Mandollel screams. He stands far away on the edge of the camp, but his voice is like iron grinding on iron. It cuts right through the distance and the Kertharian wailing and makes it seem almost mild in comparison. Black smoke rises from the holes in Rworg’s body.

  The mage is standing on opposite side of the clearing, behind where Rworg fell. His hand is stretched out, fingers splayed. Last wisps of blue smoke disperse into the air. He doesn’t cheer or look victorious. His gaze lands on me and he snarls, opens his mouth to scream the damn Kertharian wail again.

  I jerk to lie on my back. There’s no time to stand up and I have to hold the bow nearly horizontally. I’ve practiced shooting the bow in any possible angle, imagining scenarios I could end up in. This is actually one of them. Getting strength into the shot like this is difficult and the arrow tends to go much higher than intended, but to compensate for both, I aim at his crotch.

  The arrow strikes him in his open mouth, right in the middle. The mage drops like a marionette that had its strings cut. Not falling backwards, but crumbling down, limp like a noodle.

  I push myself up, using my bow for support. Mandollel rushes past me to kneel beside Rworg. His sword clatters and rolls on the ground, discarded as he slides to a halt. He rolls Rworg over, moving the large man easily.

  Rworg grunts and his hand rises to grab at Mandollel’s arm. “Help me up, elf. We’re not done.”

  Mandollel laughs, tears streaking his face.

  Rworg snickers but coughs, grimaces, grunts. His fingers dig into Mandollel’s bicep and the elf winces and leans toward the grip.

  Mandollel presses Rworg’s hand down. “Folke, the rest is up to you and Finna!” he shouts, grabbing at a bottle on his belt.

  There aren’t many Kertharian voices left anymore. They are all toward one side of the camp, where Finna ran earlier.

  “Lead them here!” I shout as hard as I can.

  I plant my feet on the ground, nock a new arrow. Some have scattered from my quiver on the ground as I fell, but there are still enough left for the voices that I hear. My teeth press together and I unclench them. As Lille always said, no matter the situation, stay loose. I forget Mandollel tending to Rworg behind my back. The dead Kertharians around the fire pit, the mage with the arrow sprouting from his mouth. I relax my arm, make my face soft as I wait.

  Finna skids into sight from between the tents. She takes four steps before a soldier appears from behind the same tent. He manages to take three steps. The arrow strikes him in the chest. His legs try to continue his run forward as the rest of him falls. His heels fly into the air before he crashes down on his back, arrow pointing up. Finna flinches to the side and ducks, but it’s not like I was going to hit her. I have the second arrow drawn back, waiting for the next Kertharian.

  Blood thunders in my ears.

  Finna throws herself on the ground and my arrow whistles above her. The next Kertharian has a shield and he raises it just in time to catch the arrow. Wood cracks and splinters, but the arrow stops half-way through the shield. He takes a step to balance himself and peeks out from behind his shield. That’s when I shoot him in the eye. His head jerks back, but two more Kertharians run into view from the other side of the corridor of tents.

  They wear no armor, they wield tools from the stables. In any imaginable situation they would be pleading for mercy or running away or trying to hide. Yet these two men run straight at us, shouting and singing with voices raw and teeth bared. Not even glancing at the corpses surrounding them. In any other situation I would call out to them, asking them to stop, telling them to surrender.

  Finna sees Rworg behind my back and her face falls. Her mouth opens into a shout and she scrambles ahead, staying low, running crouched down like a kid pretending to be a dog. The Kertharians run at me in a straight line.

  I shoot. The first man goes down, but the second one doesn’t flinch or slow down his dash toward me. Not until he drops on his knees and rolls forward for a full turn, arrow through the lung, carried by his earlier momentum.

  I pull out a new arrow. It’s the second to last in the quiver. Finna reaches me and stands up, knees and hands brown with sand and dirt. On her, it’s not much of a difference.

  “It’s over,” she says.

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  My arrow is pulled half back on the string, eyes scanning the camp. It’s quiet. No one is shouting anymore. We’ve killed them all.

  Finna pushes me, slaps my shoulder. “It’s over! Help him!”

  The bow drops from my hand. I rush to Mandollel, who’s still crouching over Rworg. He is tying a bandage over Rworg’s chest, but why? No one could survive what happened to him. The darts looked exactly like the ones Lictor shot at Corum and what Mandollel himself used on the teratome. They blasted chunks out of solid stone floor, blew apart the armor of the bug like a rock thrown into water. He has to have bled out by now, or at the very least soon.

  Finna reaches them before me. Her foot hits the empty bottle and it skids to the other side of the clearing, clattering over the ground before coming to a stop. “You used it all on him?” she asks.

  Mandollel shakes his head. “It’s still not enough. I’m not sure if he’ll make it.”

  The bodies lie around us. Only the torches crackle, their oily smell covering the smell of blood. Rworg breathes peacefully, but there’s sweat on his brow and blood seeps through the bandages Mandollel wrapped around his chest. Even after the ambrosia, the wounds still bleed.

