Author's Note: Woooooo! Chapter 400! How cool is that?
Ch. 400 - Acceptance
All throughout dinner and the following day, Simon kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it never did. He kept waiting for another master or a quorum of knights to ask him more questions and see through his lies, but the only time anyone mentioned it was by clapping him on the back or muttering a few kind words.
While the Unspoken didn’t exactly classify things, it certainly felt like everything to do with this warlock was on a need-to-know basis. Simon found that reaction interesting, but he enjoyed the change of pace; more and more often, he was being met by nods of respect instead of trailing whispered suspicions in his wake.
Still, that praise was always nonspecific. “I heard you struck a terrible blow against the enemy this month,” one of the knights told him. Sir Reginald, or perhaps, Sir Regeneld, Simon wasn’t sure. “You’ll have to let me buy you a drink.”
“I fear if I’m bought too many more drinks I’ll be as dead as the villain I defeated,” Simon answered, to more than a few laughs.
The last time he’d won there’d been endless questions about what he’d found, but this time those questions were more circumspect and general. It was less than the other men of the order were afraid of the answers, and more than they were afraid they might get caught asking the questions. Simon had yet to be assigned penance for any of his actions, but he knew that it did happen, and he expected a man asking too much about things he should not know would be kept on his knees, praying for a long time to come.
The only thing he risked doing was learning the gesture for the word of nullification. He didn’t practice it. He wasn’t that brave, but it was too valuable a weapon not to commit to memory, and every night before bed he reviewed the gestures in the mirror until he knew every twitch. That wasn’t a guarantee he could use it without practice, of course, but it was better to have and not need to than to get his soul ripped out of his body somewhere along the way because he was unprepared.
After a few days, Simon asked Master Harrin for a new mission and news about Varten, but was rebuffed on both fronts. “Write up more details about your most recent encounter instead,” he instructed. “But not specifically. Write it for a young knight; try to explain to him what tipped you off and told you something was amiss.”
Simon bristled at that, not because it wasn't a perfectly reasonable request, but because wheels were turning in the background that he wasn’t privy to. He did as he was told, but somewhere between trying to explain the feeling of dread that had overcome him in the inn and the way the memory of the villages seemed to waver, he ended up writing a page-long poem about the wavering smoke blowing against the wind.
That was the catalyst, whimsical though it was, that finally got Simon to ignore the larger issues and focus on the task. While he wrote pages more on the subject, he drafted three rules that distilled a great deal of other wisdom down to three concise points:
Pay attention to your surroundings; evil is the fruit, but also the tree.
Houses have no aura, but hide their owners completely.
If their neighbors do not know them well, then you should.
They were simple, but pragmatic thoughts, and while Simon thought they’d make good dogma, he also thought he could improve on them later.
A week later, he was finally summoned to the order master who commanded him. “Many were hesitant to believe in any fulfillment of prophecy, you understand. Such things reek of fraud and witchcraft in the best cases.”
Simon nodded in agreement at that. There was exactly one woman in the world whose prophecies he was inclined to believe. He tried asking where this one had come from, but was rebuffed as Master Harrin continued.
“So it was decided that we should test you, especially after what happened at the Tithe Pools. If you could solve one obscure case, then why not more?” the master continued.
“So then you knew that the warlock would be in—” Simon started to ask, but he was quickly overridden.
“If we’d known that monster had squirreled himself away at the edge of nowhere, then we would have sent an army, not our newest recruit,” Master Harrin assured him.
Sent and lost, Simon told himself silently. Magic was a world of cloak and dagger. Knights worked well on criminals and monsters, but a warlock, well, if Jranesh Karell had dragged himself away from his experiments for a pint the night that Simon had come to the village, Simon might never have woken up again. An army would have been wiped out, but there was no way he could explain that to the White Cloaks. They did things one way: the righteous one.
“So is that my fate then?” Simon asked. “To solve unsolved mysteries?”
That made the master smile. “Your mission is whatever I say it is, until I expire, or you advance to the service of some other part of the order, and I say the tasks before you are the same as anyone else. Find evil, purge it, and keep your heart pure in the doing of it.”
Simon was relieved to hear that, but not as relieved as he was to have Varten reassigned to him a few days later. That was both a surprise and a relief, given that no one said a word about the boy until one day he just marched into Simon’s room and told him, “I’m ready to begin our training again.”
