Fool's Gold (21 page)

Quirk was on her feet in an instant. Lette allowed blades to drop into both her palms even as the curse formed on her lips. Balur was widening his stance. Will was making a round O with his mouth. Firkin's shrill voice was carrying thinly on the wind from where he preached. Sounds of laughter and pain were coming from the crowd, mingling in the air.

“Lawl's breath, it's him! It's really him!”

A girl's cry, breathy and excited, shot into the moment, ricocheted off several walls of inappropriateness, and struck Lette right in the frontal lobes.

“Oh by the gods. Look at him!” Another girl. Just as breathy. Just as excited.

Slowly, keeping her eyes on Quirk for as long as possible, Lette turned her head to look in the direction the voices had come.

Charging, mouths wide, nostrils flared, pupils blazing, with all the energy and ferocity of a pack of wolves hurling themselves straight out of the mouth of the Hallows, two teenage girls flung themselves at Will.

“You're the prophet!” one babbled. “Like the actual prophet.”

“Oh gods, he has his axe!” the other girl babbled. She reached out, touched the handle. She was fourteen, perhaps, black curly hair gathered up in two loose buns on either side of her head. She wore a bloodstained smock cut, in Lette's opinion, far too low. Her friend filled out her smock to a lesser extent, but she had eyes the size of saucers, and they were fixed on Will's own.

Will, for his part, looked a lot like he had just stepped in something unpleasant while visiting a much-honored elderly relative—horrified but unsure of whether he could actually say anything.

“Can I… Can I touch you?” said the one with her hair in buns.

Lette watched the refusals form on Will's lips but none of them made it into the audible realm. She glanced back at Quirk. The thaumatobiologist was watching the exchange with a mix of bafflement and disgust.

“For the sake of the gods, Will,” Lette said, since obviously someone had to take hold of the moment, “tell her to get gone before her father finds you and accuses you of something indecent.”

Too late.

“'Ey up,” said a man approaching from farther down the slope of the mountainside. “What the fuck do you think you're doing with my Maisy?” He was large, heavyset. There was fat on his gut, held in place by a tightly cinched apron, but his wrists were thick and his shoulders broad. He wore a flat cap on his head and an ill-advised mustache on his upper lip.

Will flinched away from the girl, arms going wide, palms up. “I didn't. I swear… It wasn't… She… I mean not to suggest that she… Except… Well…”

Lette grit her teeth. She was still holding her daggers. She had been trying so hard to be good. And she knew Balur would be no help. He was grinning too much.

But then the girl's father got a better look at Will. “Oh,” he said, and then again, more bashfully. “Oh it's you. I, err, didn't realize, your, erm… prophetness. Didn't mean to get in the way. I mean.” He pulled his cap off his head, started to work it in his large hands. “If you've taken a shine to Maisy there, well she's a fine girl. And if you, well… It would be an honor to me and my family if you wanted to… you know… with her.”

Will's hands, if anything, got farther apart and farther away from Maisy. The look of horror on his face hadn't left. “She's only fourteen,” he said. “Or…” He checked Maisy. “Thereabouts.”

“Fourteen exact,” said the man, who looked not even slightly abashed. Rather it was a look of admiration on his face. He glanced at Maisy. “See that?” he said to her. “He knew your age right off.” He tapped his head, just next to his right eye. “Got the vision, he does. Just like the Voice says he do.”

Lette rolled her eyes so hard she almost snapped her head from side to side. The girl couldn't be more fourteen if she tried. That said, at this point neither could the farmer. He was still advancing on Will.

“Would it… erm…” He worked the cap in his hands harder than ever. His broad cheeks blazed red. “Would it be okay if I touched you?”

Will backed up fast, making inarticulate noises.

Lette had had enough. “All right,” she said, stepping between Will and his admirers, “that's enough creepy time for today. His prophetness needs a break from all your weird shit. He's decreed you all fuck off for a bit before I shove my foot up your arse.”

Beside her, Balur nodded. “Prophetic,” he whispered. She ignored him.

