Fool's Gold (10 page)

Will sighed heavily. “You know what?” he said. “It's too early for this. Let's just go eat, and try to work out if we really meant what we said last night.”

They had really meant it. Quirk was surprised by how rapidly that became apparent over their makeshift breakfast. Even Will, though he put up some token resistance, quickly conceded to the gravity of events. A good man, a naïve man, but a man with a stomach full of rage too, no matter how well he hid it. He wanted to hurt the dragon.

And then, with the plan settled, it was time to put it into action. And so she was sent out into the woods to look for herbs.

“This is being a thing that is taking a long time,” Balur said from where he leaned against a nearby tree, quietly wringing the neck of grammar.

Lette had assigned the lizard man to protect her as she looked for ingredients. The woods, Will had said—repeatedly in fact—were not safe. But Quirk had traveled more than three hundred leagues. She had crossed the wooded valleys of the Vale. She had kowtowed to war chiefs, hidden from spiders, drugged tribes of orcs, given gifts to elven kings, and…

No, she was not thinking about that.

—and had survived to tell the tale. Lette knew that about her. Or suspected enough of it to know it wasn't likely that Quirk needed protection. No, Balur was not there to protect her. He was there to keep her there.

Quirk bent, picked up the lower branches of a hawthorn bush, checked the scrub below, and tried to figure out how she felt about that. Was she thinking of running? Was she going to go through with all this?

“Snag Weed is picky about where it chooses to grow,” she said. “It likes shade, but not too much, the damp, but not too much, clay soil, but not too much.” There was peace in the litany of facts, something to calm the questions quivering in her gut.

She found what she was looking for, and threw the handful of Snag Weed into her thaumatic wagon, which trundled through the woods after her. They had a fair amount now, but not enough, she suspected, to knock out a dragon of the proportions described to her.

“I am not knowing why we are needing this Snag Weed anyway,” Balur groused.

“I think,” Quirk said, as carefully as possible, “that the group seems to think that not having to fend off an enraged dragon would be the safest way to address the proposed plan.”

Balur snorted. “Red of tooth and claw. That is how adventures should be. The testing of oneself against the fury and the rage. The animal inside being let loose. To be living at the edge of oneself and one's civilization. To be being honest with oneself about what one is being.”

Quirk didn't answer that. That was a dangerous conversational path for her to be wandering down. Instead she moved to the next hawthorn bush, lifted it up.

“The plan is sounding good,” Balur said. “But plans are always being that way. They are always sounding like you will be waltzing into somewhere and will then be two-stepping out while one's shit is smelling of roses. But what is actually happening is you are waltzing in and you are having your skull smacked, and then you are eviscerating your foes with your jaws, and you are staggering out with your shit smelling of your internal bleeding.” He hesitated. “To be using one specific example.”

Still Quirk held her tongue. She tried to concentrate on the large Snag Weed plant before her. All she had to do was take it and leave.

But there were ripples on the surface of the lake. Worries skittering through its waters like panicked fish.

No killing
. Lette had said that. Except for the guards. But she had been appeasing Balur. She hadn't meant it. Had she?

Something calm and simple. That was what she needed. That was what the plan promised. Right? No bodies. No worries. Everything simple. Everything calm. She gripped the Snag Weed at its base, close to the root.

“You be trusting me,” Balur said. “We will be seeing that dragon, and soon the mountains will be running red. Weed or no weed.”

Flame blazed in Quirk's hand. Bright and sharp. The Snag Weed's small purple flowers blackened and curled. In an instant all she was holding was a fistful of ash.

She straightened, glanced at Balur. He hadn't noticed. She fixed on a smile like a rictus. “Nothing here,” she said. “Let's try looking somewhere else.”

The morning staggered into afternoon. The afternoon stumbled on and eventually evening fell. Balur's narrow tongue licked the air. The smell of Quirk's brewing painted the sky around the cave mouth, thick and heavy, coating the back of his throat like blood. He moved away, deeper into the woods. Lette would be being upset at him if he was ripping the drunkard's head off.

He found Lette alone, beyond a stand of trees that masked her from the cave. She didn't turn to face him, but he could read the subtle tides of her body language as she relaxed minutely in his presence. They were tribe. Stronger together.

