Of course this all led to a bunch of questions about how I knew about the place. Fortunately, Lucille volunteered to relate our adventures this time. Even if I came across as more of an ass in her version, I was all storied out. That, and the girls were fascinated about her life as a dragon.
I shut it out because I was guilty enough about what had happened. So she regaled the girls as I led the way to Fell Green. We trudged along a slushy road that followed the perimeter of the Lendowyn border. Traveling by foot, we were probably two or three days away from the bridge on the Fell River that led to our destination—and that was only if the rumors that the town actually moved around were hyperbole.
That was probably a good thing, since I needed to figure out how we were going to pay the toll. There were ten of us now, and nine-tenths of us were recent escapees who were lucky to have boots, much less a purse. Of us all, only Brock had any money, and since he worked for the Lendowyn court now, he only had two gold crowns and an assortment of copper that might be enough for three of us to enter.
Not to mention that, despite salvaging bits of armor, the girls were not dressed for the weather, and were starting to show it. Also, we had all been moving since nightfall the prior day, and the pause by Sir Forsythe’s burned camp was barely enough for the girls to catch a second wind. We needed to find rest and shelter soon.
It was clear that I was going to have to indulge in some old professional skills if we were going to have a chance of just getting to Fell Green.
We could hijack some merchant caravan, if we were lucky enough to come across one. The problem was, unless we were a little more bloodthirsty than I was comfortable with, it would probably draw the wrong kind of attention. Merchants, if left alive, would likely report such a theft to the nearest city guard, and the makeup of our party was strange enough that news would probably reach as far as the royal court and Prince Bartholomew . . .
If we were really lucky, we’d run across a merchant dealing in contraband, like Lucille and I had accidentally stumbled upon before our prior trip to the wizard town. Someone already on the wrong side of the law was probably not going to go running to the nearest city watch.
And that gave me an idea.
“Sir Forsythe?”
“Yes, My Liege?”
“Does this area look at all familiar to you?”
“Perhaps, but I have traveled widely in your kingdom.”
“Her kingdom.” I gestured at Lucille, who had just gotten to the part of the story where the elves showed up. “But when you first met me in her body, you were just coming across from Grünwald, weren’t you?”
“Yes?”
“So this road?”
“There are several, but yes, I think this road might be it.”
“Good. That means that the inn is just a few miles farther down.”
“Inn?” Grace heard me. Her breath came out in a fog and I had the sense that she was forcefully resisting the impulse to hug herself for warmth.
“The Headless Earl,” I said.
“I thought we didn’t even have the money for the damned toll. How’re we going to afford an inn?”
“I wasn’t planning on buying anything.”
“You weren’t . . . oh.” I saw a light begin to shine in her eyes. Slowly, she smiled. “Oh.”
Lucille stopped her storytelling. “What are you planning?”
• • •
I’ve said before that my specialty when it came to liberating objects outside my possession has always been stealth and the liberal use of nimble fingers, and if need be, nimble tongue. However, the last five months of my life had taught me nothing if it hadn’t taught me to be adaptable. There was a time for stealth, and then there was a time for cracking skulls.
The Headless Earl was an instance of the latter. It was a literal den of thieves, and one that—after my last stay here—I felt I owed no particular professional courtesy. Everyone there, innkeep on down, was an outlaw of some stripe—mostly of the bash you on the head and steal your boots variety. We came up on the place in the early afternoon, and I had everyone hang back in the woods as we watched people enter and leave. We heard the voices and the sounds of the midday meal in full swing.
“Frank?” Lucille crouched next to me, about thirty yards from the rear of the inn by the stables, peering through the underbrush at my target. “There have to be thirty people in there, maybe more.”
I nodded.
“This is insane.”
I nodded again.
“You have some sort of plan?”
This time I didn’t nod.
“Frank?”
“You know me,” I said.
“Improvising?”
I nodded.
“Damn it!”
I shrugged.
“You do realize you don’t have a dragon backing you up this time?”
“I’ve got Sir Forsythe.”
“He’s not a dragon.”
“Lucille, I want to rob the place, not burn it to the ground.”
“All by yourself?”
“Hey, you said yourself that I’m not an idiot.”
“Are you trying to prove me wrong?”
“Shh.” I turned and waved Grace over.
She crouched down on the side of me opposite Lucille. “You going to tell us how we get in there?”
“First things first, we pare down the opposition.” I pointed at the inn. “See that door, back by the stables? That’s to the kitchen.”
“Yeah, and the two guys sharing a bottle next to it.”
“Well, little miss outlaw, you think you and yours can remove those guys quietly without unnecessary bloodshed?”
“What about necessary bloodshed?”
“If it’s quiet.”
“I thought you’d never ask.” Grace slipped away.
Lucille grabbed my arm and yanked, glaring at me. “You’re sending a bunch of children in there?”
“They know what they’re doing.”
“But—”
“If you’re going to worry, worry about those two guys.”
