My own naivety troubles me. I was not raised to be afraid of others. Caution and wariness were taught later in life. Mirel did not intend for us to lose the bastion of ?oloman??. We could retreat and consider what we'd learned in the fortress of stone, watched over by the cold but just eyes of the Solomonari. No one could have anticipated its loss, or what that could mean. I see now that she should have done things differently. She should have let us suffer more consequences than that of the magics we dealt with.

  In some ways, people are more dire a thing than a spell.

  From the journal of Drago? Buh?scu

  Dragos woke to the sound of a caravan rumbling along the road. The creak of wood and rustle of footsteps on the road shocked him into groggy wakefulness.

  It rolled by in the distance as he dosed himself with some m?selari?? and yarrow, and dragged himself up with a groan. Zgavra had transformed into a black goat with orange, hourglass eyes before he’d woken, and was stomping gleefully on bugs when he left the bivouac.

  The click of its hooves on the road warned him that it was still following him.

  After a ways, when the caravan was little more than dust in the distance and a lone courier raced by, sweaty horse flanks glistening in the morning sun, he stopped hobbling. The clattering of hooves receded in the distance as he turned and looked at the little black goat.

  “If you’re coming, why don’t we fly?”

  The goat trotted up and butted Dragos’ uninjured leg hard enough to make him stumble. The monster’s voice was a dark clarion trumpet of laughter. “I’m not your packmule, nor your mount. Take yourself.”

  “It’s a long way. I’m injured.” The goat’s flat stare made Dragos want to kick it right between them. If only he could stand straight enough to do it.

  They stared at each other, the shapeshifter and the outcast, until Dragos snorted and turned to face the road, and the next town beyond. A road with stones left behind by old empires always led to another town, though he didn’t know which it was.

  The walk had been agonizing. Medicine helped. Along the way, he’d heard the name of the town as another caravan rolled past. Cenu?a Mare.

  No one offered a ride. He did not ask for one.

  When the town came into sight beyond the forested road, he was relieved to see it was fairly large. As much as he hated towns, villages could be worse. The further from civilization, the worse superstition got. A stranger like him was noticeable. For him, that was usually a bad thing.

  The farmlands ate up the forest. Barns and houses were scattered along the low hills of the central plains between Platou and the Embrace. Cenu?a Mare sat atop one of the hills, looking down over the farthings with a squat pride. Its defensive wall was low and crumbling. A structure from old times. The war in the south with the Aur hadn’t touched its side of the mountains.

  War seemed far away in this place.

  Dragos sat on a section of dry stone wall surrounding a fallow field. Zgavra flopped down beside him, as if a faithful companion instead of an obnoxious presence.

  “Tell me about the school, the Solomonari, your cohort,” it said, leaning in the shade.

  “Not much to tell,” Dragos hedged, eyes scanning the road a short distance away. Conversing with a goat would get him labelled insane before they saw anything past his hood. Maybe that was a good thing.

  “Oh, I disagree,” the zmeu commented. It also looked out towards the activity on the road, carts, wagons, people, riders.

  Dragos had nothing to say, so he said nothing. He didn't want to talk about them, or think about his cohort brothers and sisters, although he had a hunger to find them. It was fear of what he might find, perhaps, that held his tongue.

  The Spineback was a smudge of gray in the distance. Corvesta and Cenu?a Mare sat close to the northern border. They were far, far from his old home.

  He pushed up and dragged himself back to the road. The little black goat followed, trotting along with a jaunty gait. The way in was simple, a broad gap in the wall opening into tall, narrow buildings that stood like rows of teeth beside the road’s mouth.

  The open road narrowed, and the travellers closed in, bunching together at the mouth of the town.

  The crush between wagons and bodies and the stained wood slabs of siding was overshadowed by the stench. Animal piss and unwashed human bodies were too close. Dragos hunched his shoulders and hobbled through what would have been a simple annoyance if his knee had been fine. Someone thumped into his shoulder and turned to face him. Her face was strong-boned, almost masculine, but her figure was nothing like a man’s, though she wore her tattered skirts tied up.

  “Apologies peddler!”

  Her voice was loud, pitched above the rattle of wagons and clatter of hooves. Dragos ignored her, doggedly moving forward. Instead of going on her way, she flicked at the half-dried bundle of slippery elm he’d shaved from a root and tied to the handle of his box.

  Dragos twisted away from her hand the best he could. There was little space to go anywhere in the press at the gate mouth.

