Ryan

“Look. Old man. It’s been days. You can’t keep me trussed up forever,” Ryan said, as Wynfor returned with a string of rabbits. Ryan shook his wrists where the old bastard had tied him to a support post of his ridiculously sturdy hut. Nearby—on the bed—the other kid that Wynfor had abducted still slept soundly, though he was pale and unhealthy-looking, and Ryan doubted he’d live much longer, if he didn’t wake soon.

“Can and will,” the old man said, throwing the rabbits onto the tiny table beside his tiny kitchen hearth. “All I need is for you to impregnate a few dozen girls, seed a new crop of Ganlins, then your usefulness will be at an end.”

Ryan laughed. “So you definitely can’t keep me trussed up forever. I have to have my hands free to—”

The old Auld gave him a pointed look, and Ryan choked.

“Besides,” Ryan muttered, “that’s straight out of a cow’s ass. I know you’re here to teach me magic.”

The Auld gave him another irritated look.

“I also know,” Ryan continued, “that you’ve tried to wipe my memories a grand total of three times, now.”

“Six,” the old man growled. He didn’t look happy about it, instead looking at Ryan as if he were some sort of puzzle.

“—and somehow it’s not been working.”

“I’d say that’s an understatement,” the old man said. “Any other Auld of the Spyre would have been a drooling mess from the strength of the enchantments I tried to put on you after the first ones failed. Everything I put on you is just…disintegrating. Has another Auld reached you before me, boy?”

Ryan thought of the time a little over a decade ago when he and Saeby were kids and the Vethyle woman had accused Saeby of trying to kill her baby. “Nope, nobody.”

Wynfor narrowed his eyes. “Who was he?”

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ryan said.

“It was Rhydderch, wasn’t it?” Wynfor growled. “He’s the only Auld this close to the Idorion who wouldn’t have killed you where you stood, you fool brat.”

“Pretty sure he said his name was Goscrew Yoself,” Ryan said.

Wynfor shook his head, looking irritated with himself. “I should have guessed days ago. No wonder my spells haven’t been sticking—he’s got a shield on you.” At that, the old fart walked up and reached for Ryan’s head. Ryan tried to jerk away, but the support post would only let him jerk away so far.

Immediately upon the old man’s warm palm contacting his skin, Ryan felt a tingle. No, Ryan thought, horrified. No, I need to remember…

A few moments later, Wynfor removed his hand. “What’s my name?”

Realizing he still remembered, Ryan gave him his most believable blank look. “Why am I tied to a post? Where’s my mom? Who are you?”

Wynfor sighed, deeply. “It didn’t work that time, either, did it?”

“You stink of toe cheese,” Ryan said, still looking confused. “And that soap they use to disinfect socks.”

Wynfor continued to give him a flat look.

“Do you shave?” Ryan cocked his head. “Like…ever?”

“You remind me of my brother.”

Ryan felt a pang of regret, but quickly stifled it. “So is growth like, reversed, as you get older? You start losing inches of height and you stop having to eat as much?”

“And a good portion of the rest of my family that was buried in shallow graves a few weeks back. The boys, especially, but there were some feisty girls, too.”

“I’ve always wondered if wrinkles were made or if they just kind of appear,” Ryan said. “Like, did you earn those, or did you just wake up one morning looking like a horse’s puckered asshole?”

“The Vethyles killed them all, with the Norfelds’ help. Everyone from four-hundred-year Aulds to infants at their mothers’ breasts. Slaughtered like beasts. Throats cut. Blasted with fire. Eviscerated alive.”

“Sounds like something that doesn’t interest me,” Ryan said. “I told you—I’m an innkeep’s son. If I’m really lucky, I get to play chits with Saeby on the slow days.”

“You need to come to the realization that you are in danger, and I’m saving your life. Then I will free you.”

Ryan bit down the impulse to tell him that Saeby’s help was all he needed. “If you’re only looking out for my own good, how about you set me free first and we talk about it after, huh?” He jiggled the enchanted ropes holding his wrists against the pillar again.

“You hit me in the face with a nightstand,” the old man told him. “Then you hit me with a fallen tree.”

“And they broke,” Ryan chuckled. “In half. Like hitting a boulder. Talk about hard-headed. Is that granite between your ears?”