She gaped at me.
If I had any sense left, I probably would have shared her concern. After all, my assessment of the girls’ aptitude with the wrong skills was based mostly on circumstantial evidence.
Behind me, the six girls slipped silently into the woods. After a tense five or ten minutes, I caught sight of Rabbit slipping out from the tree line to sneak into the stables on the far side from the two men. The horses barely made a sound to acknowledge her presence.
I saw a small bit of snow dust the ground from above, and glanced up to see Laya flatten herself against the stable roof. After another minute or so, Grace stepped out from the woods. She had stripped off her salvaged armor and weapons, and stood now in the robes of a virgin acolyte of Lysea. She stood there for nearly a minute before the guys with the bottle noticed her.
“What is she doing?”
I held up my finger. “Shh.”
There was the predictable banter and shoving when they noticed her. None loud enough for me to make out at this distance. The two men started heading toward Grace, all drunken swagger and ill intent. The larger one said something, and Grace responded with a come-hither smile and a hooked finger as she slipped back into the woods.
The big one broke into a loping run, reaching for his belt, while his smaller companion said something that sounded like it might have been, “Wait up!” By the time the second man was just reaching the end of the stables, the larger man was just about at the woods, and paying no attention to his companion.
That was why he didn’t see Laya rise up, twirling an improvised sling to send a rock sailing down on the top of his companion’s head. His companion’s response was to fall down face first into the slush, at which point Rabbit jumped ou
t from between the last two horses to land on his back to restrain him with what appeared to be three repurposed bridles.
I turned to watch the first guy just in time to see him slip into the woods, and three shadows drop from the trees on top of him. I saw nothing of the impact but some shaking foliage, but after a brief moment Mary and Krys ran out of the woods to where Rabbit had finished tying up the second guy. They reached him as Laya dropped down from the roof, and the four of them each grabbed an arm or a leg and ran off to the woods, carrying the man between them.
I turned to Lucille and I reached up and lifted her chin, just so a bug wouldn’t fly in her mouth.
CHAPTER 22
I glanced in the back window, into the kitchen. The cook fires were burning, and I saw three people working. More precisely, two people working, and one balding guy standing by the inside doorway yelling orders. I glanced behind me at the girls, and they had all fallen back against the side of the inn on the stable side of the door. Even in the weak afternoon sun, the shadows were deep enough so no one would see them from the front of the building.
In front of all of them was Lucille. I had tried to object, but five months as a dragon had made her much more assertive.
I wiped my palms on my new clothes, freshly liberated from the larger of the two guys who were now tied and gagged in the woods. For once, the stolen clothing fit.
That was probably the last time that would ever happen.
I waited, giving Brock and Sir Forsythe time to get into position. Then I pulled the door open and stepped into the kitchen. The balding guy, who I remembered as the innkeep, was busy shouting orders at the two women dishing out the remains of a roasted animal of some sort—not enough left on the spit to clearly identify it—along with a thin barley stew and some nearly black bread. The woman placing bowls on a tray glanced up briefly, saw me, and didn’t seem to consider me worth the attention as she went back to work.
The bald guy turned toward me. “Karl, are you and Jonah finally done watering the hors—you’re not Karl.”
I smiled and shook my head. “Sorry, I’m not.”
“That lazy bastard—look, no guests back here. Go out front and I’ll show you a room. Food’s included.” He hooked a thumb back out the door he stood by and turned his attention back to the two serving women.
I walked up next to him and said quietly, “Don’t you know who I am?”
“Should I care?” He didn’t turn to look at me.
“The name’s Bartholomew,” I whispered to him. “Lately they call me Snake.”
“Never heard of you.”
Well, how about that?
He finally turned to face me. “So what do you want, Mr. Bartholomew Snake?”
“This.”
I slammed my fist into his face.
His head snapped back and hit the doorframe with a hollow thud. He sputtered and blinked at me and I grabbed his shirt, pulling him into the crook of my arm so I could squeeze his neck and help him complete the job of passing out. I heard dishes crash and turned to see both women staring at me.
“I suggest you run,” I told them.
Instead, one of them grabbed a knife from a hook on the wall and leveled it at me. “I suggest you let him go.”
“Wrong choice,” I said as a rock sailed from the doorway and slammed into the side of her head. The knife fell from her hand, to stick upright in the floor as she grabbed her bleeding temple and cursed.
The other woman grabbed for something, another weapon probably. I didn’t see what it was, because suddenly the kitchen was filled with bloodthirsty teenage girls. There was a shout or two before the two serving women were subdued, but the noise from the common room was more than enough to cover the sounds.
As the three defenders were trussed up, I closed the door to the kitchen and moved a heavy bench up to lean against it and bar it shut.
When I turned around, all seven faced me. Grace was grinning ear-to-ear, Rabbit had grabbed a hunk of whatever roast beast they’d been serving and was quietly munching on it, Mary and Krys were looking at a few shiny bits of jewelry they must have taken from the women, Laya was squeezing Thea’s shoulder with one hand while hefting a rock with the other.
