by Logan Jacobs
“What about the weight of it?” Katrina asked. “It’s too heavy for the horses.”
“Oh, now you’re concerned for the welfare of your horses!” I scoffed. “After spending all day yesterday shopping for new clothes.”
“We didn’t buy anything heavy,” Katrina protested.
“A lot of light objects add up to a heavy burden,” I countered.
“But, what about it?” Katrina asked her sister again as she chose to disregard my judgment.
“The carriage,” Janina replied smugly. “We have four horses. They will fit it perfectly.”
Soon after that, our food arrived. We had roasted chicken, bread with butter, mashed potatoes with gravy, and cider to drink.
When we were halfway through the meal, a young man from a nearby table eagerly invited the twins to join in a game of poker, but to my surprise, they declined this favorite game of theirs.
“Thank you kindly, but we are retiring early tonight,” Katrina informed the crestfallen youth.
“Now, I understand that you will disregard this,” I said to both twins once the fellow had returned to the poker table, “but for contractual reasons, I must state clearly to you both, that I strongly advise against proceeding with your current plan, in the interest of your safety.”
“Duly noted,” Janina said cheerfully.
I sighed. I’d probably find the girls to be quite enjoyable company, if only I weren’t responsible for them.
After we went upstairs and retired to our separate rooms, I lay awake for a few minutes, in the half hope that I might hear a knock at the door from one or, dared I hope, both twins? But no knock was forthcoming, I suppose because they had really meant what they said about trying to get some rest before an early start and the potential for a violent encounter the next day. That didn’t bother me much. It was the end of day five. I still had five more days left with the twins, which I reckoned was just about the right amount of time, neither too few nor too many.
As it happened, I did in fact wake up to a knock on my door, which was delivered by both twins, but when I opened the door, it was nearly dawn, and the girls were fully dressed and clearly had other matters besides taking turns riding my cock on their mind.
“Come on!” Janina hissed imperiously. “We don’t want to miss them.”
I grudgingly threw my clothes on, buckled on my sword, and followed them downstairs.
After Janina had checked to confirm that the carriage she had identified the previous day was, in fact, still parked in its place, we had a light breakfast of gruel and eggs with a few sausages. Then we sipped on coffee, mine black and theirs practically ivory with milk and cream, while they anxiously eyed the staircase and awaited the descent of Mathilda Hodgson.
“You know,” I remarked offhandedly, “what if this is really what your father meant by being good girls? Maybe he didn’t mean it in the conventional sense. Because what you’re doing right now is following in his footsteps. Maintaining the family trade.”
“I know you’re just saying that to irk us, and discourage us,” Janina responded, “and it isn’t going to work.”
“We’re not anything like our father,” Katrina insisted.
“You still rely on a lot of the same tricks he taught you, don’t you?” I asked.
“We’re not heartless and mean-spirited like he was,” Katrina argued. “And, as far as the ‘family trade’ goes… we have far surpassed the mediocre abilities that allowed him to scrape by. We’ve turned it into an art form. We’re not tramps on the road, like he and his gang were. We are real ladies, ornaments of society.”
“That doesn’t change the essence of how you’re making your living,” I said. “It just means you’re better at it. If you really want to defy your father, you’d have to do something respectable.”
“But there isn’t anything interesting for women to do respectably!” Janina declared in exasperation. “We can only be housemaids and brood mares.”
“But I thought you said you always dreamed of having a cozy household, as children,” I said. “You said that sounded like a better ‘adventure’ to you than roaming the frontier and sleeping under the stars.”
“Yes, but on our own terms, and not being at the beck and call of a husband and screaming babies,” Katrina said.
“As you will,” I shrugged. I didn’t know how feasible it would be in the long term to maintain a lifestyle of domestic luxury and reckless larceny combined, but despite their supposedly troubled childhood, the twins did seem rather like the sort of charmed people for whom things tended to just somehow turn out well even when all the standard laws of the universe indicated that they shouldn’t, so maybe they would get their odd happily ever after.
