Now that we have a wizard in our party, no one fucks with us. We trot through town after town like we own the place. I don’t pull up my hood once. Oh, you saw a wanted poster with my face on it? Well, fuck you, I don't care. People stare and I stare right the hell back. And dammit, it feels good. We make it across the country in amazing time.

  There’s a bit of disagreement within our group about what our actual objective is. Ulric of course wants to go straight to the front line to ice the sorceress, but Fallow’s main concern is rescuing the princess to alleviate the king’s melancholy. He seems to think it’ll rally the troops when their leader’s not such a sad sod anymore. Personally, I think he’s just scared of the sorceress but, whatever, it means our goals align. We’ll deal with this sorceress-killing business after we’ve saved Piper.

  Our plan is to cross the border in a rural part of the country and avoid towns at all costs. And we’re back to traveling at night. But not for Ulric’s sake. We do it now because we know there are Fornian scouts in the wilderness along the border and we need to get through undetected.

  The monsters out here are about as pedestrian as they come. Fallow can’t even be bothered to step in to help when we get bum-rushed by each new horde of pissed off forest critters. It’s apparently below his pay grade to use his magic on giant squirrels and shit. Which of course is fine considering I have no intention of paying him for any of this. And anyway, Piper and I made it through this area without much trouble, and the two of us came in with barely any supplies. Now I have a fully armed, fully badass party at my disposal, complete with mystical, enchanted weapons (with proper names!) and a vampire whose powers I’m still not clear on, but who I’ll never get tired of watching absolutely wreck anyone and anything that gets in his way with Hellstorm.

  We’re in between monster-pulverizing sessions, making our way into the mountains on the northern tip of Valencia when Tabitha sidles up next to Ulric and Gabriella and whistles to get their attention. Gabriella’s the only one who looks over when Tabitha says, “You both look like two peas in a pod! Are the two’ah you coupled up?”

  Gabriella shakes her head while Ulric says, “No” without looking at her.

  “Oh. Well how ‘bout you, Ulris? You got a girlie back home?”

  The vampire rolls his demonic eyes and explains, “The only woman I’ve ever loved has been lost to the ravages of time and not a day has gone by since that I haven’t agonized over my decision to leave her behind.”

  “Oh…Well there’s a lid for every pot, that’s what I always say! Maybe you’ll meet someone new.”

  “Not likely.”

  She pesters Gabriella next. “What about you, bright eyes? You got someone?” Gabriella shakes her head. Tabitha leans halfway off her horse to tell her, “Well, you sure are purty! I ain’t never seen hair as light as yours. I bet you drive the boys in Fornia wild!”

  Gabriella shrugs and says in her signature monotone, “I’ve never cared much what they think.”

  “Oh…” Tabitha gets kind of quiet after that. Which is weird for her.

  The mountains are thick with vegetation at their lowest elevation. We stick to the most traversable parts but that’s not saying much in this place. On top of being a mess of trees and thicket, the path gets awfully steep at times and it isn’t long before Fallow is griping over his shoulder at me, “I’ll fall off my horse riding at this angle! Isn’t there some other way to get through these mountains?”

  “Unless you know a spell to fly us over, I’d say this is the only way.” He waves the back of his hand at me to end the discussion.

  It’s a few minutes after that when I start to hear singing off in the distance. It’s faint at first, but gets steadily more distinct the longer it goes on. Tabitha says, “You all hear that?”

  “Shhhh…” I turn my head to the right to see where it’s coming from. But then it sounds like it’s coming from the left so I look in that direction. No matter where I look, it’s too dark to make anything out. It’s a new moon tonight, which seemed like a great time to travel when my primary goal was to stay hidden. But I suppose I didn’t take into account the fact that it would also make it easier for every other fucking thing in this forest to stay hidden from us.

  Fallow starts to say something but stops. It sounds like some combination of ‘falafel’ and ‘fornicate,’ though I’m fairly certain he didn’t mean to say either of those words. At least I hope he didn’t. Right after that is when the tiredness comes. And not a normal kind of tired. More of a ‘so tired I have to reach up and hold my eyelids open with my fingers to stay awake’ kind of tired.

  Fallow’s the first to go. He slumps over and falls right off his horse onto the ground, snoring the whole way down. Then the horse falls over. Tabitha goes next. She passes out and manages to stay on her ride while it collapses underneath her. After that, my horse buckles and then Ulric, Gabriella and I all tumble to the ground. My horse barely misses me when it crumples down at my side. And now I’m laying in the dirt, staring straight up at the stars with my eyelids feeling like they weigh about a thousand goddamn pounds, wondering how the hell this sort of thing happens when I finally have the most competent team I’ve ever assembled at my side. And that damn singing just keeps getting louder and louder. It’s like I can feel the sound, swirling around me, on and on until finally…

  Everything goes quiet.

  ***

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  When I force my eyes open, I’m greeted by one of the most perfectly proportioned, objectively beautiful faces I’ve ever seen. The kind of face you might see sculpted in marble to represent some impossible-to-obtain, godlike standard of beauty. Her eyes are bright green and her mouth is curled up just slightly on one side in a pleasant, alluring smile. She doesn’t have hair. Or not normal hair, anyway. Instead, there’s just blackness jutting out of the top of her head in all directions, bending and curving around to form something resembling antlers. She’s got the same blood-red dress on that I saw her wearing in the royalty box at the arena in Fornia, and purple lines run up and down her neck to outline her veins. It’s all pretty fucking freaky-looking.

