Death After Death PLUS 315-317

Ch. 315 - Hero of the Day

After his orb disappeared into the darkness above, Simon sat just where his doppelgänger had been a moment before and waited. Instead of reflecting on that strange disconnect between the man and his aura or even the irony that he was sitting exactly where the other man had been sitting a few minutes before, Simon only looked up and watched the volcano, willing the eruption to stop. 

Intellectually, he felt certain that it would work, but some dark part of his mind whispered that he’d have to fight Brogan one more time. If that monster appears over the lip again, I’ll go, he told himself. If I have to do it again, I will. 

Still, despite the fact that Simon didn’t fear death, some part of him dreaded fighting that battle again. The idea of falling and waking up nearly paralyzed was certainly one of his less pleasant pit experiences, and this time, if he found himself falling again, he was much more likely to simply end it and start over. 

While he waited, though, the lava never splashed over the rim, and eventually, the rumbling became less frequent and less powerful. It was darker by that point, so it was impossible to tell how much less smoke there really was, but Simon hadn’t seen any flying magma bombs in a while, and most of the fires that had sprung up in the city seemed to have been put out. 

That was about the time the guards arrived for him. Simon had expected that, but he’d waited anyway, as he’d been unwilling to abandon his watch half-done. Still, by the time they approached close enough to see that he was more than a figure, he’d already stowed his armor, dawned his toga, and was busy sketching the fulminating scene. 

It was a weak cover, but it should do, and given that a word over power was only ever seconds from his lips, he could easily cut all of them down if he had to. “Do you have anything to do with this?” the guard captain asked. “You don’t seem like you’re from around here.”

“I’m not,” Simon agreed. “I’m just an artist in the employ of the Strigeon family. Ask anyone. They’ll vouch for me.”

“An artist? What business does an artist have with a volcano?” the man asked, obviously confused. 

“It was a rare and beautiful phenomenon,” Simon explained. “I’ve heard of such things but never expected to see it. If the thing erupted completely… Well, I think I’d be dead no matter where I am in the city, so I thought I’d come for a closer look, and now it seems like my hike was wasted. I don’t think it will erupt now.”

“Just the same, you’ll have to come with us,” the captain said. “We have orders to bring anyone suspicious back for questioning.”

“Suspicious?” Simon bristled, feigning outrage. “On whose authority.”

“The Queen’s Vizier,” the man responded. It came so quickly that Simon had to fight to keep from smiling. The man was an idiot. 

He’d seen this coming from the moment he’d seen the guards coming this way. With the orb gone, he had nothing suspicious on him. Any incriminating notes were written in his mirror, and the queen didn’t seem to have anyone in her employ who would see the marks on his armor as anything but decorative. 

Simon put up a little more of a fight after that, but only for appearance’s sake. He knew the score and invoked the name of his patron and important friends but ultimately went willingly enough. It would waste an hour or two of his life, but it would also get him in the palace without violence or magic, and the sooner he did that, the sooner he could fight a troll and get back down to levels that really mattered. 

Despite the fact that Simon was being marched through the street by twenty men, almost no one noticed. They were too busy celebrating the turn of events. The volcano had stopped, and everyone was overjoyed by that. 

That didn’t change when he got to the palace, either. Most of the servants and guards were celebrating just as much as the nobility, and Simon didn’t reach anyone sober or sensible until he was brought to an audience chamber, where the Vizier sat pensively waiting for news. 

The guards explained what had happened and where they’d found him. That got Simon a lecture and plenty of questions, but he brushed them aside as the man went through a few of Simons stranger possessions, like his dowsing rod and a purse brimming with silver and gold. 

The closest the aging advisor got to pinning Simon down was when he went through his gear and asked, “If you’re just an artist, then why’d you bring a sword and armor to the volcano. What good would that do? Did you expect to fight it?”

“Even a foreigner like me has heard the tale of Bro… of the titan imprisoned in that mountain,” Simon answered indifferently. “If today was to be my last day, why not go out fighting?”

That baffled the old man, who looked at him with undisguised contempt. Simon was aware of how stupid it sounded, but then, that’s what he was going for with the character he’d been playing here for the last year. This Simon was no hero. He was just a self-indulgent artist. 

Unfortunately, that’s not what Elthena heard because she picked that moment to come out of hiding and join the conversion from where she’d been sitting behind a curtain. If he’d had his sight, he would have seen her, but even without it, he suspected she was listening from somewhere. 

