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  To Archie’s utter shock, Thord dropped to the ground the instant one of Archie’s fists made contact with him. Archie had landed only a glancing blow, but the evoker toppled backward and sprawled across the open ground as if he’d been punched by a giant.

  The people around Archie gasped in horror. Archie stared down at Thord and then at his fist. He had barely made contact. There was no way he’d knocked him down. That could only mean one thing.

  “Get up, you faker!” Archie shouted at Thord. “Quit pretending to be hurt, and get up!”

  Thord squirmed away from Archie, still on his backside, clutching his wounded leg. Archie stomped over and kicked him in the thigh.

  The Illagers prized strength over anything. To show a sign of weakness before others could be lethal. If Thord was going to fake being injured, then Archie was willing to fake triumphing over him.

  “Get up!”

  Thord howled in agony and curled up into a ball. As he did, the other Illagers surged forward, and several of them grabbed Archie by the arms and hauled him back, away from where Thord lay writhing in pain.

  “What are you doing?” Walda demanded. “Kicking an Illager leader after a battle? Are you out of your mind?”

  “I’m not going to put up with him anymore!” Archie said. “It’s bad enough he’s bullied me my entire life! Now he’s lying about me too! I’ve had it!”

  Walda stood there before Archie and waited for him to fall silent, even if he couldn’t quite calm down. “Are you finished?” she asked softly, but with enough command in her voice that everyone in that part of the forest could hear her, even over Thord’s groans.

  Archie glanced down at Thord and caught him grinning up at him. The downed evoker wiped the smile from his face before anyone else could catch him, though.

  Archie drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly as he struggled to calm himself. “I suppose I am.”

  Walda nodded at him. “I’d like to thank you,” she said. “I had thought this was going to be a hard decision, but you just made it far easier on me.”

  Archie cocked his head to one side, not quite clear on what Walda was heading toward. Despite that, he kept his mouth shut and waited for her to continue.

  She motioned to both Thord and Archie. “Obviously, this kind of behavior can’t go on. In a way, I blame myself. I should have put a stop to it a long time ago.”

  Archie imagined being able to be a part of a tribe that didn’t have Thord in it, and he felt a huge surge of relief. “I would have truly appreciated that.”

  “The tension was always between keeping on someone who already contributed greatly to the tribe’s might, or keeping on a weakling who had potential.”

  Archie suddenly didn’t like the turn the conversation had taken. “Wait, what?”

  “But your actions today have made the choice clear.”

  Archie put up his hands to plead with Walda to stop. “Hey, no, I didn’t betray the raiding party. He’s lying!”

  He stabbed a finger down at Thord, who rolled over and groaned in pain, pretending to be only half conscious.

  “That may be true,” Walda said. “I cannot prove or disprove that. But the manner in which you attacked him in front of the rest of the tribe…The way you kicked a wounded Illager nearly to death…”

  “He was already halfway there!” Archie shouted, both desperate and indignant.

  “That’s enough!” Walda said. Her calm facade had finally cracked, and the naked rage on her face hit Archie like a diamond blade. “You’re not only worthless and weak, you’ve done actual harm to the leadership of the tribe. You need to leave. NOW!”

  “But that’s not fair!” Archie protested, although he knew it would do him no good.

  Walda pointed toward the lands beyond the camp, into the dark and foreboding forest that sprawled all around them. “You have been banished forever. Go, and never come back!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Archie wandered lost in the plains, distraught over being kicked out of the only tribe—the only family, really—he’d ever known. His entire life he’d worried that no one actually liked him much. That the only ones who even seemed like they might tolerate him had only been doing so out of politeness.

  And now he had proof.

  When the tribe had been given a choice between Thord and him, they’d thrown Archie to the mercy of the mobs. Given how Illagers prized strength over anything, he’d been expecting it to happen forever, but he’d still hoped for something better. Without the protection of the tribe, he’d probably be dead within a week.

  He wondered how he’d go. Would a zombie take him down? Would a skeleton skewer him with an arrow? Or would a creeper come hissing up behind him and blast him to nothing?

  As night fell, Archie did what he’d been trained to do if he was ever caught out alone in the open after dark, something that had rarely happened to him before. It was supposed to be the only way to protect yourself from the roaming hordes of undead mobs that came out at night to claw and tear at the living.

  So, Archie found a hole in the ground—a bit of a depression, really—and jumped into it. Then he buried himself under the earth.

  He knew he’d done a bad job of it right away. It wasn’t like he’d carved out a proper space in the ground below himself and then sealed himself in. He’d just done the best he could, which came down to covering himself with as much loose dirt as he could manage.

  It didn’t take Archie long to realize he couldn’t breathe—or at least that the fear that gripped him made it feel that way. Maybe that was the kind of thing that people with proper tools and discipline could manage by making themselves a well-protected space, but Archie had neither such implements nor the know-how to use them.

  Terrified by the tight confines and gasping for air, Archie clawed his way back up out of the dirt and stood there exposed under the night sky. It was a big world, he knew, and he was a tiny Illager. Maybe the mobs would just miss him?

