Progress down the mountain was slow, and by the following evening, they still hadn’t reached the gently rolling pins that would lead to the distant vilge. Simon would be gd when they did, though. He’d pinned his hopes on it. Not only was it exhausting having to double back whehey entered aoo steep to pass, but it took forever as they tried to get down the sandstone bluffs that separated them from anywhere hospitable.

  Once, just after noon, they heard the shriek of the wyvern as it soared through the sky. Simon immediately dropped what he was doing and pulled Freya into the shadow of a boulder, where they hid for almost half an hour as they watched the thing soar across the sky. In the end, it was only when Simon saw it flying back to its with a goat in its cws that they tinued on their way. Though Freya took the rest of the journey well enough, even though her feet were bleeding by the end of the day, thanks to her poor excuse for shoes, Simon couldn’t stop w even after they stopped and the sun started to set. All he could see was that wyvern flying back to its with her bloody body in its cws.

  By the evening, she was noticeably limping though she still hadn’t pined. He wao heal her wounds immediately, but he didn’t wao freak out, so he decided to wait until she went to sleep as they made camp for the evening. That night they didn’t make a fire, but because there recious little wood on the slopes and because Simon didn’t want a bea that would attract attention, because there was no real shelter, and he couldn’t help but think that given the slightest provocation that wyvern would swoop down looking for prey and decide that the two of them were the perfeabsp;

  He didn’t have any idea how far those things ranged when they hunted, but given their size and the number of calories they had to burn every day, it had to be far, and he was certain they’d still be at risk for days until they could make it to the light forest that was still over a day from here, and he had no idea what new dangers would await them there.

  “What are you thinking about?” Freya asked eventually, rousing him from his recursive train of thought about all the dahat they faced.

  “How did you know I was still awake?” he asked. They were spooning together for warmth, and she was fag away, so he was genuinely fused.

  “If you were asleep, then you would have been sn,” she said pyfully. “When you’re this quiet, usually you’re just w about things.”

  “The Wyvern,” he said holy, unwilling to tell her too mubsp;

  “It’s going to be okay,” she reassured him. “We’ll get somewhere safe soon. You said so yourself.”

  “I did,” he agreed.

  They chatted for a while about what he thought would happe and what they would eat first when they got back to civilization, but eventually, there was a lull in the versation, and Simon thought that she’d drifted off to sleep until she said, “It’s funny, you know? You spend all your time w about what’s going to happe, but all I think about are all the terrible things that have already happened.”

  “I get that,” he agreed, looking briefly at the Pandora’s box of past traumas in his mind before he decided he did not want to open it again. “But eventually, all that just gets to be too much, and you have to move on.”

  “I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to move on from Bre… From what happened in that inn,” she said, in a voice filled with sadness.

  “You know, it helps if you talk about it,” he said, not really believing the words. It was something his therapist had always told him, though, and somehow at this moment, it felt right.

  “I just… I ’t believe that she would do something like that…” Freya said, “Not really to him.”

  “You mean Breanna?” he asked. “She seemed like a real piece of work to me.”

  “But you didn’t…” she paused as she remembered. “oh, was this before?”

  “Yeah, we met before. Aime.” Simon agreed, not eager to tell his lover too much here. Other women were a sticky situation that he wasn’t used to, and fag a cave full of goblins was less than treacherous in his mind than trying to thread this needle. “She almost got me killed once.”

  “Oh,” Freya said, letting the ominous word hang in the air for a long time.

  “What did she do to you?” Simon asked, unwilling to let the versation die in such a precarious pbsp;

  “She almost got me killed, too,” Freya said. At first, her words came out slowly, o a time, like they were being dragged out of her. At some unseen critical point, though, that trickle became a waterfall, and she couldn’t stop. “No - worse. She almost made sure I was turned into one of those things. After the owurned, she tried to use me as a human shield to save her skin, and we fought aually… I had to, you uand, don’t you? I had to…”

  “It’s okay,” Simon said, stroking her hair. “I know you did what you had to. Only what you had to.”

  Freya was g now, and that made it hard for him to fouch of anything else besides how unfortable that made him feel and how he could somehow get her to stop, but at least the mystery finally made sense. Every time he jouro level 6 and the door opened, it was in the middle of some crucial moment, and so sometimes Freya won, sometimes Breanna won, and sometimes no one won at all. That expihe blood on Freya’s hands and the on in Breanna’s whenever he found one of them, at least.

  They both drifted off after the sobbing stopped, but it was only when he woke up that he realized he’d fotten to do something about Freya’s blistered, bleedi.

