#medifant

“Delta,” he said, “in the north. Where you’ll have your trees.”

“And you can see your ocean.” Reme clenched her eyes shut, a grimace of pain on her face. “M-My side...”

In the dark, it was hard to see the spearhead lodged in her side. Banner ran his hand down her body until he found it, and she hissed in pain. “Oh, Star Lady, take - take it out.”

Banner shook his head, though whether Reme saw, it was debatable. Her eyes were clouded with pain, tears streaming down her blood-streaked face. “We can’t, Reme, you’ll - you’ll lose too much blood. The medics will yell at me.”

“Oh, well, we c-can’t have that.” Reme and Banner shared a weak chuckle. She found his hand and gripped it with an intensity at odds with the pitiable state they were both in. The spearhead was buried completely under her skin; all that stuck out was a jagged bit of wood, not two finger-widths’. The fallen tree crushed her legs into the ground, too heavy for Banner to move even if he didn’t suffer from his own wounds, the worst of all an exhaustion dragging at his very soul. “Delta?”

He smoothed her hair out of her face. “Or Ensille,” he said. That was closer to the forests she loved. Banner didn’t mind making the sacrifice, as long as it meant having Reme there with him. “There’ll be a garden. Flowers on the left.”

“The right, idiot,” Reme sighed. “Flowers on the right. I-I can’t have them under the - the window. I’m -”

She coughed wetly, blood flecking her lips. “You’re allergic,” Banner finished for her in a soft voice, and closed his eyes. The flowers had been a concession on her part, made out of amused surprise when she discovered his secret collection of pressings. There wasn’t much of a variety along the coast that was Banner’s home. Reme liked to look at them, though, even if a bouquet would have her sneezing until she went cross-eyed.

“Which ones?” she demanded. “You - You had a list.”

Instead, Banner said, “You should’ve stayed with your company.”

Reme rubbed her thumb over one of Banner’s rings. “What company?” she said, eyes closed. “They all - into the ground, Banner. All of them.”

And hers hadn’t been the only one. The ground had opened up beneath their very feet, swallowing nearly half the cohort. Banner shuddered at the memory. His company had been one of the lucky ones to avoid that. Lucky enough to walk straight into a hell of living trees and earthquakes.

“Dog-rose,” Banner said instead, huddling over Reme as a light rain started falling against his back. “Thrift, crane’s-bill, morning glory. Oxlip. Those - Those little purple ones you like to look at.”

He kept it up, a quiet murmur, naming far too many flowers for any one garden to hold. One hand held Reme’s hand; with the other, he stroked her cheek. Banner didn’t remember when he stopped naming flowers and started recalling memories. Reme smiled through the pain, but didn’t say a word until she squeezed his hand.

“Don’t let them bury me, Banner,” she whimpered. “Please.”

“I won’t.”

Reme gripped his hand even tighter, and with a great effort, nodded. “I see fire,” she whispered.

“Reme - ” Banner choked on her name. “Reme, don’t - don’t go with her.”

She laughed. How she actually managed to laugh, Banner didn’t know, but it was stronger than her voice had been not seconds ago, and her eyes opened. “I can’t stay here, Banner, you know that.”

He reached to his waist, blindly feeling for the hilt of his knife. “I’ll come,” Banner whispered. Reme’s hand was warm in his - and it grew warmer and warmer, until he dared hope.

“Don’t you dare,” Reme said firmly. “Don’t you dare, you bastard. I don’t want to see you for years and years.”

“But I do.” Banner’s voice shook. “I do, Reme.”

Her breathing grew ragged. Banner held her until the sudden warm strength faded. When her last breath finished with a sigh, he leaned back against the trunk, eyes closed. The sobs didn’t come; he had no energy for anything more than tears.

~

“Mafvin, you can’t do this.”

“I told you to stay behind, Tibur.”

The voices roused Banner from his stupor. He blinked and looked down - had he been sleeping?

