Errant, Volume Two, page 16
Fog veiled the town as Aspen and Charm rode out the next morning, their horses’ hooves striking the cobblestones and then eventually thudding against the packed earth of a country road. Aspen’s grouchy old healer friend Tescui had a cousin of some kind in a village called Nauvis, and Aspen was sure he’d host them for a couple of days while she plotted a course through the wilderness. Charm had shrugged. She wasn’t in any particular hurry for this journey to end.
If it took them a long time to get home—if Aspen couldn’t leave her yet—that would be all right.
She didn’t like to think of how she’d spend her days when Aspen wasn’t in them anymore.
Luckily, Charm was skilled at not thinking of things she didn’t want to think about, so she enjoyed the cool air of the forest and the level, easy riding. Aspen probably knew what these trees were, but Charm had never seen any that were quite so tall. She couldn’t have wrapped her arms around any of the tree trunks in sight. The forest was also curiously spacious. It would be possible to ride a horse through it. Still, she was grateful for the locals who’d gone to the trouble of building such a straight, well-kept road.
After a few hours of blessedly uneventful riding, they came upon a strange display in the road. Ruby reared when she saw the huge arch spanning the road, and Charm slid off in an ungraceful dismount. Aspen dropped easily from Mouse’s back and went to calm the other mare.
Charm dusted herself off and examined the arch. It was built of twining branches and covered with hundreds of varieties of impossibly brilliant flowers. Ribbons hanging from the top fluttered in the breeze.
“It’s Rain Moon,” Aspen said. “None of those things should be blooming yet.”
“So it’s magic of some kind,” Charm said. Mist magic was all she knew, and that was only good for one thing. Maybe this was Earth witches or Moon witches—they could do all kinds of things. “Do you think it’s for the Spring Equinox?”
“Maybe,” Aspen said. “There’s no indication of what it’s for. The horses don’t like it.”
“It would be nice if it had a helpful explanatory sign,” Charm agreed. “As for the horses, when I rode Ruby to meet you in Orcester, she saw a stick by the side of the road and got spooked. Maybe if I walk through and show her it’s not dangerous?”
Aspen and the horses made roughly the same dubious expression.
“I’m coming with you,” Aspen said.
“It’s a floral arch,” Charm said. “How dangerous could it be?”
She took Aspen’s hand anyway. Aspen didn’t stop her.
They walked through. Nothing happened. They walked a few more steps. Charm dropped Aspen’s hand, twirled around, and called to Ruby through the arch, “See? It’s fine.”
Both horses stared at her.
“We’ll just have to go under it with them,” Charm said. She walked toward the arch and found herself abruptly yanked backward. “Aspen, let go of me. I’m not a kitten you can grab by the scruff of the neck.”
“I’m not touching you.”
Charm turned slowly. Nothing hindered her progress. Aspen was perhaps five steps away, perplexed.
“Why did you stop and jerk back like that?” Aspen asked. “I didn’t touch you.”
“You mentioned,” Charm muttered. “Walk away.”
“What?”
“Take a few steps away from me. We have to test this.”
Ever obliging, Aspen turned and began to walk. On her second step, it was as if a rope had pulled taut between them. Not only did Aspen move like something had pulled her back, Charm felt it.
Holy Esmuste, Queen of the Mists, this was Charm’s fault. She’d wished Aspen wouldn’t leave her and now some unseen force had tied them together. Shit, shit, shit. She was never admitting that out loud.
“Um,” Aspen said. When she turned around, her cheeks were faintly pink. An adorable overreaction—it wasn’t like she’d fallen on her ass in the dirt. “I think we’re sort of… tied together. By magic.”
“Yeah, I got that,” Charm said. “But it was probably the arch, right? So let’s walk back through and undo it. Should be easy enough.”
“Right.”
“No, no, you have to say it with feeling. Don’t draw it out and trail off, that makes it sound like you don’t believe me. Come on.” Charm linked arms with Aspen. “Back through the arch. Just a few steps.”
