They’d put something in the water. Something that made it taste sweet and made Fjord’s thoughts and body slow and heavy. He’d suspected something and hadn’t wanted to drink it, but when he resisted, they’d threatened to hurt Jester, and when Yasha had resisted, they’d threatened to hurt him. Maybe Jester had resisted and they’d threatened to hurt Yasha, Fjord couldn’t remember if that had happened or not. It worked fast, whatever they put in that water.
After that, he only remembered bits and pieces, and, for the life of him, he couldn’t string them together into anything coherent. He remembered gray light filtering through chinks in the side of the wagon. He remembered darkness. He remembered something fading from black to white that he thought might be Yasha’s hair. He remembered someone crying. He remembered angry voices. He even thought he remembered Jester singing, but he wasn’t sure about that one, because he also thought he could remember seeing Jester gagged. He remembered flashes of blue, and red. Lots of red.
It was the cold that woke him, pushing him out of a deep, unrestful sleep to wonder why he was suddenly shivering. It hurt. It hurt different than the exhaustion and the cramping muscles and the weight of manacles around his wrists. This was a sharp, needle-like pain that stabbed unnaturally into his skin and deep down into muscle and bones.
It hurt. It hurt bad, but it also helped him think. The pain worked its way into his head, stabbing through the fog of the sickly-sweet water. Things were still slow. Thoughts dripped thick and sluggish as molasses, but Fjord eventually realized that the cold wasn’t the only thing that had woken him. There were sounds outside the wagon, familiar sounds. Not sounds he knew from his previous bouts of semi-lucidity, but from before that. Before the cages and the wagons.
He remembered what a fight sounded like. That ringing of steel on steel wasn’t just his manacles banging against the side of his cage. Those shouts weren’t just the slavers yelling at their prisoners or each other. Someone out there was fighting.
If thinking was hard, moving was even harder. Still, Fjord marshalled his strength and will and forced his eyes open. There wasn’t much to see. The wagon was dark, only a few thin trickles of light making their way in through gaps between wooden boards or around the edges of the locked door at the back. It was just enough for him to make out the shapes of other cages and figures lying bound and drugged within them, just like him. He thought Jester might be nearby, but he couldn’t make out color in the dark.
He squinted and tried to raise his head, trying to determine if any of the person-shaped lumps were Jester or Yasha. His molasses-slow thoughts were telling him that was important, though he hadn’t quite put together why. The cold, he thought. It was cold and it hurt and it might be hurting them.
The figure in the cage next to him was pressed close to the bars separating them. Were those horns on her head? Was she taller and stronger than most other people? It was hard to see, hard to focus.
Moving hurt. Fjord didn’t think he’d moved much in hours, if not days, and his muscles had tightened and cramped. The cold just made it worse. Every inch hurt, but he pulled himself closer to the bars of the cage, closer to the figure who wasn’t moving.
No horns or tail, he realized as he drew close. A thin beam of light shifted enough to show blonde hair, not black fading into white. Fjord still reached out toward the woman, because she was so still, too still.
His fingers brushed the edge of her neck. The flesh wasn’t just cold, but frozen solid. Fjord shivered, not entirely from the chill still digging into his flesh. How close had he come to that being him? What about the others? Jester was pretty good at shrugging off the cold, but how far did that resistance go? Hopefully far enough. And Yasha…Yasha was tough, he reminded himself. Even if she didn’t have Jester’s natural cold tolerance, she was tougher than all of them. He couldn’t find them in this dark with the cold and the drugs already sapping what little energy he’d mustered to look in the first place. Fjord would have to trust and hope that his friends were all right.
His friends…
The fighting outside…
Was that them? Had the others come after the people who had taken him, Jester, and Yasha? In his previous lucid moments, Fjord had wondered if they would. Molly might, he’d thought, if only because of Yasha. Beau too. She hid it well, but from the very beginning she’d struck Fjord as the type to go running into trouble for others. He was less certain about Caleb and Nott. They might have finally cut their losses and ran, or not. Or the fight going on right now might not be them at all.
He almost hoped it wasn’t. He wasn’t sure they’d be up to it, even if all seven of them were there, free and in fighting shape.
Fjord closed his eyes. They were no use to him right now. Instead, he listened. There were fewer sounds of fighting now. People were shouting. He recognized the deep, booming voice of the slavers’ leader, the tall man who’d held a knife to Jester’s throat when Fjord first refused to drink the drugged water. Lorenzo, the others had called him. His name was Lorenzo.
The cold was fading, but so was Fjord.
Another voice shouted something…something he couldn’t quite parse. There was something familiar there, the words or the tone, maybe the anger behind them. Maybe the fear hiding deep beneath it all.
“Beau…” Fjord muttered, not certain if it was a question or an answer. Either way the sound was lost in the gag shoved in his mouth.