  “Can you come with me? You’ve got apothecary herbs. Maybe something for a child?”

  That slowed his step. “For obloi or food. I don’t care which.”

  The woman beamed and crooked a finger, then slipped into a narrow gap between the buildings. “He fell, just over here. He’s in awful pain…”

  The walls rose high, close enough for his shoulders to brush both sides of the narrow alley. Beyond the woman, it opened into a junction between buildings, though that wasn’t exactly reassuring. One could hardly call it a courtyard. A stack of broken crates sat in a veritable mound of refuse.

  Noxious fumes wafted. Dragos lifted his hand to press under his nose as he stepped out into the small space, where the corners of buildings didn’t quite touch anything but waste. A bruised child sat on top of the sludge, on his boat of shattered wood. He did look bloody, didn’t look up as they approached.

  The tap of goat hooves was gone.

  Dragos glanced back to see that Zgavra had decided not to join him. Good.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  He unslung his box from his back. “First, we should get him somewhere less—unsanitary.”

  At the same time, Dragos felt a disturbance all around him, and looked up from the child.

  Four figures stalked down each of the tall, narrow passages. None of them looked friendly. He twisted the box away from the woman, who lunged for it. The child shrieked, not with fear, but with anger, his small face crinkling with a clear malice.

  He jumped off the crate, a section of one of the crates in his hand like a club.

  The little rat swung for Dragos’ bad leg. He’d have noticed the wanderer’s limp; it was hard to miss. Dragos stumbled, knee lit up with fresh agony, his back hitting the corner of one of the buildings. The others rushed in to swarm him.

  One of them grabbed his arm. The woman grabbed the leather handle at the top of the box. Yet another yanked his other arm as he twisted, and Dragos’ leg betrayed him. His fall was caught by a young man in the crew, his smiling face mocking as his compatriots ripped the box away.

  Never had he felt more like a lamb surrounded by wolves. But a lamb would have been afraid.

  Dragos had no fear for his life. Disgust, then a low-burning anger surged as the thieves, skilled at their game, ran off with his peddler’s box. The woman took the lead, and the rotten child right behind her. The two men and the other woman followed, blocking his path.

  He stared after them, murder in his gaze. Dragos took a few faltering steps but knew the folly in it. Any other day, he’d run them down. Not this day.

  Still, he had his gloves, a pouch with seeds he’d gathered, and most importantly, the money pouch he carried tethered inside his pants. A trick he’d learned from the first person he met who hadn’t been from ?oloman??.

  Fuming beneath his hood, Dragos pressed a hand to the rough siding and walked until he got to the street. It widened into the market, and he found an alcove near the drab canvas overhangs. Zgavra caught up to him there, still wearing the form of a goat.

  “Hm.” The goat looked up at him, clearly assessing the situation.

  Dragos bared his teeth at it and growled. “Give me a minute. I can find it.”

  He couldn’t chase them, not in the state he was in. However, those were his things. Attuned to him as few things in this world were, if he could calm and concentrate, he could follow the subtle trail of his own magics, provided he hadn’t moved too far away from where the thieves went.

  “I can find it faster,” the goat bleated.

  A woman nearby with a basket over her arm startled and glanced their way. Dragos turned away from her and moved further down the alley, shoving his hood back enough to look up.

  He didn’t need his bad luck to continue and end up with a chamber pot’s contents dumped on his head. The goat trotted alongside, nostrils flaring. “Follow me.”

  With no choice but to trust the monster, he trailed the beast along to the other side of the alley and out into the next street. It was less busy than the main thoroughfare, with a handful of shops and houses that had pedestrians outside.

  Dragos yanked his hood forward again and struggled to keep up with the goat’s easy amble. The zmeu led him to a cartwright’s shop face, and around the side through the narrow dirt track to the back workshop. The wanderer paused and listened as the goat happily trotted into the workshop’s yard beyond the shadowed eaves.

  He buckled on gloves, their wicked dark iron talons protruding from his knuckles. A grim scowl tugged at his lips, but before he could take two aching steps, he heard a shriek. Forced into a teetering run, Dragos peered around the corner of the building.

  The scene was expected. It was not Zgavra setting them on fire. The goat had paused just inside the cartwright’s workyard.

  “They used my summoning scroll!” He barked, forgetting to be stealthy as he stumbled out into the yard. The rage that had been stoked exploded as their foolishness hit his internal flames.

