VIRAN

  Mirri had her waterskin un-stoppered and upturned over her tongue, when Viran turned around. It was a reason good enough that Viran would have made the offer even if Auntie hadn't told him to be friendly with the humans.

  And just throwing his waterskin at Mirri in the back of the cart would have been rude.

  "Can you pass this to her?" He held the water out to the bigger human, who was tucked under the hood of their strange cloak.

  Neither of the Arrivals had beards, so Viran had no idea if either of them was male or not. A wave of tension seemed to climb up the bigger one, locking their heels, knees, spine and shoulders in place before radiating out to their elbows and wrists.

  Viran might have worried they were going to pounce, if they weren't so obviously poorly-positioned to do any moving at all.

  The human just stared like that, wide-eyed, at his extended hand. One of their fingers was picking at the teeth-marks in the rawhide straps of the shield they were leaned against, but they made no move to reach out.

  Maybe they thought it was a hospitality trick. Or that Viran was being rude, by not offering any to them.

  He had forgotten to introduce himself too.

  "I'm Viran. You can have some too, if you want," Viran tried to address all three possibilities. "It's full."

  He could always grab some of the rain if they drank it all. Which wasn't looking likely.

  Viran's outstretched arm was starting to feel a bit heavier when the little human with a thinly-woven half-tunic cleared their throat and reached over.

  "Calen. She's a little rattled right now. I'll get it." The other Arrival said. "It's my fault Mirri's is empty anyway."

  It was Mirri's turn to freeze with her arm hesitantly outstretched.

  "Did it stop?" Mirri asked. "Are you still stuck? I don't see—"

  "I'm fine." Calen said, sniffing the open top of Viran's waterskin before pouring a little into his mouth. "It's only happened a few times, I'm not stuck."

  Viran had no idea what they were talking about, until his manasight roiled violently around the human's head. Dovin's shoulders shifted, and Viran had to lean to get his horns out of the way when the golden snout snapped sideways.

  "Yup, I can turn it off now." Calen said, apparently satisfied with his trick.

  "I'm not a priest, but three gods above and below, don't take risks like that." Dovin grumbled when the mana faded from Calen's head.

  Viran nodded, unsure of how to help. The Arrival obviously hadn't been taught how mana worked properly.

  Which was Mirri's job. But she had been busy trying not to die, there wouldn't have been time.

  "I've told him it's dangerous repeatedly. Emma, make sure the back of his head is clean. Look for paint, don't get any on your own skin." Mirri ordered before leaning over the back of the cart to rinse her mouth.

  Viran would have given her some rainwater, if he had known she wasn't going to drink it. Or that offering would cause a fight.

  "Yeah, but nobody has told me *why*, and it saved your life out there, I saw him line up the deflection," Calen argued. "Ow. Em I don't have a lot of that left."

  'Emma' had dragged him over her lap and immediately yanked a tuft of fur off the back of Calen's neck. Viran saw the tell-tale glint of platinum adorning the short strands.

  Mirri coughed on the water that was in her mouth, and threw her head back over the rear of the cart to clear her airway while Dovin explained.

  "Have you ever seen an ox step on an overripe fruit?" Dovin asked, continuing without waiting for an answer. "That will happen inside your skull, if the mana there is too busy filtering your perceptions to protect you when you take a nasty hit. The organ in there is called—"

  "We know what brains are," Emma finally said something. "How do we stop his brain from doing that? Just get the paint off?"

  "That will help, but he'll need to train himself to stop doing it automatically." Mirri said carefully, and then not so carefully; "Even if he gets scared. Or distracted."

  "Startled. Sometimes," Calen scowled back at her. "Nobody bothered telling me exactly how dangerous it was."

  Viran winced at the way Mirri's face changed shades, and looked around for a way to solve the problem. They were supposed to be making friends, not arguing.

  His eyes landed on something shiny behind the bench, half-buried under his tail.

  "Including me. I left the matters of faith to the Venatrix while she was busy with matters of reality," Dovin sighed. "Viran give him your— what is that?"

  Viran turned the bronze helmet over in his palms until he was looking at the inside of the 'forehead', and stuck his thumbs past the pitiful snout-guard to feel around.

  Sure enough, he could reach the inside of the dent with both of his thumbs.

  "A helmet for humans." He said. "Auntie said you would know what to do with them."

  Viran rested the 'top' of the helmet on the back of the bench and pressed until he felt and heard the metal give a light pop.

