He could still taste the stew on his tongue as he made his usual breakfast of bread and cheese. That made Simon ch his fist in frustration as he tried to figure out what could have possibly happened. Sure - the proprietor hadn’t seemed to care for him, but she certainly didn’t poison him. After all - he’d had the same food and drink as Thomen and Yars had. Everyone else had been really great too. He doubted that they’d decided he was riough to kill in the middle of the night. They didn’t seem like the type, which meant that he was missing something.

  “No,” he told himself. “You’re overplig this, Simon. There are really only two options here. Either you died st night, or you didn’t. If you died, then it robably that bandit motherfucker following you, and if you didn’t, then there’s a real possibility of some kind of glitch. Some rubber banding effect.”

  He khis wasn’t a game, of course, but the metaphor still worked. Who was to say that if he got far enough off track from what he o do, the magic at work here didn’t just put him back to start all ain? As a theory, it was worth expl, but the only way to do that would be to walk all the way down that damn mountain again.

  Simon sighed loudly at the thought. Just because he’d been able to survive a blizzard and hike for miles didn’t mean he wao do it over and ain. It would be worth it if he could spend a month or a year in civilization but for a single night?

  “Kind of a pain in the ass,” he told himself as he y ba his bed and tried to brainstorm something else that might be a better use of his time. All of his other ideas eventually led through the zombies, though, and he had zero wish to go there yet. No matter what he found, he was sure it was going to hurt. It always did.

  So, after wasting half an hour, he finally grudgingly got ready and started the whole ordeal all ain. This time the only real ge he made was to gather a couple smaller s from the hidden treasure hoard on level two just in case he ran into someohat couldn’t make ge for a whole gold piece. He didn’t know how many of one kind of exged for how many of another, of course, and the likelihood of being cheated was still high, but he could figure all that out ter.

  The trip through the snow was uful, and though he was still ahat he had to light his campfires with a fmethrower, he made it work. Once, on the sed day, he smelled the smoke of someone else’s campfire, which told him someone else was out here, but he didn’t iigate.

  “It’s probably just more bandits,” he told himself.

  This time when Simon finally reached that main road, he thought about trying the other dire, but he was hungry, and he’d already spent the st three days wandering around the wilderness, so he wasn’t eager to spend a fourth when he knew where a perfectly lovely inn was. Instead, he strolled down the road like he didn’t have a care in the world, and though ambushing the ambushers would have been funny, he just let things py out as they had the first time, just to see what would happen.

  “Sorry, sir, but we’re going to need for you to pay a toll for the upkeep of this fine road if you want to travel any closer to Wellingbrooke,” Luken said, stepping out into the road in just the same way as he had the st time.

  “See, if you had just taken my mo time a me by, you would never have had to see me again,” Simon said with a smile. “And if I did happen to e back through, you could have had a repeat er, but you went and got greedy!”

  That didn’t stop him from walking forward, though, and though Luken put his hands on the hilt of his sword, he didn’t draw it because the only thing Simon had in his hands was a rge sabsp;

  “Excuse me, sir,” Luken said, trying and failing to hide his fusion. “I don’t think I’ve ever had the pleasure, however, for a mere six pence will see you on your way with no harm done.”

  “Yeah,” Simon agreed. “You said that st time too. This time though, I brought a little ge.”

  Simon didn’t pull silver out of his bag or even copper. Instead, he pulled out eight inches of steel in the form of his dagger and stabbed the other man in the heart before his sword was halfway out of his sheath.

  Luken started to crumple, but Simon grabbed him by the colr and started to walk to the side of the road, using him as a body shield. “ime, maybe just let me pass, and I won’t have to kill you every siime I walk this path.”

  “But I…” A volley of arrows flew at Simon just as Luken gasped his final words. O wide, just missing Simon’s head, but three embedded into the man he was using as a shield.

  Simon winced as he saw the pain py across the other man’s face before the light left the bandit’s eyes. He kly what that felt like, and he felt bad for the guy. At least it was a death, though. Simon tried hard to make sure that was eople got whenever he could, but when it came to a forest full of archers, sometimes that couldn’t be helped.

  He waited for a lull iion, then he leaned around to one side of the trunk and yelled “G????????????r???????v?????u?????u????????? ???????M???????e???i???????r??????è?????n????,” as he eled all his rage and anger into a gout of fme that eradicated the vegetatioween him and the bandits that were trying to kill him. The energy surged through him so hard that it grayed the edges of his vision for a moment, and when the fiery streamers subsided, he slowly pulled out and loaded his crossbow to make sure there weren’t survivors.

