I padded over to where Rowan sat in the shade and glanced over my shoulder at the twins as they disappeared into the building. “You know they didn’t really have a chance, right?”
Rowan grinned. “After the first few minutes of our match, I did. They didn’t, though. That was the lesson.”
“Bit harsh.” I slid down the wall onto my ass and propped my arms up on my knees.
“It certainly is. Those two came to us as refugees in the aftermath of the keep, not quite adults yet. Came in out of the dark covered in blood. Not theirs. They’ve had plenty of training here, but not against anyone as big or as capable as you. Some teachings require humility to sink in properly.”
I smirked. “Considering how different some of those techniques were from what you used, I’d suspect they had plenty of training somewhere else. Cailleach’s the dangerous one, too.”
“I haven’t asked where they learned that style and I don’t plan to.” Rowan chuckled. “That said, they’re both dangerous, but you’re right. Aine plays the obvious distraction while Cailleach angles to stick you from behind.”
I theatrically sighed. “And here I was hoping Aine was actually flirting with me.”
Rowan snorted. “Sam, I might be wrong assuming soldiers are the same everywhere, but be careful. I know you know just how distrustful some of us can be already, but the last unattached men here married before my brother’s grave saw its second snow.”
I raised an eyebrow. “I guess I’ll be careful, then.”
“Sam—” Rowan suddenly frowned and then shrugged.
Reading minds wasn’t a skill of mine, but I took a stab at what I thought she was trying to get at. “Part of you wants to treat me like a veteran, but you don’t know how appropriate that would be because humans live such short lives.”
She nodded.
I cleared my throat. “Well, I’ll put it this way then. I’ve spent a third of my life in the army and I was a squad leader before coming here.” Realizing the numbers involved elicited a smirk on my part. “I had eight people under me. I just wasn’t responsible for the whole damn forest like you.”
When Rowan’s gaze finally returned to me, she seemed far more relaxed. “In that case, you’re an adult just the same as anyone else here. I figured some warning was called for before something ill-considered happened.”
“Rowan,” I started to say but the sound of the door opening made me think better of finishing that statement. “I’ll keep it mind. You said something about anything short of broken bones not being a problem?”
Rowan’s eyes glittered as she grinned. “Aww, somebody get hurt?”
“Hurt? No. But it’s a bit early in the day to be this sore.” I accepted the mug one of the twins offered me. Based on the cool way she eyed me, I guessed she was Cailleach. “How about you, Cailleach? You okay?”
Cailleach’s lips pressed together before she drank from the mug in her hands. “If anything’s hurt, it’s my pride. My sister needed a little attention while we were inside, though. That knee of yours—”
“For a second, I thought I was choking on my lungs,” Aine sputtered. Our eyes met briefly when I glanced in her direction. Her cheeks reddened and she looked away. “It’s been a while since I lost that handily.”
Aine stepped into the shadow next to me and laid a hand atop my head. Before I could ask what she was doing I suddenly felt lightheaded. A chill rushed down my spine and my sweat felt like it froze. She snatched her hand back, clutching it against her chest as if she’d been bitten. “Dear Goddess!”
Cailleach darted to her sister and Rowan lurched to her feet. My breath formed an icy cloud when I exhaled. Aine’s hand, what little I saw before Rowan stepped between us, looked like it had been momentarily dipped in a fryer.
My thoughts were slow to come, so it took me several seconds to recognize Cailleach’s face when she knelt down in front of me, worry plain on her face as she asked, “Sam, are you okay?”
“I—” Another cloud of icy vapor, bigger this time, came out with that utterance. I realized the water in my mug was frozen solid. “I didn’t think this would happen. Magic doesn’t behave when it’s pointed in my direction. Your sister—”
Worry in her eyes, Cailleach cut me off, “—is going to okay. You on the other hand—” She held her hand up, palm toward my face and then spread her fingers. There was an instantaneous blinding flash of light accompanied by a loud bang that made the air around me jump, like I’d been too close to an artillery impact or a supersonic flyby.
Blinking away the sudden tears in my eyes, when I could see again the light from the noonday sun seemed sickly, unsaturated like something had drained the life out of everything. It was only when I opened my mouth to speak and my voice made no sound at all that I realized the world around me had gone perfectly silent. I couldn’t even hear my heartbeat in my ears.
Before I could do anything, Cailleach leaned in closer and touched my forehead. The skin beneath her fingers erupted in a burning sensation that quickly ebbed into a pleasant seeping warmth that left me fighting sleep.
The next thing I knew, I felt perfectly normal, and Cailleach was over with her sister, who was flexing her uninjured hand cautiously. Rowan stood a short distance away from the two, looking like she’d just seen a ghost.
“What just happened?” I managed to sputter, out of sorts.
Cailleach’s glanced over. “I did something necessary, but unwise.”
I climbed to my feet and shot Rowan a quizzical glance as I walked over to the twins.
