Chapter Seventeen

  The Unbound

  There were too many god damn stairs.

  After they had been climbing for about five minutes, Freya finally thought to ask what Esselem’s crown was. It was the tallest point in all of Esselem, the top floor of The Poet’s Tower. Which also happened to be the farthest spire from Esselem Castle.

  After crossing several rickety rope bridges, getting misted with frozen salt water, and climbing a million steps, they finally emerged into the cramped storage room at the top of the spire. This was Esselem’s crown? What a dump.

  A varied group sat atop boxes and sacks with unknown contents. Freya looked out of the single slit in the wall and let out a breath. The clouds this evening were not so far above them, the whole world was tinted orange as the sun hit the horizon.

  “Was there anyone behind you?” A man resting comfortably on a burlap sack asked.

  Freya looked to Zora. She shook her head “It seems not.”

  “Well. This is awkward.” Said a familiar face leaning against the back wall. Roman.

  “Why didn’t you say you wanted to come with? I would have offered-”

  “What are they talking about Taylor?” One of the women asked.

  Freya and Zora shared a look. Taylor?

  “These are friends of mine. They don’t know about our little group.”

  “Can they be trusted?”

  “I said they’re my friends didn’t I?”

  The man on the box grunted. “Somebody also decided to post our secret group’s meeting place on the boards. Not exactly a CIA operation.”

  Roman nodded. “We can skip the usual tip toeing around.”

  “No, they should go through the same process everyone else does.” The same increasingly grouchy woman said.

  “Your opinion is noted Molly. The choice is mine.” Roman’s tone was hard, unlike anything she had seen out of him thus far.

  Not only was Roman secretly a member of this group, he appeared to be their leader. Or at least the most senior member of the group here. Freya had only known him a short while. It made sense there would be plenty she didn’t know about. But Zora looked as if she was ready to punch someone. She clearly wasn’t aware either.

  “Explain yourself,” Zora said, the words were laced with gunpowder. One wrong move and this whole thing would blow.

  “I couldn’t know when we met that we would-” Roman caught himself. “I’ll explain everything to you after this. I promise.”

  “Get on with it, Taylor,” Zora said.

  “Right then.” Roman hopped on top of a box. He looked at the hatch to the stairs, his eyes flickered for a moment, just long enough for Freya to recognize disappointment. He had been hoping for more. “We know why we’re here. The Tsar.” The word dripped with derision. “We received word from some elements within the Travel Agency last night, he has broken out of the Bluffs, and tentatively claimed the land between The Mind’s Mirror and the Plains of Mourning. I personally saw that they were attacking civilians in the area.” Roman gave Freya and Zora an apologetic look. “My mission of the last year has been a success. We are now well primed to take the fight to Sulivar’s backyard. The infrastructure for further operations has been laid. If our last few exploits have have annoyed him.” Roman tapped the box next to his with his foot. It jingled. “He is going to hate what we do to his organization next.”

  Freya found herself nodding along despite how strange it was to see Roman in this position. It looked like Zora was interested too. But then her face twisted like she had just been stabbed with a rusty screwdriver.

  “The last year?” Zora asked.

  Oh shit. Freya thought. When they met her, they said they had less than a year of experience in the Harbor between them. Or was it that they both had a year themselves? Either way. Roman lied. If he was in this group well enough to go on a year long mission, he had to have been in the realm at least two years. Probably more.

  “Zora, this isn’t the time.”

  Freya was annoyed for her, though Zora clearly didn’t need the help.

  “Keep going,” Zora said, her voice had gone soft.

  “Right…” Roman trailed off. “We are going to take the fight to Sulivar. And the people in this room are going to be the tip of the spear.”

  All together, there were six people present. Freya, Zora, Roman, the woman Roman had been talking to, Molly, and the two others who so far hadn’t done or said much. Molly wore surprisingly modern looking clothing, leather coat and blue jeans.

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  The only other woman aside from Zora and Freya had silver hair and was wearing a gold trimmed green dress. She had to be another fan of Robert Jordan’s Aes Sedai. They were by far one of the most common groups Freya had seen emulated thus far. Lastly there was an absolute beast of a man. The one who had asked her if anyone was behind them. Even sitting he was taller than she was, he wore gleaming white armor with a blood red cloak.

  Was this really it? The posting made her feel like this was like a militia, she was expecting dozens. Were people really that keen to let Sulivar do whatever he wanted? Though maybe she was getting ahead of herself. This could just be one cell of the Unbound.

  “How many others are there?” Freya asked.

  “This is it,” Roman said.

  Well that answered that.

  “How do we start?” Zora asked.

  Freya was proud of Zora for that. She was angry beyond belief, but she still wanted to help her take down Sulivar. How many other friends did Freya have like that? Ben of course, maybe Leia, though they had been talking less and less recently.

  Roman smiled, a genuine, room-warming smile. He obviously was taking the wrong thing from Zora’s question. “How we start, is greeting our new friends. I’m Roman Taylor.”

  “I thought surnames weren’t really a thing here.”

  “They aren’t.” The heat had returned to Zora’s voice.

  “Roman Taylor is my real name. I was born in Rochester, New York, and I work in New York City as an assistant editor at TOR.”

  “What are you doing?” Zora asked.

  “Shedding a dangerous custom.” Roman’s matter of fact tone seemed to aggravate Zora even further.

