Lette could think of no greater sign of how terribly awry things had gone than the fact that she was waking up to the sound of children’s laughter.
She stood up from her bed of pine needles, wiped drool from her chin, and tried to put the pieces of the previous evening together.
She had been hidden in the portcullis lock. She had gotten out, killed a guard, found Quirk. Everything had been going well. Then she had opened the portcullis to Mattrax’s cave. And that must have been what alerted the guards. Some mechanism she had missed, or more likely, never been in a position to discover. But at the same time the guards came running, so did the villagers. Balur and Firkin must have had something to do with it, but afterward Balur was tight-lipped on the subject. Still, the soldiers and the villagers had clashed in the cave mouth. Then the fight had spilled deeper and deeper into the cave. And then, in those depths, Quirk…
The thaumatobiologist had killed how many? Twenty? Thirty? Enough to make Balur look as if he’d just been handing out love taps all night. The thaumatobiologist had flung fire about like a bartender serving drinks on Barph’s feast day, lost in some passion Lette neither understood nor wanted to understand. There had been no way to reason with the woman, and Lette thanked all the gods that Quirk had collapsed eventually. Just keeled over unconscious and dribbling. Though that wasn’t before her antics convinced almost everyone in the cave that Mattrax was awake and angry. Even Lette would admit she had felt fear grip her bowels when the first jet of flame had come.
Except Mattrax had been out cold. Hadn’t even come conscious as Balur had beaten the brains from him.
Gods, that had been a mess. Balur had been in almost as much of a passion as Quirk. Lette still wasn’t sure how she’d managed to drag the lizard man away. Not before he’d gotten himself elbow deep in Mattrax’s skull by any reach. Still, she’d managed it. But by then it had become clear to her that the only real option left to them was to get into the crowd and lose themselves. So she’d made Balur grab Quirk, and hidden amongst the villagers, they’d been whole enough, safe enough.
Except then Will had gone and shown up clutching that cursed eyeball…
She looked around her. Women and men were all still gathered around the cave entrance. Campfires burned. People sang and danced. Their half-feral children ran everywhere whooping, and screaming, and—for the love of all that was holy—laughing.
Where had the children even come from? Gods, if Balur had brought them up to the cave to do murder last night, she was going to kill him.
There was an atmosphere of celebration in the impromptu camp. And though this barren mountainside was nothing like the packed streets of Essoa, where she had grown up, something in the air reminded her of the city’s annual carnivals. All the rules thrown out for a day. The children ruled the households. The dockworkers told the nobles what to do. You went into a store and just took what you wanted from the shelves. Everyone was on the streets, shouting, running, dancing.
The first carnival she remembered, she had gone into a pastry store. It was the one she and her brothers and sisters passed on their weekly sojourn to the temple to pour libations in the hopes that Toil would bless their father’s work, and Klink would bless his purse. Everything in the store’s window always looked fluffy and delicious, covered in layers of powdered sugar. The store owner had welcomed her with a broad smile, had helped her hold her skirts out so they formed a pouch into which she could sweep armfuls of pastries. And then she had found a quiet rooftop from which she could watch the festivities, while she stuffed her face. It had been glorious. A day of pure gluttony and pleasure.
Then the next day she vomited four times. She felt nauseous for two days more. Every time she passed the pastry store she felt sickness roll through her. And it was not just her. The day after carnival, all of Essoa crawled, a beaten, groaning thing. It was a stinking beast crawling through the filthy aftermath of its own indulgence.
Yes, this reminded her of carnival very much.
They had to get out of here.
Correction, they had to take advantage of the shrinking window of opportunity they had for retrieving as much gold as they could from Mattrax’s cave, and then get out of here.
She cracked her neck, pulled a few leaves out of her hair, and set off into the camp. Children ran past her, yelling something about a prophet.
The prophet… That could be a problem.
She opened her ears to the voices of the crowd. Situational awareness, she’d heard others in her profession call it. Knowing-where-the-next-knife-is-coming-from was a term that sat better with her.