Reme stared sightlessly up at the sky. The rain had washed little of the blood and dirt from her face. It was still dark. Banner’s fingers ached from holding her hand and his knife, and with an effort, he uncurled both hands. Gently, gently he lowered Reme’s head to the ground, his movements stiff. A dull ache spread through his entire body, sharpening at various cuts and bruises, and he hissed as he moved one leg, the bandage soaked through with blood.

Using the branches sticking out from the tree, Banner heaved himself upwards, peering over the trunk at the two rain-blurred figures not fifty yards away.

“Get back here,” one man snarled, and lunged forward to grab the other by the elbow. “I won’t have you risking your life out here alone -”

“Let go of me.” The resonant power in the man’s voice frightened even Banner, hiding in his hollow. The other man jerked back as if he had been stung; in the dark and the rain, his expression was impossible to read.

“Your majesty,” he murmured, and Banner sucked in a breath. “You don’t really believe the Eolan king will come alone.”

Mafvin laughed, a sharp, hysterical, bitter bark of sound. “Who is he going to come with, Tibur? I’ve killed them all. Leave.”

“Mafvin -”

The king whipped around, his cloak flaring out behind him in spite of the heavy rain. “Do not make me ask again,” he said, voice low. Banner strained to hear what else he said, but could hear nothing; finally, Tibur turned and stalked off.

Banner stared at the witchking of Cordell. He was unmistakable, now, as a small globe of light appeared over one outstretched palm. Blazing red hair glinted in the feeble light, and Banner squeezed his knife until he could feel the individual wires wrapped around the hilt, even through his glove.

The man responsible for the decimation of Banner’s army stood not fifty yards away from him, alone and unprotected. Banner had nothing but his knife. One knife against the most powerful witch ever to have lived. His breath came in short, angry hisses, and he grunted as his leg gave out underneath him.

The witchking snapped his gaze over to the tree. Banner dropped to the ground, tears trailing out of the corner of his eyes. He couldn’t even stand - how could he kill the most powerful man in the world? The one man who had routed the entire might of Eola’s armies.

Banner dropped his gaze to Reme’s sightless face. Shuddering, he stifled a sob in the crook of his elbow, sinking back to his knees. He didn’t know how long he stayed there - time slipped away from him like water through open fingers - but another voice caught his attention. A familiar one.

“Mafvin?”

“King Jyordan.” Mafvin turned away from the tree trunk. Banner, muscles protesting, dragged himself upwards again, until he could just barely view the scene. “And you are alone.”

“As you said.” There was a curious ring to the Eolan king’s raspy, deep voice. “And you?”

In reply, Mafvin made a show of looking over first one shoulder, then the other. He stood on higher ground than Jyordan; as Banner watched, his king trudged up the rise, the unmistakable silhouette of a truly massive sword at his side. One hand gripped the hilt, and as Jyordan approached Mafvin, he slowly pulled the blade from his scabbard.

Banner gritted his teeth. His king, as mighty as he was, might need help. Banner struggled to pull himself up, but he hardly had one arm over the top of the trunk when Jyordan lifted his sword. Mafvin simply stood there, waiting, and Banner watched, both dumbfounded and grimly satisfied, for the killing stroke.

Jyordan plunged the sword into the ground, fell to his knees, and begged.

The words barely reached Banner’s ears as he watched his king’s shoulders heave with emotion.

He begged for the lives of his soldiers, what few brothers and sisters in arms he had left. He begged for the witchking to spare the innocent people of his country, to turn away his fury and place it solely on the shoulders of their king.

“Please,” Jyordan said, as the rain slackened off in some perverse pleasure to allow Banner to hear each and every word. “Do with me what you will, but my people -”

“Enough.” The single word cut the air like a knife. Banner, sickened to his very soul, longed to turn away. This utter debasement was not meant for anyone else to see, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away. Star Lady, if he could only walk - !

“I warned you, Jyordan.” Mafvin’s voice sounded as sorrowful as the rain itself. “You never should have offered battle.” He paused, as Jyordan murmured something, then laughed harshly, like a crack of lightning. “It is not my forgiveness you should plead for, but that of your dead. Stand up, warriorking, and see what we have wrought.”

