by Simon Archer
I walked through and entered the house. The closest piece of furniture was the living room couch, so I plopped the half-elf there, rolling her out of my arms. I propped up her leg with a pillow and then did the same with her head. I snatched some of Deity’s tumeric and green tea salve from the kitchen, intending to put it on her ankle. When I returned, however, the half-elf was awake and grimacing.
“Where in Walden’s name am I?” she said as she clutched her forehead.
“You’re on my farm,” I answered before Gerry could. The gnome’s mouth hung open, probably preparing some snarky remark, but he shut it, dismayed.
“Farm?” the half-elf repeated, completely unsure. “Ugh! Why does everything hurt?”
“I think you fell down a hill,” I supplied.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” she said as she rested her palms on her forehead. “I was running.”
“Running?” Gerry asked, beating me to the punch this time. “Like in the marathon?”
“Yeah,” she answered, “but suddenly, I blacked out. There was this huge pain in my head, and my vision went dark.”
“Is that the last thing you remember?” I wondered, still holding the jar of the healing salve.
“Uh-huh,” she grumbled. “You said I fell?”
“Down a hill,” I replied. “At the back of my property.”
“Maybe someone hit you on the head and then threw you down the hill to get you out of the race!” Gerry supplied unhelpfully. “Were you winning?”
“No,” the half-elf said. “I was in the middle of the pack.”
“Too bad,” Gerry said disappointedly. “I liked my theory.”
“Who are you creatures?” the half-elf asked like she had a disgusting taste in her mouth.
“I’m Gerry, and this is Rico,” Gerry introduced. “And you are?”
“Nyah,” she replied. “I’d shake your hand, but I don’t really feel like moving right now.”
“Understandable,” I said. “I think I have something that might help with that, but we need to take off your shoe, if that’s okay?”
“Whatever you have to do to make it stop hurting,” she moaned.
I went to work, applying the salve and dressing the wound. We put some on the back of her head too for good measure. She didn’t say anything more as I did this but let me wait on her, almost like she expected it.
When we had her resituated, I stood across from her awkwardly. “Well, I guess we will let you rest now.”
“I’m going to kick Barth out of the stall,” Gerry reported unnecessarily. “He’s had enough time with Achter while I was here playing healer. It’s my turn.”
The gnome left the room without another word. Nyah and I watched him go, the half-elf stretching her neck to do so.
“I didn’t understand any of that statement,” Nyah admitted.
“Achter’s a calf,” I explained. “He and my other guest are taking turns taking care of it.”
“Other guest?” Nyah said curiously. “What did I stumble upon here? Some sort of farm bed-and-breakfast?”
“No, just a farm,” I corrected. “I just have some… friends staying with me for a while.”
“Nice hesitation there,” she noted with a chuckle.
“Caught that, did you?” I said while my cheeks turned red. I didn’t know what to call Barth and Gerry. My trainers, while true, seemed too formal. And this half didn’t need to know that, anyway.
“Well, I appreciate being one of your guests/friends for a little while,” Nyah said with a grin. “Even though this stupid ankle means I won’t be finishing the race.”
“Sorry about that,” I said sympathetically.
“I just trained so hard for it, and now, in the blink of an eye, it’s gone.” Nyah snapped her fingers for emphasis. “It sucks.”
“I know what it’s like,” I said unexpectedly, “having a chance like that taken from you. It does suck.”
“Right?” she lamented, throwing her hands into the air. She plopped them back down and covered her eyes with an elbow.
When the half-elf didn’t speak for a solid minute, I figured she just wanted to be left alone. So I stood and felt an unfamiliar weight pulled at my pocket. I slipped my hand in it and pulled out the leather pouch. I looked at it and then back down at Nyah. Without saying anything, I placed the bag on her chest and went to leave the room.
“What…?” I heard Nyah say. “Hang on! Rico!”
“Yeah?”