“Where did he come from?”
“Is he going to stay?”
“Is Mattrax really dead?”
“Must be some avatar of the gods. Ain’t no way no mortal man can just be killing a dragon. Probably Klink, I reckon. Dragon keeping all that gold in one place, ain’t natural. Money meant to flow. Old Mattrax pissed off Klink and now he’s paid the price.”
“Like to get my hands on his dragon…”
“Oh, you’re awful.”
“The axe, I reckon. Dug it up from some tomb like as not. Take away that axe and he’d be nothing special.”
“A prophet they said. Prophet’s talk. Prophesize. Clue’s in the name. Mattrax was just the start of it, I tell you. He’s come to lead us.”
“Didn’t look like no prophet. Just looked like some kid. Some farm boy with an axe.”
“What in the Hallows did we drink last night?”
They were gathered in small groups. Three men sitting perched on rocks, their heads leaned in. Two women using puddle water to wash the mud from their faces. A young couple leaning against a tree stump, wrapped in each other’s arms. A gaggle of teenagers, gathered around a discarded breastplate bearing the tattered heraldry of the Dragon Consortium. And all of them were talking about Will. Every last one.
Yes, the prophet was going to be a problem.
There was a flow to the crowd, she realized. Some faint gravitational pull. She gave in to it, moved with the masses. She felt like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It was a reassuring feeling.
When she found the source of the pull, she thought perhaps she should have known.
Firkin was perched on a rock pressed up against the mountainside. A little stone pulpit. He sat cross-legged upon it, potbelly protruding over his filthy underwear. His beard blew in a morning breeze that sent his words billowing over the small crowd that had gathered at his feet.
“—and verily it was said unto, erm… unto… it was a farmer, I think. Worked in a field anyway. Nice man. Used to buy folk drinks. Very important that. The prophet is always saying that giving someone a free drink is pretty much the height of, erm… being prophetic. Root of all goodness, I think. Wet a man’s throat and, erm… verily you shalt be raised up. Thou shalt. Very high. Like really, really way up there.”
He was slurring badly, eyes half-closed.
“Anyway, it was said unto this man. It was said verily to him. That erm… to have thine balls back, then thine must follow he who slays the beast. And verily the beast was slain as you saw.”
Personally, Lette wanted to slay Firkin very, very badly. But that next knife—it would come from the crowd if she tried it. And while she was good at her job, there were a lot of people here, which would mean a lot of knives.
Instead she limited herself to calling out, “Firkin, what the fuck are you doing?”
Firkin lurched, as if shaken from a trance, or more likely as if he had been nodding off into a drunken stupor. He stared at her blearily, tugged at the tangled mat of his beard, and cast it over one shoulder.
“I am preaching,” he said, “profound truths.”
A murmur of agreement rose from the crowd.
“You,” said Lette with a certain amount of feeling, “are the swill at the bottom of the barrel and you are leaking out and staining all these good people.”
Public speaking was not her thing. Still, she was damned if she was going to give ground before a creature as base as Firkin.
The crowd, though, seemed to have other ideas. The murmurs became mutters, an angry tone slipping into the sound.
“Did we not see him?” shouted one. “Holding Mattrax’s eye?”
“He came from nowhere!” yelled another.
“The gods sent him!” It was more than one who called that out.
“Probably Barph,” said Firkin with a hiccup. “Good god, Barph is. Always my favorite. Got his priorities right.”
Lette ground her teeth. “You are listening to the words of a drunkard you would have kicked out of a tavern nine nights out of ten. Your prophet is Will Fallows, a farm boy most of you I imagine have known since birth.”
The muttering stuttered.
“Does sort of look like him,” said someone nearby.
“I ain’t following Will Fallows fucking nowhere,” someone replied. Lette smiled.
Then another voice rose up, louder. “Will Fallows is dead.”
Silence fell.