“I’m going to go see to Theo and get him saddled up,” I continued. “One of you should come to ready the mares. And I suppose you’ll need to hire a man to load your luggage again, won’t you?”
“Yes,” Janina rose to her feet. They’d stopped bothering to glare at me for refusing to help with their luggage for free, by then. It seemed they’d stopped thinking anything of it at all. “I’ll take care of it. Kat, you keep an eye out, and come out to fetch us immediately if any of the Hodgsons come downstairs.”
Katrina nodded.
I walked out to the stable, greeted Theo, and fed him some treats from breakfast as I started readying him for the day. A few minutes later, Janina came out to join me there accompanied by two workers from the inn hauling two suitcases each.
“I often wish I had another intelligent horse for company,” Theo remarked to me as we eyed the beginning of the daily loading process on the unfortunate creatures whose turn it was to serve as mules, “but, you know, I think I’m rather glad those mares are mute, or I imagine they would complain quite a lot.”
I drank a vial of potencium from his saddlebags. His saddlebags still carried a lot of gold and potencium from the sorcerer Gorander’s palace that we had raided after defeating him, and Theo had given me an earful about that added weight more than once, but they were getting lighter every day, with the quantities of potencium I had been drinking.
Then Theo and I stood by idling and waited for the transfer of the luggage from the twins’ bedroom upstairs to the stable to be completed. I held a stalk of grass in my hand and absently shrank and enlarged it. It was just a habit of mine, no different from someone else chewing on tobacco or twiddling his thumbs, but I think it may have alarmed the inn workers a bit when they noticed.
Then, when half of the twins’ various containers for their extensive traveling wardrobe had been secured to the mares, and half still remained in the inn, Katrina came running out.
“They’re coming,” she said to Janina and me somewhat breathlessly.
“Who’s coming?” one of the inn employees questioned as he deposited a particularly heavy valise.
“Never mind-- we don’t want the rest,” Janina said as she pressed gold into his palm as well as his coworker’s.
“W-what do you mean, Miss?” the other employee asked in confusion.
“Our luggage,” she said impatiently. “We don’t want the rest. Keep it, auction it off, whatever you want to do with it, we don’t want it.”
“I d-don’t understand, Miss, is something the matter--”
“We do not require your services any further,” Janina informed him imperiously. “Thank you and good day.”
The inn employees looked at each other in bewilderment, shrugged, and hurried off. They probably didn’t mind being relieved of the obligation to finish their task and still being paid handsomely for it notwithstanding.
“Our dresses,” Katrina said in dismay. “We should have risen earlier.”
“Five thousand gold coins,” Janina reminded her. “We can buy as many new ones as we like.”
Their dresses were very nearly matching that morning, which I didn’t much like, as it made it more difficult to tell them apart at a glance. They were both cream-colored with ruffled hems, but J
anina’s had faint peach-colored stripes, and Katrina’s had faint peach-colored polka dots. The twins were also wearing white hats to shield their faces from the sun and white gloves.
“They’re coming out now, don’t let them see us,” Katrina gasped.
She and Janina stooped and together they hauled that last valise into the nearest stall, out of sight. Then they huddled down in that stall, while I huddled in Theo’s, and we watched Mathilda Hodgson emerge from the inn, flanked by her two middle-aged grandnephews. Under her ghastly purple gown, she wore a crinoline so huge that it initially obscured the fact that there were two men following behind the trio, other workers from the inn who were red-faced and grunting under the weight of the chest filled with her poker winnings.
The old lady pointed to indicate which carriage was hers, and with the grandnephews’ help, they managed to maneuver the chest inside before stepping back in exhaustion to stand there awkwardly in evident expectation of a tip.
“Well, what do you want?” Mathilda practically snarled at them when she realized they hadn’t left yet.
