Power Trio

Quillbear troop onto the stage in rugged performance blacks. Nick slings his superstrat on and nudges his overdrive pedal to life. His amp’s vicious promise curls out in a bleed of static. He clicks his tongue into the mic. It’s hot. The bar room chatter melts into silent anticipation.

No intro, no fucking around. He turns his back on the audience. He looks to his mate, who winks and wraps her lips into a little blown kiss. He looks to his drummer, who shimmies in her seat and nods.

“Punch it,” he whispers.

Anise flicks a stick into the air, twirls it end-over-end, and catches it in a fist. Then she brings it whistling down onto her snare and drills out the precise volley of triplets that launches them into Integration.

Nick spins on his heel and locks onto the mic, spitting the first verse into the vast, clear cavern of Anise’s drumline. The bellowing fuzz of Dee’s bass comes rushing up like a terminal fall and Nick pulls his guitar perpendicular to the floor as he dives its neck to meet her.

And here’s the storm that he was hoping to summon from his two neophytes. Your first show, it’s easy to give into adrenaline and rush the rhythm, floor it into a frantic speed that causes mistakes. But Anise is as clockwork as ever, her shoulders pumping in time as she directs her gaze to the blur of her drumsticks.

Your first show, it’s easy to close off, glue yourself to one spot and succumb to the anxiety of the stage lights. But Dee is dancing and twisting to the rhythm, her face lit like a beacon with shocked joy at the sight of an audience ensnared to her sound.

Your first show, it’s easy to get in your head on the first inevitable fuck-up. But when they blow past the bridge (oops!), they keep right on blowing into a free-flowing repeat of the verse that Nick improvises a kamikaze solo across.

Dee sizzles the song to a halt with a grinding slide up the neck and the ovation is exactly what he had prayed for. Nick glances at his backline and gives them a mouthed fuck yeah before stepping up to the mic. “On your feet for Quillbear.” He barks it in packtongue and the several orcs in their audience go ballistic. “This one’s called Sword of the Lictor.”

The tick-ticka-tick-ticka BANG of Anise’s drums under his words and they catapult into their next intro.

By the time Nick’s final shriek has reverberated back into his ears, the crowd’s grown and the applause is unanimous. Nick has time for a clipped thank you before Legendary’s stormed the stage in congratulation.

“I knew it,” Kell crows as she plucks Anise into an embrace. “I fuckin’ knew you fucked severely.”

Anise’s laugh sounds like a giddy kid’s as she returns Kell’s hug. She looks so bright and unburdened.

A tap at his shoulder. Evan’s offering him a frosty stein of lager. “That was a sick set, man,” he says. “We’re on in fifteen. Go smooch your mate and sign some autographs, then get back up here.”

Nick licks the froth from his upper lip as he hurries to the green room. Dee is belting her bassline to Lictor as she packs her stuff away. “Nicky!” she cries, and leaps into his arms. To his smug satisfaction, he’s strong enough now to catch her.

Anise sidles into the room with her backpack in tow. “Don’t mind me.”

Dee grabs her wrist as she goes by and tugs her into the hug. “You are a fucking star.”

Anise makes an adorable little oh as the orcs fold their arms around her. “You brought it, Ani,” Nick says. “That was incredible. Thank you.”

Anise’s arm wraps around his waist. “Thank you for making me do this shit. This was one of those dreams deferred for, like, decades.”

They stand together and share a breath. Nick and Dee’s hands together cover most Anise’s back in their scope. She’s so soft and small, so unlike them.

That urge comes again, and it tightens Nick’s grip against the leather on Anise’s back. He starts to break out of the hug, but the elf’s light touch keeps him close. She closes her eyes and nestles her head against Nick and Dee. The orcs share a look. Anise’s chest expands on a deep inhale. Is she smelling them?

Her eyes snap open, and she takes a quick step back. “Gotta change. Be right back.” She hastily shoulders her backpack and heads to the bathroom.

They follow her with their eyes.

“We’re doing this, aren’t we?” Dee says.

Nick bites his tongue pensively. “If we are, we tell her about the magic first.” He glances at her. “I was keeping things from you, and it messed me up. I can’t do that again.”

She blows air out through her nose. “Okay. That’s fair. Gonna be a bear of a talk, I bet, but the ‘do you want to have sex with us’ talk is gonna be a bear, too.”

