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“Of course I can.”
“No. You can’t. I’m going to stay here, and I’m going to kill men who try to hurt women. I’m good at it. Well, I will be good at it. For the moment, sometimes I just maim them. It’s a process.”
“No.”
She smiled. “You don't understand, Bryn. I’m not asking you. I am telling you. I might be stuck here on this mountain. I might be touched by a demon, but I think I can be useful this way. I think I can stop bad people.”
“By becoming one yourself? Do you think if I don’t bring you back, they won’t send soldiers after you?”
“I am very scary,” Hail smiled, her teeth sharp. “I am more frightening than you remember, and what you remember was me being so scary I had to be cast out.”
Bryn sighed inwardly. She insisted on believing that she had been driven out because she could not confront the reality that her own selfish willfulness had led her to be cursed. He wanted to whip her more badly than ever. He had spent the last three years thinking how if only he had whipped her more she might have been saved from this corrupt fate which had overcome her.
He did not argue with her any further. There was no point. He could argue with her for years and get nowhere. He already had, in fact. Bryn threw the net in an athletic arc over her head. She smirked, thinking he had missed, but the heavy weights of the near side caught around her waist and in seconds the thing had tangled around her.
Her scream of rage made every bird on Mount Eternal go screaming and flapping into the sky, but it was too late. She was caught.
Hail screamed as the net fell over her. Dark rose but fell again when Bryn lifted a skeptical brow at it. He was not a randomly generated traveler to be destroyed by a demon infested brat. He was a master. Her master, and this time he was determined to make sure she knew it.
“Let me go!”
“No,” he intoned firmly. “You’re coming with me, lass, whether you like it or not.”
“You can’t take me!”
“Of course I can. I can take you and I can make you mine. I can drive out what the Dark put inside you.”
Hail laughed, a wild, maniacal sound. “You can never undo what he did to me, Bryn.”
“I don’t have to undo it. I just have to drive it out.”
“Why don’t you reload the world?”
He stopped in the act of securing her and looked at her askance. “The demon told you about that, did he?”
“He told me many things. He told me this world is not real. He told me you have a power to turn back time and making things that have happened not happen. If you could do that, why didn’t you turn time back before the war and we were all orphaned?”
“Because it is not that simple. Some things are scripted into the universe. They happen no matter what I do. Some outcomes can't be changed. I thought you being lost might be one of them. I was wrong, and maybe I was right as well.”
“How convenient.”
“It’s not convenient, actually. It’s damned inconvenient. The last three years have been like watching some long unskippable scene I was not part of and had no control of. Finally I am able to do something again. Finally, I see what I need to do with you.”
With those words, he hefted Hail’s wriggling, cursing form up on his shoulder.
“What the hell is an unskippable scene?”
“There are some interactions I do not have to suffer through,” Bryn explained. “There are others I feel forced to experience in excruciating detail.”
“You sound crazier than I am.”
“The reason you can’t get past Mount Eternal isn’t because you’re cursed. It’s because you’re corrupted.”
“Sounds like the same thing,” she replied, grunting as Bryn’s shoulder dug into her with his first step back toward New Rahvin.
“It’s not.”
Eleven
Whipping Girl
They stepped through Bryn’s front door. Actually, no, they didn’t. They were inside the den. Simply inside it, as much as a moment earlier they had been outside in Old Rahvin.
“How did you do that? How did you travel here with such speed?”
Bryn slid Hail from his shoulder and began to free her from the net.
“I have one save point, and one fast travel location. I set it to my home for convenience.”
“All this time you denied me magic, and here you are, full of it.”
She did not understand all the terms he used so easily and freely, terms she had never heard before and yet seemed to be smooth and familiar parts of his vocabulary. She understood their general gist though, and what they did. These were no health potions, or healing spells. These were deeper magics which went to the very core of existence. He had some brute force power over time and space.