He’d even steeled himself for her appearance, but it did no good. When the Vizier said, “You majesty, please, this man had nothing to do with saving our fair city,” he didn’t even react. Simon couldn’t move. He was frozen by lifetimes of memories that flashed through his mind.

“Oh, there’s more to this one than meets the eye,” she said confidently. “What of the ball of light that citizens claimed they saw before the eruption, or the rings of light after?”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” Simon lied smoothly. “I didn’t get there until shortly before your men found me. I scarcely had time to draw a single illustration. If I’d been there since that first moment, I’d have a dozen pictures to show you.” 

She looked unconvinced. “And how would you commemorate this event then? If you were granted a royal commission to memorialize it.”

“What event?” Simon asked. “The volcano almost erupted, no more than that. If anything, perhaps you could make a large shrine to placate it in the future. Perhaps it was just feeling lonely?”

“Lonely, is it?” she asked with a flash of something in her eyes. “I sympathize. Join me for dinner, Simon of Brin, and we shall speak of lonely volcanos, art, and other interesting topics.”

In his heart, Simon knew that he shouldn’t. He knew that he should make his excuses and leave, but he couldn’t. The idea of one last meal with the woman he’d loved and the mischief in her eyes was too much to bear. 

This time, she didn’t call him the hero of Ionar and didn’t accuse him of slaying Brogan, but she clearly knew something was amiss, and as the two dined later that evening and during the fifth course, after two glasses of wine and an hour of pleasant company she ambushed him about it. 

“You did something to stop that volcano, didn’t you,” she said as they dined alone in her private dining room.

“What makes you say that?” Simon said, not as willing to lie to her as he’d been to lie to the Vizier. 

“Your story is too strange, for one, and you’re much too calm besides,” she said. “Look around. My servants are very well trained, but they can’t stop looking out the windows, waiting for the rumbling to start again. You don’t give them a second thought… Because you know this is over, and only the person that stopped it could possibly know that.”

She always was a smart one, Simon told himself. That was half the reason I fell in love with her.  

“And what if I did?” he asked finally, after letting the question linger long enough that it might as well have been an admission on his own.

“Well, then I’d want to know how you did it and, more importantly, how you knew that it was going to happen,” she asked, reaching across the table to take one of his hands and both of hers. “It might happen again someday and—”

“It won’t,” Simon promised her. “I’ve made sure of it. That volcano will never erupt again. You have my word on that. As to the details… Well, they say magic damns the soul, and yours seems much too beautiful to damn.”

“Oh my,” she said, taking his attempt to minimize his efforts as flirtation. 

Simon didn’t mean them that way, at least at first, but as the conversation and the drinking continued, he started to. When she insisted on celebrating his secret victory over the forces of fire and darkness, that celebration turned out to be rather more private than he expected. He was thoroughly drunk and in wonderful spirits by the time they left that dining room, and what started with an unexpected kiss on the balcony overlooking Ionar quickly led back to her room. 

When Simon fell into the queen's bed, he was as surprised as anyone, and as she kissed him, and each of them helped the other to remove their clothes, it was easy to believe that the intervening century of lifetimes hadn’t happened at all. Once they were naked, though, they weren’t even a dream or a memory because Simon didn’t think about them. 

Instead, all he thought about was how beautiful Elthena was as they lost themselves in each other's arms. It was only hours later when he was completely spent, that thought returned. 

The queen nuzzled beside him and murmured, “What a mighty hero you are… I think there might yet be a place for you in my court,” before drifting off to sleep. Even after that, though, Simon could not join her. As much as he might have wanted to, his mind slowly came awake as the twin poisons of lust and drunkenness left his system. Those thoughts, in turn, forced him to lay there reflecting on the day. No matter how much he tried to let the darkness claim his drunken, tired mind, though, it always returned to this same moment. 

I shouldn’t be doing this, he decided. I shouldn’t be here. 

He felt more than just the guilt for being with a woman who didn’t know him when he’d rejected Zoa in the same way. For that, at least, he could blame the alcohol. No matter how pretty Elthena was, he would not have done this sober. The real danger, though, was that he’d stay and make the same mistakes all over again, spending yet another lifetime trying to chase ghosts. 

He couldn’t. He was done with that part of his life. 

Reluctantly, Simon dressed in the dark and then returned to the dark throne room, where he found the portal and slipped away to the darkness of the next level. He had nothing to feel shame about, but he felt like he’d made a mistake. Despite the fact that he still loved the Queen in some way and even still wanted to marry her, he knew he’d never get that life back, and as the portal closed behind him, he slammed the book on that chapter of his life. 

