No Miracles

Brochwel paused his attempt to start a fire when the forest behind him fell silent. Night was well underway, so every crawling bug, swooping bat, and night-calling bird had been making a racket until instinct told them that now was a terrible time to draw attention to oneself. The fact that they all agreed at once meant a sudden arrival, but there had been no thundering of hooves or earth shaking footsteps.

Staying crouched, Brochwel turned and drew his sword from its silent scabbard. He wore a threadbare tunic and trousers, with sandals improvised out of some old leather wrapped in place with gauze. A third of his face had long ago been replaced with grayish purple stone, which blocked the patchy blue-black beard from growing on that side. No one would mistake him for a knight now.

The forest held its breath as Brochwel crept forward. Moonlight filtered through the leaves, leaving him to piece together the world from how dim spots fell over a log here, a tree trunk there. Ahead, the light stopped: a dark patch several feet wide but at least ten feet long, tapering in the back. Tail, that was a tail. Which put the mouth ... directly overhead.

A forest monitor. A reptile larger than a horse and almost as fast. Sleek with mottled green and gray scales. Tooth situation: not huge, but sharp and many. Having to swallow their prey whole, they were a danger to children but avoided adult humans. A natural forest monitor would have smelled Brochwel 20 feet ago and given him a wide berth. No roaming forest beast, this one.

Brochwel rose and stabbed upward into the dark. His blade found something and sunk into it, but not far. Two screams answered: one animal, and one human from behind the forest monitor. That had to be the person who conjured this huge lizard. Though created by magic, the creature was flesh and blood. Blood now running down Brochwel's blade. Brochwel pointed himself toward the human voice.

But before he pulled his sword free, Brochwel felt the blade tugged at and heard leaf litter shift. He brought the sword down in front of him and braced behind it. The forest monitor's paw swatted him in the side, sending him tumbling. Brochwel slid till a briar bush caught him. His back stung as he got up, tunic tearing as the thorns tried to hold him.

Then light burst upon the scene, bluish white and brilliant from the tip of the summoner's staff. The blazing light revealed that both Brochwel and the controlled lizard had missed their mark in the darkness. A trickle of blood ran from the forest monitor's broad neck. Brochwel had hit muscle, not a critical blood vessel or the windpipe. Its return strike had hit Brochwel with its wrist. While the beast's claws were small and adapted for running, they could mortally wound if they connected in the right place.

Now that all three could see each other, Brochwel rushed for the summoner. The forest monitor ran the shortest line to put itself between Brochwel and its master, arriving with plenty of time to put its best fangs forward. Brochwel slowed the last few steps to a walk. Without a horse he had no chance to outrun this creature in a sprint or marathon. He smiled, knowing his horse was still doing his best to bankrupt the Flaxen Order on feed costs alone.

The forest monitor reached its long neck, going for a lethal bite on the ragged man's throat. Brochwel stepped down and under, stabbing his sword through the bottom of its mouth and into the beast's head from below. He pulled the blade out and let the creature fall. The summoner was trying to conjure some other creature while shaking like a leaf. That was probably the greatest threat they could materialize.

Brochwel slashed the arm that held the staff, which still glowed as it fell and lay in the leaves the summoner tried to scramble through.

"Oh no." Brochwel grabbed the summoner by the good arm and spun him around so he could see the sword at his throat. "You're not going anywhere until ... Powell?"

The trouble with spinning people around so they can face their doom is sometimes you recognize them.

"Are you here for the bounty?" Brochwel asked. "Or some sense of duty to our homeland?"

"My homeland is besieged," Powell said, wearing a look of disgust mixed with defiance that dared Brochwel to say 'our' about anything again.

Brochwel had known Powell as a bookish sort, son of a silversmith, a nice enough person if a little too stiff-collared for even some of the knights. Never imagined the man was learning magic.

"Then why are you here? If you can summon a forest monitor you could be of use to the defenders."

"It's beyond any helping now. We need a miracle."

"You're not here to ask me to come back, are you?"

"I'm here ..." Powell took a deep breath and closed his eyes, saying something with the resignation of a man who had seriously believed he could lasso the moon before he tried just now. "I'm here to make sure you die before Tragaron falls. Vengeance for Tragaron, for all of us, for our five most promising warriors who you murdered."

"I didn't ..."

Brochwel kept the sword at Powell's throat. The staff was dimming now, allowing the forest to return to its noisy routine. Tragaron, its cobbled streets, a bed with sheets, all felt so distant now they were more concept than memory. Had it even been a full year yet?

In the staff's last glimmer, Powell's uninjured arm rose, fully formed magic circle between his finger tips. A viper sprang from it, deadly fangs wide and reaching.

A flick of the wrist. Brochwel cut the airborne viper in half and returned the blade to Powell's throat in one curving motion.

"I killed two. You say I killed five. Maybe I killed Tragaron. What's one more?"

Brochwel made it quick. He left Powell's body where it fell and went back to his firepit to try again. Maybe, if he could get a blaze going out of all this green wood, he could finally eat something. Forest monitor meat wasn't poisonous, right?

As he picked up the flint, Brochwel heard a piercing cry, aloft and far away, of a Roc. Extinct, but that wouldn't stop a really good summoner creating one. People only summoned them when showing off or tracking something of value over great distances, such as a man with a 60 thousand ducat bounty on his head.

"Alright. Depths of the forest it is."