Chapter 5: Corwin and Rook
The armored warrior's name, once Alicia pried it out of him between labored breaths, was Corwin. He said it like he expected them to recognize it. When they didn't, something in his shoulders sagged with the specific disappointment of a man who'd built an entire highlight reel in his head and just found out nobody was watching.
"You've never heard of me," he said. It wasn't a question. It was grief.
"We just watched you get backhanded into a canyon wall," Jeff said, still sitting because standing seemed like a personal attack on his body right now. "I feel like that's a pretty good introduction on its own."
"I softened it up first."
"Sure you did."
"I did! Look at it!" Corwin gestured weakly at the dragon's ruined bulk, forty feet of shattered plating cooling in the desert heat like a demolished cathedral. Ichor pooled black and slow beneath it, already crusting at the edges where the air met it. "You think it just decided to lose?"
"I think it looked at us and calculated that this was, statistically, its worst day," Alicia said, kneeling to check the burn along Corwin's ribs where his armor had buckled. "Which, respectfully, might not have anything to do with you."
Corwin opened his mouth to argue and then apparently remembered he had two broken ribs and closed it again.
Jeff wasn't listening anymore. He was looking at the dragon.
It hadn't gone still the way a killed thing goes still — the sudden absence, the weight dropping out of a body like someone unplugged it. This was slower. Its remaining eye, half-lidded, tracked nothing, but it hadn't glazed. Its chest, what was left of it, rose and fell in increments too small to be called breathing and too regular to be called anything else. Dying, if it was dying, was taking its sweet time about it, like a phone battery insisting it still had six percent left through pure spite.
"It talked like it's done this before," Jeff said.
"It walked straight to the right crystal every time like it had notes."
"It could be a wish," Corwin offered, wincing as he sat up. "Somebody wished a legendary creature into existence at some point. Won't die permanently any more than the rest of us do."
The dragon's eye rolled, slow as a tide, and fixed on Jeff.
"You," it said. The word came out wet, dragged over broken things in its throat. "I remember cursed possession like yours."
"I get that a lot," Jeff said.
Its eye slid shut, and this time it stayed shut, and the small increments of movement in its chest went from small to smaller to nothing, the way a held breath finally, quietly, gives up. It simply stopped, the way a machine stops when the last charge bleeds out of it, and the canyon held its silence like it was used to holding worse.
Something dropped out of that silence at an angle no hawk would have attempted and no sane creature would have survived, cutting across the sun close enough that Jeff saw its shadow before he saw it — a hard bank, a violent snap of wings that kicked up a fan of grit into his face, and then it was standing on the dragon's largest surviving horn like it had booked the spot in advance.
Bird wasn't quite the right word, though it was doing its best. Two feet of it, maybe a little more, feathers the restless black-teal of oil sitting on water, shifting color when it moved like it hadn't fully decided what color it wanted to commit to. Threaded through the black were narrow seams of gold, not painted on and not natural either — too clean, too deliberate, like filigree pressed into metal rather than grown. Its eyes were a pale storm-gray that didn't belong on anything with feathers, and they missed nothing, least of all the fact that everyone present was staring at it.
It looked down at the dragon's corpse with the specific unimpressed air of someone arriving after the meeting had already wrapped.
"You started without me," it said. The voice came out crisp and fully formed, every consonant landing exactly where it aimed to land — nothing like the wet drag the dragon had spent its last words on.
"You weren't invited to the part that mattered," Corwin said, grinning through what that grin clearly cost him. "You were invited to the flying-around part."
"I was extensively flying around. At altitude. Some of us appreciate a good canyon." It hopped once, resettled, and turned that gray gaze on Jeff and Alicia with open, unhurried assessment. "New faces. Wonderful. More witnesses."
"That's a wish-granter," Jeff said, in the tone of a man doing math he didn't like the answer to.
"That's your wish-granter," Alicia said to Corwin.
"Still on duty," the bird said, dipping its head in a bow that somehow communicated total formality and zero actual respect at the same time. "Two wishes down. One outstanding. Assuming he doesn't decide to sit on it, in which case I fly around some more and eventually go home."
"Genie," Jeff said, testing the word.
"Wish-granter," the bird corrected, without heat, in the exhausted cadence of someone who had corrected this exact word more times than he cared to count. "Genie implies lamps. I have never once lived in a lamp. Call me whatever helps you sleep, but I reserve the right to sigh about it."
"And before anyone asks," Corwin said, holding up a hand, "no. He's not the reason I have any of this." He rapped a knuckle against his cracked breastplate. "Armor's mine. Axe is mine. The lightning thing is mine, six years running, long before this one showed up. He's granted me exactly two things in the whole of our acquaintance, and neither of them put a single joint of this armor on my body."
"Name's Rook. If you need something to call me that isn't an insult to my intelligence," the bird said.
"You're new," Jeff said. "Recently summoned, I mean."
"This morning," Corwin said. "Found the object two towns back. Carved thing, about the size of a walnut. I touched it and there he was, mid-sentence, like he'd already been having the conversation and just hadn't had anyone to have it with."
"I had been having the conversation the whole time," Rook said. "Standby doesn't prevent socializing."
