“No, no,” Faberious, a young elven nobleman with flaxen waves of gold for hair. He spun, an easy smile on his lips, waving back at the three men attempting to stand at the front of the gate. The baron’s sons were especially free with their drink, and Faberious had a way of spurring men to fun and sin. “If I stay any longer, my woman will be more cross than you can imagine.”

  “Come now, Fab.” The baron’s middle son, Caladari, called leaning on his steward for support, a half-drunk wine bottle dangling in his hand. “We can find you a dozen women here. One for you and your strange little lad too.”

  Ferro’s eyes roam over the lord. He grants the man a bit of attention, but despite the initial novelty of being in the same room with real nobility, the impressiveness of the young men has vanished. They were much the same as the young men he had known: loud, boastful, judging, quick to drink, and only ever thinking about themselves. They were rather handsome, and elven, which did make them better than the others, but not by much in his estimation.

  “This lad needs no women,” Faberious says, smacking a hand down on Ferro’s shoulder. “As for me, you would not be able to find a woman in your barony as worthy as mine back home.”

  “Must be something,” Graeder, the baron’s eldest, grunts. “You’ll need to have us over some time so we might judge with our own eyes.”

  “You are always welcome,” Faberious says, delighting in another laugh. “After you have sobered up and had a shower of course.”

  “Fuck off!” Caladari calls down before dissembling into more laughter.

  Taking the cue, Faberious turns and strides down the bricked road in front of the baron’s impressive home, turning Ferro along with him as he begins to walk. The guards at the gate pay them little mind, despite the late hour of night, and they find themselves out into the town in short order.

  The further they descend away from the keep at the top of the rise, the more Faberious’ smile seems to falter, becoming a scowl as they set sight on the inn. Ferro watches the man as they walk. He also watches the streets, but the people have locked themselves up tight for the night. By the time they reach the front door, Faberious’ back is hunched, and a low growl rumbles deep in his throat.

  “Fucking elves,” he growls as they make it past the door, slamming the heavy wood closed once more. Faberious reaches to his face, tearing the skin and hair away with frenzied fingers, tossing the gore to the floor just inside the entrance. A moment later, Morello, stands on the mat, blood streaking his weathered face, and a bit of fine elven skin sticking in his beard.

  Ferro watches as the man’s features beneath his clothes ripple and change, growing bulkier, losing the fluid grace that seems innate to the fairer race. He knows Ferro doesn’t need to rip his face off to change shape, but given the man’s easy anger, the thought of bringing it up never occurs.

  “The wine was nice,” Ferro says, though, to his surprise, that only makes Morello seem angrier. The big man turns his seething gaze on Ferro, looking for all the world like he might beat him into the ground again, but a whistle from further into the room stops him dead.

  “That’s enough of that,” Sigrid calls, lowering two fingers from her lips. “I’ll have my questions answered before you two lose yourself to grabassing.” Sigrid sits back in her chair, legs kicked up on the table in front of her. Only six sit or stand in the room, only six left in the whole building.

  Ferro’s eye flicks over, taking in a red stain left on the bar, slowly setting into the wood. It smelled divine, but he had felt no particular draw to it just then.

  “They think some fuckin’ wolf did it,” Morello says, marching across the floor toward Sigrid.

  As the man stalks closer, Lumina, the newest member of the coven, wriggles in her chair and scoots back from him an inch. The girl always kept a tan robe pulled tight about her, a dark hood drawn and pulled tight to hide her face. Ferro had never even seen her face before, didn’t know if the change had made a monster out of her features as it did most of the others. The one thing he did know was that she has the prettiest hands, fair almost ghostly skin so pale the blue lines of her veins peeked out on the backs. Her hands are on the wrong sides, thumbs sticking out rather than in when she puts them flat on the table, but so long as her face is pretty, Ferro thought that he could like her.

  He hates the hideous, and remembering that draws his eye over to Caberlin. The cretin sits in his seat at the largest table in the room, pulled up close to a sheeted window that he peeks out from on occasion. He might have been a looker once, big broad shoulders, easy smile, but the left half of him had all but melted away in the change. The left half of his face droops in such a fetid glob that it is hard to tell where his nostril ends and his mouth begins, and his left arm is more a mallet of massed flesh than anything resembling a proper appendage.