Simon had expected more of a ceremony than that. Something with a chapel, and sacred vows said while being anointed with holy oils. None of that happened, though. Instead, Simon’s squire was returned to him, and he was given new orders.
The boy didn’t offer Simon any details about what he’d been up to in the intervening months beyond broad statements like, “They asked me many questions about myself and my family. It was very uncomfortable.”
When they left a few days later on general orders to “Press as far west as the damned Ionians will allow and then return,” the boy was obviously grateful to be gone from the Broken Tower. He didn’t even need to say it. It showed easily enough in the way that he never complained again. However, they’d treated the boy in his absence, it would seem that Varten much preferred Simon’s chores and lessons to the idea of being paired again with someone else, and they walked in silence more than they used to.
It took the boy two days for him to come out with what was bothering him. “Did you know they were going to kill me if I wasn’t, uhm, suitable?”
“I knew you were suitable,” Simon answered swiftly. It was a lie, but a kind one. “Had there been any question, I wouldn’t have brought you back with me.”
In reality, he’d risked Varten’s life because he preferred that loss to the loss of a child that hadn’t wronged him. At the time, it had been a hard-hearted decision, but if he had it to do over again, he might not have.
“What makes you think I’m suitable?” the boy asked. “My father? My bloodline?”
Simon shook his head. Those were the last things that would make him the right choice to be a soldier for good in this never-ending battle. “Because you have fight in you,” Simon answered. “And more than anything, the Unspoken need people who will never give up.”
For a moment, he worried he’d slipped by saying that name out loud, but when the boy didn’t react, he assumed he’d faced his own initiation. Simon tried to bring that up in a roundabout way a few times over the next few days, but the boy always changed the subject, which told Simon he was sworn to secrecy. That didn’t surprise him.
He probably thinks I’m testing him even now, Simon reflected.
Still, after Varten asked the question, it no longer weighed on their trip, and things became more normal. They helped a wagon that had become stuck in the mud the following day, and spent the next two days in a shoddy inn, dodging the storms that lashed the region this time of year.
When Varten asked why the rains were so random and poorly distributed, Simon could only laugh at the boy's indignation. “Crowvar needs this water, and this area already has too much! Everything is mud! Couldn’t they just… move the rainclouds further east?”
Simon gave him the briefest, simplest version of the evaporation cycle he could think of, but when that largely went over his head, he chose a simpler road that fit what he’d probably been taught by his tutors.
“It’s the rule of attraction,” Simon explained. “Like attracts like. Here, there are rivers and lakes, and not so far away to the west and south, the sea surrounds us. That will create many storms, especially in the water months. Crowvar, on the other hand, has a great deal of air and earth, so they get—”
“Nothing but dust,” the boy complained. He immediately disavowed the place, arguing it didn’t matter anymore, but Simon could see that wasn’t true.
The two of them continued west toward Ionia for the next several days. There was no good way overland to Ionia without going all the way south, through Montain to the sea, or north far enough to get to Coramin, but he didn’t think that getting to Ionar was really the point of this exercise. The region worshiped their own gods, showed little interest in magic, and had no tolerance for the Whitecloaks. Sometime before they reached their goal, an outpost or a unit of scouts would turn them around with harsh words or bared weapons. Simon would oblige them in either case, though he'd prefer the former option.
They never got that far, though. Instead, he sighted a traveler with a witchmark and stopped him. “I-I’ve done nothing wrong!” the man claimed, and Simon believed him. He certainly wasn’t getting anything out of the deal. Someone had inflicted him with a word that took Simon a few seconds to puzzle out, Dnarth Farzehl Zyvon Vrazig, which more or less meant distant luck draining and ruination.
The words were clear, but the writing was strange, as if the marks he’d seen from the Charian witches were in a heavy block print and these were in a lighter cursive. The font choice didn’t matter, though. What did was that he’d clearly pissed someone off, and Simon wanted to find out who.
“Let me guess, friend,” Simon said. “You’ve had an unbelievable run of bad luck lately, and you think I’m just the torment you have to suffer through.”
“I don’t have any money left!” the man said, “You can’t even take my dignity. I lost all that and more a few days back.”
“Easy, stay calm,” Simon said, reining up and letting his horse take a couple of steps back. “No one’s hurting or taking anything. You’ll sit by our fire tonight and tell us your tale of woe, and tomorrow we’ll start in the direction you point and see if we can’t address it.”