“I thought I had lost this, or someone had taken it from me,” Nyah said. She leaned over the side of the couch, propping herself up on one arm so she could look at me properly. “I honestly thought you had taken it. Or your gnome friend.”
“It’s actually how I found you,” I said with a point to the bag. “Or how my dog found you.”
“Your dog?”
I tilted my head to the rug at the center of the room where Graham guarded Nyah like a palace guard. Except he smiled a lot more than one of them would have.
“Oh,” Nyah commented. She looked from Graham to me and then back to Graham. “You could have easily taken this, you know.”
“It’s not mine,” I said with a shrug. “Get some rest.”
Nyah tucked the pouch between her hands, hugging it to her chest. She sighed contentedly and closed her eyes. I left her to her thoughts, wondering how my house had become a sort of inn.
16
“You wanna tell me why there is a really pretty half-elf asleep on the couch downstairs?” Deity said when she walked into my room that evening.
Deity looked pissed and worn out. Her hair flopped about in a messy bun atop her head, and her cheeks were flushed. She had red stains on her shirt and a bandage wrapped around her right pinky.
“What happened to you?” I asked, taking her injured hand in mine, but Deity quickly pulled it out of my grip.
“No,” she said. “You answer me first. Who is she?”
“Her name’s Nyah,” I answered slowly as I held my hands up innocently. “I found her passed out on my property out by the back road. She was rather beat up, so I brought her here to heal. Which, considering she’s a half-elf, should only take a day.”
Deity narrowed her eyes at me. They glinted angrily in the candlelight. I chanced a guess and thought she might be able to use a hug. Cautiously, I opened my arms and wrapped them around Deity. She didn’t respond right away. If anything, she was as stiff as a corpse.
“How was your day?”
At my question, Deity flopped against me and tucked her head against my chest. She squashed her nose, so her voice came out all clouded like she was underwater. “I hate this job, I really do.”
“Go on,” I prompted.
She took a big breath in and then pulled away from me, readying herself for a rant. “I love Herc, I really do. The man is like a father to me. Maybe more like an uncle. Anyway, he just has no imagination. He wants to serve the same bland shit all the time, and when I try to get him to change the menu, he won’t hear anything of it.”
She paced about the room, and I maneuvered to the bed to get out of her way. “And then the bastard doesn’t go and get the basic ingredients from his stupid recipes even though I told him there was that big race coming through today, so we didn’t have enough of anything. When I tried to improvise, he yelled at me again, and I was so frustrated that I cut my finger when chopping an onion, which I haven’t done since I was a teenager.”
Deity flopped next to me on the bed and put her head in her hands. “I’m just done. I’m so done. I want to bake what I want to bake. I’m sick of working for someone else when I could so easily be my own boss.”
I rubbed her back and fought back the urge to say something. In this time with Deity, she’d told me that I wasn’t supposed to talk when she ranted like this. Most of the time, she just needed to vent and then she would get over it. While that turned out to be true, seeing her so distraught made me want to help her more than anything else in the world. I w
anted to see her smile, not this crumbled and defeated expression she wore now.
“But I’m just a stupid, magicless human which apparently means I can’t bake when baking doesn’t take magic. It just takes a brain!” Deity concluded her rant with a huff. She curled into me, signaling that she was done.
I cradled her and pulled her onto my lap. “We will figure out a way, okay? You won’t have to work at the Blue Water Inn forever. Things will change, or we’ll make them change. It won’t be like this forever.”
“You say that, but days like today,” she sighed, “make that so hard to believe.”
“I’ll believe it for the both of us,” I said as I squeezed her tight.
“I don’t deserve you,” she moped.
“Shut up, don’t say things like that about my girlfriend.” The phrase came out so naturally that I didn’t recognize the meaning behind what I had said until I felt Deity jerk in reaction.
“Girlfriend?” she asked.
