I stared at Helena, wondering if she was insane. I studied her eyes; deep, cool, blue-grey, like the ocean on an overcast day. The lines at their edges gave her a wise look. Though, I reasoned that didn’t necessarily mean she was playing with a full deck.
“What do you have to say to that?” the woman returned my gaze, her posture now challenging. And in spite of that she turned, scooted to the opposite side of the room and retrieved a tray. When she returned she placed it in front of me. “You should eat and drink, you lack nourishment.” Atop the wooden tray sat a silver pitcher, a glass and rather aged looking loaf of bread. I quickly poured the contents of the pitcher into the glass. The water could’ve been champagne the way I cherished it as it moved down my throat. I tore off two hunks of bread and chewed them mercilessly.
“Well you just told me that I was walking a dog that’s, what? At least four decades old? What exactly am I supposed to think?”
“I’d like to know how you did it?”
“Did what?”
“Brought it back from the dead?”
The look on my face must’ve shown this woman that I was seriously doubting her sanity, but the questions continued.
“Or was it just an illusion? You read our minds then? Plucked it from our memories?”
“Helena, I have no clue how the dog came to be here, I don’t even know how I came to be here…”
“You entered our minds without permission, and stole from one of us, both of us!”
“I swear lady if I could’ve figured any of this out, I would have leveled with your already.”
Helena stood, “Because you are a thief I cannot trust you. Because I cannot trust you we cannot risk your existence.”
I tensed, realizing somewhat stupidly, that throughout this interrogation I had not been, nor now was, restrained. “Wha-?”
Before Helena could berate me further, shouting made its way into the cabin from outside. I could hear a man, whom I thought might be Thaddeus hollering back at another man, or group of men. And then I smelled smoke.
Helena ran to the door, forgetting about me, and the apparent ghost-dog, at least for the moment. She flung the cabin door aside faster than I would’ve thought a woman of her age was capable. She yelled out at someone that I could not see, “He’s escaped Praesus you won’t find him here, even if you burn down our whole village!”
“Lies pour from your tongue you dried up husk of a woman.” a voice boomed from beyond my view.
At this point I rose, thinking that self-preservation may be dependant on getting away from these whackos. There was no discernible way out other than the door at which Helena stood, she I headed straight for it, intending to go through her if I needed to.
However, when I got to the passageway and stared from it Helena and Thaddeus were outside. There was a man on horseback wearing a duster and sitting on top of a horse. In spite of the flowing coat, he looked as if he were chiseled from stone and sported a long blonde beard that ended in three distinct points, as if he had styled it after a trident.
When the man Helena referred to as Praesus saw me he just laughed. The sheer confidence of it was enough to make you shiver. It was if he knew how all of this was going to end, “Little man, you’re coming with me.” the man did not point, but it was certain he meant me.
Helena turned to me, her once cool, calculating eyes were wet with warm tears, “Where’s Old Rufus?”
I looked behind me, searching the cabin despite of the situation unfolding around me. Old Rufus was gone, if he had ever even been there in the first place. I turned back to Helena, and offered the only thing I could, a shrug.
The smoke had multiplied exponentially, and was now filling the cabin. as I rushed outside, I noted that the thatched roof had been set ablaze. Three men, also on horseback, circled towards Helena, Thaddeus and I from the rear of the building. In appearance, they looked not unlike Praesus, save for the fact that they lacked his air of superior confidence.
They sat atop their steeds as thick, deep orange flames and black smoke rolled off the roof of the building.
As if Praesus was giving us just a moment to take this all in, he broke his silence, “Helena, if I ever hear of you doing anything like this again, without my knowledge the next building to burn will have you and the old man inside it, I’ll make sure of that.” When he was finished addressing the woman, he turned his attention to me, “And you there traveler, you’ll be coming with me now.”
Before, I could protest, I was scooped up by one of Praesus’ henchmen, he lifted me like I was a child, tossing me over the forefront of the saddle. I struggled but only briefly, with the finesse that only practice can bring, the man pinned me down, holding my arms with one hand while he searched in his saddle bag and retrieved a length of rope with his free hand. He easily cinched my wrists, and when he was done he looked down at me and said one line only, “Don’t start to scream, for two reasons: One, it annoys me, and two there’s no one that’s gonna hear you that’ll care.”
