by Thomas Head
He sat and grabbed a cake. As did Bunn.
Once the fear ceased, he nibbled. With the next small bite, the food was passing more assuredly through his lips. He watched Bunn’s mouth, noting the sturdier bones of her slightly cleft chin. And very, very quickly he grew comfortable with the sight of her. He was enthralled by the rhythm of her neck, the round smooth pulses of muscle in her cheeks. The way the tip of her nose rose and fell as she chewed.
He found her… interesting. Pinchable, yes. Soft, indeed.
But infinitely interesting.
.
__________
When he was fully done with his cakes he glanced again at Bunn and found that her gaze did not hold any trace of any need to thank her—which was fascinating in its own right.
He kept looking.
It was strange how food made everything look different. It was as if in his little nap they had traveled some great distance. The landscape was different, brighter, even in the gathering night.
For the first time in far too long, he smiled.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Thank you,” she told him.
Oh.
She was very interesting indeed.
Chapter 80
“Oh lord, we are open to so little that awes us. Let this sausage shock us.”
—Uncle Fie, praying over a breakfast of sausages, followed by beer and more sausages
__________
The Dwarf-King approached Dhal slowly, staring up at her with ironically bright gray eyes, and he seemed to breathe her in another moment before he looked her up and down again.
At length he asked her, “Human, have you no passion whatsoever?”
As far as the small stone mooring would allow, Dhal stepped back, as if more perspective might allow her to answer.
“Passion?” she finally asked.
“Love and war, woman!” the Mage King said in a thundering whisper that was somehow like both a lion and a snake. Dragon-like. “Have you never driven your lover to madness! Have you never driven your enemies to their knees!”
“I have not. And may God have mercy on those who done with the pleasure you would seem to take from it!”
“Nay, girl. Shame on those who have not! What manner of life is this?”
It took another moment for the words to register.
“What?”
“Do you want to live, Dhal?”
“Well! Isn’t that something, put simply, we must do?”
“Hmm, quite. I suppose you felt quite safe tucked away in your mind. You’ve probably wondered what I would do to you when you came here? No doubt you’ve been waiting to be a slave, or to be eaten, or used as some manner of prey animal for my new pet on a morbid hunt. But I don’t suppose you could even know how much you dishonor me with those thoughts…”
“Safe?”
The Dwarf-King harrumphed. “Do you not ever feel the urge of the hunt, Dhal? Do you not long for the fearsome terror that someone will knock the meat from your bones?”
Now, Dhal thought, she understood what he meant. And what he was getting at….
Her pride.
She smiled.
The Dwarf-King returned the smile, and it was the unique smile of a dwarven sorcerer, a beam that involved little more than a tilt of the head and raising the eyebrows.
“Oh, such questions...” Dhal said. “Perhaps it is not a question at all. Perhaps we should slice down to the truth of what it is… We both know full well I would die before you turned me into bait for my nephew.”
“Oh, you know much. And assume much. Perhaps you expected the young wizard would come here! That I would have that lad enslaved so that might be invincible through a thousand years of battle?”
Now Dhal understood nothing. Nothing whatsoever. Except that perhaps this Dwarf-King was insane. He raised a brow under that crowned helmet and laughed at the confused look on her face.
Dhal laughed, too. Nervously. “I’m afraid you have me on a scale of disadvantage I cannot easily describe. Why, exactly, have you brought me here?”
“When one lives in a cage…” the Dwarf-King began, but trailed off into silence. “My apologies, lady. I was called Bhiers at birth. But I made myself more than a name. ”
“I’ll call you mad, if you prefer.”
“Aye, the Mad Cruithne, the Conjuring Dwarf, the King of Fools I’ll be, when I tell them what I’ve seen: Dhal the Great, shackled to her fears like a simple dog.”
Dhal said, “This particular what, is a who!”
“And who is this who?”
Dhal pulled the robes of her dress aside. She put her hand on her heart, the wind from some unseen shaft in the cavernous castle pressing her under-dress against the understated curves of her body. “I am Dhal. And he who owns this heart was called Wyrmkiller.”
“Ha! Owns!? A monumental act of vulgarity, my lady! Most egregious!”
“And just who the thundering hell do you think are you?”
“A dwarf who, for most of his life, has sought the dragons from the stories of his youth. A dwarf who has sought barrow snakes and even the dark goddesses. But no more. I can see now in this age, a woman may not be the mysterious knights they once were. You, dear lady, are just that. A lady. No longer a night creature. No longer a knight, no longer to be feared. And…”
But he said no more, and waved her off.
“… And the road home is quite open, I can assure you.”
Bhiers seemed genuinely depressed, and began to walk away.
Dhal watched him go, utterly confused.
“Where are you going?”
“Ha! What does that matter to you? You are free to go as you please.”
Dhal made an exasperated sound. She covered herself and looked down in the blackness of the hole the vessel had sunk into. Then she looked at the Dwarf-King, walking away, seeming to wipe a tear from his eye.
“You’ll not feed me first?”
Bhiers stopped. He looked at her, now smiling.
