The Amoral Hero

by Logan Jacobs

  “Ernest Razputen,” Katrina said. “That was his full name.”

  “He gave his full name when he was in town, but the lawmen, and your father, were never able to track him down?” I asked. “To find anyone who knew of him?”

  “It probably wasn’t his real name,” Janina pointed out.

  “It had a certain irony to it,” Katrina said. “For him to be called Ernest, when he was a treacherous villain.”

  “Indeed,” I said. “So your father-- he never sent so much as a telegraph after he left?”

  “Never,” Janina agreed.

  “Our grandmother raised us,” Katrina said. “But eventually, we inherited our parents’ property, once we came of age.”

  “Hmm,” I said. “And this grandmother of yours, what was her name?”

  This time, the twins didn’t both answer at once. Instead, they both paused, seemingly waiting for each other to answer. As if they were wary of repeating their previous mistake.

  Then Janina finally said, “Mary.”

  “Mary Elliott,” Katrina agreed.

  “I see,” I said with a great deal of emphasis on the words.

  I turned to look at the twins. They were exchanging worried glances with each other. When they noticed me looking, they turned their wide eyes to me and attempted to radiate innocence. I don’t think they realized that they were overdoing it.

  “Are your names even really Elliott?” I asked.

  “What!” Katrina exclaimed.

  “Of course they are,” Janina scoffed.

  “Of course?” I repeated as I arched an eyebrow at them.

  “All right, well, maybe some things we say are a tiny bit of an exaggeration sometimes,” Katrina conceded.

  “But our surname really is Elliott,” Janina repeated.

  “I suppose I believe you on that account,” I said. “Not that it makes any difference. So, what really happened to your parents?”

  “It’s none of your business,” Katrina snapped.

  “I suppose not, but you sure do ask a lot of questions about my business,” I pointed out.

  “You’re right,” Katrina sighed. “And I’m not cross with you, not really.”

  “It just isn’t a very good story,” Janina said.

  “You mean it’s not a happy one?” I asked. “Most stories aren’t, in the end.”

  “No, it’s not a happy one,” Katrina said.

  “It’s not even a beautifully tragic one, like the one we told you about the sorcerer,” Janina added.

  “That was a good story, wasn’t it?” Katrina asked me hopefully.

  “Yes, it was,” I chuckled to myself at her lack of shame at being caught in a lie.

  “But our real father wasn’t like that,” Katrina said.

  “He didn’t love our mother,” Janina said. Her voice was usually lighthearted and teasing but this time I could hear the undertones of pain in it. “He abandoned her.”

  “So you were raised by your mother and didn’t know your father?” I guessed.

  “Actually, we were raised by our father, and didn’t know our mother,” Janina corrected me.

  “He left your mother, but took the two of you with him?” I asked. That sounded like a rather uncommon thing for a man to do.

  “Yes, he did, so we practically were raised by wolves,” Janina said. “He brought us along from town to town with his gang, from the time we were two until the time we were ten. His various girlfriends sort of looked after us, the ones that liked children anyway.”

  “His… gang?” I repeated. “You mean, like a gang of outlaws?”

  “Exactly like that,” Katrina said. Her tone was quite solemn. I didn’t think she was joking.

  “Look here, you don’t have to tell me a damn thing, as long as it’s not going to make a lick of difference for the next seven and a half days,” I sighed. “I’m not some gossip-starved matron. I can accept not knowing.”

  “We’re not lying,” Janina said sharply. “Not this time.”

  “The real story isn’t any less colorful, it’s just less romantic,” Katrina said.

  “Your father was an outlaw, and he took you along with his gang for eight years?” I asked incredulously.

  “It wasn’t because he loved us, although we thought that at first,” Katrina said.

  “It’s because when we were small, we were useful to him,” Janina explained.

  “How so?” I asked. Children of an age to be small, weak, easily tired, prone to complaining, incapable of advanced reasoning, and incompetent at regulating their emotions seemed to me like a huge burden and liability for-- well, anyone, really, but in particular for a violent gang of bandits.

