by Jon Hollins
“Of course I did,” Will spat.
“So you are not being a complete idiot.” Balur nodded.
Given that he had just opened the wound in his heart and let the contents spill, bloody and raw over the table, Will thought that was a touch harsh.
Balur saw his expression and rolled his eyes. “Truly? Truly you are telling me this story and are not expecting me to be calling you fucked in the head. Breeding season went well? Were you talking with her about the excitements of crop rotation as well?”
Will hesitated. “I … yes … well …” Why was he being defensive? “We’re farmers,” with a little more vigor.
“No.” Balur put a hand on his shoulder. “Let me be stopping you right there. You are being a farmer. Lette is being a cold-blooded killing machine who is looking for a way to be spending her life with less blood on her hands. I would be giving Lawl’s left nut to be knowing why, but I am not possessing that, and so I am taking it how I must.”
Even through the wine haze, Will was starting to see Balur’s point. “You think that she wasn’t interested in crop rotation?”
“I am thinking that if she was managing to be manifesting any semblance of interest then she must have been truly loving you.”
That word. Love. It hung in the air like an accusation. Because if it had been real, if he did allow himself to believe that she had truly loved him, and not just used his body while it was convenient … then it was his fault. He had driven her away.
Which, in the end, was exactly what Balur was saying.
“Oh Gods,” he said, letting his head sag and hit the table.
“How long was she managing?” Balur said as if his former ally wasn’t repeatedly beating his head against a wooden surface.
“She’s been gone four months now.”
“So she was making it four.” He patted Will on the shoulder. “That is a surprisingly long time for her.”
Will looked up sharply. “She tends to leave men often?”
Balur shrugged. “After the first night usually.”
“And you didn’t think this was useful information to tell me before I hitched my ride to hers, and built a life around the future we were promising each other.”
Balur shrugged. “You seemed happy enough with how things were.”
“Because I thought my life was built on a solid foundation!” This sort of conversation, Will thought, was exactly why he had snuck out of the whole being-a-prophet thing.
“You would not have been listening to me, if I had been telling you.” Balur gave a resigned shrug. “Lovestruck idiots are being that way.”
The other reason he’d walked away from Kondorra, Will went on to think, was because his companions had no qualms about beating him about the head and neck with ugly truths.
“So,” he managed to conclude, “I screwed up my life, and now you’re here.” He chugged his wineglass. Balur handed him the bottle. “How can I help you?”
Balur shrugged. “I was not looking for you.”
This, Will thought, seemed disingenuous, and not entirely respectful of his bitterness. “You came to my bloody farm,” he pointed out.
“I was thinking Lette was here.”
“Oh.” Will chewed on that. It was, he decided, unreasonably reasonable. “Well she’s not.”
“No,” Balur agreed. “There is only being the drunk wreck of the man you used to be being. It is being very warming to the cockles of my heart.” He did not appear to be being very genuine.
“Well,” said Will—there was no warmth left in him to buoy his voice, “it looks like we’ve both been left in her wake doesn’t it?” He sighed, poured himself another drink. Balur retrieved the bottle and did the same.
The silence between them grew.
“Why are you even looking for her anyway?” was all Will could finally muster by way of conversation.
“Oh,” Balur shrugged. “Some assassins were coming a little too close to killing me, so I was abandoning the whole prophet thing, and was hitting the roads again. And at first I was thinking that perhaps the assassins were from Vinland, and as Lette and I share history with Vinland that is predating our meeting you then perhaps—if the Vinlanders are feeling murderous—they may be sending assassins after her as well, and that I should be telling her that. But then I was realizing they had been saying a dragon’s name. But Lette and I are sharing that history too. So I thought I should still be telling her about it. But now she is not being here, so”—he chugged his wineglass again—“I am thinking whatever.”
“Wait …” Will said, struggling to parse Balur’s torturing of Avarran grammar. For the first time in a long time, he wished he wasn’t quite as drunk as he was. “Assassins?” he said. “Vinland?”
