Windalfr, Right Hand of Vengeance
Chapter Two
The night air was pleasantly chill with a strong hint of pollen and grass. There wasn't even the suggestion of smoke or gunpowder, which San liked even better. She and Alo left the dirt road as soon as they escaped the stone fortress, traveling by the light of the stars and the blue and red moons.
"Alo," San asked. "How long have there been two moons?"
The horse tilted his head to look up at the sky. "As long as I can remember. I don't pay much attention to that sort of thing."
"I've only ever known there to be one until tonight."
Alo snorted. "Are you sure you weren't looking at them cross eyed?"
San smiled. "I'm sure."
"Then I can't help you. My life has mostly been a series of commands of stop and go. The moons never affected me that much."
"Then I'll just have to ask someone else." In the distance, San saw a forest. It wasn't her forest, but it might have someone who knew her mother. She threw her head back, cupped her hands to her mouth, and howled.
Alo whinnied nervously. "Th-that's some, um, wolf imitation you have there."
A song pierced the midnight silence, answering her call. San smiled. "It wasn't an imitation."
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Louise was up half the night looking for her familiar, and all she found were horses. She had never even gotten the wild commoner's name, and had to call out, "Familiar! Familiar!" until her voice gave out. She had gone to the spot where her familiar had landed, to where she had first summoned her, all around the central tower to beyond the outer wall, and all Louise got for her trouble was a sore throat.
She returned to her room tired and defeated. What was she thinking, going off on her own? Louise thought. What will people say when they find out that I couldn't even keep track of my familiar for one day? It was the mage's duty to look after her familiar, and in that, just like in every other aspect of magecraft, she had failed.
My familiar is out there, alone, with no one looking after her...and she can't even figure out how to open a door.
But that was her familiar's own fault for running off. I hope she stays gone, Louise thought, plopping down on her bed. I never wanted a stupid commoner familiar anyway.
The next morning, she climbed out of bed and cursed her own reflection. The day before, she had been meaning to have the healers look at the cut that her familiar had left her, but then Colbert had put the girl to sleep, and Louise had decided to stay with her until she woke up to prevent her from trying anything else foolish. Then her familiar had run away and she had to chase after her, and when Louise had given up, she had forgotten about the scratch and gone straight to bed.
The cut had healed completely by morning, and had left a scar right below her eye. It wasn't a large scar, but her face was one of the few things that she hadn't managed to screw up. Even the simplest spells blew up in her face and her body had never gotten the message that she was no longer twelve, but she had a nice face and pretty hair. Or at least she did. Now, she just had pretty hair.
She sighed, knowing that there was nothing that she could do about it anyway, and got ready for the day. Her first class for the day was...cancelled. All the second year students were given the whole day to spend with their familiars to get to know them better.
Crap.
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The wolves San met were smaller than those from her own pack, but they were enough to send Alo into a fright.
"Are you the one who called?" their leader, a male with a dark grey coat and bright yellow eyes growled.
San placed a comforting hand on Alo's mane. "I am. I, San, daughter of Moro, seek permission to join your pack."
"In your howl, you gave the impression that you were a wolf."
Alo pranced nervously. "We should run," he said. "We should run now."
"I am a wolf."
"You look like a human."
San tried to keep her voice level. "My mother said that it is better to see with your heart than your eyes."
The pack leader studied her with both his eyes and his ears pointed at her as his mate and son circled around her. Alo grew more frantic, but San never took her eyes off the leader. It would be terribly ironic, she thought, to spend my whole life hunting humans, and then end up killed by my own kind.
"You are wolf," he growled. "You may hunt with us."
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Why, Louise thought, do they have us spend the entire Founder-cursed day with our familiars? Clearly the Academy's faculty, as well as its students, was intent on rubbing her nose in her latest failure.
All over the plaza, her classmates gloated over their magnificent summons, whether they were manticores or moles, owls or owlbears, geese or griffons. And then there was Louise, trying to pretend that she wasn't out of place.
"Why, hello, Louise. Have you met Flame?"
And then her day took a nosedive. Kirche von Zerbst trotted up to her, followed by a massive fire salamander with a burning tail.
"Hello, Zerbst," she said curtly. "That's your familiar? I've seen worse."
"Yes, he's marvelous, isn't he? Native to the Fire Dragon Mountains, if I'm not mistaken. But speaking of worse, where's yours? That commoner you summoned looked like fun."
"She's out, um..." What did commoners usually do? "She's out getting tea."
"Tea," Kirche said flatly.
"Yes, tea. It's a common heated beverage. I'm sure you've heard of it."
