Chapter 10: Face to face with the past 3
The scorched scent of a long-dead olive tree still seemed to cling to the inside of Ezra’s snout, even here, a decade older and leagues away. He blinked, the vivid memory of that tiny, radiant fire-bird dissolving against the harsh, sun-bleached reality of Serpico’s church wall at his back. The weight of his adult armor felt suddenly foreign, a shell over a boy who’d just had his first taste of belonging violently interrupted.
He shifted, his gaze still locked on those distant, accusing vines, when Lira’s elbow nudged his ribs.
“You’ve gone quiet,” the elf said, her voice low beside him. Her keen brown eyes scanned his profile, missing nothing. “That’s usually Sig’s trick. Everything alright?”
Ezra’s mask snapped back into place with an almost audible click. He snorted, a puff of dust rising from his pauldron. “Quiet? Me? Never. Just contemplating the profound philosophical implications of vineyard orientation. See how those rows follow the old aqueduct? Terrible for the grapes. Creates a stubborn vintage. Much like our dear Ginny.” He forced a chuckle, but it landed flat even to his own ears.
Lira didn’t press. She simply nodded, her attention returning to the church door, but her silence was more probing than any question. It held space for the truth he wouldn’t give.
He was grateful for it. His mind, however, was already tumbling back through the years, not to the screaming flames, but to the quieter, greener afternoons that came later. A different vineyard. A different tree.
The air under the old cypress tree was heavy with the scent of warm earth and ripening grapes. It was a private world, a pocket of shade on a hill overlooking a valley where the guild camps had finally gone cold. Ezra, now fourteen with horns that had grown sharp and stubborn, lay on his back, one hand behind his head, the other absently spinning a wooden practice sword by its hilt. The blade was clumsily carved, nicked from a hundred imaginary battles against knotty roots and thistle patches.
Beside him, Mira, a year younger and perpetually tucked into herself, was scribbling in her book. It was no longer the childish ledger of berry-juice dreams. Its covers were now reinforced with scavenged leather, its pages a chaotic mix of precise, arcane diagrams, smudged charcoal practice circles, and tight, anxious script. Her velvet-covered antlers were more pronounced, and a permanent smudge of soot or ink seemed to live on the bridge of her nose.
“I’m telling you,” Ezra said, his voice cracking mid-sentence. He cleared his throat, annoyed. “The Guild of Hawks is recruiting out of Valloria’s eastern garrison. Well, not recruiting recruiting. But they take on auxiliaries. Squires. People to polish shields and stuff.”
“Polish shields,” Mira repeated, not looking up. Her charcoal stick whispered across the page, adding fine cross-hatching to a diagram of a locking rune.
“It’s a start! You start with the shields, you learn the patterns, you get noticed. Next thing you know, you’re on a proper adventure.” He sat up, enthusiasm animating his every limb. He pointed his wooden sword toward the hazy horizon. “Clearing out a gnoll den from the Trade Pass. Escorting a merchant caravan through the Blackridge. Helping people. Actually doing something.”
Mira’s hand paused. She looked at him then, her large, liquid eyes holding a depth of knowing that always unnerved him. “Helping which people, Ezra?”
“Any people! The people who need it. The ones getting kicked around by… by whatever. Bandits. Monsters. Bad weather.” He gestured vaguely, his conviction pure but shapeless.
“The people who would hire a demon to help them?” she asked softly.
The question hung in the dappled light. A fly buzzed between them. Ezra’s grip tightened on the wooden sword. The grain of it was familiar, a comfort. He had chosen it deliberately, years ago, after the olive tree incident. Magic was Mira’s path. It was glorious and terrifying and theirs, but it was also loud. It brought adult voices, low and worried. It brought moving on.
A sword was quiet. A sword was straightforward. A sword was something an adventurer carried. An adventurer belonged nowhere, so he could belong anywhere.
“They won’t care what I am if I’m saving their village,” he said, defiance hardening his voice. “They’ll see the act, not the horns.”
Mira sighed, a sound too weary for thirteen. She closed her book, clutching it to her chest like a shield. “Maybe. Or they’ll see the horns first and you’ll have to save the village twice.” She plucked a blade of grass, splitting it with a careful claw. “What about the whispering? You haven’t even tried in months.”
A hot flush of shame crept up his neck. The ‘fire-whispering’. Their secret. Her heritage. His abandoned gift. The few times he’d tried since childhood, all he’d managed were pathetic, sputtering sparks that died in his palm, leaving behind the smell of singed fur and failure. Mira’s control had grown, her focus turning inward, toward containment and precision, her magic moving from wild bursts to intricate, tiny constructs—a flickering lace wing, a chain of minute, interlocking flames.
It was beautiful. And it felt like a language he was forgetting how to speak.