It was ten years now. Ten years that they had been fighting, killing, and fucking side by side. Ten years cutting a bloody swath out of the Analesian desert, through Salera, Batarra, and Vinland before finally crossing the Kondorran peaks and descending into…

What was this being?

Opportunity? Futility? Complete and utter shit show?

He was knowing half the answer. He was knowing what this was to him. Kondorra was having dragons. He had not been knowing much else about Kondorra, but he had been knowing that. So this was being his chance to bloody his hammer's head on the skull of a dragon. This was being his chance to feel the breath of a beast roasting his skin. This was being his chance to show a dragon's tooth to one of the skinny little human girls he liked so much, and to be seeing her eyes go wide. This was telling tales while ale was making his blood grow hot in his veins.

But that was not what this was being to Lette. This was being something else to her. But he was not knowing what. And that was worrying him. Tribe was knowing tribe. That was how it was supposed to be being. That was how it had been being for ten years.

She had found him in the desert. Ten years ago. She had come into the sands leading a pack of scholars. Tribe to each other but not to her. They had paid her coin, and pointed at the desert, and told her they wished to plunder its depths.

They had thought of the desert like a virgin child, standing for her first night on the brothel balcony. Balur had grown up in the desert. He knew it for what it was. The cruelest of killers. She had many the faces, the desert, and, yes, many treasures, but she gave none of them up. She stole life, either quick and savage, or slow and with a smile.

Lette's employers—no matter that they called themselves scholars—were being a bunch of idiots.

Not that any of that had been concerning Balur at the time. He had been too busy dealing with the fact that the desert was busy killing him.

He had gone three days without water then. Fifteen without meat. The scales had hung loose on him. His tongue had been a stick of wood in his mouth. His eyes had burned. The skin between his scales cracked and ran with blood so thick it could scarcely flow. Thought was almost gone from him.

He had taken shelter in the ruins, was hunkered between half a sandstone column and a broken-down stump of a wall. Some temple perhaps. Half lost in the dunes. Like him really. And he had given up. Even the need to survive not enough to drive him on anymore. He had curled up upon himself and waited for the end.

And then he had heard them. Heard her. She was telling them to set up camp because a storm was blowing, she had told him later. And she was stifling laughter at their inability to do so.

“Literally had to tell one of them to try not to club himself in the head so often while driving in a tent peg,” she had said. “Good thing I was too parched to piss myself.”

While he had heard the words, none of the sense of them had made it into his skull. Scholars. Idiots. Whatever they were, Balur had seen them as one thing.

Food.

He had sunk into the sand—so only his spine, nostrils, and eyes showed—and slithered forward. Slow. So slow. It was easy to be slow when he was more than half-dead already.

He had taken one scholar before they knew he was there. Hands reaching up and unseaming the man's belly before they understood what was going on. Burying his face in the man's guts and feasting on blood. Feeling slick viscera slide down his dry throat. His empty stomach clenching in response.

The scholars had stepped back, shocked, aghast. And he had smiled. There was no time to be shocked in the desert.

And then, just before his claws had closed around the second one's throat, Lette had been there.

She was small. That had been his only thought. And then, as he went to crush her,
small and sharp
. Her blades sliced at his scales, at his weak, cracking skin. He tried to swat her. She had darted away.
Small, sharp, and fast.
And then a thought to sum all those up.
Annoying
.

He had gone at her then. With all that was left of his fury and strength. Great swipes of his claws that sent her leaping back, crashing off ancient architecture. She scrabbled up a wall, a column. He beat it down. She rolled free, and he stomped with a foot. She leapt out of the roll. He grabbed a scholar, bit deep, trying to recover his strength. She flung a knife at his eyes. He used the scholar as a shield. She had closed the distance, struck at his hamstrings. He kicked her away. She flew, but rolled as she landed.

So it had gone. On and on. Trading nicks and cuts but never landing a killing blow. And then the scholars were forgotten. Even the dead ones leaking out precious fluid into the sands. It was just the dance of combat. Just the testing of skills. Just the two of them, feint and counterfeint. Seeing who could deliver the mortal blow. Seeing whose strength would falter first.

And then finally his strength would carry him no further. He fell. Waited for her blade to follow suit.

When he had the strength to see why it hadn't, he saw her on her knees, panting, unable to get up.

They had lain there, side by side, while around them the sand began to howl.

A week later they had crawled out of the desert together. And they had been together ever since.

Tribe.

