Brigands & Breadknives by Travis Baldree - 7

“She’s gone. Wake up.”

“Whazzat?” Fern startled awake at a hand on her back and searched her surroundings wildly. The disorientation of finding herself sleeping on the ground in the middle of nowhere was profound. Specters of guilt and dismay still haunted her from the fading tatters of her dream.

The heavy scent of cold grass in the shadowed valley and the sooty funk of a recently expired campfire quivered her whiskers. When was the last time she’d slept out of doors? Had she ever ?

Struggling to a sitting position, Fern drew her cloak—currently serving as a woefully thin blanket—tighter around her. In the sharp morning chill she was spectacularly glad to have fur.

Astryx straightened and loomed above her, edged in what little morning light had made an early advance over the eastern hills. It took a solid ten seconds before Fern’s recent memory slotted into place and she realized who she was looking at, where she was, and that she would not be stumbling out of bed to feed a hungry gryphet anytime soon.

“The goblin? How? Wh-Where is she?” Fern’s mouth was still asleep. She glanced in muzzy confusion toward the wagon and the ringbolt, sans rope.

Even in the dim light, she didn’t have any trouble interpreting the flat expression Astryx returned. “If I knew that, I wouldn’t have bothered to wake you. I need you to watch the camp while I hunt her down. I’ve seen signs of hazferou in the area. The bounty doesn’t specify that Zyll should be uneaten, but it is implied.”

Nothing in her tone hinted that a joke was implied, though.

“Hazferou?” Fern scrubbed sleep sand from both eyes with her paws.

“A bit like a giant chicken. But with teeth. And venom.”

That banished any lingering drowsiness, as surely as plunging through the surface of a frozen pond. “I thought you said this was safe country when you were sending me off to walk home?”

“It was. Now, it isn’t.”

“And you want me to stay here? Alone?” She snatched the red book from her satchel and brandished it. “If a bunch of devil chickens attack, you want me to, what, read them to death?”

Astryx plucked the book from Fern’s paws and tested its weight. “I think you could get some power behind this if you used both hands.”

That was a joke. Fern was pretty sure. Nothing seemed very funny at the moment.

“Fuck me.”

“What a foul mouth you have.”

“Seems appropriate to the situation? I’m coming with you.”

Astryx glanced at the draft horse and scratched her ruined ear in a gesture that Fern was beginning to understand meant she was debating something. “I suppose if there are any cries of distress, you can translate.”

Fern winced inwardly at that.

The elf approached the stub of a branch where the horse’s reins were tethered and untied them. She looped the leather in her fist and then tucked them into his halter, patting his shoulder with her other hand. With absolute seriousness, she said, “All right, Bucket. You see any hazferou, you kick them and run.”

“Your horse’s name is Bucket ? Is that a play on words, or just a really boring name?”

Astryx frowned. “What do you mean, a play on words?”

“Um. Never mind.”

The elf shrugged, swept up her sword in its sheath with the baldric still attached, and strode purposefully west of their campsite and into the undergrowth with nary a backward glance.

Fern squeaked and hurried to follow.

While it was technically dawn, and allegedly, this involved the existence of sunlight, the forest beyond the road was positively stygian. Fern also knew about enough woodlore to fill a teaspoon.

As a result, while she did her best to follow Astryx into the gloom, her cloak snagged on brambles, leaf litter clung to her fur, and whippy young branches slapped her in the face.

She tried to be quiet about it, but in addition to the general trampling and bumbling, the occasional curse made it past her lips, too. Sotto voce, but still.

After a few aggrieved glances over her shoulder, Astryx stopped, waited for Fern to catch up—scratched and panting—and without a word, slung the rattkin onto her back.

Fern squawked and hugged the elf’s neck tight as Astryx hooked her forearms under the smaller woman’s legs and set off again at a silent trot.

“You can let up on my throat,” Astryx rasped. “You won’t fall.”

“Oh.” Fern tried her best not to throttle her mount. “Sorry.”

“Mmm.”

Astryx didn’t appear to mind the weight at all though, gliding with incredible agility through the dark woods without disturbing so much as a leaf.

