Andrew Hartley - Act of Will

Lisha’s black eyes glittered at me and I felt my irritation and resentment shining through like torchlight.

“We’ll find something more exciting for you later,” she said.

“What?” I murmured, unconvincingly. “No, this is fine. Great. Right up my street, is this. Dialect books. Brilliant.”

She just nodded and I felt stupid again.

“Perhaps you can research those old tales of the lands we are visiting,” she said.

“All that magic and sorcery bollocks?” I said. “Sure. If you like.”

Keep me safe and fed and I’ll read whatever rubbish you like , I thought.

The next room was a gym, hewn out of the stone and running below the foundations of the houses above. As Orgos was to demonstrate over the next hour, you could tone and strengthen every major muscle in the body with the stuff they had in there, a pretty depressing prospect for a man like me, as was the announcement that I was to “eat more healthily” from here on. No more bacon, in other words. Probably leaves, and the odd handful of seeds.

“After lunch,” said Orgos, apparently unironically, “we’ll see if we can get you up on a horse for a while. Bring your crossbow and you can practice that too. If we have time, we could go for a quick swim in the harbor and then have one more workout before bed.”

Great. All my life I had avoided weapons, exercise, a sensible diet, horses, and water. Now they were all I had.

My book on dialects was dry as a Hrof well and turgid as. well, something very, very turgid that I can’t think of at the moment. One particularly riveting chapter was “Major Inflectional Features and Word Usage Common to Shale and Its Environs.” A real corker.

It was tough to believe, but I started to prefer the prospect of perching on the back of a horse to reading. At least up in the saddle I had the challenge of controlling my bowels as the beast started to move, and as the days went by and I continued to avoid some horrible, limb-mangling accident, it became, if not actually enjoyable, then at least less nauseating. A week wasn’t going to turn me into a rider (nor would it make me a weapon master) but I began to feel fractionally less terrified up there and that, Orgos assured me, was half the battle.

The swimming was a very different story. Only once in the whole week did I get out of my depth, and then I was so convinced that I was going to drown that I almost did. By the fourth day I had made no progress whatsoever and it seemed that my fear of water was actually increasing. I told Orgos that my body didn’t float. I wasn’t sure what the problem was but I just wasn’t a buoyant kind of person.

“Right,” he said unhelpfully, and pushed me off the dock. I yelled and gargled quite a bit, but when he showed no sign of coming in after me, I floated. Sort of. By the end of the week I still couldn’t swim a stroke but I didn’t automatically equate any body of water larger than a bath with certain death.

As for the Empire, things had been quiet. I was even getting used to seeing their casual patrols, which frequented the markets and dockyards. Down by the water there were always crowds of people hawking and trading their wares or their favors, and you could easily lose yourself in the crowds if panic set in. A pair of soldiers leaned on a fishing boat one day and laughed as I flailed about in the water. In Cresdon I might be a notorious rebel; in Stavis I was just some kid who couldn’t swim.

On Monday evening we had a meeting which began with Lisha checking off a list to see if they had missed anything. They hadn’t. Naturally. The boxes and crates and bags had been packed, transported to the harbor, and loaded aboard a light trading vessel with a cargo of mahogany. It was bound for shores east of Greycoast but would, for a fee already settled, deposit us in a serviceable port in southern Shale. We were to leave at seven the next morning, and should arrive by the end of the week, weather permitting.

They smiled and clinked their rare celebratory beer mugs with anticipation. They were excited. I was hungry and aching and dreading the journey, but when they grinned and drank, I joined them, as if I was one of them.

The ship in which we were about to sail round 240 miles of coastline was called the Cormorant and was, as I should have guessed, a leaky old crate that didn’t look like it would make it out of the harbor. I told Garnet that there was no way I was getting on that beat-up piece of driftwood, but he just gave a knowing smile and lugged his bag up the gangplank.

I watched him get on board and was suddenly struck by the sense of being on the threshold of a life-changing decision. I had stuck with them this long because I needed them to get me out of Cresdon and because they were useful allies in an unfamiliar and hostile world in which I knew nobody. But get on that boat, and everything would change, even if it didn’t sink as soon as we hit open sea. This was the point of no return.

I turned and looked across the dockyard into the gaze of an Empire trooper, one whom I had seen in a local tavern three nights before. He was with another soldier and they were both looking at me and muttering to each other.

They couldn’t have recognized me. Surely. Not now. I dropped my eyes to my bag and tried to look busy, fumbling with panic.

The boat was ready to go, but a glance told me that the guards were still watching. By the time I picked up my bag and turned to the ship, they were coming over, slowly, uncertainly, each seeming to follow the other.

“Garnet!” I called, trying to sound unconcerned. He paused in the midst of passing a crate up onto the ship and peered from me to the two soldiers, who had picked up their pace significantly. He called to Renthrette and then stooped to pick something up: a bow. I turned to the soldiers quickly.

“Everything all right, Officer?” I said, smiling blandly.

“I saw you the other night,” said one of them. “I thought you looked familiar.”

“Really?” I said, my heart fluttering. “Just one of those faces, I suppose.”

“No,” said the other, taking a step towards me. “I know you. I recognized you when I saw you the other night, but I couldn’t place you.”

I smiled and shrugged. “Oh?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Till two months ago, I was stationed in Cresdon.”

Oh, hell.

For a moment I could think of nothing to say.

“You’re Rufus Ramsbottom, aren’t you,” he said, thrusting his hand into mine. “The actor.”

He was smiling, his eyes bright, his cheeks flushed.

I blinked.

“Yes,” I said, taking his hand and shaking it. “Yes, I am.”

I scribbled my name-or, rather, Rufus’s-on whatever they put in front of me and then sort of glided over to the Cormorant to find Renthrette and Garnet warily unstringing their bows, their eyes fixed on me. I wasn’t sure whom they would have shot first, the soldiers or me.

I watched the soldiers from the rail, my heart still thumping. Any minute I expected them to realize that I was not the actor-and I use that term in its loosest and most degraded sense-Rufus Ramsbottom, but the actor, rebel, and fugitive for whom new torturous means of execution were being devised, Will Hawthorne. We were out of port before I relaxed enough to realize that if this had indeed been the point of no return, I had just made a career choice.

The captain had his eye on Renthrette from the outset. I saw the drunken half-wit leering at her as she watched Stavis fall behind us, and knew then that there would be trouble.