And now…

“What are you thinking?” he rumbled. Subtlety had never worked for him. He treated conversations like he treated fights. Hit hard and directly until something cracked and leaked.

“It's a good plan,” she said quietly, still not looking at him.

Balur considered. “You are sneaking out here to be staring morosely into the middle distance so that you can be thinking about what a good plan it is?” He nodded. “I am believing that I am smelling the odor of bull's dung.”

“What if I told you I didn't want to talk about it?” She sounded petulant. Probably because she knew she would not win this fight.

“Tribe shares with tribe.”

“Your tribe is dead.” She knew pretending to misunderstand this point annoyed him.

“My old tribe was exiling me. That is making me anxious to not be repeating the experience with my new tribe.”

She turned finally. There was a tightness about her eyes. “That gold we had was a new start, Balur. It was a way to get started in Kondorra, away from gods, and kings, and wars, and backstabbing, and bullshit. It was a different kind of life. And now it's gone. And we're back to doing the same thing.”

Balur nodded. “So we will be making more gold. We will be finding that new life in a short while. Maybe somewhere that is having slightly fewer dragons after all.”

Lette shook her head. “I know that. That's not what worries me.”

“What is it that is worrying you?” Balur had enough respect for human syntax that he worked hard to avoid sounding like a pirate.

“That now that we have a plan—a good plan—I'm glad we lost the gold.”

Balur was not subtle, but he knew how to kill silently, how to slip into an enemy's camp without being detected. And that was how he kept the smile in his heart hidden.

“I am thinking,” he said, “that this is being less to do with the plan, and being more to do with the planner. I am thinking that you are out here to be trying to put out the flame in your britches.”

Lette hesitated a moment, then grinned. “The only one with flaming britches is you after that whore in Vinland.”

That killed Balur's smile a little. He nodded in acquiescence. “That was being a miscalculation,” he conceded.

Lette grinned, teeth pale in the waning light. Balur grinned back. Behind them, Quirk's voice rang out. “Potion's done.”

“Come,” said Balur. “Night is falling. Potion is being brewed. And you are having a whole village to fuck up.”

The problem with high-risk adventuring, and other acts of derring-do, Lette thought, was that they mostly involved just sitting around on your arse. No ancient and mysterious cult had ever bothered to build its temple within an easy morning's ride of a city. No long-dead king ever bothered to be buried anywhere near where he had actually ruled. And considering the frequency with which terrible beasts terrorized villages, they tended to live remarkably far from them.

Even the more lowly adventurous acts—mugging two soldiers and a cow, for example—seemed to involve lurking in a yew bush for such an inordinate amount of time that several bards would start composing ballads about the pair of you.

The soldiers in question, and their truculent bovine captive, were half a mile away. The road—little more than a loose mixture of gravel and mud—wove drunkenly down a hillside and up another before disappearing out of sight toward the local village. On either side, barren pasture spread out, pockmarked by a few sagging trees. A few sheep observed the scene, as morose as the day's weather. Rain seemed on the cusp of falling, but had yet to gather its nerve to properly pour down.

Like the pregnant clouds above, Lette's impatience was growing.

“I was telling you to be taking a nap this morning,” said Balur, who it seemed had decided to do an impression of her mother. “You are always being cranky after early morning crimes.”

She looked over at Balur, squatting beside her in the bush. Well, mostly on top of the bush. The bush was not really up to concealing the lizard man. But when he was sitting still enough, and curled up on himself, Balur could look remarkably like a piece of the landscape. A particularly stupid piece of the landscape.

“Did I say anything?” she snapped. “Any complaint?”

“You were breathing angrily,” Balur deadpanned.

“Is this more tribe bullshit?”

“You are breathing very shrilly when you are being angry,” Balur told her, still without inflection. “I am thinking you have a tendency to narrow your nostrils. It is likely being related to why you so often lose at cards. Too many tells.”

“I'll tell you where to shove that tail in a moment.”

It would be easier, Lette reflected, if Balur was wrong. But she had been up early. And she was cranky.

With Quirk's potion brewed, the next step had been to introduce it to the villagers' morning bread. And if there was one career worse than mercenary and itinerant adventurer, it was, in Lette's most sincere opinion, being a gods-hexed baker. Up at the arse crack of dawn. Before it even. Not even the arse crack, but instead that strange mutant tuft of back hair that announced the arse crack. That moment when the rooster rolled over and thought,
Fuck it, everyone can hang on another fifteen minutes or so.