It was still early to stop yet, but they weren’t in any hurry, and Varten could do with some lessons. The stranger, for his part, conceded immediately. He was on foot and knew he had no chance of running away from a knight on horseback. They could all use a rest, and it would be nice to get the tent up before sunset for once.
Ch. 401 - A Man of Constant Sorrow
Wildon, as the stranger eventually was persuaded to introduce himself, didn’t calm down until the three of them were eating. Even then, he never relaxed completely, but it was enough that he could tell his tale of woe to them. To Simon, it sounded like the plot of a bad comedy.
One day, he was just a normal merchant, moving from village to village. “I’d buy carded wool from the shepherds along the Raiden mountains, then bring it to the lowlands and sell it for wheat and beer, then go down to the coast and sell it for a profit before I repeat the trip again. But then, after I met that crone, everything changed,” he told them, before going into his tale of woe.
Apparently, he’d offended a customer when she’d tried to haggle him down with the quality of his wool, and according to him, she’d cursed him. While that sounded like normal enough behavior to Simon, he really had no way of knowing, and as the man was actually cursed, it did lend a great deal of credibility to his story.
Cursed really was the right word, too. It would have been tempting to think the man was exaggerating. However, as they traveled they had constant problems along the way, which made everything he’d said more believable. First were the goblin attacks. Almost every night Wildon slept at their camp, their sleep was interrupted by goblins.
Normally, the pests were rare enough and skittish enough that they wouldn’t approach two or three people unless they’d picked an overgrown campsite with an easy approach.
Even a bare field and a watchman didn’t deter these groups, though, and on the third night of their trip, Varten got a second kill to his name, which made Simon proud even though he did the lion’s share of the fighting. Wildon didn’t do much but cower. That wasn’t the only misfortune he brought to them, either.
Simon’s horse threw a shoe on a bad road, and near constant rains all conspired to slow them down. Still, they made steady progress toward their destination. Simon expected to find the witch he was looking for in the village of Drummond. He’d never been there before, but it wasn’t so far south of Ordenvale that it hadn’t ended up on Simon’s maps. They almost shared the same woods; only a river cut between them.
There was no witch to be found there, though. The woman that Wildon had fingered as the culprit was dead. However, there were plenty of witch marks present to show the problem was even bigger than Simon feared. They weren’t even leeching luck from everyone like they were from Wildon.
The culprit was stealing beauty from a couple of other women, and health from several more men, along with other, more esoteric things. One man who’d been sleeping almost continuously for months had a mark that was draining his wakefulness. A spiritual infestation was taking place here, and no one understood why.
Simon had planned to bring the village together for a frank discussion, but they did that without prompting, begging him for aid as soon as word of his white cloak spread. They knew something was wrong, but they just didn’t know what. So, before he questioned them, he led them all in a prayer to make them feel at ease. That wouldn’t do as much good for them as drawing a symbol of greater nullification and canceling all their curses, but then, as a Whitecloak, he didn’t really have that option.
Patience, Simon, he cautioned himself. Finding the culprit will cure them just as easily. Afterwards, he asked those who had been affected when the symptoms of their curses had started and who they thought was to blame.
The villagers were obviously surprised that he unerringly approached those who were most affected without being given any details, but that didn’t help them to give him any answers that were helpful. They could describe their symptoms well enough. He could see those branded on their soul, though. What they couldn’t tell him was who had done it.
Oh, every last one of them had ideas. The kindly young baker who’d apparently been the most beautiful woman in the village the year before was a withered old crone who looked twice as old as her mother. She said it was a peddler who had come through town. Others remembered him, but had nothing to say about him.
Another said it was the old widow Spence who had cursed her man, but even after the town had banded together and burned down her house, the symptoms had persisted. Everyone was certain of who had done this to them, but none of them agreed.
Simon made a mental note of each suspect, but wouldn’t have been surprised if it was none of them at all. Some of the suspects were local and quickly ruled out. Others were strangers who had passed through with no information about where to find them next.
That would be the most dangerous sort of witch, he quickly decided, remembering Aranna’s experiences. Not one who preys off the same people day in and day out, but one that moves around from place to place, leaching as she goes.
There were probably limits to that. He knew for a fact that the word of distance had its limitations, but they had to be close enough to here, and to the place where Wildon had been cursed and where they’d ultimately found him. Simon drew a simple map from memory and studied those three points, creating overlapping circles until he found a point where they all intersected.
“That’s where we’ll search next,” Simon told his squire after the village smith had reshoed his horse.
