by Logan Jacobs
“And what did they do then?” I asked.
“First they laughed, then they realized that I really meant it and forbade me to go,” Lucinda said. “So then I went, and here I am, and here you are.”
“So am I to understand that it was… er… an unauthorized hiring decision?” I asked.
Lucinda seemed to recognize the source of my concern instantly and sighed. “Don’t worry,” she said grimly. “They’ll make good on my offer all right once they hear about the circumstances under which I found you.”
That was probably a fair point. At the worst, I’d have to stand by and wait for some other fellow that someone else had already hired for the job to get chomped before the townspeople would agree to transfer his payment to me.
The sun continued to rise steadily as we rode and turned from a beautiful sight into a hostile entity that wanted to scorch our skin off and melt our strength. At the hottest part of midday we stopped under the shade of a rare grove of trees to eat some bread and jerky. When Lucinda dismounted, I could see that her lips were chapped, and her perfect ivory skin had a subtle sheen of sweat. She produced a fan from one of the mare’s saddlebags and fanned herself vigorously, but I appreciated that she hadn’t complained about the heat.
“So, how did you come to serve Mr. Hale?” Lucinda asked Theo when I didn’t immediately commence small talk.
“I was a gift to him on his eighteenth birthday,” Theo answered. “I was just a foal then.”
“They took you from your mother so soon?” Lucinda asked.
“Well, not exactly, I stayed in the pal--”
I kicked Theo lightly in the ankle.
“His family owned my mother too,” Theo said. He bowed his huge and regal head to munch some dried brush. It had no nutritional value compared to the grains that I fed him and unlike other horses, he understood that, but just like other horses, he couldn’t resist snacking on it anyway.
“Did you come from a good family, then?” Lucinda asked me curiously. By “good,” I knew that she meant “wealthy,” but wealthy people didn’t use that term. I also knew from the way her brow furrowed that she couldn’t fathom how someone who came from a good and wealthy family could possibly have ended up a sellsword, but she probably didn’t think it was polite to ask. Not that she didn’t say plenty of objectively impolite things to me, but there were certain aspects of social etiquette that she still felt compelled to abide by. People were odd that way.
“I don’t have a family,” I answered shortly. I tried to think of it like that even in my own head. They wouldn’t recognize the man I had become if they saw me two decades later, anyway. Whichever of them were still alive, anyhow.
“Well, I don’t have much of one myself,” Lucinda replied. “It’s just me and my father. My mother died when I was young, and I never had any siblings.”
I nodded to acknowledge her statement, but I didn’t think it warranted condolences necessarily, if that’s what she was seeking. I poured some water from a skin into a tin canteen, set the canteen on the ground, and enlarged it, and the water with it, to the size of a trough so that Theo could drink from it. The mare heard his gulping and splashing and moved over to drink too. Theo paused in his drinking to glare at her, but evidently decided to tolerate the intrusion.
“But I will have a family of my own soon,” Lucinda continued. She turned her head to observe my reaction.
“Will you now,” I said flatly.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I’m engaged to be married, you see. To the town sheriff.”
“Congratulations,” I said.
“We’ll have many children I’m sure,” Lucinda continued. “I know that will please my father, since he has been lonely since my mother died without giving him any more children than me, and has been waiting all these years for me to grow up and give him grandchildren to play with.”
“How nice for you all,” I said. Her domestic future really didn’t interest me. I would have preferred to talk more about the werewolves, but nothing she had told me about them so far seemed to be very detailed or analytical. She just saw them sort of vaguely as the embodiment of horror and death, which wasn’t useful for planning purposes.
“Why, are you jealous?” Lucinda asked me coyly, with a smirk.
“No,” I replied honestly. I couldn’t think of anything less appealing than shacking up with one woman for the remainder of my life and crowding a house with squalling brats; growing old and useless in a single house in some arbitrary dusty town, no better than the hundreds of others I might encounter if I continued to roam, that would forever remain mysteries to me if I settled down.
“Well, you seem jealous,” Lucinda sniffed in a tone of annoyance. She clearly wanted me to be jealous.
“Of a man marrying a woman who offered to sleep with me just last night?” I asked dryly.
“How dare you,” Lucinda hissed.
“Did I mistake your meaning when you asked if there was ‘anything at all’ that would convince me to help you?” I asked.
“There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to save my town,” Lucinda said. “To save the lives of everyone I care about! That doesn’t mean that I am promiscuous by habit or inclination.”
“Oh, I see,” I said.
“You do?” Lucinda asked suspiciously.
“Yes,” I said. “It wasn’t a matter of passion for you, just a matter of prostitution.”
“What did you just call me?” Lucinda demanded as her face turned white.
“You were offended by the suggestion that you were simply overwhelmed by your sexual attraction to me, and wanted to clarify that it was a purely pragmatic exchange on your part of one service for another, didn’t you?” I asked. There was really no pleasing some people.
“There is no reason I should have to endure this villainous slander,” Lucinda asserted. “I should simply ride off and leave you here.”
“So, you’ll do anything to save your town, except listen to talk that displeases you?” I asked wryly.