It was only then, as he stood there, that he realized he wasn’t exactly where he expected to be. Where is the bridge troll? He asked himself as he looked around. 

Ch. 316 - No Surprises

Once Simon realized he wasn’t where he expected to be, it only took a second to figure out where he’d ended up. The dregs of the wine still in his system slowed him down, but only a little, and he decided against a word of lesser curing to dissipate the poison. 

There weren’t exactly a lot of levels that led to dark forests. Somehow, solving the volcano level had reset this one. In fact, now that he was thinking about it, he was pretty sure it wasn’t even the first time that had happened. 

“This is the fourth time I’ve been here?” he asked himself. “The fifth?”

It didn’t matter. He could check the mirror to find out, but right now, the number of times he’d saved these kids didn’t matter nearly as much as saving them again. This time, Simon didn’t guess which way to go. Instead, he pulled out his dowsing rod and, after focusing on the children and their ruined wagon, slowly turned until he felt the carved stick pull lightly in his grip. Then, he put it away, drew his sword, and charged off into the night. 

As directly as he traveled, though, he didn't get there before he found one of the big ugly birds. That surprised him, even though it shouldn’t have. It surprised the owlbear too, and Simon they both turned in time to see each other. Simon drew his blade even as he sprang backward. A sword was not his preferred weapon for a monster this large, but he was determined to avoid using magic unless absolutely necessary, so he resisted the urge. Instead, he waited for the thing to charge at him before pivoting behind a tree and letting the thing charge past. 

Simon was too slow to hamstring it as he intended. So, he did the next best thing and continued his swing, bringing the blade down at an angle that sent the tree tottering toward the beast. It charged again but never reached him because, this time, half a ton of wood crashed down on top of it. That wasn’t enough to kill it, but it was enough to pin it to the ground long enough for Simon to finish it off with a single thrust to the brain. 

That stopped its outraged squawks, but the muscle tremors continued a while longer. While those died down, Simon stood there, holding his breath as he waited to see what the noise would bring. For a long moment, there was only silence, and Simon muttered, “Come on, motherfucker. I know you're out there.”

That silence wasn’t broken by the sound of an eight-hundred-pound apex predator, though, but by a child’s shrill screams not so far away. That sent him running again, sword in hand. 

“Wrong damn one!” he growled, crashing heedlessly through the underbrush. He’d thought that this time, he’d finally headed that one off, but he’d killed the one that would end up killing him in a few minutes. 

At least, he hoped that was the right one. I’ll check for more owlbears as soon as the kids are safe, he promised himself as he charged into the fight. 

That part went right, at least, though fight might have been a bit strong of a word. The owlbear was just as distracted as it had been last time, but this time, he had a magic sword that could slice right through pretty much whatever he wanted. So, it just took one slice through the thing’s lumbar vertebrae to paralyze it. 

Simon would have chosen the cervical vertebrae for the quick kill, but he remembered how much the damn bird weighed, and he didn’t want it to crush the kids. So instead, he let the thing squeal and rage and claw pathetically across the road after him before Simon pinned it to the ground with his blade right through the skull. 

Then, he released it and retrieved his dowsing rod a second time. “Stay there, kids,” Simon said, trying not to show off his magic to them as he had the last few times. “Just making sure there’s nothing else out here that’s going to try to eat you.”

He spent a few seconds spinning in a circle as he focused on the predator he’d just killed. The two corpses he’d left behind tripped it until he refocused on living owlbears. That brought a few more tugs and trembles, but those were much smaller; there were a few more of these things out there in the woods, but they were much further away. They might have been miles. It was hard to say; Simon had followed faint signals like that when he was prospecting, but he hadn’t done much hunting with this magic. 

“Alright, it looks like the coast is clear,” he called out as he put the thing away, “You can come out now.”

He expected a general reluctance, or maybe even silence, but what he didn’t expect was the sound of gentle sobbing. That was his first clue that something wasn’t right and sent him dashing to the overturned wagon. Simon crawled in there with the kids and instantly found the problem. Kaylee had been hurt pretty bad. If not for the fact that she was stroking Eddek’s cheek with her bloody hand, he would have said she was dying. 

