Emma woke up with a headache. That was nothing new, she’d spent most of her adult life in varying states of sick and enfeebled for one reason or another. A lifetime of living off mac and cheese tended to do that to a girl.
Granted, it had never been quite so bad as it was now. What had she been doing the night before, anyway?
Ah, yes, getting my head stomped on by a bunch of angry vikings.
It was all coming back to her now. Painfully, sharply. Emma heard the sound of wheels rattling and wood creaking, looked around with her vision slowly clearing and saw she was bundled, shackled, onto the back of…A wagon. Huh.
“Hey, you.” A voice rang out, activating several of Emma’s formative memories all at once and causing her to reflexively blurt out a response without even realising it.
—”I’m finally awake. I was trying to cross the border, right? Walked right into that Imperial ambush.”
She looked around, and found several people staring in confusion at her. Some looked worried, others pitying, one scared. She grinned.
“Where are we?” Emma noted a few distinct ethnic features at play among the group. Most were certainly Aethiqi, that much was clear at a glance, but one or two had the pale skin and blonde hair she’d come to associate with Sculds. She wondered if she could verify by getting them to speak and gauging their accents.
“We’re nowhere.” A man answered, the one who’d first spoken to Emma when she woke up and, she noted, one of the maybe-Sculds. He certainly used their dialect.
Emma paused at that, considered his answer. They were…What, between realms? Caught in limbo? Did this magic world have some kind of afterlife?
No, stupid.
“We’re on the road,” she noted, “But where are we going to?”
“Vichin.” Another of the prisoners grumbled, face low and body…Trembling. It was more than a little disconcerting. Emma wasn’t used to full-on fear-tremors. It just didn’t happen, not in real life where most people never knew anything more dangerous than a speeding highway. She thought he might fall out of the wagon, so much was he shaking.
“I…Don’t know what Vichin is.” She continued, wincing slightly as she exposed her own ignorance.
The looks she received at that were about what she’d have expected, more or less the same kind Emma would’ve given someone back home if they’d told her they didn’t know what New York was. They did, however, lead to a few answers, when bolstered by some careful prodding. Which made them more than worth it.
Vichin was a smaller city, and the closest settlement in Scurlga to the Aethiqi border. That meant it had, naturally, become a slave-trading town. Turned out a lot of the profit on these wars was people. She shivered at that, but kept prying. Vichin had maybe a few thousand people, which apparently made it on the smaller side, and fell under the rule of Earl Ragni.
Her new friends had just gotten to talking about how the Earl was a snobby idiot who’d put his dumbass son in charge of a Warband which had led the half-cocked raid on Tepetlmoseua when one of their escorts—guards, he was a guard—took exception to hearing his leader badmouthed and hit someone.
That shut most of them up, but also brought a new source of conversation towards Emma. And she had a very, very burning question for him.
“Are you and your comrades planning on spit-roasting me?” She asked.
The man stared at her, baffled for a long moment before he finally spluttered out an answer.
“Wh…No?”
Emma frowned. “Are you sure? You can tell me if you are you know.”
“No.” He snapped. “No we’re not going to…do that to you.”
“Really? It’d be okay if you did.”
His jaw almost hit the floor. “What…”
“Well,” Emma added hastily, “Not okay, obviously, but I couldn’t exactly stop you, right? I mean, I’ve exhausted my magic, and you’re all so big and strong—” It was around then that the man just veered off from the wagon and gave Emma a very deliberately wide berth for the rest of the trip.
She turned back around to see several of the other prisoners grinning at her.
“Never seen a karl freaked out like that.” One of them snorted. “Nice going there, weird way to go about it but you bought us some privacy.”
“Hm?” She asked, distractedly. “Oh, right, yeah, I’m very clever. Anyway, who is the leader of this Warband, then?”This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
“Vari.” One of the maybe-Sculds spat, lip curling at the name’s very mention. “Little shit he is. Twenty years old and he thinks he knows more than any two karls twice his age. Only has his position because Earl Ragni handed it to him. Father helping son—a disgrace.”
Emma had gathered, so far, that Scurlga actually disapproved of nepotism for the most part. Inheritance was a thing, to some extent, but there was a steep tax on it, most going to the Pristhood and the other to the King. Even the King himself was elected by popular vote of his Jarls, who themselves were composed of any warrior who happened to prove themselves able to carve out a slice of territory by the strength of their own arm.
Vari was one of those Jarls who did not, and the contempt he got for being known as such probably contributed a lot to him doing dumb shit like trying to take the town with about two thirds as many warriors as he ought to have.
The hours slipped by, then a few days joined them. Emma chatted more with the prisoners, kept her head down when soldiers piped up, and grew steadily hungrier as she fed off the crummy bread and watery stew prisoners were apparently entitled to. It seemed odd, to her, that they were being fed at all, but then that was far from the most noteworthy thing about her situation.