"Yeah, I think I've had it once or twice." Louise waited for her to leave, but she kept on talking. "You know, there's a rumor going around that you knew you couldn't get the summoning spell right, so you grabbed some commoner off the street and had her pretend to be your familiar."
Louise bristled. It wasn't enough that they called her Louise the Zero for all the spells she messed up, but she summoned her familiar fair and square. Couldn't they at least let her have that? "Rumors that I'm sure you had nothing to do with."
"Of course not," Kirche said with a laugh. "I actually tried to squelch them."
Louise looked up at her in surprise. "You did?"
"Of course I did. I mean, really, I should give you a little credit. If you were willing to fake a summoning, they you would have brought a trained dog that to follow you around, not some commoner in a wolf suit that was willing to attack you on sight!" She laughed again, but as usual, Louise didn't appreciate the joke. Of course, if her familiar had stabbed Kirche in the face, it would have been hilarious, but still. "So, where is she?"
"What?"
"Your familiar's certainly taking her time with the tea. It would be a shame if she got lost or something."
"I should probably check on her. Excuse me."
"I'll come with you," Kirche offered.
"I appreciate your concern," Louise said through gritted teeth. "But don't you have some blind, weak minded lord to seduce?"
Kirche laughed through the insult. Louise hated how she could do that. "I've been doing that all morning. Besides, that little spitfire acting like your personal maid? I wouldn't miss that for the Prince of Albion."
Her mind raced. She couldn't let Kirche find out that she had lost her familiar, but she couldn't shake her, either. Sure, eventually everyone would know, but if she could put it off long enough, it wouldn't be that bad. But maybe Kirche already knew, and she just wanted to rub her face in it. That would explain her persistence, although her familiar's absence wasn't that much more humiliating than her familiar's presence.
"Um, Miss Valliere?" A maid with black hair approached them. "I apologize for the interruption, but I have a message for you from Professor Colbert." She handed Louise a note, bowed, and left.
Louise read it quickly and tried not to show her relief. Founder bless the man! "Well, Professor Colbert needs to see me. I sounds important, so I better go."
"Oh. Well, later then."
Unfortunately true, Louise thought as she made her way to the Fire Tower where Colbert kept his office, but she had until then to come up with a more permanent solution. Maybe her familiar could get sick with something chronic, and had to stay in bed. And then die. How tragic.
Colbert, for a fire mage, seemed to have little interest in magic, favoring old books and mundane experiments. His office was full of records of the melting points and combustion properties of different materials and designs of contraptions that she couldn't understand.
"Ah, Miss Valliere," he said, standing up from his desk. "Thank you for coming."
"Think nothing of it, Professor. I'm happy to come."
"Thank you for saying so, but I'm sure you want to get back to your friends, so I won't take long."
Of course. Why wouldn't she want to go back to that flock of vultures? "So, what may I help you with?"
"You see, while every teacher at the Academy has their own area of expertise, we are expected to know a bit of everything, because while we can write our own lesson plans, we can't control what sort of questions our students ask us. Why, just the other week, I believe it was young Mr. Bonoton who asked me a question about..."
Louise knew as well as anyone how easily Colbert could get distracted. If no one forced him back to the topic at hand, he could keep rambling for hours...so she let him finish.
"...and that's why you should never ask a sphinx rhetorical questions."
"That's very interesting, Professor."
"Yes, nonstandard voice-protocols of interrogative creatures is fascinating. Anyway, I was reading about familiar runes last night, and there is so much about them that we still don't understand. There's one school of reasoning that argues that the rune refers to the familiar itself, and the rune would be the ancient word for 'cat' or 'dog.' Of course, it's more complicated than that, because not all cat familiars have the same runes, but there are hundreds, if not thousands, of species and subspecies of cats, and taxonomy is a lost art, let me tell you."
"Indeed."
"Or the rune could refer to the role and specialties of the familiar, and it tells you if the familiar is best suited for spying on the mage's enemies, gathering spell reagents, or any of the other thousand things that familiars are used for. The other school argues that the rune refers to the mage who summoned it. We classify mages by their level, dot through square, and by their element, but I've always considered that a crude system at best. For example, I specialize in fire magic, but I can cast air spells much more easily than earth spells, and I can cast earth spells more easily than water spells. I know other fire mages who are just the opposite, and can cast water nearly as easily as their specialty. Proponents of the second school argue that the rune offers a more accurate description than what we use today, such as that the mage has great aptitude for healing magic and statecraft, and so forth."