There might as well have been a pane of glass under the arch. They could see the road—and the horses, who seemed to regard them with pity—but no matter how many times they tried to reverse their path under the arch, they couldn’t pass. Going around to either side proved equally impossible.
“Well,” Charm said, slightly frazzled after so many failed attempts, but still aiming for optimism and confidence, “from what I can tell, we foolishly walked into some kind of magical trap and now we can’t retrace our steps or walk more than six paces from each other. But things could be worse!”
“Like, say, we could be separated from our horses and provisions and stranded in the middle of the wilderness?” Aspen asked.
“That too.”
“And nobody knows where we are.”
“But we’re uninjured. And there’s this nice straight road ahead of us, and we were going to Nauvis anyway, so we might as well just keep going. Maybe somebody there can help us.”
Aspen narrowed her eyes. “Why aren’t you complaining about this? Aren’t you worried?”
“Why would I be worried? I’m very clever and resourceful and you have a sword.” Charm deployed her brightest smile.
“Oh, that’s my only good quality? The sword?”
Charm considered the question at length and finally said, “Well, you do have all those muscles.”
That made Aspen laugh, which was good because it was good to hear Aspen laugh, and also because when she was laughing, she wasn’t wondering about the peculiar nature of their predicament and whether it was Charm’s fault.
5
It was Aspen’s fault that they were stuck. She should probably confess already. If she hadn’t been thinking about how much she didn’t want to leave Charm, about how nice it felt when Charm took her hand, then the arch would’ve stayed an inert floral arrangement and they’d be trotting down the path on horseback by now.
But Charm didn’t seem bothered, and maybe she was right that there’d be help in Nauvis, so continuing down the path struck Aspen as the best option for now. There wasn’t an urgent reason she had to mention exactly what she’d been thinking about. She could let Charm believe it was a random magical coincidence until circumstances made the truth necessary.
It wasn’t so bad, strolling through the forest with Charm on a mild, late winter day.
It wasn’t so bad until the road ended at a steep cliff. A canyon opened in the forest, a river raging through the gorge at the bottom, hundreds of feet below.
A single, precarious rope bridge was strung from one side to the other.
“What the fuck,” Charm said.
“This wasn’t on the map,” Aspen said. “It’s not possible. This canyon doesn’t exist.”
“It looks pretty fucking existent to me,” Charm said. “And I guess it’s not possible like it wasn’t possible for those flowers to be in bloom so early.”
“You think this whole canyon is a product of magic?”
Charm lifted and dropped her shoulders elegantly. “You can talk to horses and I can turn into Mist.”
“But this… it can’t be the work of a single Earth witch. There would have to be at least a dozen people working in concert to do something like this, maybe more. That’s a huge expenditure of power. For what?”
“I don’t know,” Charm said. “But I don’t think asking why the canyon exists is going to get us across it.”
Aspen walked to the cliff edge. Charm followed, but stayed a few steps back. The rope bridge had wooden slats across the bottom, or it used to. Now the footing was more gaps than slats. At least the posts on either side of the canyon that secured the ropes looked relatively sturdy, unlike the single, weathered rope at about waist height meant as a handhold.
Aspen could probably crawl across using the lower ropes for handholds. Even with gloves, it would rub her palms raw, and it would be a struggle to get from one plank to the next—she might have to make a few leaps—but she could do it.
“I can cross it,” Aspen said.
“Yeah, there’s just one problem,” Charm said. She took a big stride backward, forcing Aspen to step closer to her or be yanked off-balance.
“Oh.” Aspen didn’t want to avert her eyes and shuffle her feet at every reminder of their predicament, but she probably looked equally silly being so stiff. “Could you just… follow me and step where I step?”
“Aspen, you’re at least a head taller than me and far stronger. I appreciate your faith in me, but let’s be practical. Remember that if I step wrong and tumble into the abyss, you’re coming down with me.”
“Would you rather go first, then?”
