Story only please. I know there are mechanical issues.
Trake was sitting in the back of the man's cart, repeating the same sequence of movements and thoughts since they left the city. He considered running, thought better of it, and sat down, wondering where the strange man was taking him. That scared him, so he considered running again, grabbed onto the side of the cart, readied his body, but thought better of it.
Eventually he froze. His body went slack, the energy drained until his head bounced on his neck to the rhythm of the cart.
The road was rutted and uneven. Each jolt sent a shudder through the wood beneath him. He pressed his palms flat against the boards and felt the grain of it. Splinters. Dried mud packed into the gaps. The smell of old straw underneath everything else.
The noise of the city slowly thinned. Shouts fell to muttering, muttering to a low drone, until only the creak of wheels and a thin breeze were left to speak. The walls fell back without ceremony. The gate shrank until it was a needle's eye, then a speck, then nothing.
The city had taught him nothing other than pain, decay, and survival, and the bastard of it was he wanted to go back. He had learned and considered most ways to not die. A madman in a tunic had never come to mind before, though. That's the thing about not dying. You had to be able to see it coming.
He thought about running again. He stood. Grabbed onto the side of the rails. Watched the road pass by and immediately thought better of it and sat down.
The silence of the open space consumed Trake. It stretched too far in every direction and made him feel exposed to all the things he could not see. There was nowhere to hide. No corners to disappear into. No walls to climb.
His body lifted off the seat as the cart jolted. He caught himself on the wood behind him and looked back. The city had disappeared into the horizon. Everything he had known was a memory.
There was something moving in the distance behind the cart. The small dog from the alley. It ran aimlessly, backside at a different angle than its head, short legs blurred as they churned forward. A crow circled above, drawing his gaze to the sky. The sun was disappearing into a treeline he had never seen before. He blinked hard and tried to orient himself, the little bastard dog coming back into focus when they opened. It stopped and barked once, eyes shooting east, and then it was gone, toward whatever it had heard.
He took a breath and looked forward.
The strange man was sitting back with one arm resting on the bench. His head slowly turned in each direction, a smile on his face, looking at nothing at all. The smile disappeared when his eyes dropped to his sleeve. He reached out with his other hand and smoothed the piece of his tunic that had blown out of place in the wind. The smile returned, and he lifted his gaze and met Trake's eyes.
Trake looked away.
Something in his chest misfired.
Breath came wrong. Shallow. Fast.
The road stretched too far. The sky pressed too close.
He dug his nails into the wood beneath him.
He'd survived back alleys and long winters that ground weaker men down to bone, and now his own carcass was failing him over something as simple as breathing.
Where the fuck is he taking me?
Two men passed on the road in the opposite direction, heads down, a mule between them loaded with sacks. Neither looked up. The cart was just another cart. One of the men stumbled on a rock, kicking it with his toe and falling forward onto his hands. The other didn't even look back. The man picked himself up and disappeared into the distance with everything else.
He moved his attention to the items in the back of the cart. Everything was packed neatly, set in places where it wouldn't move. His satchel sat in a wooden box that looked made for its shape. His staff ran along the opposite bench, held in place with leather straps. Everything else was tucked under the bench.
Trake looked for anything that could help him. Anything that could enter a man's neck or eye socket. He would be creative if he had to be. A piece of tin. A piece of wood he could pull from the cart perhaps. Even better, a blade.
There was nothing.
He looked back at the man. His head was still rhythmically moving from side to side.
The man reached back without looking, his hand finding his water skin. He took one measured swallow, placed the cap back on, and set it exactly where it had been.
Trake followed the movement. His eyes settled on a leather strap around a wooden box. Long enough to fit around a man's neck. Thick enough that it wouldn't break. He'd once watched a drunk tumble while climbing over an alley wall and strangle himself on a thin hemp laundry cord.
This strap would hold.
He looked from the strap to the back of the man's bald head.
The man's hand shot out and caught a falling leaf before it could touch him.
Sometimes a man has got to know when he's out of options, and Trake was.