"Fascinating." Louise wondered how long it would take Colbert to notice if she fell asleep.
"And that brings me to the point of why I asked you here. I got a glimpse of your familiar's runes, and though I could tell that they were a bit unusual, I never got the chance to study them. Would you mind if I took a second look at them, for purely scholarly reasons?"
She blinked. "You want to do what?"
"I would like to take a look at your familiar's runes. That's not a problem, is it?"
Crap.
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It had been too long since San had gone hunting just to find something to eat. It seemed like the last half of her life was spent fighting humans instead of food. Alo, Niahak, Tala, and Usdi were not her family, but when they were hunting together in the woods, caring more about their next meal than about revenge against mankind, it almost made her feel like she was a little girl again.
Their prey was an old buck with a bad infestation of ticks. The ticks, which they had found rubbed off on the trunk of a tree, singled him out. A healthy deer could run as far and as fast as they could, but one suffering from a thousand tiny bites from a thousand tiny parasites wouldn't last.
The buck finally came into view. They were gaining on him; for most of the hunt, they trailed him by his scent, his tracks, and by his simple, desperate mind. Now that they could see him, the hunt was nearly over.
Still riding Alo, San readied her spear and stood up on his back. The balance was tricky, the jolt of every gallop threatened to throw her off, but she had practiced the trick since she was a little girl. Back then, she thought it was just a game.
Every time they got close, the buck would force out a burst of speed until he got a bit more distance. The most desperate hour of the deer's life could indeed last an entire hour, but San was not as patient as the rest of her kind.
When they were as close as the deer would let them before sprinting again, San leapt from Alo's back and stabbed at the deer's hind leg. She fell to the ground, knocking the wind out of her, and Alo veered to the side to avoid trampling her. Tala caught the deer as he stumbled, bringing him down, and before he could find his feet again, Niahak came down on his throat for the kill.
"That was an interesting tactic," Usdi said. He had come to watch, being too young to participate in the hunt.
San stood up slowly. Scraped knees and dirty elbows were nothing new to her, and she preferred the thrill of a sudden kill over feinting and nipping at the prey until it could no longer stand. "I come from an interesting pack." That answer seemed to satisfy him, and he trotted up to his parents to join the meal.
San turned to Alo. "Are you okay?" They had herded the deer through the woods and shallow creeks, hoping that the roots and rocks would trip him up with his longer legs, but that chase had been nearly as bad for the horse.
"I'm okay. Of course I'm okay. Why wouldn't I be okay? I've been on hunts before. Of course, usually I was with hounds instead of wolves, and they didn't eat it on the spot, but I'm fine."
"Thank you," she said. "I never could have kept up without you."
Alo didn't answer, and instead turned away shyly and started munching on grass. San made a mental note to hunt something less persistent next time, like a rabbit. She knew a few tricks to get them out of their holes. And the deer would last a while with just the four of them eating, and San had a way to get to the marrow that didn't involve burying the bones for a month and hoping that they remembered where.
San drew her knife and joined the rest of the wolves. They were a good pack, but they weren't her family. They didn't recognize Moro, the Night Walker, or any of the other names San offered them. Even more discouraging, they knew of no time when there was only one moon, and knew of no part of the world where there were not two.
She began to feed, cutting off bits of meat small enough to swallow. Despite everything, she really should have felt more at home with this pack, but there was something nagging at the back of her mind that she couldn't name. Maybe after spending so much time hunting humans, a deer just couldn't compare. No, hunting was the wrong word. She had been at war with the humans, striking out at them whenever they strayed too far from their walled town, hoping that eventually she'd be able to kill that demon Eboshi who led them.
And after that, after being willing to risk everything to create a better future for her dying world, how could she go back to hunting for her day to day survival? How could she go from fighting in a war that meant everything to living a life that meant nothing?
Niahak, Tala, and their son, Usdi were fine with such a life, and that, more than anything else, separated her from them.
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What Colbert should have done was decide that Louise had nothing that he wanted and then dismiss her so he could get back to work. Instead, he offered his condolences for her loss and made her a cup of tea.
As a Valliere, Louise needed neither pity nor mockery, but if she had to choose, she'd have chosen the later. Mockery, at least, was familiar.
"I can't say how sorry I am that this happened," he said. "Are you faring?"
"Oh, I'm fine," she said, a bit snippier than she intended. "It's my runaway familiar that has the problem. As soon as she woke up, she jumped out the window without as much as a 'how do you do!' I don't know what I could have done differently without having her tied up for the rest of her life."
Colbert nodded understandingly. "Yes, the art of controlling one's familiar is a complex one that I fear we should have covered more."