She was sincerely glad that Balur had not taken her up on that particular career path.

What was worse, she had needed to wake up not only in time to be at the baker's at the same time as the baker, but in time to travel the two leagues from the cave in the Breccan woods so she could be at the baker's at the same time as the baker. The whole thing had almost gone to the Hallows when she'd nearly alerted the baker to her presence by yawning at considerable volume. Still, when the baker had stumbled blearily into his storage closet to investigate the noise, she was up braced against the roofbeams, and the fool had never even looked up.

She had dropped down behind him, slugged the base of his skull with a weighted cosh, spilled some milk on the ground to make it look like he'd slipped, dosed the dough, and bugged out.

And then she had not napped. And now here she was waiting to steal a cow, and regretting it, and unable to complain about it because for some gods-hexed reason she had decided to make her closest friend in the world a smug, sarcastic arsehole.

There again, thinking about it, that was probably why he was her closest friend in the world.

She sighed. She wanted a better life, but she was having a very hard time being the better person that required.

She watched the soldiers, watched the cow, watched the sun rise in the sky. She cursed each one in turn.

There was rustling from behind her. She grimaced. She would have preferred to leave Will, Quirk, and Firkin far away from this part of the heist, but Will and Quirk needed to be here so they could change into the soldiers' outfits after the mugging, and no one was willing to leave Firkin alone to his own devices for even a second.

She turned around to see which one of them was trying to ruin everything. It was Will. Despite herself she felt the harshness of her expression soften.

And then he went and ruined it by opening his mouth.

“Ethel?” he said.

She narrowed her eyes. “No. Lette. We've been hanging around each other for the past two days.”

“No.” Will shook his witless head. “I know that cow. That's Ethel.”

Lette closed her eyes.
I know that cow
. She'd suspected that Kondorra would be rural, but this…? This is why she liked working in cities. The fetishes were a little more predictable there.

“I am not supposing that means you can be talking it into being our accomplice?” Balur asked.

“Do either of you remember,” Lette hissed, “the part where we're supposed to be ambushing people?”

“That's
my
cow,” Will said obstinately.

“Technically it is not being your cow.” Balur insisted on dragging this out.

“I raised her from a calf,” Will objected.

“The reason we are being here in the first place,” Balur pointed out, “is that the dragon Mattrax was confiscating your farm, including”—he paused for just a fraction of a moment—“Ethel.”

For a blessed moment, Will held his tongue. Then he appeared to reconsider the whole being-sensible thing. “But they're taking her to be eaten,” he said. “For Mattrax to have as some sort of pre-dinner snack.”

“Yes,” Lette hissed. “That's precisely why we're taking her, filling her full of drugs, and feeding her to him. It's your cursed plan.”

“But,” Will said yet again, “she's
my
cow. I raised her.”

Lette clawed at her face, and checked the road. The soldiers were very close now.

“Get back in your hexed bush,” she hissed at Will.

But instead of doing that, Will seemed to take it into his head to step into the road.

“Hey,” she heard him call out. “That's my cow.”

She exchanged a glance with Balur. “Maybe,” he rumbled, “this is being a very cunning distraction.”

Lette considered. “Him being gutted by two soldiers is a cunning distraction?”

Balur paused. Then, “It would mean that we are only splitting the haul among four instead of five.”

Out on the road, things were not going so well. A prime example of that being that both soldiers had drawn their swords. They regarded Will with a mixture of suspicion and disbelief. As if watching a mouse saunter out of its hole, climb up onto their dinner plate, and politely demand the cheese.

“You fucking what?” said one.

“He said it was his cow,” said the other.

“That's funny,” said the first.

“Not that funny,” said the second.

“He don't look like Mattrax,” said the first.

“He didn't even have a punch line,” continued the second.

“And this is Mattrax's cow.”

“Now your mother's face, that's funny.”

“And unless you is, Mattrax—” the first went on, addressing Will now.

“And that,” said the second, “was a punch line.”

“—then you better get the fuck out of my way.”

They were dissimilar men. One short, one tall. One fat, one lean. One with lank, greasy blond hair, one with tight brown curls. One pale-skinned, one dark. In fact, the only thing uniting them was the same look of growing contempt on their faces.