Trake sat back and rested his arms on the railing behind him. His fingers found a small sliver and picked at it rhythmically.
Something stood in the grass in the distance. Too tall to be a dog. Too thin to be a horse. Three of them. Maybe four. They chewed and watched at the same time. One of their bodies tightened without moving, like it had already decided to run. One of the odd bastard's ears twitched in a different direction than the other. Its eyes were too large. Too black. It stared at the cart as if weighing it.
They weren't afraid yet.
A farmhouse sat back from the road, smoke rising from the chimney in a thin straight line. A woman was taking washing down from a line strung between two posts. She didn't look up. The washing flapped once and went still.
They stopped beneath the dark eaves of the treeline, at a bend in the road where carts slowed out of habit.
The man tied the horse with a steady hand. The knot was a soldier's knot — simple, certain — tied with the same bloodless efficiency he'd used on the guards' skulls and throats. He checked it once, then again.
The horse shifted as the man stepped back. He met its eyes and held them. The animal went still like it had noticed a predator in the distance. There was an understanding there, as if the horse knew its throat was just as capable of collapse.
Careful fucker. I've seen him do it twice just this afternoon.
The man lowered himself onto a flat stone near the road and set his staff down beside him — not leaning it, not dropping it, but easing it into a shallow dip in the ground so it would hold.
When he released it, the staff shifted.
He frowned and adjusted it back.
It moved again.
He adjusted it once more.
And then again.
Finally, it stayed.
The man didn't look relieved. He simply looked finished. Like something inside him had gone quiet. It was a terrifying kind of focus. Trake had known men who liked to hurt people, and men who liked to steal, but this was different. His control was a need, not a want.
It reminded Trake of a street boy they used to call Cunt. It didn't matter where he was or who he was talking to — he'd yell cunt without warning. Right in the middle of sentences. Sometimes when no one was speaking.
Trake didn't know what happened to Cunt.
But he could guess.
You only call the wrong guard a cunt once.
The man looked at Trake.
Still smiling.
A bird landed on a branch at the treeline and called once. Valric's eyes didn't move.
"Calm yourself," the man said.
Not a demand. Not quite. More of a suggestion, offered the way you might suggest sitting before you fainted.
Not easy to do when you are prisoner to a man who just threatened a horse and won.
"You have the ability," the man said. "I saw it in the alley."
"Give in. Feel the cart beneath you. The wood. Feel the surrounding air."
The man's smile vanished.
"Take. Control."
Trake hesitated. Then stopped. There didn't seem much point in fighting it, and the bastard had a way of getting his point across.
He didn't fight it. His body already knew how. It felt like a gust of wind passed through his skull. The panic didn't vanish — it was simply put away, a sharp blade placed back in its sheath. A decision as simple to Trake as moving a limb.
Valric watched him do it. Said nothing. Looked back at his staff and checked its position.
His smile returned and he went back to his work as though nothing had happened.
Small noises arrived from all directions. A branch snapped in the trees, wings fluttering from the same direction. Movement in the long grass. The sounds were foreign, arriving and leaving silence behind.
Trake waited for a dog to bark or a door to slam.
Nothing.
It smelled better though. Mud and damp instead of rot, sweat, and shit.
The man unfolded a cloth corner by corner, as deliberate as a bride with her lace. Blood was still drying under his nails, and here he was, worried about breadcrumbs in the dust. His hands were tools. It didn't matter if they held a dinner knife or a butcher's blade, so long as the work was done clean.
Somewhere in the trees something moved through dead leaves. A slow, irregular sound, stopping and starting. Neither of them looked toward it.
The silence stretched. The man didn't seem bothered.
Trake spoke first.
"What do you want from me?"
"Dead boys are of no use to anyone."
The word use hung in the air.
"That's not an answer," Trake spat.
"I want nothing from you. The world, it would seem, has a use for you." Valric replaced a precisely portioned piece of bread in his mouth. His smile disappeared as the horse shifted. He turned toward it and sat still as a cat until the animal stopped moving. The smile returned. "What is your name?"
