by M. A. Ray
At top speed, Windish took him a frantic hour. From the moment he took off, his head swam with images, each scenario more horrible than the last, so when his feet finally—finally—slammed the boards of Tikka’s top deck, he’d worked himself into a seething, shivering mess. He yanked the door open. “Tikka!” he called down into the house. “It’s Vandis!”
“Coming!” she trilled, but damn, she took her sweet time getting up there. Vandis paced the deck, flexing circulation back into his icy fingers.
“Where are they?” he demanded, the instant he saw her crest bobbing up the stairs.
She didn’t answer until she’d stepped out. “You won’t find them here.”
“Oh, I know! Good thing Dingus wrote to me!” His voice blasted out much louder than he’d meant it to, and he couldn’t stop. “Did you not think I’d want to know about this? In what world is it acceptable for you not to tell me?”
“Now I see where he gets it! You’ve got the same problem, young man! No respect, no respect at all for your elders.”
Vandis turned away and stared out at the cedars, taking a long, deep breath. He turned back to face her. “Where are my kids, Tikka?” he asked, low, poisonous.
She spread her hands. “I don’t know.”
“That is quite possibly the worst answer in the entire fucking history of time.”
“How dare you curse at me?”
“I trusted you! I trusted you, and you fucked them over! I’ll curse at you all I want, you unbelievable shit-smeared cunt!” By that last bit, he was screaming as loudly as he ever had, feeling incandescent, a pillar of fire. “Tell me what happened to my kids!”
“They left,” she snapped. “Dingus didn’t want to stay, and Kessa believed, in her infinite thirteen-year-old wisdom, that she had to follow him. I offered them both a choice. And they spat on it!”
Vandis’s heart staggered. “You kicked them out?”
“I offered a choice. Dingus’s behavior—”
“You kicked them out! And you call yourself a Knight! You kicked a Junior and a Squire off your land!”
“I did not! I gave them the choice! Dingus thought it was more important to harbor a swarm of motherless pickpockets than to obey me—and he left!”
His nostrils flared. He dived over the railing and burst up through the canopy, scattering needles. As much as he had left to say to Tikka, damn her eyes, there were far more important things to do.
Vandis went to Sodee Marketplace and started poking around. He didn’t have to poke much; he asked three different people about Dingus and Kessa, and got the same information three times over. Whether it was a relief to find out where they were so quickly or embarrassing that everybody knew all about it, Vandis didn’t know.
Either way, he couldn’t help being impressed—and more than a little proud. They’d done an amazing thing, his kids, and never mind that it was also a spectacular example of compulsive do-gooding foolishness. He couldn’t wait to see them, or to chew them out, so he decided to fly over to the finger peninsula in Feej Park. Easier to find it from the air, and easier to surprise them. He laughed to himself, thinking of landing at the end of the peninsula and shocking the color right out of their hair.
He found it empty, except for signs of recent camping: fresh ashes in the firepit, myriad tracks on the ground, and a storage pit left open and empty. At last he found a trail blazed by over a dozen Ishlings, plus his own two kids, and—he wasn’t sure, but maybe—someone else, someone tall and broad. He straightened from the sign he’d been examining and scraped his hands back through his hair. Left in a big damn hurry, he thought. Why?
Yatan, She said, and Vandis froze.
Are You fucking kidding me?
Would I?
He legged it along the broad trail; he would’ve flown, but he didn’t want to lose the sign in the falling night. Luckily, there was so much sign on the ground that even when the sun sank lower, he couldn’t miss it.
Vandis…
What is it? he asked Her, but he was already putting on the hustle.
I’m so proud of him. You ought to know that.
He broke into a flat run, stretching his legs as far as they’d go, and as fast. Over half a mile he ran, deep into the center of the park, and before long he didn’t even need the sign. He heard muffled shouting—Dingus shouting—and then it went quiet.
“Shit, shit, shit,” Vandis muttered. He rounded a bend, clutching a stitch in his side, and saw a tableau of chaos: the backs of a dozen Treehoppers, and Kessa with her sword held ready. Behind her, with Ishlings clotted around his ankles and staring into the trees on the other side of a little stream, Dingus.