  “A??????u??????f?????v?????a?????r????u??????m????? ????H???????j??????a?????k???k??????” he whispered in the dawn light while she still slept softly.

  Uhe bs, he couldn’t see the results of his magic, but he was certain that he was successful as he felt the tingle of magic flow through him. Fortunately, Freya didn’t wake up from that, and even after he woke her up and they had the st of their stale biscuits for breakfast, she didn’t say a word about the state of her feet, even though he was sure she knew something was different.

  Simo much of the day thinking about the moment she’d described to him st night instead of the wyvern. Did the fact that either option ossible mean that the oute wasn’t important, or did it mean that one of them was the right answer? Why would Hedes have started the level right at the moment? Why not before the fight so he could save them all, or after the fight when Freya had lived.

  He had no answers, but when they finally found a trail weaving through the rolling grassnds at the base of the mountains, they made better time and camped at the edge of the wood. They roasted some of the cured ham that night, which was delicious, but Simo half the night awake listening for the noise of predators as he realized that the delicious smell of roasti had been a terrible mistake in such a wild pce. While Freya snored softly beside him, all he could think about was the razor-sharp beak of the owl bear and that he hoped they didn’t range in this wood like they did iher oraveled in so frequently.

  This time when they reached the road he went south instead of north. He wasn’t going to expose Freya to those bandits or the crazy innkeeper in Wellingbrooke. That meant it was two more days on the road before they reached the safety of the vilge. This time Simon was careful not to use gold when he paid this time. He struggled to introduce the two of them at the inhey sought lodging because he doubted that there were words like girlfriend in the world, but Freya quickly hahat. “I’m his cousin,” she said quickly, making Simon wonder if she was iionally choosing to downpy their situation or not.

  “And where you folks traveling from?” the ky old proprietor asked. “Not from the troubles up north, I hope.”

  “No, definitely not,” Simon answered too quickly. “We e from a vilge to the east, beyond the mountains. Why? Has something happened?”

  “We got any number of problems right now to choose from, but none as bad a Schwarzenbruck,” the older man said with a sigh. “If I were you, I’d think real hard about going back the way you came.”

  “We might do that,” Simon answered. “We just o rest a few nights after such a long trip.”

  Simon had po stay there for three nights, but in the end, they only stayed two. In the end, it wasn’t the lumpy bed or the mediocre food that the pce served. It wasn’t even that Freya was ag a little distant. It was that on their sed night there, during dinner, one of the newly arrived merts had a seizure and began to spasm and tremble at the table he door before he suddenly rose again as a flesh-hungry monster.

  Fortunately, Simon repared, and no sooner had the creature started trying to tear the throat out of their neighbor than Simon was there to crush the thing’s skull with his mace. He ended up doing the same thing to the man that had been bitten, even as everyone looked on in horror like he was the murderer.

  “What?” he said defensively. “You get bit, you bee one of them. Those are the rules.”

  “How could you possibly know that?” someone gasped.

  “Like you learn anything important: the hard way,” Simon shot back as he ed his ma the deadman’s clothes before he grabbed Freya by the hand and pulled her away from the table. “e on. We’re getting out of here. Who knows how many more of those things are close by.”

  The fear in the woman’s face as she relived everything that had happeo her before made resistance impossible. “Where will we go?” she asked meekly.

  “Away is the only dire that matters,” he said as they went upstairs to pack their meager belongings.

  Simon had sidered swiping the dead man’s purse, but he thought people might react badly. Ohey were out of the inn, though, he had no problems swiping the wagon that the man had e in on, though. Simon had been sitting on the porjoying the breeze and the su when the mert had e in earlier.

  At the time, the man had seemed a little off, but not I’ve-been-bitten-and-you’re-all-gonna-die off. Simon needed Freya’s help to put the mert’s horse ba the harness, but after that, they were on their way. She had some qualms about stealing someone else’s property to her credit, but it was this, or walk through the night, and Simon wao get away as far and as fast as they could.

  “You know, it’s funny,” he said as they started to ride down the dark road to whatever horror awaited them , “I always thought that in a med… In the midst of a pce full of swords and axes, zombies wouldn’t be much of an issue, but it appears I was wrong.”

  He’d almost said ‘medieval world,’ which would have been a mistake that was hard to correbsp;

  “Simon,” she sighed. “Even if everyone in that room was armed, you were the only killer there. Most people just want to live. They don’t go around looking for things to fight like you.”

  It was an iing statement, and a few lives ago, he probably wouldn’t have gotten what she was saying, but now, he definitely did.