  I shudder as I remember Lictor shooting hundreds of darts at Corum. The Kertharian mage managed three.

  “I made him sleep. He’d just try to get up otherwise,” Mandollel says. He rubs the back of his neck as he paces in a circle around the clearing. “The ambrosia staunched the bleeding, restarted his heart. It even cleared the blood from his lungs.”

  Finna crouches next to Rworg, fingers tracing the bandages. “But?”

  “He might live, but he can’t fight, or move. For months. And we’re out of ambrosia.”

  Finna tightens one of the bandages. “We’re out of time as well. We need to get moving.”

  Mandollel shakes his head. Even he doesn’t seem to know what to say. He walks to the command tent and pushes the flap to step inside.

  Rworg makes a small noise in his sleep. A yip or a whimper.

  He saved me. He didn’t even know me, or at least I didn’t know him. Yet he was the first to step in when I wanted to attack the camp to save the village. People he didn’t know and who are Veloneans, foreign to him. I didn’t find and handle the mages in time and he stepped in, again, in the way this time, to save me.

  We need him. And I owe him. Yet we’re out of ambrosia and we can’t get more. I saw the way the wounds started to knit together after Mandollel poured the stuff on him. Red meat scabbing, blood clotting and small nicks scabbing over instantly.

  I didn’t get to watch it happen this close after Ral, our village’s elder, had his fight with the teratome. The monster spat out its teeth, sharp and long as daggers, straight through his stomach. The wounds should have been deadly, even if it would have taken him days to die. Lille used the only bottle of ambrosia we had on him, pouring it over his torn mid-section. By the time the bottle was empty, he was already complaining she used too much.

  “We took the teratome down. We can distill more,” she said, pressing him to lie back down on the bed.

  That’s it!

  That’s it. Teratome blood can heal. There’s a teratome near. And we always win the fight against it, Lictor said. Even if it did kill me the last time, but this time will be different.

  The worst part about hunting teratomes is that you never know what to expect. Yet that doesn’t apply when the Mountain Ride is part of the equation. “We can save him.”

  Finna stops what she is doing.

  “We need him. You know Lictor said we’ll need all four of us. I know a way how we can heal him.”

  “How?” Finna asks. She’s continues pulling a ring from the finger of the mage who shot Rworg. She has already emptied his pockets and spread the trinkets around on the ground around the corpse.

  I lick my lips. “You might not like it. Or believe it’s possible.”

  Mandollel pushes his way out of the command tent. He has the large map rolled up under his arm. “Folke, we have been living the same day for weeks. We’re transporting a device to shift a whole nation 30 years into the future. I think we’re past being surprised.” Of course he heard the discussion, even when that far away and rummaging inside a tent.

  Finna grunts and yanks the ring off, lifting it near to a torch to peer at it. “Yeah, what he said.”

  I guess that makes sense. “We kill a teratome and boil its blood to—“

  “Yuck!” Finna says.

  “This is not the time for jokes,” Mandollel says.

  I glare at them. Rworg makes a small snoring noise on the ground.

  Finna watches me for a while, then pulls her head back, frowning. “Wait, are you serious?”

  “Teratomes heal. That’s their whole thing! Their blood can be purified to be used for healing.” I don’t mention that Lille said that you’d need to be either desperate or stupid or both to try it, but I feel pretty damn desperate right now. “I know teratomes. I’ve fought them and learned about them. Finna, you know there’s one nearby.”

  “Well, yes. But it’s gross. And Rworg is the one who always kills it.” She points a finger at him, lying on the ground.

  I’m waving my arms, turning from her to Mandollel and back. “We’re not on a Ride anymore! We can do new things. And he needs our help. Trust me, we can do this.”

  “We trusted you with this,” Mandollel says and waves a hand around the camp, ending his gesture with Rworg. “Now you’re asking us to risk another battle.”

  “I am. What is your alternative? Just leave him here? He deserves better. He saved me and he saved everyone in the village. Hundreds of lives!”

  “Only 97, actually,” Mandollel says and rises a hand on his brow. He presses it down and drags it over his face, massaging his right eye. “But I grant the rest of the mission would be much harder without him.”

  “I want to help him,” Finna says. Her face is pale, but jaw set. She stands, feet planted on the ground, not meeting either of our eyes, looking to the side. “He’s an ok guy.”

  A stone rolls off my heart. I could hug them both. “I’ll tell you all about hunting teratomes on the way. This one isn’t as dangerous as most, but we need to be careful.”

  Or at least I need to be. I’m not going to mention how I got impaled, speared through the throat, how my blood painted the forest red.

  No one said going on an adventure would be safe.

  Patreon is 7 chapters ahead of RR, but I actually didn't have time to put everything in place during the weekend. After posting this, I'm going to go and put up chapters 31 - 40. I hope to see you there!

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