Decision Made Read online

  The effect was somewhat similar to making someone very angry, giving them a sword, and putting them on a cross between a bumper car and a mechanical bull.

  She watched for a moment—all the time she could spare—and her mouth twitched. “Prima, could you…record video of that for me?”

  “Record it? Hell, I’ll put it on YouTube for you.”

  “No, thank you,” she said politely as she turned and directed another baseball swing at the elven leader. “It doesn’t make effective blackmail material if it’s already public, you see.”

  “Ah.”

  Taigan advanced on the elven leader, who looked much the worse for wear. “Who. Are. You?” she demanded.

  He spat at her.

  “Yes, you can spit, very impressive.” She thumped her staff in the ground and was amused to see him jump. “Explain why six men on matched horses and with shiny armor are resorting to highway robbery.”

  “Men!” His face screwed up. “I am an elf. I am nothing like the men of other races!”

  “Do you still have a—not important.” She chose not to belabor that particular point when he’d given her such a sore point to focus on. “Dude, you walk on two legs, you have two eyes, a nose, a mouth, ears…give it up. Elves aren’t any different from anyone else.”

  As she had expected, his face darkened considerably. He drew himself tall and raised his chin so that he could stare down his nose at her. “Elves are the superior race,” he said.

  “You know how ridiculous you sound, right?”

  He snarled and leapt toward her. She swung the staff and ducked, which turned out to not be the best combination of tactics. However, because it was a terrible idea, it wasn’t what the elf expected either. He tripped over her and his toes made a definite impression on her ribs, but she was able to flail the staff over and land a blow along his back.

  They both scrambled to keep fighting. The elf looked a little dazed now as if he couldn’t focus correctly. He shook his head slightly.

  A glance over her shoulder showed her that Jamie was still holding off the other five but only barely. Taigan turned back, narrowed her eyes, and made a choice.

  “Why are you here?” she asked him quietly. “You’re not merely bandits. Who are you?”

  “We’re tax collectors.” He bared his teeth, which was much scarier when his mouth was bloody. “The people of the world insist on not giving the elven king his due so we have come to take it by force.”

  “Ah,” she said. She looked at her fingers wrapped around the staff and tried to calm her racing heart.

  Was there any way around this? No. These six soldiers would kill the twins if they could and from what she had gathered, that would not go well for her.

  She had to move without thinking. That was the only way she could do this.

  Taigan turned the staff and let it shoot forward in one smooth motion. It slid through her loosened hold to strike the elf leader hard directly in the sternum. She yanked it back and launched it forward once more, this time aimed at his trachea.

  Unfortunately, she missed and caught him directly in the face. His grunt from the first strike was nothing compared to the scream at the second one. Behind her, she heard shouts, doubtless from his followers.

  There was no time to do anything except keep moving. She let the staff fall from nerveless fingers and caught the elf’s sword hand. Her hold tightened and she tried to yank the sword free, but he wouldn’t release it. With blood streaming down his forehead, he couldn’t see but he could clench his hands.

  The pounding of hooves behind her told her she had no time to waste. She yanked his hand up and bit it as hard as she could. He screamed and dropped the sword, which she snatched and spun to plunge into his chest.

  “Damn,” Prima said and sounded vaguely awed.

  Taigan stared at him and tried not to be sick. He wasn’t real, he wasn’t real, he wasn’t real—

  “Taigan!”

  Jamie’s shout jogged her out of her stupor. Two of the horsemen were bearing down on her with murder in their eyes. She didn’t have much time, and when they could separate from one another, she’d be very vulnerable

  She hauled the other elf’s body up and threw it at them. Nothing about it was graceful. It was heavy and slick with blood and she hated seeing the eyes all wide and staring. It did make the two riders break with one another to give her a wide berth, however. She pushed the body away from her and scrabbled for any weapon she could arm herself with.