  “Dozens of ways,” Janina said. “I bet between the two of us, we still remember nearly all of them, don’t you think, Kat?”

  “Where’s Mother, Savajuns Attacked Our Camp, Please May I Have a Peppermint, My Sister Fell Down a Well,” Katrina started counting off on her fingers. “My Doggie is Lost, I Need a Drink of Water, My Stomach Hurts… ”

  “My Grandmother is Sick, I’m Frightened of the Woods, That Man Tried to Touch Me,” Janina continued. “What a Pretty Dress That Is, Can You Do Magic?, I Can Do Magic, My Sister is Dead, The House is On Fire, We All Have Dysentery.”

  “He used you to lure robbery victims into ambushes,” I said. “And perpetrate swindles on others which willingly caused them to give up their goods.”

  “Precisely,” Janina said.

  “Our being twins was particularly useful to the gang,” Katrina said. “It was like the ability to be in two places at once. One of us could be the decoy, another the thief. And no one would suspect us because they knew they’d been watching ‘the little blonde girl’ quite closely the entire time, feeding her milk and cookies in the kitchen, so she couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with the things that went missing from upstairs.”

  “We did crueler things than that,” Janina said. “A few times we staged our death, with the help of the gang, and then the other one would immediately reappear unharmed. You will find that most people are shockingly amenable to obeying the instructions of a ghost child.”

  “I suppose this makes a sort of sense,” I mused. “This was your… education that prepared you for future mercenary endeavors.”

  “We aren’t like Father,” Katrina said emphatically. “We don’t ever hurt anyone.”

  “Being deprived of their worldly goods can cause folks quite a lot of hurt,” I pointed out.

  “I mean we don’t hurt them physically,” Katrina said. She seemed quite unconcerned by my point.

  “And you hired me,” I added, “someone who has made a career out of hurting people physically.”

  “Yes, but only just in case we need your protection,” Janina said. “We haven’t asked you to attack anyone innocent, have we?”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “If you did ask me that--”

  “We’d have to pay you extra, I know,” Janina sighed.

  “That’s right,” I said. “But go on. I want to hear about your childhood. It sounds like a rather peculiar way to grow up.” Maybe not more peculiar than the way I had grown up, in truth-- but most people would certainly consider it to be so.

  “You know everything important about it now,” Janina said. “Or you can deduce the rest, at least. He wasn’t a good father. He left us behind a couple of times when the gang had to make a quick getaway. Or when he got really drunk, and I think he genuinely just forgot. We would never know whether he was ever going to come back or not. Usually, locals would look after us. We wouldn’t tell them anything about where we’d come from or who we ‘belonged to’ and then after a few days when someone from the gang did come to fetch us, we’d just sneak away from our hosts and vanish.”

  “And he, Father I mean, he had a-- quick temper,” Katrina said tightly.

  “But that made us fast learners,” Janina said.

  “So how did you get away from him?” I asked.

  �
��It was one of our hosts, that we thought would be a temporary host like all the rest,” Katrina said. “Marianne Elliott. We stayed with her in Dunville, after Father abandoned us again. He came back, but when we tried to go with him, it was different that time.”

  “Marianne stopped him,” Janina said with a slight smile. “She was a little old lady, but she put her foot down. I was scared for her at first. I thought that Father might kill her, or at least knock her out.”

  “She threatened to call the sheriff if he wouldn’t leave,” Katrina said, “and he said he had a right to us, that we were his daughters, and the sheriff would just hand us over to him anyway.”

  “And she said that may be, but that the sheriff would be mighty interested in giving him a good swing on the gallows first in repayment for the various ways he’d spent his time in Dunville, to which all the neighbors could certainly testify,” Janina said.

  “He looked at her like he was going to strangle her, but then-- he didn’t,” Katrina continued pensively. “He just muttered something about us getting too old anyway. He meant by that that we were starting to get to an age where people didn’t implicitly trust us anymore, where we were no longer above suspicion and therefore much less useful to him. And then, he turned tail and left, and that was the last we ever saw of him. I’d be surprised if he’s still alive today.”

