COMPANION, Chapter Three

CHAPTER THREE

Eriane hunkered down in her winter cloak, a scarf around her face like a bandit’s mask. Pare hadn’t said a word to her in days. Their time on the road felt interminable. He trudged alongside her through the chill, boots crunching atop churned ruts of frozen mud. In only his hunting gear and a light green vest, he managed somehow to seem warm despite the heavy mist accompanying each exhale.
          Eriane pulled the scarf away from her face and sniffled, shocking her sinuses with the intake of frozen air. The silence closed in as they walked the empty road.
          “Are we ever going to talk about this?” she asked.
          More silence. Pare maintained his pace, a step ahead of Eriane, without so much as a hitch to acknowledge her question.
          “We can’t just keep going on like this, Pare,” Eriane continued. “You have to talk with me eventually.” She sniffled again. “You have to give me a chance to—”
          With a loud crack!, her foot vanished beneath a sheet of ice into a hole full of viscous, near frozen standing water, bringing her to an abrupt halt. She righted herself and pulled, to no avail. Pare still walked on, several yards ahead.
          “Uh,” Eriane stammered, “I could use a little help here.” She regained her feet, but still couldn’t free herself. Pare kept walking.
          “Pare?” she said. The sound of shifting ice drew her attention. The puddle had already re-frozen, trapping her foot inside. “Hey!”
          Pare stopped twenty yards distant, staring down the forest road. She pulled again, failing to even rotate her ankle as the water solidified around her foot.
          “Pare!” Panic rose up. Invasive cold sank into her leg and crept upward. Her thigh throbbed where it had been broken, sending pain into her hip and knee. Ice formed around her calf and her pant leg froze solid.
          Still no response. Pare stood rooted, stone still but for the gentle rise and fall of his shoulders. Breaths of mist shrouded his head with each exhale and dissipated into the night air. Still he did not turn.
          “Pare, you son of a bitch!” Eriane screamed. She dropped her cloak and unstrung her rucksack, freeing a small hatchet. With frantic strokes she hacked at the ice surrounding her leg, desperate to free herself. “I need you!”
          When she tried to shift her weight, she found her other leg pinned, vines of ice surging upward in small advances every few seconds, pausing between. Her swings grew wild, the ice creeping faster than she could hack free of it. A strong swing stole her breath away, igniting searing pain in her gut that doubled her over, clutching her midsection.
          Blood soaked her gloved hand, seeping from the re-opened wound in her belly. “Pare?” she asked, less pleading than disappointment. Pare’s shoulders rose and he exhaled again. The ice around her legs rose in response. With each breath the ice advanced, encasing her, trapping her. Crimson stained the white crystals around her thighs, pumping out from beneath her clasped fingers.
          “No, Pare,” she whispered. “Please no. Not again. Not like this.”
          Pare turned, eyes downcast. Blood sheathed the lower half of his face, his hands clenched into fists at his sides. Steam pumped from his nose like smoke with every angry exhale. Ice clamped down on Eriane’s arms, a clear sheath around her bleeding belly like a crystal goblet full of wine. Tears froze to her cheeks as she cried, stinging her eyes.
          “Pare-” she croaked, little more than a whisper. When she tried to speak again, to yell for Pare’s help, ice at her throat stole away her voice. Her jawbone ached as the cold crept into her skull, pinning her head and locking her gaze to where Pare stood. She sobbed.
          Pare shifted his shoulders, turning his back on her. Tendrils of ice slid around her head, covered her mouth, crept into her nose. Eriane’s lungs burned for lack of breath as another exhale from Pare covered all but her eyes. He turned his head so his gaze met hers, his eyes flashing silver—
          Eriane jolted awake. At some point during the nightmare she’d discarded most of her bedroll and lay exposed to the night air. She wiped half-frozen tears from her cheeks and sat upright, a bit too quickly, and her abdomen screamed in response. Pressing a hand to the scar beside her belly button, she took a few deep breaths and the pain subsided to a dull throb.
          Something brushed her shoulder. “Another nightmare?”
          Eriane started, bolting away from the touch and clutching at the hatchet beside her bedroll before she registered the voice. “By the Vells, Samuel!” she said, wincing as another stabbing pain stole a breath. “How can something so big be so burned quiet?”
          The construct knelt before her, his three-fingered hands raised. Firelight reflected in the burnished metal of his face and arms, and the blue-green glow of his eyes looked for all the world like an expression of worry, set into an immovable copper visage.
          “I didn’t mean to startle you.” Samuel said.
          Eriane shook her head. “What did you expect, sneaking up on me like that?”
          “I wasn’t exactly sneaking,” the construct replied.
          Eriane drew a deep breath and rubbed her eyes. They’d been on the road for what seemed like months, but it had in fact only been a few weeks. Adepts from Kelef cleared the bulk of winter’s snowfall from the pass through the Eastern Range but it still lingered in abundance on trees and undergrowth, early spring still carrying winter’s chill in the mountains. The cold seeping into her bones, exacerbating the near constant pain of her mended leg, made foot travel slow going.
          Without prompting, Samuel tossed her the blanket from her bedroll and stoked up the fire, waving her in close. In the months she had known the construct, he managed to regularly surprise her with little gestures of caring, a stark contrast to her experiences with most of the emotionless automata of his kind. Only one other had shown her the kindness Samuel displayed… but Icariascus was gone now. The thought eroded her calm, recalling her nightmare and stealing her breath. She closed her eyes and huddled into the blanket, wiping a few stray tears in the process.
          They were all gone now. Everyone she’d begun to build her new life with—Mane, Icariascus, Pare—either died or abandoned her. Even her newest acquaintance, a slip thief named Jacob, walked away while she lay comatose, recovering from her injuries.