"What do you mean?" Louise said. "Isn't that the whole point of the Familiar Contract? To control it?"
"The Contract helps," he said. "But as it affects the mind, a familiar with a strong mind would be less affected."
"Like a human?"
He nodded.
Well, that wasn't so bad. It wasn't that the contract didn't take, it was that Louise had summoned a more challenging familiar. "But it still doesn't make sense. Even if she weren't my familiar, a commoner should have at least heard me out before running off."
Colbert frowned thoughtfully before continuing. "Let's say, for example, that you had a dog. If you play with it, it will follow you around, but if you ignore it, it will leave. Cat's are just the opposite. If you try to play with a cat, it will ignore you, but if you ignore it, it will demand your attention."
Dogs? Cats? Colbert had a thing for non sequiturs. "...Okay."
"Now, instead of a dog or a cat, let's pretend you had a human. Then what do you do?"
Louise took a sip of her tea. It was a bit too bland and far too hot. "Assuming that this human is a commoner? I'd give her a place to sleep and food to eat and clear, direct commands so that she'd know what she was supposed to do."
"So, you'd treat her like a maid."
Louise hesitated, sensing a trap. "So?"
"If you had to guess, what fraction of the commoners in Tristain would you say worked with the nobility?"
If Louise remembered correctly, about one in ten people could do magic, so that left the other nine to be commoners. She thought back to her family's estate. There were maids, cooks, gardeners and the like as commoners, and then there were Louise, her parents, and her two sisters as nobility, so five nobles and about twenty or so commoners. "About half?" she guessed.
"I suppose growing up among the upper nobility is giving you a skewed perspective. Even this Academy as a whole is a poor microcosm for Tristain. While Dukes and barons often have dozens of servants, most of the lesser nobility have none at all. On average, only about one commoner in ten decides to work as a servant."
"Really?"
He nodded. "While the maids and cooks at the Academy work for nobles because we're rich and powerful in comparison, the rest of their social class avoid us like the plague for exactly the same reason."
"What? But that doesn't make any sense!"
Colbert shrugged. "It does to them. But back to my previous question, if you had a human, what would you do?"
She realized that the only commoners that she had ever interacted with were commoners who had chosen to interact with nobles. The weak and poor followed around the rich and powerful for money and protection, but why would the rest of their social class avoid nobility...like the plague, Colbert said? Did they want poverty and danger? That made no sense. She was missing something, she just couldn't say what. If the commoner servants wanted physical and financial security, what did the rest of the commoners what? Something that money couldn't buy...
"If I had a human, I would ask her what she wanted most, and then go from there," Louise said. Colbert smiled in approval. "But what good does that do me now?"
"It does you good in two ways. First, having a familiar is a great learning experience, and if your familiar only taught you one lesson, then you ought to learn it. Second, not everyone gets a second chance. Sometimes the first one is all you get, and then after that it's all over." His eyes glazed over in a moment of melancholy. He forced a smile. "But not always. And if you're one of the lucky few, then when that second chance comes, you need to make sure you're ready for it."
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As the days turned into weeks, the deer they had caught became reduced to nothing, his bones broken and licked clean and the everything they didn't eat taken by scavengers. They had gone on other hunts after that, taking another deer, a few hares, and even some fish, but while the hunts filled her belly, San felt the rest of her grow more and more empty. Alo, on the other hand, had settled in quite nicely after Usdi stopped making jokes about eating him, becoming just as comfortable as San assumed that she would be.
One night when she couldn't sleep, she decided to lie down and look at the stars. That used to relax her, but ever since she came to this land, even the stars seemed off.
"Have you ever hunted humans, San?" Usdi asked, the pads of his four feet rustling against the unkempt grass as he approached her.
She didn't bother to sit up. "Yes." After a few days with the pack, she discovered that she could think her words to them without speaking. Moro, her brothers, and many of the other animals in her forest could do it, but she never could until recently.
Usdi sat down next to her and looked up at the overhanging branches of the surrounding trees to see what she was looking at. Those branches swayed as the wind whistled through them and reached upwards as if to embrace the stars, but Usdi seemed to be scanning them for bird nests and wild cats. "I never have," he said. "Neither of my parents have either, but they won't go near those creatures. They're not strong and they're not fast, but Father insists that they're dangerous."
"Niahak is right," she thought to him. "They can kill anything they see."
"But you hunt them."
"There's a trick to it." Not a very effective trick, but by keeping her distance and moving quickly or by attacking a night, the humans' weapons were less accurate.