She’d been raked across one side of her head, her face, and part of her upper chest with three long claw marks. She’d never been hurt in any of their encounters, though in at least one of them, she’d been replaced with a different servant girl entirely, which indicated she wasn’t the important part of all this, at least according to Helades. Simon didn’t care who was important and who didn’t matter at all. 

He whispered the word of greater healing under his breath. He wasn’t about to worry about his clarity or lifespan when a kid’s life was on the line. He tried to heal the wound as cleanly as possible because it would be an ugly place to scar, but at that moment, his mind was on blood loss more than infection or anything else. 

He took her from Eddek and said, “Go scavenge the other wagons, and find me some cloth to bandage her,” he ordered the boy. That was more busy work than anything, though.

“Who are you?” the boy asked, but Simon ignored that. 

“Later,” he snapped. Less talking, more life-saving.

As Eddek bolted to obey, Simon turned to the girl and gave her another look to make sure he hadn’t missed any injuries, even if the wounds beneath the blood that covered her were sealed. “Don’t worry, Kaylee. You’re going to be okay.”

“You’ve got… you have this glow about you, mister…” she sighed. “Promise me you’ll look after Eddek when I’m gone, alright?”

While her second statement was understandable, it was her first statement that made him wonder, and he was tempted to ask her more questions that would reveal whether or not those were merely words spoken in shock or something more. 

Simon shook his head. That wasn’t the point right now. There would be time for that later. “Nope. It has to be you,” he insisted. “You have to pull through, or he’ll be all alone in this world.”

Those words hit the girl like a slap. Her eyes widened at them, making Simon feel guilty, but only a little. He needed to give her every reason to live. Even if there was a fire in those eyes, though, eventually, they closed. That worried Simon until he checked her pulse and confirmed she lived. There was no reason at all for her to die at this point, but a greater heal could take a lot out of you as the body worked overtime to fix everything, so he didn’t begrudge her a nap. 

When Eddek returned, he panicked that his maid was dead, but Simon reassured him. He taught him how to check for breath and feel her neck for a pulse while he bandaged her. She didn’t need them at this point, of course, but everyone would feel more comfortable about her miraculous healing if she stayed covered up for a few days.

When that was done, part of Simon wanted to continue the farce by looking for herbs that would help with the healing. Infection was only a very small concern now, but she might need something for the pain when she woke. Still, with so much carrion lying around in the form of shredded men and mounts, he decided it was best if they left. So, he picked her up in a princess carry and started hiking toward the miller’s home several miles away. 

That trip was a quiet one that was largely filled with Simon huffing and puffing under the weight of the young woman he carried. She was  slight and not much older than fourteen or fifteen, but she still weighed more than the orb he’d carried for so long. That contrasted pretty strongly with the last times he’d taken these trips. 

Before, Eddek had always been psyched up by Simon’s magic and heroism. It had been impossible to shut the boy up. This time, Simon had to force him to talk, asking him questions regularly just to keep things moving. 

Slowly but surely, the relevant facts came out. They were headed to Adonan for a festival and a ceremony. That was the capital of Charia, and Simon had been there several times, though he’d never set foot outside of the palace grounds because of all the murdering. Still, as he understood it, the place was much smaller than the capitals of Brin or Montain. It was said to be small even compared to Ionar and not so much bigger than Schwarzenbruck.

“Father feared treachery at the capital,” Eddek explained, “Hence why he sent me in his place. Not before it, though. He sent enough guards with us that wild animals shouldn’t have been a problem.”

“I’m sure your guards fought well,” Simon nodded, “But there’s only so much a man can do against a beast that weighs more than a mounted knight. If an owl bear caught me by surprise, I’d certainly be a dead man.”

I have been more than once, he added mentally. 

They took rest breaks every ten or fifteen minutes after that, both so that Simon could take a breather and flex his aching arms and so he could check on the boy’s worsening shock. Their conversation lapsed into uncomfortable silence at least twice that often. 

In previous runs, Simon had intentionally kept the boy away from the worst of the carnage, but forcing him to gather cloth for bandages had apparently been a harrowing experience for him, and in retrospect, Simon regretted that. 

This time, when they reached the miller’s place, Simon had to do little more than pound on the door and show him the unconscious girl before he was let in. It spoke well of the man that he threw away his very reasonable suspicions as soon as real danger was afoot. Simon found her a place by the fire and then got half a glass of brandy for a boy to calm his nerves as the miller sent his own wife back to bed. 