Light slowly filtered through the canopy as daylight took the sky. Despite that, Fern quickly became disoriented as they passed in and out of glens, leapt over streamlets, and wove between crowded bastion oak. She had the sense that there was a method to Astryx’s navigation. Fern just didn’t understand it in the slightest.

Jouncing against Astryx’s back wasn’t comfortable as conveyances went and called to mind the horse cart traveling over the wrong sort of road. The elf didn’t come with any built-in cushions, either.

Still, it beat stinging thorns and flesh-eating chickens.

At last, at some signal Fern couldn’t detect, Astryx abruptly stopped and crouched. Her unspoken request was obvious, so Fern unlatched her bloodless paws and slithered off the elf’s back.

Straightening, the Oathmaiden leaned on her sheathed sword, point down in the earth. She scrabbled a hand through her short, silver hair in an annoyed way.

“This isn’t working,” she said, at a normal speaking volume.

Fern opened her mouth to say something, and realized she didn’t have anything to offer that wouldn’t probably diminish her even further in the eyes of a thousand-year-old legend. She closed her mouth again.

Astryx quirked an amused smile and nodded once. Approval?

Fern experienced a tiny bloom of pride at maybe having put a foot right. Even if it was for choosing to do nothing at all.

“I followed her trail until it vanished. I crisscrossed the area, picked it up once more, and again it disappeared right here.” The elf gestured at the glade they stood in. “No blood. No sign of a struggle, but still, there’s a chance something got her. Or she’s an unparalleled master of forest lore. But since she doesn’t have the use of her hands . . .” Astryx frowned. “The former seems more likely.”

An image of the trussed little goblin halfway down the beak of some malicious poultry flashed through Fern’s mind. The goblin girl had an air of innocence about her, no matter what tales she’d given rise to.

“And that would be . . . bad, right?”

“Yes. That would be bad.”

“Because she’d be hurt, or because of the bounty?” asked Fern carefully. She winced after she said it, but at the same time, she didn’t wish the words un said. It felt increasingly urgent to find out what sort of person Astryx was, and while alone in the middle of a dark wood a dozen leagues from civilization might not have been the wisest place to discover the answer, Fern didn’t figure it would get any safer in the future.

Astryx’s eyes narrowed in speculation. “Neither would be ideal.”

That was sort of an answer.

The elf continued, “If she’s in dire enough circumstances to want my help, we’ll try something else. It’s convenient that you speak her language. That makes this a lot more straightforward.”

“Oh. Um. Really?” asked Fern in a strangled voice.

“We’ll spiral out from here, and you can call out to her, asking her to shout for help if she needs it. That shouldn’t be a problem, should it?”

“Er.”

An uncomfortable silence stretched.

Astryx sighed. “You don’t speak goblin at all, do you?”

“Just the swears?” replied Fern in a tiny voice. “But to be fair, I never actually said I spoke the language.”

The elf looked up and to the right as she appeared to review their previous conversation. “Hm. That’s vexing. I can’t believe I didn’t notice at the time.”

“Although,” said Fern quickly, “I don’t imagine she cares what language we’re speaking if she hears us calling and needs help. Right?”

Oh gods, please don’t leave me stranded in bloodthirsty chicken territory because I implied I knew more than a few dirty goblin words, thought Fern, with great fervency.

“Let’s hope so,” replied Astryx. “Still. You’re walking from now on.”

On balance, Fern decided she was getting off easy.

They tramped through the woods, hollering until they were hoarse. Well, Astryx’s holler was more of a commanding shout, but it all amounted to the same thing. Sore throats for the both of them, and no Zyll.

“That’s that then,” said Astryx suddenly, dropping her hands from where they’d cupped her mouth. “She’s gone.”

She didn’t seem particularly upset. Mildly annoyed, if anything. Like she’d forgotten where she’d left her toothbrush.

Fern found this challenging to wrap her head around.

It was solidly midday, and the bookseller’s stomach continually registered displeasure at its total emptiness. Her feet hurt, her head felt swimmy, her cloak was a ragged mess, and she could barely remember why she was there in the first place. That mental thread led to a hopeless tangle she didn’t dare tease out.

