# Deal's Worth

Part 21 of 22 (1,618 words)

Chapter 5: Corwin and Rook



The armored warrior's name, once Alicia pried it out of him between labored breaths, was Corwin. He said it like he expected them to recognize it. When they didn't, something in his shoulders sagged with the specific disappointment of a man who'd built an entire highlight reel in his head and just found out nobody was watching.



"You've never heard of me," he said. It wasn't a question. It was grief.



"We just watched you get backhanded into a canyon wall," Jeff said, still sitting because standing seemed like a personal attack on his body right now. "I feel like that's a pretty good introduction on its own."



"I softened it up first."



"Sure you did."



"I did! Look at it!" Corwin gestured weakly at the dragon's ruined bulk, forty feet of shattered plating cooling in the desert heat like a demolished cathedral. Ichor pooled black and slow beneath it, already crusting at the edges where the air met it. "You think it just decided to lose?"



"I think it looked at us and calculated that this was, statistically, its worst day," Alicia said, kneeling to check the burn along Corwin's ribs where his armor had buckled. "Which, respectfully, might not have anything to do with you."



Corwin opened his mouth to argue and then apparently remembered he had two broken ribs and closed it again.



Jeff wasn't listening anymore. He was looking at the dragon.



It hadn't gone still the way a killed thing goes still — the sudden absence, the weight dropping out of a body like someone unplugged it. This was slower. Its remaining eye, half-lidded, tracked nothing, but it hadn't glazed. Its chest, what was left of it, rose and fell in increments too small to be called breathing and too regular to be called anything else. Dying, if it was dying, was taking its sweet time about it, like a phone battery insisting it still had six percent left through pure spite.



"It talked like it's done this before," Jeff said.



"It walked straight to the right crystal every time like it had notes."



"It could be a wish," Corwin offered, wincing as he sat up. "Somebody wished a legendary creature into existence at some point. Won't die permanently any more than the rest of us do."



The dragon's eye rolled, slow as a tide, and fixed on Jeff.



"You," it said. The word came out wet, dragged over broken things in its throat. "I remember cursed possession like yours."



"I get that a lot," Jeff said.



Its eye slid shut, and this time it stayed shut, and the small increments of movement in its chest went from small to smaller to nothing, the way a held breath finally, quietly, gives up. It simply stopped, the way a machine stops when the last charge bleeds out of it, and the canyon held its silence like it was used to holding worse.



Something dropped out of that silence at an angle no hawk would have attempted and no sane creature would have survived, cutting across the sun close enough that Jeff saw its shadow before he saw it — a hard bank, a violent snap of wings that kicked up a fan of grit into his face, and then it was standing on the dragon's largest surviving horn like it had booked the spot in advance.



Bird wasn't quite the right word, though it was doing its best. Two feet of it, maybe a little more, feathers the restless black-teal of oil sitting on water, shifting color when it moved like it hadn't fully decided what color it wanted to commit to. Threaded through the black were narrow seams of gold, not painted on and not natural either — too clean, too deliberate, like filigree pressed into metal rather than grown. Its eyes were a pale storm-gray that didn't belong on anything with feathers, and they missed nothing, least of all the fact that everyone present was staring at it.



It looked down at the dragon's corpse with the specific unimpressed air of someone arriving after the meeting had already wrapped.



"You started without me," it said. The voice came out crisp and fully formed, every consonant landing exactly where it aimed to land — nothing like the wet drag the dragon had spent its last words on.



"You weren't invited to the part that mattered," Corwin said, grinning through what that grin clearly cost him. "You were invited to the flying-around part."



"I was extensively flying around. At altitude. Some of us appreciate a good canyon." It hopped once, resettled, and turned that gray gaze on Jeff and Alicia with open, unhurried assessment. "New faces. Wonderful. More witnesses."



"That's a wish-granter," Jeff said, in the tone of a man doing math he didn't like the answer to.



"That's your wish-granter," Alicia said to Corwin.