“It’s not my thing,” he muttered, slashing the wooden sword through a sunbeam, watching the dust motes scatter. “Swords are. Action is. Out there.” He jerked his head toward the wide valley. “Not in a book.”
“It’s not just a book,” she said, a rare flicker of irritation in her voice. “It’s notes. It’s practice. It’s how you don’t burn down the world by accident.” Her gaze flicked to his sword. “That’s how you don’t get killed on your first day. Preparation.”
“Planning is for wizards and generals,” Ezra scoffed, adopting a swagger he’d heard from a traveling sell-sword. “Adventuring is about guts. About seeing what’s in front of you and doing something about it.” He sprang to his feet, falling into a theatrical guard stance, the wooden sword extended. “Imagine it! A griffon, feathers all charged with lightning, diving out of the sun. The villagers are screaming. The guards are useless. Who steps forward?”
Mira watched him, her expression unreadable. “The idiot with the wooden sword?”
“The hero!” he insisted, undeterred. He began to move through a series of exaggerated parries and thrusts, his movements energetic but unpolished, his hooves churning the soft earth. “He doesn’t wait! He assesses the angle of descent, notes the crackle in the air—a metal weapon is a liability. So he dives, rolls, comes up beneath it with… with a tangle of rope! Or a spear! Or he lures it toward the old mill, gets it tangled in the sails!” He was panting slightly, his eyes shining with the imagined victory. “He uses the world. He acts.”
He finished with a final, triumphant lunge, holding the pose. The vineyard was silent save for his breathing. Mira hadn’t moved.
“And then what?” she asked.
“What do you mean, ‘and then what’? He saves the day! They cheer! They give him a real sword.”
“And then he leaves,” Mira stated. It wasn’t a question. She looked down at her book, tracing the worn leather edge. “Because that’s what adventurers do. They save the day and then they go, looking for the next one. They don’t stay to help rebuild the mill. They don’t learn the villagers’ names. The act is everything. The belonging is nowhere.”
Ezra’s sword arm dropped. The exhilaration leaked out of him, replaced by a cold, frustrating ache. She saw right through the glittering fantasy to the lonely engine at its core. He wasn’t dreaming of helping people; he was dreaming of a moment—a single, crystallized moment—where his form would be so undeniably, heroically useful that the question of what he was would become irrelevant. He was dreaming of a performance that would finally earn him a permanent seat at the table.
But she was right. The performance always ended. The curtain fell. You took your bow and you left.
“It’s better than hiding in a vineyard,” he said finally, the words coming out sullen and smaller than he intended.
“I’m not hiding,” Mira whispered, but she pulled her knees tighter to her chest, making herself small. “I’m learning. So that when I do something, I know exactly what it is, and I can control it. So no one gets hurt. So I don’t have to…” She didn’t finish, but the image of the weeping, blackened olive tree stood between them as clearly as if it had grown there in the shade.
They sat in a silence that was no longer companionable, but charged with the friction of two paths violently diverging. He, towards a loud, external validation he could hold like a sword. She, towards a quiet, internal mastery she could barely control.
The sun dipped lower, stretching the cypress’s shadow like a dark finger pointing down into the valley, toward the road that led away. Ezra finally sat back down, laying the wooden sword across his lap. He stared at it, the earnest tool of his childhood dreams, and felt its terrible lightness.
“I’m going to go, you know,” he said, not looking at her. “When I’m old enough. I really am.”
Mira was quiet for a long time. When she spoke, her voice was so quiet it was almost lost in the rustle of the leaves above. “I know.”
“I know.” Her words were barely a sigh, a surrendering to the inevitable road that would unspool between them. She hugged her book tighter, a parchment-and-leather fortress against a future she already saw too clearly.
The crunch of gravel under boot soles was the only warning.
It wasn’t a casual sound. It was deliberate, a triplet of heavy, scattering steps coming up the hill from the workers’ path. Ezra’s head came up, his ears swiveling beneath his helmet of hair. Mira went very still, her eyes widening not with fear, but with a familiar, weary dread.
Three figures crested the rise, backlit by the low sun, their shadows long and predatory across the vineyard rows. They were human boys from the nearby hamlet, two years older and permanently marinated in the arrogance of being the local majority. Their leader was Goro, thick-necked and perpetually sneering, his two shadows, Toma and Luca, fanned out beside him, grinning.
“Look what’s fertilizing our fallow row,” Goro announced, his voice a dull rasp. He kicked a clod of earth that shattered near Ezra’s hooves. “The stink’s been bothering the pickers all afternoon. Thought it was a dead badger.”
Toma snickered, picking up a loose stone. “Nah. Badgers are useful. Eat pests. These things just eat and take up space.”
