Many Words

It was as he’d thought. He had an ontlig counterpart, a seer of some sort who could disrupt Falthejn’s own sight. This ontling didn’t hide his tracks like a human would. Ericsdottir—she’d had the right idea, taking the western route, Falthejn thought, wishing he’d thought a little further ahead before saving his four—would have made the army invisible, in a sense. Anyone looking into the future for it would find her carefully-crafted version of events, where no trace of five thousand soldiers and twice as many refugees remained, fixed in place and blended in with the real. This ontling, on the other hand, had found a way to show Falthejn his death, his specifically, and that kept him from looking too closely for the seams.

He knew what to look for now. A new set of futures arrayed themselves before him, futures in which he walked methodically south, southeast, and southwest, counting steps until he died. In time, he had a picture of the extent of whatever his adversary was hiding. Two leagues south, they waited. The next day, they gained ground—no, not if Falthejn pushed his party harder. The adversary paused through the nights, it seemed—likely, it was the ontr army, making camp as the sun went down and resuming the chase with the light. Falthejn could just keep ahead of them, if he could keep up a fast march.

He looked back to the present. An hour had already passed. He had little margin left. A few minutes served to erase his band of survivors from the great swirling storm of maybes. He’d wondered about one more thing, and looked for—no, found it.

In another future, he slipped down a hill and hit his head on a rock. In another, a sudden wind caught in the branches of a dead tree, which toppled and landed across his shoulders. The snap of his back echoed in his head for a moment, before that future, too, ended in darkness.

He would have blinked, if he could. None of those should have happened. He was a diviner. Sudden surprises were neither sudden nor surprising to him—he was too attuned to the flow of time for that, living more in the next ten heartbeats than the instant called now. A suspicion took him, and he teased apart the whirling columns of dust. If he went north, he saw his death in ways he expected—fighting impossible odds by choice, backed into a corner by inaction, standing and fighting to allow the others to escape. These were deaths that, finally, he could no longer dodge, deaths at the end of a long chain of decisions and consequences, any link of which he might easily snap. Yet, if he went any other direction, the possibilities ended with random, fatal happenstance.

He gritted his metaphorical teeth and countenanced a few situations where he left his little band of survivors to fend for themselves. He could cover twice as much ground without them, and he found that he could escape to the east or the west. The happenstance faded, and once again he saw himself dying as he expected he might.

Time stretched out before Falthejn. The myriad ways billowed, twisted, and streamed away to nothingness—now, ten minutes from now, a month later, a century after that.

Neither of his questions called for that much effort. He brought his focus back in. The first question: where was the army? Why had they turned from the main road and taken another path? He couldn’t very well look for the army itself. His colleague Ericsdottir would be covering its tracks from prying eyes. She would also be pulling double duty, though, without him to help, and that meant she only had half the time to work. He would not find the army itself; he would find impossible futures, ones where the army had never existed at all. The whirling sands of those potentials covered the truth. He might have luck looking for the seams, where the clouds of dust popped against the background.

He found a promising swirl, and methodically followed it forward. Perhaps if they detoured through the wilderness to the west—a vision of his body, propped against a tree and studded with crude, black-fletched arrows, flashed by his mind’s eye, and he discarded that path. Another saw an ontlig raiding party slaughtering them in a clearing just off the road. Still others led to a pack of howlers happening upon them in the night, tearing them limb from limb.

If he were conscious of his body, he would have frowned. Vralaapr, howlers here? wolves were one thing, and they roamed these woods freely, but vralaapr were creatures of the far north, as far as he knew. His notional frown deepend.

Grateful for the distraction, Sif turned her thoughts to the question. “He saved us,” she observed. “It was dangerous, and he didn’t have to. I think he has a good heart. He’s been nice to me. It seems like he feels responsible for all of us. That’s a lot to worry about.”

Alfhilde looked out toward the sunset. “Diviners have that problem,” she mused. “Never know when to let people take care of themselves.” She leaned forward, looking around Sif at Falthejn. If the magiker had heard, he didn’t react. “Present company excluded. I’d rather have him here than not. The other side of the coin’s that they don’t know how to give up either.” She punctuated her words with a short, sharp nod, and sat back against the cliffside. Jakob reached for her chin.

“I don’t envy him,” Hrothgar said, intercepting Jakob’s hands and poking him gently on the nose. Jakob giggled, and Hrothgar smiled at him. “It must be a lonely life.”

Alfhilde said something, but Sif didn’t catch it. The world whirled around her—lonesomeness was her lot now. She took a deep breath, but the storms would not let up, and now the waves were breaking over her head. Someone said her name, and she opened her eyes. She didn’t remember closing them. Tears blurred Alfhilde, who now sat right across from her. Hrothgar cradled Jakob and looked on, concern etched into his face.

“Sif,” Alfhilde repeated. Sif looked her in the eye, and saw her own hurt there. There could be no hiding it any longer. A sob escaped her, and the dam burst. The world went dark, and the landscape of her grief took its place, grim and gray and despairing. Through it, she became dimly aware of arms around her, pulling her close. In her ear, Alfhilde whispered, “Tell me, child—what did you leave behind?”

Alfhilde laughed. “Yours and mine.”

“It’s— it is interesting. I have never been this far from the city before.” Sif paused, thinking. “I haven’t— have not ever been out of the city at all before, I do not think.”

“Trouble with your words?” Alfhilde asked, a glint in her eye. Sif blushed.

“Don’t tease the poor girl,” Hrothgar admonished.

“Oh, you know me better than that,” Alfhilde said, rolling her eyes. “I wasn’t finished. Sif, don’t worry about formality. We’ve come this far together. We’ve earned the right.”

“Thank you,” Sif said reflexively. Relaxing, she repeated herself. “Thanks.” A moment passed while Sif replayed the moment in her head. She tilted her head—she thought she’d seen that—and smiled gratefully at Hrothgar. To her amusement, he looked away almost shyly, coughing over a smile of his own. She laughed, and the sound, strange to her ears, surprised her. It had been less than two days, she thought, but it seemed like a lifetime had gone by since the last time she’d laughed.

The thought threatened to drag her beneath the stormy seas crashing around her mind, but Alfhilde spoke before it could. “Looks like you’ve made friends with our diviner.”

Sif nodded, not quite trusting herself to speak.

“You’ve talked to him more than either of us. What do you think of him?”