Dragon Thief (15 page)

I glanced in the back window, into the kitchen. The cook fires were burning, and I saw three people working. More precisely, two people working, and one balding guy standing by the inside doorway yelling orders. I glanced behind me at the girls, and they had all fallen back against the side of the inn on the stable side of the door. Even in the weak afternoon sun, the shadows were deep enough so no one would see them from the front of the building.

In front of all of them was Lucille. I had tried to object, but five months as a dragon had made her much more assertive.

I wiped my palms on my new clothes, freshly liberated from the larger of the two guys who were now tied and gagged in the woods. For once, the stolen clothing fit.

That was probably the last time that would ever happen.

I waited, giving Brock and Sir Forsythe time to get into position. Then I pulled the door open and stepped into the kitchen. The balding guy, who I remembered as the innkeep, was busy shouting orders at the two women dishing out the remains of a roasted animal of some sort—not enough left on the spit to clearly identify it—along with a thin barley stew and some nearly black bread. The woman placing bowls on a tray glanced up briefly, saw me, and didn't seem to consider me worth the attention as she went back to work.

The bald guy turned toward me. “Karl, are you and Jonah finally done watering the hors—you're not Karl.”

I smiled and shook my head. “Sorry, I'm not.”

“That lazy bastard—look, no guests back here. Go out front and I'll show you a room. Food's included.” He hooked a thumb back out the door he stood by and turned his attention back to the two serving women.

I walked up next to him and said quietly, “Don't you know who I am?”

“Should I care?” He didn't turn to look at me.

“The name's Bartholomew,” I whispered to him. “Lately they call me Snake.”

“Never heard of you.”

Well, how about that?

He finally turned to face me. “So what do you want, Mr. Bartholomew Snake?”

“This.”

I slammed my fist into his face.

His head snapped back and hit the doorframe with a hollow thud. He sputtered and blinked at me and I grabbed his shirt, pulling him into the crook of my arm so I could squeeze his neck and help him complete the job of passing out. I heard dishes crash and turned to see both women staring at me.

“I suggest you run,” I told them.

Instead, one of them grabbed a knife from a hook on the wall and leveled it at me. “I suggest you let him go.”

“Wrong choice,” I said as a rock sailed from the doorway and slammed into the side of her head. The knife fell from her hand, to stick upright in the floor as she grabbed her bleeding temple and cursed.

The other woman grabbed for something, another weapon probably. I didn't see what it was, because suddenly the kitchen was filled with bloodthirsty teenage girls. There was a shout or two before the two serving women were subdued, but the noise from the common room was more than enough to cover the sounds.

As the three defenders were trussed up, I closed the door to the kitchen and moved a heavy bench up to lean against it and bar it shut.

When I turned around, all seven faced me. Grace was grinning ear-to-ear, Rabbit had grabbed a hunk of whatever roast beast they'd been serving and was quietly munching on it, Mary and Krys were looking at a few shiny bits of jewelry they must have taken from the women, Laya was squeezing Thea's shoulder with one hand while hefting a rock with the other.

Lucille folded her arms and asked, “Still improvising?”

“Only the details,” I said as I pulled a couple of fist-size bundles from the pouch at my belt. The bundles were Brock's contribution; two pouches made from precisely folded leaves and packed with mosses, mushrooms, herbs, and other things that he'd scavenged from the woods.

Brock had never been a good fighter, and before his home village sent him on a quest to get rid of him, he had spent a lot of time with the old women of the tribe learning things like herbal lore.

Sometimes that knowledge came in handy.

I gestured with one hand toward a wooden door a few paces from the one I'd braced shut. “That's the pantry; in the back should be a ladder that will take you up to a secret passage running over all the rooms on the second floor. You should be able to drop down into any of them. If you have to deal with someone, be quiet about it.”

“Got it.” Grace walked over to the door and pulled it open. In the back of the pantry I could see the ladder just as I remembered it.

“Don't come down till the smoke clears,” I said.

Grace nodded, and started waving the girls through and up the ladder. Lucille stayed behind. “And what are you planning to do?”

I hefted a tightly packed leaf. “I'm going to brighten everyone's day.” I tossed Lucille the packages. “Hold those for a moment.”

I bent down to move the bench I had blocking the door out to the common area.

“You're not planning to go out there, are you?” she asked.

“Of course I am,” I said, plucking Brock's packages out of her hands.

“There's thirty armed men out there.”

“None of whom know who I am or what I'm doing. I'm just another outlaw taking my respite from my unlawful deeds.”

She bit her lip.

“I've faced worse odds than this. If you don't trust me, trust Brock.”

“I don't know why, but I do trust you.”

“Good. Now hold your breath when you see smoke, and get ready to barricade that door again once I come running through.”

Lucille nodded and I strode out into the common room.

 • • • 

Lucille had overstated the case. There were probably only twenty guys in the common room. Maybe twenty-five. Several looked over in my direction when I came out, but after a tense moment they resumed chatting with their neighbors and I realized that those were the people who had yet to have a plate in front of them.

Sorry guys,
I thought,
you're going to have a long wait.

By all rights I shouldn't have been nearly as nervous as I was. This
was
my element after all. I should have felt more at home here than I ever could at the Lendowyn court. I could look out over this rowdy congregation of leather, scars, and facial hair and see the lower third of every thieves' guild I had ever been part of.