“My name’s Dunstan Meffit,” said a heavyset man with a patchy beard clinging to his rolling chin. “I done worked with Will Fallows since he was a child. Worked for his father before him. And three days ago I went to his farm, and found Mattrax’s soldiers there. The barn was burned to the ground, and they told me Will had burned in it. One of the men had his face burned up, said he’d been in the barn and seen it himself.” The man suddenly seemed to realize he had the attention of the whole crowd. He tugged at his beard and ducked his head. “Least that’s what they told me.”
He shuffled back toward anonymity. Lette attempted to find enough expressions of contempt to pour upon the man.
Firkin beat her to it. “He is returned!” he yelled. For a man with such a shrill voice, he could achieve surprising volume. “The gods have returned him to us! They have sent their prophet down into the shell of this Will Fallows! A miracle! Another! He returns from the dead! He kills the dragon!”
“Three nights ago, Will Fallows was looking for his manhood in a cave with me,” Lette retorted, but it was too late. The crowd was in a passion. Shouts of “A miracle!” rose up all around her. Firkin leaned back on his rock, smiling beatifically. He closed his eyes and appeared to fall asleep.
If she ground her teeth any harder, Lette realized, she was going to crack a tooth. Still, there was one person who could end this. She pushed out of the crowd and went to look for Will.
She found him siting by himself, leaning up against a trunk at the edge of the tree line. He looked up as she approached. He was a mess. Dried blood formed a flaky beard beneath hangdog eyes. The axe he’d been holding the night before was laid out on the leaves beside him. She didn’t think he had slept at all. She grimaced. He grimaced right back.
Finally she asked, “What did you do with the eye?”
He shrugged. “I threw it away.”
Lette sighed. “Well thank the gods for small mercies.” And then—because if anyone could fill in the gaps, it seemed he could—“What happened?”
He shook his head. “I panicked. They were all praising me, claiming I saved them. Except it was me and my ridiculous excuse for a plan that put them all in danger in the first place. And they were all pressing in. And, gods, I thought they would crush me to death or something.” He shuddered. “When I managed to get out of it, I just ran and hid.”
Lette took in his hiding place. The edge of an open plain of scree. “You’re shit at hiding,” she told him.
She grinned at him. After a moment he grinned back. “Thanks,” he said. “I think I needed that.”
She nodded. “Quite all right.” Then, because the answers still weren’t all there: “I know you didn’t kill Mattrax,” she said. “So whose blood is that?” She gestured to the weapon, to his face.
He explained about the guard. When he was done, Lette found she was impressed. She hadn’t been sure Will had murder in him. And telling the tale seemed to have calmed him a little.
It was time. “You know Firkin is sitting on a rock,” she said, “preaching that you’re a prophet, to everyone who will listen to him?”
Will’s calm retreated. He curled up on himself. “Please,” he said. “You have to go and tell them it’s pig’s shit,” he said.
“No,” she told him. “You do.”
He looked at her imploringly. “I swear that’s all I’ve said to anyone since I left the cave. They don’t listen. Or they listen and get angry. One man called me a fraudulent fuck and I had to take a swing at him with my axe before he’d back off. And once I’d done that, even more people gathered and started screaming at him that he was a heathen.” He shook his head. “They want a prophet, but they don’t want to bother listening to one.”
Lette grimaced. That was simple enough, she supposed. Firkin told them what they wanted to hear, Will didn’t.
Which left her original plan.
“We have to get out of here quickly then,” she told him. “Firkin’s making a mob, and nothing good ever comes from a group of folk most people associate with pitchforks and public burnings. So we find Balur, we find a wagon, we load it up with as much gold as it will carry, and we run like Lawl has opened up the Hallows at our heels.”
That, it seemed, was a plan Will could get behind. He stood up, checked to see if anyone was pointing and screaming in an adoring manner. Firkin’s sermon, however, was drawing more and more of the crowd away. Which was about the only benefit Lette could ascribe to it.
They found Balur closer to Mattrax’s cave, sprawled out on last night’s debris, head pointing downhill, mouth open, and snores rumbling out of him that sounded like giant pigs rutting.