  The next scream wasn’t human. One of the horses had stepped on her stave and the unstable ground had snapped a foreleg. She cried out as the beast fell and the rider struggled free. He cut the horse’s neck angrily, which made her scream again, and she charged him without a weapon or a plan.

  “You couldn’t even be nice to an animal?” She heard screams and yells behind her but she didn’t care. She and the elf grappled, both weaponless after she had stamped on his sword hand. She punched him in the face and he returned the favor. Furious, she kicked him in the groin and he went down like a sack of bricks when he tried to return the favor.

  “Taigan!” A hand closed on her cloak and pulled her upright. “Come on!”

  “What—”

  Jamie hauled her up unceremoniously so she could make an awkward leap onto another riderless horse. Only his grasp on her boot kept her from tumbling over the other side, and getting into the saddle tested her strength, flexibility, and sheer determination.

  “So, you mentioned that videos should be kept out of the public sphere if one wants to use them for blackmail?” Prima asked.

  “Fuck,” the girl said. She squirmed upright and clutched the pommel with a shriek when both horses leapt into motion. “I don’t know how to do this! I don’t know how to do this!”

  “Hold on!” her brother yelled. “Everything else is optional!”

  All she could do was keep her arms wrapped in the reins and around the horse’s neck and her feet in the stirrups. Even with that, it was hard to keep herself on the horse. She wondered if her twin knew where they were going because she had no idea if they were even on the road anymore.

  “I don’t have my staff!” she called. “Or our packs!”

  “We’ll fix that some other time! Come on, faster!”

  “How do I do that?”

  They were on a road now she decided, judging by how even the ground was. Taigan held on for dear life and wondered if she was getting better at this. It seemed like she was getting the rhythm down, which made it easier to not be jostled all over the place.

  She had the sneaking suspicion that she would be incredibly sore the next day, though.

  Once, she managed to look over her shoulder and saw nothing behind her. “Did we get away?” They were slowing now, both with the sense that they had escaped.

  “I think so.” Jamie was panting. “So…you did okay.” His look said he thought she had done much better than that.

  “Me? You were keeping five at bay all on your own.”

  “I think it was more the horse.” He stroked the animal’s neck. “Thanks, by the way.”

  The horse, being a horse, said nothing.

  “Okay,” she said after a moment. “So…what the hell do we do now? We’ve pissed some king off and—what is that sound?” She looked around and reached for one of the saddlebags. It took a few attempts to accomplish without losing her balance.

  When she finally managed to open it, she gaped.

  It was full of gold and jewels. Necklaces, rings, bracelets, brooches, gold coins, unset stones…every treasure imaginable.

  “Oh, my God.” She stopped her horse. “Jamie, look in your saddlebags.”

  He did and clapped a hand over his mouth. “What do we…how do we… Holy crap. What do we do?”

  “I think we try to return all of it,” Taigan said. She held a finger up when he started to protest. “After we make a big pile and throw it around like Scrooge McDuck.”

  Chapter Three
/>   Neither of the twins had any idea where they were or how far they were from the rest of the elves—but both agreed heartily that they would like to be farther away before they stopped. They continued steadily with many looks over their shoulders.

  “I think they’ll probably go back to lick their wounds,” Jamie said finally.

  Taigan looked at him for a moment before she nodded. “That makes sense. You go out and work your way back, picking up stuff as you go. So we probably caught them on the way to their…castle? Hideout? And now they’re bringing back…” She swallowed and looked a little green. “You know, I didn’t like killing him. I didn’t like killing the animals, and I seriously didn’t like stabbing him. You read about it and it doesn’t occur to you how…um, it feels. Bones and stuff.”

  “Yeah.” He sighed. Absentmindedly, he rubbed his shoulder. Two weeks before, a magical beast had attacked them and its claw had punctured his shoulder. He had been healed by magic and there was no longer even a scar to mark the place, but talking about fighting brought the memory back vividly.

  As well as some other, less savory thoughts.

