Mischief Mage: Hmmm...this chapter's a bit longer than most chapters i write. I guess i got a little carried away.


Franz was waiting for Amelia by the time that she had strapped on her sword and picked up her lance and a knapsack. As she cantered closer, she noticed a frequent and violent twitch in his left arm. She'd ask him about it later. He looked up and smiled at her as she approached.

'Ready?' he asked, tightening the grip on his reins.

She nodded and so they set off at a trot together.

'So what is it that we need to do?' she asked him cheerfully.

'We're getting some more gear and I need to pop in to see a doctor that Joshua knows'

'Oh'

They were silent for a moment. Franz seemed exceedingly interested in his gloves.

Amelia ventured to ask.

'Franz, what's that twitch in your arm?'

Franz's eyes widened for a moment and he seemed flustered.

'Twitch? What twitch?'

In an attempt at a casual shrug just as the rebellious arm twitched again, Franz ended up jerking his horse's leather reins hard to the left, almost sending steed and rider off the road and into the pricker-bushes.

'That twitch.'

'It's nothing' said Franz, laughing bashfully, 'it's just a bit of nervousness'

'Oh I see.'

'Yeah.'

'So what is it that you're nervous about?'

Franz bit his lip for a short time before answering.

'Uh…oh…just, you know, this whole war and now Princess Eirika has fallen ill, its thrown the entire journey into confusion hasn't it?'

Amelia looked sadly ahead.

'Yes, I suppose you're right.'

Franz pressed on, Amelia was secretly pleased. War talk was a good emotional, sufficiently detached conversation topic that normally didn't lead to embarrassment of any sort.

'I mean, on one hand, we have the life of our leader' he continued, 'but in the other hand, we have the fate of the continent. I know that for those who don't know the princess, the decision is elementary, but I'm certain that the world would lose something which it could never regain if we gave up on her.'

Amelia gave a half-hearted laugh.

'I suppose that it's a shame that Prince Innes loves her.' she said in a monotone, 'This is probably when we most need a cool leader to make decisions.'

'Do you think that we should give up on her?'

Amelia sighed, she didn't know what she was feeling more; enjoyment in his company or sadness at the circumstances.

'I believe that as long as there is uncertainty, there is always hope' she said after a short time, beginning slowly but growing more resolute as she finished.

Now it was Franz's turn to chuckle to himself.

'It's funny,' he said, 'I think that you hold exactly the same opinion as Joshua'

'Really?' she asked interestedly, looking across at him.

'Yeah, I think that's why we have to go see this doctor. To see whether anything can be done so a decision can be made.'

Amelia paled as a thought occurred to her.

'But what will happen to Princess Eirika if there is nothing that can be done?'

Franz paused for a moment, speechless. Luckily for Amelia, she was interrupted from pondering any gruesome course of action which may result from 'giving up' on Eirika, by the gate keeper of the village of Brundi. The wrinkled pair of black eyes surveyed them for a moment through a rectangular peep-hole in the gate, looking them up and down, trying to see whether or not they were servants consisting of rotted flesh, reanimated for the purpose of causing general, low-grade destruction. Upon deciding that a handsome looking young-man and a pretty looking young-woman on two horses, both in armour that looked like it was polished every hour, on the hour were not remnants, he let them in.

Amelia tethered her horse beside Franz's a short distance from the gate and followed him towards a large open area of the village.

There were a large number of stalls around the edges of the square, all looking so drowsily bloated with produce which seemed odd at such a time. Only hours before supper, Amelia was used to market squares such as these bustling with panicked husbands trying to put together a meal for their families before the stalls closed at nightfall.

'It seems a bit…quiet, doesn't it?' Franz commented, voicing her thoughts.

'Yes…it's strange.'

'It was the same this morning, except possibly even quieter' he said, eyeing the few customers, there were no redeeming similarities between the consumers except that they seemed to be travelling individually. Franz and Amelia were the largest group that they could see.

Franz shook himself.

'Anyway, here' he counted out a number of coins and passed them to her. 'I'll go pick out some food, torches and blankets. You go and pick out some killer lances; four or five should be enough for the whole camp. I'll meet you back here when I'm done.'

Amelia stared at his back as he walked towards the food bazaar. She noticed that he had asked her to get the weapons as opposed to the food. She had become used to male chauvinism in the Grado army and, although there was less of it in Eirika's group, it managed to slide through the cracks in a few places. She was mainly thinking about the time that piles of dirty clothes had appeared outside the tent which Lute, Neimi and she had been sharing one night. Lute had set the culprits straight although she was also forced to buy the men new clothes after she had torched them. Lute had taken great enjoyment out of that.

But the point was that Franz had taken the food shopping, the stereotypically female role, upon himself. Now the only question was whether he did it deliberately. Then, it was a matter of whether he did it because he thought that he was better at buying bread or because he wanted to show her that he was not a male pig. But if he had done it deliberately then it was either because he thought that she was weak and needed to be shown that he respected her or because he was trying to impress her.