          Samuel was the only one to stand by her. They both danced around the idea of parting ways, neither willing to endanger the other, both concluding it wasn’t their choice to make. Of anyone she’d ever known, Samuel—an artificial metal hulk—had been the most courageous. He repaid her faith with a loyalty she’d never known, and wasn’t sure she was comfortable with.
          “Do you want to talk about it?” Samuel asked.
          “It was-” Eriane hesitated, her words caught at the sight of Pare’s silver-eyed glare. An unsteady breath couldn’t push the image away, so she shook her head as she exhaled. Samuel’s unblinking stare hovered over her for another moment before he nodded once and returned to tending the fire.
          Eriane’s nerve-calming breaths pulled chill air into her lungs, so she opened her blanket to the fire with the hope of absorbing some more warmth. When her chest and face were almost too hot to bear, she sat back and rummaged through her rucksack. She produced her journal, a leather-bound volume stuffed with all manner of drawings and notes regarding the journey ahead. She pulled a piece of parchment from between the journal’s pages and unfolded it into her lap. Hand-drawn waypoints dotted the map, their destinations marked in red.
          “Are we still on track?” Samuel asked.
          Eriane nodded. “We left with plenty of head start,” she said. “Jo said the SAO agents dispatched by the Sovereignty to investigate Achtemenius’s involvement in the battle wouldn’t reach Kelef for another few weeks due to the road being out.”
          The construct nodded. “What’s next, then?”
          “It’ll take a few more days to get to Fen,” she said, “where we can resupply and I can get a pack for you to carry water. Then we head to Porral.”
          “To see your parents.”
          Eriane still struggled with that idea. In the years since she ran away from home, her entire existence centered around forgetting the parents she’d left behind. They could likely skirt Porral entirely and she’d never have to face the confrontation, but too much of her worried that she’d never get the closure she needed if she didn’t go back, if for no other reason than to assert her independence.
          “To see my parents,” she said, quietly.
          Samuel, seeming to sense her discomfort, changed the subject. “I still don’t see how a water pack is more practical than a harness for me to simply carry you,” he said.
          “I can walk on my own two feet,” Eriane said, perhaps snippier than she intended. “I’m happy for your ability to carry extra water, but I’m not interested in being carried.” She couldn’t deny the appeal of not having to trudge the whole way out, but her pride made the idea of being outright carried distasteful.
          “Fair enough,” Samuel said. “I just hope this Gunsmith person is actually where you think he is.”
          “He will be,” Eriane said, fronting confidence she wasn’t sure she felt. Although many thought him dead, Eriane had found evidence the man she sought, an outcast gunsmith who’d worked directly with the Sovereignty until the assassination of Sovereign Solus and subsequent Sovereignty-wide ban on all firearms, had lived in the Drain ever since shortly after his involuntary exile. Even if she wasn’t completely certain of his location, she was certain of one thing: after Mane’s death, he could be the only person left in the Sovereignty who could help her figure out her ability to control the trajectory of bullets. An adeptitude which should have been, by all knowledge of kheomancy and its interaction with most metals, impossible.
          “Besides,” she said, breaking free of her worry, “even if he’s not there, no one from the SAO will follow us into the Drain, even if our trail leads out there.” She hoped.
          “And then, on to Balefor?” Samuel asked.
          The whole idea of traipsing into Balefor to investigate the Queen Sovereign’s murder terrified her still. “Just like I promised,” she said. “On that note, have you had any more luck—”
          Samuel sat in an awkwardly balanced half-crouch, one metal-clad hand in the firepit to adjust a burning log, unmoving. His dark eyes told her he wasn’t with her. With a sigh she disentangled herself and moved to his side, tipping his whole frame backward to remove his hand from the fire. He sank into an awkward sitting position, half leaned and one arm akimbo.
          “I guess it’s my turn to take watch for a bit, huh?” she asked, knowing there would be no response. Samuel’s encounter with the self-proclaimed construct prophet Acthemenius left him prone to random shut-downs like this as his core attempted to reconcile the hundreds of years of gathered memories Acthemenius forced upon him. Although Samuel endured the Chronicler’s attempt to overwhelm him, and was oddly lucky when the killer Bales intervened, the half-finished process left him with lingering problems. Episodes like this one were thankfully infrequent, but could last hours, with seemingly no rhythm to that interval.
          Eriane’s mouth watered, igniting a sudden craving for tea. She still had some of Jo’s private stash, a strong, black blend with a smoky bite derived from being dried over burning wood chips. She threw off her cloak and pulled a small cookpot from her supplies.
          A creek ambled through the woods not too far from their campsite. As she approached, the gentle sound of the running water brought her full bladder into sharp focus. She undid her trousers and crouched by the stream to relieve herself. After bundling back up, she moved a few steps upstream and dipped her cookpot into the water to fill it.
Eriane made her way back towards camp, guided by the dancing shadows in the low glow of their fire. Trees were sparse on this side of the mountains, so light carried further than through the dense foliage of the woods around Morrelton. The forest was unusually quiet in the pre-dawn darkness as the sounds of the creek faded behind her.
          Within the circle of the campfire’s light, Samuel still leaned at his awkward angle, eyes dark. She paused and shook her head. When the first blackouts hit she’d been frightened, almost panicked at losing him. Experience taught the benignity of it all, and now she struggled to be anything but amused. Someday, she’d commission a painter to render an image of Samuel in one of his fainting poses so he could see how ridiculous he looked.
          Before she could step forward to the fire, a shadow moved behind the frozen construct, punctuated by the snapping of a twig underfoot.
          A man stepped out from behind Samuel, a pistol at his hip leveled at Eriane.