  She noticed instantly. “What’s going on?”

  “I didn’t mind it,” he said. “Not that I like it. I don’t want you to think I’m a sociopath or something, I only…it had to be done and I did it. I’d do it again. And sure, that part didn’t feel good—the actual stabbing—but knowing the fight was over? Yeah, that felt good. Winning? That also felt good.” He fixed his gaze on the pommel.

  His sister said nothing for a long time. He could tell she was uncomfortable and when she spoke, it was in a very small voice. “I liked getting angry.”

  He looked at her in surprise. Although he knew her very well, he hadn’t expected this.

  “I wanted to do it,” she said. She looked at him and he could see the horror in her eyes. “I saw how cruel he was and how much he liked hurting people and I wanted to hurt him right back to make him pay for what he’d done. I wanted to kill him. And then I did, and now he’s…dead.”

  Jamie had no idea what to say to that. Agreeing that killing people made them dead seemed insulting, somehow, but he wasn’t quite sure how his sister had been unaware of that fact until now.

  “What if I was wrong?” she burst out.

  That made more sense. He sighed and nodded.

  “Do you think I was?” she asked

  “No! No.” He shook his head and looked at her. “I understand that it freaks you out now—that it’s so final and if it was a mistake, you wouldn’t be able to fix it.”

  “Yes.” Her eyes looked very wide.

  Hastily, he ran through all the things he could say. He could tell her there hadn’t been any slaves following the elves. Or that her assessment of their cruelty was entirely accurate. He could tell her that they didn’t even see her as sentient or worthy—they’d made that clear. Whether they would have killed her simply to get rid of an inconvenience or killed her for fun, he didn’t know.

  But he did know they would have killed her.

  Now, his blood pressure began to rise. He grasped the reins and tried not to pull on them. The poor horse didn’t need to be on the receiving end of his anger. It had probably dealt with enough—somehow, he didn’t think any of those jerks was good at taking care of another being.

  “I think your instincts were good,” he said. “There’s so much you took in about him that you probably can’t articulate. It was a quick decision, but that doesn’t mean you didn’t base it on anything.”

  She considered that. “I suppose.”

  Jamie studied her. “So…when you said you didn’t like doing it, what you meant was that you didn’t like that you did like it.”

  “Was that English?” Prima queried.

  “No,” Taigan argued, “what I meant was that I didn’t like doing it. And I didn’t like that I wanted to do it but it’s true—I did want to do it.”

  “Seriously, am I having a stroke?”

  Both twins grinned up at her.

  “You did it. You feel good or bad about doing it. What’s all the rest of this?”

  “That I feel bad about wanting to do it,” she explained.

  “So you have feelings about things—which is already ridiculous, by the way—and then you have feelings about feelings?

  “Uh…yes?” Jamie said.

  “You people are…I can’t…”

  “Oh, dear,” Taigan said. “We broke her.”

  “You did not break me. I am screaming internally.”

  The twins exchanged a look and their lips twitched.

  “Later,” she mouthed at him and he nodded.

  “I can hear you.”

  She put her face in one hand. “Okay, then let’s talk about where we’re going.”

  “Oh, good. More illogic.”

  “Listen, woman.” She jabbed a finger at the sky.

  “Yes?”

  “I honestly have no follow-up. Jamie?”

  Her brother laughed. “Okay. It’s a good point. We should find out where we’re going now that we have the space to be more specific than ‘in the other direction than the people who want to hurt us.’ You said you want to return all this stuff.” He waited for her nod. “Do you…uh, have a plan for that?”

  “Yes, I do.” She had taken to riding quite well by this point. “I’ve been thinking. The next time we come into a town, we explain that we got the horses while fighting off elven bandits—although not if the town is elven. We’ll want to check. But if they’ve been there and they’ve been robbing people, then we have leads. We can go to those people and ask them what was stolen, and if we have things that match those descriptions, we can give them back.”