Amelia suddenly gasped and shook herself; reading too much into something as simple as that had to be saying something.

The man behind the counter in the armoury was hardly a man at all. He looked, at oldest, a year younger than Amelia. As he bustled about, looking for five killer lances for Amelia, appearing very new to the shelves and the cupboards, Amelia asked politely, 'Who owns this shop?'

The brown haired boy froze for a moment.

'My father'

He went back to pulling lances down and placing any killer ones on the counter.

'Do you work for him sometimes?'

The boy swallowed loudly.

'No, miss, I work here full time now.'

Amelia was taken aback.

'What? So, where is you're father now?'

'He's…gone'

Amelia blushed with shame.

'Oh, I'm so sorry.'

After a moment or two, as the boy quickly and silently polished the heads of the lances before bundling together with twine, Amelia said, 'If it makes you feel any better, my mother is gone too, I suppose that she must be dead too'

The boy grunted before saying in tone which was a mixture between sorrow and anger.

'He's not dead…well…he is dead…but- wait a minute.' He jerked his head up and looked her in the eye with the expression of someone not looking for hope but searching for a companion in misery.

'Did you lose your mother to the…you know?'

'The what?'

The boy's face fell.

'You're not from around here are you?' His tousled hair seemed to droop as she shook her head.

'Never mind then'

The two of them were silent as she passed over the money and he lifted the bundle of heavy lances into her arms. But as she side-stepped through the door to allow her burden through, she thought that she heard a faint sniff.

Amelia dawdled back through the square to where Franz was now standing, looking apologetic.

'I just realised' he said, scratching his head, 'we should have visited the Doctor first so that we didn't have to carry all this stuff about.' In his hands were two bags of groceries, torches and blankets.

'No problem' she replied, shifting the bundle so that she could hold it under arm with it resting on her hip.

'You alright with those?'

'Of course, are you alright with those?' she hit back playfully, eyeing the grocery bags.

Franz laughed; the stall owners and their few sad-faced customers turned at the noise as though it was unknown to them.

So, picking up their purchases, the two of them trudged down several side streets before coming to a large town house. Knocking on the door, Franz was met by an old but not so vulnerable looking landlady with a large ring of keys tied to a dirty blue ribbon around her waist.

'I'm looking for the residence of Doctor Hugh Largo, ma'am.' Franz said politely and with a certain charming humility which made him look very gentlemanly in Amelia's eyes. She inwardly kicked herself.

The woman silently beckoned to them and led them up a stair case with more than one rotted stair, as Amelia discovered.

Once on the second level, the woman gestured towards the end of a dingy looking corridor before retreating back down the stairs, hopping over the hole which Amelia's leg had made in the sixth step.

'Hey Amelia?'

'Hmm?'

'Could you uhhh…grab the address out of the satchel please, if I put these bags down then we'll be wading in a sea of rolling fruits.'

'Sure.'

Amelia bent down and with her free hand she managed to retrieve the torn paper from the leather bag which was hanging around his waist. She avoided touching him more than was strictly necessary as a little voice in the space just between her eyes told her that extended touch was a bad thing. She had no idea why but she saw no reason to doubt the little voice. It also happened to be the little voice that told her that, upon Franz first meeting Amelia, that she should not tell him exactly how dashing she thought he looked at that moment, in that armour, on that horse, with that lance, with the sun just there causing a back lit effect, glinting off his breast plate.

'He lives at number nineteen' she said, reading off the scrap of paper and pointing towards the end of the dim, dusty, damp corridor.

Noting the tarnished gold plated numbers on the doors which looked as though they had come off worse in a fight with the butcher, they waddled up to nineteen, well…Franz waddled, carrying his two heavy bags.

Fifteen…sixteen…seventeen…the number eighteen had a cobweb spanning across it like a fisherman's net, a large, fat spider nestled happily in it's nest of legs in the bottom dip of the eight.

Nineteen. The rather tragic golden numbers failed to glint in the light of the setting sun, namely because they were under a piece of paper which was tacked to the door with a rather well placed dagger.

'What does it say?' asked Amelia from behind Franz who was peering at the large but roughly scrawled writing.

Franz read aloud:

'I, Sergeant Haggard of the third Regiment based in Rausten, have been bade by the Empire of Grado to search and destroy a Doctor Hugh Largo for crimes of treason against His Excellency the Emperor Vigarde himself and his empire by any means necessary. The criminal in question has been removed from this residence and has been executed by drowning as is the custom. This residence is under ownership of His Excellency the Emperor Vigarde until further notice and is not to be trespassed upon by pain of death.' The writing was followed by a scrawled signature and the seal of the Empire.

Franz pushed the door open, the hinges creaking almost as an alarm to Sergeant Haggard. Amelia stood up on her toes to see over his shoulder and gasped at what she saw.