“Yes,” Balur nodded. “A while ago, Lette and I were hearing of an artifact in the Sacred Section of Vinter.” He looked at Will. “The Vinland capital,” he added.
“I am knowing …” Will shook his head, corrected himself. “I know what the bloody capital of Vinland is,” he said irritably.
“Well, we were hearing about this cup that used to belong to Barph, and how it was always being full of sacred liquor. So we were thinking to be lifting it and be selling it for so much gold we would be able to be making a life-size sculpture of my genitals. But things were going rather awry, and we may have been burning down a significant portion of Vinter. Which was why we were heading to Kondorra in the first place and met you. But they have been having a death warrant out for us for quite some time.”
“Death warrant,” Will repeated. “Assassins.” An idea was coming to him. Emerging from the soup of the night.
“It may have been being to do with the trade dispute,” Balur went on, oblivious to Will’s slowly building epiphany. “But quite frankly, as soon as plots around trade disputes are being involved, I am considering disemboweling myself.”
And then finally it came to Will. Like a light descending from the heavens. Knole, goddess of wisdom, reaching down a single glowing fingertip and pressing it to his forehead.
“We have to go after her,” he said. He felt a smile spreading across his face. “We have to find Lette and warn her that her life is in danger!”
Balur’s brow furrowed. “Why?”
“Because her life is in danger!” Will stood up. He swayed slightly but he felt more clearheaded than he had in months.
“And how will knowing about them be making her more capable of killing them?”
“She’ll be able to hide her tracks. To live more safely.” His grin threatened to split his face. “She’ll be grateful.”
Balur shook his head. “Have you even been meeting Lette?”
But Will wouldn’t be stopped. He turned around. “We’ll leave this whole place. This whole fucking farm. Leave it in our dust.”
“Weren’t you being the one who was insisting on the farm, and driving off the love of your life with it?” Balur looked thoroughly confused.
“Yes!” Will shouted at him. And it felt good to just say it. To just finally say it and know it was true, and that it didn’t matter, because finally, finally he had a way back. A way to reunite with her.
“I fucking hate this farm!” he yelled.
The farm, taking offense, caused him to step in some cold, spilled stew, and sent him flying to the floor, where he smacked his head against the flagstones. But he was still smiling, even as the sense was knocked out of him.
4
The Open Road
Even the cataclysmic headache that came the next morning could not dampen Will’s spirits. Balur had bound his head inexpertly, largely making it look like Will had been savagely attacked by some bloodthirsty bedsheets, and now the open road beckoned. Will’s wanderlust had him out of bed early and chastising Balur to ready his pack and be on his way.
“Are we not taking horses?” said Balur, confused. “Are you not being a wealthy farmer or some shit?”
Will scoffed at him. “This is a return to my roots, Balur. I got out of
touch with myself.”
“Yes,” Balur deadpanned. “You were a farmer. Then you were leading a revolution. Then you went back to being a farmer. I can be seeing how that would be being the total opposite of a return to your roots.”
“I mean a return to being one of the people,” said Will, purposely ignoring Balur’s sarcasm. “I want to be someone down in the dirt again. This separation from the people—that’s what was wrong.”
“So it was not being the whole chasing off of Lette and lapse into drunkenness then?”
That was a little harder to ignore, but Will managed it.
After three days of aching feet, a continually pounding head, vomiting, loose bowels, constant rain, sleeping in barns, and utterly failing to come across any sign of Lette, Will was beginning to think he was as full of shit as Balur had suggested.
He also finally decided that he would be able to live with Balur’s smug satisfaction.
“Fine,” he said into Balur’s silent judgment, “tomorrow we’ll hire pissing horses, and gallop about like the poncey arseholes we apparently are.”
Balur clapped him on the back. Will staggered and Balur laughed heartily. “Do not be thinking of it as going soft, Will. Be thinking of it as never actually being anything but soft to begin with.”
