CHAPTER TWELVE: TWICE-CROWNED

"Tis neither king nor pauper sees truth fair -
sees each fool what he wishes to believe.
In his own mind, each builds great realms from air -
and in the daylight fade they back to dream!"
-Robin Brindle-hair, from 'The Enchanted Marriage'

"What is this?" Rurik Koenig boomed - fortunately, he didn't have Heath killed on the spot. The king had too much of a sense of the dramatic.

"I bring a message, lord, from Bestel Myrdon!"

"Who?" Rurik looked to his assembled jarls, yeomen, and sorcerers, none of whom knew the name.

"Lord Myrdon, despot of Nortsair, bids you a happy Purgistok and cautions you against further incursions northward. Ask your jarl, Igna Battle-blessed, what happens to Soenmen who venture where they are not wanted."

Heath reached into a pouch by his side - a pouch that hadn't looked half so full a moment before, and cast something black and stinking to the ground, something strewn with ruddy orange hairs. Thea gasped - it was the head of Igna Battle-blessed, three days dead and starting to putrefy but clearly recognizable. How had he even gotten the thing?

"Then I shall send your lord my regards - perhaps your own head, stuffed with dung," Rurik snarled. His tattoos pulsed to life and his axe was out in an instant, taking big, reckless swings that Heath easily dodged.

"I'll tell my lord the old, fat king is ripe for the taking!" Heath laughed.

Two of the yeomen on stage were also Runed Men, imbued with Soenim's strength. They stormed over to assist their king, but Heath leapt over the closer one, spinning mid-air and firing off two quick shots at the second man. That man caught the first arrow mid-air as Igna once had, but didn't expect a second shot in such rapid succession, for Heath didn't have to nock at all. The second arrow grazed right past the first, and right through the man's eye. Despite her traumatized state, Thea's common sense piped in, suggesting that the time to get out was now. She turned to the girls, determined to get them to safety.

"You killed my father!" Maddie screamed. She'd just watched her father immolated into ashes before the great face of Soenim moments before.

As Thea watched, Maddie and Svilga slipped through the table with impossible speed, seeming to blur out of existence for a moment before appearing next to Rurik and stabbing him in each thigh with meat knives. Thea lunged forward to pull the girls away just as a dozen warriors were stormed the high table, ready to chop anybody to bits for any reason. Before Thea could escape with the girls, she found herself being pulled backward by iron-strong arms. She screamed and kicked against her assailant and bit at his flesh - realizing when she heard the yelp of pain that it was Cano. She squirmed to turn and hug him - he'd escaped! But now was not the time for reunions. Cano hoisted her over his shoulder, grabbed Maddie's hand, and started sprinting at his impossible pace.

+++++

The whole of Purgistok erupted into pandemonium, people confused about who was Soenmen and who was traitor, some screaming 'the king is dead!' and others shouting to defend the king. Hands reached out to grab at Cano, but he shrugged them off with ease. And the whole mountain trembled with anger, for the war god Soenim had been denied his sacrifice. Thea wasn't sure whether to be thrilled to be escaping with Cano or to be devastated that Matthias had just been incinerated to a crisp in front of them all. Her emotions wavered between extremes.

Soon, they were at the edge of the valley, a steep path leading up to the route they'd taken into the damnable place. They'd put enough space between themselves and the roaring crowd, some of them now in rapid pursuit, that Cano felt he could put Thea down. He placed her down and knelt. It took her a moment for to realize he meant to boost her to a rocky ledge nine or ten feet up. With a mighty push, he did so, tossing Thea right over the ledge. A moment later, Maddie and Svilga joined her up there, slipping up using whatever strange means of movement they were capable of.

"Why did you take us? We were going to kill Rurik!" Maddie said, lips quivering, tears streaking down her cheeks.

"Because then you'd have died right after and I don't need the angry shade of your father haunting my dreams," Thea said. It took her a moment to realize that she was crying, too.

"We can discuss it later," Cano said. "Come on."

The ledge was a choke point and a hurdle that bought them a few seconds, but not many. Thea rushed at the front of the group, having remembered the exact way down. Whenever there was a vertical shortcut, Cano would boost her, the girls would slide upward through space to join her, and Cano would follow with a mighty leap. If anything, the girls would have been faster without Thea there - though each magical slip through space seemed to tax them a bit more . Thea suspected that they couldn't zip forward too many more times before exhausting themselves. As they reached a promontory, Thea glanced downward: the whole valley was a field of prickly lights many of them people swarming up the slope to pursue them.