Lucille folded her arms and asked, “Still improvising?”
“Only the details,” I said as I pulled a couple of fist-size bundles from the pouch at my belt. The bundles were Brock’s contribution; two pouches made from precisely folded leaves and packed with mosses, mushrooms, herbs, and other things that he’d scavenged from the woods.
Brock had never been a good fighter, and before his home village sent him on a quest to get rid of him, he had spent a lot of time with the old women of the tribe learning things like herbal lore.
Sometimes that knowledge came in handy.
I gestured with one hand toward a wooden door a few paces from the one I’d braced shut. “That’s the pantry; in the back should be a ladder that will take you up to a secret passage running over all the rooms on the second floor. You should be able to drop down into any of them. If you have to deal with someone, be quiet about it.”
“Got it.” Grace walked over to the door and pulled it open. In the back of the pantry I could see the ladder just as I remembered it.
“Don’t come down till the smoke clears,” I said.
Grace nodded, and started waving the girls through and up the ladder. Lucille stayed behind. “And what are you planning to do?”
I hefted a tightly packed leaf. “I’m going to brighten everyone’s day.” I tossed Lucille the packages. “Hold those for a moment.”
I bent down to move the bench I had blocking the door out to the common area.
“You’re not planning to go out there, are you?” she asked.
“Of course I am,” I said, plucking Brock’s packages out of her hands.
“There’s thirty armed men out there.”
“None of whom know who I am or what I’m doing. I’m just another outlaw taking my respite from my unlawful deeds.”
She bit her lip.
“I’ve faced worse odds than this. If you don’t trust me, trust Brock.”
“I don’t know why, but I do trust you.”
“Good. Now hold your breath when you see smoke, and get ready to barricade that door again once I come running through.”
Lucille nodded and I strode out into the common room.
• • •
Lucille had overstated the case. There were probably only twenty guys in the common room. Maybe twenty-five. Several looked over in my direction when I came out, but after a tense moment they resumed chatting with their neighbors and I realized that those were the people who had yet to have a plate in front of them.
Sorry guys, I thought, you’re going to have a long wait.
By all rights I shouldn’t have been nearly as nervous as I was. This was my element after all. I should have felt more at home here than I ever could at the Lendowyn court. I could look out over this rowdy congregation of leather, scars, and facial hair and see the lower third of every thieves’ guild I had ever been part of.
Instead, I felt even more on edge. The unease brought uncomfortable flashbacks of the last time I was here, when I was in Lucille’s body. Back then the discomfort had been because of the implicit threat of being near this crowd in a woman’s body . . .
It was as if I still felt that now.
Or maybe I had gained enough distance from my prior peers to see them more clearly than I wanted to.
While a nearby table broke into a rude ballad about a young woman of unnatural flexibility, I walked over to the large stone fireplace as if to warm myself. I bent over in front of it and took a few deep breaths as I stared into the flames. Then I tossed Brock’s packages below the burning logs to land on the pile of coals that glowed on the floor of the hearth beneath the fire.
I held my breath and prepared to run, just as the “Ballad of Bendy Brigit” cut itself short in the midst of some acrobatic maneuver.
“You!”
I turned to make my escape, still holding my breath, but chairs crashed and a large gray-haired man with a heavily scarred face stepped into my path, brandishing a dagger. “Look who we got here, fellas.”
A shorter man with a goatee and a ponytail stepped up next to him. “I don’t believe it. Snake?”
“Believe it. Just look at him.”
From behind me, I heard someone else say, “What you think the reward is?”
“Reward?” someone else said. “The guild wants his liver.”
“Your guild.”
“Why you ain’t saying nothing?” said the first man.
I was getting dizzy from holding my breath.
How long before—
My thought was cut short by two men grabbing me from behind. I gasped in surprise just as Brock’s packages erupted into clouds of white herb-scented smoke. The men holding me let go as they started coughing, and I fell forward toward the floor.
And I kept falling.
After a long time I put my hands out to break my fall, and the floor felt so far away . . . as if I was trying to reach out and touch the moon.
I tasted licorice on the air and realized I was supposed to be holding my breath . . .
“What What did did you you do do do do do do?”
I looked up from the floor I didn’t remember hitting and shook my head, trying to make sense of the chaos I saw. The common room had become huge, cavernous, a universe all to itself filled with colors brighter than anything I ever remembered seeing. Burning colors. Some I didn’t have a name for. The gray-haired man with the knife ran at me from a mile or two away. His voice echoed off the mountainsides that had once been serving tables.
“What what what did did did did you you you you do do do do do?”
On top of a neighboring cliff, a monstrous scorpion with a human face screamed down at the man, “Where’s my ale? I want my ale!”
The gray-haired man turned in the direction of the scorpion, who pounced.
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