The workers exchanged glances with each other.
“Er, is there… any other way we can serve you, Madam?” one of them asked finally.
“No, you are dismissed,” she replied.
The workers cast each other disgruntled looks, wiped the sweat from their brows, and trudged off back to the inn.
The blond grandnephew helped his great-aunt into the carriage and climbed in after her. Meanwhile the brunette one with the receding hairline hopped up into the driver’s seat. Their team of horses had already been hitched to the carriage, probably by other inn workers who had then been denied the customary tip. The grandnephew in the driver’s seat flicked his whip, and the three of them rolled off.
Katrina started to stand up, but Janina grabbed her by the arm, and she sank back down out of sight. We let another minute pass. Then we emerged from the stalls, brought our horses out, and mounted up.
“Don’t let them get out of sight,” Janina cried.
“I’d advise letting them get out of sight, if I were you,” I said. “If you follow that closely behind them they’ll be able to see you too. It’ll look suspicious at the least.”
“Then how are we supposed to find them or know which way they went?” Janina demanded.
I sighed and waited for them to notice the obvious grooves in the dirt left behind the wheels of the heavy carriage.
“You’re just trying to make us lose our prey,” Janina accused me.
“Janie, look,” Katrina pointed to the carriage tracks. Janina looked down at them and then back up at me. I nodded once.
At a very leisurely pace, to allow the Hodgsons’ carriage to roll further ahead, we started our pursuit. Theo took the lead because, unlike the other horses, he understood that we were following the wheel tracks, so he just kept glancing down to check and stayed next to them.
We meandered, we paused, the twins chattered to each other and waved merrily at passersby. We gave absolutely no indication of purposefulness or urgency, and although men called out greetings to the beautiful blondes, no one asked us any questions or made a serious attempt to start a conversation, and most importantly, no one tried to follow us as we left.
Eventually, we made our way out of the miraculous desert boomtown of Sunderly and into the open plains.
The tracks became slightly harder to follow then, because the grass grew taller where people had not cleared it away to make way for their town, but we could still find recently crushed patches. And then, after perhaps half a mile of that, the carriage itself came into view, as a tiny speck on the horizon.
We could make out just enough detail to confirm by the colors that it was indeed the Hodgson’s carriage. The twins wanted to break into a gallop immediately and catch up, but I reasoned with them that we should first travel far enough to be not only well out of the range of any interference from Sunderly, but far enough out that if we allowed the Hodgsons to walk back, we could be long gone by the time any retributive pursuit by law enforcement might materialize. They agreed to this, and we continued to trudge onward for another two hours and cover several more miles. We stopped when the Hodgsons stopped, which happened twice. We even sometimes stopped when they did not stop, and allowed them to vanish over the horizon for a bit, at times when their direction was clear and the landscape that lay ahead was too barren to conceal them, in order to lessen the chance that they would happen to look backward and notice our presence.
“Can’t we get them now?” Janina asked impatiently.
I had already answered that question in the negative several times by then, but that time, I felt that we’d probably covered a sufficient distance for our purposes.
“I reckon so,” I said with a shrug. The words had barely left my mouth when Janina spurred her mare onward, and Katrina quickly followed suit. Theo caught up to their clumsy canter within a moment. The luggage mares couldn’t quite keep up with the rest of us, but the three horses carrying riders rapidly gained on the Hodgsons.
Their carriage was white, trimmed in blue. We got close enough to see the texture in the wood before the blond grandnephew finally stuck his head out the window, gaped at us, and yelled to alert his relatives.
The driver stopped the horses and dismounted, as his brother also got out of the carriage.
“Who are you and what the hell do you want?” the brunette, and slightly older-looking, of the brothers demanded loudly in a tone of poorly disguised panic as he placed his hand on the sword at his belt. Surely he already knew in his gut exactly what we wanted, regardless of who we were.
