high above the opening after
her eyes scanned up the rocky walls and the earth that sat above them. Roots
protruded out of the soil around the room. If she had been standing above and
looking down, she would have thought it was a pit.