It was only when both of them were asleep that he told the miller the grisly story of how he’d found them. “How utterly wretched,” the man said, drinking quietly as Simon talked despite the early hour. “So you’re their last surviving guard?”

“Me? No,” Simon shook his head. “I just happened to be there at the right time. Nothing more than that.”

Ch. 317 - A Minor Detour

They stayed at the miller’s for nearly a week. That was for a variety of reasons. The first was because the normalcy of spending time with the miller’s family was helping them put the trauma of the event behind them, but it was also because Kayla was still weak. She probably didn’t need her bandages anymore, but Simon had no intention of taking them off until they were away. People would talk.

The kids weren’t his only reasons, though. There were two other reasons that overshadowed even that very good one. The first was that he wanted to help the miller out since he’d been such a good sport about this, and looking around his place in the light of day, it was clear that things weren’t going well for him.

The final and most important reason was that he needed to figure out how to take these kids where they were going. Normally, that would be easy; Simon could see the covered bridge they’d need to take from the hilltop across the River Gellin. For anyone else, that would have worked, but for Simon, that bridge led to a troll attack sometime in the future, which made that a no-go. 

So, while he discretely consulted his mirror map and chatted with the miller’s family, he paid for their keep by fixing a number of joists in the old man’s mill and even whipped up some plasters to address the worst of the cracks in the thing to slow down the decay. While a few days wasn’t enough to fix it completely, he definitely helped. Simon could have welded all of those closed with words of earth, of course, but he was trying not to lean on magic for everything and had used more than enough for now. 

The break was good for all of them, and when Kayla felt better, the miller gifted them half a dozen loaves of bread before they were on their way once more. Eddek wanted to visit the remains of their caravan again, but Simon told him that wasn’t going to happen. 

He’d already gone back to the scene of the slaughter on the second day and put as many of the corpses as he could find on a funeral pyre, which was the most he could offer to the dead. Even after that, though, crows still soared above the area, and Simon had no wish to let that memory dig any deeper into the heads of the survivors. 

“There’s nothing there we need,” Simon told him as they made their way toward the river. It was true, but not the whole truth. Besides, anything of real value would have long ago been picked clean by other travelers. 

“What if I need a sword to fight?” he asked. “While I appreciate your help, Sir Simon, and my father will make sure you are richly rewarded, we must be ready!”

Simon responded by giving the boy his hunting knife. It was more for fileting and skinning, but he couldn’t exactly give the boy his dagger. It had several enchantments on it that would complicate things. 

“That will do for now,” Simon told him. “We’ll see if we can find you something more fitting in the next town. I’d like to get horses, too, if we can find some for a good price. We’ve got a long road in front of us.”

He thought about offering Kayla his bow, but despite how fearfully she looked at the woods they were approaching, she had no interest in fighting and clung to him like a child now and then. In some previous encounters, Simon could recall her viewing him with suspicion, but all of that was gone. Whether that was because he’d saved her life, though, or because he hadn’t shown off any magic yet, he couldn’t say. 

Maybe seeing my magic is half the reason she fell in with that crowd a decade from now, he thought morosely, becoming even more determined not to reveal himself to her. 

Horses would be helpful, though, because they certainly had a long way to go. It was nearly two hundred miles of hiking, much of it through mountains, even after their detour to the next bridge, which he did not bother to explain. While the children’s caravan would have covered that in a week, and Simon could walk in less than two, as slow and out of shape as they were, he was pretty sure it would take a month. 

Still, it was good for them, and eventually the fatigue of hiking, combined with all the chores involved in making meager dinner and camping arrangements, overpowered the memories of what they’d been through. Kayla took to it pretty well, especially after her bandages came off to reveal she wasn’t as horribly scarred as she thought she’d be. 

“It’s a miracle!” she proclaimed. 

“Not a miracle,” Simon said before offering up elaborate lies about careful stitching and the right use of herbs. 

The truth was that no mundane healing could have fixed this without skin grafts, and this world was a long way from sterile operating theaters. Still, with magic, by the time she finished growing in a few years, he felt confident that those three pink lines would be all but gone. 

Perhaps a healing device, He considered that evening. Something crystal-powered with words of lesser healing that you rub against such a wound to help erase it like a hot stone massage. He didn’t have the tools now, and there were questions about how it would know exactly what to heal, but with a word of order, he thought it likely that he could make something work.