  He knew, of course, that the kid he’d spared st time was still out there somewhere. If he’d been oher side of the road st time, he probably was this time too, which meant that he might have to take the feral bastard dowly, Simon hoped that the little brat had run off because the st thing he wao do was shoot a starving kid in the back, even if that deight e back to haunt him.

  No arrows came at him this time, so Simon finished off his fallehen helped himself to the s in Luken’s pockets as the only restitution the man could offer for wasting his time before he tinued on his way.

  The rest of the journey was utterly uful, and this time when Simon reached the vilge of Wellingbrooke, he went straight for the inn and paid for a real meal and a drink in his stolen silver. The proprietor still gave him the stink eye as she made ge, but right now, Simon just didn’t care. He wanted something warm and filling. It turned out that dinner wasn’t for hours yet, though, so she brought him cold cuts smeared with stone ground mustard on some bread that wasn’t quite stale, but it would be in a few more hours. While it wasn’t as good as the dinner he’d eaten here st night, just being able to taste something as simple as mustard again was amazing, so he made do.

  Simon whiled away the rest of the day much the same as he’d dohe st time. This time the only difference was that he stretched his legs expl the hamlet before dinner rather than sitting in his room, and after dinner, he did a bit less drinking and a little more winning. Surprisingly Yars turned out to be just as good a loser as he was a winner, which Simon thought was a rare trait. Rather than bluster wheurned into the night’s biggest loser, he just patted Simon on the bad said, “Now, you be sure to stick around for a few days and give me a ce to win all that back!”

  That was enough to make Simon smile as he wandered up to his room and made himself fortable on the lumpy mattress. Last time her fell asleep like a rock, but this time he found himself ying there, staring up at the ceiling for the better part of an hour once he got tired of tossing and turning as he worried as soon as he closed his eyes his small victory was going to be snatched from his hands and he was going to be put ba that awful little again. He khat Hedes didn’t want him to be happy, of course. He’d known that from pretty much the first minute he’d met her, but to think that she would just break her own game or punishment ination or whatever and snatch him back to the pit just because he’d figured a clever way out of her clutches, it was just…

  Simon’s endless internal monologue came to a screeg halt when he heard the door swing open with only the fai scraping. Sound as it brushed against one of his boots. The room was dark, but irely pitch bck, so he could see a short shape as what he could only imagihat brat he’d spared earlier snuto his room to finish him off.

  His muscles tensed as he y there, waiting to pounce, and it was only when he saw the gleam of light on the edge of the bde that he reached up and grabbed the slender wrists of the wielder, yanking it away from them in a brief struggle, and sending them backwards hard enough into the shutters to knock them open.

  Simon was surprised by two things then. The first was that he was holding a meat cleaver, not the dagger he’d expected, and the sed was that the person that had been about to strike him dead wasn’t the young boy but the innkeeper herself.

  “Just what in the fuck is going on,” Simon spat as he gestured at her with her own on, making her shrink away from the reprisal she feared.

  “I just… you were…” The woman was older than him, but not by much, and all the poison that had been in her gaze until now had been repced with fear.

  “Out with it, woman,” Simon yelled, not g who heard. “Choosing to Keep your reasons for assassinating me a secret will cost you your life!”

  “I-I would never harm a fly,” she whimpered nonsensically, “But th-theres a darkness in you. Anyone who trucks with evil so much has to—”

  “Evil?” he asked, utterly baffled by the accusation. “I’m the damn hero; what are you talking about. There’s no evil here except a crazy woman with a meat cleaver!” To emphasize his point, Simon buried the on into the wood of the windowsill.

  “The taint of your spirit does not lie!” she hissed, and then seeing him onless, she chose that moment to try to dart past him and down the hall.

  Simon was baffled by her words and didn’t try to stop her. He just stood there stunned for almost a minute as his intoxicated mind tried to work through everything that had just happened. It was only then that he realized her move might be to rally the town watch or a few brave adveo strike him down. It was that thought that finally spurred him to a, and he began to pabsp;

  He supposed that it was bad hat people could see the ’taint of his spirit,’ whatever that was supposed to mean, but as he quickly packed his things, he decided that, ultimately, this was good news. After all, the crazy bitch that had sent him back to his own private hell hadn’t been Hedes. It had only been some innkeeper with a magic power he just hadn’t seen before.

  He could work with that, even if he wasn’t sure if she was seeing the magic he’d used, his e to the pit or something deeper like his massive experience poi, but either way, it was useful information and something to watch out for.