  Ferro keeps his face placid as he looks at the ugliness of Caberlin, not that it is difficult to do. He finds that he has to try to make his face do anything else, and doesn’t rightfully know why everyone else changes their expressions so freely all the time. It seemed exhausting.

  To Caberlin’s left, a woman no older than nineteen stands in a fine lace dress that barely leaves anything to the imagination. Tear lines streak her face and her hands shake on the clay pitcher she holds. Ferro watches on as the biceps in her arms spasm. How many hours has Caberlin kept her standing here to wait on him? She jumps when Caberlin slaps a hand down on the table in front of him before she rushes forward to fill his crystal glass with more crimson fluid. The tendons on the back of the woman’s hands told that her hands wanted to shudder as she poured, but the fear in her eyes kept the pour steady.

  Was the woman the daughter of the innkeeper here or the burger in the last town? Ferro couldn’t remember at the moment. The long frayed rope tied with slack around her neck was old, Caberlin brought it around with him to each new town. Old rope, new girl.

  “You staring at something, freak?” Caberlin sneers when he catches Ferro looking.

  Ferro squints back at the man and remembers that his mind has wandered off-topic. He turns his attention back to Morello and Sigrid, poor Lumina caught between the two, though neither of them seem to notice her.

  “Weren’t that hard to send ‘em on that way,” Morello says. “Were already half convinced that it was the wolf to begin with.”

  “Not that we should need the distraction.” Sigrid thumps her boot on the table, drawing everyone’s attention to herself as she cast a glare over to Caberlin. The man sneers, turning back to the window. “My boy Ferro, did you ferret out what I asked?”

  “Has to be on the third floor, in the baron’s office. A lot of steel there, box-shaped.”

  “That sounds like a safe to me,” she says, smiling with her pretty white teeth at him. “Lumina, sneak into the place in a few hours and take it. I am tired of trekking this country like a gods damned peasant. We’ll be taking some horses on our way out of town as well. Big ones.”

  Ferro feels a twinge, a bit of happiness trying to compel him to smile. He considers doing so for a moment; it was rather pleasing to actually locate the thing Sigrid asked him to. In the end, the effort seemed too much, so he merely grunts and nods.

  Sigrid reaches into the bag laying open at her side and pulls free a jar of sturdy glass, filled to the brim with the most enchanting swirl of crimson Ferro has ever seen. “A full jar for you today,” she says, smacking it on the table next to her. “I know how it exhausts you to deal with people all day, and I had you do it for three. You are a good lad, Ferro. A good one.”

  The scent pooling on the sealed jar draws him to the seat before he even realizes his feet are moving. His butt smacks into the chair, eyes locked on the jar. He hesitates, seeing a paper pinned beneath the jar. Ferro looks up to Sigrid, and she nods back to him. Slipping the note away, he unscrews the cap and takes a long pull on the liquid ecstasy inside, shuddering as it slides down and coats the inside of his throat. It takes all the effort in the world to return the lid to the jar, but he does. The best gifts are savored, and he plans to savor this one for a long while.

  Sigrid rocks from her chair like a dancer, springing to the balls of her feet and coming around the table to stand near Morello. “You won’t be missed tonight, will you?”

  “We made a show of leaving,” Morello says. “Throw on some cloaks and no one will miss us making our way out of town. There won’t be questions.”

  “Good,” she purrs, moving in close to whisper in his ear. “You met the baron’s wife, yes?”

  “I did,” he whispers back.

  Ferro wasn’t certain who they were whispering for. He was pretty sure that everyone other than the shaking girl with the jug could hear them plain as day.

  “Good,” Sigrid says back, right into Morello’s ear. “You will be her for me tonight. I want to taste some of that myself, see what the nobles keep locked away for themselves.”

  At the wall, Caberlin lets loose a laugh. Morello is on him in an instant. The shaking girl falls onto a table five feet away as she is slapped aside by Morello’s charge, the jug she clings to spilling red fluid all over her pretty dress and the floor around her. She holds her breath, looking up with wide eyes at Caberlin kicking against the wall.

