QUEST WORLD

It's Raining Adventurers

"All right." I dust grass off my skirt, which honestly doesn't clean it much after I smashed onto the ground, but it feels like a decisive thing to do. "Fine. I'll humor you both as long as you can get me as far from Morine as possible."

I'm going to leave Morine.

A little flutter of excitement trills through my chest, negating the sheer horror of exploding Steel's quill and flying accidentally and being in danger from using so much magic and, well, everything at the moment.

Steel is still kneeling on the ground, looking a little too close to vomiting, but Sela narrows her eyes at me.

"Wait." She points at me. "I'm not doing this for free. I'll take you out of Morine, but you have to help me."

"Help you."

"Yes."

"Help you take down the king?"

"Yes," she confirms without the slightest recoil from admitting so easily to treason.

I scoff. "You cannot be—"

"I don't expect you to go head-to-head with him in a battle," Sela cuts in. "But your magic is...unique. And it could be useful. So really, I just want to figure out what you are and why you are and if you might be useful to stopping the king—which I'm guessing you want to learn, too? So it benefits us both."

Steel flies to his feet. "Yes!" he says, practically screams. "Um. I mean. Yes. Amelie should be on that path. The, um, path to facing the king."

"Yeah," I say. "Sure. That makes sense. I mean, this morning I was watering down the day's supply of beer for The Dizzy Ogre, but yeah, facing off against the king is totally the path a barmaid should be on."

"No, I mean—" Steel wilts. "I don't really know how to explain this. But if you set off on the path to face the king, everything else will work out. It has to. Just—trust me. Okay?"

"Trust you," I say flatly.

Steel and Sela go quiet for a second, which is the longest they've given me this night so far.

I pinch the skin over my nose. "I don't want to go off on some path. I don't want to face the king. I honestly don't even want to find out the what's and why's about my...my magic." My throat swells. Lies, lies, I totally want to know but I don't want THEM to know I want to know. "I just want to get out of Morine. Can we just focus on that to start? Just getting out of this village."

"Gladly," Sela says. "We probably only have a few hours before adventurers descend on this place anyway, looking for you."

"Awesome," I say.

"Really?"

"No! Where should we go? Renem?" I remember Sela'd said that was her village. It's a few days' from here, over the cliffs, and famous to adventurers for being a place to—

Oh.

For being a place to fight witches.

I'd forgotten that hedgewitches like Sela can be adventurers, but are most commonly known as yet another magical creature that human adventurers can defeat to earn conquest glory.

Sela's jaw sets, bulging out her cheeks. "We can't go to Renem. But maybe—" She chews the inside of her cheek. "I think I know someone who can help us. A—" She stops. "—witch," she finishes, but that obviously wasn't what she'd meant to say.

"A witch? So...we are going to Renem," I say.

"No! We can't go to Renem." Sela starts walking, barely making a noise as she shoves through the bushes and undergrowth. She stops to glance back at us. "We're going east. Or I should say, I'm going east. You two coming or not? We should get some supplies from Morine before we head out."