Lette kicked him in the side of the head. Balur grunted. So she kicked him again.
“Be leaving it a-fucking-lone, woman,” Balur rumbled. Only his jaw moved.
“Woman?” There was no way Lette was going to let that shit lie. She went to kick him again. Balur’s arm shot out fast enough that she had trouble tracking it. He caught her ankle.
“It is already feeling like Mattrax was taking a shit in my skull. I would be begging you not to be kicking it anymore. Ours has been being a long and fruitful partnership and it would be being a shame for it to end with me being the one to be tearing your leg off and to be shoving it up your arse.”
Lette sneered. “Like to see you try.” The truth was, though, that if Balur wanted to, she would see him both try and—assuming she didn’t pass out from the pain—succeed.
Balur grunted, let go of her leg, and rolled into a sitting position. He let out a second grunt, somehow deeper and more profound, and put his head in his hands.
“Be reminding me,” said Balur, his voice even more gravelly than normal, “to not be drinking any more Fire Root potion.”
Lette groaned. So that explained it. “You stupid, silly fuck,” seemed the best way to summarize that situation.
Balur grunted. “Was killing a dragon.”
That, she knew, would in Balur’s mind excuse any behavior. Show up at a Batarrian wedding, tear the bride in two, and use both halves of her as a latrine? Okay as long as it resulted in an unimpeachable display of one’s might.
“It was an unconscious dragon,” she pointed out, for all the good it would do.
“Wasn’t seeing you killing it.”
Will, Lette realized, was staring and pointing. Both she and Balur turned to look at him. Will’s finger wavered at Balur. “You?” he managed.
“Of course him,” Lette said. “Who else would get drunk enough to cave in Mattrax’s skull.”
“So… so…” Will’s jaw worked. “Balur’s the prophet,” he managed. He looked off at where Firkin sat. “They should be worshipping him. Not me.”
Now it was Balur’s turn to look confused. “They are worshipping you?” He looked from Will to Lette. “Why are they worshipping the farmer?”
Lette couldn’t quite resist the short, sharp punch to Balur’s pride. “They think Will killed Mattrax,” she said.
The transformation was immediate. One moment Balur was a sagging ball of scales and aches, the next he was an eight-foot towering statue built in honor of righteous rage. His arm snapped out, caught Will around the neck.
“You are claiming my kill?” he roared. Brown phlegm flew out of his mouth, spattered Will.
Maybe that particular punch had been a little too short and sharp…
“Balur,” Lette said, affecting patience.
Will croaked.
“I am going to be killing you,” Balur growled at him. “Or are you going to be claiming that as suicide as well?”
“Balur,” she repeated.
“I shall be arranging your intestines so that they shall be reading, ‘I claimed the rightful kill of Balur, mightiest of the Analesians.’”
Balur always got far too invested in the whole revenge thing.
“Bal—” she started for the third time, then changed her mind and went for the more direct, “Hey, you, the son of a whore lizard.”
Balur snapped his gaze down to her. “What?”
“Let him go, you gargantuan fucking idiot.”
Balur curled his lip but did as he was told. Will landed, gasping, pawing at his bruised throat.
“Why?” Balur growled. Whether he was asking for Will’s motives or hers, Lette wasn’t sure. Maybe Balur wasn’t either.
“I didn’t claim it,” said Will, his voice sounding raw. “All I’ve done is tell people that it wasn’t me. I just found an eye you left on the ground. I was using it as a lantern. I didn’t even know what it was.”
“The crowd,” Lette said, “did what crowds always do. They made a stupid assumption. And then someone did what people always do when crowds make stupid assumptions. They agreed with it, and took advantage of it.” That was, as far as Lette understood it, the entire principle of the political system.
“Who?”
Perhaps there was a little Fire Root left in Balur’s system. He was never at his best when he was monosyllabic.
“Firkin,” she said reluctantly. If she didn’t give the name up now, it would just take up more time as Balur badgered her for it.