“You wanna bring her on the next hike, then?”

Dee shrugs. “Better to do it near camp so she doesn’t feel trapped. We could invite her to have some of that bigass trout you caught.”

Anise emerges from the bathroom, in her work clothes again. “I’m headed for GA,” she says. “Want to meet at the bar, Dee? Let Warcry buy you a drink or two?”

“You bet, girl.” Dee drops her gig bag with a carelessness that twitches Nick’s eye. He doesn’t suppose he has a leg to stand on, the kind of thrashing he gives his guitar. “You ever have a Traitorous Sister?”

The bridge of Anise’s nose wrinkles with her smile. “I’m not gonna ask what that is. I’m just gonna order two.”

Dee gives Nick one last fortifying touch, a palm against his chest to feel his heartbeat. “See you out there, my lovely man.”

He clasps her hand and shoulders his guitar back on, and for a few minutes he’s alone in the green room, twanging his unamplified strings. Legendary file in at 5 minutes to showtime.

“Dude.” Thekla’s voice is low and urgent. “Are you and Dee trying to sleep with our manager?”

“What?” Nick’s pulse jumps like he just leapt into an ice bath.

“You were this close to grinding on her when you zipped her up and now Dee is drooling all over her at the bar.” Kell’s eyes are wide. “Oh, my god. Look at his face. He wants to fuck our manager.”

Nick’s eyes nail themselves to the floor. “Let’s just focus on the show, okay?”

Kell cackles. “No, man. You don’t get it. We been trying to get Ani some dick for, like, a year.”

“We endorse it.” Evan nods serenely.

“Fuck our manager, Nick,” Kell says. “We’re rooting for you.”

Nick throws his hands up. “Guys, I am really not prepared to talk about this.”

“Okay, but just know that if you do, we have a dowry to give you,” Thekla says. “We got like five cows and a dinner set.”

* * *

Rain that night. Nick and Dee listen to it cascade in sheets off their yurt.

Rain the next morning, too. The rhinos lurch and grunt as they navigate the softening earth. The Voraag pack waterproof their supplies. The Legendary trailer plays host to anyone who needs drying off and warming up. “This shit was not recorded in the almanac,” grumbles Parag as he stretches his poncho across the pack’s battered binder. He slaps it shut and holds it out to Nick. “You pass this to Dee, Nicky?”

“Got it.” Nick bundles the binder away. Everyone’s calling him Nicky now. He remembers how much it used to bother him.

Dalma Kamiyon pokes her head out from around Parag’s hip. She’s taking cover within his poncho like some kind of pet rodent. “While you are in the trailer, please inform Thekla that I’d like my big hat returned. The one with the brim that she likes. I need to stay dry and I disdain umbrellas.”

“You got it, DK.” Nick reaches under Doink’s rain cloth and gives his irked rhino a scratch. “By the way, I keep getting mixed reports on you two. Is it, like, a thing?”

“No,” Parag says.

Dalma slides into Parag’s lap. “Yes,” she says.

“It is not.” But Parag tucks a hand across Dalma’s midsection to keep her steady on his rhino.

“Yes it is,” Dalma says.

“Hey, congrats.” Nick clicks his tongue and peels off with Doink as Parag and Dalma argue sotto voce.

“DK, we can’t. I’d squash you like a fuckin’ bug.”

“Yes, Mr. Parag. That’s my expectation.”

Nick hitches his rhino to the trailer team and whistles Dee’s summons. This is a little trick she taught him. Every packmate has their own whistle; Dee’s is a cheeky little warble and Nick’s is a low loop-de-loop thing.

The trailer window slats down and Evan pokes his head out. “Nick,” he cries, over the drumming sound of the rain. “Get in here. We’re making Dee her first margarita.”

“Oh, shit.” Nick hops up into the moving staircase and swings the door in.

Dee and Anise are listening to the radio, which buzzes to them in packtongue. Nick definitely hears flooding in the mix. He slides his packmistress the radio almanac and smooches her forehead.

Kell’s clattering something in a cocktail shaker while Thekla sits on the kitchen counter, nose in a little cocktail book and foot poking the orc’s thigh. “Sex on the Beach,” she says.

“Cranberry juice, orange juice, peach schnapps, vodka, ice,” Kell recites. “Garnished with a cherry and-slash-or an orange slice. Gimme a hard one, come on.”