“You can pretend to be cool and indifferent all you want, but I know you wanted me,” Lucinda accused me. “And you still do. I can tell.”
“Well, of course I do,” I said matter-of-factly. “You’re a very pretty girl. There’s no reason to get your temper up about any of this. Why, we have a nice patch of shade right here in the trees, and there ain’t another soul for miles about. Excepting Theo, and he won’t mind one bit. We could just lie down--”
“Don’t you dare touch me!” Lucinda shrilled.
“Well, let’s get on our way then,” I said with a shrug.
“Maybe we should just take a nap here first,” Theo suggested hopefully. He was extremely strong and fast and had incredible physical endurance. But he was also one of the laziest creatures, man or beast, I had ever encountered.
“Richcreek is waiting for us,” Lucinda said sharply.
“Hal, are you going to allow her to boss me around like that?” Theo demanded indignantly.
“No, I’m not,” I said as I swung back up into the saddle. “Get moving or you’re about to feel my spurs.”
“You use spurs on a talking horse?” Lucinda asked as she mounted the docile white mare. “Isn’t that a bit… barbaric?”
“Just because he can talk doesn’t mean that he’s more cooperative than an ordinary horse,” I said. “It just means that he’s able to explain why he’s refusing to do whatever I want him to do. Or complain about it.” As a matter of fact I didn’t use the spurs. But I wore them and talked about using them and that seemed to have pretty much the same effect.
We rode for hours after that. I didn’t know where Richcreek was located so I just had to trust in my guide, whose anger showed in her unusually stiff spine and her even more unusual silence for a few hours, until the urge to start chattering again overtook her. Gradually the light began to fade and the heat became more bearable. A bit of orange like smoldering embers began to creep over the edges of the mountain ranges visible on the h
orizon, which turned them a dark indigo by contrast.
“I think we’d better call it a night,” I said. “Before it gets too dark for the horses to see.”
Theo said nothing, but he immediately stopped still in his tracks so I knew he approved of my suggestion. Lucinda pulled her mare to a halt and slid off. She tried to take a step, wobbled, and grabbed onto the mare to stop herself from falling. I guess she wasn’t used to spending all day in the saddle. But since she hadn’t complained about it, I refrained from laughing or poking fun at her.
First, I built a fire with some cow pats and twists of grass for fuel.
“What if Savajuns see the blaze?” Lucinda whispered, as if her very voice would summon them, no matter that she’d been talking quite loudly the whole time we were riding.
“Then we’ll probably get scalped,” I said. “Theo, if that happens, I’d advise you to keep your mouth shut. I’ve heard they have a superstition about talking animals. They think you’re demons in disguise, or something. They have some unpleasant methods for dealing with demons, you know. But dumb horses on the other hand are valuable, and you probably wouldn’t be treated poorly as long as they thought that’s all you were.”
“I am a horse for a king, not a Savajun,” Theo said haughtily.
“Well, a sellsword can’t be many steps above a Savajun,” Lucinda said scornfully.
Thankfully, Theo knew better than to press the issue.
The truth about my fire-building decision was that the plains were vast. Whether you ran into someone else, or even came close enough to be able to spy someone else’s fire in the distance, was more a matter of luck than anything else, for better or worse. It was true that I was increasing the radius from which we could be seen, but the difference was negligible. The risk of freezing to death during the night was less negligible. The desert was as icy by night as it was scorching by day.
Lucinda didn’t say anything else about it. I got out my bedroll, and she got out hers, and we both settled down. After a few minutes I saw her shiver and scoot closer to the fire.
She saw me watching her and said, “I hope you don’t have any nefarious designs in mind.”
“Nefarious designs are more or less how I make my living,” I said. It wasn’t just bad guys that I killed. I killed pretty much anyone that someone else was willing to pay to have killed. I charged a hundred times more for children since I wasn’t too keen on the task but still wanted to propose I’d perform any job for money. No one had ever found that to be worth their coin, probably because most children weren’t particularly difficult to kill and there wasn’t really a need to hire a specialist. But other than that, my prices were fair, and I decided which jobs to accept based purely on the ratio of risk to reward.
“Nefarious designs on me, I mean,” she said.
“I’m not going to kill you,” I said. “How would I find Richcreek then? Besides, no one has paid me to do it, so why should I?”
“It is so comforting to know that my traveling companion is a gentleman of such lofty principles,” Lucinda sighed as she rolled her lovely gray eyes.
As a matter of fact I did have principles of my own. Maybe I had fewer of them than did most members of society, but on the other hand I was willing to bet they were also more unbreakable than most people’s. Chief among them was that once I took on a job, and due payment had been rendered, I finished it. No matter what. If it took me the rest of my life, or cost me my life. I damned well did what I said I would.
I was also an unusually honest fellow, if I did say so myself. It’s not that lying was against my code. I just didn’t feel the need to do it constantly in a thousand petty ways for the reasons that most people seemed to. To coddle other people’s feelings. To make oneself seem wealthier, or more respectable, or more interesting, or braver, or cleverer. To fit in. To be accepted.
