Relan rounded the corner so fast that he lost his footing and slipped on the cobbles. With the strength that came from long days of hard work on the farm, he caught himself on his palm and shoved the upper half of his body back into balance.

He saw two men in black running away with Sabriella, one holding her over his shoulder, the other glaring back at him and brandishing a wickedly curved knife. He was pretty sure they weren’t priests of the infinitely kind and forgiving Dar, Goddess of Mercy.

On the street in front of him, a third man lay on the cobbles. He lifted a hand weakly and called after the kidnappers. “Please! Don’t hurt her,” he sobbed. Sobbed, thought Relan? What weak, unmanly, un-Heroic behavior was this? Had this man not heard the sagas? The full-throated minstrels singing of Heroes rescuing beautiful Ladies in Distress through Selfless Acts of Valor? This was not how it was done.

Clearly, this man would be no help. Relan dashed past him and turned the corner. In front of him was a long alley. Sabriella was nowhere to be seen. What sorcery was this? Relan ran faster, trusting in his belief that if a Hero was pure of heart, he would prevail in the end.

In defense of this naiveté, Relan had spent many of his formative years listening to the wandering minstrels who came to the village longhouse to coax a meal out of the flint-hearted farmers with Tales of Valor. He knew them all by heart. And in not a single one of them had the Hero ever stopped to check the doors he ran past.

Relan ran on and on, running out of patience before he ran out of breath. He trotted to a halt and spun around, glaring at the blameless buildings of old Robrecht Town as if they had personally wronged him. But, in the end, he was left with the ugly fact: they had gotten away with the Love of his young Life.

Cursing his luck and the perfidious sorcery with which Sabriella had been snatched away from him, he returned to where he had lost her. The wretched man was still sobbing in the middle of the street.

When he heard Relan’s sandals, the man looked up and said, “She is my sister. Oh, cruel Gods, it is all my fault.” He dropped his head, and his long, stringy hair fell across his face. Sobs shook his shoulders.

Relan picked the man up and set him on his feet. The wretch weighed almost nothing. “Who?” he asked. “Where?”

“It’s all my fault,” the man repeated. His large dark eyes seemed like haunted pits sunk into his pale skin. “The dice. I lost too much money at dice. And they have come for her.”

Relan said, “I can rescue her!”

“You? You have money?”

“No, I have no money. But I have courage.”

“Courage?” he said, gazing into a hopeless middle distance. “They won’t take courage. I owe them money. Do you have money? Can you get money? I meant to get money at dice. But…” and here the pitiful sobbing took over once again.

“I can rescue her! If you would but tell me where they have taken her.”

“No, they would kill her before they would let you have her. No, money is the only way. It is the only way to do anything in this world,” the man with hopeless eyes said.

“Look at me. Look at me!” Relan commanded. “I will return your sister to you. This I vow. Now tell me, where they have taken her?”

“You?” said the man with a laugh bereft of hope. “You don’t even have a sword.”

The man’s pitiful wails seemed to follow Relan through the streets as he went in search of a sword.

* * *

Of course, a sword was hard to find. Relan had tried to beg or borrow one for two days before he worked up the nerve to go and talk to Boltac. He had gone to the market again, looking for work as a laborer. He had begged for change from rich passersby. But nothing had worked. Sabriella’s brother, a poor wretch named Stavro, lived in a shack built against the outside of the south wall. Every time he saw Relan, he wailed and cried. He told and retold his sad tale, claiming that it was all his own fault, but he would not do anything about it. He lacked the courage, he said. He lacked the strength, he said. All he had was Love for his sister and hatred for himself.

He was worthless, except for the information that Relan managed to extract from him. The men who had taken Sabriella worked for a thug named Hogarth, who controlled gambling in Robrecht. They had taken her to a hold in the south, a pile of dark stones on the river Swift known as the Tower of Forgetting. There they would keep her for a week. Then the rapes would start. The week after that, they would cut fingers off. Relan did not think to ask how this creature, Stavro, could describe such tortures in detail without breaking down into tears.

Relan, of course, vowed that he would rescue his lady (with all Faithfulness and Heroism) but the how of it had been impossible until he had saved the Merchant Boltac. Now that he was armed, free, and left to his own devices, the question became: what should he do? His lady had been kidnapped and wanted rescuing. He could think of no saga, song, or lay in which the Hero had left his lady in peril to embark on a larger, more important quest.

But, in a moment of unusually clear thinking, it seemed to Relan that the needs of the city should come before the needs of one heartbroken Hero. Shouldn’t they? Robrecht must be avenged, and the threat of these Orcs and that flying Evil Wizard had to be dealt with. Clearly, that was a selfless Hero’s first duty. Wasn’t it?

So it was that, lost deep in the shallows of his limited philosophy, Relan bumped into a wheelbarrow with a corpse in it. He muttered half an apology before he recognized the man pushing the barrow. “Stavro! You have survived the assault. I am so glad.” Relan heard a sharp intake of breath. A decidedly feminine intake of breath. He looked up to see a teary-eyed Sabriella on the other side of the wheelbarrow.