“Ha! Yes! Most good! Come, woman. Let me introduce yourself to your own mind!”
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As they left the riverside, Cullfor and Bunn walked for a few hours in the dimming afternoon light. Cullfor sensed that, in life, there were very few people comfortable with silence, and he was pleased to discover that Bunn was among them. He found he was rapidly taking in her appearance as well, and just as rapidly growing fond of it, so nearing dusk, as they stepped upward through a tangle of maple toward the sound of water, it was almost a novel sound. They traced uphill a bit, close to a smallish hilltop, where they discovered a spring. The grass was cropped at the pool’s edge, the work of deer or wild goats or some such, and the spring sent a pair streams down a crevice of mossy wood and then back underground. There was a smell in the air like jasmine. They sat for moment, both of them resting their sore feet in the streams that trickled from it. For a moment, they just stared. And when his eyes were full of the beauty of it, he drank for a while.
With his lips still fixed from the cold, clear water, he kissed her forehead.
Bunn unclasped her hooded cape from around her shoulders. She slid it off, then extended it to him.
He grabbed the cape and looked down into the pool, at the wavery moon that was reflected in it. The wind had picked up. The slow-growing shadows gathered a shocking cool. Tying the cape around his threadbare beltline, he felt less broken down.
He could still sleep for a month, but his hip felt better. His leg was taking weight much more easily.
Bunn looked at him, then stood.
Trekking deep into the small mossy hollow, she eyed him to follow.
Cullfor went, slowly. He paused, and he looked at her while she strung the length of herself alongside a fallen log. It was not like reclining, but more like she was placing herself there. There was something curiously engaging about her stillness. She had a certain dexterity in her lack of motion, folded and pleated as if tossed casually to the ground. But from
the confusion of angles something perfect had emerged. Like a piece of art.
He kept staring, unable to break from his look—besides, there was no energy left for the madness of decorum and decency. He was so sleepy, and she was like the leafy edges of a dream, and it felt like a vial of arm liquid had cracked in his belly, leaking upwards against gravity into his chest.
After a moment, he lay beside her in the everyday practicality of rest
He put his arm around her.
And they slept.
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Cullfor stirred at some point in the night, trying to eke some meaning from a dream.
Very soon after, he gave up, and stared at Bunn, whose perfection had collapsed. But it had only collapsed into something more endearing and soft. Her face was bunched and snoring. A portion of skin was exposed and red against the log in front of her. But damn if he’d seen anything prettier in his life.
Shifting onto his side in the wombish cocoon of the cape, he detached himself from a tangle of her sweaty hair. Then he nuzzled closely again.
He realized she smelled of new, white berries, and a little like jasmine, and he went back to sleep.
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Sometime in the night, Cullfor was wakened by a sound he mistook for a purr. He opened an eye, slowly, to discover that beside him waves of flesh were rippling in a continuum of groaning motion. Then there was a pause, a general, slow sigh, and then all the soft noise of sleep was punctured with a high scream.
He froze, arching a single brow.
“What the icy hell?”
His breath was pushing his heart back down when he was seized on the neck. Bunn pulled his face toward hers and looked at him with a bulging, bloodshot eye. And she smiled.
Cullfor stared. Dawn’s air was a cold contrast the pleasant heat of her breath. He pried loose of her grip.
She shook her head.
He emerged from the doorway of sleep to kiss her mouth briefly. He kissed her neck and the lobes of her cold ears. When he felt himself needing to do more, he paused.
She kissed his nose.
He kissed her between the eyes, then stood.
__________
The forest floor had transformed into a placid ocean of sparkles. It dazzled the eye in spite of the low morning light.
Cullfor stretched.
When Bunn emerged more fully into the waking world, she rose. She was beaming, an elegant and sure expression on her. Immediately she knelt and breathed a small prayer, thanking God.
Cullfor winced, then laughed, catching himself taking some credit for her thankfulness. He secured the remarkable little gem in his inner pocket, looking at her.
Slap him to hell, but he was going to marry her one day.
That settled, they got moving. And they moved swiftly, blanketed in her pleasant silence.
Chapter 81
“Popes and paupers, all of us.”
—Halfling philosophy
__________
Friar Basil limped to the high turret atop of Covenloft Tower, visibly out of breath. As he leaned between the stone merlons, his tattered green raiment looked all the world like an errant piece of spinach in a massive lower jaw.
He cupped his hands to his mouth. “Verily, liege, he burnt my feet. I know not where he went after.”
“Oh, my. That is your answer to me? Monk, I’ve gathered two thousand men of the cruelest demeanor with me. They have not slept for a week, and I dare say no one among us is in the mood for any foolery. Now, please, if you will, tell me where he was going.”
High overhead, some blubbering faded into indiscernible prayers. His hands were folded, looking down at the crowd of Dellish soldiers.
“My dearest liege, you know well enough of me. My heart does not hold well in such conditions. Could I lie to you without fainting?”
Jorigaer knew this was true. And he was already certain the monk was telling the truth; a thorough search of the monastery had produced nothing. He smiled sufferably, then looked up.