"How long do you get him for?" Alicia asked.
"Eleven days," Rook said, "unless I die first, or he dies first, or he spends the last wish first, whichever gets there sooner. Then duty's over, the little walnut packs itself up and relocates several trillion miles in whatever direction feels appropriately dramatic, and somebody on some other planet gets to find a very lucky-looking rock."
"And the wishes he's spent," Jeff said, "so far—"
"First one," Corwin said, with the specific pride of a man who had rehearsed this speech and was thrilled to finally give it, "was worded exactly right. I wished for a magical livestream showing what I am seeing and hearing right now to be publicly accessible through a most viewed Sports Smart TV app. Precise. Airtight."
"And the second," Rook said, "was, somehow, even more precise."
"'I wish for that livestream to continue following me wherever I go for the next 24 hours,'" Corwin said. "I workshopped that for four minutes before I said it out loud. Some people wing their wishes. I do not wing my wishes."
"You're currently being watched," Jeff said slowly, "by an unknown number of strangers, on television, on this planet."
"Sports bars have odds on whether I survive the day," Corwin said, not without some satisfaction. "I checked before we left the last town. I was fourteen-to-one against. I intend to make several people very rich by staying alive out of spite alone."
"You look like you walked out of a storybook and never walked back in," Alicia said to Rook, studying him with the same open, unhurried curiosity she'd have aimed at a rare stone, and which would have been rude aimed at a person.
"I wasn't granted into existence looking like this, if that's the theory." Rook tilted his head, considering how much of the answer was worth giving. "I was a plain gray fledgling once, a very long time ago, in a body that had nothing gold or black-teal about it whatsoever. This is several centuries and a great deal of editing later. Every life I've lived, I've been small enough and biological enough to set off objects sized for creatures like me — and every time one summoned a wish-granter for me, I spent at least one of my own three wishes on myself. A little more color here. A little more precision to the voice there. Nobody wishes a plain gray bird into existing this loudly. I did that. Slowly. Over and over. It's the only kind of vanity project available to something that keeps dying and coming back."
"Coming back as what?" Jeff asked.
"Me. It's not reincarnation in this universe. Whenever I died, I was given options, same as anyone gets — and I've made the same one more times than I can comfortably count." Rook's gray eyes didn't waver. "Option Three. Almost every time. Doing standby duty, eventually summoned, granted somebody's wishes, sent back, leave eventually, another life, another death, and options. I've done this often enough that Corwin here is not even memorable competition for strangest grantee I've had."
"That's insulting," Corwin said.
"It's accurate. You're merely above average."
"The voice," Alicia said. "It's clearer than his." She nodded at Corwin.
"That wish changed my life," Rook admitted, something almost like satisfaction in it. "Perfectly clear speech. 100% worth the wish. And while we're handing out the practical version of events rather than the flattering one: anyone within about thirty-seven feet of me gets the same courtesy, whether they asked for it or not. Whenever someone speaks to me and whenever I speak to them, the speech is magically translated translated into one's own language in real-time. It runs the whole time I'm active. I don't turn it off, and I can't turn it up. Professional courtesy of the position."
"Handy," Jeff said.
"Occasionally," Rook said, "it's the only interesting part of the job."
They found the town by evening, which was less a discovery than a surrender — the mirrored maze of the forest kept redirecting them toward it with the polite insistence of a mall cop, and eventually Jeff decided that fighting a labyrinth's opinion about where he should be standing was a losing use of an already exhausting day. Rook rode the last mile perched on Corwin's pauldron, silent, watching the treeline with the specific attentiveness of something that had learned, across several centuries, exactly how often trouble waited at the edge of a forest for people who assumed they were done for the day.
The town called itself Emberglass, according to a sign made of what looked like fused glass shards, their auras still faintly luminous, also luminous from whatever crystal had been ground down to make it. It was smaller than Jeff expected and busier than made sense for its size — stalls selling shard-cut jewelry that pulsed faintly when touched, a blacksmith reforging a blade that occasionally flickered translucent for no reason anyone bothered explaining, two kids racing each other on legs that weren't the legs they were born with, laughing in a way that suggested the new legs were, frankly, an upgrade.
Corwin, limping between them with his axe now serving as a cane, eyed the crowd like a man auditing a competitor's business. "This is one of those communities that grows up around a cluster of wish-granter-summoning objects. People migrate here because the odds are better. Somebody finds three wish-granters in a week, word spreads, suddenly you've got a town." He said it with the weary contempt of a man who considered wishing beneath him, which struck Jeff as rich coming from someone who fought dragons with a lightning axe for a hobby and no visible retirement plan.
"You say that like you didn't grind your entire kit out of wishes."
"That's different. I earned mine through struggle and sacrifice."
"How many different wish-granters did it take?"
"...We don't need to relitigate wishes."
"For the record," Rook said, from the pauldron, without opening his eyes, "it was several. He's told me about several. Unprompted. Several times."