"Still on duty," the bird said, dipping its head in a bow that somehow communicated total formality and zero actual respect at the same time. "Two wishes down. One outstanding. Assuming he doesn't decide to sit on it, in which case I fly around some more and eventually go home."



"Genie," Jeff said, testing the word.



"Wish-granter," the bird corrected, without heat, in the exhausted cadence of someone who had corrected this exact word more times than he cared to count. "Genie implies lamps. I have never once lived in a lamp. Call me whatever helps you sleep, but I reserve the right to sigh about it."



"And before anyone asks," Corwin said, holding up a hand, "no. He's not the reason I have any of this." He rapped a knuckle against his cracked breastplate. "Armor's mine. Axe is mine. The lightning thing is mine, six years running, long before this one showed up. He's granted me exactly two things in the whole of our acquaintance, and neither of them put a single joint of this armor on my body."



"Name's Rook. If you need something to call me that isn't an insult to my intelligence," the bird said.



"You're new," Jeff said. "Recently summoned, I mean."



"This morning," Corwin said. "Found the object two towns back. Carved thing, about the size of a walnut. I touched it and there he was, mid-sentence, like he'd already been having the conversation and just hadn't had anyone to have it with."



"I had been having the conversation the whole time," Rook said. "Standby doesn't prevent socializing."



"How long do you get him for?" Alicia asked.



"Eleven days," Rook said, "unless I die first, or he dies first, or he spends the last wish first, whichever gets there sooner. Then duty's over, the little walnut packs itself up and relocates several trillion miles in whatever direction feels appropriately dramatic, and somebody on some other planet gets to find a very lucky-looking rock."



"And the wishes he's spent," Jeff said, "so far—"



"First one," Corwin said, with the specific pride of a man who had rehearsed this speech and was thrilled to finally give it, "was worded exactly right. I wished for a magical livestream showing what I am seeing and hearing right now to be publicly accessible through a most viewed Sports Smart TV app. Precise. Airtight."



"And the second," Rook said, "was, somehow, even more precise."



"'I wish for that livestream to continue following me wherever I go for the next 24 hours,'" Corwin said. "I workshopped that for four minutes before I said it out loud. Some people wing their wishes. I do not wing my wishes."



"You're currently being watched," Jeff said slowly, "by an unknown number of strangers, on television, on this planet."



"Sports bars have odds on whether I survive the day," Corwin said, not without some satisfaction. "I checked before we left the last town. I was fourteen-to-one against. I intend to make several people very rich by staying alive out of spite alone."



"You look like you walked out of a storybook and never walked back in," Alicia said to Rook, studying him with the same open, unhurried curiosity she'd have aimed at a rare stone, and which would have been rude aimed at a person.



"I wasn't granted into existence looking like this, if that's the theory." Rook tilted his head, considering how much of the answer was worth giving. "I was a plain gray fledgling once, a very long time ago, in a body that had nothing gold or black-teal about it whatsoever. This is several centuries and a great deal of editing later. Every life I've lived, I've been small enough and biological enough to set off objects sized for creatures like me — and every time one summoned a wish-granter for me, I spent at least one of my own three wishes on myself. A little more color here. A little more precision to the voice there. Nobody wishes a plain gray bird into existing this loudly. I did that. Slowly. Over and over. It's the only kind of vanity project available to something that keeps dying and coming back."



"Coming back as what?" Jeff asked.



"Me. It's not reincarnation in this universe. Whenever I died, I was given options, same as anyone gets — and I've made the same one more times than I can comfortably count." Rook's gray eyes didn't waver. "Option Three. Almost every time. Doing standby duty, eventually summoned, granted somebody's wishes, sent back, leave eventually, another life, another death, and options. I've done this often enough that Corwin here is not even memorable competition for strangest grantee I've had."



"That's insulting," Corwin said.



"It's accurate. You're merely above average."



"The voice," Alicia said. "It's clearer than his." She nodded at Corwin.