"We're almost there," Cano said.

"Almost where?" Thea demanded, but he couldn't or wouldn't say.

Thea scrambled up the mountainside as fast as she could, her palms scraping raw and the fabric of her cornflower blue 'Battle-Maiden' dress ripping in several places as it snagged against rocks and shrubs. Her lungs were burning, her limbs were burning, and she wanted to collapse and rest - but to do so was certain death. Even now, a few dogged warriors weren't so far behind on their ascent up the slope. Nowhere behind them did she see Heath or Larian - where were they? Had either of them managed to...

"Stand back," Cano said.

With a grunt, he lifted a stone a large as he was overhead and hurled it down, striking one of the warriors closest to them and forcing the rest to dive out of the way. Then he took another stone, rounder and too big for even himself to lift, and rolled it to the path, giving it enough of a push to start it grinding down the mountain's slope. Its impact sent smaller rocks tumbling behind it, triggering a small avalanche and earning them precious seconds to escape. Thea would have given anything to trigger her goddess powers, to smite every last bastard in pursuit, but about the only power she could find at the moment was that of not breaking down into tears and exhaustion - it would have to do.

Thea crested the ridge of the mountain, scrambled down the broken scree of the far slope, and very nearly ran face-first into a horse. She looked up into a dark and handsome face, its golden eyes strangely reflective in the light of the crescent moons.

"Matthias!" She grabbed him with such force that he nearly fell from his mount. Now, she really was crying. "I... I saw you burn to death."

"You saw me burn," he corrected. "But, it turns out, burning doesn't work so well on me."

"Daddy!" Maddie shouted happily, zipping through the air and onto his lap, with Svilga right behind.

"I hate to break up the reunion..." Cano said. "But we're still being pursued."

+++++

Thea hopped onto one of their four horses, and each of the other adults took their own. As before, Maddie and Svilga shared a mount. And, as quickly as they could, they made for the next ridge and down, and before long anybody in pursuit had the whole of the mountain range to search to find them. They rode in the meager moonlight, and anybody who thought to follow them had no horse and carried neither torch no lantern.

"I... I don't understand," Thea said eventually. She pulled up to Matthias, running her hand along his arm, as if to reassure her that he was real. "Do you mind telling this Thrice-Blessed Battle-Maiden what in the fuck just happened?"

"I'm sorry," Matthias said. "Everything sort of fell into place. Heath found me when you and Larian were in the competition. He said he could get close and create a distraction if I could get near enough to Cano to get him out of his chains. And I couldn't think of a much better way to get close than to burn up on the next sacrificial post over. That's why you had to take Maddie and Svilga."

"You knew the fire wouldn't hurt you?"

He nodded. "Not much, anyway. Last night, I realized that the candle's flame in our room wasn't bothering me, not even a bit. And when I snuck down later and put my hands in the cherry-red embers of the hearth, even that didn't cause a welt. Even my clothes wouldn't do anything worse than soot up. So I escaped through the back of the fire while I was 'burning up' and, while Heath was doing his best at creating a distraction, freed Cano and then ran for the horses while he was getting you."

"What about Larian?"

"Her job was to make sure Heath had an escape route... hopefully, they're both okay..."

"You don't know?"

Matthias shrugged. Cano snorted and looked back, frowning. "If either of them has so much as a toothache, I'm riding back and killing every damn Soenmen I see..."

"Don't," Thea said. "No matter what, promise you won't."

He shot her an odd look, scratching at several days' worth of stubble. "What do you care what happens to the south-men?"

"I don't. Not if they mean harm to us or our people. But most of them are just people, the same as... well, not the same as us. We're barely people anymore." Thea looked back to the girls. "Even you two. Don't think I didn't notice you flitting about, however you learned that trick. I think most of them have the same worries as anybody else... even Ubba Wyrlock seems like he'd be a decent man if he wasn't enthralled to a bloodthirsty god."

"But he is," Matthias said.

"He is," Thea agreed.

They rode in the feeble moonlight for a while - Thea remembered the way, as she remembered very nearly everything, but it wasn't easy to do so. In the dark and going mostly-downhill, things looked quite different and she had to do some serious interpolation to retrace their steps, recalibrating after every turn or ridge. They'd have to ride until the wetlands at least to make sure they wouldn't be easily followed. They passed by a meltwater waterfall and Thea shrieked at the sound of unexpected voices beside her.

"It's about time," Heath said. "I thought we might have to go without you."

