Austin Grossman - You

On the far side of the mountain, the country was different. You met your first dwarves. They’d heard of your country, but maybe one in four could name the king, and none could speak the language.

You moved north through the forest lands while the long summer lasted, following the track of a lazy green river. At night you heard bats hunting in the warm air. You crossed a low stone wall that once marked the border of a farm. No one had lived there for centuries. You had never felt that alone, or that free. After weeks of travel you reached the northern ocean, and walked east.

Caracalla is a city you didn’t know, a northern city that trades with the hunting and mining tribes. No one you knew, no one from your family, had ever been there. At first, tradesmen looked askance at your currency. You decided to wait a few days before booking passage north.

You slept alone at an inn that first night, lying awake long into the dark. The city was never quite silent. You heard bells, here and there a shout, the yowl of a cat, or hooves. You smelled horses, dirt, the ocean.

In the darkness you thought again about who you were before this, a life you remember less and less well, but what you remember doesn’t flatter you. You remembered lying to people about what you were thinking and feeling. You remembered constantly thinking about how unhappy you were. It was very different from the way you are now, before you wore a dagger and slept in forests.

You fell asleep trying to count days, trying to guess how many weeks are left before the snow will cut off the mountain passes. In the morning you learned how to negotiate with a sailor. You’re not sure if you’re here for forgetfulness or redemption, but you notice they’re not calling you a vizier anymore. They call you a wizard.

Brennan has an easy time on the road. High strength, endurance, hit points, medium speed. All weapons usable, bonus with long sword or dagger. When the rain comes he lets it fall on his broad bare shoulders, but ties his long hair up in a bun over his round, boyish face. Bandits are nothing to him, he’s—God, twelfth level or something. He faced down the spider queen herself in her mountain lair. He can let his mind wander.

There was a yellow patch in the snow by the side of the roadway. They stood around it, eight of them, mildly puzzled. There was a faint smell of wood smoke, but otherwise the mountains were silent.

Your two cousins exchanged glances behind your back. They were each fifteen years older, almost twice your age, but a few inches shorter. You outranked them by birth, but they’d ridden this way a dozen times before, and the bearers had long since stopped looking at you for confirmation of your orders.

Your father was getting older, and your brother was spending more and more time running the place, so it was your turn to ride out with the annual tribute caravan, through the pass and over the mountains you’d heard of but never seen, carrying your family’s third-best sword to the stronghold of the House of Aerion.

“Bandits, maybe. We’ll go have a look,” Eran said, the dark one. The two older men set off through the trees, up a short ridge and out of sight, one looking back to make sure you and the others stayed put. But the snow was half a foot deep and it was getting on to sunset, and the other men got cold fast. The wait was awkward; the party had run out of things to chat about an hour into the first day.

What if your cousins weren’t coming back? What was happening? Sound didn’t carry well in the snow. After ten minutes of looking at the other men and the darkening sky, you cleared your throat and said, “I’ll just look. To see what’s happening.”

You climbed the ridge and looked off into empty pine forest. Your cousins’ trail was clear. You walked quickly, breaking through the snow at each step, already feeling too hot in your chain mail. Up ahead you heard what might be a man’s grunt—how far off? You started to jog, then ran to a cleared space, where your cousins were fighting four men.

They stood, swords drawn, with their backs to a tree. Berik, the fair one, was on one knee, with no wound showing but drops of blood in the snow around him. Four men were fanned out in front of them. They were dark-skinned, wearing embroidered cloaks. Southerners? Two held spears with bronze heads; one had a broad, short sword of old and discolored metal. One had a proper heavy longsword. It seemed silly, four against two, the kind of fight you’d fall into while goofing around at the end of arms practice. You weren’t supposed to win, just have fun battling the odds.

No one looked at you. Eran rushed the swordsman on his extreme left, trying to push him away from the others. Berik turned to watch, and a man put a spear into him, soundlessly, once and then twice to be sure. Metal was banging against metal. You stepped forward and lunged at the spearman’s neck with your sword. It went right in and stuck there. It was like a trick, a sword through a man’s neck, made more absurd by the way the man stuck out his arms and looked around. You wanted to laugh, but another man with a sword ran at you and tackled you. You landed on your back, then twisted to the top, the way you used to wrestle your brothers, except this was a stranger, heavy and stinking of sweat and smoke and thrashing under you, biting unfairly as your brothers never would, and that was the enraging thing. You shifted your weight and pinned the man’s sword arm with your left hand and got your right forearm stuck under the man’s chin and pushed with all your strength for long, long seconds, long after you would have let up in a play fight. You held it there until your opponent stopped moving and someone jabbed you rudely in the small of your armored back.

You rolled to your feet with the attacker’s tarnished short sword in your hand. How had it gotten dark so fast? You remembered now how Eran had been calling your name for some time, then he’d stopped and turned into one of the black shapes on the ground.

Now you felt warm, like you could make the world go in slow motion. The last man was small, thick under his cloak, with wide-set eyes. He was castle-trained but fatally tired, and he knew it. It was almost too easy to knock his blade out of the centerline, slip his guard, and strike him in the temple with the hilt. The thought, involuntary, was that you were killing the third man of your life and no one was watching. You never knew who they were or what started the fight.

Your father’s men had gone, in which direction you couldn’t tell. It was starting to snow. You sobbed a few times with shock and exhaustion. The strangers’ camp wasn’t that far. You sat in the dark under the firs and watched snow fall, hissing into the coals. Your cousins were freezing solid a hundred yards away. Your mind jumped from one image to the next, Berik dying, the swordsman’s blue eyes, climbing the stairs of the roundhouse in summer, your cousins talking about a peasant girl they’d shared, a girl you’d grown up with.

You woke up three or four times in the night, terrified, thinking you heard voices, and that was when you realized that what you dreaded most now was your father’s men coming back to find you and take you back to your old life, your coward of a father, and the name of a house that would never rise again. In two weeks, you thought, you could be anywhere.

I bought Brennan a shield with a griffin on it, crimson on a field of gold.

Prendar is the only one left. Quick and stealthy, with devastating surprise attacks. Forbidden from wearing metal armor, but bow, dagger, and sword are all permitted.

You can imagine Prendar’s home as clearly as you can your own. It was a muddy village of three hundred at most. Everyone knew him, everyone knew his mother was gone, and everyone knew his father worked his field during the day and at night sat in his home in the dark like a fucking ghost. He learned his letters from a priest who came through once every two weeks and taught whoever would listen. He knew the long chants that told the history of the world, and he could draw the shape of the entire continent in the dirt, with a dot for where the village was.