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The Mark of the Bee'zhah
Session: 2026-10-14
It went fast. That was the first problem.
Vath stood in the ring of people with everyone else and watched, and afterward he could not have said in what order most of it happened. Later Pedro told it one way, and Victor told it another, and the two of them agreed on less than either would admit. Vath put together what he could. He did his best with it.
Pedro had the jacket off, and the hat. She was thirty or forty feet away, maybe more.
"You might be a princess," Pedro said, "but in this ring, Pedro is the king."
He launched himself at her. She wasn't there. He came around in a spinning elbow and that one landed — Vath heard it.
Pedro said afterward that up close he could see the scars. Old ones, under the bangles and the fine cloth. Vath hadn't seen them from where he stood. He believed it.
She looked at Pedro once and kicked him twice. Left side, right side. Then her knee came up at his face with something in it — a light, or a heat, Vath couldn't tell which — and missed by a hand's width.
Victor was at the edge of the circle shouting encouragement, the kind he puts something behind. It wasn't reaching. Eight of her people sat around the ring singing, a folk song, low and steady, and every time Victor raised his voice the song rose to meet it.
Something changed in Pedro then. He said time slowed down. He said he could see four ways in at once. Vath didn't see any of that. What Vath saw was Pedro hit her twice, chest and face, hard enough to end most fights, and then stop, waiting for something.
She wiped the blood from her mouth. She was perfectly calm.
She isn't afraid of him.
Then Pedro was face-down in the dirt.
From outside the ring, that was all it was: he hesitated, and then he was on the ground. The rest he told them later, by the fire. He said that for a moment he wasn't in the field at all. He was standing on a temple, spiders painted and carved on every stone of it, and she was standing beside him.
"This is my home," she had said. "Beautiful, isn't it. But beauty can be dangerous."
Then something came through the vision all knees and elbows, and he went flying.
Pedro got up grinning. Vath gave him that.
He started using his legs. A flying knee — she stepped out of it. He used the momentum for a back kick and missed that too. Then two big punches, close in, that took her by surprise, and Vath watched Pedro's shoulders come back up. He was in it again.
She stepped back. Her outline went soft, like breath on cold glass, and then there were four of her, smoke and spider-web, and all four came in. Pedro took a kick in the chest and one to the head. He said afterward he didn't know which one to block. Vath didn't know either, and he had been watching.
Pedro spat blood. "You think you're spinning a web of victory, princess. But you just stepped into the Palchenko fly trap."
A stream of fog came off her and hit him full in the face.
He told them about this one too. He was old. He was in a city, sitting in a chair, both hands resting on a cane. She was there. She told him he had the heart of a warrior, and that he should seek out his queen, in the future.
Then she came at him like a panther on fire, and he went down.
Pedro coughed. Got an elbow under himself. The old cloth he carried, the one from the dead, had done something.
"Well, princess," Pedro said. "Looks like you may have needed one more hit."
She knelt over him and put her palm flat on his chest. There was a smell of hot metal. The chainmail under her hand went dull red. Pedro went out.
Victor ran.
Victor got there first, which was right. He was on his knees beside Pedro talking the whole time, the way you talk to a horse that's been hurt, and then he stopped talking.
Vath came up behind him and saw why. The mail itself was glowing, there on his chest where her hand had been. The links were whole. The glow had the shape of a spider.
The whole fight she had not thrown a single punch. Knees and feet, the entire time. Vath noticed that afterward, going back over it. He had been watching the wrong thing.
He put his hands on Pedro and gave him what he had. Zephyr knelt on the other side and laid his own hands on. Pedro's eyes came open.
"Victorious," he said. "I think I just fell in love."
Victor sat back on his heels. "I'm pretty sure they were cheating. I've never seen you beaten like that."
The eight who had sung were different afterward.
Zephyr noticed it, and Cain. Heads bowed when Pedro passed. Eyes kept low. Not afraid of him — careful with him. Cain said quietly that the fight had done something for Pedro's standing, and Vath thought he was right.
One of the men came with a bowl of stew. He knelt in front of Pedro, bowed his head, and held the bowl up over it with both hands.
Pedro took it. He didn't know where to look. Vath had never seen Pedro not know where to look.
They were friendly people, and the fire was warm, and the food was good. The party kept its own watch anyway.
Zithar was reading when Victor and Pedro came to him. He closed the book and bowed — slightly, but to Pedro.
"Warmakers," he said. "How may I assist you."
Pedro pulled his chainmail off over his head and pointed at his chest. Under where the mail had glowed, there was a scar. It looked older than an hour. Raised lines, like a scar that had healed in the old way, on purpose — a spider, square-shouldered and patterned, nothing like the ones Vath knew from the woods.
Pedro asked about the city of spiders. He asked how she had become so strong.
"Where we are from," Zithar said, "spiders are an important part of who we are. Of our spirit. We craft them into our jewelry. We see all things as being part of a larger web of life."
Pedro pulled Victor forward by the shoulder. "Clearly I am not strong enough to beat your warriors. But I want to be. Show me where to go."
Zithar touched the scar on Pedro's chest with one finger.
"You have been given the mark of the Bee'zhah. It will be well for you, if you come to our lands."
He asked for paper. Victor had some. Zithar drew quickly: Etheryn as two pieces of land, and then a long way down and to the southwest, something else. He said the name — Maztica. He said other words that Vath didn't keep, a place called something like Anchorome, and somewhere under the sands of somewhere. Vath tried afterward to remember the second name and couldn't.
"Any trader that you speak to," Zithar said, "will know how to get to Maztica."