Thea could only see Larian in the alcove beside her - Heath was too well-hidden, as was often the case. Then he rode out into the moonlight atop his horse, his brindle hair shifting with the shadows. He rode out to Cano and they embraced, touching foreheads and looking into one another's eyes for a long moment. When Cano smiled, his teeth flashed in the moonlight.

"What, no elk?" he said.

Heath shrugged. "They don't do so well in the mountains. Maybe we'll come across an especially large mountain goat?"

Larian rode up to Cano and leaned up to kiss his cheek. The three of them proceeded side-by-side, and Thea was glad that she no longer had to lead the way. With Heath's sharp eyes and expert direction, they'd make much better time. Instead, she dropped back to Matthias's right with the girls riding to his left. She reached over and grasped his hand, giving it a gentle squeeze. He squeezed back.

"I'm really glad you're not dead," she said.

"Me, too."

She punched his arm and huffed. "I was only mildly traumatized, thanks for asking."

+++++

They stopped briefly to rest the horses before continuing on into the wetlands. It was strange, stopping in the Soenmen village after what they'd just pulled, simply riding in and acting like nothing was amiss. But, as far as anybody there was concerned, nothing was. They were just some travelers passing through the night and not seven outsiders who'd just disrupted the holiest of holidays at the holiest of sites and barely escaped after an attempt on the king's life. Maddie and Svilga had each stabbed him a few times, mostly in the meat of the thigh from what Thea had seen.

"Why the legs?" Thea asked.

"I thought I'd get a better shot at his neck after he fell down," Maddie said.

Thea nodded. That made sense. She shook life into her own legs and made a circuit around the stable, encountering Heath and Cano around the back and excusing herself for interrupting their moment. Whether they'd been kissing or pissing, it was a bit awkward. But, since they'd stopped...

"How in the hell did you get your hands on Igna's rotting head?" she asked Heath.

He shrugged. "I didn't."

"Then how... I saw it, Heath."

"So did everybody," Cano said. "Whose head was it?"

Thea thought back to the moment. Heath's bag had looked far too small to hold a thick-skulled, braid-bearded human head, and yet he'd tossed the foul thing at Rurik's feet. But, in retrospect, it hadn't quite looked like Rurik's head. More like a pile of smelly rags... but something in Heath's conviction had convinced Thea that it must be Igna's head... she hauled back and punched his shoulder, though not as hard as she might have.

"Ow! What was that for?"

"You fooled everybody!" Thea said.

Heath rubbed at his shoulder. "That was the point, yeah?"

"Well you shouldn't fool me," Thea said. She gestured to Cano. "Us."

"No offense, but I don't trust you lot to behave for a ruse. But, for whatever it's worth, if you catch me up in one of your own some day, I promise not to be offended."

"Whatever." Thea rolled her eyes. "You boys finish your business back here. I want to be well into the wetlands by sunup."

"Yes, Battle-Maiden," Heath said with a smirk and a bow, his brindle-hair shifting in the moonlight.

They rode for a few hours more, out past the Soenmen farms and the rolling, grassy hills and into long expanse of marsh, tracing back across their passage at first. Thea counted the remnants of three rune posts as they trotted by.

Even at night, the marsh was alive. The hiss of the breeze through the rushes and cattails was barely audible over the croaking of frogs and the clicking of insects. Thea felt a coolness at her feet and worried that she'd wandered into water far deeper than she'd thought, that she was about to get herself and Blotto (her horse) drowned - but that wasn't it at all. The torn, scuffed, and dirtied remnants of her outfit had reordered themselves into a proper Battle-Maiden's ensemble: a scaled leather skirt barely past her knees and greaves of leather and some impossibly light metal that went high enough to provide a few inches of overlap, soft leather gloves with a mesh of that same light metal, and a flattering blouse reinforced with leather scales and mail of the same expert make. It all looked to be different shades of blue, from azure to navy - not the heaviest armor ever, nor the most fetching dress, but a happy medium of the two... It was, Thea realized, the first armor she'd ever worn.

She unsheathed the knife that she found at her side - even that was blue, glinting cerulean in the pale moonlight. Its sharp blade marked the soft leather of her saddle easily enough, but it took some decent pressure to scratch the leather of her new dress, and the mail was nigh-impregnable, made of something far stronger than carbonized iron. Maybe it was the same stuff as Cano's cuirass, which retained its pristine luster despite its several days of rough use.