  “The last thing he said to us though, I’ll never forget it,” Janina laughed darkly.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “You already know what it was,” she replied. “We told you.”

  “‘Be good girls,’” I repeated. I did recall them saying that, at the end of their invented story about a lovesick father who’d left them only in order to go in search of his beloved wife, kidnapped by a sorcerer. In that context, they had seemed like rather banal parting words. The words themselves were still banal, but they acquired a bitter irony in the mouth of an outlaw father who had exploited and abused them and taught them nothing but how to operate as criminals.

  “That part was true,” Janina said. “It was exactly what he said. The last thing he had any right to say. The kisses on the top of our heads were a lie, though.”

  “Marianne sounds like a remarkable woman,” I said.

  “She was,” Katrina replied. Her face and Janina’s were both aglow with such earnest affection as they thought of her that I knew their story about their adopted guardian must be true, at least in part. “She stood up for us. She was the first person who ever did.”

  “And we weren’t easy children either,” Janina added. “Not after all the nasty habits that had been ingrained in us. Not with our lack of trust and our proclivities for lying and stealing and cheating. We disappointed her so many times, but she never gave up on us.”

  “May God rest her soul,” Katrina said.

  “It’s her house that we live in,” Janina said. “She never married or had children, but she was her father’s only child, so she inherited his estate, and spent very little of it throughout her life, except to provide for us. The people of Dunville knew that we weren’t really her granddaughters, but they thought we had been sent to live with her by our uncle, some wealthy industrialist who was a distant relation of hers.”

  “Uncle Elliott,” I said as I remembered our conversation at dinner that first night I had met them, after collecting the reward for Ermenildo Zabala’s false orange-bearded head.

  “Yes,” Janina said. “That fiction existed all along. But we didn’t hire the actor until after Marianne passed away, on a few occasions when we needed someone to throw around the heft of male authority a bit. No one ever found out that we were really the discarded offspring of a notorious bandit. We wouldn’t have been regarded the same way in town.”

  “You know, that may be so,” I said, “but you’re lucky you live in the West. In the Old World, folks are even less forgiving of each other’s pasts, even for things they can’t help. People are judged on the basis of what their ancestors achieved or failed to achieve in the past several centuries.”

  “I suppose,” Katrina said doubtfully. “But we don’t know any of our ancestors past our father, so I don’t see how that would be possible.”

  “That would be considered even worse,” I said.

  “Some people have no sense,” Katrina huffed.

  “Just so,” I said.

  “Well, what about you?” Janina inquired curiously.

  “Me? I have a great deal of sense.”

  “No, I mean, what about your past,” she said.

  “It’s over and done with, I guess,” I said. “It’s involved a lot of fighting and killing. You can rest assured that I am an experienced professional at my trade.”

  “That’s not why I was asking,” Janina said. Her sweet, youthful face had an unusually intent expression. “I just want to know more about you. Who you are, I mean.”

  “In the hopes that you’ll gain enough material to be able to manipulate me?” I laughed.

  “No!” Janina protested. “I just really want to get to know you. You’re an awfully interesting person, you know.”

  “What do you want to know?” I asked. I didn’t have much to hide from these girls. Sure, I liked them well enough, but it didn’t really matter, ultimately, what they thought of me. They had already hired me, after all, and I wasn’t really one for repeat customers. Things could get tangled up fast, that way.

  It was much simpler, cleaner, purer, if Theo and I just took our payment and kept on heading West, onward to whatever laid beyond the horizon. Of course, with girls who looked like Janina and Katrina Elliott, I was well aware that most men would bend over backwards to try to fill their mouths with honey and tell them whatever the hell they imagined they wanted to hear. But I wasn’t that kind of a liar. It wasn’t a matter of honor. I just found it pathetic watching fellows pretend desperately to be something they weren’t, just to bed a girl, when most times I could admit outright what I was, and they’d still let me have my way with them.

  “Well… what kind of family were you born into?” Katrina piped up.