  He looked around the woods through which he had wandered, hoping perhaps that they could offer him some shelter. In the day, the trees had kept the sun off his head, but now, in the darkness, they seemed like they only gave cover in which all sorts of nameless nightmares could hide. He peered around them in every direction, fully expecting death to leap out from behind them.

  That’s when he heard the groans, and he knew just how much trouble he was in.

  Somewhere there in the woods, a zombie was staggering around, looking for something living on which to feast. Archie knew that he would be at the top of the mob’s menu. He began to edge away from it, hoping that maybe its ears had rotted off enough that it wouldn’t be able to hear him rustling around in the dark.

  As he did, he heard another moan, this time coming from the opposite direction. Archie nearly leaped out of his skin. He spun about, staring into the utter blackness of the night, trying to see how far away the zombie might be.

  He must have made too much noise as he moved around. The first zombie moaned louder this time, having come even closer.

  Archie knew then, without any doubt in his mind, that if he stayed in those dark woods, he would surely die. The only hope he had was to leave as soon as possible. To get away before the zombies cornered him among the trees and made a screaming meal out of him.

  Unfortunately, he didn’t have anywhere to get away to. He could try to worm his way back into the tribe, but he knew that wouldn’t work. His people were not known for their pity, and Walda had been extremely clear about expelling him. The best result he could hope for from them was to be killed by someone he knew rather than by a zombie, and he didn’t think that would be all that comforting.

  Waiting around in the woods for someone to murder him didn’t appeal much more though. If he lay down to sleep there, he was sure to wake up with an undead mob attacking him—if he was lucky e
nough to wake up at all. The only solution was to stay awake, alert, and on the move, so he decided to do just that.

  Archie made his way through the woods as quietly as he could manage, moving away from the two zombies he’d already heard roaming nearby in the dark. He was far from a good sneak, but he figured if he could just stay quieter than a zombie’s moaning, he might be all right.

  The same went for creepers. They always started hissing before they exploded. All he had to do was keep his ears sharp for them and be ready to bolt if they got too close.

  Skeletons had no lungs to breathe with and therefore couldn’t groan at him. Fortunately, their bleached-white bones rattled as they walked, and stood out a bit better in the darkness. He kept his eyes wide in the hopes that he’d see them before they put an arrow into his heart.

  Perhaps that was why he spotted the torch flickering in the distance. If he hadn’t been so anxious about threatening mobs, he might have missed it entirely. As it was, even its faint illumination seemed like a blazing lighthouse beam reaching out for him in the darkest part of the night.

  Archie moved toward the light carefully. He feared it might be a trap of some sort, meant to draw in weary travelers so that whoever built it could attack them as they came near. Even if it wasn’t meant that way, whoever had set the torch burning probably wouldn’t be happy to find a lone, lost Illager approaching in the middle of the night.

  Unless, of course, they were another tribe of Illagers. Sometimes other tribes roamed into the area—often by accident, occasionally with bad intentions. If that’s what this was, as improbable as that sounded, Archie thought that he might be able to plead with them to take him in. They wouldn’t have the awful history with him that his old tribe had. Perhaps he could step in new and start fresh for the first time in his life.

  Still, that was a long shot at best. If he’d had a camp to return to, Archie would have opted for that. As it was, he could either approach the torch or take his chances with the creatures in the night.

  The torch got his vote.

  As Archie got closer, he saw more than one torch. First one more appeared behind it, off to one side, and then another and another. Soon he saw a whole array of torches spread out before him, and he realized he’d not stumbled upon a camp.

  It was a village.

  Archie’s heart constricted in his chest. He wanted both to dash forward and to run away.

  Villagers were the sort of people that Illagers liked to raid best. Sure, they often just hid inside their houses where they were relatively safe, but they usually did that at night. During the day, you could find them just wandering around, tending to their gardens and their domesticated animals: cows, pigs, and sheep.

  Best of all, they never came chasing after you once the raid was over. Maybe it was because they had more important things to do—or perhaps because they simply weren’t warriors at heart—but once the Illagers wrapped up a raid, the Villagers always let them be.

  That meant, of course, that the only time Archie had ever had anything to do with a Villager was during a raid that Walda had ordered him into. He only knew about Villagers as targets, not as people—and certainly not as saviors.

  But then Archie didn’t really need a savior. He needed a host, someone who would let him into the village without running him off. He was so hard-pressed, he’d have settled for being allowed to sleep near a lit torch—anything that would keep the mobs off him, if only for a little bit.

  He creeped closer to the village and peered around, looking for anyone who happened to be wandering about. At this time of night, he wouldn’t have blamed all the Villagers for simply hunkering down inside their homes, but he didn’t want to startle someone into ringing the village’s alarm before he got the chance to at least plead his case with them.

  That’s when he spotted the iron golem wandering through the edge of the line of torches that encircled the town. It stood nearly three times as tall as Archie and almost three times as wide as well. It was an artificial person that had been fashioned out of raw metals and then imbued with a semblance of life by some arcane magic.

