Unfettered II: New Tales By Masters of Fantasy

by Shawn Speakman

  Following a cool night, it was early morning, warming up to be a nice spring day, when I walked into town. I went directly to Trader Army. He was regretful, seeing me come in by myself. He’d heard the news.

  “Jackson told me he’d found Tarken and Martin on the Corbin road,” Army said. “Galilee too. Didn’t find you, so I figured where you were.”

  “Jackson buried ’em?”

  “Aye.”

  “Okay.” The funerals were long over. My shoulders relaxed.

  “What did you bring me?” Army asked abruptly, maybe scared I’d get all teary.

  “I got a pistol and a rifle and boots and four water bottles,” I said, laying them out. I regretted the bandit rifle, but I was keeping Galilee’s. If she’d had a young kid, it would have gone to the kid, but her son was grown. I was keeping one of the bandit pistols, selling another.

  We haggled for a while, in a subdued kind of way. I needed every penny I could get. I would be out of work for a while. Ended up the way most haggling does: neither side totally satisfied, but on the whole feeling all right.

  “Who’s hiring?” I was putting money in my pocket, looking forward to getting home.

  “Since her gunnie got put down two weeks ago, Lavender needs someone,” Army said. His eyebrow, about the size of a small caterpillar, was hiked up, showing what he thought of that.

  “I’d sooner work for Big Balls,” I said. Army laughed. Big Balls was the pig owned by Butcher Frank. Everyone was waiting for the day Frank put Big Balls down. That was one mean pig.

  When I left Army’s store, there were people waiting outside, including my mom and Jackson. I was startled at first, then I realized they all knew. “Good on you, Lizbeth,” said Jackson approvingly. “You did right,” said my mother, and her voice was steady. She’d saved worry and tears for private.

  Person after person I met said, “Good job, Lizbeth,” or “Welcome back.” Hands patted me as I went by, but no one expected me to stop.

  But Tarken’s former woman and their son stepped into my path, and it was not possible to bypass them. The boy was about eight, and he looked a lot like Tarken. I was too tired to remember his name. Tarken had had an on-again, off-again relationship with the boy’s mother, whose name was Liesel, but he’d always supported the boy. I took Liesel’s hand and told her exactly what had happened. There was a collective sigh when I’d finished. Martin and Tarken had been well liked and well respected, and Galilee had been known far and wide. I could see her son on the edge of the crowd, and tears were glistening on his face.

  “Tarken stayed alive to give me my charge,” I said. “When he could tell I’d finish the job, he passed.” Liesel stared at me, not consoled or mollified by the best story I could tell. “He left a gun, and it saved the cargo,” I said. I handed her Tarken’s gun. “For the boy.”

  But in a movement that took me by surprise, she threw the gun down on the dirt. “I never want my son to hold a gun,” she said, her voice quivering. “I never want him to risk his life, job after job, for people who don’t care! Those bandits who’d kill him as soon as look at him! The shooting!”

  The crowd took in a collective breath. This was high drama.

  I stood straight. I knew she was grieving, and I didn’t want to call her a fool, but I had to stand up for us . . . and the boy should hear the truth. “Tarken kept you and the boy in food and clothes by taking people where they wanted to go,” I said. “He was the best at what he did. He died with honor.”

  “Liesel,” said my mother, gentling her voice as much as she could. “Don’t insult my girl.”

  But Liesel was too bitter to mind my mother. “My boy will never do that,” she said, pointing down at the gun. She shoved her way through the crowd, towing the boy by his hand.

  I bent to pick up the pistol, and I tucked it in my waistband. There was a long moment of silence.

  “She’ll want it later,” said Galilee’s son, and we all went our own ways.

  After a couple of days, one of my neighbors told me that Liesel had gotten a job at the Cantina, a bar run by Pedro Montoya and his brother, Francisco. The Montoyas had a fair reputation. I was relieved. A woman with no man and a little kid—like my mom and Liesel—could have a real hard time of it in Mexias. At least my mom had been trained for something, and she was real smart.

  “What’s Liesel doing with the boy while she’s at work?” I asked my mother. She would know. She always thought of the children.