  I squint and bob my head all around while I try to look in any direction but hers. Just a hunch, but something tells me I shouldn’t look this lady in the eyes. But I’m already forgetting where I am and it’s all I can do to keep my head in one place. As I struggle to blink myself awake, the sorceress places two fingers on my temple and says, “You are a long way from home. Why have you come all this way?”

  I raise a hand up to bat her away but end up missing and just swatting at the air like a drunkard. “I came here…to kill you.”

  She pulls back with a flirtatious smile. “No. That’s not why you are here. You came here for a woman.” I swat at her a couple more times while she puts her other hand on my head and leans forward until her face is almost touching mine. “Oh…I see. It’s that woman. You’re the one she came here with. How terribly interesting.” Then her smile gets even creepier when she says, “Let’s see what she is to you.”

  And then I forget where I am completely.

  ***

  Piper is running across a golden meadow toward me. It’s the first time I ever see her, though I don’t know who she is at the time. I have a stick in my hand that I’m swinging at some barley stalks when I hear her and look up. She’s barely taller than the stalks. She stops in front of me and stares while her hair sways in tandem with the golden wheat. I let my arm drop to my side and turn to face her. She’s smiling so I smile back. Neither of us says a word. She just laughs and runs away.

  The next time I see her she’s much taller, wearing a green gown with high-heeled slippers that she can barely walk in. The Royal Ball is just getting underway and I’m standing guard in a ceremonial role as part of my training at the castle when she walks up with her arms held out at her sides like a tightrope walker. This is the first time Piper talks to me. All she says is, “Hold still,” while she grabs onto my shoulder with one hand and pulls her slippers off one at a time with the other. Then she says, “Thanks!” and scurries off with her friends. Two of them giggle and look over their shoulders at me as they go.

  I don’t see her again for a whole year. When I do, she’s sitting at a table in the castle’s library, humming to herself and pretending to read a book when she’s actually just rolling the pages over to press the edges into the binding and make them stick out like frills. The light from the window casts a ray down at an angle onto the table. The dust in the library scatters the light in a way that makes the scene look like something out of a painting. After mustering a bit of adolescent courage, I walk over and take a seat next to her. When she looks over at me, I point at the book and say, “That looks pretty.”

  “It does, doesn’t it! I like the book better this way. And look, the pages all jiggle when I do this!” She pats her frilly creation and, sure enough, the rolled up pages all bounce around in the binding. Then she scoots the book toward me. “Here, you try!”

  I hesitate for a second before reaching up and giving it a go. And then I can’t help but laugh at how silly it all is. No one makes me laugh like she does. Having been orphaned and pressed into the military at a young age, doing anything that could be considered ‘silly’ has always felt tantamount to treason. ‘Decorum’—now that word may as well be my middle name. That and ‘discipline.’ And possibly ‘dignity.’ Of course that’d mean I’d have three middle names but I think you get the idea. What I’m trying to say is that, from my perspective, this girl may as well be from another world. Right away, I’m in awe of her complete lack of inhibition. She’s utterly unafraid to be exactly who she is. And seems devoid of judgement about me being who I am. Speaking of which, I fill her in on the basics, “I’m Darion. I’m here training to be a special kind of soldier,” and then I hold my hand out for her to shake.

  She obliges. “I’m Piperton. I live here. Not in the library but, you know, here in the castle.”

  “I figured that’s what you meant.”

  “So what kind of special soldier are you training to be?” I tell her about the king’s idea to have a group of warriors who specialize in fighting non-human threats and then the two of us talk for the rest of the afternoon.

  After that, I spend three weeks trying to find her in between sparring sessions at the castle. When I finally do, she’s at a table in the Great Hall after a gala has just ended, pulling olives out of a bowl to drop them into her pocket. When she sees me seeing her she stops and asks if I want one. “Out of your pocket? Um, no thanks.”

  She snorts out a laugh and then pops one into her mouth, saying between chews, “I can get you a fresh one. They’re right over here.”

  “No, I hate those things.”

  She throws another one back and scrunches her eyebrows together. “They’re the best food in the whole world.”

  I’m just about to argue with her when…Wait—what the fuck is Ulric doing here?

  “Darion, this is the sorceress’s witchcraft! Come! You and I must leave.”

  “Leave? What do you mean, ‘leave?’”

  He walks forward until he’s standing next to Piper. “None of this is real! Don’t you see what’s happening? Lilithene is toying with your mind. Rifling through your memories. And you’re letting her do it! You have to put a stop to it!”

  I shake my head. “No. You go. I want to stay here.”

  Piper pokes him in the arm to see if he’s real. Then he steps forward and grabs me by the shoulders to shake me. “Dammit man, wake up! You’ll die in here!”

  I throw his hands off and back away. “No! I’m not leaving. I’m not ever leaving. This is where I want to be. Here with Piper. You can go and fight the sorceress without me.” Then I cross my arms and the two of us stare each other down. Ulric tilts his head forward and lowers his eyebrows. I do the same. Then he draws in a long breath, rears his arm all the way back, and punches me right in the face.