The clouds seemed to clear, for that brief moment, though not one day before, Banner would have scoffed at the idea of even the witchking being able to turn the weather itself to his will. Banner, instinctively, hunched his shoulders and lowered himself against the tree again, but the gaze of kings never fell upon him. His legs trembled with the effort of holding himself upright, even with the trunk’s support, but he knew that if he fell again, he wouldn’t rise.

“Never again,” King Jyordan said hoarsely as they stared out over what couldn’t even be called a field of battle, but one of outright slaughter. He sounded nothing like the proud, regal monarch who had been bellowing orders at the fore of his army. The moonlight, briefly, touched on tears rolling down his face. Mafvin shook his head in agreement.

“Do you mean it, Jyordan?” he said, low, as the rain began to fall again. The Eolan king snapped his head towards him, a flash of anger on his face, but Mafvin forestalled him with one gesture that caused both Banner and his king to flinch. “Never mind; I see that you do. Then swear with me, Jyordan, on the blood and the lives lost of this day, that we will never take up arms against each other ever again.”

------

Rhonyn already missed his partner. Granted, Myles was too much of a naive young chatterbox for Rhonyn to stand as they walked the streets, but another patroller -- any other patroller -- would be a lot more welcome than some Collegium mage. He didn't know what aims the Collegium of Magic hoped to reach by assigning a few of their spell-crafters to the City Patrol, but Rhonyn could care less. Having a mage walk the beat alongside him was only going to stir up more trouble, especially in the parts of Glassgate City that Rhonyn worked.

Raynessi was a small country in the Western Quarter, known for resisting the Golden Empire through sheer determination and a touch of magical prowess. That hardly meant warriors of a heroic level and mages with the power to move mountains lounged on every street corner. It just meant that the king and his council had a devil of a time playing their political games and all but kowtowing to avoid another invasion like that of seventy years ago.

Rhonyn's grandfather had fought in that one, and these days he sat legless by the fire, puffing away on his pipe and grumbling darkly about how this peace was ready to shatter at any moment. (He had been saying the same thing for decades, but lately Rhonyn was actually starting to believe him.) Of course, these days he had been telling fewer soldiering tales than criticizing Rhonyn for his less-than-successful profession (anything besides being in the King's Royal Military was less than successful) and how Rhonyn better get looking if he hoped to settle down before Grandfather was in his grave.

Rhonyn pushed his grandfather's sharp words from his mind and instead focused on the sharper idea of a mage following him around all evening. The patrol's commander had been the one to reassign Rhonyn's partner and inform him -- personally -- of his new 'friend.' Rhonyn had worked as a patroller for a good sixteen years now and he could count the times the commander had talked to him on one hand, which basically, in a nutshell, meant that Rhonyn had better take care of this new crossbreed of magic and city law enforcement, or else it was all on his head.

In theory, the patrollers were supposed to rotate routes, giving everyone a chance to work both the rougher and nicer neighborhoods. In practice, Rhonyn was such a presence in the gang-infested roughs that he had gotten to patrol the clean part of Glassgate exactly three times, each for a three-month period, before they quietly shunted him back to the city roughs.

At the least he could have been promoted by now, but you need to have either wealthy blood or exceptional connections to manage that in the Patrol, and Rhonyn had neither. He had come to terms with his lot years ago, though, considering he lived at the very edge of the roughs anyway and at least this saved him the trouble of walking any farther than the five-mile route he worked nearly every day.

The evening patrols started as the sun went down, though now that it was summer Rhonyn could count on about an hour and a half of sunlight during his shift. He leaned against the old, crumbly wall that surrounded the City Patrol West District Station, a tall, broad-shouldered man whose mere, watchful visage often stopped petty crimes before they were even committed. His brown hair was already beginning to gray, much to no one's surprise, and even though Patrol regulations stated their patrollers must be clean-shaven, a thin, dark line stretched from Rhonyn's sideburns to his chin.

Patrollers  wore a uniform of severe gray and blue, and all carried a lead-cored baton at their hip. Rhonyn wasn't the only one who augmented this with leather gloves, or even with thin metal strips sewn across the backs of the glove's hand and fingers. In the roughs, gentleness wasn't worth it.