“Sabriella, you have been rescued!”

“Why, I uh, yes, Relow! I, uh, have been…” She looked from side to side, unsure of what she should say in this situation. Relan’s smile faded when he realized that the man standing behind her was none other than the man in black with the knife who had carried her away from him in the first place.

“My lady,” Relan said, “I thank the Gods that you have been returned to me unharmed, but I am confused by…”

“Oh, I just bet you are,” one of the men in black quipped.

“Silence, varlet, or I will stave in your head,” Relan said, because it seemed like the kind of thing a Hero should say in this situation.

“Let’s steal his boots!” said the man in black, because it was the kind of thing a Thief should say in this situation. Relan answered by drawing his sword.

“Oh ho, ho. Look who’s a man at arms now!” exclaimed the man in black, as he drew his wickedly curved dagger. “You’d best grease that up so it will hurt less when I take it away from you and stick it up your…”

“Whack!” said the man in black’s skull as the pommel of Relan’s sword came down on it.

“Please don’t hurt me!” cried Stavro. “Haven’t I been through enough?”

“You?” shrieked Sabriella, “What about me? How could you forsake your own sister, so recently rescued from ruffians of, uh, ill-intent!”

“Sister. You’re not my sister! I swear, they forced me to do it. Please don’t hurt me. Oh, Shirley, you sure know how to pick ‘em. I thought he was just a country bumpkin. Did you see how fast he moved?”

“Wait,” said Relan, feeling that he should have some part to play in all of this, “You know the men who kidnapped you?”

Stavro said, “Ah, there it is. You can take the bumpkin out of the country, but you can’t take the–OH MY GODS, I take it back, please don’t kill me.”

“I haven’t killed anyone… here,” said Relan, “What happened to him in the ‘barrow?”

“Torn apart, by those things,” said Sabriella, “those Hork-Hork things. He died trying to protect me.”

“Protect you!?!” cried Stavro. “We ran and you locked him out. I still remember him clawing at the door and screaming. Don’t look at me that way, Shirl. This grift is blown, this town is done for, let’s just bury Herveaux here and get on down the road.”

“Shirley? Your name is Shirley?”

“Well, I see you two have a lot to talk about,” said Stavro, “I’ll just wheel poor Herv out the east gate, and when Thorvin wakes up you can catch up with–”

“NO!” Relan and Sabriella/Shirley shouted.

“Those things are coming back, you know,” Stavro said ruefully. “It’s not safe.”

“I go to root out the source of this Evil,” said Relan, not taking his wide eyes from Shirley.

“Then you’re an idiot, kid,” said Stavro.

“No, he’s brave,” said Shirley, not taking her eyes off of him.

“But I see it is not the only Evil that plagues Robrecht Town. Treacherous woman. I… I… Loved you.”

“I know you did,” said Shirley, not without kindness. “That’s my gift. As for the rest,” she shrugged, “don’t blame me. It’s the world that’s treacherous; I’m just trying to keep up. Besides, a girl’s gotta make a living, hasn’t she? And I don’t have a big, strong man like you to protect me.” As she said this, she edged closer to Relan, unafraid of the naked blade in his hand. She pushed the flat of it gently out of the way with her fingertips.

“We were trying to take whatever money you could scrape together. I’m not proud of that.” She ducked her head bashfully, then threw her hair back to reveal an expanse of perfect, pale throat that drew Relan downward into her dangerously plunging neckline. “But the feeling was real, you know.” Then, like the sun breaking through the clouds after a storm, her pouty frown was replaced with a dazzling smile.

“Come with us!” she said. “We could journey the land together. Make money, have Adventures, share love–we could have it all. And with you I can finally ditch these losers.”

“Right here,” said Stavro, grunting as he struggled to push the unconscious Thorvin on top of the corpse already in the wheelbarrow.

Relan almost believed it. Shirley almost got away with it. But whether the Gods were looking out for Relan or Shirley’s luck had run out, didn’t matter. Relan caught a flash of morning sunlight as it glinted off the thin-bladed dagger Shirley was concealing along her wrist. It wasn’t stout enough to chop off a limb, but it was thin enough to slip between chain mail rings, just far enough to tickle his heart and kill him.

“What are you going to do with that?” Relan asked. And then he did it right. He didn’t give her time to explain. He didn’t give her time to stab him. He hit the beautiful creature in her beautiful face with his fist. Then he looked down in horror at what he had done. A Hero never, ever hit a lady.

Relan ran away in shame.

When he heard the punch, Stavro had just finished getting Thorvin into the wheelbarrow. When Stavro turned and saw Shirley unconscious on the ground, he said, “Aw, come on!” He was already sick of this day.

As Relan ran north, he thought he might have just learned some kind of lesson. The confusion, the pain in his heart, the feeling of being totally inadequate to the moment–yes, that’s what it always felt like when he’d learned a lesson before. But it wouldn’t be until years later that he would be sure.