  The goat dashed forward, head down.

  The cartwright’s work yard was bristling with scraps. Rounded axles, iron joints, and sawdust littered the ground. The six thieves were scattered around the yard. Zgavra ran straight into one with a decisive headbutt. The man fell right over the goat’s back, tumbling head over heels.

  It was the smirky one that got in his face and kept him from falling in the refuse.

  A bitter pleasure rose at the sight, quelled as he spotted his box sitting open. The bottle of theriac was intact, still strapped into the lid. The nightweb and starlace were concealed, nestled in their leather pouches. Some of the drawers were open, revealing packets of medicinal herbs and poisons, the packets scattered on the ground around the old wooden box.

  The steel plate lay in the dirt, along with the quartz and onyx. The bulky lad stumbled back and stepped on the thin slab of quartz, shattering it. Dragos’ lip curled up again, recovering from the shock of seeing the unnatural iele.

  The child was already dead. The lemniele had impaled the boy upon one of its arms, a makeshift thing cobbled of the wood scraps in the cartwright’s supply.

  The lemniele was a mockery of nature. The spirit summoned by the scroll was a twisted thing, not meant for simple folk to have.

  Perhaps it was a fair retribution. The unnatural creature born of scrap wood and warped intent creaked as it walked on stilt legs toward the heavyset man, stabbing out at him. He was spry, but didn’t anticipate the thing tearing another arm out of its barrel-like body to slash low, taking his legs out from under him.

  Dragos’ stomach clenched. It was a slaughter.

  He staggered toward it and shouted, “Lemniele!”

  It didn’t seem to hear, or perhaps ignored him. His gaze shot to the box. The herbs: useless. The iron filings… not enough. The small drawer of salt wasn’t enough to banish what had been summoned. The quartz and obsidian were just shiny glass, useful for enhancing sight into the veils, not for controlling what came out of them. The unworked bronze and silver discs could be made into amulets. If he had the time.

  The dead boy flopped like a puppet off one limb scattering blood as the travesty of a wood pile body split into multiple stiff arms that slashed and stabbed, running the other girl in the group through the throat. Her mouth opened, but only a gurgle of blood came out, painting her lips a scarlet red. She fell to her knees, fingers around her neck.

  He didn’t have time for beating a sigil into metal.

  The leminele’s corpse-weighted limbs slowed; it only made more limbs as it moved. For every stack of timber it stepped over, more was added to its body. It groaned as new legs attached themselves, creaked as new arms smashed downward, striking the fallen man, splitting his skull wide open.

  Blood and bone scattered over the ground as it stomped through his body towards the girl with the wooden plank. She hefted it, eyes round with terror. The thief that Zgavra had knocked flat shouted, “Andy, hit it! Hit it!”

  Eyes still wild, she wound the plank up over her shoulder and charged with a terrified shriek.

  Dragos ran at its side, ducking the swing of an arm, spinning on his good foot to dodge the kick of a spidery splinter of a leg. He drove a solid punch into the underside.

  Where his iron bit, a blackness spread.

  He drove his fists at whatever lashed his way, deflecting the next swing of a broken plank with the boned side of his glove and counterpunched, scoring the wood. The girl smashed her makeshift club down on a limb that jabbed out at her. Her eyes went even wider when her wooden club did not shatter, nor break the creature’s limb. Instead, it stuck. Clung there, and then became a second appendage.

  The new arm cracked the girl across the face. She spun away with the momentum of the strike and crashed into a workbench.

  Dragos had no time to enjoy her misfortune. The leminele’s body turned on skittering wooden stilt-legs to face him. The surviving thieves came together and tried to run as it seemingly turned away from them. The sweep of a limb cracked into ankles, and both man and woman fell screaming.

  He couldn’t leave his box, nor this mess that was inadvertently of his own making.

  His gaze flicked around, looking for a definitive plan, and fell on a sledge with a precious iron head leaning against the wall. A bloody fan of whirling death spun at him.

  M?selari?? (muh-seh-lah-REET-suh) [rolled r]: Henbane. A highly toxic herb, but used in olden times in small doses as a pain reliever and sedative.

  Yarrow: Sometimes known as bloodwort. Used for pain relief, fever reducer, and for sleep.

  Cenu?a Mare (cheh-NOO-shah MAH-reh) [rolled r]: Town name. Means Ash Hill.

  Lemniele (lem-nyell): An iele made of wood, in which it is not natural like a forest spirit.