“But Your Majesty, are you going to leave that girl in the tree?”
“Yes.” He turned and awkwardly remounted his horse.
One of the hunters snickered and nudged the man next to him. “Well, if His Majesty doesn’t want her…” He nocked an arrow and pointed his bow towards me.
Sanctuary! I cried in my head.
Nothing happened.
Except the arrow buried its head into my thigh.
It took every ounce of willpower not to scream aloud. I clenched my teeth so hard that I felt my jaw crack.
“What did you do?” Calvin bellowed, scrambling back off his horse as I half-slid from the branch.
Heal! Heal! I thought desperately. It didn’t work.
I had to call the name of the skill aloud.
God FUCKING dammit.
WHAT? WHAT? YOU… YOU…
I slammed my fist against the tree and the branch broke, sending me spinning towards the ground. A pair of firm arms caught me. I opened my mouth to call Calvin’s name, but had to slam it shut again without even a wordless sound of anguish. I could only grip his shirt and grit my teeth as I tried not to cry.
“Damn… Damn…” he was muttering. “Why did it have to be you, Mik Tsaam?”
What was that supposed to mean?
Sorry I’m not Peach.
“Where are the others?”
I shook my head.
“Why aren’t you saying anything?”
I covered my mouth and shook my head.
“Have you been cursed?”
Not really.
I shook my head again, then wiped my eyes and pointed at the arrow in my leg to remind him.
“Right…”
I was fully expecting that getting me on to the horse would be extremely undignified, given the height of the horse and my injured leg, but Calvin fiddled with the stirrup and it extended easily. Once my feet were on its wide plate, he pulled at the other end of the adjustment strap and I was boosted comfortably up into the saddle.
I stared at the man who had shot me the whole time. Calvin finally noticed the direction of my gaze and uncomfortably addressed the man. “You… You’ll be punished when we return.”
The words were awkward in his mouth, as unsuited to him as his clothing. But the man’s face turned a faint green and he tried to fall back inconspicuously amongst the ranks of hunters.
The trotting of the horse jolted my injured leg repeatedly, although not as much as I had expected. The saddle almost felt… like it had built-in suspension?
Exhausted, I leaned against Calvin’s bulk, seated behind me. Everything felt so tiring, even with a high Endurance stat and no need for sleep. I supposed it was my… soul that was tired, if that even made any sense?
Are you stupid? Of course it doesn’t.
Shut up, I responded mentally. I’d gotten tired of listening to that voice, the one that sounded like my mother’s, over the past two years alone.
Being around people was probably not a good idea, but I was injured and I missed my friends, even if they apparently didn’t miss me. Calvin was an odd one; with his taciturn nature it would have made more sense for him to play the mute sister, although perhaps the game thought that would have been too easy.
I knew three things about Calvin:
- He didn’t speak much;
- He liked old Cantonese songs; and
- He was around my age.
We had been in the same friend group through the latter half of secondary school, but never really interacted one-on-one. I didn’t know his birthday (because he never told anyone), his hobbies (because he never told anyone), his family structure (because he never told anyone).
This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
I was sensing a pattern.
Actually, I could add one more thing to my list:
- Lee Wai Meng really pissed him off.
I mean, Wai Meng could be pretty abrasive, but he annoyed Calvin in particular. The otherwise calm-as-a-Buddha Calvin proved himself to have a very unenlightened vocabulary whenever Wai Meng would start spouting nonsense. Speaking of…
“This fucking game…”
The venom in his voice shocked me. His hands tightened on the horse’s reins. I wanted to ask him what had happened to him in the game so far. I reached out and tried to write on his hand.
“Uh… Slower.”
I tried again.
“‘What’s wrong?’” He breathed deeply and did not answer for a long moment, leaving only the steady clop of horse hooves to fill the air. When I felt the silence stretch out a little too long, I went to write again, but he suddenly said, “I don’t know how to tell you.”
I let my hand drop back onto my lap.
“You shouldn’t be here.”
‘I’m here, though?’ I wrote.
“It wasn’t supposed to…” He trailed off.
Finish your damn sentence. You’re the only one who can talk right now.
This was so awkward. I couldn’t talk and Calvin didn’t want to. All I could get were cryptic responses. I couldn’t even pull the Encyclopaedia from my Inventory without being able to speak.
I was useless.
I wrote as much on Calvin’s hand.
“You’re not useless.”
‘I am right now. HELP me.’ I wrote the ‘HELP’ as large as possible.
Still, no answer. What is going on?
The trees began to thin, then disappeared altogether. The horses had emerged on the outskirts of a town, their hooves stirring pale dust.
People bowed their heads as we trotted past. I could sense their curious glances under their eyelids, seeing me seated on the king’s horse. I kept my own eyes down and tried to make myself as discreet as possible, and failed entirely. I could see children pointing at me, parents folding their hands away quickly.