"This isn't the way we came in," Thea said with a start. They'd ventured into territory unknown to her, and it had been at least a mile since the last rune post.

"You're right, it's not," Heath said. "That's for the best, though - no way for them to track us if their wizards can't follow our same path."

"You're going to get us lost..."

"You know I'm not," he said. "The way I figure it, we'll go for another hour or two and then stop - I could use a few hours of sleep, and I'm sure the rest of you could, too..."

"Maddie's already asleep," Svilga said. She sounded awfully tired, herself.

"Don't you let her fall off," Matthias cautioned.

"I won't. Because then she might let me fall off."

By the time they finally stopped, they had perhaps two hours before first light. They might have ridden further, but the horses were starting to wobble at the marshier bits of their path and needed rest even more than their humans. Heath found them a hillock in the marsh that offered both dry berth and a few trees and shrubs for cover, so Thea dismounted and walked to the top of the hillock, surveying the miles and miles of undifferentiated marsh around them, the grasses and waters merging into shimmering, undulating waves in the moonlight.

The top of the hillock had a single modest pine tree, its trunk the width of Thea's thigh. The mat of nettles about it was dry with just a bit of spring, and circling around the tree, about four yards out, was a fairy circle of little brown mushrooms with white spots.

"Backsbane amanita," Larian said, plucking a few of them from the ground. "Not edible, not even a bit. Two bites of this and you'll die the next day, screaming in agony and pissing blood as your kidneys turn to mush."

"Lovely."

"But this might be more to your liking," Heath said. He handed her a few stalks of deceptively-heavy marsh reed the width of her finger. He bit a chunk of another stalk and started chewing. "Best source of fresh water out here. I got some for the horses, too."

Thea was thirsty. She'd had a decent amount to drink at Purgistok, and none of that had been water. She bit into the reed and chewed. It tasted a lot like she imagined dirty grass might taste, but there was a lot of water in there, too. She chewed it to a pulp and swallowed, gagging as the stuff scratched down her throat.

"The horses can eat it, too... people usually just spit it out."

"Oh."

"Welp," Larian said. "I'm going to sleep. Wake me if they find us."

+++++

Thea and Matthias wound up taking the first watch. Cano promised to take the second watch in an hour and a half, but he needed at least a bit of rest after almost getting sacrificed to Soenim and then hoisting Thea and the girls half-way up the mountain during their escape. Realistically, they were only getting three hours to rest before it was light enough that they should get off of the hillock to avoid being spotted.

She sat next to Matthias on a little lump of raised land next to the edge of the fairy circle. At first, they sat side by side, staring out into the night and listening to the chorus of frogs. Her eyes had adjusted to the dark and she could see little flashes of light in the marsh like the glimmer of stars, too many to count. Then she found her slim fingers twining with his and her head nestled against his shoulder. His body's heat was warm, and Thea wondered whether he was as immune to chill as he was to the flame.

"It's fine if you want to sleep," he said.

"No," Thea mumbled and shook her head to rouse herself. "I promised I'd help you keep watch. Do you know what all those little lights are?"

"Most of them are insects. Or so I've been told. The ones that dart and weave and flicker, though, are the marsh children - again, so I've been told. It's said that they lead travelers astray in the wetlands, leaving them to be devoured by their mother, the Jenny O' Fen."

"Um," Thea said. She pointed down the hillock and, thinking Matthias probably couldn't see, directed his own hand toward the spot. "A lot of the dart-and-weave-and-flicker ones are down there. Where we've got the horses."

"We should check," he agreed.

Thea stood, gave her skirt a shake to limber its armored scales, and headed down with Matthias right behind. She found the horses further out than they ought to be, some of them a full step into the muck. She clicked her tongue, a command that most of them knew, and they followed her away from the edge of the water and back onto the safer slopes of the hill. Then she went back to the water and crouched down, watching the pinprick lights swarm and weave.

"Where's the other horse?" Matthias said.

"Shit. I can see her out there in the reeds," Thea said. It was her horse, too: Blotto, the brown filly.

Resigning herself to mucky feet, Thea trudged after the filly, a dozen little lights scattering as she rustled through the cattails. She reached out and caught one of the things mid-flight, gasping when she saw what it was: a tiny figure, winged and distinctly humanoid. It was perhaps two inches tall and its whole body glowed a pale yellow… and it had many-faceted eyes and antennae like a moth... and a big mouth full of sharp teeth busily trying to chomp on Thea's gloved fingertip.