Instead, I felt even more on edge. The unease brought uncomfortable flashbacks of the last time I was here, when I was in Lucille's body. Back then the discomfort had been because of the implicit threat of being near this crowd in a woman's body . . .

It was as if I still felt that now.

Or maybe I had gained enough distance from my prior peers to see them more clearly than I wanted to.

While a nearby table broke into a rude ballad about a young woman of unnatural flexibility, I walked over to the large stone fireplace as if to warm myself. I bent over in front of it and took a few deep breaths as I stared into the flames. Then I tossed Brock's packages below the burning logs to land on the pile of coals that glowed on the floor of the hearth beneath the fire.

I held my breath and prepared to run, just as the “Ballad of Bendy Brigit” cut itself short in the midst of some acrobatic maneuver.

“You!”

I turned to make my escape, still holding my breath, but chairs crashed and a large gray-haired man with a heavily scarred face stepped into my path, brandishing a dagger. “Look who we got here, fellas.”

A shorter man with a goatee and a ponytail stepped up next to him. “I don't believe it. Snake?”

“Believe it. Just look at him.”

From behind me, I heard someone else say, “What you think the reward is?”

“Reward?” someone else said. “The guild wants his liver.”

“
Your
guild.”

“Why you ain't saying nothing?” said the first man.

I was getting dizzy from holding my breath.

How long before—

My thought was cut short by two men grabbing me from behind. I gasped in surprise just as Brock's packages erupted into clouds of white herb-scented smoke. The men holding me let go as they started coughing, and I fell forward toward the floor.

And I kept falling.

After a long time I put my hands out to break my fall, and the floor felt so far away . . . as if I was trying to reach out and touch the moon.

I tasted licorice on the air and realized I was supposed to be holding my breath . . .

“What What did did you you do do do do do do?”

I looked up from the floor I didn't remember hitting and shook my head, trying to make sense of the chaos I saw. The common room had become huge, cavernous, a universe all to itself filled with colors brighter than anything I ever remembered seeing. Burning colors. Some I didn't have a name for. The gray-haired man with the knife ran at me from a mile or two away. His voice echoed off the mountainsides that had once been serving tables.

“What what what did did did did you you you you do do do do do?”

On top of a neighboring cliff, a monstrous scorpion with a human face screamed down at the man, “Where's my ale? I want my ale!”

The gray-haired man turned in the direction of the scorpion, who pounced.

“Give me my damn ale!”
it screamed as the two tumbled and fell down a ravine between me and the kitchen.

I got unsteadily to my feet and someone grabbed for me. I stepped aside and a man tumbled to the ground in front of me. At least I think it was a man. When I looked closer at him his face got all amphibian on me.

The giant toad he had become started croaking, “The rats. You see the rats? Do you see the rats?”

I stepped away from the toad and stumbled into a forest that had grown up between a pair of mountains ahead of me. As I did, a raven flew right at my face, pecking at my eyes and cawing, “Don't eat the verbs! Don't eat the verbs!”

I managed to bat it away from my face and ran into the relative calm of the woods, jumping over a python that redundantly hissed “Sssssnake . . .” at me.

It felt like I ran for hours, the forest creatures shouting nonsense at me when they weren't trying to kill each other. I finally broke through to a sunlit clearing, all meadow grass and flowers whose colors burned.

“Wait,” I said. “It's winter . . . isn't it?”

“Of course it is. You're hallucinating.”

I spun around to find the speaker and saw nothing. “What?”

“This way,” the voice came from above me.

I looked up, and a woman stepped out of the sun to stand before me. She was shorter than before, and wore a white dress that was so sheer that she might as well have still been nude.

“Hello again, Frank.”

“Lysea?”

“Who did you expect? How many gods do you serve?”

“Serve . . . What?”

She reached out and touched my cheek. “You weren't looking for that bad boy who wrecked my temple, were you?”

“I wasn't looking . . .”

“Of course you were. That's why you're here, and not down there.”

I looked down and saw we floated far above the forest floor of The Headless Earl
.
The woods themselves seemed engulfed in a war between nonsense-babbling forest creatures. I swallowed, remembering my dislike of heights, and tried to will my stomach to stop rolling.

“This is an accident,” I said. “I wasn't supposed to inhale.”

“My dear,” Lysea said, lifting my chin. “No one goes on a vision quest by accident.”

“But—” She placed a finger on my lips, silencing me.

“Unexpected does not mean accidental.” She gazed into my eyes, smiling as if enjoying some private joke at my expense. “Also, fate is the sum total of the paths we choose to take.”

“What?”

“I am the goddess of love and storytelling,” she said. She bent over to kiss me lightly on the lips, sending a shudder through my body that felt as if it broke apart the world around me. “That makes you particularly fascinating to me.”

I blinked and looked down again, and we were floating above Lendowyn Castle. More immediately, I was back in Lucille's body, wearing the dress that I'd worn when I had married her. “What?” I said, realizing that being intoxicated by Brock's herbs allowed the return of my singular drunken eloquence.

She traced her fingers down the side of my face and my throat. “There's something of greatness in you.”

“I don't think so.”

“No, you don't.” Her fingers lightly touched my breast and I shuddered. “But when it is offered, you choose the higher fate.”

I shook my head.

“Look down there,” she said.

I did. Swarming the castle were the forest animals, still fighting, wrecking the castle below while still spouting their nonsense.

“Those men below, given the choice, embraced the animal.” She turned my face back toward her. “You chose to embrace the divine.”