“Hey, I know you,” the blond grandnephew said suddenly as he pointed an accusatory finger at the twins. “You’re the girls from the inn… the ones that Great-Aunt--”
“Called whores?” Janina inquired dryly.
“Well, I’m s-sure she didn’t mean--” the man stammered awkwardly.
“Don’t worry,” Katrina said sweetly. “We’re not here to take revenge for that.”
“We’re here to rob you,” Janina explained, equally politely.
At this point, the wizened Great Aunt Mathilda herself poked her head out the window. She squinted in the sun for a long moment, without showing any comprehension of the current situation that was unfolding. Then, finally, she seemed to recognize the twins.
“You,” she gasped.
“Yes, yes, the vicious harlots,” Janina said impatiently. “Here we are again. We sorely missed you, too.”
“Leave us alone, or Sheriff Cavendish will see you hang!” Mathilda said shrilly.
“You know him?” Janina asked.
“Yes, he is a dear friend of mine,” Mathilda stated triumphantly. She seemed to mistake Janina’s contempt at the mention of the sheriff’s name for consternation.
“Birds of a feather,” Janina muttered.
“Pardon me?” Mathilda asked.
“Never you mind,” Janina said.
“Why do you plague me so?” Mathilda lamented. “Why can’t you leave an old woman in peace? Why have you made me your victim?”
“Stop wailing, we haven’t done anything to you yet,” Katrina said. “And, it isn’t anything personal. Do we despise you? Certainly. But that isn’t why we’re here.”
“We’re here because the simple fact of the matter is that you won the tournament,” Janina stated, with a hand on her hip. Both girls wore smug expressions. They were thoroughly enjoying Mathilda’s dawning misery and rage, and their own sense of security to say and do as they pleased without fear of repercussions.
“No, you can’t have it, you heartless wretches,” Mathilda wailed. “Sheriff Cavendish will punish you. God Himself will strike you down if you take it from me!”
“We’ll take our chances,” Janina said dryly.
The gibbering old woman turned her attention to me then. “And what kind of man are you, to participate in a scheme like this?” she demanded. “A hired ruffian? A bandit?�
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“Ruffian is a subjective term really,” I said. “But no, I’m not a bandit. They are, though.”
“How can that be?” Mathilda asked. “You’re robbing me right now!”
“I’m doing no such thing.” I was simply sitting atop Theo, with my hand on the hilt of my sword, and maintaining enough eye contact with Mathilda’s two middle-aged grandnephews whose hands were also on the hilts of their swords to deter them from making any movements in the direction of the Elliott girls as they taunted their great-aunt.
“Well, you’re about to!” she insisted.
“I’m not, actually,” I corrected her mildly. “They’re about to.”
“Get out of the carriage,” Janina commanded her.
“It’s my carriage, you vile girl!”
“Not anymore,” Janina said. “Hurry up before we have to remove you by force.”
“Alfred! Manny!” Mathilda squawked as she looked over at her grandnephews, who still looked uncomfortably undecided about whether they should attack, and if so, if they should go for me or the girls, who were clearly more of the aggressors but also obviously less of a physical threat.
“Yes, Great Aunt?” they chorused unhappily.
“Deal with these savages,” she ordered them. “There are two of you, and only the one man.”
The grandnephews still hesitated. I don’t think they liked what they saw when they looked at me. I looked strong, yes, but I was only a reasonably large man, not an exceptionally large one, so that wasn’t where most of the intimidation came from. It was something subtler than that. Every scrap of fabric on me was well-worn, and every inch of metal was scratched and battered. I wasn’t old yet, but I wasn’t young anymore either, and I knew my face had acquired a sharp weathered look through the years. I looked, in short, like a frontiersman, a creature forged and hardened by the West.
I looked like a sell sword.
I didn’t know what the Hodgsons’ family history was, but both grandnephews looked like they’d be a lot better suited to life in a town like Sunderly than to hacking their way through the wilderness.