Free 1633880583 (F) by Chris Willrich

Pinching Lobster upon the sword-arm, while employing the Grass-Cutter Kick to topple the uldra, who went down in a clatter. Innocence yanked the tapestry from the wall and covered the knight. He fled for the gate.
    “How can you leave me?” demanded Alfhild, the earl’s daughter. “After all we’ve been through together!”
    “Delightful!” Innocence yelled back, nearly losing his balance on the sharp-edged moat bridge. “But I think it’s too early for betrothals!” Two more glass knights stomped over from the far side, and Earl Morksol and Alfhild advanced from the nearer. He looked down at the moat and saw its waters surging as though he beheld wavetops of the deepest sea.
    “You ate from my hand,” said Alfhild. “It might be too early for betrothals, but it is too late for escape.”
    “To eat of our food,” said Earl Morksol, “is to partake of our reality. You cannot leave.”
    “It was only a morsel,” Innocence protested.
    “To eat is to eat,” said the earl.
    “Enough,” said Alfhild, advancing, enraged. She was no longer quite so fetching. “I will slap the mischief from you, boy.”
    Her words unlocked something within him. Like a song heard from far over the hills, he remembered being very small, and his mother telling him stories. In one of them, the daughter of the Earthe itself was trapped in an underworld, bringing her mother into a despairing winter. The daughter might have escaped for good, but she’d unthinkingly eaten a few pomegranate seeds underground. She must always return for part of the year, and thus the world had to endure the cold for a time.
    But she had escaped.
    If they were so sure they had him, he wondered, why were they so set on serving him a feast?
    Innocence called out, “I will return to my world, even as will the spring.” He leapt.
    Entering the moat was like resuming his plunge from the moon into the sea. He sputtered and struggled for breath.
    “You must do the honorable thing!” Morksol called down. “Does it not say in your Swan scripture that to look upon a woman with desire is morally the same as having relations with her? You have looked upon my daughter, eaten from her fingertips. You belong to her.”
    It’s not my Swan scripture, Innocence thought, and found the strength to swim. He thought of the sage of Qiangguo who said, “Only one of virtue truly has the discernment to love and hate people for who they are.” He might not be a man of virtue, but he had reason to hate, not love, his captors. Anger urged him on. He might be commencing manhood, but it would be in his own time, on his own terms.
    He’d noticed that this ocean-like stream did not fully envelop the castle of Sølvlyss but had a horseshoe shape, emerging from and returning to the walls of the great cavern. And it was his hunch that it was easier to cross from this place to his own world at the cavern edges. Otherwise why wouldn’t Alfhild’s passageway have led directly to her father’s castle?
    Of course, by the same reasoning, if this border had led to Fiskegard, Alfhild would have used it. He’d probably not be returning to the Pickled Rat. No help for it.
    He swam, throwing his full strength into the act, and at last reached a place where the water surged into the rock. He sensed glass knights upon the nearby shore. The current carried him into a small cave, where it battered him against an opening he could not pass. He called upon the power in him, this time not with language but with wordless rage. He stretched out his arms and shoved, willing the structure of the place to shatter.
    The land shook. With desperate fury he found words. He called upon all the gods and holy ones he could think of, the Swan, Torden, the Painter of Clouds, the Celestial Emperor, the Undetermined. He murmured the name of Joy.
    He screamed for his mother.
    Through the rumble of an earthquake, he heard other screams as well. Above all the wailing rose the voice of Earl Morksol. “Very well! I