The man, his daughter, and her friend all backed away slowly. The man attempted to bow, almost tripped over himself. Lette turned her back on him, put herself between the trio and Will.

“This is only going to get worse,” she said, trying to put all the urgency she felt into her words. “Right up until the point when they realize that Firkin is full of shit. And then it's going to get downright terrible. So let me repeat myself: We need to get some gold, get a wagon, and get the fuck out of here.”

Quirk looked up from where she was sitting. “You're just going to abandon these people?”

Lette felt her fists clench. Had these people never heard of haste? Balur had his faults, to be sure, but at least he was already moving toward the cave.

“I am not going to just leave them. I am going to actively flee from them, and I am going to discourage anyone who wants to follow using the edge of my sword blade.”

“But when the Dragon Consortium finds out what happened here, when they find out they were all here…” Quirk's eyes were wide with shock. “You have accused
me
of killing these people…”

“Yes,” Lette said. “Because you did.” She had been told tact was not her strong point. Personally she had never seen the need for it. The world was the way it was; you either accepted that or pretended it wasn't until it put the knife in your gut and showed you exactly what color your spleen was. “But I did not lead these people up here last night. I did not even suggest doing it. I did not kill Mattrax. I did not fuck up my part of the plan in any way.” The smile on her face felt small, savage, and justified.

“But they'll be killed.”

Lette nodded. “More than likely.”

Will put a hand on her arm. “Wait. Is that true?”

So pretty. So naïve. “What do you think the Dragon Consortium will do when they find out someone killed one of their members? Shrug, put it down to bad luck, and have another sweetmeat? Or come here raining down fire and vengeance so that nobody ever dares fuck with them again?”

Balur snorted a laugh next to her. They all looked at him. “Sorry,” he said. “I am just thinking that there is probably being an underappreciation of sweetmeats among dragons. It is being inappropriate. I am being aware.”

“We can't just let this happen,” said Will. “We have to do something.”

Lette decided to try to take the time to explain it simply once. Maybe then they could just move on to the fleeing bit. “How,” she said, “do you think we will manage that? We got incredibly lucky last night. The plan just about worked because we surprised Mattrax in his lair. And still many, many people from your village were hurt.” She swept her hand about them, at the injured and bandaged all around them. “Or they were killed,” she went on. “So how do you think it will go if one, or two, or three, or four members of the Consortium swoop over our heads, looking for trouble and revenge?”

“Four dragons?” Quirk breathed. “Flying over us? You truly think that could happen?”

“Oh, put it back in your britches,” Lette snapped. What was it with her traveling companions and inappropriate arousal?

“We cannot be saving these people,” Balur said, finally pitching in to help the cause, his bass rumble adding a sense of finality to his words. “Lette is being right. We can only be saving ourselves.”

Quirk shook her head. “This is wrong.”

Lette shrugged. “So stay behind, don't get any gold, and get roasted alive by a bunch of pissed-off dragons. What you do here is up to you, but I'm telling you your options.”

Quirk and Will looked torn. Lette shrugged. She'd laid it all out. She owed them nothing more. “Come on,” she said to Balur, and together the pair walked toward Mattrax's cave.

It was Will who joined her first. Quirk wasn't too far behind. They stood together and just stared at all the gold.

“They say it can't buy you happiness.” Will was chewing his lip.

Lette grinned. “Poor people say that. So let's go and get a wagon, and stop being them.”

“You've
got
to talk to them.”

Will kept his head down and avoided Lette's gaze.

Quirk's thaumatic cart bounced and jostled beneath him as they made their way down the rutted path. Behind him, the sacks of gold clinked together, providing a musical backdrop to the conversation. Around them, scrubby woods stretched away in every direction. Above, wispy gray clouds looked down judgmentally.

Seven days had passed since they left Mattrax's cave, and this was not the first time Lette had made this argument. The problem was, every time she made it, she was right.

Rapid footsteps saved him from having to admit that. He looked to the wagon's left to see a boy running to catch up with them. He was twelve, perhaps thirteen. Hair painted a thin dark line along his upper lip. His cheeks glowed red with the exertion of running. His eyes were alight.