“Then I am knowing who I must be killing next.”
“No!” she snapped with more than a little vehemence. “He is surrounded by a crowd of a hundred or more, all of whom believe him completely.”
“Then I will be killing all who are getting in my way,” Balur said, already turning.
“No!” There was a shrillness in Lette’s voice that she regretted. But it stopped Balur. He turned, looked at her. “No,” she said again. “That’s not who we are… Not who I am anymore.”
Balur stared at her. She saw disbelief. Disappointment. But she wanted to be a better person, not a weaker one. So she held his gaze.
“We are tribe,” Balur growled.
“Then our tribe is not killing a hundred innocents today.”
Balur curled his lip. For a moment she thought it might come to blows. Analesian dominance patterns died hard. But then Balur shook his head, let his shoulders slump. “You are not being fun anymore.”
Lette breathed. “We just need to get the gold and get gone from here,” she said.
She flicked her gaze over to Will, checking that he was still on board. He was looking at her with a distinctly nervous expression. She arched an eyebrow.
“I could go and tell them Balur killed Mattrax” he said quietly.
She shook her head. “Shut up,” she told him, “and help me get rich.”
Lette’s nerves tightened like bowstrings as they approached Mattrax’s cave. There was another crowd here. Not as big as Firkin’s, but big enough to keep her up at night if she had to cut through them to get to the gold.
I’ll let Balur go in first, said the cold, calculating part of her mind. Shock and awe. Let him carve a path. They’ll start to flee downhill—the path of least resistance. I’ll cut them down just as they start to break. Five or six should do it. Women and children if I can. That paralyzes them, gives Balur more time to work. Then they flee backward, toward the mountain. I put a blade in anyone spilling off to the sides. Then we press them up against the rock, finish them. Less than a minute’s work.
She half shook her head, half shuddered. She didn’t want to listen to that voice.
It got you this far, she whispered back to herself.
“Is that Quirk?” Will had stopped walking and stood squinting.
Lette’s stomach did a slow gymnastic routine. Memories of fire and fear. The smell of cooking flesh in her nostrils. She looked over at Balur.
“Wait,” she said. “Are you aroused right now?”
Small purple frills had opened up along Balur’s neck, narrow vibrant lines of feathery color. Like a fish’s gills. Their display was involuntary, and only ever appeared when Balur was contemplating mating rituals.
Balur brushed a hand at his neck, and failed to meet her eye.
“No,” he blustered. “It is just being… I am just waking up. This is being the way I am in the morning. It is being nothing to do with nothing.” He looked away.
She shook her head. “You sick bastard. You’re totally turned on by her body count, aren’t you?”
Balur hesitated, then shrugged. “There were being a lot of torched bodies in that cave last night.”
Lette grunted her disgust. Still, she was used to Balur’s depravities. A lot of his whores liked to share their stories with her. They seemed to think that some battle-scarred bond must now exist between them. She rather wished they wouldn’t.
From the poorly stifled sounds of revulsion coming from behind her, it rather sounded like Will didn’t want to hear about the depravities either. She wondered what that was like—to still have innocence left to lose.
“If you’re so hot and heavy for her,” she said to Balur, ignoring Will, “then why don’t you go in first, and make sure she’s feeling less murderous than last night?”
“Murderous? Body count?” Will, it seemed, had gotten over the mental image Balur had summoned. “What are you talking about? Quirk wouldn’t even kill Ethel last night because she’s a pacifist. I think she’s treating the wounded up there.” He pointed. And, Lette saw now, the women and men were almost universally bandaged and hobbling.
Lette turned and smiled. “Ah,” she said. “Yes. Well, you know how our thaumatobiologist has given up magic? How she’s moved on and made herself a better person?”
Will nodded.
“Yes,” Lette said. “So that was horseshit.”
“She…” Will started.
“Roasted a score of people alive?” Lette finished. “Yes, she did that.”
“Oh fuck.”
Balur cut in. “It was being like a firestorm in the night. Ribbons of fire were dancing about her.”