Alicia, ignoring all three of them with the practiced ease of a woman who'd been married into this exact dynamic, had already drifted toward a stall where an older woman was laying out shards sorted by color with the reverence of someone arranging a wedding cake. "These are healing-crystal cuts," Alicia said, delighted, holding one up so the low sun came through it pale gold — and threw a matching gold across the very light tan of her own arm, a shade she liked to credit to a Cuban grandfather who'd spent sixty years insisting he had "fisherman's blood" like that was a documented ethnicity, and a Havana-born mother who barely tanned at all no matter how long she stood in the sun. "Real ones. Look at the veining."
"Freshest batch in three months," the woman said. "Crystal cluster two valleys over finally cycled out and reset. Testing a cluster's crystal yourself, before you know what it does, can sometimes trigger its aura to turn a part of you extremely heavy." She said this with the specific flatness of someone reciting a lesson she'd learned the hard way and intended to spare exactly one stranger from repeating.
Jeff bought four shards, mostly because Alicia gave him a look that communicated, without a single word, that they were leaving with four shards whether he participated in the transaction or not. He was getting good at reading that look. It had saved him from at least one bad decision a week since they'd married. He scrubbed a hand back over his dark cornrows while he waited, dislodging a small cascade of canyon grit — the rows sat tight and even, and stopped a clean couple of inches short of his shoulders, not dropping past mid-neck. 6ft and slender with cornrows, he never changed that about himself — height from his Georgia-raised father's side, slenderness from his Chilean mother's side.
It was while they were haggling — well, while Alicia was haggling and Jeff was providing color commentary nobody asked for — that he noticed the reading room.
It sat at the town's center, open on all sides, roofed but wall-less, shelves built into the support posts. A dozen people sat inside on cushions that had clearly been replaced more than once, reading. Not idly. Studying. A kid no older than ten had a page open and was mouthing the words with the concentration of someone memorizing scripture.
"Every room has one of those," Alicia murmured, following his gaze. "Every house, every building. It's in Eric's rules. Reading material disclosing plenty of rules. I think that kid's read the same page eleven times and isn't going to stop until it makes sense, and I think eventually it's going to make sense."
"Somebody should tell him some of it isn't for kids," Corwin said.
"Somebody should tell you that too," Rook said, "and yet."
They were three streets deeper into Emberglass, following a rumor about a map dealer, when Jeff started messing with his ring.
"My ring is so weird."
"Your ring's always been weird."
"Weirder than weird. Weird-weird." Jeff flexed his hand, and the ring on his finger sat there being smugly cryptic the way it always did, offering exactly zero additional context.
Corwin, several paces ahead and clearly done pretending he wasn't eavesdropping, stopped walking. Rook lifted his head off the pauldron a half-second before Corwin spoke, which Jeff noticed and filed away.
"There's someone doing something weird near here," Corwin said.
Jeff and Alicia both turned. "Where?"
"There," Corwin said, pointing his axe toward an alley between a shuttered forge and a dye shop that smelled aggressively of crushed flowers. "That man is having a conversation with absolutely nobody, and he's using the specific hand gestures people use when a translated conversation is running a beat behind."
He was right. A man stood in the alley's shadow, gesturing animatedly at empty air, occasionally pausing as if listening, his lips moving a half-second before sound would've caught up if there'd been any.
"Translated conversation," Jeff repeated slowly, and looked at Rook.
"I'm thirty-one feet away," Rook said, already doing the math out loud, wings half-lifting off the pauldron. "He's well within range. Whatever he's saying, whatever's answering him, it's coming through clean on both ends — which means somewhere in that alley there's something else nearby that qualifies as a listener. Or a wish-granter of its own. I'd need to be closer to tell you which, and I'd genuinely rather not be."
"He's talking to somebody, maybe," Alicia said slowly.
"Unless he's talking to something, maybe," Jeff said.
The man in the alley finished his conversation, nodded once at the empty air like he was thanking someone for their time, and turned to leave — and stopped dead when he saw the three of them watching him. Four, if the bird counted, and the way the man's eyes flicked to Rook and lingered a half-second too long suggested he counted.
For a moment nobody moved. Somewhere behind them, the town went on being a town, oblivious — a child laughing, a hammer striking hot metal, the low murmur of people reading rules they didn't yet know were the walls of their world.
The man's expression didn't do anything dramatic. He didn't flinch or bolt or reach for a weapon. He just looked, very briefly, like someone who'd been caught doing something he'd assumed no one nearby would ever be equipped to notice — and then, worse, like someone recalculating, in real time, exactly how much that assumption was about to cost him.
Then he smiled, pleasant as a shopkeeper, and the smile didn't reach anywhere near his eyes.
He turned and walked deeper into the alley — not running, not even hurrying, just a man keeping an appointment he had no intention of missing — and by the time Jeff's legs remembered they were allowed to move, the alley bent, and the man was already gone around the corner of it, unhurried the entire way, like he'd known exactly how many seconds of shock he had to work with and had spent every one of them on purpose.
"I don't like him," Rook said, into the quiet that followed.
"Nobody asked," Corwin said, already limping toward the alley's mouth, axe held like it weighed nothing at all anymore.
"Nobody had to," Rook said. "I'm telling you anyway. Professional courtesy."
To Be Continued.