Ezra felt the old script tighten around his lungs. The script said: get up. Make a joke. Defuse. Leave. He saw Mira shrink infinitesimally, her gaze fixed on the ground, willing invisibility. The memory of being pulled away from a smoldering tree, of placating adult voices, of constant, graceful retreat, flashed hot behind his eyes.
His fingers curled around the wooden practice sword. It was a child’s toy.
He didn’t stand up. He didn’t smile.
He slowly lifted his gaze to meet Goro’s, and he stayed seated under the cypress tree. “We’re not on your land, Goro,” he said, his voice unnervingly flat. “The fallow row ends by the marker stone. You’re standing in it.”
The boys blinked, their grins faltering for a second at the lack of flight, at the direct correction. This was a new line in the play.
Goro recovered, his sneer deepening. He took two heavy steps forward, now well within the tree’s shade. “I say where my land is, goat-foot. And I say your stink is trespassing.” His eyes flicked to Mira, who was trembling now. “What’s in the book, freak? Drawing pretty pictures of your mommy?”
“Don’t,” Ezra said, the single word cracking the air.
“Or what?” Goro laughed, bending down to put his face closer to Ezra’s. His breath smelled of cheap wine and onions. “You’ll tell your caretakers? They’ll just tribute the Devil with some Blood for...uhh.. vengeance? They always do.”
The falsehood of it was a physical slap. It stripped the final veneer off the old, accommodating pain. A cold clarity settled over Ezra, sharper than any blade. This wasn’t about this patch of dirt. This was about every patch of dirt they’d ever been asked to leave.
Goro, mistaking the silence for surrender, reached out a callused hand not for Ezra, but to snatch the book from Mira’s grip.
Ezra moved.
He didn’t use the wooden sword. He exploded upward from his sitting position, the crown of his head driving with the full force of his legs into the underside of Goro’s jaw. A wet, clacking sound echoed under the tree.
Goro staggered back, tripping over a root and landing hard on his back, his hands flying to his face. Surprised shouts erupted from Toma and Luca. Mira scrambled backward, clutching her book to her chest.
Ezra was already standing, breathing steady, the wooden sword now held in a proper two-handed grip. The weight felt different. Real. “Get up,” he said to Goro, his voice still that terrible, calm flatline. “Get up and leave.”
Goro lay sprawled in the dirt, more stunned than hurt, the taste of copper flooding his mouth where his teeth had cut his cheek. His eyes, wide with a confusion that swiftly boiled into pure humiliation, focused on Ezra standing over him. A low growl worked its way up from his chest. He pushed himself up onto his elbows, then his feet, his movements deliberate and heavy.
“You little shit,” he slurred, wiping his mouth and staring at the red smear on his hand. The surprise was gone, replaced by a blotchy, vengeful rage. Toma and Luca shifted behind him, their earlier bravado tempered by the unexpected violence, but they didn’t flee. Not yet. “You think you’re something? Out here with your freak friend?”
“I think you should walk back down the hill,” Ezra said, his voice still devoid of its usual performative cheer. It was a cold, clean sound. He adjusted his grip on the wooden sword, its point not raised in threat, but held ready at his side. Everything in his posture was waiting.
Goro charged. It wasn’t a fighter’s lunge; it was a bull’s rush, all graceless anger and swinging fists. Ezra didn’t move until the last second.
He pivoted on one hoof, letting the charge carry Goro past him. As the bigger boy stumbled by, off-balance, Ezra reversed his grip and brought the practice sword’s pommel cracking up in a sharp, rising arc. It connected squarely with the side of Goro’s nose.
A wet, crunching pop echoed, too loud in the quiet vineyard. Goro cried out, a garbled sound of pain and shock, and reeled back, both hands flying to his face. Blood, shockingly bright, immediately began seeping between his thick fingers, dripping in steady patters onto the sun-baked earth at his feet. He made a wet, snorting sound, his eyes swimming with tears of pure, animal pain.
Ezra stepped back, resetting his stance. He watched, breath even. The wooden sword in his hand felt like an extension of his own cold intent. Mira had gone utterly silent behind him.
Toma and Luca stared, their mouths agape. The sight of their leader, bloodied and confused by a demon with a child’s toy, unmoored them. The fantasy of easy cruelty met the reality of a cost. They exchanged a single, panicked glance.
“Goro…” Toma ventured, his voice thin.
Goro removed one hand from his face, staring at the slick crimson covering his palm. He looked from his blood to Ezra’s impassive visage, to his hesitant friends. The fight drained from him, leaving only a profound, humiliated emptiness. He took a stumbling step backward, then another.
No one spoke. With a final, gutted glance, Goro turned and shambled down the hill, his shoulders hunched around his broken pride. Toma and Luca scrambled after him, their earlier swagger completely gone, their footsteps scraping a frantic retreat through the grapevines.