On and on, and the numbers of people only grew larger as we entered steadily bigger towns. Calvin had to be hating this amount of attention; I had cover my own face so I could barely imagine how he was feeling.
At last, the sound of the hooves changed, and I finally peeked between my fingers to find we were crossing a drawbridge into a stone castle.
It was the strangest castle I had ever seen. Not that I had seen many castles.
In movies, though, castles didn’t have what appeared to be pneumatic pistons to raise and lower the drawbridges, nor bitumen roads…
Seeing my head swivelling around and around as I found more and more anachronistic devices, Calvin said shortly, “My Skillset.”
‘Artificer?’
“I added the class at third level. I’m a… War Engineer now.”
‘What happened to Magic Swordsman?’
He shrugged, and that was all.
I was handed off to a healer. A wooden stick was stuck between my teeth as she cut the arrowhead from my leg. Throat straining to hold back sounds of pain, I tried to distract myself by wondering how much worse this would be without high Endurance stats.
Finally, the wound was washed with alcohol, and sewn shut. The healer then daubed some kind of clear, sticky substance over the top and left me to rest.
A raven landed on the windowsill.
I waved my hand at it. It hopped forward and began to cackle incessantly.
Lee Wai Meng?
Casting about, my eyes combed the room for something to write with. The clinic space was cleaner than I expected, and stocked with a number of items that I was certain weren’t originally found in medieval European castles. Several unusual-looking but functional syringes sat in a box next to a jar of leeches, and the needles that the healer had used to sew me up shared bench space with a machine that resembled a primitive blood pressure monitor.
There was a box of pens, the type with a button that when clicked would cause the nib to appear and retract. Seemed that Calvin had been busy over the past two years.
There was no paper. Perhaps the healers kept their records elsewhere. I began to write on my arm.
‘Wai Meng?’
The raven looked at my arm and cawed loudly. It hopped onto the bed where I had been put to rest and looked at me expectantly.
‘I can’t Dispel Curse without speaking.’
The raven cawed again.
What an utterly stupid situation.
‘Calvin is here.’
Caw.
Now what?
There was a knock at the door.
The raven hopped back onto the windowsill and cawed impatiently.
“Mik Tsaam, it’s me,” said Calvin outside the door. There was a silence, then he seemed to remember that I couldn’t speak. “I’m coming in.”
After pushing the door open, his eyes travelled from me on the bed with the pen marks on my arm, to the raven dancing aggressively at the window.
“Is that Lee Wai Meng?”
I almost laughed out loud in surprise, caught myself and managed to nod but then shrugged.
“Why aren’t you talking?”
‘The others are cursed to be ravens,’ I wrote on my arm. ‘To break the curse, I have to stay silent.’
“For how long?”
I held out three fingers and a knuckle.
“Three and half… years?”
I nodded.
Calvin blew out air forcefully and sat heavily down on the bed, head bowed, hands clasped. He looked like a man at the edge of desperation.
‘You have to tell me,’ I wrote.
“It’s not good. I don’t know how… The fucking game. What the hell was wrong with the developers?”
I looked at the presumed Lee Wai Meng as a raven, but it just cawed and managed something approximating a shrug.
Calvin was scratching at his face, unconsciously, I realised, because his skin was starting to bleed. I grabbed his hand to pull it away, but he jerked back like I was a spider.
“I… Don’t. Don’t, Mik Tsaam.”
I punched him, with just enough force to make him realise I was losing patience. He stared at me through his fingers, unblinking.
“What do we do?”
How the hell am I supposed to know if you won’t tell me what’s happening, you idiot?
What was so bad that he wouldn’t tell me? Suddenly, horrible thoughts began to circle, ideas that I thought I had put to rest, or at least successfully shoved out of sight, during the last two years.
He continued to stare at me through his fingers. His eyes were faintly bloodshot. He opened his mouth, closed it, repeated this sequence four or five times before finally –
“My tasks… My tasks are… to find a woman in a tree in a forest…”
‘And?’
I need to know.
I don’t want to know.
“… and… shit…”
I wanted to grab him by the collar and shake him. It probably wouldn’t have done anything – he was too solid.
“… child.”
I almost yelled, “WHAT CHILD?” I should have stayed alone in the damned forest, wounded or not. I shouldn’t have come here with Calvin. Something was wrong. Something was terribly wrong. I felt suddenly, horribly sick.
‘Again?’
“I have to have a child,” he gritted out.
My mouth fell open. Calvin covered my mouth so hastily he bumped my teeth, but I didn’t even register the sensation. I had run out of space on my arms for words. With a shaking finger, I wrote on the back of his hand.
‘With the woman you find?’
Calvin couldn’t meet my eyes.