“Keep it in your pants,” Lette told him. He brushed at his neck.
“She’s treating the wounded,” Will repeated.
“She probably wounded most of them herself.”
“There must have been… I don’t know. Some sort of extenuating circumstances.”
“Like her being a psychotic, magic-using arsonist and lying to us about it?” Will was cute and all, but it was possible to push the naïve thing too far.
“How about we are going over there and just asking her?” Balur put in.
“I told you to keep it in your pants.”
“I think ‘just talking’ is pretty close to keeping it in your pants,” Will put in.
Lette breathed. She had started to calculate whether she could stash Will’s body before the crowd noticed. She was not going to be that person.
“Fine,” she said. “Let’s talk.”
They pushed through the crowd. Quirk kept her head down as they approached, focused on the stitches she was putting in a young boy’s arm. Her fingers made short, precise movements. Strands of pig gut tightened, sealed fleshed together.
“You don’t know a… ‘better way’ to help with that?” Lette asked without preamble. She and Balur loomed over the spot where she sat working. The young boy looked up at them. He was biting on a strap of leather while Quirk worked.
Quirk didn’t look up. “I told you,” she said. “I’m reformed.”
None of them said the word magic. None of them mentioned spells. The crowd hadn’t put it together yet. There was no need to help them along the way.
“Reformed?” Lette allowed acid to etch the edges of her voice. “You were reformed last night?”
Quirk cinched a stitch tight with a sharp jerk of her wrist. The boy winced, let out a slight moan. Quirk blew out, put a smile on her face.
“Sorry,” she said to the boy. “That’s the last one, though. You go on to your mother. Tell her how brave you were.” She flicked a glance at Will. “As brave as the prophet himself.”
The boy’s eyes widened along with his smile. He ran off, grinning.
Will was looking about anxiously. “You’ve heard?” he asked Quirk quietly.
“When it’s all someone will talk about despite the fact that you need to amputate his hand, then you work out that it’s important to a lot of people.”
Will shook his head.
“This is striking me,” Balur rumbled, “as being a fairly transparent attempt to change the subject.”
The small grin that had graced Quirk’s face fled. She looked down at the ground. “I have more people to treat.”
“Cauterizing wounds?” It was probable, Lette thought, that antagonizing someone who could cook you in your clothes was unwise, but… gods, she sat there so calmly, trying to pretend it hadn’t happened. She had lied, had killed. Lette would not be satisfied until there was some blood in the water.
Yet when Quirk looked up, Lette was afraid she had cut too deep. Something flickered in the mage’s eyes. Something bright and dangerous.
“What else would you have me do?” Quirk hissed, with the intensity of a flame. “I caused half these wounds. I cannot go back. I cannot undo them. I slipped. Sometimes I slip. Not often, but last night I did. So I can stand up, and say, Yes, it was me, I did this. And they will string me up and burn me, or something else more inventive but equally vile, and I shall die. Or I could keep my mouth shut and actually do some good healing the hurt.”
Lette hesitated. There was some sense to the words.
“That is being all well and good,” said Balur, “right up until you are doing it all over again.”
Quirk nodded, short and savage. “You’re right. I should just end my life. A knife across the wrists is effective, I hear. Maybe I should find a ledge. Just let my past beat me. Just let the person I was win. Or maybe, if I’m going to do that, I should just torch you all. Watch you all burn.” She eyed Balur. “The meat would be peeling off your bones before you even got that hammer above your head.
“Part of me wants to do that, you understand? Since I’ve met you, there’s been just a little piece of me that wants to know what you’d smell like if I cooked you.” She turned that slow, big-eyed stare on each of them in turn. “But I don’t. Because I’m better than that. Because I still have things to offer. Because I am holding on to the dream of who I could be.”
Lette honestly felt bad for the woman. Her heart went out to her, in fact. They were alike in many ways. She had forgotten that somewhere along the way. Possibly when her hair was on fire the night before.