Will tried to not regret his decision. And another hour later, as they passed through the fortified walls of Pekarra, a small market town, he was glad that he had climbed down off his high horse.
The Pekarra gate guards wore the colors of the Batarran High Council—green and yellow emblazoned with the Coin and Keys. They were lighting torches, and preparing to bar the gates for the night. One poked a pike tentatively in Balur’s direction. “He going to be trouble?”
Balur grinned. “You be wanting trouble?”
Will massaged his brow. “No,” he said as definitively as he could. “An idiot, yes, but trouble, no.”
“Oh good,” said the guard, who looked rather glad. Balur was about the same height as the man’s pike itself.
Such niceties dealt with, Will stared about. Pekarra’s gates opened onto a broad but shallow square of buildings. Most were dark now, but in one lights blazed, and a fiddle and pipe played a jaunty tune.
“All right,” Will said, “how’s about this for a plan? We go in there, we pay whatever obscene amount it is they demand to put you up for the night, we sleep until the sun is high in the sky, and then we finally hire those gods-hexed horses?”
“There?” Balur nodded toward the inn. It was four stories tall and draped all over with red bunting. A festive place, in Will’s opinion.
“It looks nice,” he said. He was surprised Balur showed any hesitation at all.
Balur shook his head. “I was not thinking of it as being your sort of place.”
Will tried to work out if he was being insulted or not. “What’s wrong with it?” he asked as they crossed the square. His legs ached, and the blisters on his heels were approaching the point where they were close to screaming. He pulled open the door to the inn and, in a moment of confused largesse, held it for Balur. “Why are you being such a cryptic bugger all of a sudden?” he asked.
Balur hesitated, filling the door. Music and tinkling laughter pushed out around his massive frame. “Cryptic?” He looked as puzzled as Will felt. Then realization must have dawned, because he smiled, and clapped a heavy hand on Will’s shoulder. “Ah,” he boomed, as he dragged Will bodily through the door, “you are not understanding what the red flags are signifying.”
Slowly, but with irresistible force, Will’s mouth formed a perfect O.
The doors opened up onto a massive space, more than half the full footprint of the sprawling tavern and stretching up to the rafters. The space was packed with round tables, and each table was packed with men. And the space between each table was packed with women. Women and lace. Though significantly more women than lace. Indeed, it seemed the town was under a significant lace shortage given what the women seemed forced to wear. Everything was sheer fabric, and soft curves, and jiggling, jiggling flesh. The place stank of sawdust, sweat, ale, and lust.
A bordello.
A long bar stretched the full length of one long wall, and on either side broad oak stairways led up to walkways that circled the room. Upon the walkways paraded yet more women. And behind each woman was a door. And through each door was the glimpse of a soft, warm, red bedroom. Three tiers of walkways looked down upon the room, each one lined with women and doors.
Will watched as a man so drunk he could barely walk was escorted by two women, both half his age, through one of those doorways. The door swung shut. It was not the only closed door.
He swallowed hard.
It was not as if he were unaware such places existed. He was in his twenties, after all, and he had more than a rough idea of how to keep Lette entertained on lonely nights. And yet, to be confronted with it all so abruptly, so … much all at once.
“I always wondered why the farmhands were so eager to take a three-day journey just to sell corn,” was all he finally managed.
Balur slammed his palms together in an echoing clap. “Two rooms for the night!” he bellowed. “The Emperor’s package!”
Will turned to him. “The Emperor package? You’ve been here before?”
Balur shook his head with an expression of mixed exasperation and fondness. “No, of course not, but if I ask for an Emperor’s package then they shall either give me the closest thing they have, or they will be making something up, and it shall be as glorious as it is expensive.”
“Expensive?”
“He’s paying!” Balur roared, thrusting a finger at Will just before they were enveloped in giggling women.
