Chapter 9: The Icewinder

“You there,” the village mage repeated, arriving at Miro’s side and looming uncomfortably close to his table. “You aren’t no fisher.”

“I ain’t no fish either.” There went the Charisma points outweighing the Intellect point once again.

“Funny, that was funny,” Bagsil said in a tone that strongly suggested he thought nothing of the sort. “You some kind of runaway court jester or something?” he asked, rubbing the fabric of Miro’s filthy sleeve between his fingers. “What happened? Had to bail because you called the wrong Baron a fat hog?” The mage glanced back at the tables of his friends. It was their cue to laugh, and they followed it without fail. “Are you here to entertain us, jester? Have any fun tricks for us?”

“Actually, I have a disappearing trick I’m really dying to try, so if you’d just let me –”

Miro made a move to rise but a heavy hand pressed him back into his chair.

“Sit down.”

“Okay.”

“Just let the kid be.”

Both Bagsil and Miro turned to the source of that voice.

Miro wondered how he failed to notice her before, nestled among the fishers at the bar; perhaps it was the heavy purple cloak she wore over her shoulders, the cowl raised over her head. The best part about her was that her life bar was solidly green and underneath it was displayed the name “Icewinder”. She was a darker skinned young woman, her complexion reminding him of the stands of pine trees in the Lake Country, and she was maybe only a year or two older than Miro, with a prominent nose and dark eyes that gave the impression that they’d already seen every way a situation could unfold and were now bored with the predictable outcome.

“Why should I leave him alone?” The mage let out a derisive snort and Kerik, the woman Bagsil had to restrain earlier from fighting the fisher, moved toward the edge of her seat as if in anticipation of her wish being fulfilled. “Does this belong to you?” Bagsil asked the icewinder as he shook Miro’s shoulder roughly.

“That remains to be seen.” The cloaked woman sounded disinterested and hadn’t as much as made eye contact with Miro.

“Who are you?” the blonde mage asked, his sneer growing more hostile as the exchange went on.

“I’m Hima.” She lowered the hood of her cloak, revealing black hair that hung loose to just below her shoulders.

“Hima what?”

“Oh, you haven’t earned that privilege yet,” Hima said, approaching Miro’s table and standing to the opposite side of him from the village mage. “Now, am I going to need to ask twice?” As she said this, Miro heard a faint crackling sound coming from the table and when he looked down he saw that where Hima’s hand was touching it, the surface had turned frosty and menacing-looking shards of ice grew upwards from the wood.

Bagsil let out a low chuckle in the back of his throat. “That’s great, then,” he said, and Miro’s world was turned upside down before exploding in golden sparks.

The mage had grabbed the back of Miro’s chair with both hands and threw it to the ground, taking Miro with it. Miro hit the back of his head hard against the floor but through temporarily blurred vision saw that Bagsil had little time to do anything else before Hima kicked the table toward him, knocking Bagsil back across the tavern.

The fisherfolk had wisely chosen to merely scoot far away enough to provide themselves with a safety buffer but still watch the chaos unfold as Bagsil and his six companions now focused their attention entirely on Hima. The table that had just knocked down the mage suddenly launched itself in Hima’s direction. So it turned out that Bagsil had the same powers as Volod from Miro’s village, which somehow made Miro hate this mage even more. The table, though, did not reach its intended target. With an upward wave of her right hand, Hima summoned a thick shard of ice to grow from the floor in front of her, which then splintered the table in half before it struck her.

In the next moment, Kerik was running at Hima with a bottle raised over her head, poised to smash Hima’s head in, but the moment Hima laid eyes on it, the bottle turned frosty and exploded in Kerik’s hand, showering her and even Miro in fine shards of broken glass. At this point, Miro decided that in order to avoid suffering any collateral damage, for example from a boot landing on his nose, and to perhaps hone the new Strength points he’d given himself, he ought to make an effort to help. He hauled himself from the floor and slammed his fist into the first person he saw running by, a mistake, to be sure, given the pain that went through his knuckles as if he’d just punched a solid block of iron.

The squat man with a blocky face looked down at where he had been struck, and then looked up at Miro with a crooked grin. Had Miro stopped to pause for a moment, he would have noticed that this was the other man whose life bar identified him as a “Mage”, a detail that receded into the distance as the man thrust both hands into Miro and sent him flying backwards across the tavern.

Hima briefly turned to check where he had landed, and then turned back to the other mage.

“So I see this is a two mage kind of town,” she remarked.

The mage gave Hima the same crooked grin and only managed to twitch in the icewinder’s direction when several ice bolts knocked him back and pinned the clothing on his arms and legs to the wall beside the front door. “You –” he hollered, but before he could finish the expletive, a blue muzzle of ice was slapped over his mouth. She had commanded this all with her left hand, while her right hand created an icy slick beside her causing two other attackers to slide into the counter. After that, no one was left that had been itching for a fight.

She approached Bagsil, who was still lying on the floor nursing his ribs and squatted beside him.

“Like I said, I don’t like having to ask twice. Understood?”

“Yes,” he answered, the pain showing in his voice, but Miro noticed that he wasn’t looking at her. Instead, he was looking past her to a stuffed animal on the wall – an enormous fish with a long sword-like point to its nose. Once Miro understood what was happening, he let out a yell of warning but it was too late – the fish had detached itself from the wall and flew towards Hima’s back, point first.

Miro could see, even from where he was, the whites of Bagsil’s widened eyes as he watched his chosen projectile be frozen in mid-air by a spike of ice that instantly descended from the ceiling. Hima did not even glance back at the fish, eyes on Bagsil the entire time.

She then calmly leaned right into his face, shaking her head.

“You are a tragically slow learner,” she said right before popping her right fist into his nose and knocking him back onto the ground. One of the fisherfolk grunted in approval, while another raised her glass in Hima’s direction with a slight nod.