"Stop that!" Thea said, giving the marsh child a reproachful shake before tossing it loose.

She proceeded out to the shin-depth muck, her greaves actually managing a good job of keeping her skin muck-free and dry. She moved the rushes to get at the horse and gasped again at what she saw. In the water, just a yard or two from Blotto, a faintly-glowing figure undulated beneath the surface, coaxing a transfixed Blotto further out. The water-woman was close to Thea's size with a thousand pellucid and wavering fins across every surface of her body, their pattern resembling a shimmering wedding gown. Her eyes were only slightly larger than a person's but had the same strange, faceted appearance as her children's, and her mouth had row after row of needle-sharp teeth, a little rasping tongue swishing back and forth among them in anticipation of a meal.

"Hey! This is my horse!" Thea snapped.

The Jenny O' Fen turned to face Thea and bubbled out a hiss, baring the full complement of her teeth. And, upon actually glimpsing Thea, it closed its mouth and slid close to the water's edge, less than a foot from where she stood in the muck. Matthias stepped forward with his axe at the ready, but Thea waved him off - the creature was prostrating itself before her and her marsh children were lighting upon the crown of mountain laurels Thea still wore. The jenny held up a single ghostly finger and retreated into the marsh.

Thea worked to extract a confused Blotto from the swamp and, just as she finished, the jenny returned with several other Jenny O' Fens and hundreds of little flitting children in an aura about them. The whole of the nearby marsh glowed like the dawn, though that was still over an hour off. Then the first jenny hauled itself onto the land, her many-toothed mouth grimacing and her thousands of tiny fins lying limp in the air, her hundreds of tiny gills gasping. It was obviously very painful to the jenny, and she could barely raise her head to smile her toothy grin at Thea - this creature posed no harm. In fact, it had a gift for her: a silvery tiara with hundreds of tiny pearls embedded in it. It was covered in muck and dirt and a jenny scale or two but appeared to be in perfect condition.

"Thank you," Thea said, accepting the crown from the jenny's clammy hands. "I... um..." she wasn't sure how she felt about putting such a marshy thing on her head, but it seemed like very poor form not to. Thea removed her crown of mountain laurels, handed it to the jenny, and then crowned herself with the murky pearl crown. "You can keep my flower crown, I guess." It was only meant to last for the night, in any case.

The other jennies pulled their companion back into the water, and they looked upon the woven crown of the Battle-Maiden with awe before greedily devouring it, the remnant shreds of tiny petals dispersing over the water. Somehow, that seemed fitting. And now, Thea suspected, they had absolutely nothing to worry about from the jennies. Thea crouched back down and beckoned them closer - after a moment's hesitation, they obeyed.

"If you find anybody following after us, do your worst," she said. The Jenny O' Fens nodded eagerly and retreated into the dark and the murk.

+++++

When morning came around, Thea was convinced she'd dreamt the whole thing. She awoke snuggled next to Matthias's warm body, and only Maddie trying to remove the tiara from her head convinced her that it wasn't. Her hand shot out, as surely as when she'd plucked the marsh child from the air, and intercepted Maddie's wrist. Maddie shrieked in surprise and tried to use her trick to slip away from Thea, but her grip held strong. She was the Battle-Maiden Thea Thrice-Blessed, after all.

"That's not yours," Thea said, her eye cracking open and squinting into the sunrise.

"I know," Maddie said. "I only wanted to see it, I swear. Um. Can I wear it?"

"If you clean it off, I'll let you wear it for a while," Thea allowed, extricating herself from Matthias. It felt far too early to be awake, but their flight from Soenmen territory wasn't for personal convenience.

"I know where clean water is!" Svilga said. "Can I wear it, too, Miss Thea?"

"Only if you can manage the turns with your sister." Was Svilga Maddie's sister? Saying so felt right.

They rode on, passing the end of the wetlands before midday and continuing on into the rocky hills and untamed orchards of Rouentz's southlands. They passed the several Soenmen encampments, none of which seemed to be active. In fact, Thea spotted a dozen gray shades near one of them - they'd been killed in the two days since they'd left for Purgistok... but by whom?

Soon enough, the hills grew gentler, transitioning into the softly-rolling countryside of the Rouentz homesteads. Only not all was as it should have been. When they'd left two days before, Igna had left the farms all intact and his surviving men, scattered to the winds, had been in no position to change that. But somebody had. Thea counted at least three burning homesteads trailing char-dark smoke into the sky.

"Um," Cano said. "That can't be good." And Thea had to agree.