Not for the first time, I was completely clueless about the implication of her tone. It was impossible to tell if she wanted to be my girlfriend or if the notion repulsed her. I swallowed audibly and opened my mouth, but unlike five seconds ago, nothing remotely natural came out. The noise that emanated sounded like a cross between a gurgle and a burp.
Deity burst out laughing. “We don’t have to take that step if you don’t want to. It just sounded nice, hearing you say it.”
“No, I want to,” I said too eagerly, even for my own taste. I coughed and corrected myself. “That is if you want to?”
“I think I could get used to being Rico Jacek’s girlfriend,” Deity said as she snuggled up against my side.
I breathed a sigh of relief and kissed the top of her head.
“Come on now,” Deity scolded playfully. “Kiss me properly. None of that chaste stuff.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I replied and did as I was told.
We got very little sleep that night. Surprisingly, my body slept through the rooster’s call and well past sunrise. We hadn’t done anything usual from last night, but it was if the odd day had cast some sort of spell over my body. It collected the necessary energy to face the day.
What I did wake up to was the smell of bacon wafting up from the kitchen. The scent snapped me awake, and my eyes shot open faster than an arrow releasing from a crossbow. I moved to get out of bed when I noticed that Deity wasn’t next to me. Her side of the bed still smelt like her, and the blankets were rumpled. However, it was rare that she woke up before me.
I dressed and ventured downstairs to find the source of the delicious smell permeating the house. Deity rarely cooked in the kitchen, preferring to use it for baking only.
“I can cook in so many other places,” she told me. “I want this to be my sanctuary.”
So the bacon was a delightful surprise, and I was ready to kiss her senseless when I greeted her in the kitchen. However, when I entered the kitchen, it wasn’t Deity at the counter, but Nyah.
The half-elf dumped a heap of scrambled eggs onto a plate that already had several slivers of bacon on it. My mouth drooled at the sight of it.
“Good morning, sleepyhead,” I heard my girlfriend’s voice call out from the kitchen table.
When I glanced over at the table, Deity wasn’t alone. Gerry and Barth sat with her, mugs in their hands and empty plates in front of them.
The whole scene sent weird vibrations through me. I hadn’t seen the kitchen this full in years. In fact, I couldn’t remember a time when it had been this full. Sometimes maybe, when my grandparents visited, but I was really young then. For so long now, it had been just me, and I avoided the loneliness the kitchen brought.
However, here were four creatures sitting in my kitchen as if they owned the place. They looked comfortable here. Barth sat hunched over his mug, which probably had a shot of something stronger than coffee in it. Gerry crouched in his seat so he could be up higher as he told some story with animated gestures. Deity glowed in the sunlight and sipped her own drink. Nyah whipped about the kitchen, seeming to know where everything was.
I stood in this moment, humbled and gracious. Something ached in my chest, and I couldn’t place the emotion right away. So I paused and let it pass. I wanted to focus on something other than myself and my reverie. I watched Nyah for a moment and decided to comment on her mobility.
“You seem to be damn near fully healed,” I said.
She pointed at herself with a spatula. “Half-elf. We heal fast. Not nearly as fast as our elven parents, but it’s a perk.”
“Huh,” I said. “I always wondered if that was true. I thought it was, but never had seen it tested out.”
“Why do you think that Barth never swells when you actually manage to hit him?” Gerry piped up.
The kitchen fell into an eerie silence. Only the bacon’s sizzles popped in the air. No one could seem to look at each other even though Gerry’s head whipped about nervously.
“What?” he asked, clearly missing his mistake. “What is it? Why did you all go weird all of a sudden?”
“You fight?” Nyah wondered. Casually, she bit into a piece of bacon, her chewing suddenly becoming the loudest thing in the room. She waited for someone to answer, but no one did.
“I figured you did since I saw the make-shift ring in the barn,” Nyah supplied. She took another bite and licked her lips to gather a stray crumb.
“You were in the barn?” I asked, not bothering to hide my annoyance.
“I couldn’t find the chicken coop right away,” she said with a shrug. “You know, for the eggs.”
