Page 50 of Bound and Tide

So of course they landed in a small clearing and lost an hour, but by the time the griffin was back in the air, the complaints and fidgeting were cut in half. Unfortunately, Xander’s patience was already worn threadbare.

There was room on the griffin for four, but just barely, with the children in the middle because Red was concerned they’d fall off—a thing Xander would not have lamented.

The imps were there too because of bloody course they were, but at least they were contained. When Xander realized there was no leaving anyone behind, he instructed the infernal creatures to make themselves as small as possible, and their bodies each contorted at his order until silvery minnows replaced the gangly imps, flopping breathlessly out of the air and onto the floor. Costa had scooped them up while Red filled a jar with clean water, and the imps were now swimming happily in Maia’s lap like the realm’s worst pets. No one really needed to be concerned since dead imps could come back, but then Xander didn’t share that fact just in case they lost one or three because he did not intend to go through the annoyance of a summoning ritual when they indeed bit it.

That was his argument about all of them back at the apothecary: “You’re an extremely killable troupe,” he’d finally shouted. “I could off each one of you with the smallest amount of effort!”

The three had stood side by side, arms crossed, heads cocked, as defiant as they were soft.

“Well, all right, maybe I couldn’t”—and he would not clarify exactly why that was—“but something else certainly could, and this trip will see me bumping into a number of something elses, I reckon.”

But they chose to not listen and argue instead, and really, it was going to be exhausting enough, all the going and doing, so when he did eventually give in, Xander was convinced he only allowed them to tag along because they’d been so adamant and not because he had been dreading the part where he had to go and do the going and doing all on his own.

Briefly, Xander had considered forming a more worthy party. He could contact Bloodthorne and call in his I-resurrected-your-woman favor, and maybe even said saved woman would come along, the ability to talk to trees potentially useful in the Kvesari Wood. As for expendable brute strength, he could also convince that big dumb holy knight from Valcord’s temple that this was a worthy crusade to die for. But pride was an Abyss of a hindrance, and while the idea was a fun alternative third act, his party needed to be made up of the characters who had been influencing him throughout the rest of his tale for consistency’s sake.

So Xander was instead laden with the worst band of cohorts that could be written onto parchment. Red was capable and intelligent but that fatal mix of not at all martial yet supremely protective. Maia might be capable in about ten years if her hasty temper let her survive until then, but currently she acted as if she were invincible even when her bruises indicated otherwise. And Costa was…Costa—an easy target unless he turned himself sideways and then at least his thinness would make him difficult to hit.

Surely Xander had done more with less in the past, but it wasn’t really their lack of skill that made the three impractical, it was his unwillingness to use them as fodder. It just didn’t do to care about your minions, and by all the darkest and basest of beasts, the whole point of this bloody trip was because he cared.

Fucking Abyss, I care about them? All of them? Even the little one?

Maybe even especially the little one.

“What if your father comes back while you’re gone?” Xander had asked them in a last ditch effort to leave at least those two behind.

Maia and Costa traded a look, one Xander recognized the potential deceit in immediately.

“He’s not coming back,” Costa blurted because he just wasn’t very good at containing the truth. “A letter came a week ago, after you got us the ship. It says he’s spending winter in Nicosa again because he won some coin, I guess. And then come spring, he’s sailing all the way to the other side of the Maroon Sea.”

“He’ll blow it all, probably get stranded across the ocean,” Maia grumbled, arms tucked in tight under one another, scowling at the floor.

“We should have said,” Costa was quick to apologetically admit. “We just thought if you knew for sure he wasn’t coming that you might…leave.”

Xander thought he should feel some grandiose loss then, some pain, some regret, but there was only a simmering anger that it was Costa and Maia who would be alone. And, of course, there Xander was, trying to leave them anyway.

So of course that had decided things.

With their late start, Xander pushed the griffin after darkness fell, but Maia’s chattering teeth and complaints that the imp’s jar was frosting over eventually convinced him to stop for the night. He found a nameless village that reeled at the sight of the winged beast, but Red’s charm was more than enough to win over suspicious country folk, and shivering children proved helpful in getting the local inn to open its doors and reheat the last of their stew. But even their helpfulness didn’t absolve the three from being berated over dinner for their encumbrance.

He told Maia and Costa to be up at dawn or be left behind and then stalked off to his rented room, grabbing Red by the wrist as he went. She let herself be pulled into the bedchamber but shook free the moment the door was closed. The glare she gave him held no playfulness behind her eyes.

“Tomorrow,” she said, stalking to the bed and punching down the sad state of a pillow, “you will be much nicer to them.” And then she threw herself down, back turned to him.

Well.

He huffed and unceremoniously flopped down beside her. Did she have any idea what she was asking? He had never been so distressed, so overwrought, so put upon, and she expected him to be nice? Xander Sephiran Shadowhart hadn’t been nice for a single moment in his entire life, and he certainly wasn’t starting now!

He eyed her curls, an impenetrable barrier between them that even in his petulance he wanted to crawl beneath and hide. How dare she top off her ridiculous request by ignoring him! What was the point in coming along if she wasn’t even going to look his way?

Xander grunted and rolled over, shaking the too-small bed until he was back to back with Red. He doubled over his flattened pillow, squeezed his knees in under the thin blanket, and stewed in his annoyance at the day. It had begun so well, but lying wrapped in Red’s arms that morning felt like a lifetime ago now, and he wondered if he’d been bamboozled by that Father Theodore, set out on some lethal mission, or worse a holy one.

The priest said that the rift below the Osurehm temple in Ironwood Hollow would be the most likely place Xander could communicate directly with Birzuma on the infernal plane while remaining safely on their earthly one. He would then need to sever the hold she had over his powers, but how that was to be done, he couldn’t advise. It was purely coincidental that a blood mage had been identified in a prophecy to cleanse the very same rift.

Xander insisted on not being told the details of said prophecy because that would only lead to needless worrying and would also mean it needed to be written down, which certainly wasn’t happening this time around. But the worry broke in anyway because that was what worry did, even if one was a blood mage.

Noxscura swirled weakly under his skin, the shadows in the chamber bending, darkness hemming in. The priest had “helped” Xander with a spell to quiet the voice and the dark magic, and since he’d left the temple, he’d felt particularly drained, only faint whispers prodding at the back of his mind. But he’d been warned it wouldn’t last, and the closer he got to Ironwood Hollow, the more chaotic his arcana would become, eventually breaking the spell. As he lay there, though, feeling so wretchedly helpless, he wondered how he would possibly be strong enough to bend the noxscura in that place and face her.

He squeezed his eyes shut, but behind his lids, he saw infernal fire licking flesh from bone and claws shredding skin, not just his own, but that of the others he had dragged into peril with him.

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