Without quite understanding how, Will found himself sitting at a table with a woman on each arm and a mug of ale in each hand. The girls kept asking him inane questions, and even answers such as “Erm?” and “Pardon?” seemed fit to send them into gales of giggles. And each giggle seemed an excuse to press ample flesh against him.
Some part of his mind could see the artifice of it all. He could glimpse the professional hardness that leaked out behind the airy giggles. And part of him knew that he did not want to be here, that bedding whores while you claimed to be looking for your great love was hypocritical at best, and hazardous to the continued health of one’s nethers at worst.
And another part of him yelled, “Titties! Titties! Titties!” And every time he took a sip of ale to try to work out what he should do, it got louder.
He leaned his head back, trying to shake himself free from the moment, from the press of delicate hands on his chest, from the buzz of alcohol in his mind, from the sinuous rhythm of pipe and fiddle, from the cheers and laughter of the men, from the smell of perfume and sour ale. He looked up at the tiers of balcony and tried to lose himself in the abstract pattern of wooden railings and doorjams.
One girl, who seemed drunker than the rest, though he couldn’t be entirely sure if that was true, leaned in and licked his face.
It was as her tongue reached his cheekbone that the door he was staring at dispassionately opened and …
No.
No, it couldn’t be. It mustn’t be.
A divine pissing comedy.
She emerged. She, laughing. She, smiling. She, without a care in the world.
Two girls were with her, and two boys. All young. All very pretty. And at first he wanted to scream. Because some great tragedy had befallen her. Something awful that had condemned her to this life, selling her body instead of her sword. She had been robbed and broken. That must have been it, because there could be no other explanation for Lette being here, in this place.
But there was, and as the whore’s tongue arrived in Will’s ear, and began to make slow circles, he saw it. He saw it in the way the girls and boys fawned on her, laughed too hard with her, in the way they touched and stroked her. He was not looking at an employee, but a patron.
Together, Lette and her entourage stumbled
down the corridor. She was holding a wineskin, slopping drink over the railing to fall like red rain on the hall below. One boy and girl were on either side of her, propping her up, laughing so hard they could barely support her.
She was coming down. She would see him. She would …
He didn’t know. But, gods, he didn’t want to find out.
He stood up fast. The whore with her tongue in his ear fell away with an irritated gasp, which then dissolved into another gale of giggles. More hands pawed at him.
He stood, trapped by table and bodies, pinned by events and emotional paralysis. She would see.
And then she did.
Their eyes met across a crowded room.
And then a whore grabbed his arse, and he flinched just as he saw Lette mouth a single word.
“Shit.”
“Will?” Balur was shouting. “Will, you are being ready for a room then? Because I am wanting to swap my blonde here for your … Will?” And then he saw what Will was looking at, and trailed off.
A moment of perfect, silent stillness. Lette avoiding his eye. The whores still fawning around her, not feeling the change in the temperature of her emotions yet. The patrons of the bordello utterly oblivious to this tragedy of the heart playing out around them.
“Lette!” Balur’s bellow was a war cry that silenced the room. Everyone in the place froze, a primal fear rising in them.
Balur took off, bulldozing through the table, chairs, patrons, whores, and serving girls. People flung themselves out of his way. Will watched it all. Watched Lette staring at this oncoming monstrosity, eyes wide, as she braced for the impact of her oldest friend.
“Lette!” Balur roared again, catching her up in his massive hands and tossing her into the air. She didn’t flail, just rose straight as an arrow. It was not an elegant maneuver, just one of blunt efficiency. It was utterly her. Will’s heart tremored in the cage of his ribs. Balur caught Lette, spun her around. “We have been finding you!” the lizard man roared. “Will is always finding a way. It may be being a rough road but it is getting you there in the end.”
Lette said something. Will could see her lips move. But the words escaped him. The hubbub of the room was rising once more. Outrage and amusement in equal measure, though none of the irritated parties seemed interested in pressing their point with a creature capable of ripping them in two.