It was impossible to tell their numbers, because so many of them stayed in the woods, hidden by the trees. I could see at least seven or eight, but the forest was alive with movement. As they appeared, everything seemed to go still. The birds we’d scared up had been circling, but now they sped away. The wind died down. The men were scruffy. Outcasts. Their weapons were notched and battered, their hilts wrapped with tattered cloths, heavily stained.

  There was only one woman, a thin creature who barely seemed human, and perhaps wasn’t. She wore deep blue robes that’d once belonged to someone of wealth, but they’d endured long months in the forest. The bandits themselves appeared almost as a part of that forest, with twigs and leaves stuck to their beards and clothes, and knotted on purpose into their scraggly hair.

  A conscientious dentist would’ve burst into tears looking at these men, as would’ve anyone with an aversion to overpowering aromas, because the bandits smelled like an outhouse carved from onions.

  “Fuck you fuckers stink,” Molly said. We’d backed somewhat behind one of the boulders, forcing them to charge us. There was no way to shoot us through the stone.

  Molly reached over, grabbed my ass, and said, “Fireball. Right there.” She pointed to the largest of the men, a towering creature with a bare chest covered in dirt and grime and what seemed to be a summoning circle. He had branches tied into his hair in a manner to appear as if he was horned. He stood next to the woman in the blue robes. They were, at most, thirty feet distant.

  “Fucking do it!” Molly yelled at me. I hadn’t realized I’d been hesitating. I hadn’t been realizing much at all, really. Baubles snorted behind me. Maybe it was encouragement. Maybe it was fear. Maybe he just had to shit.

  I’d never let loose with a fireball. To be honest, I was afraid. My Lightning Bolts were terrifying, to think of such force gathering inside me, and then being released. But fire was worse. Fire was what had killed my mother in the gas station explosion. And with the Fox Geas on my arms and chest, it was fire that was waiting to kill me in the same way they’d murdered Molly’s mother. It seemed the work of an absolute idiot to encourage those flames.

  Still, Molly needed me to act, and I needed me to act, and the dark-toothed grin of the bare-chested man was something I’d only ever seen in horror movies and photographs of serial killers.

  I let loose with a fireball.

  It was huge. The size of a beachball. It flew from my hand at breath-taking speed and brow-burning heat. The woman in the robes looked shocked for one moment, and then her hand came up in a warding gesture. The oncoming flames mostly parted around her and the bare-chested man. They were still badly singed. Licks of flame landed all over their bodies. Her robe caught fire. The man’s hair partially melted. Impact drove them back off their feet.

  Despite this, they fared better than their surrounding bandits or the forest behind them. Other men were charred in an instant. Burnt to their bones. The trees literally exploded in the heat. A pair of them toppled. The air was alive with flames and screams. For several moments I froze, trapped in horror, not for the men who’d been trying to kill us, but in thoughts of me dying in the manner I was now witnessing, the melting charred meat, the exposed white bones, turning gray and black.

  I stumbled backward, watching the flames devour what they touched, several men dropping dead, panicked birds in flight, the shriek of animals, a snort of terror from Baubles, a grunt of satisfaction from Molly. A wave of heat pressed against me. I fell into the stream. The chill of the waters, bubbling up from so far below, slapped across my entire body. It was a heavy blow, a shock that brought me somewhat back to my senses, at least enough to understand some of what was going on around me.

  Molly was singing.

  Her voice trilled high like a bird’s, then lower into animalistic grunts. I felt the vibrations of her song in my chest. Swirls of emotion. Sadness. Rage. Loss. Desire. There was a message in her song. A story of blood and blades. She slowly twirled her axe with one hand. More men emerged from the woods.

  The two leaders had recovered from my fireball and were moving forward. I stepped closer to Molly, wanting to protect her. She was vulnerable, hopelessly lost in the song she was singing. I clutched at my dagger and was readying a lightning bolt when my gut clenched on how intensely the barbarian woman had told me, only moments before, to stay well back when she started to sing.

  So I stayed back.

  Backing against Baubles, I put a comforting hand on the side of his head to let him know that everything was fine, everything was okay, everything was under control. A lie, of course. Nothing was under control. Men streamed from the forest, yelling for blood and vengeance, with despair and rage in their voices as they yelled the names of those who’d already died, and yelling my name as well, making “Josh Hester” into a curse.

  Nothing was okay. Not with the way the bare-chested leader was striding forward, a hatchet in one hand and a short sword in the other, his skin steaming. Nothing was fine, not with the way Molly suddenly shouted in the middle of her song. It gave everyone pause. The men all lost a step in their advance, hesitant. And then Molly was singing again.

  She raced forward.

  There was a flick of her battleaxe, moving as quickly as any dagger. A man’s head was sent flying through the air. There was a splash of blood against not only the nearest trees but also the decapitated man’s astonished friend, a man with a myriad of long braids and a shocked expression of terror. Molly, still singing, gave a shoulder twitch that changed the arc of her axe and cleaved a deep line through the man’s throat, slicing him open, with his eyes riding the realization of his death all the way down.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  The surrounding flames roared. The men screamed. Arrows sought out Molly, but never found her, always deflected by the blood-soaked steel of her double-bladed axe, always whistling inches past her chest, snagging for the briefest of moments in her hair as they passed, never finding her arms or legs, which were forever in motion, always carrying her to the next victim, cleaving a man in half at the waist, ramming backward with the shaft of the axe to catch a man in his throat, another man with his right eye pierced so deeply that the shaft cracked out through the back of his skull.