“Here you go, your, erm… prophetness.” He thrust a fistful of papers up at Will as he slowed his pace to match the bouncing wagon. “We found a bunch pinned up all along the road. Pulled them all down, just like you asked.”

Will approximated a grateful smile. “Thank you,” he said, as cheerfully as he could muster. “I really appreciate it.”

If the boy had smiled any wider, Will would have had to get down from the wagon so he could pick the top half of the boy's skull up off the ground. The boy ran off beaming.

“And that sort of shit,” Lette went on, “isn't helping.”

“Being nice to him?” Will was genuinely confused.

“Yes,” Lette spat. “Think about it. Ever since that kid was born, life has shit on him. His parents shit on him. His siblings shit on him. Mattrax shit on him. Possibly literally. This whole fucking valley shit on him. And then he's given this man, this hero to look up to, maybe even worship. And what does that arsehole do?”

As the arsehole in question, Will wasn't sure he liked this line of questioning. “I'm nice to him?” he snapped.

“Yes,” Lette snapped back with just as much bite. “The bastard is nice to him. He says please and thank you, and blesses his young stupid head with smiles and platitudes.”

“You're right.” Will nodded. “I totally am an arsehole.” He checked to see if any of his sarcasm had dripped onto his chin.

“You set him up,” Lette snapped back. “You ensure the worship. You double down on the crap Firkin has been spouting. And what does that do?”

Will rolled his eyes. He thought it was a trait he had picked up from her. “Makes the best of a bad situation?”

“The crowds are going to kill us, Will.” There wasn't the hint of a smile in Lette's eyes. “And we're going to kill them.”

Will looked back, over the wagon, over the sacks of Mattrax's gold, over the road of mud and gravel that had been bruising his spine for the last seven days. He looked back at the crowd.

It had all seemed so simple back in Mattrax's cave. The world so full of possibility. Quirk had agreed to fetch her wagon. He had found sacks. And they had filled them full to brimming. A day spent merrily looting. So much gold it took them until dusk to load the wagon up. So much gold they had to reinforce the wagon's axles. So much gold that Balur's purple frills of arousal had become an almost permanent fixture upon his neck.

And then merry and laughing—Lette's hand actually upon his arm—they had left the cave, come blinking into the dying light of the day. And the crowd had been there.

Firkin hadn't been at its head. That was probably what had saved the man's life. But the fire he had lit beneath the crowd was an inferno now. It didn't matter what anyone said to them. It didn't matter that Will wanted to slip away. The decision had been made without him. They would follow him to the ends of the earth.

He'd thought they'd lose interest over time. Give up and slowly drift away. Instead, the crowd had grown, was now perhaps three times the size it had been when they left Mattrax's cave. More flocked to it each day, arriving in greater and greater numbers.

“And if you want proof,” Lette said, cutting into the horror of memory with all the sweetness of blunt-force trauma, “just look at those damn papers you're holding.”

Will didn't need to look at them. He knew exactly what they were. They were tacked up on trees, all along the major thoroughfares. They clustered at crossroads. They were images of his face, of Lette's, Balur's, Firkin's, and Quirk's. Images and numbers. Lists of the piles of coins that the Consortium would pay for their heads. And those numbers grew faster than the crowd did.

“One of these people,” Lette thumbed back over her shoulder, “is going to betray you. Someone—Lawl's black eye, I'd be shocked if it wasn't most of them—is here not because of how nice you are, but because she knows exactly the sort of life our heads could buy her.”

Will wanted to argue. He would have loved to argue. But he knew what life was like under the Consortium. He knew how desperate you could get. People could betray loved ones for a little gold. What loyalty did they have for some arsehole sitting on a wagon full of it?

“The bigger this crowd gets,” Lette went on, without pity or remorse, “the worse it gets. The more people there are to sabotage us. The more people to get killed when we finally reap what we've sown. You
have
to speak to them. You have to get them to disperse.”

Will grimaced. Again, the problem he kept coming back to was that she was right.

“I wonder what the reward is up to now?” He stalled for time, flicking through the posters.