The curtains had been torn from the windows, shreds of them hanging like a shed skin in the corners of the rooms. Scorch marks on the wooden floor showed where a torch had been dropped in what seemed to have been a midnight invasion. There was a single bed with sheets twisted from their occupant trying to escape his attackers. Slash marks and trails of dried burgundy flowed down the side of the mattress like intertwining frozen rivers stained with blood. The doors on the shelf of medicines had been thrown open, one of the doors hanging on a single hinge. Half of the shelf's contents lay shattered on the floor, some glowing red like stolen rubies where a bare-footed resident being marched from the room, beaten and bruised, would have walked. The drawers had been pulled from the dresser and thrown to the ground; some of the soldiers had obviously felt obliged to confiscate any gold the doctor had had. But perhaps what were most haunting were the blood-stained scalpels and tweezers that littered the floor as well as others of the doctor's instruments. It seemed that the instruments of healing had been turned against the wielder and had led the man towards and over the threshold which no medicine could breach.

Amelia made an indistinct noise and the back of her throat and grabbed Franz's arm, the lances falling to the ground with a metallic clatter that still managed to echo in the damp corridor. She could take the remains of battle grounds and killing was no longer a big deal to her…except…this wasn't a battle. Battles are constituted of fights between any number of sides. But this hadn't been a fight. It had been a directed, planned bludgeoning.

'I don't understand' she whispered, almost in a moan, 'What could a doctor do to affect Grado? Why would they follow him all the way out to Rausten? Why did they see him as a threat?'

Franz took several deep breaths before saying that he didn't know. Having put down his bags, oranges rolling in all directions, he squeezed her arm reassuringly but as he pushed the creaking door further aside to step inside, she saw that his arm was shaking.

Amelia followed him in and reluctantly released his arm to go to the window, inspecting the torn curtains. Faint red splotches caught her eye. Her face was nearly an inch away from the remains of the shreds of faded pink material which were fluttering in the wind of the open window. She drew back suddenly when she discovered bloody red finger prints. Red hand prints were found on the window sill. It seemed as though Doctor Hugo had made a bid for freedom during the attack.

'Hey Amelia, take a look at this'

Having adjusted to the intense silence Amelia actually jumped at the sound of his voice.

'What is it?' she asked, drawing nearer to him. He was crouched down over the shattered glass medicine vials.

'Take a look at the shelf' he said quietly.

Amelia did a quick eye-flick up and down. She didn't know much about medicine and the language on some of the labels was unknown to her. Sludgy brown gunk floated in an oily pale brown liquid, milky white fluid clung to the sides of glass, there were even vials of some blue stuff which was giving off a pale light.

'What about it?'

'There aren't any vials of the stuff from the bottom left compartment.'

'What does that mean? They were probably all knocked off'

'I don't think so, look here.' Franz showed her several sodden labels. I've counted the labels and accounted for anything else knocked off. There aren't any labels that match the one on that compartment but there are the remains of a purple fluid here that I can't find in any of the other vials'

Surveying the ground, she saw that he was right. In the freakish rainbow whirlpool there was a purple colour which she hadn't seen any trace of on the shelves.

'Could…could that be what they really came for? Do you think that they wanted it?' she asked in a whisper.

'I don't know. I think that they would have been more careful with it if they wanted to use it. I think it was a bit like…uh…you know…a drug bust'

Amelia peered at the label for the missing vials on the shelf.

"Drothsleh Triscert " she read aloud, forehead wrinkled in trying to pronounce the words unknown to her.

'That was two long words that I didn't understand anything of' said Franz from the floor, sucking a finger which he had just cut on a shard of glass.

'It's clearly a medicine for something,' Amelia said, peering at the few labels which were in the common tongue, 'Look at these other ones: "Hellfang poison antidote", "Draught of sleep counter fluid", "Stone vaccine". Where could he have gotten these? They must be extremely rare.'

Franz seemed to have just thought of something. He was dragging the remains of a torch through the pool of medicine absent-mindedly, the trail refilling with a chaotic mosaic of colour as the wood slid away.

'All those medicines' he began, haltingly as though still trying on the theory in his mind, 'they're all related to the sicknesses caused by the creatures that have been spawned from the darkness right?'

Amelia nodded, waiting for him to continue.

'So, that medicine that those soldiers were after…it must cure or prevent an ailment that's arisen from the presence of all those remnants. But, they didn't bother with any other medicine that would cure something like stone or poison so this one sickness must hold greater importance to them.'

Amelia looked out towards the door where the notice of the Doctor's arrest was posted. It fluttered in the wind flowing in from the open window.

'But what sickness?' she wondered.


Mischief Mage: I should be able to get the next chapter out soon. I'm on school holidays for a bit longer. But then i have exams so all writing will basically stop for a month and a half. sniff