Wayfarer (Passenger 2)

“They use elephants in war,” Sophia muttered, her voice as soft as he’d ever heard it, her fingers brushing the trunk. It seemed to tickle the loose pieces of her hair. “Sorry about this, my handsome fellow.”

She reached between the bars and carefully, with a touch as soft as a flower petal, unlatched the door.

“Sophia!” Nicholas whispered. Scraping up the remains of her trampled body from under an eight-foot-tall beast hadn’t been included in his plans for the evening. “Stop this!”

Sophia held out a hand and eased her body into the stall. The elephant shuffled its heavy body back a step, giving her enough room to slip inside the stall and crouch in front of the large food trough, half-full of what looked to Nicholas to be grain and grass. Sophia took up her small bag and began to stuff handfuls of the raw food in it, before motioning for him to pass his bag over.

“Here.” She filled it, then threw his bag back to him. “Let’s get moving.”

He caught it easily, turning back toward the door. Sophia gave the beast’s flank one last pat before she shut its stall. Eyes scanning the ground, the walls, for anything that might be of use, Nicholas had nearly missed the one thing that wasn’t present.

The guard.

He gripped Sophia’s arm and brought a hand to her mouth, muffling her protests. Nicholas nodded to the spot where they’d left the unconscious man and felt her suck in a small gasp of surprise. Pulling away, he moved back to the entrance and put his eye back to the door’s lock, peering out into the darkness.

There was movement outside—shadows gliding against one another, fading in and out of the night. Sweat broke out at the base of Nicholas’s skull, his mouth shaping into a silent warning as a nearby guard was knocked out in an instant, crumpling to the ground; shadows swept in around him, covering him, dragging him away.

Hiding the evidence.

Not killing him, so as to avoid changing the timeline? He and Sophia had played a dangerous game in how careless they’d become, risking change after change to ensure their own survival. These…travelers? These warriors, men and women, were decidedly not careless.

Nicholas strained his ears to catch the murmuring on the other side. Once his eyes adjusted well enough to the darkness, he was able to count four figures of varying stature, all sweeping toward the door like a high tide. It might have been the thrumming fear in his mind playing an unwelcome trick, but he could have sworn the ring on his finger grew warmer with each step closer they took.

Sophia pointed up, but Nicholas shook his head, competing thoughts racing to best one another. There might be more soldiers on the second level, and to get out of the stables, their ultimate goal, they would need to jump onto a nearby building—but none were near enough, and all were taller. He didn’t fancy breaking his neck after nearly being drowned and stabbed already in one night.

In battle, you could fight a foe head-on until both of your ships were in splinters around you. But, when outmaneuvered, there was always the potent combination of creating a distraction of some sort and escaping at full speed, hopefully with the wind on your side.

His idea was almost absurd. In spite of everything that had occurred, or perhaps because of it, Nicholas felt a grim smile touch his lips. It hadn’t made sense to him why they would store wine here in the stables, other than to hide it from the people outside who desperately needed it. But what if the wine wasn’t for men at all, but for the elephants?

They’d pour it down the elephant’s throats, see, Hall had told him and Chase, miming the gulping. Get them good and primed. The wine would send them into a rage, enough to trample any men who stood in their way.

Nicholas ducked down, peering one last time through the lock to see if the men had moved. As if they’d somehow heard him, one of the men—the one nearest to the door—shouted something. Sophia clucked her tongue, likely at the viciousness that coated the nonsensical words.

“I have a thought,” Nicholas told her. “About what to do—”

“Is this a thought that’s going to get us murdered, our heads smashed under an elephant’s foot, poisoned, et cetera?”

He gave her an exasperated look that Sophia shrugged off as she took his place at the door. “Keep watch for a moment—make sure they aren’t planning to storm their way in.”

She gave a sloppy salute and leaned down to peer through the lock. “What are you on about, Carter—?”

He took the sword and swung down, cracking open each of the wine barrels in turn.

“Are you deranged?” Sophia whispered, jumping to her feet.

He took her by the arm again and launched them at a run back toward the nearest elephant’s stall. Before Sophia had time to question him, Nicholas unlatched the door and dragged it open.

The elephant didn’t move.

There was a sliver of a second in which he was furious with himself for wasting good drink. Then, as the air thickened with the smell of the wine, the elephant let out a deafening trumpet, as if alerting the others, and all but charged out of the stall. Sophia leaped back with a cry of alarm, even as Nicholas attempted to shield them with the stall door. The animal must have weighed well over a thousand pounds. The whole building quaked as it galloped toward the pooling wine.

“My God,” Sophia said. “That’s an animal with his priorities straight.”

“Come along,” Nicholas insisted, waving her after him.

There were two more elephants stamping and hollering to be let out, their enormous ears flapping like a ship’s colors. Nicholas leaned back, away from one of the trunks that was feeling down his front, as if trying to hurry him along, as he worked the door open.