There were always a hundred ideas in his head of what he might work on next, but every time he built something new, he worried about what might happen to it when he died. It was a question worth worrying about since he died fairly often. One day, something would kill him, and he’d leave whatever he had on him where anyone could pick it up. While most things simply wouldn’t be understood, there was the possibility that the words etched on them might inspire any number of warlocks, causing that much more evil to circulate in the world despite his best intentions. 

Of course, his reliance on them concerned him, too. If I build a magic-powered gadget for everything, how long will it be before I’m herding slaves beneath a pyramid for blood sacrifice? He considered as he fell asleep that night. 

For now, all of those questions were safely theoretical, and he spent the day chatting with the children and the night sleeping with one eye open to make sure they stayed safe. 

They made it to the next bridge and the village of Ifrin’s Crossing. It didn’t have any horses for sale, but he was able to find a short sword for Eddek and better shoes for Kayla, which sped her up remarkably now that she wasn’t trying to make do with torn slippers. He bought tattered blankets for the both of them and a donkey for their supplies, too, but he let the children name it, lest it end up as Daisy number four. 

They chose Lazy because of how reluctant the beast was to move. However, Simon judged that to be a bit too cruel to the poor girl and named her Liza instead. 

“But it’s a donkey!” Eddek protested as they continued on their way toward the growing mountain range. “It can’t understand us!”

“She can’t,” Simon agreed, “But she hears the tone in which you speak and knows disrespect when she hears it. You should be careful; the kick of a donkey is a powerful weapon. Never give her a reason to use it on your skull.”

Simon couldn’t tell them that he’d been killed by a donkey before, but he kind of wanted to. Kayla understood his point, but Eddek didn’t, which Simon supposed was common enough. The divide between the rulers and the ruled was stark in some parts of the world. Still, nothing that Eddek told him about his culture was half so alarming as the Magi in the northern lands. 

The biggest problem in the Kingdom of Charia seemed to be the very geography. The mountains simply made it impossible to get anywhere in a straight line. Simon already knew the answer when he asked the boy why his father had sent him so far south instead of taking a more direct way, but he wanted to hear the details. 

“The mountain roads are much more dangerous,” he explained. “It’s merely five nights between my father’s valley and the capital, but every one of them would have been infested with goblins or worse. Really, only armies can move safely in the night.”

Simon understood that, making it all the more ironic that they’d made a nearly two-week detour just to find themselves the victims of monsters once more. The world was a dangerous place. Simon needed no reminders about that. 

Still, it seemed Charia was much more dangerous than the fertile fields and forests of Brin. Civilization pushed monsters back, but in the wild places between civilizations, they flourished, and Simon spent an afternoon wondering if his best use of time might just be spent giving up on the Pit for a life or two and doing some serious monster hunting. 

The boy hadn’t heard of vampires but spoke about werewolves, ogres, griffons, and other abominations in the nightly stories they traded around the campfire. He even knew a wicked tale about Castle Grevenstone, though it sounded more like a lich or strange form of zombie than the vampire that Freya had become.  

It was there, in one of those story sessions, a week into their journey, that Simon discovered something he should have known from the beginning: Kayla couldn’t read. Literacy wasn’t exactly common in the world, but that didn’t do anything to reduce Simon’s shock at it. 

“Why would a servant learn to read?” she asked him. “Maybe if I was the head cook or something, or I had to deal with the house’s account books, but a handmaid? There’s no need.”

While logical, that reasoning hurt Simon and resolved to teach her how to write at least her own name before they arrived at their destination. Lessons became mandatory between dinner time and the period when he told them the tales and myths of Ionar, but she didn’t complain too much. 

Indeed, none of them had much to complain about. They'd had good weather, decent food, and, thankfully, not a single goblin or bandit attack, though Simon didn't expect that luck to hold once they got into the mountains.

What was more unexpected was that after a few days, Kayla looked forward to those lessons more than the stories themselves, much to Eddek’s dismay. This caused Simon to increase his goal from her name to the entire Charian alphabet. He enlisted the boy’s help with that since he still occasionally mixed up various alphabets.

Eddek was not very enthused by that, but when Simon carved two wooden swords and promised the boy lessons of his own before dinner, he agreed. In Simon’s experience, lessons in combat were the one universal bribe that he could offer young men to ingratiate himself with them. 

In all his lives, only his reluctant art student, Bertrand, had not been tempted by them. There was an almost universal appeal there, and Simon enjoyed exploiting it in nearly every life. While he’d recently had a second childhood that wasn’t a miracle that any of his companions were ever likely to endure, so he wanted to give them the best experience he could.