“Come on, the camp is this way,” said the elf. She’d long since buckled on her baldric, freeing both hands, and she strode away without bothering to see if Fern would follow.

An ember of anger sparked in Fern’s chest and wanted to flicker into something much hotter. “We’re just giving up?”

Astryx didn’t stop moving, but called, “Nothing else for it, really.”

“But . . . she could be dead!”

The elf was getting farther and farther away. “It’s likely. And if so, there’s not a thing that can be done.”

“But . . . hey !” Fern scrambled into a trot before she lost track of Astryx in between the tree trunks.

Panting, she mostly caught up to the Oathmaiden, who didn’t so much as pause. “How can you be so . . . so . . . indifferent ?” she sputtered angrily, if breathlessly. It was challenging to confront somebody who kept walking away, and whose stride length was easily double your own.

Astryx spared her a look at least, brows raised. “Do you imagine things always go perfectly in my line of work?”

“Well . . . no, but—”

“And when they don’t, what do you imagine I should be doing differently?”

There was no heat in Astryx’s voice. Just a sort of distant politeness. Possibly even a mild curiosity.

“It’s just . . . stop, will you?”

To Fern’s astonishment, Astryx did.

The rattkin clenched her paws by her hips and caught her breath. “Look. You said that these bounties, they’re about delivering someone someplace. For money.”

The elf didn’t reply, only waited patiently, with that infuriatingly mild look on her face.

“So . . . if that person dies on the way, doesn’t that mean you fucked up ?” demanded Fern, with real heat.

“I’d like to point out that the goblin is the one who fled.”

“In her position, that seems like a pretty reasonable thing to do!” hissed Fern.

“She was safe in my care,” insisted Astryx.

“You tied her up . All the time. ”

“Because of the fleeing,” replied the elf, reasonably.

“Well . . . shitkindling !” cried Fern.

Astryx crouched so they were face-to-face, a distant candle-flame of empathy in her icy blue eyes.

“I understand what’s happening here,” she said. “It’s easy for me to forget, but I think I know what you’re feeling. Seven or eight hundred years ago, I might have felt the same. A sense of responsibility for events you can’t control. A conviction that things could have been different, if only .”

“Why don’t you feel that now?” demanded Fern, but quieter with the elf’s face so close.

“In all the years I’ve been doing this, can you imagine how many jobs have turned sour? It’s more than you’d believe. And after a while, it becomes clear that those feelings you’re having aren’t practical. Sometimes, the ill turn is your own mistake; sometimes, it’s not. But that depth of feeling? It can’t survive the numbers .”

“I think that’s supposed to sound reasonable, but it only sounds awful,” said Fern.

Astryx stood again. “I don’t wish her ill, and I’ve done what I can to protect her. It’s possible she escaped. Unlikely, but you never know.”

“So . . . what now?”

“We go back to camp. We journey to the next village. We go our separate ways. And onward and again.”

An hour later they trudged out of the woods and into view of the campsite—only one of them lacerated and aching. The first thing Fern noticed was Bucket calmly cropping grass by the roadside. Apparently the threat of hazferou had never materialized. Or he’d kicked them to death, she supposed.

The second thing she noticed was Zyll, just as calmly sitting beside the expired campfire. She perched atop a neat coil of the rope that had once bound her, her coat of many pockets puddling on the hemp. The goblin’s sharp-toothed grin was barely visible over the creature clutched in her lap—a black-and-white hen the size of a turkey, with long feathered frills capping its feet.

“Chuptik,” declared Zyll, lifting the bird and gesturing with it, much to the chicken’s consternation.

No, not a chicken, Fern realized.

Chickens did not have cruelly hooked beaks and fangs and poisonous green eyes, nor did they hiss like a kettle on the boil.

The goblin hugged the indignant hazferou to her chest and snuggled her face into the spines and extravagant feathers of its back.

“Is she really a prisoner?” asked Fern.

Astryx scratched her ear. “Hm.”

“Honestly, she’s not very good at it.”