Will Power by A. J. Hartley

than shelter, it promised civilization. Given that I was freezing, irritated, totally confused, and bleeding slightly from wounds too minor to get any real sympathy, that promise was as good as a hot bath, a joint of venison, and a flagon of strong ale. Well, not quite, but you take my point.
    But the idea of the bath cooled rapidly as we strode along the blackened track for an hour or more with no sign of intelligent life. The road, if that was what it was, felt like it was going somewhere, butit dragged through the mountains, curling aimlessly here, doubling back around an outcrop of rock there, so that its progress was random to say the least. After a while I felt like I was riding some huge, lazy, and very confused—or possibly blind—earthworm. After a second hour, I gave up on the beer and venison, too.
    The one thing we did have on the path was protection from the icy wind and, though the air was still crisp and clear, the sun brushed our upturned faces and warmed them gently. Around us the mountains loomed: great angular crags of pale russet and violet-gray, towering as hard and impassive as a gold merchant’s wife and fading into distant peaks white with snow. Of Vetch there was little hope and no sign.
    After another hour, the company grew restless again. The sun had clearly begun its descent (in the west?) and we couldn’t go on walking till dark with no plan for what happened if we didn’t stroll into a cleverly concealed city around the next corner. Mithos grew even more surly than usual, and as he muttered earnestly to Orgos, they began walking a little faster. Renthrette, still mounted, trotted up to them and exchanged a few insights on our condition. Apprentice Will, man of dubious talents, tired legs and all-round miserable bastard, trudged behind and counted off all the places I would rather have been.
    Suddenly there was a bird call, high and caustically harsh, from in front of us. It was a starling, feathers ruffled, wings aggressively half-spread, and it sat in the bare branches of a small and withered yew tree just left of the path. We hadn’t seen many trees in the mountains, and even one as blasted as this was something of an event. Moreover, the bird’s position in it, coupled perhaps with the way it fixed us with its hard bird eyes, gave it the aura of a guard or sentinel. I couldn’t help but smile as the bird, small though it was, continued to screech its anger at us, flicking its wings and bobbing its head up and down as it called.
    Mithos and Orgos stopped in their tracks before reaching the little tree, giving me time to catch up.
    “Odd that it doesn’t seem afraid of us,” Mithos remarked.
    “Probably used to people ’round here,” I answered, snide. The bird cried again and flashed its wing feathers, dark and glossy as polished steel. Then it took to the air, circled us once, and flew away over a great purple boulder, calling all the time.
    That was the highlight of the afternoon. We walked on for another mile or two before Mithos came to an abrupt halt.
    “We have only two or three hours of good light left, and there isno sign of a town or an inn,” he said, as if we might have missed that fact. “We are going to have to spend the night outdoors.”
    I opened my mouth to protest, but the others seemed quite unmoved by the patent idiocy of this suggestion so, for the moment, I held my peace.
    Turning to Renthrette, Mithos asked what we had with us.
    The saddlebags on the horse were the only luggage that had completed the “journey” from the Black Horse. Most of the rest had been inside the carriage, and we had been traveling light even then. Now, as Renthrette’s quick inventory of the leather satchels across her mount made clear, we were virtually weightless.
    “Two blankets, flint and tinder, an oil lamp, one small hatchet, some bread and cheese, and a length of rope. About thirty feet,” she said, not exactly exuberantly.
    “No tent?” I ventured.
    “Did I mention