  All right, so that was one question with an answer that I generally tried to keep to myself. I considered for a moment whether it was worth inventing some sort of wild cover story like they’d done to me at first on the same subject. Or how much grief I’d catch from them for the rest of the day if I chose to refuse the very first, seemingly innocent question that they asked me. Then, something else occurred to me.

  They wouldn’t believe the real answer, anyway.

  “The royal family of Delorne,” I answered nonchalantly.

  “How amusing,” Janina huffed.

  I had to turn my face away to hide my smile. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I could feel Theo’s flanks between my thighs shudder slightly with suppressed laughter.

  “Tell us really,” Katrina insisted.

  “Very well, I wasn’t just born into the royal family, I was born first of all the King’s sons,” I said. “I was the crown prince. The heir to the throne.”

  “So you were educated in statecraft, and formal etiquette, and ballroom dances,” Janina said sarcastically.

  “Most assuredly.”

  “Well, at least I believe that knights taught you swordsmanship,” Katrina giggled.

  “I was considered gifted at that, but I wasn’t the most gifted of my brothers… the discipline where I surpassed them all was ballroom dancing,” I said. That was quite true. One of my brothers had been markedly superior at swordsmanship, and another roughly equal. That was, however, when I wasn’t permitted to use my magical ability of manipulating the size of objects. When I was permitted to use it in sparring, none of them could touch me.

  Both Janina and Katrina giggled uncontrollably at that idea.

  “I didn’t know you had such a sense of humor, Mr. Hale,” Katrina remarked.

  “I don’t,” I replied.

  “Well, you shall have to demonstrate your ballroom dancing skills for us sometime then, Mr.
Hale,” Janina cooed.

  “Next time we end up in a ballroom,” I promised, but that would not happen based on the unlikelihood of our location out on the frontier.

  “But do we really need a ballroom?” Katrina asked. “We could dance in the grass.”

  “Like peasants?” I replied.

  The twins broke into uncontrollable giggles at that again. Theo also emitted an audible guffaw, but it sounded different enough from a human laugh that I didn’t think the girls really recognized it as such.

  “So I suppose we shouldn’t call you Mr. Hale anymore,” Janina said. “We really ought to call you Your Highness.”

  “No, that would have been my father,” I said. “My proper address would be ‘my lord.’”

  This, too, was hilarious to the Elliott twins.

  “I hope you’ll forgive us for failing to address you properly, and that you won’t have us executed,” Katrina said.

  “Lord of what? The desert?” Janina scoffed meanwhile. “A few tumbleweeds?”

  “I’m glad you find my family history so amusing,” I said.

  “Oh, terribly,” Janina said. “I suppose it doesn’t matter if you don’t want to tell us.”

  “Was your father an outlaw like ours?” Katrina speculated. “Maybe that’s why you don’t have any sort of proper moral code.”

  “Maybe his father was a farmer,” Janina said. “Maybe it isn’t really much of a story at all, and that’s why he won’t tell us.”

  “Maybe he grew up in an orphanage,” Katrina guessed. “Did you, Mr. Hale?”

  I had no interest in trying to convince them one way or the other, so instead of denying any of their increasingly more outlandish speculations, I began casually agreeing with every single one of them. In this way the girls easily amused themselves for a solid half an hour, without any further effort on my part than monosyllabic answers.

  That day’s riding passed uneventfully, without encountering any hazards, and the twins’ high spirits continued into the evening as we settled around a small campfire for our first evening in the open. We were half a day’s ride yet from Sunderly, and it was already dark, so there was no settlement that we could practicably reach. There was, of course, some chance of attracting unwanted attention every time one lit a fire in the dark, which served as a beacon to your location, but Savajuns generally did their raiding during the day, unless they had planned an attack on a specific settlement. It didn’t make any sense for them to rove around looking for hapless travelers all through the night, as chances are they wouldn’t find anything at all but holes to break their horses’ legs and vindictive nocturnal animals with venomous bites. So, we had the comfort and warmth of a fire to gather around.