  Dovin's eyes drifted up to Viran's helmet.

  "And it had a dent that matches the one in yours because...?"

  Emma had frozen again, and stopped picking at the sparse strands of hair on the back of Calen's neck. The smaller Arrival used the distraction to escape her grasp, and was asking Mirri questions about mana faster than she could answer.

  Mirri was busy rinsing her mouth with Viran's water for the fourth time in a row, in between one and two word answers.

  Hopefully she was just being rude, and not cleaning her mouth so thoroughly because she had been forced to bite someone. She had to worry about things like that more than someone who could just have their eyes checked for silver and eat carefully until it went away.

  "Oh! The squires you were looking for were at the south tower, looking for food." Viran said, returning his attention to Dovin. "They tried to steal the whole cart after Dast left, so I stopped them."

  Dovin didn't sigh this time, at least.

  "Good thinking. Make sure it's clean before you pass it back there." Dovin's amber eyes flicked towards the back of the cart. "You can tell me the rest of the details later."

  The early-afternoon light filtering through the bare branches wasn't quite enough for Viran to feel confident there was nothing gross inside the bronze half-dome with his eyes alone. He stuck his snout inside the head covering, giving it a gentle sniff.

  He nearly gagged when an overwhelmingly pungent odor invaded his nostrils, like someone had crumbled cheese into the leather padding, smeared it thin, and left it in the sun for a day or six. The humans in the city had smelled a bit odd, but this was at least four times stronger than anything that Viran had scented in the crowds moving through the streets.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  Which might have had something to do with the fact that his face was shoved up against it.

  "No blood." Viran confirmed, retreating after he failed to detect any hint of the distinct rusty tang. "But it needs a wash, or new leather."

  "That's what humans your age generally smell like, something about growing a beard for the first time does it to everything they wear for half a decade or so." Dovin dismissed. "Get it on his head, Isha will shave my horns bare if he cracks his skull falling out of the wagon."

  Viran extended his arm a little more to pass the human-shaped helmet back to Calen, because he didn't want to climb over the bench and crowd everybody. Calen had all his fingers, he could put his own helmet on.

  Or not. The bronze was wobbling with every dip and bump in the road, and the big one was fussing about it, until Viran reached out with the second helmet.

  Emma startled like she had seen a ghost when Viran tapped her on the shoulder with the smaller piece of bronze. It was Calen who accepted the gift, fitting it neatly over his own head and passing the larger piece of bronze to Emma.

  Viran turned away quickly, trying not to crowd them any more. Apparently personal space was different wherever the Arrivals were from too, and he had made the mistake this time.

  Then he turned back around, almost as quickly. Emma jumped again.

  "Sorry." He said, before finishing his turn to Mirri. His tail bent awkwardly in the trough behind the bench, but this was important. "Did Sutai make it down from the tower?"

  Mirri's eyes widened, and she grasped for her emergency pouch. Maybe the priestess had been wounded, and needed a potion. Maybe—

  "Preening like a raven that's found out food merchants will take coppers, last I saw her. Basking in praise from 'new friends.'" Dovin rumbled. "She skimmed in below the northern cliff-edge and tossed some overloaded concealment effect made for the Dust while the Seraph was busy playing Immortal Games with the Warlord."

  Viran breathed out, and sat straight again. Sutai wasn't an Immortal, but she had been part of a Venatrix's hunting party. Of course she was fine.

  "Do you think she'll stay to help?" Viran asked Dovin. "With the Venatrix... not alive any more?"

  "Just long enough to return my brush, I hope." Mirri grumbled nonsensically from behind him.

  He didn't get an actual reply for a few seconds, but Viran waited patiently. Dovin was busy driving the cart. And pretending he hadn't heard.

  "She's got her claws sunk in well enough to perch here. That array she carved ripped up topsoil for twenty lengths, scared the piss out of the initial charge until they realized it was a bluff." Dovin shrugged noncommittally. "Might have even made a difference, but it was loud, and in view. There'll be no quietly packing her off back to the Long Road right now."

  Auntie's lieutenant didn't sound as happy about that as he should have been. The Venatrix would have been more help, but some assistance from Sanctum's fighters was better than none.

  After they turned at the crossroads, a gentle gurgle reached Viran's ears, drifting over the creak of the wagon wheels. He made sure to turn around slowly, and keep his arms off the back of the bench, away from the Arrivals.