"Can you show me this trick?" He didn't ask her to explain it to him. Wolves learned by watching and by doing, not by listening. "A trick to hunt humans should not be forgotten."
"I'll need a human."
"I found one."
San sat up. "Here? In the forest?"
Usdi looked her in the eye. "There is a human den not far from here. Humans do not often go there, but tonight the earth carried one to the den and back. The human may return. I do not know."
San stood up. Usdi's human might be a good one, like Ashitaka, but more likely it was like one of the humans from Iron Town. Either way, a human in the forest should not be ignored, and if the human was a destroyer, then, like Usdi said, a trick to hunt humans should not be forgotten.
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Louise made small talk with Miss Longueville as they made their way to Fouquet's hideout, mostly because she barely tolerated Kirche's company and Tabitha was too busy reading her book to talk to anyone. But since their brief conversation derailed onto the topic of how Longueville lost her noble status, Louise waited through the trip in silence and tried not to worry.
It didn't work, though. As the two chestnut mares dragged their cart through the dirt road into the forest, Louise grew more and more convinced that volunteering to reclaim the Staff of Destruction was a bad idea. She had a ways to go before she became even a dot class mage, and Fouquet was a triangle class mage at the very least.
But Louise was a noble, and nobility was more than magic, and it was more than wealth. It was pride, and the day she let go of that pride was the day she let go of who she was.
Also, she couldn't help to feel slightly responsible for the Staff of Destruction getting stolen in the first place. Shortly before the heist, she had gotten into an argument with Kirche. The Germanian had snuck into her room and discovered that Louise's familiar was not, as she had said, sick in bed, so Louise told her that she had died. Any decent noble would have apologized for bringing up such a sensitive subject, but instead Kirche accused her of lying and demanded proof of such a tragedy.
So Louise cast a spell at her.
She didn't lose her temper, of course, and even if she did, she did so in a perfectly ladylike manner, but she missed anyway, leaving a crack in the Academy wall twenty feet above her. Kirche made a bad joke about her being unable to hit the broadside of a barn and laughed, but when Fouquet struck, her golem left a hole in the wall right where Louise's spell hit.
So really, the whole thing was Kirche's fault, but you could hardly expect a Zerbst to clean up her own messes.
Tabitha closed her book suddenly and scanned the forest.
"What is it, Tabitha?" Kirche asked.
"Is it Fouquet?" Louise looked around to see what Tabitha was looking at, but all she saw were trees.
Tabitha opened her book again and resumed reading. "No."
The road led to the shack where Fouquet was last seen, and Longueville stopped the horses. "Well," the secretary said. "Here we are."
Louise jumped as a wolf howled in the distance. "A little twitchy, aren't you, Zero?" Kirche laughed. "No one's going to think less of you if you turn back now. I mean, Louise the Negative just doesn't have the same ring to it."
She glared at her. "Shut up, Kirche. I can handle myself." And, traveling back through the forest alone would be more dangerous than facing whatever was in the shack as a group, not that she was afraid or anything.
"I'll stay outside," Longueville offered. "Just in case Fouquet comes back while you're in there. If I see anything, I'll howl." She smiled.
Just great, Louise thought. Now even the secretary's making fun of me. As she made her way to the shack, though, she couldn't help but take a backwards glance, trying to shake the feeling that she was being watched.
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San devoured any information she could gain from the human den. She could tell that a human had been there recently, but only one, and it hadn't stayed for very long. There were undisturbed cobwebs in the corners and only one set of footprints in the dust, and the human smell had entirely vanished. The only thing that stuck out was a long, thin box that wasn't covered in dust.
Usdi howled in the distance. Danger! Humans! San's first instinct was to wait by the door (which had taken her forever to figure out how to operate) and ambush them as they came into the den. But she didn't know how many humans were coming, and the human den made her feel trapped. If the humans decided to wait outside and fire their guns at her, then she'd get killed.
She climbed out a window on the side furthest from the road and ran through the forest as silent as a shadow.
"I did not eat the horse," Usdi told her as they met up.
"It's true," Alo said, sounding surprised. "He didn't."
"Did you find anything useful in there?"
San shook her head. "I shouldn't have gone in there at all."
Usdi barked a laugh. "I'm still surprised you did. I wouldn't have gone inside a human place for a flock of sheep."
San peered through the trees to the road. She saw a pair of horses tied to a cart, but no humans. "Where are they?"
"Three of them went into the den right after you came out. A fourth one wandered into the forest. I couldn't keep track of it."