Charm went a little grey. “I’d rather not go at all.”
They both knew that wasn’t an option.
“It’s not that far,” Aspen said in her most reassuring voice. “We’ll have to go slowly and be careful, but the bridge really isn’t that long.”
“It’s the drop that concerns me.”
And all the churning water below.
“I won’t let you fall,” Aspen said, and even though she meant it with all her heart, she knew it wasn’t a promise anyone could keep. “You hold on and you follow me and you put one foot in front of the other.”
The bridge creaked under Aspen’s boots. To begin, she put one hand on the rope handhold and held the other out for balance. The rope went taut when Charm grabbed it, and the bridge swung a little as she stepped onto it.
The wooden planks weren’t too far apart on this side, so Aspen picked her way across them, trying to ignore how much the sway of the bridge and the force of the wind felt like being on the root-forsaken boat. This was different; she had control. Every step was one step closer.
Charm clamped a hand onto her waist, her fingers digging into the snakeskin leather vest. Aspen didn’t mind. If Charm was grabbing her, Charm was still with her. Aspen could salve her bruises later.
The bridge dipped low in the middle. Aspen placed her boot onto the lowest plank, testing it, and the whole structure wobbled with the change in weight. Charm stepped behind her, pressed close enough that there was no air between their bodies.
Aspen might have enjoyed that—or felt guilty about enjoying it—in other circumstances.
Here, there was only the next step.
It was a long gap to the next plank. Aspen could stretch her legs to get across, but there was no way Charm was tall enough. She’d have to jump.
The bridge rolled and groaned under them. The missing planks framed a long rectangle of clear drop into the dark, roiling river.
Aspen shouldn’t have looked.
“Charm,” she said, raising her voice over the wind. “You’ll have to jump to the next one.”
“What? No, no, I can’t, Aspen—”
“Can you… be Mist?”
“No. I don’t have enough control over where I end up when I come back. Not with the bridge moving so much and all this empty air around us.”
“Then you have to jump,” Aspen said, as steady as she could, a counterbalance to the pitching and shaking of the bridge. “I won’t let you fall. Let go of me. Watch me cross the gap. I’ll be waiting for you on the other side.”
Charm dug her fingers in harder. “Aspen, I can’t do this.”
“It’s the only way across. I would carry you, but I need my hands.” Aspen twisted to glimpse her face. The whites of her eyes were huge. “Listen, Charm. You can do this. It’s like acting, right? You just have to become someone who isn’t afraid.”
Charm’s laugh was more of a shudder. “You place a lot of faith in my acting abilities.”
“It’s not faith. You can play any role and we both know it. You only have to play this one for a moment. Believe you can do it. I do.”
Charm took a deep breath, nodded, and let go of Aspen.
Aspen took one long stride across the gap and clenched the rope with both hands once she got over. Between the boat and the bridge, she really, really missed solid ground.
Her invisible tie to Charm wasn’t at its limit—if it had been, she’d never have made it across—but she could feel it strung taut between them. The rope bridge had more slack. Aspen made as much space for Charm to land as she could.
The wind tugged at Charm’s cloak, sometimes pressing it to her body, sometimes making it billow. A few tendrils of hair had come loose from her braid and whipped around her face. She closed her eyes. There was the tiniest of shifts in her footing, a bend in her knees, and then she launched herself toward Aspen.
Her arc through the air seemed to take forever.
And yet it wasn’t long enough. Not enough time to realize Charm would fall short, lunge forward, reach for her, catch her, and pull her safety. Aspen moved fast, but still Charm slipped through her grasp.
Charm screamed when her feet failed to find the plank.
Her hands caught it instead, slapping and scraping against the wood. The tether between them drew so tight Aspen couldn’t breathe.
She knelt and took Charm’s hands.
“Let me go,” Charm said. The wind plucked tears from her lashes. “You can’t pull me up. I’ll pull you down and then we’ll both die. That’s stupid. Let me go.”
