Act of Will by A. J. Hartley Page A

it off by the wagon, and gone back for another, the light was going fast. I was poking around for more sticks when I saw it, just out of the corner of my eye. It reared up and its head sort of hung there in the air, its hood flared. I’m no naturalist, but I know a cobra when I see one. They turn up from time to time in the city, but this was the first time I’d seen one up close outside a street show. It watched me, its tongue flicking slightly. I wanted to call out to the others but didn’t dare. Could snakes hear? I didn’t even know that. I turned my head to face it and felt like I was about to pass out.
    “Don’t look at it.”
    Garnet was behind me. I hadn’t heard him approach. “They spit venom into your eyes,” he said. “Look down and back off slowly.”
    “They spit venom?” I muttered, fear making me stupid.
    “Just back away,” hissed Garnet, rather like the snake.
    I moved and the cobra reared another few inches and made a gasping, hostile sound like Mrs. Pugh on rent day. Garnet slipped between me and it with his ax in his hand. I edged back, then scrambled away and watched Garnet staring at it. It was a good ten feet away but looked big enough to strike most of that distance. Shielding his face, he too backed off, towards me. When he reached me and the snake lowered itself to earth I spluttered, “Why didn’t you kill it?”
    “It wouldn’t have harmed you so long as you kept your distance.”
    “And if it comes back?”
    “We’ll be sleeping,” said Garnet. That was supposed to be reassuring. He added, “It can’t eat anything as big as us so it will only strike at us if we threaten it. How can we threaten it if we are asleep?”
    Great. So we would be sharing our camp with all manner of reptiles, which was fine so long as we didn’t move and force them to kill us all.
    “Snakes have worse social skills than you,” I remarked. “I can’t believe you didn’t swing for it while you had the chance. What do you carry that ax for if you never use the bloody thing?”
    “Oh,” he replied menacingly, “I use it, all right.”

    They put me on first watch. I asked what I was supposed to do and Renthrette, her lips curled with the contempt she reserved for me, said, “You watch.”
    That was really helpful. So I spent an hour sitting by the dying fire looking around through the night and reflected on the day. I had washed in a bucket of warm water until it was cool and brownish. I had eaten two raw carrots and some stewed mutton and potatoes flavored with the herbs Orgos found hereabouts. Not bad, but not duckling. Though I had presumed that Renthrette would do the cooking, she had left it all to Mithos and Orgos while she repaired a broken wheel spoke on the wagon, just to prove me wrong. The two men worked silently together, used to each other. How long had they been together? Ten years? More, perhaps. Ten years of tents and wagons and bloody snakes and swords. They must be out of their minds.
    And I was with them. I had relieved myself in the bushes, drunk from a smelly waterskin in the wagon, and shot my little crossbow over and over until I could hit a tree at twenty paces every other time. I had been reprimanded by Mithos for bringing green wood and for shooting at live trees. I had been vaguely threatened by Garnet and ignored utterly by his good-looking sister. If things didn’t change soon, I was going to make a real pig’s ear out of the rest of my life.
    I had watched Renthrette and her brother unpacking their stuff and laying it out. Everything was meticulously arranged: cooking pots stacked together, rope neatly coiled, horse bridles and harnesses untangled and hung up, mail corselet oiled and laid out, sword at the ready in case of emergency. Renthrette had spent much of the evening stitching some clothing, and I had watched her working with the same careful, regulated focus that typified the pair of them. I looked over to where she had bedded down in a small tent and