  Morello holds him there, feet scrambling for purchase. The entirety of Morello’s right arm has become a mass of muscle and sinew, like the arm of a giant reaching out and grabbing Caberlin’s head like a child might hold a bug. Hollow bones press through the skin of the massive arm, dangerous and jagged things thick enough around to impale as well as any spear. There was a whine in the air, the sound of Caberlin’s skull singing as it was slowly squeezed in Morello’s giant hand.

  “Let him go.” Sigrid’s voice is calm, controlled, but imploring. “There is no killing for you today, love.”

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  Morello drops him, letting Sigrid pull him back a step. Caberlin crashed into the table, falling to the ground and shaking there. As Sigrid leads Morello back toward the stairs, his enlarged arm begins to shrink, slowly becoming that of an average man’s once again.

  “Get those jobs done,” Sigrid calls down as she climbs the steps. “We leave with the sun. Caberlin, you can handle cleaning up the horses.” With that, the two disappear upstairs.

  Ferro takes his time, looking over Caberlin as he sits up against the wall, a cut on the side of his head slowly weeping red.

  “What!” Caberlin snaps at him. “You got something to say, ghost?”

  “Nothing much to say,” Ferro says, turning away from him. Across the table, Lumina hunches lower in her chair, hood pulled down.

  Caberlin levers himself up from the floor, the effort of it taxing him. “Come, dog!” Ferro listened, hearing the woman jerked violently to her feet by the rope tied around her neck. The stomp-slide of Caberlin’s gait came next as he limped over, and then Ferro felt the man’s hot breath on his neck, hotter than any person’s breath ought to be. “You are just the newest pup, Ferro. Already she grows bored with you. Give it a month and you will just be Freaky Ferro, tossed aside for the new project that she finds. I’ll have you then. Maybe I’ll need to make a new collar for you, put freak in big letters on it, not that you could read it.”

  “I can read it actually,” Ferro says, turning his pale eyes up at the man.

  “Don’t lie to me, freak. You don’t have letters.”

  “Maybe,” Ferro admits. “But the candle maker in that last town did. Took his letters from him, and now I got ‘em.”

  Caberlin squints, trying to puzzle out if there was any truth to that. It wasn’t impossible, they both knew that. Often they picked up impressions or feelings, and Sigrid had found a new knack for the flute after one night of purging emotions. Taking the entire skill of reading, however, that would be quite the claim.

  “You’re still weak,” Caberlin says. He spits a glob of mucus onto the table. “You will saddle some horses for me, dog.” He jerks the rope again, dragging the woman after him as he limps from the room, heading to the stable attached to the inn.

  The slamming of a door signals their exit. Ferro rocks the jar in front of him. His hand presses against the cool metal of the lid, and he only realizes then that he has been shielding it from Caberlin. The fear he feels is more than a twinge of emotion, something real, the thought that Caberlin might have tried to snatch the jar from him, or worse, break it.

  “I don’t like him,” Lumina says.

  Ferro looks up, trying to look into the woman’s shadowy hood, but finding the darkness there impenetrable. “No one likes him,” Ferro says. “Maybe they did once, but no one now.”

  “No.” Lumina shakes her head, a soft rustle coming from her hood. She falls into silence, and Ferro thinks for a moment that she might find the same exhaustion with her words that he does with his expressions.

  Exeter, he wants to see her face so badly.

  The jar rasps against the tabletop as he pushes it across to her. “Take a sip,” he says.

  “You don’t have to offer me that,” Lumina says.

  “Don’t have to. Choose to though.”

  Lumina reaches out, a pale hand slipping from the sleeve of her tan robe. Ferro cannot help but follow the line of her wrong-sided thumb as she grasps the lid of the jar, unscrewing it slowly. She turns away from him to sip.

  She must be ugly, he thinks. But then he reckons that he hasn’t seen her face, so he can go on pretending it is like the face he pictures in his mind. A shy and pretty face, like the sister’s back home had been. Maybe she would give him a lock of hair if he asked for it.

  “Thank you,” Lumina says, sliding the jar back.

  “Sigrid has a job for you.” Ferro checks the lid, making sure that it is screwed on tight. “Will you be alright with it?”

  “I wish Iz was here.”

