54 – Criminal Record

“This sucks,” said Jonny, hugging his knees in the makeshift shelter he had created.

“Well, you should have thought through it better,” said Igrette right beside him.

Currently the two of them were huddled into a very cramped space surrounded by a very low wall made of loose stones frozen in place by half-melted and refrozen snow. The wall was actually plenty high for him to sit down comfortably, but Jonny had severely miscalculated when he thought of how much space they would need. The wall was roughly semicircular, and attacked on both sides to the stone table in the center of the mana well. He thought it was plenty big as he worked, and Igrette was focusing on her healing, so she wasn’t paying attention, and by the time he realized his folly, it was too late.

The issue was that he had forgotten how much space Igrette would take up. Part of it was that he was in the body of a child, and everyone looked big to him, so he didn’t really think of Igrette as much different from other people. The other part of it was that he had been dragging her around for the past few days, and hadn’t seen her standing up, and also that the snow banks that they used as shelter were much less space-limited, so he rarely needed to think about making sure she had room.

Unfortunately for him, Igrette was actually quite tall—close to six feet—and even missing an arm, her shoulders were a bit broader than he expected. Plus, he couldn’t just shove her up against the stone circle, or against himself, since he couldn’t aggravate her wound. By the time he realized his mistake, it was too late, though. The storm was here, and Igrette was taking up a full three quarters of the sheltered space, and Jonny was trapped in a tiny sliver on the outer edge.

Overhead, they had placed the wolf pelt, covering it with a thin layer of half-melted snow that quickly froze. The pelt was almost big enough to cover the entire space, and the small cracks, they had just filled with more snow from underneath. It would be a pain and a half to get the ice off the pelt after the storm so they could keep using it, but it was better than getting slowly buried.

Their source of fresh air was a group of small holes in the ice that Igrette made Jonny poke with his knife when she realized he forgot them. A few were in the snow mortar between stones, and a few were in the sections of the roof that the wolf pelt failed to cover.

“You could always lie down,” offered Igrette, patting the ground beside her. “What’s wrong with sharing a bit of warmth?”

“I dunno…” said Jonny.

“Just lie down,” she said, exasperated. “Your legs are going to cramp if you stay like that.”

Jonny hesitated a bit longer, then slowly stretched himself out, laying down beside her. There was not enough room not to touch her, so he ended up snug against her side. He was scared to touch her, worried that he might aggravate her wounds somehow—a ridiculous worry, since he had to pick her up to set her down here in the first place—but it still made him hesitant. It also felt weird to be so close to someone else like this. He usually only made physical contact with people when he was fighting them, or when he brought a girl home. Casual closeness was unfamiliar and uncomfortable.

He felt awkward, especially when Igrette wrapped her arm under his head and around his body and pulled him slightly closer so he wasn’t smushed against the cold rocks, but there wasn’t really any room to squirm, so he just had to accept it.

“I was watching your fight earlier,” said Igrette. “I watched as well as I could, at least. It was impressive.”

“How far does your mana sense reach?” asked Jonny.

“It depends how much I focus. I can get a solid picture of anything within three hundred feet or so, and clarity rapidly deteriorates beyond that. I can sense strong fluctuations and mana sources from much further, though. Even from miles away, they have an effect on the ambient mana that you can learn to read.”

“Wow.”

“Helen is better than me, though. She was never as good at me as controlling mana, but her sensitivity is some of the best I’ve ever encountered. It made her a great battlefield medic.”

“Huh,” said Jonny.

“From what I’ve seen, you’re more like me than her, but you can still train your sensitivity if you’d like. I’ll show you how later, once you’ve got a better handle on the other things you’re working on.

“Anyway, as I was saying, I watched your fight, and it was impressive. You have good instincts. You must have had a good instructor.”

“Yeah…”

“Tell me about them.”

“Huh? Why?’

“No particular reason. I’m just curious.”

“Well,” said Jonny, staring up at the wolf pelt. “Coach was… Well, he was kinda mean. He was a fighter too, and he always said he coulda been one of the best, but then he tore his achilles and his career was over before it started.”

“His achilles?”

“Oh, the uh…” Jonny raised his leg and pointed to his achilles. “This tendon.”

“The heel tendon?”

“Yeah, that one. He tore it, and never fully recovered.”

“Could he not afford a healer?”

“We didn’t have healers. Just doctors. And there weren’t any doctors that could fix that kinda injury back then. He was never the same, so he retired and became a coach instead.”

“A mean coach?”

“Yeah. Well, kinda. I guess he was more tough than mean. If he called you a dumbass, it’s ‘cause you were being a dumbass. And he was really good at telling when you were being a dumbass.”

“Probably quite often for you, then.”

Jonny heard the smile in her voice, and he smiled too.

“Yeah…” he said. “I shoulda listened better. He knew what he was talking about. I know if he saw me now, he’d call me a dumbass again. That’s how I died. Being a dumbass.”

“How did you die?”

Jonny frowned. “I dunno exactly. It’s kinda fuzzy. I was in the bathroom, and then some guys came, and then next thing I know, I got stabbed. I think they were trying to mess me up before my fight? Something like that.”

“That doesn’t sound like your fault.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“Well, I never shoulda been in the bathroom to begin with. It was at a nightclub, and I was really drunk. I shouldn’t have been getting drunk like that, and definitely not the week before a fight. I knew Coach was gonna chew me out when I got back, but I went anyway. And then I died.”

“Ah.”

A short silence followed.

“I used to sneak out to drink too,” said Igrette. “I actually got kicked out of a convent for it.”

“You did?” asked Jonny, turning his head to look at her.

“To be honest, the whole reason I joined that convent was to drink. They made their money off of wine that they brewed. Good wine that some nobles and rich merchants paid a lot for. After I ran away from home at sixteen, I had a wild two years on the road, and then got arrested and forced to choose between dedicating myself to God or serving a prison sentence. I chose the former.”