San nodded. Four humans. Those weren't terrible odds, but humans were so strange. Some were completely harmless, but others were deadly, and until she got a look at them, she wouldn't be able to tell which sort she faced.
She knew that she should wait and watch them come and go. Wolves would often study herds of deer for days before choosing one to go after, and humans were far more dangerous than deer, but San had always been an impatient wolf.
She studied the two horses that the humans brought with them. "Okay, here's the plan. I'm going to cut those horses loose and we're going to chase them off. The humans will be stranded here and will have to walk home." She paused. Fleeing through the forest would weaken and exhaust them. If the humans fought instead it would give San a better idea of their strength. Besides, panicked marksmen were more likely to miss. But if she could find a way to injure one of them, the other three would leave it behind. "Then we'll go after the fourth human. I'll need your help tracking it, but after that, keep your distance, and never let it see you standing still."
San climbed on Alo's back to free the horses when the earth opened up and a demon stepped out.
It didn't have the oily black tendrils that marked the demons San was familiar with, but she knew a demon when she saw one. It was light brown, as though made from dirt and stone, with patches of grass growing from it, and two black craters for eyes. It had thick arms and legs and stood nearly as tall as the trees.
"Is this part of the plan?" Usdi asked.
"New plan. Follow my lead."
"Which is?"
Good question. They should kill the demon before it had the chance to do much damage, but if it wanted to kill the humans first, she had no reason to stop it, or way to. She pulled her mask over her face just in case.
The demon stepped towards the human den, shaking the earth with each step, and knocked the roof off its walls. A whirlwind crashed into the demon, and tongues of flame exploded from the den into its face. The humans inside must have caused that using weapons that the humans of Iron Town never displayed, but neither harmed the demon.
The demon was a moment away from demolishing the den with the humans still inside when God showed up. If the Deer God was the Forest Spirit, this god was the Sky Spirit. She had sky blue skin, a long, serpentine neck and tail, and broad wings. She swooped down on the demon, raking its head with her claws, knocking it off balance. The humans scurried out of the den like so many rats, trying to get away.
The humans wore matching clothes and were distinguishable by size and coloration only. They ran, short blue, tall red, and short pink. San peered at the last one in surprise. She recognized that human; it was the same one she had talked to weeks ago. That human had...made no sense whatsoever.
The demon swatted at the Sky Spirit, forcing her to circle around it at a distance. The humans spread out, and the pink one turned to face the monster. It set down the box she carried and pointed a slender rod at it. It must have been a gun of some sort, because while San didn't see any flash of fire or smoke, part of the demon's body exploded. Not enough to kill it. Just enough to annoy it.
The demon turned towards the pink human and raised a massive fist to crush it, and San would wonder for the rest of her life why she did what she did next. While humans generally weren't much better than demons, the fact that a god intervened on their behalf meant something. That was the most logical explanation, and she used that to justify her actions. But whatever the reason, she willed Alo into action. The symbols on her hand burst into light as Alo gallopped faster than he ever had before, and she grabbed the human out from under the demon's fist.
The human looked around wildly before realizing where she was. "What? Who are...you! You saved me, just like you were supposed to! Where have you been all this time? Have you been following me?" She sat in front of San on Alo's back, still holding that long box.
Alo ran past the demon and into the forest in a show of speed and agility as he darted around trees and over roots that would have put a rabbit to shame. Usdi tried to catch up.
"I'm trying to follow your lead," Usdi said, "but I have no idea where you're going."
"Neither do I!" San shouted back.
"What?" the human asked.
"That demon! Did you bring it here?"
"Demon? You mean the earth golem? No, Fouquet made that."
Fouquet? "Is that a human?"
"Of course he's a human. Unless he's an elf. Oh, Founder, I hope he's not an elf."
Typical. She wondered if there were any demons that weren't made by humans.
"None of our spells can stop the golem, but if we find Fouquet, we might be able to force him to dismiss the thing."
San nodded. Plans that solved problems by killing humans were her specialty.
The demon–or golem, as the human called it–stomped into the forest after them, snapping trees like twigs and sending birds into flight.
"Danger! Danger!" the birds squawked.
"A human is responsible for this destruction!" San called after them. "If you help me find it, then I can stop this!"
"Danger! Danger!"
"And I'll give you a strip of meat." Her stomach was smaller than it should have been, so she had to eat every day to keep up her strength. She kept a few strips of meat on her person to munch on between hunts.
The birds fell silent for a moment. "Mine? Mine?"
"If you help me!"
"Human? See human! Pink human! Green human! Red human! Blue human!"