  Men dropped dead wherever she passed. Molly sang all the while. Her voice was unwavering, unchecked by her brutality. The bandit leader tackled Molly from behind, and even that didn’t stop her song. There wasn’t the merest break of her voice. She fell onto her back and he slammed a forearm against her throat, causing the first waver of her song.

  By then there were as many as ten men dead by her axe. Others had fallen to my fireball. The woman in the blue robes was readying a spell and the bare-chested man was about to bring his short sword down on Molly, moments from plunging it through her chest.

  Then Molly was singing again and she slashed a dagger up through the man’s armpit, severing muscle and tendons. He dropped the short sword and Molly grabbed it by the hilt, placed the butt of the weapon on the ground next to her, and—with her song reaching a fever pitch—reached up with her free arm and grabbed the bare-chested man into an embrace, pulling him down like a lover.

  His own short sword slid through his chest. He settled slowly onto Molly’s stomach, between her legs, with the point of the weapon erupting from his back. Molly was somehow laughing and screaming and singing at the same time. The flames bit at the trees. I saw two archers readying shots at Molly, pulling back their bowstrings as she heaved the dead leader from her fatal embrace and began to stand.

  “Duck,” I told her.

  She did.

  My lightning bolt cut through the air maybe two feet above her, slamming into the men thirty feet behind her, cracking and crashing back and forth between them, a thousand times in one second, a burst of meat and blood.

  It startled the woman in the blue robes and her spell flickered uncertainly for some moments, with waves of black light dripping from her momentarily slack hands. Baubles charged out from behind me and trampled her. It wasn’t something that was over in moments. It took longer. Beneath his feet, the woman snapped and cracked and broke. The rhino flattened her chest. Her head. She was a mess. Baubles was muddy with her. When the rhino was satisfied he paused for a moment, then snorted in terror at the surrounding flames and tromped his way into the deepest part of the stream.

  The rest of the men ran.

  Molly stared at me for a moment, then fell unconscious.

  I pulled her farther away from the fires, closer to the boulder, letting her legs rest in the stream.

  There in the water, I washed the blood from her, with me breathing heavy from the fight, feeling drained from casting the spells, and with the resonations of Molly’s song still hammering through my head.

  I waited, tense, for any arrows to whistle their way toward me from the forest of burning trees, but they never came.

  As I cleaned the barbarian woman, scouring the blood from her body and using a healing spell to close several wounds, a trio of foxes stood atop the largest of the boulders, watching my every move, not making a sound.

  -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

  There was money.

  While waiting for Molly to wake up, I walked carefully through the battlefield. The fires had sputtered out, thanks to the chubby trees with rope-like leaves. The leaves themselves had burnt well enough, but the trunks were so full of water that they were essentially sponges. The fires had met their match with these wooden buckets, unable to overcome their wetness. The ground was charred and slushy. I walked through the muck of water and blood. There were more dead than I’d first thought.

  I was looking for survivors but didn’t exactly know why. What would I do if I found any? Would I heal them? Watch them die? Would I . . . kill them? In the midst of the devastation, I was somehow both dispassionate but enraged. They’d tried to kill us. And it wasn’t some random attack. They’d known me. I stared at the dead leader, thinking of how he’d spoken my name.

  His short sword, poking up through his chest, had “Kill” etched into the blade.

  “Aptly named,” I told the dead man. “You got stabbed by irony.” I drew back a foot to kick him, but thought better of it and only nudged him with the point of my toes. I was ready for, and almost expecting, his eyes to snap open. They didn’t. My tension slowly drained away.

  I barely whimpered when a little bell rang out.

  It was the treasure bell.

  Other bells began ringing all around. An impromptu concert. The noises didn’t disturb the squirrels, which had gathered in the nearest trees to wonder at the aftermath of human stupidity, and the bells didn’t bother any of the birds in the trees, either. Fridu had once mentioned that treasure bells can only be heard by the ones who’d earned them. I’d asked her how it was possible that sounds could only be heard by a specific few, and she’d told me that the world of Goncourt never answered such questions, and that only children asked them.

  A leather pouch appeared on the ground next to the dead leader, nestled against his chest and its tattoo of what appeared to be a summoning circle. There was another bag near the trampled woman in the blue robes. Several more across the battlefield. As I gathered them all up I peeked in a few of them. They held various amounts of coins. Handfuls of copper coins. A wealth of silver and a few scattered pieces of gold. One pouch contained several gemstones and a ring. I piled all the pouches next to Molly, checking to see if she was still breathing. She was. I wondered what else I could do for her.

  “Keep watch,” I told Baubles, patting his side. He snorted. Maybe it meant something. He curled up next to the barbarian woman, lowering his mass with care. His ass ended up in the stream. Nature’s toilet paper.

  I was searching for more of the leather pouches, worried about archers in the trees, and wondering how I could strap Molly to the rhino’s back and get us the hell out of there, when the tattoo on the dead leader’s chest began to smolder.

  “The fuck?” I said, looking down to him. Around the edges of his tattoo, his flesh was smoking. Sizzling. It looked mighty fucking uncomfortable. My own tattoos felt warm. Sympathy pains.

  “The fuck?” I said, looking to the dead man and then up to Molly and Baubles to see if they had any comment, but Molly was unconscious and Baubles was a rhino.

  Light came from the tattoo, which I realized had more than the appearance of a summoning circle; it had that function as well. The flesh turned a hazy gray, like soiled fog drifting over his dead skin.

  “Seriously?” I said, kneeling to take a closer look.

  “What the fuck is this?” I asked, as a tiny hand pushed up through the dead man’s flesh.