Vandis called to him, and he turned his head. Everyone turned, but it was Dingus that Vandis saw, and the longing and resignation in his eyes. He faced the trees again. Vandis was on the point of calling once more when he coiled his legs beneath him and leapt, inhumanly strong and fey-graceful, fifteen feet from a standing start. His bare feet touched the opposite bank of the stream, and he darted into the wood, soundless and lightning fast.
“Just what the hell is going on here?” Vandis demanded.
“Go help Dingus,” Kessa said grimly, holding her sword on the Hoppers.
“Dingus can handle himself,” he said, much as he hated to admit it, and forced his way through the Treehoppers in their loose semicircle around Kessa. They didn’t move; too shocked to hit out at him. In the shadows to his left, he caught sight of a Rodanskan sailor, tall and tattooed, and recognized a man of Wynn’s; why hadn’t he done anything? “I won’t leave you alone. I—”
“Where is he?” It was another Treehopper, just coming through the trees at Vandis’s back, and she sounded like her soul had caught flame. Her fur blazed orange. She had two others with her. Vandis threw up his hands. He wouldn’t unwind this until it was all over.
“Across the crick!” Kessa said. “After Yatan.”
“Stay here,” the brightly-colored Hopper said, but Vandis was already splashing through the stream. She bounded after him, slightly behind, but gaining.
Sir Dingus
that evening
They were somewhere near the middle of the park now, deep in the forest, where not even the city sounds penetrated. A stream trickled past the new camp; there’d already been a firepit and a little wooden roof over it, so he figured it was a park thing, but he’d told Kessa it was a good choice. He sat on a damp, mossy rock at the side of the stream, letting the cold water run over his bare feet and watching the Ishlings fish for minnows—which meant he was watching a splash fight, and getting wet, too, but the water soothed his nervous headache, and the scent of the water, deep with wet weed and the slight tang of decaying needles, relaxed him. He pulled one foot onto the rock so he could rest his arm on his knee and have a place to put his head.
“Dingus, Dingus!” Peepa squealed, leaping up by his foot and lifting a tiny minnow in both hands. “I is catch one, lookit what I do!”
That was all it took to lift Dingus’s heart. You are so worth it. “Well, how ’bout that?” he said, smiling at her. “You did it, baby girl.”
She ate the minnow, right down the hatch, slurp! “Ooh!” she said, putting her hand on her belly with a grimace. “He wiggle in my tummy!”
Dingus laughed. “Well, you did eat him alive!”
“Come play, Dingus!” Voo chirped, and Dingus didn’t even have to think. He unbuckled his belt with its weight of scabbards and swords, stripped off jerkin and tunic, and slid off the rock into the shallow stream. In five minutes flat he was chasing sopping-wet Ishlings and laughing his ass off. They swarmed away from him and swam around his feet while he stomped—carefully—up and down in the stream.
He bellowed a terrible roar. “I’m a moss monster! I eat Ishlings! And I know just where to get me one!”
They all shrieked with delight and scattered. He swooped an arm down and caught one around the middle: Zeeta, who shrieked extra-loud, then squealed giggles, thrashing when
he pretended to gnaw on her. “Yum, yum! Ishlings!” He set her gently back in the stream and straightened. “I’m still hungry!”
He leapt after them, roaring again, but when his roar trailed off he heard Haakon say, “...need to do this. I’ll write my boss. We can get this straightened out, Yatan, you don’t need to do this.”
Dingus dashed back up the stream, heart hammering as the voices approached. Downstream, Kessa leapt up from her exercises and started to gather Ishlings. “Come on, you guys!” she whispered.
“I’ve already told you, Haakon, I won’t be satisfied with money. Some things are personal. I’ll settle this with that jumped-up whore you call boss when I’m good and ready, but the redneck boy’s gone too far!”
Dingus buckled his belt as Yatan came past the firepit, the white streaks in his fur showing bright against gathering dark, trailing Haakon, one of his heavies, and a passel of Treehoppers.
“Guys!” Kessa hissed. “Guys, no, come on! I’m serious!”
Dingus looked down. The Ishlings clustered around his feet. “Move,” he said.
“We isn’t,” Tai said, and Dingus cursed.