  “He’s in school most of the time,” Mom said. “Then he goes home to the house till she gets off her shift.”

  “Not bad, just a couple of hours,” I said.

  “Yeah. He’s no baby. Only thing is, the McKeon boy.”

  Jeter Paul McKeon was only ten, but most of us in the ravine were of the opinion it would be a waste of air to let him reach adulthood. Jeter Paul was a bully, and he was sly, persistent, and resourceful. Unless he had a true come-to-Jehovah moment, the world would not benefit from his presence. Ever. Even his doting parents had stopped calling him high-spirited and misunderstood.

  “He’s got it in for the kid?”

  “Yeah,” my mom said. We were sitting in the sunshine outside my cabin, and she lit one of her rare cigarettes. I never smoked. The smell would give you away.

  “What’s the kid’s name?” I asked.

  “Robroy.” My mom made a face.

  I laughed. She was named Candle, and she never got over it. She was all in favor of plain names.

  My hair was growing back thick and black, and it felt like a dog’s coat when I ran my hands over it. “I’ll think on that,” I said. “I got to do something for the boy.”

  “Because of you and Tarken?” she asked.

  I nodded. “We were getting pretty steady.” I stopped, took a deep breath. “But course he was always clear that taking care of Liesel and the boy was the number one thing. He couldn’t live with her, though.”

  “She’s drastic,” Mom said, and we nodded at the same moment. I couldn’t look less like my mother, but you can tell we’re kin.

  Next day, I was standing outside the schoolhouse when the kids ran out. The older girls were already on their dignity, and trying to look like women, but the other kids were still kids, and full of excitement. School was out! Weather was good! Time to go home and do chores and play!

  Tarken’s son Robroy was the next to last one out. The one behind him was Jeter Paul McKeon. He was poking the much smaller Robroy in the back, repeatedly. “So go home, little twerp,” he said. Jab! “Your mama is giving drunks something to look at.” Jab! “They pay her to bend over for them.” Jab!

  I could feel my jaw harden. Robroy was keeping his face, but just barely.

  “Robroy,” I said, and the boy looked up, hoping against hope that something was going to get this asshole off his back.

  I stepped between the boy and his tormentor. “Jeter Paul McKeon,” I said. “You know who I am?” I didn’t have to look down very far to meet his eyes.

  “Gunnie Lizbeth Rose,” the boy said, looking off to the side.

  “Gunnie,” I repeated. “What does that mean to you?”

  “I dunno,” he blurted, squirming and wiggling. I seized his shoulder. He was a big boy, but I was a strong woman, and I made my grip hurt.

  “Ow, let go!” he said. “I’ll tell my dad!”

  “Oh, I’m scared,” I said, my face not changing. I was doing McKeon a favor, way I looked at it.

  “What you want?” he asked, torn between pain, fear, and indignation.

  “Leave Robroy alone,” I said. “He’s the son of my friend. That makes him my friend now that his dad’s dead. Wonder what kind of job your mom would get if your dad passed?” Leaving Jeter Paul to his own thoughts, I stepped away and said to Robroy, “We’ll be going now.”

  He was smart enough to keep silent until we’d gotten out of Jeter Paul’s hearing. When we were on the path up to the ravine, he said, “Why’d you do that?”

  He didn�
��t sound grateful, which was okay.

  “What’s it to you?”

  Robroy was taken aback. Finally, he shrugged. “Maybe he won’t bother me a while,” he said. “But he’ll think of something worse.”

  “He may,” I agreed.

  “You always going to be around?”

  “No.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then you learn how to fight and shoot.”

  “My mom’s going to be mad.” There was a ghost of a smile on his face. The boy was a little angry at his mom for going to work, leaving him alone, when his dad had just left him alone forever.

  “I’ll talk to Liesel about it,” I said.

  “You want me to shoot Jeter Paul?”

  “No,” I said. “I want you to be confident. He’ll leave you alone. Let someone else kill him, because it’s going to happen sooner or later.”

  Robroy looked really surprised I’d said that. “You’re serious,” he said. “You mean it.”