  "Is anyone hungry?" he asked. "I have trail food. With the good berries, not the sour ones from by the ocean."

  Viran had only sat on the rations once or twice, since the current pouch had made its way onto his belt at Second Bend.

  Calen looked curious, and even Emma nodded. Mirri muttered something about already getting the taste of lunch out of her mouth, but Viran had mostly been offering the Arrivals anyway. She had her own rations.

  Viran carefully cracking the waxed cloth along the neat fold where the pemmican had been packed and unfolding a corner. The brick of meat, fat, and berries had a distinct shine to it where the fat had congealed in the circular mold before the rations were packaged, but the smell was properly smoky. The meat had been dried well enough not to go rancid.

  "Pinch a chunk off. It's chewy." Viran said, demonstrating before daring to extend his arm a little more.

  Neither one of the humans flinched away this time, so Viran stayed moving slow while they examined the food.

  Even if he wanted to wince at their reactions.

  "This is real meat." Calen said, turning over the waxy, barely-palatable mix of ground berries in dry jerky to examine both sides. "Is it like, safe for humans?"

  "It's safe for everyone." Viran shrugged, and tried to offer a little more reassurance. "It's made of cow, not people, or anything that might have eaten people. Your eyes won't go silver from it, not even a little."

  Calen was already gnawing at his chunk, but Emma stopped with her share of the food practically a scaleswidth from her lips.

  "People?" Emma sounded more afraid of the food, not less. "Why would it be people?"

  "It wouldn't be." Viran said patiently. "We don't want anyone to get mana poisoning. Especially Arrivals, since we don't know what you can do yet."

  Judging by the way everyone started talking at once, that was also the wrong thing to say.

  "Wait, mana is poison?" Calen scowled at Mirri. "Why did nobody—"

  "Is that why the monsters had silver eyes too?" Emma's quaking voice was barely audible over the thud of Mirri's tail against the wagon. "Why is eating people common here?"

  "Mana isn't poison, it's power." Viran's cousin spat, sitting up and lashing her tail again as she launched into a lecture everyone had heard a thousand times. "Mana poisoning is—"

  "Everybody stop." Dovin commanded, hauling on the reins.

  The wagon lurched mid-turn, rocking everyone back and forth with half a view of Eastwatch's lower walls at the end of the road. A gentle drizzle pattered over the cloth covering behind the bench, and Viran took the time to grasp at the water running down his head and shoulders, tossing it into the bushes while Dovin readied himself.

  "Listen up," Dovin sighed, and started with Viran. "You, eyes front and let the professionals explain the world. They just almost became Horde rations, and they weren't raised knowing how mana works. They're going to misunderstand you, get scared, and think they're in danger."

  Viran slouched down to make himself smaller, faced front, and tried not to look scary. The aurochs turned its head to eyeball him and tamped a hoof on the bricks, complaining about the bit, the unfamiliar road, and stopping somewhere with no grass.

  Viran ignored the animal, even when a snort promised vengeance. He didn't have the reins, and Dovin was busy fixing his mess.

  Hopefully the bull would forget all about the problems Viran had caused when it was warm in the stables with real food and water.

  "You, save it for when they're safe, dry, and well-fed," Dovin was clearly talking to Mirri. "Those come before teaching, in the scriptures, unless your mother snuck off and called a conclave to change that some time in the last decade?"

  "It does." Mirri admitted. "But I—"

  "Mana is in everything, and it is not poison, no matter what your Wardens told you in order to keep it for themselves," Dovin ignored her protests to soothe the humans instead. "Other people's mana is poison, and it won't kill your body. It works on the sanity, and the question is dosage."

  Both Arrivals attempted to speak at once, resulting in jumbled gibberish, followed by pointed words about 'priorities' that ended in what sounded like half a scuffle.

  "So silver eyes are a symptom of eating people, or stuff that ate people's mana," Emma's voice had finally stopped shaking, with Viran facing the wrong way. "And that's how common, here?"

  "On Avarea, yes. Around here? It's famously not common. Silver eyes tend to get you driven off the Long Road, because they're not the kind of thing that happens from one mistake," Dovin scoffed and snapped the reins. "That food is safe, and so is the food at the fortress, if you want to wait until after you've washed up for something a little more appetizing."

  "Right, figures Eastwatch is a fortress of some kind," Calen grumbled, muffled at first. "Em let me up, I've got questions about the rest of this faerie-tale bullshit."