The pink human sat right in front of her, and the red and blue ones exited the den with her, and Usdi mentioned a fourth one that separated from the rest. "There are four humans in this forest, and I think they all came with you."
"What? How do you know that? There must be a fifth one hiding somewhere, and that fifth one is Fouquet!"
"There is no fifth human! There's a pink one, a green one, a red one, and a blue one, no more!"
The human mumbled a few words under her breath. "Hold on, Miss Longueville was supposed to stand as a lookout. She never warned us when the golem showed up! The green one's Fouquet!"
"Usdi, find the fourth human who wandered into the forest. That one's our prey."
"I have to tell the others!" She looked up. "Kirche! Tabitha!"
The Sky Spirit carried two humans on her back. "Hey, Louise!" the red one called out. "You're alive! Good for you!"
"Miss Longueville is Fouquet!"
"Are you sure? How do you know that? Where is she?"
Usdi howled, a far more pleasant cry than his warning howl before. Prey found.
"Never mind! Found her!"
A whirlwind tore through the forest, stripping the leaves off the trees and flinging a green-haired human into the clearing. Alo carried San out of the forest and they prepared to charge.
The human, Fouquet, pointed its weapon at them. San didn't know if it was going to fire a toxic ball of metal at them or something else entirely. Fortunately, Usdi bolted out of the forest towards his prey.
Usdi! Go for its right arm!"
Usdi grabbed onto its arm with his teeth, and it let out a scream. Fouquet didn't drop its weapon, but the human was no longer aiming at anyone.
San readied her spear to impale the human, but the golem slammed its fist into the ground between them. Alo didn't have time to stop or veer away, so he jumped, clearing the obstacle with impossible grace, landing on the other side of Fouquet. San jumped from his back, stabbing her spear into the ground to break her momentum, and then darted towards Fouquet to run her through.
The pink human cried out behind her. "Stop! Stop!"
San stopped, the point of her spear at Fouquet's throat. "Why?"
"I surrender!" the human begged. It dropped its weapon, and the demon dissolved into dirt. "I surrender! Please don't kill me!"
"I said stop, you stupid horse!" the pink one called again. "Stop already!"
Oh. She was talking to Alo. "Alo, calm down. The danger has passed."
Alo relaxed and trotted over to her, the pink human still on his back. "Ah, good horse. Miss Longueville, Fouquet, for multiple accounts of breaking and entering, theft, larceny, and wanton endangerment, I'm placing you under arrest."
"I surrender already! Now are you going to call off your dog, or are you going to let it rip off my arm first?"
She looked at Usdi, then at San. "Familiar, let her go. She's no longer a threat."
Usdi looked at San, his jaws still latched onto the human's arm, which was bleeding through its clothes. "So, what's the plan?" he asked. "I don't like the idea of eating this one with all the other ones watching."
"You probably shouldn't eat it at all. My mother always said that humans taste too oily, and if you eat too many humans, you might end up like one of them."
Usdi growled, but he let go. The Sky Spirit landed, and a red and a blue human climbed off her back.
"Well, that was fun," the red human said. It grinned at San. "Hold on, isn't that the familiar you summoned?"
The pink one nodded with pride. "Yes. Yes she is."
"But didn't you say that your familiar was sick? And dead?"
She looked away. "She got better."
"Yeah, well, all's well that ends well." The red one approached San with a smile. "Hey, there. Nice mask. I'm Kirche. Pleased to meet you."
Usdi growled and San glared. There were far too many humans standing far too close for her liking. She turned to the Sky Spirit. "Great one, can these humans be trusted?"
The spirit turned her long, serpentine neck towards her and looked at her with her large, nearly glowing eyes. "Who, me?" she said cheerfully. Her voice sounded childish, contrasting with her majestic form. "Of course. These humans are wonderful, and Tabitha here is the best one ever!"
The blue human looked at the Sky Spirit, then at San, but said nothing.
"Then I'll leave Fouquet to you. Please see to it that the human does not return." She turned to leave.
"Where are you going?" the pink human asked. "Familiar? Wait!"
The red human chuckled. "Do you two, like, need a moment or something?"
"Yes," she said. She climbed down off Alo's back with difficulty, as though used to a saddle, and set down her box. "Take the Staff of Destruction and Fouquet back to the Academy. We'll catch up."
The rest of the humans left, taking the cart and two horses with them. The horses had tried to run, but bound to each other and the cart, they didn't get far. The humans rode off in the cart with the Sky Spirit circling around them in the sky, leaving San, Usdi, and Alo alone with the human.
"What do you want?" San demanded, standing on the edge of the forest. Usdi had already gone deeper in and waited for her.