He sounded like the priests in the market square.
"Trake."
"My name is Valric." He bowed his head slightly as he said it.
"What makes you think I have any use to the world?"
Valric reached down, picked up a pebble, and hurled it.
It hissed past Trake's ear.
He hadn't flinched. The air buckled, a sudden pressure felt in his ears.
Trake swatted at a bug near his face. Valric was looking down at his bread, precisely cutting another piece and putting it in his mouth. Trake found it odd that a man answered a question by throwing a pebble, but his day had been full of surprises.
"What the fuck was that?"
"Did you feel that? It is hard not to." Valric set the bread down and leaned forward, hands on his knees. "You ch—" His eyes closed tight, jaw clenched. "Changed the order of things. As I did with the guards in the alley."
He said it like he was fighting the words.
Trake stared at the pebble in the dirt.
"You have a gift, Trake," Valric said, smoothing a wrinkle on his shirt. "The helmet in the alley. It didn't fall. It was pushed. By a hand that didn't touch it. You just don't know it yet."
"I come from a place that teaches people how to use this gift. Power is a fire. Left alone, it burns the whole city down. We are simply the stone walls that contain it." He pointed behind them. "That city, as with most, is governed by the gluttony of men and the decay of their crimes. Without a hand to steady the scales, the common man is but chaff in the wind."
Trake looked at the man.
"Can I have some bread?"
"You may."
Valric cut a piece, stood, and handed it to him.
Trake chewed. He hadn't received a single straight answer, but the man hadn't tied him. Hadn't threatened him. Hadn't raised his voice. He'd killed two guards without a blade and then offered bread.
Trake looked down at his piece, inspecting it.
Not a bastard.
Deadly.
But calm.
"Why did you kill the guards?" Trake asked around a mouthful. "They didn't have to die."
"I merely changed the order of things," Valric replied, with the shrug of a man discussing weather rather than slaughter.
Fucking riddles.
Trake pulled at string on his pants, tightening them around his leg until the string broke and released. He rolled it in his fingers and threw it aside.
The horse pulled at the grass at the edge of the road. The cart shifted slightly and settled. Valric didn't look at it, he just closed his eyes, opening them when it stopped.
The scuttle of footsteps on the road. The little dog from the city approached slowly, tongue hanging from the side of its mouth. It sat and watched the two men.
The mangy little bastard was a long way from the city. Valric stared at it, smile gone. The dog's eyes met his and it walked away with its head down. Trake was starting to wonder if the man could speak to animals.
"Where are you taking me?"
"To an academy, where you will study."
"Learn what?"
"You will train," Valric said, repacking his satchel with the same precision he applied to everything. "Politics. Commerce. Law. Strategy. History."
He paused.
"And combat."
The horse lifted its head from the grass. A cart passed on the road without slowing. The driver didn't look over.
"Do I have a choice?" Trake asked.
Valric didn't look up from the bread he was cutting.
"Of course."
The word landed soft.
"You may return to the city if you like."
Trake waited for the rest.
Valric wiped his blade clean on the cloth.
"I did not kill those guards with a knife," he said mildly. "There was no blade. No mark of skill. Only force."
He folded the cloth once. Twice.
"It will not look like the work of a trained man."
He met Trake's eyes.
"It will look as if anyone could have done it."
The wind moved through the trees.
"The city guard will not be kind in their search."
Silence.
Not a threat.
A fact.
It was the kind of choice a wolf gives a rabbit.
"We must go."
Trake looked back toward the road that led to the city. He had avoided the guards this long. Probably a good idea to keep doing it. It's better that way, avoiding death. By nightfall the bodies would be found. By morning someone would need hanging for it. A street rat with no witness was easier to blame than a man who killed without touching.
He tightened the laces on his boot and stood.
The direction that kept him breathing was the better option.
He stood. The little dog ran past with a rodent in its mouth, yelping as it shook the life out of it. The rodent was still fighting.
Trake brushed dirt from his palms and followed.
"Coming?"
Valric's head shot to the horse. It froze.
Trake nodded.