“Right,” I said, drawing out the word.
“Look, I think it’s great,” Nyah said, finishing off the last bite. “I fight too.”
“You do?” Gerry asked, simultaneously skeptical and impressed.
“Yeah, not professionally, though,” Nyah said. “On occasion, like you do, I’m sure.”
“Yeah, it’s kind of our thing,” Barth said, his voice sharp.
“It’s not my thing,” Deity added unnecessarily. “I just bake.”
“So you were telling me,” Nyah said with a nod in Deity’s direction. “I’m going to need that recipe for those raspberry scones, by the way.”
“Absolutely,” Deity said with a genuine smile. She loved it when she got to share her recipes. “I’ll give it to you before you leave.”
“Which will be when?” Barth asked not so subtly.
“Soon,” Nyah assured us, “but I thought it might be fun to do a little sparring before I leave. You know, I’m not hurting anymore, and I haven’t ever fought a human. I don’t think anyone has. I’d like to see how that goes. What do you say, Rico?”
A flood of emotions hit me in all different directions. I could see Barth’s face who grimly stared into his mug. He shook his head with a prominent frown. Gerry was all but shouting his disapproval with his grunts and hand gestures of slicing across his throat, the universal sign for abort. Deity remained indifferent and almost serene. She didn’t have an opinion either way, which I appreciated.
However, I really could have used an ally or two in favor of fighting Nyah, which I wanted to do. I couldn’t explain the desire exactly, but the idea of facing off against someone other than Barth intrigued me. It was a free test of the skills that I needed without the regulations from the elves. I had no idea what kind of opponent Nyah would turn out to be. Something about the challenge spoke to my soul, and I could feel the want seep into my bones, going deeper the more I thought about it.
“We can do it without special moves if that helps with your decision,” Nyah offered. “Considering I have minimal magic, and you don’t have any at all, I think that’s fair.”
It did, but I didn’t tell her that right away. No magic, just skill versus skill. It was entirely possible that Nyah was a brilliant fighter and would kick my ass. However, as strong as she might be, she was still slight, and my size alone would be an advantage. Regardless of all that, I was itchi
ng for a new fight. A real fight.
“Alright,” I said. “Let’s do it. Barth and Gerry can be our refs. Five rounds of three minutes each.”
“Sounds good to me,” Nyah agreed with a bright, excited smile.
“Not to me,” Barth announced to the group. “If you insist on doing this foolish quest, Gerry will have to be your ref. I have an errand to run.”
“Where are you going?” Gerry asked the question we were all thinking.
“None of your damn business, Gerry,” Barth snapped back.
“I think it is my damn business considering I’m your business partner,” Gerry responded as he stood up on his chair, though he still didn’t reach eye level with the elf.
“Then follow me outside, and I’ll tell you there,” Barth said with a scowl. Then he left the kitchen without another word.
Gerry jumped off the chair and tipped a nonexistent hat to Deity and Nyah. “Ladies,” he said, full of charm. Then he followed Barth out of the room.
“I’m going to see what they’re up to,” I told the females. I pointed my finger at Nyah, drawing her attention. “We’ll meet in the barn in an hour.”
“See you then,” she said, the smile never leaving her face.
Deity gave me a wave as I exited. I met up with Barth and Gerry outside while the two so-called business partners argued about something.
“You can’t go to Myles!” Gerry protested loudly. “He’ll blab it to the whole organization.”
“Do you have someone better I can go to?” Barth questioned doubtfully.
“Actually, I do,” Gerry countered while putting his hands on his hips and glaring up at the elf. “Which I would have been happy to tell you about if you trusted me with this information in the first place.”
“What information?” I asked, finding my moment to interject.
“None of your business,” the both of them retorted simultaneously. They each shot a glare at the other, irritated by their synchronicity.
“If it has anything do with my fighting, as I suspect it does, then it sure as hell is my business,” I said firmly. “Now, what’s going on?”