He was slipping, the muzzy exhaustion swallowing him again. The cart lurched beneath him. It almost reminded him of the ocean, the rocking of a ship. He missed that. He missed the open water. As he sank back into something that couldn’t quite be called sleep, Fjord wondered if he would ever see the ocean again.
***
The next time he woke was when the cart jerked to a halt beneath him. He’d been dreaming, not quite like the ones he’d had before, the ones that spoke to him and left him vomiting salt water or swallowing swords, but not entirely unlike those ones either. It fit with aches and the lingering chill that crept back in as he regained consciousness.
The wagon rocked and the door at the back was flung open. It was overcast, the first flakes of snow falling from the gray skies, but the weak sunlight was still bright enough to hurt. Still, Fjord had missed the light too much to close his eyes or turn away from it.
“Ah, shit,” a voice muttered. A small figure, about Nott’s size, hopped up into the open doorway. Fjord couldn’t make out his features, but the voice was somewhat familiar, and not in a good way. “Wohn, get over here, looks like the boss’s cold spell hit the wagon harder than we thought.”
Another, taller figure stepped into the opening, peering inside. Fjord didn’t move, didn’t do anything that might draw attention to himself.
The taller figure grunted and stepped up into the wagon. “Well, I guess that solves one problem,” she said as she opened the closest cage to the back of the wagon and dragged a stiff, still frozen half-elf out of his cage, carelessly dumping his body to the road behind them. Grumbling, the halfling climbed up and unlocked the next two cages, though he left the bodies for the larger woman to dispose of. When he reached Fjord’s cage, he leaned down close. Fjord wished he could summon his sword, but even though the pull of the drugs didn’t feel as strong on his mind this time, his body was still slow and aching, and the magic he’d come to rely on so much felt just out of reach.
“The green one looks a little rough, but he’s alive,” the halfling said. He had a weaselly-looking face and a voice that matched it. He smacked a palm against the bars of Fjord’s cage and peered around it. Fjord turned his head to look as well and his heart stopped as he caught sight of the blue-skinned figure curled into a tight ball in the next cage over. Jester was clearly out of it still, but Fjord could see her chest rise and fall as she breathed.
The other two bodies, were tossed unceremoniously from the wagon. Fjord heard it, but he didn’t watch. He kept his eyes on Jester. A part of him wanted to reach out to her, to see if he could reach a hand through the narrow gap between the steel bars and assure himself that she really was there, even if he wished she was anywhere other than here.
“Plenty of room for this one, at least,” the woman, Wohn, said. Behind Fjord someone groaned in pain followed by the clatter and clang of the cages as a new captive was dropped into the cage next to Fjord where the young human woman had died.
The lock clicking closed made Fjord wince. It was such a small sound, but he hated the finality of it so much. Just like that, there was some other unfortunate soul trapped in here with them, an easy replacement for a life cruelly stolen then carelessly snuffed out far from whatever life she’d lived before.
Fjord had never been much of one for religion, and he was pretty sure that, powerful as it might be, the creature that had given him his powers was no god. However, he still spared a few thoughts for the three folks who had died, just a hope they’d found some peace.
The slavers finished what they were doing in the wagon and it rocked and lurched as they climbed back out, already chatting and joking like nothing of note had happened here. They shut the door, plunging them back into near darkness again.
“Fjord…”
At first, he thought he’d imagined hearing his name whispered in the dark. When it came again, he assumed it was Jester, only the voice, thin and pained as it was, still sounded wrong, and he’d clearly seen the gag still tied around her head when the slavers had checked on them.
“Fjord…sorry…I’m sorry…”
The voice was coming from the cage on his other side, the one where the woman had frozen to death. The one where they’d thrown in a new captive.
The wagon started off again, tossing Fjord away from Jester toward the other cage, the cage that held another painfully familiar person.
Molly lay sprawled on his back, though his head was turned toward Fjord. His coat and armor were both gone, as were his weapons. He hadn’t been gagged or manacled like the rest of them, but there hardly seemed a need for it. Molly didn’t look like he could win a fight with a wet piece of paper right now. In the grayscale of his darkvision, the blood covering Molly looked black. A few of the worst wounds, including a deep stab wound between his chest and shoulder were still bleeding. The whole while he kept mumbling Fjord’s name and apologies.
“We fucked up…fucked up real bad,” Molly whispered. His eyes were barely open, barely clinging to consciousness, but even being on death’s doorstep couldn’t stop him from talking.
“I’m sorry…we tried…tried…to rescue you. Fucked it up.” Molly’s eyes closed. His breathing was slow and ragged.
Fjord couldn’t speak around the gag, but he tried anyway, just to make some sort of noise, something that might keep Molly awake and here. He’d seen how little these bastards cared about the captives they took. If Molly died here they would toss his body out into the road with as little fuss as they had the others.
“Sorry…” Molly mumbled, “we tried…”