20. Potential Espionage

“Bridget and I grew up in the same village. We actually lived next door to each other, and played games together a lot. More importantly our parents were both pretty active in different guilds, but they were close friends. This was before the church was quite as active in guild matters as they are now, although in retrospect I think they were looking to get a foot in the door.” Willard sighs and shakes his head. “It was a nice enough childhood, you know how it is, I had a few guilds interested in me for my magic, all the normal stuff, at least until I was twelve.”

He pauses to take a few more deep breaths before continuing. “Me and Bridget were out of the house playing … something, I don’t remember what. On the way back … I saw the smoke before we were even on the street. It wasn’t a full fledged fire, closer to the smoldering wreckage a fire leaves in its wake.” He pauses again, rubs his eyes and continues. “Apparently Bridget’s family were accused of being Dark Mages, and the church did an on site execution. Obviously I never figured out if they were telling the truth about her parents, but that doesn’t really matter.”

His hand goes to rest on his sword, and ends up resting on his empty sheath. “My parents weren’t accused of being Dark Mages, they weren’t even accused of knowingly hiding Dark Mages. They were found guilty of “willing association with Dark Mages”, and apparently the punishment for that was the same as the punishment for Dark Mages. A part of me is curious what would’ve happened if they found us. My guess is the two of us would have been considered willing associates of willing associates to Dark Mages or something similar, and punished the same way … luckily we didn’t have to find out. I don’t know who tipped them off, although not for lack of trying, but whoever it was either didn’t know or didn’t care about the two kids, and the church never even knew to look for us.”

Gwendolyn nods. “I see … I think I can guess, but where did the person you just attacked come in … and the apprentice for that matter?”

He sighs and rubs the bridge of his nose. “I wasn’t exactly lying when I said the apprentice was an accident. A few years ago I managed to track down the Light Mage who actually did the job ‘Sir Thomas’, as against the idea as Bridget was she managed to get me a really nice sword, nicer than the one I was using in that last fight. I tried to sneak into the church, and pretty immediately it went wrong.” He pauses and looks off into the distance. “You can probably fill in the rest, I was pretty lucky how empty it was at the time, but I ended up in a fight with both Thomas, and his apprentice without even getting the element of surprise. It felt like he was a lot weaker back then, but maybe he was just toying with me back then too. I probably would’ve died if not for the sword, and even then I barely escaped with my armor in scraps. There’s not all that much to tell after that. I tried to train my magic and get stronger, but as you can probably tell, it apparently wasn’t enough.”

There’s a few seconds of silence before Gwendolyn starts talking. “I see … I appreciate the honesty, although I’d much prefer to have known about this before it became an issue. In the future we’ll need to be even more careful regarding our interactions with the church now that they have a set of faces to attach our group to each other. We might need magical disguises if that’s something you can do.” She directs the last part of that to me.

I shrug. “At this point, sure. Just don’t let it trace back to me.” I’m pretty sure whichever part of my brain was maintaining strict adherence to laws went out for a break a few days ago and hasn’t come back since, I’ll probably find it face down dead in some alley at this rate. It wasn’t really all that important of a part anyway, I might have just been imagining it’s existence before.

She continues. “Great. Today didn’t go even remotely well, but we all knew something like this would eventually happen. Everyone here has at least some tension with the church, something was going to erupt into a fight eventually. The important thing is that we still have paths forward.” She pauses. “Though I’m a bit interested where Bridget fits into all this … I didn’t know any of this about her.”

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Wait a second. “Could you describe that sword you mentioned? With the timing …”

Willard looks over at me. “It’s been a while but … it was attuned heavily with rock magic. Every time I made an attack it would launch shards of nearby rock at odd angles towards the target to make it harder to block anything. It could also cut through rocks like butter. That’s how I managed to escape with it, collapsing the ceiling on them as I ran. Unfortunately it burned out after the fight, the blade got snapped in half so while it still worked for a few minutes eventually everything just faded.”

“I remember that sword! She said a friend of hers needed a powerful weapon for hunting magical beasts that could let the user escape from Dark Mages. I even avoided illusions out of fear that multiple Dark Mages would see right through them.” So … she lied to me? Glass houses I know, but I still want to talk with her about this.

Gwendolyn looks between the two of us. “So Bridget knew you well enough to commission a powerful weapon for a friend sight unseen, and as soon as you might have had to stop working she connected you with that same friend. As a result she not so subtly pushed you towards continuing to work as an artificer, just illegally. All after apparently having parents who were at least accused of being Dark Mages? Not to mention she’s also the one who set us up with our employer in the first place … I think we all need to talk with her as soon as we get back. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but she’s clearly making a lot more moves than we’re seeing. Not to mention she never told any of this to us … How many things have you made for her Jezebel?

I think for a bit. “A dozen … or so? It was over a decent period of time, and there wasn’t anything terribly memorable about a lot of them, so I’m probably forgetting a couple. It’s not like it was directly illegal to do a friend a favor every once in a while.”

Gwendolyn nods. “We should talk to her when we get back, as a group. With that said, what direction are we going? Assuming nobody else has any massive secrets they want to get off their chest.”

After a few seconds of silence that gets a chuckle from Johannes. “No, I don’t think so. Just please tell me we’ll avoid jumping straight into another fight we can’t win … and that we’re not going to start yet another fight unless the majority of us actually agree on it beforehand. No matter how this Bridget situation pans out.”

Gwendolyn nods. “I can agree to that, arguably that’s how it was supposed to work from the start.” She looks pointedly at Willard. “We’ll call this a warning, if you want to get vengeance, at least tell us first, we’ll be more than capable of warning you if you’re about to charge into something you’re not going to win, and of getting you out if stroke when things get out of hand.”

Willard sighs looking down at his empty sheathe. “I’ll try it, no promises that my emotions won’t get the better of me again. It’s hard to be face to face with someone like that.”

She puts her hand on his shoulder again. “I know, but that’s why it’s important to have someone else think clearly.”

Willard stands there for a few seconds. “Fine. Can we just finish up our work out here? With everything that’s gone wrong I just want to get paid.”

Gwendolyn gives a chuckle. “I can get behind that. Are there any objections to finishing the mission, getting paid, then meeting with Bridget?” She waits a few seconds for anyone to object, when nobody does she continues. “Great, then let's go wipe out these spiders.”

The five of us start our traveling again, and despite everything not much about it actually changes. Whenever I have the dark magic to spare I try to practice creating illusory objects in hand and getting the feeling right, but that’s not even all that often with how little dark magic I have to work with. I at least still get to practice at night even if it’s not on other people, that’s better than it could be.