Yatan stopped near the stream. “I’ve come for my payment.”
Dingus planted his foot on the rock and drew himself up until he stood on it. Water dripped from the hems of his breeches and pattered onto the moss, onto his jerkin and tunic. He looked down his nose at Yatan. “And I told you I won’t pay. Not one copper.”
Yatan shook his head, chuckling. “We’re quite beyond that now.” He snapped his eyes up, narrowing them on Dingus, and bared his teeth in something that pretended to be a smile. “I’m here for my Ishlings.”
Dingus drew. The swords sang in the humid air. “They’re not yours.”
“Us is Dingus’s Ishlings!” one of them yelled.
“How sweet,” Yatan said.
“They belong to themselves. But if you want ’em, you’ll have to come through me.”
“Dingus Xavier, you’re under arrest,” said one of the Hoppers, a fat woman with a scrubby black crest. “For disturbing the—”
Dingus snorted. “All right, if you wanna do it that way, but I’m gonna finish up here first.”
“You’re under arrest!”
“Take them,” Yatan said to his goon, and the heavy moved toward the stream—toward the Ishlings.
“Don’t move!” Dingus bellowed, and when the heavy got close enough he lashed out with his right, opening a deep cut in the guy’s chest. He fell back, whimpering. “Nobody fucking move!” Dingus’s brain clicked away, desperately, emptily, he couldn’t think, he didn’t have a plan, and the Hoppers closed in on him.
“Didn’t you hear him?” That was Kessa, and his knees almost buckled in shock at the sound of her sword whispering out.
“No!” he tried to tell her, but she stepped right up in front of him and the Ishlings, showing her long blade with menace in her posture. It gave the Hops pause where he hadn’t, and the scrubby one glanced at Yatan, who jerked his head toward the group of them.
The Hopper shook her head, resigned, and they moved again—until Kessa made to strike, and they fell back.
“That’s right,” she said. “You stay there, and we’re gonna go, and you won’t stop us.”
Movement flashed in the corner of Dingus’s eye. He stopped himself from hacking down. He didn’t want to hit an Ishling; but a shriek rose, Tai’s shriek, and there was old Yatan in the water behind with Tai clamped tight and a knife at his belly.
Tai cheeped short, soft panic sounds, driving Dingus’s pulse faster, and Yatan grinned vicious and broad.
“Put him down,” Dingus ground out. He gripped his hilts in sweat-slick hands. His name spilled from the Ishling’s mouth, and fire bloomed at the base of his spine.
“I don’t think so.” Yatan backed up slowly.
“Don’t hurt him!”
“Stay where you are and I might let him go when I’m clear.”
Tai’s eyes rolled, huge and wide, as he tried to see Yatan, and his little belly pulled in, showing the bottom of his ribs through his wet tunic.
“Don’t hurt him,” Dingus repeated, and his fear for Tai leaked into his voice. The smile spread wider across Yatan’s face, yellow fangs, eyes that found his most vulnerable spot and liked punching it. He backed out of the stream and Dingus’s muscles twitched to follow.
“Ah-ah,” Yatan said. “Don’t move…” And the knife poked at Tai’s stomach, drawing a little blood. Dingus stilled. His pulse slammed against his eardrums. He could only watch while Yatan dragged Tai away crying and disappeared into the trees. His heart beat so hard he thought it’d explode.
The other Ishlings clung to his legs, all those tiny hands wound trembling into his breeches, dragging at him. A breeze blew stiff through the forest, chilling the sweat on Dingus’s skin. Branches creaked, and a raven took to the sky on rustling black wings, cawing a protest.
“Isn’t you save him?” Zeeta whispered.
“I will.” He hadn’t come this far just to lose one of them—not Tai, who hard as he tried he couldn’t help loving best. He stared at the spot where he’d seen Yatan fade, a gray wraith into the sundown trees, carrying a treasure beyond price. He’d have it back. “Let me go now.”
“Dingus!”
That voice, the voice he’d longed to hear, and it was too late. Dingus looked over his shoulder at Vandis, Vandis at last, reading a riot of questions on the granite face. Too late. Dingus had no choice.