“Rain,” Anise says. “That means rain?”

“Yup.” Dee writes it out on a notepad in pack script. “Now use it in a sentence for me.”

“Rain make you wet,” Anise says.

“Ooooh,” sings Kell. “It’s reaaadyyyy.”

“Pass me the Aux cord.” Evan holds his hand out. “Dee’s First Marg will be set to Margaritaville.”

Dee chuckles. “If y’all say so. Long as the River Hasinalzk don’t flood while we’re margariting.”

They switch off the radio and the dulcet tones of the king of Yacht Rock fill the trailer as Kell pours a rack of dripping margaritas. They pass the drinks around and clink them together. As Jimmy searches for his lost shaker of salt, they take deep pulls.

Dee lowers her glass. “And that’s alcoholic?” she asks.

Kell grins a wicked grin. “That’s quite alcoholic. Whatcha think?”

“I think I’m gonna need two of these.”

Mr. Buffet continues to serenade them as they finish one round, then another. It turns out Evan has a fabulous impression of the man.

Around the last it’s my own damn fault, the trailer creaks to a halt. Nick looks out the window; there’s a queue on the road. Carts, cars, pack animals.

Rarek is talking to a pair of goblins on horseback with a grim set to his face.

“Brother,” Nick calls. “What happened?”

Rarek looks up. “Bridge collapsed,” he says. “River took it.”

The River Hasinalzk has flooded while they were margariting.

When Nick passes along the news, he’s half-convinced that Anise is going to spiral and yell at everyone for switching the radio off, as if knowing about the flooding 5 minutes earlier could have changed it.

And okay, she does kind of spiral. But it’s nothing like the nervous breakdowns of the Anise Cantator he first met, and she isn’t throwing blame around, at them or at herself. Mostly she’s just frantically reading schedules.

“Tamarac’s off,” she says. “Tamarac is seriously off, but there’s other places we could play on the way through Nalar. They’d take us. Wouldn’t they take us? I mean, the bar did.”

“They’d take us.” Dee holds an edge of the foldout map up for her.

“We’re probably missing Rawa City, but that doesn’t kill us if we can negotiate a refund or a reschedule.” Anise chews fretfully on the edge of her pen. “Does the Old World do force majeure?”

A rising hubbub from outside. A cheer? And then there’s a rumbling lurch and they’re moving again. Thekla leans out the kitchenette window. “What the fuck? Did they fix the bridge?”

As the convoy nears the crossing, they hear it over the rain and the peals of thunder.

Music.

A bridge spans the river, but it’s not the one anyone expected. Partially constructed from the wreckage of the old, but in places it looks like it’s made from trees that have been uprooted entirely, their roots tangled and coursing dirt into the whitewater rush beneath them.

And there’s nothing visibly joining them together. No crossbeams or arches. This is not a physically possible bridge. And yet one after another the traveling parties cross it.

This is magic at work. This is some of the most powerful magic Nick has ever seen. The Voraag convoy crosses with chattering awe. The logs beneath are solid and unyielding, as if their passage were over stone and not green, unjoined wood. There’s a burst of speed as the spooked rhinos desperately rush to the far shore.

“This is fucking spooky,” Evan says.

The last rhino’s across and the bridge slow-motion drifts apart; the trees lose their unnatural weightlessness, dipping and dragging into the rapids.

The unearthly song continues, and there’s a ring of gawping observers around its source. “No fucking way,” Thekla says. “I know that playing. No goddamn way.” Legendary pile out from the trailer, heedless of the rain. Nick, Dee, and Anise follow.

The music reverberates from a figure silhouetted in a storm of leaves that flow and eddy around him like the rings of a planet. A lacquered guitar strapped across his chest. Waist-length silver hair, fanning from him like a halo. A billowing onyx tunic, a jet-black hose fretted with golden constellations. Long, graceful ears. Piercing carnelian eyes.

The ash elf’s feet drift to the ground. “I really must work on the aura discharge.” He frowns and plucks a dry leaf from his silver hair. “But it does look quite sorcerous, doesn’t it.”

“Holy shit,” breathes Kell. “Sion.”

“Good evening, Kamiyon family.” Sion Benefice, lead guitarist for Legendary, slides a tempestuous note down his D string. “Not divorced yet, are we?”