“Gentlemen don’t kill werewolves,” I said. “Gentlemen pay other people to kill werewolves. And so, here I am. Just like you asked. Now get some sleep.”
“… How do I know you won’t ravish me in my sleep?” she asked.
Theo, who I guess wasn’t quite asleep yet, snorted aloud when he heard that.
“I guess you’ll just have to take your chances,” I replied.
“I’m not sure I like the sound of that,” she said huskily as she gazed at me with her chin propped up on her hands.
“Stay awake all night if you’d rather, then,” I said. “It’s all the same to me.”
I don’t know what Lucinda decided to do after that, because I rolled over on my side and fell asleep within a minute.
Chapter 4
I woke up to Theo using a piece of long grass to tickle my face, and I shoved his snout away with a groan.
I sat up to see Lucinda sleeping angelically on the other side of the pile of embers that had been our fire, with her head resting atop her clasped hands and the faintest of smiles curving her lips. Her loose curls spread out around her face and they gleamed a burnished red in the sunlight as if they had been freshly brushed. I wondered if she was just the most graceful sleeper I’d ever seen, or if she wasn’t really asleep.
When she felt my gaze on her, Lucinda’s gray eyes slowly fluttered open, and I decided that she hadn’t really been asleep at all.
“Is it morning?” she inquired.
“Nope, the sun just decided to rise while it was still night,” I replied.
She huffed a sigh and sat up. She retrieved her lace shawl and gathered it around her shoulders. Then she pulled out a handheld mirror and started the process of pinning her hair back up, while I got out some biscuits and jerky for breakfast.
I fed Theo some oats and enlarged the canteen for him and the mare to drink from. Then Lucinda, once she had completed her chignon and crowned it with her straw bonnet, accepted a portion of food from me and nibbled it. Then I stomped out the last embers of the fire, and we saddled up our horses and started out again.
It was about midday when we reached the town of Richcreek.
The paths were wide and well-beaten not just by foot and hoof but by the wheels of carts and carriages. There were probably three dozen buildings-- not just the cabins that people lived in, but colorfully painted storefronts. Some of the buildings were two or even three stories high.
And some of the people that I could see walking through the streets as we approached were just as well-dressed as Lucinda. Some of the women had ribbons and silk gloves and lace petticoats peeking out from beneath their skirts. Some of the men had suits that looked laundered, shoes that looked shined. But other townspeople of both sexes wore shapeless, ragged garments that had clearly been patched more than once. Of course, once a town got to a certain size and a certain age, some of the inhabitants had time and opportunity to prosper, and others either never struck it rich to begin with or gambled and whored away their small fortunes. But I also wondered if different trades had been disproportionately impacted by the potencium raids on Richcreek, since it sounded like the fuel of all magic users was always the werewolves’ main target.
Then as we entered the town, the nearest two women-- who were expensively dressed and middle-aged-- gaped at Lucinda and hurried up to us.
“Lucinda?” one of them exclaimed. She was dressed in layers of frilly purple and black lace. She had no chin to speak of and a fake beauty mark painted above her lip. “Why, child, you’re alive!”
“And so are you, Hattie,” Lucinda replied.
“Who’s the fellow?” the other woman, dressed in scarlet and carrying a parasol that matched her dress, inquired as she looked me up and down. “Not cause for Sheriff Alford to be getting jealous, I hope?”
“Martha! You mustn’t say such things,” Lucinda exclaimed. I’d noticed that she wasn’t the blushing type despite her fair skin, but if she had been, I was pretty sure she would have turned bright red just then. “Of course not. This is Halston Hale, a renowned mercenary. He dispatched Gold Tooth Jimmy and his entire gang singlehandedly in Highridg
e, and he will do the same for us here, when the full moon should come. That is why I have brought him here.”
“Oh, my!” Hattie looked at me mischievously and asked, “So is that really why you followed our Lucy home?”
“I followed her home for a job for which I was promised eight hundred gold pieces,” I answered.
“Eight hundred!” Martha gasped. “But Lucy dear, how do you expect us to raise that kind of money? A year ago, perhaps, but these last few months--”
“It will be done,” Lucinda interrupted with an imperious tilt of her chin.
“… Well, I suppose you had better go see your father, child,” Hattie said as she raised an excessively plucked eyebrow. “He’s worried sick about you, you know. The whole town is.”
“Well, they can stop worrying about me and the werewolves now,” Lucinda said triumphantly as she tipped her head in my direction. I began to feel a bit like some kind of trophy she’d hauled home to impress her friends and neighbors with.
“The eight hundred gold pieces might worry them some, Lucy,” Martha remarked.
Lucinda ignored her and kicked her mare to move along. Theo plodded along after her with a snort. He seemed to take a certain amusement in the situation whenever people resisted paying me what I asked. Sometimes I ended up getting it and sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes people just decided that they might as well let the spinster aunt from whom they stood to inherit a fortune expire naturally after all, and that was one thing. But sometimes people decided that they could probably handle their murderous creditors on their own and ended up paying their debts in a way they wouldn’t have chosen.