“It’s a spell leftover from a war with Etro many years ago,” the Auld told him. “And it’s saved my life more times than I can count, including a few weeks ago, on the Slopes outside Ganlin Hall, when an assassin hit me over the head with a club while I was out stargazing.”

Ryan didn’t want to hear any more about the Ganlins. They lived across the world on the Slope, and he really didn’t want to get drawn into their violent family politics. He wanted to marry Saebrya and raise a family, then take over the inn when his mom got too old to run things. He wanted a simple life. He’d seen adventurers, this close to the ruins of Ariod, and they’d never struck him as very intelligent. They struck him as people that wanted something for nothing, the drifters and scroungers that weren’t really willing to work for an honest paycheck. Half of the ones that went up north to pick the ruins for treasure never came back. The ones that did come back were usually maimed, terrified, and penniless, begging scraps from his mother on their way back down into the riverlands. “That’s nice,” Ryan said. “I had to take a piss earlier, but you didn’t leave a bucket, so I just relieved myself on the rug. Hope that’s okay.”

Auld Wynfor said nothing for several minutes. Then, in total silence, the Auld got up and went to the table, where he began skinning the rabbits. He had finished one and was starting another when he looked up out the window into the backyard and went totally still. “That’s impossible.”

“You know, I always thought so, too,” Ryan said. “But then I realized you probably just loosen it up with your finger first.”

Wynfor continued to stare out the window as if he hadn’t heard him.

Ryan got on his tiptoes to look over the Auld’s shoulder.

Saebrya was tentatively sneaking across the yard behind the hut, a knife in her hand, nervously looking around as if she expected to be seen.

Heart giving a startled hammer, Ryan sucked in a breath to warn her, but the Auld whipped his hand around and gestured at his mouth without taking his eyes off of Saebrya. Ryan immediately found his words bottled within him, unable to so much as make a sound.

“There is no way,” Wynfor said, frowning. “Our path was untraceable.” The old man continued to watch Saeby approach, his brow furrowing. “There are so many illusions on this hut that not even Agathe herself would have been able to locate it. How did a riverlands brat manage it?”

Ryan found himself able to answer, but only the Auld’s question. It was tempting to say something snarky, but he realized from the tenseness to the Auld’s shoulders that Saebrya was in serious danger.

“Saeby’s different,” Ryan managed. “I’ve known her for more than a decade. Please don’t hurt her.”

Wynfor’s face darkened, his confusion turning into something worse, something deadly. “You mean she’s a Vethyle put there to watch you, and she had some sort of tracking enchantment on you.” He grabbed his bow from where he had hung it on the wall, then he was nocking an arrow, and there was nothing Ryan could do about it. “Lucky for both of us,” Wynfor said, “an arrow kills a Vethyle just as easily as it does a barren man, and I shot enough arrows to fill the Spyre back in the war.” As the Auld moved to exit the front of the house, Ryan lunged in an attempt to knock him over, but he merely bumped the old man’s shoulder as Wynfor moved past and out the back door.

And Ryan once more found himself unable to speak or move.

Saeby, Ryan thought, with growing panic. Saeby run! His lungs started working faster, speeding up with his heart, but he still couldn’t bring himself to scream a warning—the Auld had gotten better with his compulsions. Through the windows, he watched Wynfor stalk around the front of the hut, then duck out of sight…

On the other side of the building, oblivious, Saebrya was sidling up to the window, her back to the side Wynfor was coming around—perfect for an arrow in the back.

Ryan’s heart was a thunderous rush in his ears, now, the pounding roar of his own blood so strong it blotted out all sound.

Wynfor was going to shoot her, and skip asking questions entirely. Ryan knew it as thoroughly as he knew the old man planned to keep him ‘safe’ right there tied to a pole for the next hundred years, if need-be. Within the next ten seconds, Saeby was going to be as dead as the rabbits gracing the old man’s table.

No. I won’t let that happen. Ryan’s world had narrowed to a powerful rush of water, like he was standing in the center of a great raging river. He felt like it was tearing him away, eroding the bedrock of his mind, the sound increasing with every beat of his heart. In the silence that followed, with Wynfor stalking his friend and Ryan unable to warn her, the liquid thunder became so loud around him, the vibration of its rush so strong, that he felt it was shaking the world apart. Ryan came to the startled realization that it couldn’t be his own blood, that it had to be something else.

Yet no sooner had he had that thought than Ryan heard the twang of a bowstring, and all Time came to a stop.