  “Not given to saying things I don’t mean.”

  “You think . . .” he paused, trying to figure how to put something. “You think Mr. McKeon’s gonna be mad at you?”

  McKeon owned the stables. He was a big guy.

  “More afraid of Mrs. McKeon,” I said, smiling.

  Robroy laughed out loud.

  “You’re a gunnie, you can shoot her,” he said jokingly.

  I stopped, so he stopped with me. I squatted down to talk to him. “You listen here,” I said. “Killing people’s like killing a deer. You don’t go shooting a deer and leave it lying there. You use it, all of it. Right?”

  I’d made him nervous now, which was good. He nodded.

  “Likewise with a person,” I said. “You don’t shoot a person for fun. You got to have a good reason. You don’t say, ‘Hey, I’ll just pick off a couple before I go to bed.’ Right?”

  He looked even more nervous now, and his nod got jerky. “But you kill people all the time,” he said weakly.

  “Yeah, but I don’t squander the death I got to give.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “There’s a reason McKeon’s called Stable McKeon, and my mom’s Teacher Rose, and if anybody gave you a title you’d be Student Robroy.”

  “That’s what we do,” he said, to show he was following me.

  “I’m Gunnie Lizbeth. I protect, with a gun. That’s my job.”

  “Killing people.”

  “If they attack, yes. Otherwise I’m not doing my job.”

  He wrestled a little with the reason I was giving him this set-down.

  Finally, I said, “I take my job serious, and I don’t make jokes about it, Robroy. Your dad didn’t either. What do you think of those people who hang around the public buildings all day? The ones who smell?”

  He made a face. “They’re drunk,” he said. “All the time.”

  “Right. They’re wasting their lives, huh?”

  He knew the answer to this one. He nodded vigorously.

  “See,” I said. “Wasting life is bad. So is wasting death. You don’t deal it out just because you feel like it.”

  He struggled with that. After a moment, he gave up. It was a hard idea. He’d think on it. “So where are we going now?” he said.

  “We’re going to my place,” I said. “And you’re going to learn how to clean your dad’s gun.”

  Just in case.

  Michael J. Sullivan

  * * *

  In my series, The Riyria Revelations, there is a reoccurring reference to a fairy-tale character: an evil dwarf named Gronbach, the Rumpelstiltskin of Elan. My new series, Legends of the First Empire, explores the truth behind many of Riyria’s legends and myths. As with all history, the tales have been twisted and inflated and yet still hold a kernel of truth. The reality behind Gronbach is revealed in Age of Swords (the second book of the Legends series, which releases in June 2017), but I never had the opportunity to present any of the fables that made his name infamous and synonymous with evil—until now.

  The fairy tales of Gronbach were first written by Brin, a character featured in the Legend series. Snippets from her masterwork, The Book of Brin, can be found at the start of each chapter of the Legends books. In keeping with that style, I present the story of “Little Wren and the Big Forest” with a preamble from Princess Farilane, a literary scholar of considerable note. She lived during the time of Riyria and spent much of her life searching for Brin’s writings. I hope you’ll enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed penning the tale.

  Michael J. Sullivan

  Little Wren and the Big Forest

  A Legends of the First Empire Short Story

  Michael J. Sullivan

  The Book of Brin is believed to have been a collection of myths, stories, and poems explaining the origin of the world. No copies of the work are known to survive. We are aware of its existence only through ancient texts that name it as source material. The loss of the Brin masterwork is incalculable as it laid the foundations of modern thought, religious beliefs, and many of our most sacred traditions. The loss is an unfathomable tragedy.

  Still, a few snippets have come down to us, surviving the generations through oral tradition. “Little Wren and the Big Forest” is one of these. This simple and charming fable, which is so popular around campfires and as a bedtime story, has endured into modern times. Clearly a morality tale, “Little Wren,” is also an excellent insight into the superstitious nature of our ancestors in the dark days before the coming of Novron.

  —Princess Farilane, Migration of Peoples

  The sheep stared at her.

