Less than a day later, the need for the sword became apparent. With loud howls, the forest came alive around the carriage, the packbeasts pawing fearfully at the ground as Darm commanded them to halt.

“Looks like we’ve got ourselves a band of Girscaws here to welcome us to their forest,” Darm commented lightly, his rings flashing in the light as he wiggled his fingers to warm them up. “Tethis, would you be a dear and return their greetings? I would hate to be a rude guest.”

With a grunt of acknowledgement, Tethis jumped out of the carriage, her warhammer balanced casually across her shoulder. Striding to the front of the carriage, she gave the trees a challenging look, her eyes hard as she stared at something Rowan could not quite make out. As she did, an arrow came soaring out from the forest, flying towards her with a deadly speed. Waving his hand, Darm conjured a shield around them, an enormous translucent dome springing up to cover the area around the carriage, enveloping Tethis only a moment before the arrow struck. With a pinging sound, the arrow bounced uselessly off of the shield, the shaft fracturing as it fell.

“Interlopers!” an angry voice shouted in broken Fyrinian, a tall gray-skinned person emerging from the woods to confront them. With the look of a man who had been elongated and painted gray, he gave off a gaunt appearance, one that was accentuated by the white paint that covered parts of his face and the exposed skin on his arms. In one hand, he held a long staff, covered in bones that rattled as he moved, angrily pointing toward them with his free hand. “You dare to invade our sacred forest?!”

“Sorry,” Darm replied easily, giving the man a friendly wave. “We didn’t know it was sacred, we’re just traveling north. We’ll be through quickly enough.”

“You have trespassed on our sacred grounds,” the Girscaw responded. “The penalty for that is death.”

“Which part of the forest is sacred?” Darm asked in a reasonable tone. “We didn’t see anything that pointed to a sacred area—we’d have avoided it if we had.”

“The entire Great Forest is sacred to us.”

“The entire forest can’t be considered forbidden,” Darm told him helplessly. “We need to get north somehow.”

“Forest sacred,” the Girscaw responded. “Penalty for trespass is death!”

Waving his staff, the Girscaw conjured a bolt of stone, launching it toward the translucent dome. As the rock slammed into the shield, it broke apart, showering the ground with stone fragments. The shield remained unharmed.

“Behind us,” Darm advised Tethis, who still hadn’t taken the warhammer off of her shoulders.

“I know.”

Whirling, Tethis leapt forward, covering a distance of more than twenty feet in an instant as the warhammer in her hands flashed, slamming into the group of Girscaw who had been creeping up through the brushes behind them. With agonized cries, the Girscaw were thrown backward, their limbs flapping brokenly in the wake of Tethis’ devastating strike.

With that opening blow, the battle was begun, Girscaw appearing from the forest on all sides, their gray faces open and howling as they advanced upon the carriage. Several of them carried bows, but the dome of magic that Darm had produced rendered their projectiles useless, a fact they soon realized, abandoning their bows in favour of hand-axes, daggers, and spiked clubs.

No matter the weapons arrayed against her, Tethis was unstoppable, her warhammer moving with the grace and speed of a weapon half the size and a third the weight. Everywhere it struck, devastation was the result, broken Girscaw left helpless in the wake of her heavy blows.

For his part, Darm launched spells, fireballs, ice lances, blades of wind, and bolts of lightning depending on his mood, taking out any enemy who thought it a good idea to try and sneak up on Tethis.

As Rowan watched the fight, Darm nodded toward Tethis. “You might as well get down there and help her out. She won’t be happy if you just sit back and watch. And from experience, I can tell you that said anger would be taken out on you in training later.”

Swallowing dryly as he imagined the training an angry Tethis might put him through, Rowan jumped down, his new sword held limply between his fingers. Although he had wielded a knife before as a street rat, it had always been for the purpose of intimidation, usually in an attempt to persuade other street rats that an easier target would be preferable than him. Now, a real enemy had presented itself to him, and the thought terrified him. As Tethis whirled around, a one-woman army of devastation and wrath, Rowan searched for a suitable target. He didn’t have long to wait.

With a loud chittering sound, a nearby Girscaw noticed him, turning away from the terrifying elf and heading instead for the shivering boy standing off to the side. Wielding a dagger, she advanced, licking her lips as she approached Rowan’s position.

Calm down, Rowan. You can do this, she’s only got a dagger, you’ve fought plenty of other gutterscum who used daggers and came out alive. You can do this, Rowan’s inner voice told him as he settled into a fighting stance, conveniently ignoring the fact that he had survived those past encounters through the judicious application of force, mainly that of his legs on cobblestone as he sprinted hard in the other direction. Now, he was trapped, the carriage behind him and the Girscaw in front.

Finally in range, the Girscaw abandoned caution, launching herself at him with the dagger held high, a scene that had Rowan had seen played out many times in the past few days. Keep your eyes open. Tethis’ words resounded through his mind. Keeping his eyes firmly locked on his opponent, Rowan threw himself to the side, swinging his sword wildly at where the Girscaw should be. Feeling his sword strike her, Rowan swore. Too shallow, I need to make a deeper wound.

Before he could advance however, the Girscaw’s fist swung out, catching him in the shoulder and sending him stumbling backwards as she recovered.

106/150

With a pained hiss, the Girscaw considered her wound. Rowan had left a long, shallow scar along her left side, exposing tender flesh beneath the gray skin, just barely visible behind the leather and bone armour she wore. Examining the wound, the Girscaw uttered a few words in a strange, stilted language that Rowan did not recognize.