One such thing was the grumpy man. Emma didn’t know his name, because he didn’t tell it to her. Didn’t speak at all, really. Not to her, and not to anyone else. He was pale and blonde, a Sculd she suspected, but didn’t engage with even his own countrymen as they rode.
Eventually, though, they were alone together. Or rather, shoved back on beside one another after one of their too-infrequent “shitting stops.” Grumpy didn’t try to speak to Emma, but she gave her best shot at bridging things from the other side.
“We haven’t talked much.” She began, only for him to cut her off by spitting. Literally spitting, like a lalma.
“And that’s just the way I’d like it, so keep to yourself and I’ll do likewise.”
Emma paused at that, having anticipated a great many things but nothing so blunt and direct as the response she’d gotten. People just didn’t speak to her like that. It wasn’t that being a young, pretty girl entitled her to politeness and niceties. It was just that she was inherently owed them, and people who didn’t show them were evil.
But these were, in fairness, viking raiders in a magic fantasy land. Evil wasn’t really saying much, even if she pretended they were real.
“Why is that?” She prodded. The man’s scowl deepened.
“Do you not understand what keeping to yourself means?” He cut back. Emma actually had to stop herself from flinching. She didn’t have a potion surging through her veins now—her strength enhancer had run out long ago, and she’d either lost her healing pots in the fighting or had them confiscated—so at the moment she was just little old her.
Which meant she was just a five-foot woman sitting within arms reach of a…Very big man. God, he was big. She was only just noticing, now, as she studied him. Sitting down seemed to de-fang the obviousness of such height gaps, but dear fuck he was big.
Emma felt her enthusiasm for irritating him suddenly dip.
She kept to herself, mouth rapidly dry. And not just because of the anxiety. Emma really wasn’t being given much water at all, not for all the time she was spending under the sun. With her talisman gone, and the wagon roofless, she was getting barbequed good and proper. Another day passed, and, thankfully, another night. Emma woke up the next morning with her skin aching, peeling and cracking. Sunburned. Brilliant.
She hadn’t gotten sunburned before, had she?
But then she’d been able to walk where she pleased, stick to shade. And the day after her really big trekk she’d downed a healing potion. Maybe this was just her getting the authentic regional weather at last.
Another day after that, Emma found her authentic regional weather was being cut short. Or, rather, it was growing even more intense, and changing somewhat. The heat died down, the sun obfuscated itself behind ever-thickening clouds, and as they made their way farther along a thick mountain pass than even she and Aexilica had gone—this journey was really teaching her how useful that sledge would be later—everything became hissy and hot around them.
Steam, and sulfur. It stung Emma’s nostrils, almost burned them. Like smelling fire without the smoke.
Not that she was doing without the smoke screens, of course. The gasses bursting out of every nook and cranny were thick enough that Emma didn’t have visibility beyond ten metres.
It was, fortunately, mainly the cooler steam that reached her. As far as she could tell the convoy stayed well away from any of the vents themselves, and Emma could only imagine what’d happen if they didn’t. She went on liveleak.
“I used to play here.”
Grumpy’s unsolicited comment was so unexpected that Emma actually thought she’d hallucinated it for a second.
“You…Grew up in Vichin?”
He stiffened, looked sour for a moment and actually had the audacity to glare at Emma as if it were somehow her fault they’d gotten onto the topic. Like he’d been tricked. Asshole.
“Oh don’t be a bitch.” Emma sighed. “Everyone grew up somewhere.”
“Including you?” He shot back, aiming the retort like…Well, a retort. And of course Emma got defensive, she was being retorted on.
“Yes.”
“Where?” He pressed.
“Upside your asshole, right next to the fun-zone.”
He glowered, turned away and, she saw, prepared to fall back into a sullen silence.
—”Okay, fine, Miami. But you won’t know where that is.”
“You’re right. I don’t. Describe it.”
He phrased it like a demand, which Emma considered ignoring before she got a look at his eyes, repeated the angry, commanding tone he’d had in her head, and felt suddenly very eager to do whatever the big sexy bicep man said.
So she described it. She talked about the shitty streets and the angry sun, the almost accidental way in which she’d become semi-fluent in Spanish simply by living there. The million-mile-an-hour speed limits and perpetual bad mood everyone seemed to be in. The way none of them had ever had time for her, and so she’d never had time for them.
That last part, of course, she kept carefully to herself. There was such a thing as over-sharing. Besides, self-pity was bad enough without wallowing in it accompanied by one’s own hallucinations. That was just pathetic.
“Sounds like a shithole.” Captain Grumpy remarked, and Emma found herself suddenly, strangely defensive.
“Yeah well at least we don’t fucking cut people’s throats on a stone altar.”
He eyed her blankly, and it occurred to her that he probably didn’t see anything wrong with human sacrifice. There really wasn’t much she could do about that, if he didn’t get it then in all likelihood he wouldn’t get it. Conversation naturally died down, and the sound of wagon wheels turning became a far greater fraction of their ambience as the convoy continued on into the steamy mountains.