Chương 28: Some Good Luck

Ultán snarled and ripped his hand off of the table - except, just as Róise had found, Miriam's lashing didn't break apart as easily as he'd thought. The table, however, did - he now had a ragged chunk of thick wood stuck to his forearm. He shot Miriam a curious glance, but didn't have much time for inspection, as Róise had begun her song. The Folksong Adept danced along to the fiddler's tune as she raced under Ultán's guard, shining blades of blue energy in her fists.

Quicker than Miriam could follow, the pixie had made four shallow slices to Ultán's midsection, his black shirt cut to ribbons. The floor was flecked with drops of blood - but not nearly as much as Miriam thought should have resulted from those attacks. Róise leaped back, still moving to the tune. The whole world seemed to sway to the beat, reality itself aligning with Róise's power. Cormac's fingers blurred as he tugged on strings only he could see. The normally overconfident man was sweating profusely.

Miriam looked for how she could contribute, but was coming up short. If she got within stabbing range of Ultán she would be instantly obliterated. Róise should have been quicker - Ultán was at least double her size - but he easily knocked her wrist aside as her phantom blades jabbed for his neck. The pixie barely evaded the counterstrike, and probably would have been hit if Ultán hadn't slipped on some spilled ale on the downswing. Ultán's eyes darted over to Cormac.

Could he feel the threads of luck pulling at him? The old sailor knocked the remnants of the table out of the way and surged forward towards Cormac. Cormac responded by summoning coils of golden threads around his forearms - this time easily visible. Ultán's right hand smashed into Cormac's left, but the gambler took it on the luck-made bracer. He still grunted loudly in pain, but Ultán's strike was immediately arrested, though the golden threads flickered out.

At this moment Róise leaped up towards Ultán's neck, her song reaching its apex. Flanked and outnumbered, Ultán growled and a dozen geometric lines extruded from his body, each leading to different parts of Cormac and Róise's. One by one in a blink, they winked out until suddenly his body was following the only two left: a line from his left foot to Cormac's chest and his right hand to Róise's neck.

It was oddly graceful as he leaned backward to catch the pixie as he kicked forward until he pirouetted on his right leg. Both of her crewmates could clearly see the attacks coming through the path lines, but somehow whatever they did to avoid it only put them in just the right place for them to hit. Cormac flew back across the tavern, through a crowd of people only just now noticing the fight. Róise dangled in the air as Ultán grabbed her by the neck. Miriam didn't know how she could help.

If Cormac and Róise were so easily outclassed, there was nothing a First Ring dryad with no real experience using fórsa could do. If she got anywhere within Ultán's range she would be dead. She realized she was still concentrating on maintaining the vine Lash she had used to pin Ultán to the table and started to release it when she had an idea. The way she understood it, her body itself was just dense fórsa.

Whenever she used her dryad ability to control wood, it was the fórsa in her body interacting with the fórsa of the wood. She was still maintaining the lash through a stream of her fórsa - she had not tied it off to be self-sustaining like she would if she were securing a sail. So… in a way it was like she was touching the piece of the table that was still lashed to Ultán's forearm. And if so… Miriam concentrated and the table scrap spasmed.

It was taking a lot more fórsa to do this from far away, but the wood was responding to her! Taking a deep breath, seeing Ultán's hand begin to squeeze around Róise's neck, she called out to the piece of scrap through her lashing. Ultán looked over at her, one eyebrow raised.

"That's a neat trick, girl. But no First Ring scheme is going to put a scratch on -" Miriam tore open the pipeline she used to regulate the flow of her fórsa and unleashed everything she had into working the plank. She concentrated on creating one simple spike of wood, enforced by her Life fórsa, taking aim at Ultán's Flexor Digitorum Profundus - one of the muscles that controls grip. You're a stalactite! She thought desperately at the mix of materials. Rigid and strong! Piercing!

Ultán roared as a two-foot lance of vine-wrapped wood erupted from his arm below his wrist and Róise tumbled down to the floor. Already in a crouch as she landed, Róise dashed forward and sliced at Ultán's achilles tendons. Again, it seemed no more than a scratch, but Ultán teetered off-balance.

"Come on," Róise panted, grabbing Miriam by the arm. Miriam was dead on her feet. She was dizzy and her tongue felt huge in her mouth. A quick peek into her mindspace and her Life river was little more than a trickle. She had never used all her fórsa like this before… she wasn't quite sure what would happen. Would it come back? How fast? Róise tugged her out of the tavern, following Cormac who was already some distance towards the port. Miriam stumbled, her legs leaden in a way she had never experienced.

It was almost as if the very thing that animated her was gone and she was just a mind, pulling on puppet strings to make her body move.

"Miriam, we have seconds," Róise said.

"If you don't move, we are all going to die."

"I'll delay him," Cormac said as they caught up to him. He was short of breath, holding his chest awkwardly.

"Get to the dinghy. I'll be right behind you once I set up a few things." Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators! Cormac stepped into the middle of the road - little more than a cart path, a far cry from the busy streets of Shirren he had come up in. He tasted the wind - luck was fair, but nothing to write home about. That was a shame - in a high luck area he might have been able to give Ultán a hard time. He would still lose, but he could make it hurt.

For now, all he could do was set traps and hope it bought them enough time to get to the Líadan. Black threads whipped around his fingers and he sent them dancing into the distance between him and the tavern. Ultán stood in the door already, sneering. The old sailor knew no Thirds could outrun him. And he was right. Cormac tore off his threads and ran. They would just have to do the best they could. Ultán chased after, only to be stopped short by a farmer moving a large ox across the roadway.