“I tried to heal you and the magic jerked out of my control, became something else,” Aine said quietly.
Cailleach nodded, “And I gave away our secret to keep us all whole.”
“Your secret?”
Rowan coughed. “The House of Silence served the Syr as mage-killers and assassins.”
Aine’s eyes glinted with something darker. “Much as fire cannot burn without air, magic cannot go awry if the weave no longer feeds it.”
The stoic countenance I’d grown used to seeing on Cailleach’s face parted like water into a slight, pleased smile. “We’d appreciate it if this remained between friends.”
Completely not creeped out by the complete body language shift, I answered with a disarming smile. “I’m not the kind of guy to kiss and tell. I guess it’s safe to assume Cailleach and Aine aren’t your real names.”
“They’re who we’ve chosen to be,” Aine said. She looked away before quietly adding, “Who we were died long before we took refuge here.”
Cailleach nodded. “Hopefully we can go the rest of the day without similar excitement.”
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“Well, then I hate to disappoint,” I said with a grin. “I brought some things I’d like to show you.”
While both twins were interested in the guns, they seemed even less surprised than Rowan was earlier.
“I’d like to make sure I understand,” Cailleach said once I’d finished. “The firing pin strikes the little button— primer, I think you called it— and that sets off the powder inside the brass cartridge? Rapid expansion pushes the bullet out at high speed?”
“Yeah,” I said with nod and then I noticed the look on her face. I couldn’t help but get my hopes up. “You’ve seen this before.”
Aine grinned and poked her sister in the ribs. “He’s got you, sis.”
Cailleach shot an annoyed glance at her sister. “Not precisely. Something similar.”
Aine responded to the glance by raising her eyebrows and staring back expectantly. After several long seconds of silence, she quietly said, “Sister, when we saw the Glade still stood, we promised to defend what was left of our people. They gave their lives so we could escape; do you really think Keefe and Torin would have you guard this specific secret when it could help us now?”
“Enough.” Cailleach glared at her sister and then sighed before shifting her attention in my direction. “Old habits die hard, I suppose. My mentor was working on something similar, but primitive. How frequently do you have to disassemble these for cleaning?”
“Depends, but if you weren’t dragging them through the mud, then after every range session but you could stretch it to every few thousand rounds if you had no choice.” Her eyes widened and the thoughts racing through her mind were obvious. “Sounds like you had a dirty burning powder. Let me guess, you were working on a muzzle loading device and instead of primers you used an armature with a wick or flint to ignite the powder?”
Staring at me like I was a snake she almost stepped on, Cailleach slowly nodded. “Wick. I suggested flint, but we hadn’t gotten that far. How? Where are you from?”
“Yeah, about that,” I replied. “So, some things stay between friends, yes? Where I’m from is one of those things. You’ve heard of the Vore?” Her eyes abruptly narrowed, and I managed to get her attention before her knife completely cleared its sheath. “Different world from mine. Up until yesterday, I’d never heard of them. Now you know I’m not from here and why magic doesn’t care much for me. As for how I guessed the design of your musket, it’s pretty straightforward: that’s where we were with firearms design on my world almost a thousand years ago. Only so many ways to skin a cat. You wouldn’t happen to know how to make your powder, would you?”
Her features went from apologetic as she sheathed her knife to disappointed. “No. Torin never shared where he got the powder.”
I patted her shoulder. “No worries. I can’t make mine either. I used the weapons, not made them. Unless I figure out a lot of stuff, when my ammunition runs out, it’s gone. Though—” I grinned and held the pistol out to her. “I can spare a handful for the three of you.”
Cailleach cautiously accepted the weapon. “Are you sure?”
“I think it’d be cruel to show you the future of your work and then not let you use it at least once. We just need to set up some targets.”
While I sat up a few melons the twins offered up, Rowan made sure the militia knew nothing untoward was going on before we opened up. Cailleach went first, and between the three of them, her reaction stood out the most. Rowan and Aine were both wide-eyed and smiling when they handed the pistol over, but Cailleach’s smile was nigh beatific when she thanked me.
All three took the shattered melons in stride, but they all jumped when I exploded the first one with the rifle.
When Aine’s turn was over and she handed the rifle over to Rowan, Cailleach pulled me aside. “Sam— if you don’t mind me calling you that— We need to get to our scheduled patrol, but I wanted to thank you for that. Would it be okay if I asked you more about how those work later? There’s so much we didn’t figure out.”
“Sure. I’d be happy to,” I said. Before anything else occurred to me, she stepped in to hug me and when she went to join her sister, she glanced over her shoulder with a grin.
“Huh. Didn’t see that coming,” I said once the two were inside.
Rowan smirked and held the rifle out to me. “I never pried, even when it was obvious they didn’t fit in as well as they wanted. I think that’s the most relaxed I’ve seen either of them. Secrets can be heavy things.”