Her name was Zenna. She was a warrior priestess, he told them. Of one caste, a very particular one. To be marked by one of them was to be placed in her circle. Vath had the sense — from what Zithar said and what he didn't — that she had picked Pedro, and that this was not a small thing where they came from.
Pedro handed the map to Victor. "Victorious. Guard this with your life."
Victor held it with both hands and looked at it for a long time.
Then Pedro unbuckled the championship belt and held it out to Zithar.
"For her. Let her know that next time, I'm winning it back."
Zithar took it.
He didn't know how she had made the mark. He said so plainly. He said his people worship two gods among others, the wolf and the bear, and that part of what interested him was the ink already on Pedro's arms. So Pedro told him how he got the tattoos. Zithar listened to the whole thing.
The map went into Victor's pack. It had a long way to go yet.
Zephyr was crouched by a tree with a squirrel on the root in front of him.
Vath came over and listened. This one was agitated in the way they get when they're telling you something they've told themselves too many times.
Many sleeps ago, it said, the nest was afraid. Things came up from deep in the dirt. It was bad, bad, bad.
Zephyr thanked it and asked it to warn him if it sensed danger. The squirrel said it would. It might.
"Undead," Zephyr said, standing. "We should take precautions."
Vath agreed. He had stood in this field before, on a night when the ground shook.
As usual, some of the women at the fire were watching Zephyr. As usual, Zephyr let them.
Pedro didn't sleep well. Everyone else did.
In the morning the Maztecans were cooking again. Vath walked over before the vegetables went into the pot and looked at them. He knew some of them. Not all.
Someone had given Zephyr a small bag of fruit nobody in the party could name.
They ate. The Maztecans packed with the quick quiet of people who do it every morning. The guards slid their long spears through the rings on the litter and lifted it on their shoulders, and the spears became poles, and that was the whole camp.
Zithar said they still meant to go on to Land Ho. There would likely be no challenge now. They had other business there.
Before he left he looked at Victor. "That map will show you to our land."
Victor bowed to him the way you bow in a temple.
Farmers in the fields,
a cart of turnips, a dog that walks beside it,
a nod from every gate and no one asking —
the road to Vogler in the fall
doesn't care who lost a fight.
Thornwall Keep came into view in the morning light, the ruins of something old perched on the edge of town. The riders they'd been worried about might have come this way. They went to see.
There were no guards at the gate. There was no gate. There were no doors anywhere Vath could see. Two or three buildings had been patched enough to live in. If anyone came for the place in earnest, it would not hold.
The history of it was simple enough: a pirate bay once, a fort the pirates never finished. The Knights of Solace out of Seacrest had taken it from them and kept it as a base, and then it had gone to the Silverwatch, and now, in the last few years, back to the Knights.
A big man came around a wall dragging a sack of rocks, no shirt. "Just a sec." He dropped the sack, found a shirt, and put it on. Tall. Built like he hauled rocks for pleasure. Becklin.
"Welcome to Thornwall. What are you lot doing here?"
He was measuring them. Vath let him.
"We have a message from East Point," Cain said, and pointed at Victor.
Becklin called over his shoulder. "Hey, squire! Visitors."
The squire was Derrit — a frail young man about half Becklin's size and half his age. He came at a trot.
Victor handed Becklin the letter. Elias's signet, an E with an arrow through it. Becklin turned the paper over in his fingers. "Poor quality," he said. Then he handed it to the squire.
Derrit read it very fast. Vath and Cain read over his shoulders. When he finished he turned to Becklin and told him, in a few sentences, what had happened at East Point. Becklin listened, nodded, and went back to his rocks. Cain went with him and picked up the other end of something heavy.
Derrit waited until they were out of earshot.
"I'm sorry," he said. "Truly. This should go on to Silverport." He looked at Vath, as if Vath were the one who'd understand. "His parents are very rich."
Vath didn't know what to do with that, so he did nothing with it.
Zephyr asked about riders. Derrit hadn't seen anything like that. The mayor hadn't spoken of it.
"There's a place in town," Derrit said, "the Fishbowl. A bar. Balik Trueleaf opened it. People call him Uncle." He shrugged. "Druid of the sea, they say."
A druid of the sea.
Vath kept the name.
Darrian Felwind's warehouse was north, toward the river. They found it by asking workers on the street. It was big, and it smelled the way it should — salt and fish and brine — and inside there were vats of salted fish in rows, taller than a man.
Vath knocked. They went in.
It had been about three weeks since they had last stood in front of this man.
"Unfortunately," Victor said, "we have poor news."
Darrian sat down. He didn't look for the chair first.
"Your relatives did not survive."
Victor told it carefully. The mine. What they had found. The large crab-thing, and their friend Beau dragged into the deep by it. He laid out some of the embroidered things they had brought back — good cloth, fine stitching, the Felwind fish. Darrian looked at them and didn't touch them.
"We buried them properly," Cain said. "The rites were said."
Darrian nodded. After a while he said, "And the mine? Ern Lindsor?"
Pedro held up a warhammer. "This is all that's left."
They told the rest of it then, as much as made sense to tell. Victor said he wouldn't go up there for a while. Darrian asked whether anyone had claimed the mine, and when he understood that no one had, something in his face changed gear. Vath had seen it happen in merchants before. Grief gets set aside on a shelf, not put away.
Gold came out. Piles of it. Then fifty more, separately, set a little apart from the rest.
"For your discretion," Darrian said.
Vath reached past the pile and took Beau's share, and set it apart again. Nobody said anything about it.
"My aide will help you with the fish," Darrian said. A case of Felwind salted fish, packed and nailed.
Pedro carried it out.