by Neil Clarke
They come to a halt in front of a brass-bound door.
Reynard pauses to sniff the crack at the bottom appreciatively. “The stillroom,” he explains. “They’ve got a great vinegar mother starter. Pickles must be amazing.”
Reynard will have been in the room already, to bring back word of the Princess’s feet; but now he just stands there. It is the Hero’s place to open the door to the Rescue.
Still, a hero knows better than to rush into what could be a trap. On the other side of the still room door, the Hero holds the light low, not to reveal himself. In the corner, propped up against a giant clay pickle jar, is a sad tangle of clothes from which stick out two very dirty bare feet. The Hero recognizes them instantly. He has looked at their portrait a hundred times. He is wearing it around his neck now.
Still, he approaches the bundle slowly, with his sword drawn.
Reynard shows no such caution. He trots right over to the Princess’s bare foot and nudges it with his nose. She comes awake quickly, flipping and flapping like a fish, for the ropes that bind her allow no better movement.
“Have you come to kill me?” she spits. Unlike the people upstairs, she speaks a kind of basic form of Middle Standard. Curious.
“Is there a reason I should?” the Hero asks.
“Monsters need no reason!”
Reynard noses the girl’s foot again, and she tries to jerk it away.
“I’m not a monster!” the Hero protests.
“Untie me then, and prove it.”
“Tell me why I should first. Then I will be more comfortable untying you.”
“My feet are numb. Numb and grimsome. It is a disgrace. You must not look at them.”
Politely, he looks over at a shelf full of preserved fruit of some kind. It is impossible to tell, in this light, what kind it is.
She follows his gaze. “And they do not feed me.”
A slash of the Hero’s sword and a dried sausage falls into his grasp.
The girl glares at him. “Most heroic. I see now. Yes, you are the Hero, with my portrait on your neck. My father sent you, to slay monsters and marry me. Are you done with the slaying? It matters not; I shall not marry you!”
“The feeling may be mutual, madam. But we get nowhere if you are not forthcoming with the reason you are in this situation.”
“Give me some meat and I will tell you.”
So the Hero cuts off a couple slices and offers them to Reynard, who takes them delicately, and carries them over to the Princess. Still bound, she takes the slices from his muzzle to her lips, and gobbles them down.
“Now,” she says imperiously, somewhat spoiling the effect by trying to wipe grease off her chin with her shoulder, “are you going to release me or not?”
One of her pretty feet, which she’d tucked up demurely under the edge of her grubby gown, peeks out a little. Good gods, the Hero thinks; is she flirting with me?
If she is, he knows this game.
“It depends,” he says. He slouches elegantly, one hand negligently on his pommel. “If you refuse to wed your rescuer, then what’s in it for me?”
“Ah,” she snaps back; “but I think you do not yet do the slaying. A braggart is no hero.”
“But a hero can still be a braggart. What have you got against heroes, anyway?”
She draws her feet back in. “In the general, nothing. But to be forced to marry the one, just because he knows how to make the Monster go SPLAT with his sword . . . How is this for me the what’s in it?”
The Hero’s just a sucker for girls trying out slang. He crouches, loosens the ropes. As soon as she is free, the girl clambers unsteadily to her feet, grabs the nearest jar and pops the lid. She doesn’t bother with a spoon.
“Ah!” she sighs happily, licking her lips. “This was the worst! To be looking always, and never tasting.” She runs her finger around the bottom of the jar. “This is really quite good. Pumpkin. I like the spice. When I home, these I take.”
“Home . . . ? But surely you live here?”
The Princess gapes at him. Her teeth, like her toes, are little pearls. “But surely I do not! You think this—this?—is the house of my father?!”
The Hero sits down on a barrel. Between the long journey, the feast, the ale, and the tiny bit of sleep he’s gotten, this whole thing is beginning to feel like a dream to him. It has a certain dream logic. If he had to slay something now, he could probably do it on sheer nerve, but untangling riddles he prefers to do by day and well-rested. He pops open another jar of pumpkin jam. It is good.
“You may,” he says wearily, “remember a certain bargain we made over sausage? I have yet to see your end of it fulfilled. Why. Are. You. Here?”
