Be Thou My Good: Chapter 10 (Patreon)

This chapter was edited by: MJGH, GrimeTide, and Death_Of_The_Artist

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Chapter Ten: The People and The Players

“Who am I?” I asked.

Across from me, the young woman stood. She looked like a stereotypical bard, lute and wineskin peeking out from behind a tattered motley cloak. That wasn’t what I noticed first, though.

It was the silence.

My voice echoed in the hall. Other sounds cut off. I let my hand trail down to the dagger at my side. “I should be asking you that,” I continued.

She took a step closer, and I mirrored her by drifting back. “I think you already figured that out.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Did I?” The weave of this moment slipped through my fingers. That just meant I’d have to cut my way through this mess. “You could at least introduce yourself.”

She hummed, taking another step forward. “No.”

“No?”

“I don’t think I will.” Step. “Not here, and certainly not to you.” She scowled, her face taking on an ugly cast. “You’re the reason it’s all gone off course. You’ve made a mess of everything, and the worst part is that you don’t even realize it.”

I took another step back. “I doubt I’ve done that much.”

“That much? That much?” She shook her head. “You’re like a rock in the middle of a stream, knocking everything off course.”

I looked to the side, placing my hand on the smooth wood wall where only a few seconds ago there’d been a door. “So that’s why you showed up?” I paused, tapping a finger against the wood. It warped like thread to the touch. “Or did I show up here?”

“Ooh, a smart one.” She smirked, folding her arms behind her back. “Most people in your situation take a lot longer to figure things out.”

I dropped my hand back to my dagger, pulling it free of its sheath. Clearly, I was on my own this time. “Where are we?”

Her smirk widened. “Nowhere.”

I sucked in a breath of air. “We’re off-screen.”

“Off-screen?” She rubbed her chin. “Like those shadow puppet plays from Mercantis? Yes.” She took another step closer. “Off-screen is a good word for it.”

I felt the weave of the story start to coalesce around us again at those words, but I got the feeling that I wouldn’t like what spooled out. Instead, I hopped to a different thread.

“But why are you bothering with me if you can do this?”

“Sometimes you have to take care of a problem directly.” She took a step closer.

“No.”

She stopped, foot in the air. “No?”

“No, see.” I moved away from the wall, dagger held loose and ready in my hand. “You’re a bard.”

She gave me another cheeky smile. “Told you you’d figure it out.”

“Bards aren’t direct. They’re tricky. Flexible.”

She spread her hands. “Guilty as charged.”

I couldn’t read her, despite her youthful appearance. She wasn’t some green child-like Squire and her friends.

So I poked. “But you pay for that flexibility with power.”

“Oh?” She put her foot back down. “Now where’d you hear a thing like that?”

I nodded. “You’re evading again.”

“I do that, sometimes.”

This time it was my turn to smirk. “That means I’m right. If you could just pluck someone up like a spider in her web, you wouldn’t need to bother with me,” I said. “In fact, I bet we wouldn’t even be talking right now.”

She smirked. “That’s an interesting idea. I could just like talking to people, you know.” She took a step closer. “We play with our food sometimes.”

“No.”

She paused again.

I took my own step forward. I felt the weave tremble beneath my foot. The bard—the Bard? No, that didn’t sound quite right—blinked once in surprise. “You don’t look like the type of person who plays with her food.”

She took a moment then, to look at me. I felt like it was the first time she was actually looking at me and not through me, at the pattern woven by my footsteps.

She sighed. “I always get the smart ones.” She fished out her wine skin, taking a long pull. “Want a drink?”

Somehow, we’d wound up only a few feet apart.

I didn’t reach for the proffered skin. “So, why did you bother plucking someone like me into this little nowhere of yours?”

She shrugged. “Suit yourself.” She corked the skin, tucking it away.

“I’m not the most influential. I’m not the newest, either. So I bet it was something simpler than that, wasn’t it?”

She hummed, noncommittally, bouncing on her heels.

“Like maybe I was the only one you could reach.” She didn’t react, but I felt the weave around us tremble at my words. I nodded in satisfaction. “So why don’t you skip this little song and dance and tell me what you really want?”

“Hmmm.” She tapped her chin. “No.”

Something pulled tight between us, a hair’s breadth from snapping.

“See, that was a good first attempt,” she said. “Controlling the melody of the conversation, shifting tempo, hells, you’ve even got a pretty good ear.”

“Thank—”

“Abapbap!” She made a flapping motion with her fingers. “I’m talking now.” The tension increased, winding tighter until it squeezed the air from my lungs. “Like I said, you talk a good game, but that’s the thing: it’s all talk to you. You don’t care about the lines, or the rest of the orchestra. Instead, you just came mucking around here like it was your play, without giving a single thought about who set everything up before you got here.” She shook her head. “Honestly, the sheer entitlement! Where do you even get the audacity?”

“Then you fancy yourself the playwright?” I forced out.

Bard stopped, turning to face me fully. “Playwright? Girl, I just work here, same as you.”

“Last I checked, I wasn’t getting paid.”

She snorted. “Like I said, talk, talk, talk. Listen, I get it.” She waved it off. “I have no idea what rock you crawled out from under, but I get it. You realize the world is big and scary and so you wanted to make it smaller and safer for you, even if you track dirt over everything.”

It was a thread, I realized, binding us together. As long as she held the other end, I was stuck.