For the second leg of their trip, they left behind their bad luck charm and continued together so they could move faster. Simon considered using a divination technique to verify they were going the right way, but he didn’t want to do that too often in front of Varten. He was a perceptive child, and the more that Simon flirted with tools he shouldn’t have, the quicker he was likely to out himself as a sort of mage.
It turned out he didn’t need to, though; they didn’t even reach their destination before Simon noticed something disturbing. While their first two days trekking through the woods in the search of a witch they didn’t seem to be able to find were uneventful, they were also unproductive. Goblins and weather no longer assailed them at every turn, but there didn’t seem to be any hidden witch at the location he’d guessed.
“If they’re not here, then they’d have to be, what, wandering through the woods?” he asked himself, but that didn’t make a lot of sense. At least until he spotted the change in Varten.
Sometime between when they’d left the village of Drummond and now, the boy had been marked. This mark didn’t drain his health or his luck, though; it targeted his emotions with Eszloum, the word of soul.
Simon kept his cool. First, he checked himself and determined he had no nasty surprises. Then, he casually asked his squire what they should do next. Gradually, he bent the conversation toward retracing their steps in case they were being watched, but there was nothing unusual in the boy’s story, and Simon did nothing to let him know he’d been assaulted with a curse.
He was in no danger, and panicking him would only make it worse. Instead, Simon waited until they made camp for the night and Varten was asleep before he acted. He was angry that someone would dare to touch his squire, especially under his nose, but he was angrier at himself for not noticing it at the time.
Still, he pushed all of that anger away and forced himself to be calm. His vision was clearest when the waters of his soul were still, and the only way he was going to find the person who had done this was to see as clearly as possible.
Rather than run off into the forest immediately, he sat there in meditation for several minutes. Then, when he opened his eyes, the world was burning with life. Plants might not be good or evil, but they were alive, and as Simon looked from Varten to the forest, he could see the thread of fate that connected the boy to whatever had done this.
Then Simon started to move. Slow at first to make sure he didn’t lose the trail, and then faster as he went. The underbrush thickened, but so unevenly that it seemed almost like it was trying to lead him astray. It couldn’t do that, though. If this were a maze, then he could see the exit clearly at all times.
After half an hour of walking and jogging by turns, he felt a tingle and looked down to see someone had marked him. When he looked down, the witchmark was as clear as a brand or a tattoo against his glowing aura. Dnarth Weylera Zyvon.
That sent a chill through him. For a moment, he read it as a distant word of soul-stealing, but only because he almost never used the Weylera rune. It was common in Murani mechanisms and acted as a trigger, but he rarely saw the need to complicate things so much. Still, the meaning was strange, and he wasn’t quite sure what it was supposed to be stealing.
Regardless, it was a mistake. The witch had tied herself to Simon directly now, and escape was impossible. The path became clearer as he got closer, but when he finally reached his goal, there was no one there. It was just a grove. There was no house or cottage. There was no bubbling cauldron. He was alone.
Well, almost alone. There were fireflies that drew his eye. They were certainly an anomaly that meant something, but they only manifested into something more when he strolled through a ring of toadstools, and they began to glow.
At that moment, the world seemed to congeal. It didn’t quite freeze solid, but he could tell something had happened, and as he looked down at his feet, he could see the way the mycelium tendrils of the mushroom had linked together, forming a natural summoning circle of sorts. That made his blood run cold, but even as he started trying to decode the strange looping cursive ring, he heard a voice.
“I sample many men, but it is rare for any of them to see me or feel me, let alone find me,” it whispered.
Voice was the wrong word. It was no more a voice than grasshoppers rubbing their legs together was the chirp of a bird. What he was hearing was the sighing of the wind through the branches and the rustling of leaves. It was just done in such a way that it made words.
“If you do not release me and explain yourself, you’ll be the one feeling me soon enough,” Simon countered. He felt anger and fear surge up through him. This was new and unexpected, but he suppressed both feelings; emotions would only weaken him, and at this moment, he needed to see everything.
“You’ve placed a curse on me, and I want to know why,” Simon answered.
“As I said, to taste you,” the voice answered. This time, as it spoke, the fireflies came together closely enough that Simon could see their aura coagulate into the shape of a tall, slender man. There was no man there visually, but it was clear that a spirit lingered. “And since you’ve come all this way… Well, I might as well devour you completely, but that will take time. So why don’t we pass it by discussing how you found me…”
Ch. 402 - An Ever Smaller World
Many things went through Simon’s head then, but giving away what few cards he had wasn’t a good idea, so that ruled honesty out. “I just followed the signs that said caution, evil fairy on the loose, and here we are.”