He turned away and leapt the stream, leaving a knot of sixteen weeping Ishlings behind—and Kessa—and Vandis. His feet, bootless, made no sound on the loam and needles, and he picked up Yatan’s sign just within the forest. Clumsy old man. Scuffs stood out on the ground, clear to Dingus’s eyes even in the deep gloaming.
His legs carried him along, swift, silent. Evergreen needles pricked lightly at his soles. Birds called their nightfall songs, but Dingus focused on a breathless little voice speaking Ishian. “<…do anything you say, Boss Man,>” Tai pleaded. “
“
There.
Yatan shuffled through the leaves and needles carpeting the forest floor. Tired old man.
He dashed softly around rough trunks, keeping that weary shuffle and Tai’s terror sounds to his right, and stretched his legs to overtake. The old man struggled along with Tai still clamped to his chest. Yatan’s tail drooped, and his breathing rasped. Dingus melted out of fathomless tree-shadow in Yatan’s path, a tall phantom burning within.
Yatan squawked and fumbled Tai, but at the last moment, caught the Ishling tight around the throat. Tai kicked desperately, gagging—strangling. Dingus’s nape stung hot with rage, and he closed tighter with Yatan. “Let him go.” He was surprised how low his voice came out, how hard.
“I don’t think so.” Yatan smirked, in spite of the sweat and stream water that dampened his fur. The knifepoint lay between two of Tai’s ribs, ready to bite baby fur, baby lung. “You’re going to walk away now, and let me walk away, too, and when I’m far enough, then I’ll let this little shit go.”
Dingus shifted, straightening taller, trying to hide the shaking in his limbs. He’d be willing to bet he was the faster, but with Tai’s life on the line?
“Yatan, son of Mohg, get on the ground!” That was Dar—when had she gotten there?—and she had her little sword out, glinting in the last of the light. Vandis was with her. Both dripped with sweat, breathing hard; his Master held up his hands, shaking his head, don’t, don’t. “You’re under arrest!”
Yatan gasped laughter. “All right, Captain Dar, all right. You arrest me. I’ll be back out tomorrow,” he said, and looked right at Dingus. Just for Dingus’s ears, he hissed, “And I’m going to kill every last one of them.” His teeth were bare and his eyes glittered with pleasure.
His hand tightened around Tai’s throat.
“No,” Dingus said, and shifted his weight forward, snapping the sword in his left hand out and across. Yatan’s spine parted like butter under the blade. The wind of it ruffled Tai’s fur. Warm blood spattered Dingus’s face, and Yatan’s head tumbled quietly to the ground.
Right Mind
Blood dripped from the end of Dingus’s sword. Yatan’s head bounced once, and the old Ish body tilted, then sagged into a heap. The little Ishling he’d been holding thumped down, coughing and sobbing. “It’s okay now, Tai,” Dingus said gently, his face coated with sprayed blood. His eyes fixed, unwavering, on Vandis’s: rational, maybe even a little cold. “I promise.”
“Sir Dingus…!” the brightly-colored Treehopper captain peeped, from Vandis’s elbow. Dingus didn’t even look at her, only at Vandis. It wasn’t Vandis’s boy gazing at him over a dead body and a hurt child; it wasn’t a boy who’d taken the head off the undisputed ruler of the shadows in Windish.
That was a man’s doing. He wondered if Dingus appreciated the real magnitude of what he’d done.
“Sir Dingus,” said the Hop captain, “you know I have to—”
“I know.” He let the swords slip from his hands and went to one knee, raising his palms.
She snapped her little sword into its sheath and took the larger set of manacles from her belt. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, crossing to him.
“I know.” He drew a long breath. “Hi, Vandis.”
Vandis went toward the three of them, Hopper, Ishling, and Junior. “You need a shave,” he said inanely, seeing the soft fuzz on Dingus’s chin and lip.
“I’m growing a beard,” Dingus said. The captain snapped a manacle around one wrist, and he gave her the other. Then: “Glad you’re okay.”
I wish I could say the same for you, thought Vandis.
“Why’d you leave Kessa?” Snap went the manacle.
“She’s not alone.”
“A couple of my Hops are with her,” the captain said, brusque with unshed tears.