  He nods. Ferro didn’t much like how the coven had been split, going different ways as they all trekked back into the properly populated lands. That was Sigrid’s plan though, so he didn’t voice much complaint. Iz was a good woman, he figured, as good as any of them were.

  “She’ll be back soon,” he says.

  “Really?”

  Ferro pauses a moment. The rhythmic clink of his nails on the jar lid pop in the air for a moment as he considers. “Don’t know, rightly. Just wanted to say something nice.”

  “I think you are nice,” Lumina says. “Nicer than most. You aren’t a freak, Ferro. Don’t let Caberlin get to you.”

  He blinks, turning over the words. “Course I am. It doesn’t bother me none, but it’s true.” The jar held loosely by the lid, Ferro pushes back from the table and heads to the bar, slipping his treat into the shelf beneath the bartop. Flies buzz about in the damp darkness, attracted by the blood soaking the wood, but even insects shied away from him now. “Got work of my own to be about.”

  The door leading out to the stables only hung into its frame by a single hinge, the entire thing almost breaking away in his hand. He found Caberlin just inside and closed the big sliding door as he stepped into the lamplight. Caberlin spared him a glance from where he sat in a big rocker, before turning his attention back to admiring the form of the woman struggling to brush and saddle the horses. She was crying again, but they were the silent tears that were easy to ignore.

  “Don’t you have anything better to be about while your master is busy taking it up the ass?” Caberlin growls. “I won’t fall for your sad puppy display. Start following me around and I’ll flay you alive.”

  “Them's some strong words now that Morello ain’t here to hear ‘em,” Ferro says as he steps up to Caberlin. He spares a moment to look over at the woman as she struggles. He finds it odd how she tries to watch them out of the corners of her eyes like they can’t notice. She is a pretty thing. Hate Caberlin all he wants, but he does have an eye for women, Ferro can’t deny that. “Thought we should make up.”

  “Eh?” Caberlin arches his one good eyebrow Ferro’s way. “Make up for what?”

  “Don’t rightly know.” Ferro shrugs. “You seem to hate me pretty fiercely. I probably earned that somewhere along the road, but I’d have it behind us all the same. Any chance that you could put that aside?”

  Caberlin scoffs, hocking a wad of phlegm onto the floor where it splashes among loose stalks of hay. “You aren’t going to be put being a pissant behind you, Ferro. You can’t. Just a little errand boy with vacant eyes.”

  “You gotta hate me for it?”

  Caberlin grunts, trying and failing to find a more comfortable position in his rocker. “Don’t suppose that I need to.”

  “I’d like if we could make peace.” Ferro holds out his hand to the man. He reaches for a smile, finding just then that it wasn’t too big of an issue to make his mouth curve a bit.

  Despite the light of the lantern set in the center of the barn, Caberlin sees the smile as he looks up at the young man, a slash of pearly white cut into the shadow of a face, stringy hair framing it. He found it an odd thing to see on the young man, like hearing a dog talk, but he couldn’t help but feel the show of emotion made him a bit more comfortable. Ferro reminded him of a scarecrow just then, and he barked a laugh at the thought, a tall lanky figure in the half-shadow of the light reaching out to him. Only, scarecrows didn’t smile at you, and you wouldn’t ever want one to.

  “I might be able to start at trying to not hate,” Caberlin says. “I can’t say that I’ll be able to do it. I have a lot of hate in me.”

  “We all do, I think.” Ferro leaned in just a bit closer, his outstretched hand hovering between them. “Part of the change.”

  “Aye, I think you’re right there.” Caberlin reaches out, taking Ferro’s hand in his one good one, squeezing it hard in an attempt to unsettle the young man. Despite whatever Ferro said, he had no intention of giving up his grudge, it was one of the only warm parts he had left.

  “I’m so glad that we could put that behind us,” Ferro says, his hand shaking as the bigger man crushes it harder and harder in his own. “Always heard it's bad to keep grudges. Can’t settle them with the dead.”

  A chill runs down Caberlin, realization dawning at the words. The magic is like a cold breath tickling down his arm. Caberlin reels, pulling away from Ferro, knocking his rocker over backward in the scramble. A sick squelch tears through the stable house as the flesh at Caberlin’s shoulder rips away from his arm in a slow pull, Caberlin’s one good arm left behind in Ferro’s hand.