However, of more immediate concern was the fact that Quirk’s hands were shaking and letting off smoke.
“How close,” Will asked, “would you say you were to slipping right now?” He was stepping back as he spoke.
Quirk clenched her fists. “Just let me tend to these people,” she said. “Just let me undo a little of the damage I’ve done.”
Lette exchanged a glance with Balur. He shrugged.
“So she is being sorry,” he said. “Plenty of murderers are being sorry. It is not stopping us from being the ones who are stringing them up from trees or from being the ones who are then hitting them until they are stopping moving.”
Quirk was on her feet in an instant. Lette allowed blades to drop into both her palms even as the curse formed on her lips. Balur was widening his stance. Will was making a round O with his mouth. Firkin’s shrill voice was carrying thinly on the wind from where he preached. Sounds of laughter and pain were coming from the crowd, mingling in the air.
“Lawl’s breath, it’s him! It’s really him!”
A girl’s cry, breathy and excited, shot into the moment, ricocheted off several walls of inappropriateness, and struck Lette right in the frontal lobes.
“Oh by the gods. Look at him!” Another girl. Just as breathy. Just as excited.
Slowly, keeping her eyes on Quirk for as long as possible, Lette turned her head to look in the direction the voices had come.
Charging, mouths wide, nostrils flared, pupils blazing, with all the energy and ferocity of a pack of wolves hurling themselves straight out of the mouth of the Hallows, two teenage girls flung themselves at Will.
“You’re the prophet!” one babbled. “Like the actual prophet.”
“Oh gods, he has his axe!” the other girl babbled. She reached out, touched the handle. She was fourteen, perhaps, black curly hair gathered up in two loose buns on either side of her head. She wore a bloodstained smock cut, in Lette’s opinion, far too low. Her friend filled out her smock to a lesser extent, but she had eyes the size of saucers, and they were fixed on Will’s own.
Will, for his part, looked a lot like he had just stepped in something unpleasant while visiting a much-honored elderly relative—horrified but unsure of whether he could actually say anything.
“Can I… Can I touch you?” said the one with her hair in buns.
Lette watched the refusals form on Will’s lips but none of them made it into the audible realm. She glanced back at Quirk. The thaumatobiologist was watching the exchange with a mix of bafflement and disgust.
“For the sake of the gods, Will,” Lette said, since obviously someone had to take hold of the moment, “tell her to get gone before her father finds you and accuses you of something indecent.”
Too late.
“’Ey up,” said a man approaching from farther down the slope of the mountainside. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing with my Maisy?” He was large, heavyset. There was fat on his gut, held in place by a tightly cinched apron, but his wrists were thick and his shoulders broad. He wore a flat cap on his head and an ill-advised mustache on his upper lip.
Will flinched away from the girl, arms going wide, palms up. “I didn’t. I swear… It wasn’t… She… I mean not to suggest that she… Except… Well…”
Lette grit her teeth. She was still holding her daggers. She had been trying so hard to be good. And she knew Balur would be no help. He was grinning too much.
But then the girl’s father got a better look at Will. “Oh,” he said, and then again, more bashfully. “Oh it’s you. I, err, didn’t realize, your, erm… prophetness. Didn’t mean to get in the way. I mean.” He pulled his cap off his head, started to work it in his large hands. “If you’ve taken a shine to Maisy there, well she’s a fine girl. And if you, well… It would be an honor to me and my family if you wanted to… you know… with her.”
Will’s hands, if anything, got farther apart and farther away from Maisy. The look of horror on his face hadn’t left. “She’s only fourteen,” he said. “Or…” He checked Maisy. “Thereabouts.”
“Fourteen exact,” said the man, who looked not even slightly abashed. Rather it was a look of admiration on his face. He glanced at Maisy. “See that?” he said to her. “He knew your age right off.” He tapped his head, just next to his right eye. “Got the vision, he does. Just like the Voice says he do.”
Lette rolled her eyes so hard she almost snapped her head from side to side. The girl couldn’t be more fourteen if she tried. That said, at this point neither could the farmer. He was still advancing on Will.