  Having grown up around evokers like Thord—and even Walda—Archie knew that magic existed and that it could do all sorts of inexplicable things, but he had no real notion about how it worked. Walda had tested him for any aptitude with magic years ago, and to his disappointment, he’d utterly failed. So, while he didn’t really get how a person made of iron could be made to patrol and protect a village, he could see that it had happened, and now he had to deal with the consequences.

  He wasn’t sure if he should stride right into town and present himself openly or not. It seemed like the most honest and straightforward thing to do—but it also was the most likely to cause him to wind up being smashed flat by an iron fist.

  Instead, Archie watched the golem lumber through the outskirts of the village until it disappeared behind the corner of one of its houses. As soon as it was out of sight, he scurried toward the village, hoping that it wouldn’t somehow turn around and spot him. As he reached the front door of the nearest building, he stopped and cocked his head to listen for the iron golem’s earth-thumping stride.

  He heard nothing but his own shallow breaths. While his success emboldened him, he knew that he had to act before the iron golem’s patrol brought it around again. If the thing saw him, it might attack him on sight, and he knew how badly that would go.

  He steeled himself with a deep breath, raised his fist, and knocked firmly on the front door before him. The inside of the place was dark, but someone in there started moving about and lit a torch to see by. A moment later, a curious face peered out through the window in the front door at him.

  The person was a clean-faced woman with sandy skin—something that marked her as a Villager rather than an Illager, for sure. As she looked at Archie, her eyes grew wide, and she gasped in surprise.

  Eager to keep the woman from screaming, Archie ginned up the best, most harmless smile he could manage and gave her an innocent little wave. “Sorry to bother you,” he said, “but I’m stuck outside tonight.”

  “You don’t belong here,” she said, confused by more than simply having her sleep disturbed. “You must be lost.”

  Archie braced himself for the conversation to take a bad turn. As it was, he felt delighted that the woman hadn’t started screaming in horror at the very sight of him. He hoped she wouldn’t come to her senses and change her mind about him anytime soon.

  “I am lost,” he said to her. “I don’t have any idea where I am.”

  The woman squinted at him as if she was unsure if she was still asleep and dreaming this whole encounter. “We’re in a village on the Squid Coast. Where are you from?”

  Archie didn’t know how to explain that, so he shrugged at her. “I was kicked out of my tribe. I don’t have anywhere to go.”

  “You poor thing. Hold on just a moment.” The Villager hesitated and then the door to her home swung open.

  She burst straight past Archie and dashed for the alarm bell that stood in the little square just beyond her home. He gasped in horror as she reached up to grab the rope hanging from the bell.

  He let loose a pitiful whimper, which elicited an angry snarl from the Villager. “Just how stupid do you think I am?”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Help!” the Villager hollered at the top of her lungs as she hauled on the bell’s rope, ringing it loud and clear. “Help!”

  Until that moment, Archie had held out some insane sort of hope that he’d be able to talk with the woman and get her to see his point of view. He’d planned to just turn around and run like a herd of creepers was after him the moment anything went wrong. But when he went to do just that, an iron golem appeared out of the darkness, cutting off his clearest avenue of escape.

  The golem reached out to grab Archie, and he squealed in terror. Before th
e massive creature could crush him, though, the Villager signaled for it to stop, and she stormed up to interrogate him instead.

  “Where are the rest of them?” she demanded. “What’s your trick here?”

  “No trick!” Archie put his hands up in a way that he hoped would calm the Villager down and show her that he meant absolutely no harm. “I’m here alone!”

  “Liar! Illagers like you never come around here for anything but looting and pillaging!”

  Archie took heart from the fact that the Villager hadn’t let the iron golem smash him flat. He knew that the Illagers probably wouldn’t have been so patient if she’d shown up in their camp.

  The woman turned her head for an instant to call for help again. Archie didn’t want to run away—he wanted to have the chance to explain himself and plead his case—but he knew that this would probably be the only chance he would have. His sense of self-preservation took hold of his feet, and before he knew it, he tried to bolt away from both her and the iron golem.

  He wasn’t nearly fast enough. The iron golem snagged him before he got even a full step away. Archie tried to squirm out of its grasp, but the iron golem’s grip was as strong as steel.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” the Villager said with a snarl as she got right back into his face again

  “Don’t kill me!” Archie screeched, now in raw panic. “I just—I don’t want to die!”

  “Then you shouldn’t have come here, Illager scum,” a deeper voice said from off to Archie’s right.

  Archie wrenched his head around to see who had joined them and he spied a Villager standing there, brandishing a garden hoe. He wore a wide-brimmed hat and clothing streaked with sweat and dirt. The sight of him made Archie scream in terror.

  “Put that thing down, Salah!” the woman said. “I’ve got this under control.”

  “Doesn’t quite look like you do, Yumi.” The man didn’t drop his hoe. In fact, he came closer with it, waving it in Archie’s face. “He’s a squirmy sort! Just back off and let the iron golem take care of him!”