She sits forward, her posture much improved by food and blood circulation. Oh, he thinks; to be so young as to bounce back that quickly from being tied up!
“You know, I think,” she says, “our land it is plagued by the Monsters. And my father, he seeks the Hero to kill them. The men of our land, them we cannot trust—for many of them are with sympathy for the Monsters, yes! Many of them even have the blood in their families, though they will not say. And those that do not, they are villains, lowly men of the soil unworthy. Do you see?”
He doesn’t, quite, but he nods to keep her going.
“My father the King, may his name be exalted although I am quite mad at him and wish never to step in his shadow again, he hates the Monsters so much, he wishes them all dead.” Another nod; this is par for the course. “My father the King seeks a man to lead us in battle, to slay them in the dawn time. And I would be wed to that man, no matter where his feet have took him!”
She shakes her head. Her ash-colored hair, loose from all her exertions, falls in snaky, dusty ringlets down her modest front. “This cannot be. I will not wed nobody like that. But it is true, my family’s throne will never be free if the Monsters are not put down.
“So I think: I will kill them myself! Then I make my own choice.” She looks up into his face to see if she is shocking him. He thinks of the Elector and her heir, and nods sagely, his face a mask of politic sympathy. “Thus I take my little brother’s sword, and I climb out my window but I do not have to go through the cactus which is good because I only bring the one dress, and I have a good horse and know to saddle so I make away before anyone know it first. And thus I come here, to their lair! But they—”
“Wait.” The Hero holds up one hand. He almost laid it on her shoulder, but you don’t do that, not yet. “This house—with the sausage, and the very decent jam—this is the Monsters’ lair?”
“Oh, yes.”
“The ones who made the jam?”
She nods, unperturbed by the dream-logic of the thing.
Ha! Well, that explains the remoteness and inaccessibility of the ‘palace.’ It’s a hideout, not a royal seat. These people want his protection, probably from the King; no wonder they were evasive about monsters. So did their Envoy deceive the Elector? Or—
She interrupts his thoughts, leaning forward to say earnestly, “Do not be deceive by their looks being like us.” Her eyes get very wide. “These Monsters are the terrible. They are—how do you say it?” She utters a word that sounds like asfdasfddfs.
At his side, Reynard mutters something softly. He can’t quite catch it—and since Reynard has not declared himself yet to the Princess, the Hero knows from experience that it is not his place to ask the fox to speak.
Her next words make it clear that he was right.
“Animals!” she whispers. “They are not human, not at all. They wear human face, but their hearts are monster, and too their shape, when they will!”
Reynard bristles, growling.
The Princess goes on heedlessly, “For years they live amongst us, pretending to be like. Because my grandfather’s father’s father, he conquered this land and made them leave or promise never to do their asfdasfddfs tricks again. Ha!” She spits delicately, for emphasis, it seems. “My toe.” Curse words never translate w
ell in any language. “But they are true to their nature. Untrue to us. At night, when they wish it, they make the shapes of animals, and then,” she breathes, like a child telling ghost stories, “then they run in our villages and eat our young and ravage our maidens and steal our coinage.”
Well, isn’t that what Monsters always do? He nods gravely, and she continues, encouraged, “They say they own this country before we come here to make them civilized like us. We must defeat them or give up our land. And that may never be. That is what my father says. I wonder sometimes because my nursie she was asfdasfddfs. And I love her very much, she no monster. But she had live with us a long time, and civilized. These, they are bad!”
Reynard’s growls grow perilously close to speech. The Hero places a cautioning hand on his head, then slices a little of what’s left of the sausage. But before he can offer it to the fox, to his surprise the Princess says softly, “Oh! May I feed it to him?”
May she? It’s an interesting moment. The Hero hands the Princess the meat, and she holds it out to the fox, very slowly and gently. This, he thinks, is a girl who has not had pets of her own.
