The Chronicles of Brendan Earle, Apprentice Mage.

Dealing With the Devil

Day Fifteen

From now on, all of my efforts most go to planning.

Adam

Life is strange, isn’t it? Mine was then certainly. I woke the next morning with one arm asleep and Phoebe’s hair tickling my nose. I don’t believe in having secrets from Haru, but then I don’t see much point in giving her something to take the mick out of me about either, so this was going to be another of those things that just never got mentioned. With luck. Shame she’d spoilt the mood by pointing out I wasn’t allowed to change back into Adam the way she’d changed back onto Phoebe. Lucky she didn’t see any significance in that.

I slid my arm out from under her head as carefully as I could, grabbed some soap and a tooth twig from my bag and then slipped off down the river a bit where I could strip to my boxers and swim. My clothes were still cleaning themselves, but I needed to freshen up.

The water was cold on getting in, but then just very refreshing. I washed all over with the soap, did my hair and cleaned my teeth. Then, of course, I had to get out and go find some trees to go behind. The forest was full of nice large-leafed plants, none of which were related to poison ivy. Nice that the AI wasn’t malicious.

I got back into the water after and floated for a bit. Today was going to include a flight over the sea to the Western Lands. The dragons had talked about some island part way across where we could stop if we needed to and I was already thinking whether we should. Part of me was all for just being the fool who rushed in before he had a chance of calculating his odds and realising he hadn’t a snowball’s chance of taking down an entire empire. Another part was all for putting this off, or at least, resting before the big battle.

“That looks nice. Is it okay if I come in too?”

Phoebe was awake and standing, smiling, by the water. Okay, I could cope with her in a wet tee-shirt much more easily than Malaika, so why not. I loaned her the soap, helped her wash her hair and got splashed for my pains. Then we went back to the camp site and got dried and dressed. Pa’alst and Fi’isk were back with some fresh fish that they‘d caught for us. Neither of us could remember packing soy sauce and wasabi paste, but they were there in the bag when I looked, so we had some sashimi for breakfast, along with bread toasted on the fire and chia. Phoebe wasn’t sure at first, but decided she loved it.

Then it was time to set off. We talked with the dragons and again they said that stopping at the island would be better, so we decided on that. And flew.

Ali

 There was nothing at the Gard, so we flew on up to Black River Bridge. Nothing. We stopped by the bridge and just slumped.

“What is this?” wailed Becks. “We had them beaten, you know we had them beaten. How could he do all this?”

No one had any kind of answer to that one. We sat for a bit more and I became aware they were all looking to me. No one said anything, but I knew. They wanted to know what we should do next. It wasn’t the first time I’d worried about being the leader of the group, but it was the first time I’d had a hole punched in my gut by it.

“Back to the Gard first. We resupply. Then we try to find out if any of the other Gards are like this. If we can find someone to report to, we do.”

“After that Ali?” asked Nick. “What do we do after that?”

“If we have orders, we follow them,” I told him, “If we don’t then we go out by ourselves. Either way I’m personally interested in some payback.”

I could see they were all of a mind on that. The only problem would be finding who we should hit for this. The miserable crew I let eat couldn’t have been part of it, and I didn’t know where we’d have to go to find the one who did it. I’d go look though.