I took a breath. “You know what, you’re right.”

She blinked.

I felt the thread give some.

“That’s my bad. You’ve given me a lot to think about.”

Her features twisted into something dark. “Now just wait here a—”

The thread snapped.

I turned, throwing open the door that hadn’t been there a moment ago. The room beyond wasn’t in Marcheford either, but it wasn’t here. I stepped through.

Nowhere else to be.

The door slammed shut behind me, cutting off the rest of her tirade. I took a breath, staggering to lean against the nearest wall. Suddenly I felt drawn and feverish. It went deeper than my body though, in a way that using my passenger never had. Not until…

“That really was a good trick.”

My head snapped up.

The bard was in front of me again, idly kicking her feet from where she sat on an empty desk.

The room started to tilt around me.

“No really, a round of applause for the lady!” She mimed clapping. “I’d say you could join in, but.”

I bit my tongue before I could rattle off a witty retort. I turned towards the door, but it was gone once more.

“Ah, she’s learning.” I felt more than saw her nod once. “Don’t want to get drawn into another battle of wits, huh? Well, I’m not a fan of fighting unarmed opponents anyway.”

If I’d been Lisa, that might have caught me, but I could almost see what she was doing. It made my eyes water, as the walls seemed to split into threads and strings, woven in and under and around…

I jerked myself to the side. Behind me, the bard clicked her tongue as the weave snapped shut where I’d just been standing. “You really are a tricky one, aren’t you?”

I dropped my dagger; it wasn’t doing me any good anyway. Reaching out with my hand, I grabbed the weave with my fingers, and—

It snapped shut around me. I let out a hiss as my arm jerked upwards. My toes scrabbled against the floor as I hung there, like a marionette. I jerked against it, kicking against the air.

“Careful, there, li—.” She paused, before sighing. “Stop—just stop wriggling. Here.” The weave wove a cocoon of gently vibrating thread around me. I spun slowly, gently, bobbing back and forth in the air as the walls faded away and in their place was…

Nothing.

Then I was face to face with the bard again. “You know, people usually start screaming by now.”

She was the only thing. Even the strands of the Weave led off into Nothing. I could see reality keening at the edges of her form, as the Nothing coveted at her.

Nature abhors a vacuum? No, it was the other way around.

“Now, little spider,” she said. “You should be more careful about whose web you’re playing in.”

I took in a deep breath. “Spider.” I tasted the word. She let me; after all, we were Nowhere.

She had all the time in the world.

“We have a story… about a Spider back where I was from,” I said. “There was a woman, the most skilled weaver in all the land. So skilled, in fact, that the gods were jealous of her skills.”

She gave a little laugh, leaning back on Nothing. “Is that where you think this is going, little bug?”

“The goddess of crafts came down from the Heavens to challenge her to a contest of skill, and she accepted. They both wove a tapestry, and the rest of the gods judged the victory.” I lifted my head. “Now, that’s where the legends differ. Some say she lost, of course.”

“Of course.” Bard nodded.

“So, the goddess turned her into a spider for her hubris, forced to weave forever and ever.” I gripped the fingers of my hand around the weave. “But then, some of the legends say she won.”

I pulled a second time. The threads materialized between us, pulling taut. Bard’s eyes widened as she was pulled off her feet.

She flew towards me. The dagger I’d dropped, the little bit of something in the midst of nothing, fell into my hands.

I stabbed.

Then her arms wrapped around me from behind.

“Tricky that.” Bard leaned over my shoulder. I had stabbed Nothing. “Playing games against the gods? Even if you win, they just change the rules.”

She plucked the knife from my unresisting fingers. “Now, let’s not hurt anyone with that. Sharp.” She tucked it beneath her cloak. “Good story, that. Why, in other circumstances it would have convinced me to keep you around.” She patted my cheek. “It can get a bit lonely, telling a story for no one else to hear.”

“Like playing for an empty concert hall,” I murmured.

She snapped her fingers. “Got it in one! Still, you really have made a mess of things.” The thread started to tighten around me. “Too many cooks spoil the soup.”

I let out a chuckle as the air was squeezed out of me. “Don’t you want to hear how the story ends?”

“Why bother?” Bard shrugged. “It’s not going to change anything.”

“That’s the point,” I said. “It doesn’t change anything. Whether she wins or loses, she always gets turned into a spider.”

Her eyes narrowed.

“But win or lose, even the gods couldn’t stop her from weaving her tapestry.” I felt the threads pull tighter against me, settling around me like a shroud. Even if the Bard was a better weaver than me, I could still touch it. “They cannot take that from her.”

She glowered “That won’t change anything.”

I looked Bard in the eyes. “And neither will you.” For the third time, I grabbed my tapestry. If I couldn’t out weave her, I would just have to, “Unravel.”

The Weave fell away. Bard fell away. I fell away, Into the Nothing.

And then there was Something.

I hit the battlements like a rock. My arm snapped. I screamed once, short and sharp. Then I realized I was far from the only one screaming.

“What the bloody fuck?”

Someone poked me in the side with their boot.

“Taylor? Where in the Bleeding Heavens were you?”

I looked up to see Catherin Foundling peering down at me, sword in hand.

With a grunt, I pushed myself to my feet. “I was… tied up.” I took quick stock of the situation. It was night, and a horde of demons assaulted the walls of Marcheford.

In other words, perfect timing.