“False,” the cloud buzzed, apparently missing the joke entirely. “I am no faerie, and there were no signs. Tell me again, how did you thread your way through my woods and make it to this grove?”
“You tell me about these little mushrooms, and I’ll think about it,” Simon answered, trying to get something out of the situation.
“The ring? It just lets my world write over the rules of yours a bit,” the fae boasted. It didn’t seem to like the word faerie, but it's clear that’s what it was.
Could it be a demon after all? Simon wondered. Just another type? Every fiber of his being told him that wasn’t the case. The colors and the feelings of the energy were wrong. This was a spirit of this world, though not any sort he’d ever come in contact with before.
He reached out and touched the boundary. It gave, but only like soft foam.
“You won’t be getting out that way,” the speaker taunted as the fireflies swirled and danced in a complicated pattern. “All the time I take from you builds that wall, and the harder you push, the faster you’ll fall!”
Simon wasn’t sure what that meant, but pulled his hand back just to be on the safe side. “I followed you through our connection. When you cursed, or as you say, tasted my squire, you connected with him indelibly. I could follow you anywhere until you release him.”
This answer seemed to satisfy him, and the fae was quiet for a moment as he considered Simon’s offer. “Why? I could leave you in there forever,” the leaves whispered, “I could steal your time for centuries, and let you emerge only to find your grandchildren were old and gray and all you’ve worked for was dust.”
“I’d need children to have grandchildren,” Simon said, eyeing the mushroom circle again as he searched for meaning among the complicated, swirling patterns.
He’d read stories about faerie circles, but until this moment, he wouldn’t have called any of them credible. Now, well, his mind raced at the possibilities. He’d carved words into trees, but making limbs or roots grow into the shape of runes? There were so many experiments he could try.
They were almost like words of power, but not quite, and he wished he could take a picture, but he recalled myths involving faeries and mirrors, and he wasn’t about to complicate things further.
“Oh, but you do, you do,” the fireflies sang, “But we don’t want to torment you or your kin… not really… we want your strength and your strength is time. Perhaps we could make a trade. What would you give me for your drab life, such as it is?”
“Here’s my trade,” Simon answered with an icy voice. “You release your hold on my squire and everyone else you’ve ‘sampled,’ and I won’t burn your forest down.”
“How can you burn when you are frozen in place?” the voice taunted.
When the lights broke up the outline of the fae man vanished, but neither his voice nor his laughter stopped. He was some kind of distributed intelligence, and while not as powerful as a demon, he was still obviously a force to be reckoned with.
Unfortunately for him, his threat was misplaced. While he probably could lock Simon in here for an age, all that would do was ruin his current run. The only damage he would do would be to leave Varten all alone in this world. While Simon didn’t want that, he could bear it.
“You claim to know when I speak the truth and when I speak falsely,” Simon said when the spirit finally reformed into a single entity. He didn’t know whether he was more or less vulnerable in that state, but he preferred a target he could see. “So know this. No matter how long you keep me here. No matter how you kill me, I will return and burn this forest to ash if you provoke me. I will find your heart, and I will pierce it. No enemy is beyond my reach. That is my promise to you. Peace or annihilation.”
That got a reaction. The fireflies didn’t swirl this time. They came apart in a cloud before coming back together again. “How?” it asked. This was the first time its leafy voice sounded anything but sonorous and amused. “If I bottle you up, you can do nothing to me, and yet you will. Your words are true, but impossible. Explain yourself. Is this tied to all the extra time you have? Where did you get it?”
“Prevent them,” Simon countered. “Agree to my demands and save yourself.”
“You think I would simply give up my taste for mortals? How? They are simply too delicious,” the voice answered, full of as much mirth as anger. “We might negotiate on the one you call squire, but everyone else, if they live in my woods, well—”
Simon didn’t wait for him to finish. With the hand he was holding behind his back, he tried to use magic by gesture instead of with words or with runes. His first attempt was unsuccessful, and so was his second, but the fae didn’t seem to realize what he was trying to do, and when he tried for a third time, he felt a jolt as the magic brushed against him and rippled outward.