Reynard sniffs it for form’s sake, as if he did not know what it was, or who was offering. For a second, the Hero thinks he will snap her fingers, but instead, he snaps the sausage, tosses it showily in the air, catches it in his mouth and swallows it whole. The Princess laughs. She has a nice laugh. The Hero lets out a little of the tension of the night. Peace offering accepted, although he’s unsure why. He can’t wait to hear Reynard’s take on everything. Did he really not realize they were in a house of Shifters, himself?
“I like this little one,” she says, bending to pet him.
Reynard nips her fingers. She squeaks, then bats him playfully on the ear. He leans in to her. She scratches him behind his neck, which he adores—but seldom lets the Hero do.
“This one,” she croons, “he understand. He is very sweet.” Reynard leans into her, cuddling. What is he up to? Gaining her trust, the Hero supposes. Playing some foxish game of strategy.
The Princess sighs, looks up at the Hero again. “So we are understanding, now?” She puts the fox aside, clambers to her feet. She leans unsteadily against a pickle barrel. “Your sword you give me, and the Monster I kill.”
The girl has sand, the Hero has to give her that. Here she stands in a storeroom, defenseless and covered in jam, and she is sticking to her plan. But he can’t give her his sword, of course.
“All of them?” he asks.
“Mmm, no. That is not possible, even to you, I think.” She taps the barrel, thinking. “I kill just one; then I am Hero. I go home. My father cannot choose for me then.”
She’s let her foot peep out again from underneath the bedraggled hem of her gown. A ruby ring sparkles on one toe. “Your sword?”
The Hero hesitates. He’s a man of action, even of strategy—battle strategy. He is clever about movements, and terrain, and how other people who think that way are likely to jump. It’s not his job to figure out who the enemy is. That’s Reynard’s job. But Reynard is licking the Princess’s fingers, seemingly unconcerned with her genocidal plots.
“I make friends with asfdasfddfs when I am Queen, I think,” she says. “That will be best for all, and no more killing nonsense. We go, now?”
The Hero has learned one piece of diplomatic strategy from Reynard: the stall. Best to leave the Princess snug in the storeroom whilst he and Reynard discuss their course of action.
“But if I release you, it would be to warn the Monsters of what we plan.” (Oh, dear; now he’s picking up her diction. He does that, when he travels.)
“Yes,” she replies; “that is right. Good thinking, Hero. You tie me up again—but loosely—and I will be so helpless and hungry they will pity me. And then—BAMM! Ha.”
The Hero smiles. She’s brave, and has a good sense of fun.
So back to the filthy floor she goes, and he ties her up again, but loosely.
He stands up, taking the light with him. Her voice at his feet is suddenly small. “I wonder if . . . if your fox might like to stay with me? Just a little while? Until light comes again?”
Of course he feels sorry for the girl; but if she wants to be a hero, she needs to learn to wait in the dark, alone. He wants to get Reynard back up to the room, so they can discuss and strategize. He wants Reynard’s take on the shifting situation. Ha. He puns when he’s tired. But it’s Reynard’s choice.
“Thank you,” says the Princess softly. He lowers the light a tidge, just enough to see the red fox curled at her feet.
Dawn is breaking; there’s movement about the house. The Hero heads stealthily back to his room. But when he gets to his door, he finds it open. Inside is a whirl of screeching Illyrians. The bear-skinned ‘King’ rushes towards him, gesticulating and shouting. He’s swept up in the whirl, and borne down the hallway.
Did they discover his discovery of the Princess? Everyone is shouting. Some are waving short swords; others brandish bows. The Hero looks around frantically for the Envoy; he hopes they are not shouting hang him or chop him or something equally unpleasant, but without the Envoy he has no idea. No one has disarmed him yet, which is reassuring. They are making enough noise, surely, that Reynard will be warned.
The horde bursts out into the courtyard; the sun is barely over the roof ridge and already its rays feel like hammer-blows on his back. The gate is open; they hustle across the cactus moat, and through the ocotillo stockade to a stand of nervous-looking horses. There’s the Envoy, holding the bridle of a beautiful paint horse.
“What is going on?” the Hero demands.
“The Monster! Come, mount, we have no time to lose! He catches the dawn!”