“Absolutely not.”
Charm dangled from the bridge and the whole structure careened left to right. Aspen tried to pull her up. It was hard work. Harder than it should have been—she should have been able to brace herself against solid ground, but nothing about the bridge felt trustworthy.
“I don’t want to be the reason you die,” Charm said. “You could make it across without me.”
“I couldn’t,” Aspen said, grunting with effort. “And not just because of the tie.”
The tie. Aspen could feel it, an invisible, intangible rope around her waist, dragging her toward Charm. She’d been thinking of it as a burden, a danger, but what if it wasn’t?
“Charm,” Aspen said. “What if the tie can save us?”
“How?”
“Don’t panic, but I’m gonna let go. You keep holding on to me, though.” Aspen had been holding Charm just under her shoulders. She lifted her hand and groped at the air between them, thinking of how she’d told Charm to believe. “To whatever magic entity or god is in charge of this thing, please, please let me be right about this.”
Her hand snagged on something. The tether. She couldn’t see it, but she could feel it. Maybe it was her imagination, but it was thick and rough like the jute ropes that composed the bridge. Aspen worked out its dimensions and then grabbed it with both hands and pulled.
It worked.
Once she’d been raised high enough, Charm was able to scramble onto the planks next to Aspen. Sitting on their knees, they panted in silence, holding each other close. Aspen felt a little seasick at the thought of standing.
“We made it a little over halfway,” she told Charm. “We can do this.”
“I’d be fine to just live out the rest of my life on this plank,” Charm said. “I’m very comfortable.”
“I’m not,” Aspen said. “And we’re going together.”
Charm gave her the laziest of salutes, and then Aspen set about the work of standing, her thigh muscles protesting her long, slow, cautious rise. Charm waited until Aspen was all the way upright and two steps ahead before she tried, which was good, because Charm’s balance wasn’t as assured and Aspen had to catch her around the waist to make sure they didn’t go tumbling down.
Every step was a calculation and every little wobble in the bridge sent blood roaring into Aspen’s ears. But if she gave up, Charm would die. So she didn’t.
When Aspen’s boot touched solid ground, she whooped with joy and bounded forward, forcing Charm to stumble behind her and shout. Aspen turned to catch her and then whirled her around.
“Put me down! I never want to be up in the air again!”
“Good point,” Aspen said. She set Charm down and then let herself fall flat.
Charm laughed and then lay down in the road dirt next to her. She made a gesture that encompassed the ground and the forest and said, “Now this, this is comfortable. I could live out the rest of my life here.”
“Well, it’s nicer than the bridge, I’ll give you that,” Aspen said.
6
Dusk fell with unnatural suddenness as they walked. The magical tether between them shivered, and Charm knew without looking that Aspen had tensed. She was attuned to the rhythms of the natural world; she wouldn’t like this.
Charm didn’t much care for it, either.
“Another test,” Aspen said.
“Maybe we lost track of time and it really is nightfall,” Charm said. Despite the mild temperature, it was still Rain Moon. Darkness would come earlier in the forests outside Nauvis than it had in Ozhleh Zna.
One step further disabused her of that optimism. She crossed some invisible border and a shimmer of light flowed from her feet to her head. Her old clothes, grimy with fear sweat and road dust, were replaced with an extravagant, full-skirted dress of dark blue silk, sparkling with silver-and-gold embroidery. Her tangled braid had lifted from her neck and her hair was now piled elegantly atop her head. At least, Charm assumed it was elegant. When she touched her head, her fingers met the cool metal of what must be some kind of diadem. She could feel something similar resting at the base of her neck. Long earrings, too.
The sorts of things she’d love to steal.
A few paces away, Aspen was muttering darkly as she took in her own new clothes: knee-length breeches, a waistcoat, and a frock coat that came to mid-thigh, all in the same dark blue that Charm was wearing, all with the same metallic embroidery. Even her shoes—slippers with a low, square heel—matched. She had on immaculately white silk stockings.