He vaulted over the animal, ignoring the protest from the farmer, only to find his foot wedged in a wagon rut in the road way. Growling, he called after Cormac.

"These little tricks aren't enough to save you!" Geometric lines exploded off of his body, drawing paths from Ultán to Cormac. One by one they disappeared, and Ultán leaped again in the right direction, neatly sidestepping several unfortunate obstacles that would have impeded his path. By this time Cormac had reached the dinghy where Róise and Miriam were waiting.

"Push off!" he shouted, making the final leap into the boat as Róise severed the line holding it to the dock. His momentum pushed the boat away as Ultán skidded to a halt at the dock's edge.

"We made it?" Miriam asked, her words slurring. Ultán raised his hand and began shaking his fist. Flecks of visible fórsa began to spin around him. The wind suddenly slammed into the little boat, thrusting them back towards the dock.

"Ah, right, he's Wind Nature," Cormac groaned.

"We're screwed," Róise agreed.

"What?" Miriam struggled to sit up.

"There's nothing we can do here?" Róise sighed.

"My Life Nature is combat focused, but he's too high Ring for me to really even touch him. Cormac's luck is the same level as my Life Nature, and he can Pathfind around it anyway. You can make vines, but what good is that going to do here? Plus, you're even lower level than us."

"We appreciate you standing with us," Cormac said sadly.

"But it looks like it was a bad move." Miriam glared at Ultán, trying to bat away the fog in her brain. This was just wind. Ships sailed against the wind all the time. Without sails, that would be by rowing, which Róise and Cormac were already doing. The wind was stronger. In the Tír, if you couldn't out-muscle the wind, or control it with fórsa, you were at its mercy. But Miriam wasn't from the Tír… and she thought she had seen something that could help. First, she slipped back into her mindspace.

The Life river was already beginning to recover, but too slowly. That was fine - Life wasn't what she needed. Instead she reached into the Reel and unlocked her Water Nature. Miriam gasped as she was flooded with vitality, her muscles instantly recovered, her brain as clear as it would be after a long sleep.

"Miriam, what are you doing?" Róise asked in between strokes of her oar.

"Got an idea," she muttered. At the lumberyard, when her youngest son had taken over as foreman, he had taken her on a tour of the facilities. She had marveled at the way it had changed since the days she had worked there and he proudly showed off all the new innovations. One of which were pressurized water hoses to make debarking the trees quicker than she ever would have thought possible.

While she was on her tour one of the hoses had come loose and rocketed around the mill floor, with eight men running comically after it, like trying to corral a giant snake. Miriam reached down to the boat's wood and asked it to change. It resisted - it was Second Ring material and like pushing on stone at first. But just like what she had experienced with Ultán, what she lacked in fórsa density she could make up for in volume, and for the second time that day she opened the floodgates.

The Second Ring wood obeyed, and a short, curved tunnel formed at the rear of the boat, creating a channel for water to flow through underneath. That done, she turned her attention to the water. She wasn't as comfortable with Water as she was with Life. She'd been diligent in practicing in her closet bunk, but that didn't match the experience she had been getting as a working sailor using Life on the Liaden.

Even then what she was trying to do was mostly guesswork and some remnants of what Eoin had her prepare to use against Solas. Under the boat she created a Lashing that filled the new tunnel she created, but it was more like a fórsa rope in its shape. She opened the manifestation at the beginning and at the end - lashing the water in front to the water behind. She had tried this when attempting to make the fórsa rope self-sustainable, but it just vomited up all its fórsa in one belch and disintegrated.

This time she used her power to hold the manifestation stable, even as it sucked water in and expelled it out. The boat lurched as a jet of water exploded out the back, pushing against the fury of the wind.

"What in the hells?" Cormac shouted. Miriam looked at Ultán, still standing immovable on the dock. His face darkened as he saw the boat fighting against his wind and he made another gesture. The wind's pressure increased and little geometric lines began to grow from his chest, making their way towards them. Miriam clenched her teeth and poured all she had into the water jet engine.

The only way they could possibly escape was if she could bring to bear all of the huge volume of fórsa she had been granted from her life in the Realms Above. She knew that compared to someone of a higher rank she was inefficient and extraordinarily sloppy, but she could only hope that her long life in a frontier town had given her the fórsa she needed to overcome it. She released the Blight. Instantly her volume doubled and the boat surged against the shearing wind.

No one had any time to notice that the water was brackish and unclean.

"Miriam, the boat is starting to break!" Róise yelled, clamping her hands on either side of a large crack in the prow that was forming. Miriam didn't have the fórsa to repair the boat and keep fighting the wind. They would just have to hope it held together. Slowly, the boat pulled away from the dock. Ultán grimaced and released his wind, walking unhurriedly back to another pier - in the direction of the derelict ship they'd noticed when they first arrived.

As a result the boat caromed out of control forward until Miriam modulated the water flow. By the time they reached the Líadan, Miriam was completely spent. Róise had to haul her like a wet rag up onto the deck. Maitiú, the deckhand on watch, looked at the sodden, wounded group and asked "What the hell happened to you?" Róise cut him off.

"We have to shove off now. Immediately." She began barking off orders and lashing lines to somehow operate a ship that usually had a full complement of ten sailors with only three. Three, because Miriam was fading fast. She only held on to consciousness out of fear, but even that was proving not up to the task. Cormac looked at her for one moment before jumping into action.

"A good question," he murmured.

"What the hell just happened?"