  Screaming. Caberlin scrambles on the ground, the bulbous flesh of his ruined arm reaching and failing to stop the blood pouring out from his dismembered shoulder. He kicks back on his one good leg, backing away from the lanky young man who still holds his arm by the hand. Horror snakes up Caberlin as he watches his arm ripple and shift in Ferro’s grip, changing, folding in on itself, and becoming dark. In a blink, the arm is gone, and a crude iron sword is left in Ferro’s hand.

  “B-Bastard!” Caberlin cries as he pushes back toward the wall. “You think you can get away with something like this? I’ll roast you? I’ll throw your body at Sigrid’s feet and show her what you did. You are fucking dead, freak.”

  “Mister Caberlin,” Ferro says, taking a step toward him. “Who do you…”

  Ferro’s words are cut away by a gout of fire that sears over him. Caberlin holds up his stump of an arm, fire pouring freeling from the mass, washing over Ferro as powerfully as any hose. Despite the pain, despite the loss, Caberlin smiles as he watches the sight of Ferro burning.

  A hand shoots out of the flames, wrapping tight around the mass of Caberlin’s left arm hard enough to crack bone. The wash of power tears a scream from Caberlin’s throat as his melted arm ripples and bubbles beneath the touch. His arm falls away, made into a new sword of jagged iron, the blade cutting a long gash down his side as it clatters to the ground.

  Ferro stands over him, his hair still burning, the front of the man burned and naked, skin flayed away to reveal twisting muscle and the white of bone. He doesn’t feel the pain. Pain is just one of the things Ferro lost in the change. He turns his head sideways, looking down at the quaking form of Caberlin at his feet, both of the man’s arms gone now, changed to something better.

  The big man stares back up at him, all watery eyes and fear, and Ferro feels an honest urge to smile then. Hells, hard for him not to. The char of his face splits into a grin wide enough to crack down the ruined skin of his cheeks, looking down at the being that just a moment before thought itself so powerful. If Ferro had his way, pathetic wastes like Caberlin would all be gone from the Coven. Made them weaker to keep them around, made the story that they were higher beings now ring hollow in his ear. How could this shaking mass of ruined flesh be a higher being than anything?

  “She...she…she won’t…you can’t,” Caberlin stammers.

  “You weren’t supposed to go and burn down a town, Caberlin,” Ferro says, the words rasping from his charred lips. “We’re supposed to be slipping through unnoticed, and you had to go do a fool thing like that. Sigrid didn’t much like that. She thinks you are unpredictable, disobedient, and she’s right. We both know she is. Most importantly, she thinks nine is an unlucky number, thinks it's best to make the coven back down to eight.”

  “Get away from me!” Caberlin kicks at him, but the blows are weak.

  Ferro has found himself kicked at a lot in the past few months, people screaming those same words at him, but just like then, it doesn’t stop him now. He flicks out with his hand, the barest touch twisting and morphing Caberlin’s one good leg into a new blade. The tip digs deep into the meat of the man’s crotch, and Ferro gives it a good kick to drive it in deeper as he steps forward.

  “It hurt my feeling a bit when you called me a freak,” Ferro admits, though he doubts Caberlin can hear him over his wailing. “We’re supposed to be something like a family, and you go and say that to me. Not very brotherly.”

  “Please!” Caberlin screams. “Please! Please! Please!”

  “You’ll be gone in just a second.” Ferro bends, reaching out for Caberlin’s chest.

  The cries climb in pitch, winding so high that they become inaudible, but Ferro is used to that too now. It doesn’t take long. With the final impact of sharp iron on meat, silence comes back over the stable. Ferro stands, stepping away from the gore left on the floor, turning burned eyes about. His gaze falls, at the last, on the woman standing there, holding a saddle between herself and him, rope dangling from her neck.

  “Please,” she starts, but she has no further words waiting.

  “I’m sorry, darlin’.” Ferro gestures to the charred remains of his face, feeling his skin tear with each flex. “Got to fix this up. I’ll make it nice and easy for you. Over real quick, you’ll never even notice.”

  She falls as he takes his first step her way, the saddle thudding heavily to the floor. His shadow passes over her, and she shakes, but he doesn’t lie. She never feels a thing.

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