As they ride away, pell-mell, the Hero looks over his shoulder, hoping to catch a glimpse of a small red shape, rushing to catch up with them. But the dust cloud is too thick and obscuring.
Even in early morning, it is hot out on the Illyrian hillside. The smells of sage and juniper mingle with the dust and old, old yellow rock. He wonders where the rubies are. Maybe right underneath him . . .
They’d ridden to an outcropping of boulders. There, they dismounted and picketed the horses, and there the monsters—who looked like men and who hadn’t acted the least bit monstrous—had given him a club made of some sort of polished hardwood, its tip embedded with shards of black glass as sharp as his sword’s blade; and then they insisted that he take a swig from the leather bota. A grassy-tasting liquid that burnt the roof of his mouth and made him feel momentarily light-headed. He accepted the club politely, planning to drop it behind a bush when he could.
What is the Monster that the monsters are afraid of? A bigger Shifter? A renegade, a rogue?
From his stance on the hillside, he looks around hopefully for Reynard; but still no sign of the small red fox. This, more than the approaching Monster, makes him nervous. Perhaps he hadn’t heard the commotion from the storeroom? No, Reynard can hear a mouse a mile away. It’s unlike Reynard to stay so far behind out of choice. He must be working strategy. That’s it.
There’s sudden silence. The Hero looks up, momentarily blinded by the sunlight. And so he feels it before he hears it, hears it before he sees it. The tremble of rock, the rhythm of hooves. Look up, look right, and across that little hill . . . and there it is, magnificent and undaunted, against the sun.
A four-legged bird, wings more than the usual two, hard to tell when they’re folded back, but jet black, obsidian black, gleaming with a million colors in the sun. Its legs are shiny, but end in spiked hooves. Its eyes are rubies. Its beak is enormous.
The man next to him is trembling. He’s breathing a word, over and over again . . . it’s so clearly “HIM! THAT! HIM!” that the Hero needs no translation. The terror is palpable.
The Monster wheels and cavorts upon the hill, as if announcing itself, as if daring anyone to approach it. It pauses, then, its wheeling more focused, purposeful. The great beak turns from side to side, ruby eyes scan
ning the terrain. It is looking for them.
This is his moment. Time for thinking, time for planning is over. The Hero charges, sword upraised.
And the Monster draws a weapon of its own.
Oh, six-fingered gods, it’s a man! A man robed in feathers and jewels, but a man nonetheless, up on a horse so he has the advantage, but that’s easy enough, the Hero has killed plenty of valiant steeds in his time (pity, though, about this one).
Unhorsed, the feathered man leaps to the high ground, defends himself with massive strokes of his strangely serrated blade, formed of a shining black so dark that when the sun catches it, it turns white, or all colors at once. Bastard. The Hero is whistling through his teeth, an old habit from his training days that he’s not even aware of doing.
The creature puts up a good fight. He has a hard time thinking of him as a man. The feathers and jewels are beautiful, distracting . . . they should slow the fellow down, but they seem to give him assurance. Maybe he’s using magic. Probably he is. The elaborate mask should be denying him peripheral vision, but instead he seems to see out of the side of his head, like a bird. The cape should be weighing him down, but he’s stronger than the Hero; he feels that when their blades collide, and the force of the obsidian blade nearly pushes him off the hillside. Damn.
The others are shouting something at him, but it’s from the direction of his deaf ear. And do they really think they can advise him how to fight?
The Hero begins to work at disrobing his opponent, to separate him from his magic accoutrements. Tricky, but fun. Very tricky. Trying to stay alive while aiming for a shoulder seam . . . Trying to breathe in the hot sun while figuring out how the headpiece attaches to the neck . . . The Hero is slowing down. This is not going well.
He seems to have shrunk to the size of a small animal; he is looking up at a huge black blade coming down at him from a cerulean sky. No, he is on his knees, that’s what it is. They’re going to hurt like seven devils later, but for now he must use them to get up. Up is where he belongs, not rolling and dodging, eating dust like a desert snake. He can’t get a purchase. It’s like the land is pulling him down, demanding he yield his bones to it before they can even belong to him for the few years remaining to him. He was planning to retire here, not to expire. Not yet.