“Monk, if you wish for your head and your arse to be attached to the same body, you will get the both of them down here. Now.”
Soon, but not soon enough, the door at the tower’s base groaned open. The monk limped out. Two of Jorigaer’s guards looked at their king, noticing the monk’s feet wrapped in blood-drenched bandages.
Jorigaer merely glanced down at the pavingstones as the monk was pushed to the ground. While they kept him pinned, a third guard unwound the dressings on his feet.
“They are burned, my lord.”
Jorigaer looked down at the scalded, open burns. The king adjusted his fox pelt over his tartan and grabbed the monk by a wrist. He stood him up with a yank. Then he walked with him, halting near a gathering throng of locals.
“Who among you can claim any real love for this man?”
There was a silence as thick as the town.
“I see,” the king groused.
As Friar Basil quivered, more and more of the villagers were gathering around him.
They closed in a bit tighter, morbidly interested in the blood-sport that was surely about to happen, the monk mumbling fast and breathy prayers. His swollen eyes watered. Between sudden, yelping bursts of tears, he began pleading, “My God, man! Have mercy! Do not leave me to these savages!”
King Jorigaer smiled slowly. Then he tsked. He put his hands to his lips and drew Urth, a sword supposedly forged from Tiamark’s great claws.
The monk shook, straining to remain silent as the guards once again placed him on his belly.
The king looked at him sideways and stared with a sort of bemused admiration. He felt no pity for the monk, but there was something he liked about him. Something he could not place. The childish honesty of his fear, perhaps. The way he shook like a woman. But in the end, he shrugged, and brought the blade around his head. He chopped downward, ripping a clean new seam down the back of the monk’s garments.
Basil squalled. He struggled to gather the shreds around him as men to either side pulled them away, laughing.
They looked at their king.
King Jorigaer approached and, closer, grabbed him by his thinning orange hair. He pulled his face up. Placed on his belly as he was, his face reddened with the mere strain of looking up. Otherwise, the monk did not offer protest now, prostrate and nude atop the cold cobblestones.
“I beg of you. Please be quick, my liege.”
“The silver I gave you. Where?”
“In the tower. Every reel, I swear it.”
The king let go of the hair. He was standing over the monk, thinking for a moment. Silence began swelling around them until there was only the sound of small birds in the distance and Friar Basil’s breathing.
Then the king lowered the blade between the monk’s buttocks.
“Every reel?”
“I swear it!”
The king laughed, goading him with the slightest penetration of the steel before he turned to the crowd.
“Behold the pink, dimpled arse of your man of God. See how it quakes!”
Dellishmen and Arwegians laughed wildly. Savagely.
“Riiip him!” someone shouted.
“Cleave his arse!”
Then there was great commotion, a torrent of wicked demands before the king held up his hand for silence.
When the quiet returned, the tip of the sword withdrew from between his rump. He raised the sword slowly. A dollop of blood fell from the tip and landed in the small of the monk’s back. The king wiped it clean across the monk’s bared flesh, then put the tip into the back of his neck. The monk, still forcing himself into stillness, began to breathe in sobs. At Jorigaer’s nod, a couple of troops tied ropes around the monk’s waist. They brought the same lengths around his wrists. The other ends of the rope were tied to a large trough at a store front. They stuffed odd bits of cut rope into his mouth, slapping him, laughing.
And the monk began squalling again. His eyes bulged. More of the Arwegians joined now. Next his a
nkles were secured. His quaking flesh was reddening now across the legs and back.
When the guards where done, the monk could not move if he tried.
Then, stepping away from the monk, Jorigaer told them, “A chest of silver to the man with the largest fistful of the monk’s hair.”
Then he and The Dwarf in the Black Thistle Helm walked away, the monk begging after them.
And the town closed in around him.
__________
Turning back, they watched them begin to pour over him like rats on a heap of chicken fat. Their lashing and pulling was tentative at first. It brought only whimpers, then muted screams. Then came more brazen yanking followed, and suddenly the ripping and clawing grew in chorus with his death-screams.
The Dwarf in the Black Thistle Helm winced, laughing. “If he knew where the wizard was...”
“He would have said long since,” Jorigaer conceded.
The Dwarf in the Black Thistle Helm nodded. He turned to one of his Thistle Knights. “Give the idiots a bit more fun, then bring him to me. I want to know everything he can tell me about this … Cullfor Stonebreaker of Gintypool.”
Chapter 82
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The peach line of dawn was radiant and soft to their right as Bunn poured the last of her oats into the pan. She added some water and fried them into crisp little cakes before carefully inching them out of the pan with her smart fingers and handing them to him.
Cullfor bowed slightly, accepting each them as if they were worth a king’s ransom.
A moment later, eating them like cookies, he suddenly felt so dangerously good that he almost forgot to split them with her.
When he did, she kissed him lightly on the lips. It was just a peck, but it washed through him.
Later, when they got moving, there was little conversation, just Cullfor’s boyish silence, and again he sponged up her nearly majestic ability to maintain it. At a westbound inroad to God-knows-where they turned northward. The only sound was the thin, crystalline patina of spring snow, crisp under his boots.