"I...I think we got off on the wrong foot. My name is Louise. What's yours?" She smiled hopefully.
"My enemies called me Princess Mononoke."
"Princess? What a pretty name. Wait, why did your enemies call you that?"
"Because they knew that they had done great wrong. And that I would kill them for it."
"Oh. Um, what do your friends call you, then?"
"San." She wished the human Louise would leave her alone.
"Well, San, I know that you didn't ask me to summon you and that we don't know each other very well, but since I did bring you here, I can't help but feel responsible for you. Are you doing okay? Are you happy here?"
Happy? San stared at Louise through the holes of her mask, gritting her teeth. No, she wasn't happy. She was lost and alone and confused, knowing nothing except that she wasn't where she was supposed to be.
"You're not, are you?" Louise said. "What can I do? If there's anything I can do to make you happy, San, please, tell me."
San turned away and faced the forest. It was darker than the bare, open road, but San liked the darkness. It felt safe. "Go away."
Louise grabbed her by the arm. "What do you want? If I can give it to you..."
San glared at her. "I want to kill humans," she said, hoping that it would make her leave.
Louise didn't even flinch. "No you don't. If you did, you wouldn't have saved me."
Louise had a scar on her left cheek. San hadn't noticed it before, but it was in the same place where she had cut Akitasha. San shook off her grip and turned away. "That was different."
"I'm human!" Louise said. "If you want to kill humans so much, kill this one!" Her pink eyes shimmered with unshed tears. San didn't know what she was so desperate about, but she preferred it when the humans were shooting at her. Because as long as they hated her, she could keep on hating them back.
"You want to know what I want? I've hated you my whole life, all you humans for what you did to me, to my home, my family!" She remembered her world diminishing day by day, tree by tree, and god by god until the forest was nothing more than dead wood covered in moss. "You have no idea the demons you create!"
There's a demon inside you. Ashitaka had said that. No matter how far away he was, he still haunted her. This is what hatred looks like!
"I've carried that since I could walk, and that hatred never helped me, it never stopped my mother from dying!" All it had done was make sure that she ended up alone. Ashitaka had left to help repair Iron Town, into the den of monsters that San would never let herself forgive, where she could never follow.
This is what happens when it catches hold of you! It's eating me alive!
San tore the mask from her face with a snarl. "And I'm sick of it! You know what I want? I want to be free of all that!" She stopped, surprised at her own words...
And very soon it will kill me.
...and at her own honesty. "I want to be free."
She didn't resist as Louise threw her arms around her and buried her face in her chest. "Come with me," she whispered. "I can help you. I know I can."
San almost wrinkled her nose in disgust. A human town was the last place she wanted to go. She could handle one or two humans at a time, but the thought of being surrounded by them sickened her. Humans were easiest to tolerate at a distance, whether that distance was a thousand miles or the separation between life and death.
But hatred at a distance was still a demon in her, and being away from humans for weeks hadn't diminished her loathing for them as much as one day with Ashitaka had. She would never feel at home among humans, but the forest she was in with the pack that she had been hunting with, that was not her home either.
"What do you think, Alo?" she asked. "Would you like to live among humans for a time?"
"If that's where you're heading, I'll come with you," the horse said. "Personally, this forest has been a bit too exciting for me."
"So that's it?" Usdi growled. "You're going to go play with humans now?"
"I am sorry. There is something that I need to do, and I cannot do it here."
Usdi bared his teeth for a moment, but then relaxed. "So be it. I'll remember your lesson next time I find a human in my forest."
"Good hunting, Usdi. Thank you."
"Good hunting to you too, San." He turned to leave. "Just in case my parents ask, what will you be hunting? Humans?"
"No," San said, shaking her head. "Demons."
WWW
a/n The Familiar Contract is a blatant plot device, and if you think too much about it, a rather disturbing one, especially how it is used in canon. But I figured if I was going to keep the plot device, I should use it for something beneficial for both sides, like helping cure San of her chronic misanthropy.
I had San go off on her own for logical reasons, like that's what I imagine she would do in that situation and she needed time to make some animals friends before facing Fouquet, but mostly for dramatic reasons. She needed to enter the relationship from a position of power. In canon, Saito depended on Louise for everything from food to shelter, so Louise could do whatever she wanted to him. Here, knowing that San is perfectly capable of independence, they stand on more equal ground.
I hope that her decision didn't come as too sudden. San is a hard character to write, but in canon, she went from wanting to kill Ashitaka to trying to save his life, so she's pretty impulsive.