  The wooly puffballs spent most of their days eating grass—eyes down, focused on their task. When the animals paused to look up, they did so while chewing. The sheep staring at Wren wasn’t doing that. Motionless as a mountain, it just stood there, watching.

  Wren wasn’t about to be intimidated by one of her own sheep, so she stared back. Being eight years old and small for her age, she stood only a bit taller, which made it easy to lock eyes with the wether. At least Wren thought that’s what it was—didn’t look like a ewe. The animal had a dangling tuft of fur on its chin that appeared like some sort of a beard.

  Definitely a wether, Wren concluded from her less-than-incontrovertible belief that the gods would never curse a female anything with such unsightly chin hair. Not much to base a conclusion on, especially when Wren wasn’t familiar with each sheep in her family’s extensive flock.

  Wren could reckon all the way up to twelve, and she was proud of that ability. The herd was bigger than that. Her family owned exactly two twelves, but it wasn’t the size of the flock that prevented her from knowing each animal on an individual basis. The reason was she didn’t want to; her older brother had warned Wren about getting too friendly with their animals.

  “They’re food,” he’d said more than once. Lee always repeated himself. Maybe he thought Wren was too young to remember what he’d said only the day before, or the one before that. He’d said it so many times that Wren had tried to keep count. Lee mentioned it more than twelve times, even more than three twelves—which, incidentally, was the same number of stars in the night sky. “When they get old, Pa’s gonna slit their throats, drain their blood into the bucket near the woodpile, and chop ’em up with his big cleaver. Then Ma will roast ’em. We’ll all sit down and eat, see? You don’t want to be chewing on a Gertrude or an Emily, do you? So don’t go naming ’em, Wren. And don’t talk to ’em. They aren’t pets . . . they’re food. Got it? When you look at ’em, you should see bits of meat. Like those in a nice hot stew.”

  Wren didn’t want to see chunks of stew meat, so she did her best not to look at all, which was a problem given she was there to watch the sheep. That was all she had to do. Wren wasn’t responsible for chasing off wolves or anything. That was Lee’s job. He was fifteen—a man, and her brother had the spear to prove it. Wren held only a stick and was nothing more than an extra pair of eyes to ensure the mounds of wool didn
’t wander off the hillside and get into trouble. The sheep possessed all the brains of a sprig of clover. If Wren wasn’t vigilant, they’d drift away after greener grass and end up miles away by the time darkness fell.

  Maybe it’s sick, she thought, breaking the staring contest. Maybe that’s why it’s not eating.

  Curious, she took a step toward the animal.

  The sheep darted away.

  This wasn’t all that unusual, but it was something that puzzled Wren. She and her brother had spent every day with the flock, so they ought to know she wasn’t gonna hurt them.

  Why run away?

  Then she recalled Lee’s words about slit throats and draining blood into buckets. Maybe the sheep could smell their friends on her breath. That could be why they were so skittish, why they ran. Most of the time, they only went partway to the bottom of the hill, but the sheep with the little beard ran off toward the forest.

  “By the Grand Mother of All!” Lee shouted, slapping his thigh as the sheep disappeared inside the eaves of the wood. “You spooked him.”

  “I just—”

  “Get the rest of them down and into the pen.” Lee threw the words at her in a rush, but he didn’t move either foot. He stood there, leaning on the haft of his spear with both hands.

  “Why? What are you going to do?”

  Lee was having his own staring match, but this one with the wall of trees—their scary neighbor. Pa was the only one who ever went into the forest, and he went just far enough to gather wood and only did so in winter after the leaves fell. That’s when the forest slept. Safer then.

  Her brother turned and looked down the slope at their home. Smoke was rising from the pit outside their thatch roundhouse, the only one for miles, the only one so close to the forest. There used to be more. Lee had told Wren about the other houses at least twelve times and always while pointing to the bare spots where they had supposedly been.

  Ma was hauling a pot of water to the fire, setting up for their midday meal, but Lee wasn’t looking at her. Wren knew he was thinking of Pa, of what he’d say, and do, if they came back a sheep short. In the end, Lee must have determined a beating from Pa was worse than the potential dangers of the forest because he cursed under his breath and chased after the sheep.