I agreed with a nod. “Don’t you want your turn?”
“We’ve run out of targets, if you hadn’t noticed. They’re also not the only two who need to do a patrol, though we’ll hopefully be returning with meat. If you don’t want to use yours, we can spare a bow and arrows.”
For the sake of expediency, I decided I’d use my bow this time around. Seemed to me, and Rowan agreed, that I should use what I was comfortable with until I had enough time to practice with their equipment.
As for the patrol itself, we spent six hours walking deer paths and clearings with Rowan periodically pointing out where various types of game tended to be and answering whatever questions I came up with, seeing as some of the flora and fauna were unfamiliar.
We were well into afternoon, if not evening, when we came across a rune-carved stone pillar in the middle of a clearing. Rowan explained waystones like this one served as the outer perimeter for settlements, acting both as early warning for intruders and ward against the most pernicious predators in the area. After letting me get a closer look at the pillar, she informed me that we’d be splitting up and I needed to return the hall by nightfall with a suitable contribution to the villa’s kitchens. Naturally, when I asked what suitable meant she merely smiled and wished me luck while walking off.
Thankfully, I’d been keenly paying attention to our path, so after a few seconds spent being unamused at the impromptu land nav skill check, I engaged in some precision guesswork and started walking toward my final destination. At that point, I figured on two or three hours of remaining daylight, so subtracting the hour I expected to need to get back left me with an hour or two to bag something with four legs.
Twenty minutes in, I positively identified a clearing I’d passed through earlier by the patch of odd purple flowers surrounding a faerie ring of mushrooms in the middle. This meant I wasn’t precisely where I thought I was going to be, but I was close enough to say I knew where I was without making my old land nav instructors wince too terribly hard. Now that I knew exactly where I was, I also knew how to get to the two gathering spots for deer Rowan had pointed out.
I’ve never claimed to be a great hunter, but I know enough to get by. I’m sure a certain subset of hunters would roll their eyes if I told them I’d mostly done stand hunting up until this point. I’m also sure those same people would see that as an admission I couldn’t hack being a ‘real’ hunter.
Truth be told, Uncle Sam paid me to stalk, track, and kill two-legged prey that shot back. Once you do that, going after deer isn’t nearly as exciting. As such, after my first deployment I normally chose to relax up in a stand. From up there, I could enjoy the view and the wildlife I wasn’t there to kill while waiting for the wildlife I was. None of which were wise things to do when someone was waiting to nominate you for the enemy marksmanship badge: the purple heart.
Still, as I pointed out, I know enough to get by. I knew my best bet lay between the two locations Rowan pointed out earlier. Deer normally bed down before the hottest point in the day, location one, and once the sun started to fuck off, they’d go looking for food and water, location two. Still, wildlife seemed to live for the chance to fuck with hunters, so I immediately shifted to a more stealthy approach on the off chance something popped out of the brush at random. To be fair, outside the clearings, the brush was pretty damn dense and I had little doubt I could come within hand’s reach of a deer with neither of us the wiser in the thicker spots. Seemed wise to me that I be ready to shoot at a moment’s notice at that point.
Any experienced hunter has plenty of stories about the weird shit they’ve seen; I’m no exception. I’ve seen the rotting head of one buck still antler-locked onto the head of another. I’ve even seen coyotes playing with a doll’s head in the middle of the woods, but I’ve never heard of a herd of deer ignoring a predator.
When I emerged from dense brush into the edge of a clearing and spotted deer, I lurched to a sudden halt and froze. I didn’t stumble into them, per se, but I was a lot closer to them than I expected. Several seconds spent with my breath held and my heart beating in my ears passed before it occurred to me that none of them were looking in my direction. I know I’ve been making noise, why haven’t they run? Gotta be that perk.
Not about to look a gift horse in the mouth, I slowly settled into a crouch while eyeballing the herd in front of me and slowly, quietly drawing my arrow most of the way back, far enough I could hold the half-draw without much effort. Single buck, at least a half-dozen velvet covered points, four does, and something like a dozen spotted fawns. The entire group was meandering away from me, which certainly helped me in terms of avoiding their attention but made any sort of shot inadvisable.
My eyes flicked to the clearing’s sides. How far can I push Some Dude? Can I skirt off to the sides? Before I could think further, one of the fawns bounced away from the herd, off to one side. One of the does made a distinctly unhappy grunt, which caught the buck’s attention. He changed direction, half coming about to look back toward the herd, back toward me.
Without thinking, I finished the draw and loosed as I rose.
All hell broke loose in the clearing the moment my bow broke the silence. Every animal fled in moments, including the buck I’d just shot.
Well shit. I hit it, right? Unamused and suddenly embarrassed at my apparent impatience, I used the shiny new bow sling I’d just bought and plodded my way over to where the buck had been when I shot it. Either I’d hit it in the vitals and it wouldn’t get far, or I missed and I’d never see it or that arrow again.