  “That custom protects all of us, keeps us even.”

  “That’s everyone says.”

  Roman’s followers, that’s what Freya had determined they were, nodded along in agreement. This certainly was not a meeting of equals.

  “To join us, we need to know your real names, so we can trust you. There is no telling where Sulivar’s agents are.”

  “You are going to talk to me about trust?”

  Freya put a hand on Zora’s shoulder. “I’ve got this. Save your rage for when you talk to him later.”

  The custom of not sharing their names sounded strange from the start, but she wasn’t about to give out her real identity to this stranger. As much as Freya hated to admit it, that’s what Roman was.

  “We need more than that. I don’t even know if Roman Taylor exists. This could all be some scheme. We tell you our names, then you disappear and do god knows what with that information. More than that, I need a real explanation as far as why we are sharing our names. Not this mysterious bullshit.”

  Roman looked between the Zora and Freya. Each of them stood firm, silently in agreement on the matter. Finally, he gestured toward the boxes. “Please sit, this all feel too antagonistic. We are on the same side here.”

  Freya moved to sit, but Zora caught her arm. “We would rather stand. Answer my friend’s questions or we are out of here.”

  My friend’s questions. The silent exclusion of Roman from the group stung even Freya. Roman’s entire demeanor tightened. If this was some kind of trap, sitting would have been stupid. Freya was annoyed with herself for letting Roman trick her into a mistake like that.

  A flash of ice burst in Roman’s eyes. “Fine. What’s the problem with the internet? Why is it such a cesspool?”

  The question for her question immediately annoyed Freya, it felt so paternal, so patronizing. But after thinking on it, she saw where he was going with it. “Anonymity. It’s easy to be vile hiding behind a keyboard.”

  “And why is that?”

  Freya was going to punch him in the mouth before Zora could if he kept this up. “Because there are no consequences.”

  “Sulivar only got as powerful as he is, sold as many books as he did, because he hid behind false names in this realm. First The Soviet, then The Latvian. He was expelled from The Mind’s Mirror eight years before he sold his first book. If the publishers knew what he was getting up to in the MythHarbor, they never would have bought his work. Only after he was an international best seller did he reveal his name. It was too late to stop him, and the executives at his publisher were not about to shove off their single biggest author.”

  Shit. Freya thought. He was right. If Sulivar never got the page reads to make himself so powerful, he would have had a much harder time going about his conquest. Was the privacy of a few best selling authors and editors really worth the kind of destruction these rogue agents could cause?

  Zora seemed to understand the same thing. She paled. This would be a hard thing for her. She had enough time in this realm to get supremely attached to her new name. Freya couldn’t blame her. This could mean real physical danger if they were successful in wrecking Sulivar’s plans. Not just in the Harbor either, but the Source too.

  “You won’t have my name,” Zora said.

  “Then you won’t join us.”

  Roman groaned. “Molly would you just not for a minute? I’m told you’ve driven off every prospective member the entire time I’ve been gone.”

  “None of them were willing to commit.”

  This couldn’t happen. This group, the Unbound, had some kind of resources. Freya and Zora would need resources if they were going to do anything about Sulivar. This name thing was a stupid requirement. Molly’s belligerence wasn’t the only thing driving off prospective members. The whole realm was attached to their anonymity and had been for decades, if not centuries. Freya could understand the desire to remove this layer of protection, but they were trying to do so at the expense of their greater cause.

  “I’ll do it. I’ll tell you my name.”

  “No, we can do this alone,” Zora said.

  “We can’t. We need resources, and judging from the suspicious jingling in that box, they have resources.”

  The man in the gleaming armor stood. “We shouldn’t force them.”

  His eyes met Freya’s eyes. There was heat there. He had a presence to him unlike any she had felt before. It was as if he had trained all his life on how to soothe someone just with a look. If Freya were to guess, he was some kind of politician in the Source.

  “Not with the white knight shit again. Fucking paladins I swear.”

  “Molly.” Roman’s tone was that of warning.

  “I’ll tell you my name, but my friend gets to keep hers private. That’s the deal.”

  “I won’t have you jumping on your sword for me at every opportunity,” Zora said.

  “It isn’t just that. They are right.” Freya met Molly’s eyes. “Even if their methods are completely brain dead.”

  “No deals. You both give it up, or you can leave.”

  The Paladin shook his head at Molly, his face softened. “Her offer is fair. Roman knows them both. If he thinks we can trust them, then we can trust them.”

  “And as I said before. Not your decision,” Roman added.

  “Do we have a deal or not?” Freya asked.

  “We do.”

  Freya took a deep breath. There would be no coming back from this one. “My name is Freya Leilani Reed. I was born April 21st, 2003. I’m a college drop out who just got fired from my job delivering pizzas for Domino’s for punching a customer in the face.”

  At that last part the tension in the room vanished. Zora and Roman smiled, the Paladin and the woman dressed like an Aes Sedai laughed. Even Molly’s look of disgust shifted to one of mere mild annoyance.

  The Paladin placed his bear claw sized hand on Freya’s shoulder. “I’ve been waiting years for someone just like you.”

  Freya’s face flushed. He was a little forward, but she would take it. “You only just met me.”

  He leaned in close, his breath smelled of pine. “What do they put on the crust? Everyone says it’s just garlic butter, it isn’t, I’ve tried.”