  Viran winced, and Dovin sighed.

  "I should have just been a priest, at this point," The mercenary mumbled under his breath. "Isha will explain the rest when you're up at the Warden's Perch, but please don't invoke the fae unless you want hooks in your soul. None of those gods are sane anymore, you don't want their attention."

  The rain and the creak of the wagon were the only sounds for a few moments while they approached the patchwork green elfbrick and grey stone of Eastwatch.

  The formerly battered tower stretched hundreds of lengths up the side of the Fang, and loomed more darkly than it had last year. None of the vines creeping up the side had bloomed this early in the spring, leaving the imposing structure wrapped up in a net of gnarled wood that rattled in the subsiding winds now that Auntie was letting the storm calm.

  "Noted," Calen's voice was a little crackly, like the squire in the tower had been when he was scared, too. "Warden's Perch?"

  "We're almost there," Dovin waved at the gate to Eastwatch as they rattled closer. "Viran can tell you all about the lake on the plateau, while you look at the tower and get ready to climb all those stairs."

  Viran was so busy trying not to look scary that he almost didn't hear Dovin's instructions. Even after he did, he wasn't sure how to start without turning around again.

  "Wait, are we about to climb that thing to get dipped in a lake on top of a mountain?" Calen made it easy, by asking a silly question very suspiciously.

  Viran shook his head and turned a little bit to answer. Just enough to see the humans huddled in the cart behind them while Dovin dismounted the cart. He was yelling at the guards for lifting the big spiky gate without challenging him for today's passphrase.

  "You can swim there, but Auntie says it doesn't count as a bath," he started. "The water filters down into the tower in pipes called plumbing, and you can heat it with the runes in the tub. There's even a special latrine inside that doesn't smell, because it takes the waste away."

  The humans only seemed a little nervous, looking at each other for a second before Calen asked a more strained-sounding question.

  "Oh? How common is that around here?" The Arrival asked. "The uh, special latrine."

  Viran might not have explained the plumbing right, but he was mostly sure they were just scared because he was looking at them again.

  Or maybe they thought squatting over running water would be dangerous.

  "It's safe to use, the pipes aren't big enough for anyone to fit through. You couldn't fall in very far, even if you stuck your foot in on purpose," Viran reassured the human, being polite just in case. "There are some in the city too, but they're for the City Councilors, not everyone. The bathhouses still use water, but they're a lot dirtier than Auntie's bathroom."

  Calen's throat bobbed nervously when he swallowed nothing, and Emma's fingers were turning white at the knuckles. She was still gripping the same pinch of pemmican from earlier, wide-eyed and stiff.

  She hadn't taken a single bite, and didn't move at all when her stomach made noise again.

  Viran turned back around, hanging his head while the cart rolled through the gate to the courtyard, and decided to stay quiet before he could make things any worse.

  Making friends was turning out harder than he had thought.

  Childe Rowland, a fairy tale first published in 1814 by Robert Jamieson, was purportedly a transcription of a Scottish ballad that Jamieson heard from a tailor. In the story, after Burd Ellen is kidnapped by faeries, her three brothers are mentored by Merlin, and make attempts to rescue her, oldest to youngest. The youngest brother takes his father's sword with him, and is almost tricked into eating by an offer from his sister, who is unable to warn him about the trap. Remembering Merlin's warnings against eating while in the land of the faeries, he throws down the food before beating the King of Elfland into submission, sparing the faerie's life in exchange for the freedom of his siblings.

  Persephone was a goddess whose passage in and out of the underworld drove the cycle of seasons. The myth, dated to at least 700 BCE, states that she was kidnapped by Hades, until her mother Demeter petitioned Zeus for her release. Zeus granted the request, but not before Hades tricked Persephone into eating several pomegranate seeds, trapping her in the underworld for several months of the year as a compromise.

  Izanami, a major kami within the Japanese Shinto belief system, was also trapped in the underworld due to consuming food there. Izanagi, her partner, failed to retrieve her from the underworld in time after her death in childbirth, and seals the entrance to the world of the dead permanently after fleeing from her rotting form. Izanami, twisted by the underworld, vows to claim a thousand of the living every day, and Izanagi angrily vows to produce 1500 lives per day to thwart her.

  The next chapter is on Monday, but if you've made it this far, why not drop the story a rating while you wait?