Pointing the dagger at him, the Girscaw dropped into a fighting stance, no longer eager to throw herself wildly at the boy. Clearly, Rowan’s first strike had instilled a sense of danger into her. Unfortunately, not the eight inches of sharpened steel he had hoped to insert, but it was a start, Rowan thought as he settled his grip on the sword.

Circling each other, Rowan and the Girscaw began to trade blows, neither eager to overcommit and leave themselves open to a lethal counterattack. Behind them, Tethis continued to wreak havoc among the other Girscaw, Darm’s support allowing her to rampage with reckless abandon as he dealt with the archers and the shaman.

Ducking low, the Girscaw dodged Rowan’s horizontal strike, moving quickly to close the distance between them as her dagger flashed threateningly in the light. Doing his best to remain calm, Rowan did what Tethis had always done to him in their training sessions, following his first strike with a hard punch, catching the Girscaw hard in the jaw as she was moving in to strike.

With a pained sound, the Girscaw dropped, her dagger spilling from her hands as she fell prone to the forest floor. Standing over her, Rowan looked around in confusion. His opponent was not dead, the continuous rise and fall of her chest proved that. However, nothing in Tethis’ training sessions had prepared him for what to do with an unconscious opponent. As he debated the matter, a loud voice rang out from behind him.

“Finish her off,” Darm told him, his usual carefree look gone. In its place was a terrifying visage, the halfling’s face transformed into a mask of vengeance. “Never leave an enemy behind, nor allow a foe to strike twice when once was enough.”

“But—” Rowan began; however, Darm cut him off.

“The Girscaw are a plague upon this land. They kill travelers such as ourselves merely for taking the less dangerous path north. If you let her go today, she’ll kill someone else tomorrow. You were a street rat, you should know this.”

Considering the statement, Rowan nodded slowly. One of the first things he had learned as an urchin was to never allow anyone to take advantage of him. Once the other street rats knew that you were an easy mark, they would never let go. Back then, Rowan had been forced to deal harshly with someone he had considered a friend, beating him until his face was barely recognizable for the crime of stealing from him. Although he had never been forced to kill, he had always known that if that was what it took to survive then that was what he would have to do. Now, the time had finally come.

Raising his blade, Rowan positioned it over the Girscaw’s heart. After one final moment of hesitation, he put strength into the blade, plunging it through her armour and into the flesh beneath. Stiffening, the Girscaw’s body tensed briefly as the sword found her heart. Letting out a small sigh, her head lolled backward, blood pooling beneath her as Rowan withdrew his sword, looking at the bloodied blade with a distasteful look. Killing had been far easier than he had expected, and he was not sure how that made him feel. Was it this easy for my killer when they did that to me? Rowan wondered. This was the thought that made him nauseous, the bile rising in his throat as he turned away from the rapidly cooling corpse of the Girscaw below, throwing up violently into the bushes on the side of the path.

Behind him, Tethis had finished off the last of the Girscaw, her warhammer descending to crush the skull of the shaman, ignoring his pleas as he begged for his life. With that, silence descended upon the path once more, broken only by the sounds of Rowan’s panting between bursts of nausea as he brought up the lunch he had eaten only two hours before.

“You did good, Rowan,” Darm told him gently, appearing beside him and placing a hand on his back. “It was us or them, and we chose to live on. That is not a crime, and nor is feeling bad about the act we were forced to commit.”

“It wasn’t that,” Rowan panted, doing his best to control his rebellious stomach. “Killing her was easy. It made me realize that I shouldn’t be alive right now myself. I should be like her, dead with no one to remember my name. Instead, I’m here, having just killed someone else, and it scares me. Before I was attacked, I had no real reason to live. Now, I’m terrified to die, and the thought that I could be so easily killed…”

Rowan trailed off. What it was about the concept of death that suddenly terrified him, he could not quite say. However, Darm seemed to understand regardless, giving Rowan’s shoulder a reassuring squeeze.

“Tethis and I will take care of the rest of them. Loot what you can from this one,” Darm told him, nudging the corpse of the Girscaw Rowan had killed with his foot. “Then I’ll send ‘em off all at once.”

As Rowan nodded mutely, Darm gave him one last reassuring pat before standing up, leaving Rowan to deal with the dead Girscaw. Fortunately, life as a street rat had prepared Rowan for this, having gone through the possessions of local drunkards or addicts on more than one occasion. Stripping the body of anything useful, Rowan took the Girscaw’s dagger, a small pouch that contained various colourful rocks and crystals, and her bracers, leaving her damaged armour and clothes behind. As he finished, Tethis appeared, pointing to a pile of Girscaw corpses by the side of the path. Taking the hint, Rowan grabbed the body under the shoulders, dragging it to the pile where Darm was waiting.

Saying something under his breath, Darm waved his fingers, conjuring an enormous flame that quickly consumed the pile of Girscaw. The bodies giving off a scent not unlike that of roast pork.

As they burned, Darm turned away. “Come on, there’s a long way to go before we get out of this forest, and this is hardly the only group of Girscaw in the area.”

As he followed Darm back to the carriage where Tethis was waiting, Rowan cast one last look back upon the blaze, the fires hungrily devouring everything that had once been a proud tribe of Girscaw. For a moment, he just stood there, lost in thought as the flames flickered and burned.

“Rowan,” Darm called.

Turning away, Rowan joined Tethis on the carriage, Darm putting the packbeasts into motion as the carriage began to move once more. Looking at the dagger he had taken off the Girscaw warrior, Rowan mused over the events that had transpired. In a strange turn of events, taking a life had taught him a lot about his own. While he was not entirely sure just what it was that he had learned, he could sense it was something important. Puzzling over the matter, Rowan rode in silence, doing his best to make sense of his new feelings.