  “What if people simply decide to rob us?” he asked.

  “Okay, we’ll find some way to make it clear that we don’t have the stuff on us. Oh! I can hide it in the other world.”

  “I certainly did not intend for you to be able to do that kind of thing,” Prima interjected.

  “She’s more chaotic good than lawful good,” Jamie said wearily. “You’ll see.”

  “Hey! That’s…accurate.” Taigan grinned. “And by the way, I found one more thing that will help us.” She leaned forward to stretch into one of the saddlebags and pulled out a long leather tube. Unscrewing one end allowed her to slide a map out, which she held up triumphantly. “Now we can get around!”

  “Awesome.” Her brother sighed happily. “Okay, well, where are we now?”

  She stared at him. “We don’t know yet. I have a map. I don’t have GPS.”

  “Oh, right.” He considered this. “Crap, how do you find out where you are on a map?”

  “No, now I’m having a stroke.”

  “Listen.” Taigan looked up at her. “We don’t solve problems the same way because we don’t have access to as much information, and we have different concerns than you do. You’ll simply have to get used to that.” She frowned. “Didn’t other people do this?”

  “Constantly.” The AI’s tone was long-suffering. “I always hope that the next group will be more logical. It never happens.”

  “Maybe it’s you who’s not logical,” Jamie responded.

  An awed silence followed.

  “Okay, now you’ve broken her.” His sister frowned at him. “Out of curiosity, though, Prima—if you’re not broken—was this how you thought we’d do this?”

  “Not even slightly.”

  “Ah. Well. Are we at least going in the right direction?”

  “I don’t even know.”

  “There, there,” she said encouragingly. “It’s okay.”

  Prima’s silence said she had considerable doubts.

  Taigan studied the map. “Okay, there’s a forest here. And mountains.” She craned to look. “Of course, it’s hard to know what scale this is on. I suppose it could be a map of somewhere entirely else. I have a couple of ideas of where we might be if this is our area, though.”

  “Look!” Jamie poin
ted. In the very distance, there was a smudge on the horizon. “Is that a town?”

  “It looks like it.” she squinted. “Huh. Okay, let’s get off the road. Give me a few minutes and I can hide all the gold.” She sighed. “Of course, I’m sure the other horses all had a stash too. Oh, well. We’re doing what we can.”

  He waited while she slid easily into the other world, bringing a saddlebag with her each time. While he waited, he dismounted from his horse which seemed like a poor choice in retrospect. Now that he was down, he could feel how much his muscles ached. He stood holding both sets of reins.

  The horses, thankfully, didn’t seem inclined to run away. Both nosed him on the shoulder occasionally and huffed near his ear. He didn’t know very much about them, but he interpreted this—and their lack of kicking and running away—as a good sign. Once or twice, he tried to pet them head-on, but they didn’t seem to like that.

  His preference was to think they were pleased to not be dealing with jerks anymore.

  When Taigan finally reappeared after the last saddlebag, he raised an eyebrow. “What took so long?”

  “I was arranging it—all the rings, all the bracelets, and all the coins. I wanted things to be easy to find.” She sighed. “I remembered I promised we’d swim around in it like Scrooge McDuck.”

  “Awww, man. I was looking forward to that.”

  “Sorry! So, should we get back on the horses, or…” She paused. He saw her move subtly as if testing her muscles. “Maybe we should walk them?”

  “Honestly, that sounds good to me,” he agreed.

  “After all, they need some rest.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So you’ll admit to rampant illogic but physical discomfort embarrasses you?” Prima inquired.

  Both twins nodded.

  “That’s good to know. Another data point for my set of indecipherable white noise.”

  Chapter Four

  Having grown up in a world with cars and trains, it was strange to have to walk and watch the town grow slowly in their field of view. Taigan began to wonder if their great quest to the mountains would be a multi-week extravaganza that could have been accomplished in a single afternoon in their world.