“Would it… erm…” He worked the cap in his hands harder than ever. His broad cheeks blazed red. “Would it be okay if I touched you?”
Will backed up fast, making inarticulate noises.
Lette had had enough. “All right,” she said, stepping between Will and his admirers, “that’s enough creepy time for today. His prophetness needs a break from all your weird shit. He’s decreed you all fuck off for a bit before I shove my foot up your arse.”
Beside her, Balur nodded. “Prophetic,” he whispered. She ignored him.
The man, his daughter, and her friend all backed away slowly. The man attempted to bow, almost tripped over himself. Lette turned her back on him, put herself between the trio and Will.
“This is only going to get worse,” she said, trying to put all the urgency she felt into her words. “Right up until the point when they realize that Firkin is full of shit. And then it’s going to get downright terrible. So let me repeat myself: We need to get some gold, get a wagon, and get the fuck out of here.”
Quirk looked up from where she was sitting. “You’re just going to abandon these people?”
Lette felt her fists clench. Had these people never heard of haste? Balur had his faults, to be sure, but at least he was already moving toward the cave.
“I am not going to just leave them. I am going to actively flee from them, and I am going to discourage anyone who wants to follow using the edge of my sword blade.”
“But when the Dragon Consortium finds out what happened here, when they find out they were all here…” Quirk’s eyes were wide with shock. “You have accused me of killing these people…”
“Yes,” Lette said. “Because you did.” She had been told tact was not her strong point. Personally she had never seen the need for it. The world was the way it was; you either accepted that or pretended it wasn’t until it put the knife in your gut and showed you exactly what color your spleen was. “But I did not lead these people up here last night. I did not even suggest doing it. I did not kill Mattrax. I did not fuck up my part of the plan in any way.” The smile on her face felt small, savage, and justified.
“But they’ll be killed.”
Lette nodded. “More than likely.”
Will put a hand on her arm. “Wait. Is that true?”
So pretty. So naïve. “What do you think the Dragon Consortium will do when they find out someone killed one of their members? Shrug, put it down to bad luck, and have another sweetmeat? Or come here raining down fire and vengeance so that nobody ever dares fuck with them again?”
Balur snorted a laugh next to her. They all looked at him. “Sorry,” he said. “I am just thinking that there is probably being an underappreciation of sweetmeats among dragons. It is being inappropriate. I am being aware.”
“We can’t just let this happen,” said Will. “We have to do something.”
Lette decided to try to take the time to explain it simply once. Maybe then they could just move on to the fleeing bit. “How,” she said, “do you think we will manage that? We got incredibly lucky last night. The plan just about worked because we surprised Mattrax in his lair. And still many, many people from your village were hurt.” She swept her hand about them, at the injured and bandaged all around them. “Or they were killed,” she went on. “So how do you think it will go if one, or two, or three, or four members of the Consortium swoop over our heads, looking for trouble and revenge?”
“Four dragons?” Quirk breathed. “Flying over us? You truly think that could happen?”
“Oh, put it back in your britches,” Lette snapped. What was it with her traveling companions and inappropriate arousal?
“We cannot be saving these people,” Balur said, finally pitching in to help the cause, his bass rumble adding a sense of finality to his words. “Lette is being right. We can only be saving ourselves.”
Quirk shook her head. “This is wrong.”
Lette shrugged. “So stay behind, don’t get any gold, and get roasted alive by a bunch of pissed-off dragons. What you do here is up to you, but I’m telling you your options.”
Quirk and Will looked torn. Lette shrugged. She’d laid it all out. She owed them nothing more. “Come on,” she said to Balur, and together the pair walked toward Mattrax’s cave.
It was Will who joined her first. Quirk wasn’t too far behind. They stood together and just stared at all the gold.
“They say it can’t buy you happiness.” Will was chewing his lip.
Lette grinned. “Poor people say that. So let’s go and get a wagon, and stop being them.”