“That,” said Will, enunciating clearly, “is
my
cow.”

The first soldier looked at the second, then back at Will. “You,” he said, “is one stupid fucker.”

Lette couldn't say she disagreed at that moment.

“We could,” Balur whispered contemplatively beside her, “always use him being gutted as a cunning distraction, whether he intended it or not.”

Lette sighed. Part of her was tempted by Balur's suggestion. Yes, Will was a good-looking young man, but there were plenty of good-looking men in the world, and many of them could be bought with coin. Except this was Will's plan. And while his knowledge might not extend to the simple mugging of two idiotic soldiers, it almost certainly extended to the layout of Mattrax's castle and how best to get a drugged cow from the entrance gates to Mattrax's cave.

Also, allowing her newfound companions to be killed as a distraction was probably not completely in line with her desire to be a better person.

She stood up, pushed out of the yew bush, and made for Will. The guards started back. Which, she noted with a tinge of professional pride, meant that they had had no idea she was there.

Then Balur rumbled to life. “Fine then,” he grumbled, as he unfolded to his full height. At this the soldiers started considerably more. Lette's mood stopped brightening.

“What the fuck is this?” said the first soldier.

“This,” said Lette, looking up and down the empty road, “is bloody amateur hour apparently.” She pointed at Will. “Get back in your bush.”

“But we can't…” he started. “She's
my
cow.”

Lette shook her head. “Yes,” she said. “I know. You have made that point repeatedly. But we need a cow, and”—she pointed to the empty fields all around them—“we are a little light on them at the moment. So we need that one. So please get back in your bush and let the grown-ups take care of this.”

“You clear this bloody road now,” said the second soldier, waving his sword vaguely at them. “This is Mattrax's business. And it don't need to be interrupted by… by…” He considered Balur. “Things like you.”

Lette turned to him. “Can you just be quiet, while I talk some sense into my colleague here for a moment?”

The soldier opened his mouth.

“It is being best to just go along with her,” Balur said. “There is being no reasoning with her when she is being like this.”

The soldier shut his mouth again.

“I would like,” Lette said to Will, “to say that I am very sorry that this cow once belonged to you. But I'm not. I legitimately don't give a shit. I just need a cow. Because doing so will allow me to get my hands on so much fucking gold, I can actually smelt it down and make myself an entire herd of golden fucking cows, should I so wish. So you are going to get out of my way, stop interfering with my cow thievery, and get back in the gods-hexed bush. Do you understand?”

Something in her tone must finally have broken through. Will looked away from his cow, and back to his bush.

“Thievery?” said the first soldier. “You think you is—”

Without looking, Lette flicked out her arm. A dagger appeared in the guard's throat, buried to the hilt. He dropped to the ground gurgling.

Balur shook his head. “I was warning you. I was being very clear.”

The second soldier's mouth was open. For a moment only air hissed out. Then with a howl he flung himself at Lette.

Or, to be more accurate, he flung himself into the head of Balur's war hammer, which was traveling toward him at considerable velocity.

He also dropped to the ground. There was no gurgling this time.

Lette looked at Will still frozen on the path. “Well?” she said.

He looked from the bush to the dead and dying soldiers. He shrugged. “Doesn't seem to be much point going back in there now.”

Balur pulled Lette aside as Quirk and Will started to put on their purloined outfits.

“What?” she snapped.

“Are you being all right?”

It took Lette a moment to realize that Balur was genuinely concerned. “Yes,” she said, almost bemused enough to stop being irate. “Of course. Why?”

Balur's narrow tongue tasted the air. He glanced at Will. “You were saving him,” he said. “You were not waiting for them to attack him, for them to be being distracted. You were standing up and putting yourself in danger.”

Lette looked at the two guards, now both dead and naked. “Danger?” she scoffed.

“It was not being much,” Balur said with a shrug. “But it was being a little. An unnecessary amount.”

Lette shifted uncomfortably under his gaze. He was getting at something, and she wasn't sure she liked it. “So what?” she said.

Balur shrugged again. “Maybe it is being nothing,” he said. “I am only thinking that the Lette from outside the Kondorra valley would not be doing what you were doing.” He stared up at the sky, gray with clouds. “It is just being that things like that, they make me worry that you are becoming a better person.”

He left her with that. And she took it with her, as she left the others and climbed up into the hills that would lead her to the mouth of Mattrax's cave.