The first thing that happened was that his sight dimmed. He’d expected that. The Oracle had even warned him that it would. Speaking words of power ruined one's sight, and using them with gestures harmed it, while writing them down seemed to do little at all. Simon’s theory was that it was all a matter of where the magic occurred, and that the further away it was from the soul, the less it churned and twisted the clarity of that soul.
Right now, that didn’t matter; what did was that the fae, as Simon saw it, vanished. At first, he wasn’t sure if he simply couldn't see the creature anymore. It was only when the fireflies winked out, though, and the glow around the mushrooms winked out, that he knew he’d been successful.
The forest still stood, but he was alone in it now. He’d dispelled the monster that had done all this, which was a shame. He would have liked to learn more about what it was.
“Next time,” he told himself, as he went back the way he came and tried to think of a lie to tell his squire about what had happened. First, though, he pulled a mirror from his pocket and made a note that Weylera had the meaning of time.
The fae version of the word he drew looked strange in his collection of other words, but he certainly deserved further research. It was easy to imagine what he might do if he could harvest and use time itself. His mind flicked to his doppelganger at the very idea.
Is that where all of this starts? He wondered. Do I play with the past or the future and end up incarnating another version of myself? Why would I stop at one? Why not a hundred or a thousand? An army of Simons could conquer the pit in a day!
He chuckled at that as he discarded the lunatic idea. “The last thing the world needs is more Simons.”
In the end, he opted to tell his squire a version of the truth. It wouldn’t help the boy in the future to be lied to all the time. Plus, whatever he told the order when they returned, he’d have to match, so he needed to keep that in mind.
“Last night, you were marked by the witch we hunted,” he explained. “You fell into a deep sleep, but I followed her trail and confronted her.” From there, he told how the strange swarm of fireflies threatened to lock him away for a thousand years, and that Simon ultimately bested the entity with the power of prayer.
The boy was wide-eyed about that and insisted on fasting to purify himself even though the mark was gone. When they returned to Drumond, all the marks were. At least, Simon was pretty sure that was the case.
That single word of power had blurred the world significantly. He could see colors and shapes, but no detail. Still, there were no malignant dark blotches on any of those he’d previously inspected, and while the damage wasn’t magically undone, everyone agreed that the ongoing symptoms had stopped. Seeing the farmer that had been trying to sleep his life away up and around, or watching Wildon actually win a round of dice in the tavern that night, was all the proof that Simon needed anyway. If his curse was broken, then everything was normal enough.
Simon spent a lot of time the next few days contemplating what a fae really was. This was spurred on by Varten’s questions, which flowed like water after the event for the first time in a long time.
It didn’t seem to be a singular entity. If he had to guess, the woods were closer to its body than its dwelling, but the lights had been the creature itself. He was sure of that much. Were they visible without sight? He didn't know. He'd been too focused to experiment there.
By day, he answered Varten’s questions, but by night, he wrote down those answers, as well as any other musings he had on the subject, as they started back south to the trade roads so they could head west to the mountains again.
What was a faerie? How did they mark people? Did they eat people’s souls? Was his soul damaged? Would the Whitecloaks burn him at the stake because of what happened?
That last question took a long time to get to, but the boy eventually got there; that one he answered vociferously. “Absolutely not,” he told the boy. “You’re just fine.”
And if anyone tries, I’ll burn down the whole damn castle for the second time, he added silently. Just because he hadn’t used the word of greater greater fire in lifetimes didn’t mean that he couldn’t drop it like a bomb and wipe out an entire courtyard full of Whitecloaks.
The rest of the questions were more complicated, and he tried to explain how the marks stole a little bit of a trait like life or youth, like a tick or mosquito.
“Some people have more of certain things than others,” Simon explained.
“So it stole strength from the blacksmith?” the boy asked.
“Something like that,” Simon agreed. “But remember, someone could steal strength from a goblin, too. I just don’t think they’d like the results.”
“Strength from a goblin?” Varten laughed, picturing it. “That’s like stealing beauty from a… a…” he struggled to find a good word. “From a leper!”
“It is,” Simon nodded, remembering how ghastly his experiment had made him look. “But there’s a little bit of strength in every weakness in the same way that there’s a little bit of gold in the dust of your shoes.”
That made Varten look at his boots. The denials that followed were vociferous. He declared such things impossible, but Simon stood firm. “One day I’ll show you,” he agreed, wondering if the real secret to life might be that there was a little bit of gold in everything. “But for now, we’ve got to get to the border so we can go home. The masters will want to hear about our adventure.”