They laughed and called her Queen of the Dogs, but it was a title she took and turned it around with pride. She wore it like the mantle of deerskin her pack had brought down so long ago, but the pale golden fur did not dim with time, and the six-pointed antlers never lost their velvet. Her brothers and sisters pointed and laughed, locked her outside to sleep with the dogs she loved, but the people of the country loved her because she and her dogs of wolves and dogs of men hunted for them on those cold, wintry nights.

Snow covered the land seven months out of the year, thick and freezing, and it was during these dark months, when she had been hunting for the small village in the valley, that it happened. Her father's spirit was carried away by the Deathmare, and by the time she came back, the Deathmare had to return for three of her six older siblings.

Three were left, her oldest brother and two sisters -- one sister had driven out the others, and now held the castle while the other two skulked away, plotting and luring away as many soldiers of their late brothers that they could. Shanfry sat back in horror, sad for her father even though he had never stopped his sons from throwing her out in the cold, and sad for her men that she had left at the castle. Not only the ones who had died, but the ones who had willingly left, the ones who had always begrudged being a part of her company and now desired to join the ranks of a stronger, saner leader.

Wells knew Shanfry was not insane. Compared to her siblings, she was positively down-to-earth. He followed her as she ran back into the forest, and so did the small contingent of his soldiers, because they remembered the way she had treated them, and knew that Shanfry's remaining sisters and brother would never be so good to them. But Shanfry and her pack outran the soldiers, until they were deep in the forest and Wells had to stop them before his wounded men died from a loss of blood.

The princess who now occupied the castle and put the crown on her own head would hunt them, but not as vigorously as her other siblings, who were undoubtedly raising their banners. Civil war would be long and terrible, but the only person Wells ever wanted to see on the throne would be Shanfry. She actually cared for the people, and surely those she had fed would rally around her. But Shanfry did not like the killing of humans.

She would chase down a buck with the fullest of glee, but that was with an understanding of nature, how her dogs and people had to eat. But never for fun, and Wells couldn't count the times she had let her siblings beat her, before her dogs had enough and the royal heirs learned to stop only because they feared those flashing white fangs and the gleaming of Wells' sword.

It took days before they found her, romping with her dogs in the mouth of a large cave. She had already made friends with the wild wolves of the forest that lived there, and they tussled playfully with the tamer dogs. Shanfry didn't say a word when Wells and his men arrived, and they set up a camp. She did not run again, but as Wells watched, she grew deeper into herself, spending more time on all fours with her dogs instead of staying human and remembering coming home to see her father's dead body laid out and her siblings battling mercilessly over it.

He tried to draw her out, and sometimes saw flashes of her as the princess. She would stand up straight and let the antlered hood fall from her head and speak in a clear, royal voice that, "No, Wells, I will not fight my family. I will do as I have always done. Hunt and feed my dogs and then you and then my people. Now leave me alone," and then she would drop to her knees and cuddle with the newest litter of pups, while Wells stomped away in frustration.

His men could not subsist only on the meat her packs brought in, so Wells would ride into town to trade and he would see the turmoil raging across the country. He saw the fear in farmers' eyes, and as his men built small, sturdy houses around Shanfry's cave and quietly recovered their families from various towns and cities, Wells planned for the day Shanfry's siblings would be winnowed down to one, and that one would come for her. It would be too much to hope that they would write her off as harmless in the woods -- no threat to their crown could exist. Shanfry either had to die, or to rule.

Wells hoped that she would realize that, but she refused to go into the towns by day, instead bringing them the carcasses of game by night as it snowed and snowed and the people were too afraid to go outside, in fear of some soldier cutting them down or taking their children. Wells made contacts, talked to those simple countrymen who knew how to use a sword or their hands to hurt, instead of build, and told them to practice. The time would come, he told them, and Shanfry would need them, and because Shanfry had fed them, they all agreed.

But all of Wells' plans splintered apart, when one day he came out and watched Shanfry romp with the dogs, and suddenly become one of them, a furry, golden wolf with antlers growing behind her ears.