His jaw fell open. He tried to reel it back in before it dislocated.

“Eight thousand gold bulls?” he managed. At its most profitable, his parents' farm had been worth… what? Five
hundred
bulls? Maybe six. And now this. You could have bought half the Village for eight thousand gold bulls.

“What about me?” Lette asked, allowing curiosity to overcome her.

Will was still recovering from the price on his head. He just thrust the papers at her. She flicked through them, put on a sour expression. “I'm still stuck down at two thousand.”

“Two thousand?” he said. It was still a staggering amount, of course, but it seemed considerably less than what hung above his head. That didn't seem even vaguely fair. “But you killed so many more people than I did.”

“Sexist bullshit is what that is. Quirk is two thousand as well. Then Balur is up at six, and you're eight. Talk about double fucking standards.”

“I'm worth more than Balur?” Will's voice was heading toward octaves he thought he'd abandoned along with short trousers.

Lette shrugged. “Well, if you actually grew a pair and told people you weren't a prophet then perhaps you would avoid the problem of being taken for a dangerous ringleader.”

Lette, Will thought, was not showing quite as much sympathy as the situation required.

“You might actually want to take the Consortium up on that offer.”

Will jerked his head around at the sound of Quirk's voice. She trotted up alongside the wagon, astride a thick-limbed farm horse. Balur strode beside her, long legs allowing him to keep pace easily.

“I am suggesting we turn in Lette,” he said. “A good quick cash infusion. We could be spending it on wine and women. The expenditures not necessarily being in that order.”

Lette nodded, a little sadly. “Regrettably,” she said, “even with all this wealth, we still can't buy Balur class and taste.”

Balur opened his mouth for another salvo, but Will flung himself into the breach. “Maybe,” he said, “we could take a brief break from sniping at each other and find out what it is Quirk's actually talking about? I'm guessing she doesn't want us to turn on each other for gold just out of boredom.”

Of them all, Quirk seemed to have adapted to the situation the best. She spent most of her time away from the wagon and the gold, and in among the crowd. She tended to the wounds of the sick, told stories to the children, led sing-a-longs, and seemed to play an important but poorly defined role in ensuring that everybody was clothed and fed. In fact, in Will's opinion, if the crowd should have been worshipping anyone it was Quirk.

“There's a problem,” Quirk said, pulling him back to the present.

“Unless it is being to do with how to spend all this gold, then I am not being particularly interested,” Balur told her.

“Well, then I'm glad this matter is gold related,” Quirk replied with a slight snap. Will saw Lette checking the other woman's palms, but the leather bridle failed to start to smoke in her hands.

“Oh.” Balur sounded slightly chastened.

“The thing is, you see,” Quirk went on, slightly more calmly, “we are actually spending the money.”

“We are?” Will asked. This was news to him.

“Where are being the whores?” Balur looked around, yellow eyes flashing as sharply as when blades were coming directly at his throat. “Where is being the wine?”

Quirk's expression was growing sourer by the second. Will was beginning to think he understood why she spent so much time with the crowd.

“Over three hundred men, women, and children are following this wagon,” Quirk said. “Most of them have lived their entire lives in abject squalor. They have brought nothing with them because everything they ever had has been taken from them by the Consortium. They need feeding, clothing, healing—”

“You be waiting a moment,” Balur cut in. “We are paying for that?”

Quirk wheeled on him. “Being astride a horse, her eyeline was for once above Balur's nipples. This seemed to add extra steel to her gaze. “You would rather them starve? Die of diseases?”

Balur threw up his hands. “Yes! How is this even being a question?”

This time when Will looked, there definitely seemed to be a red glow coming from Quirk's hands. “Lette,” he said quickly. “You don't want three hundred souls on your hands. We were just talking about—”

Lette's gaze when she turned it on him was no less fiery than Quirk's palms. “We were not talking. I was telling you to talk. And now I am demanding it. Speak to them. End this. Or I shall end you and take my gods-cursed chances with the degenerates following you.”

“They are farmers,” Quirk snapped, her ire still up, “fishermen, seamstresses. Good, simple working folk.”

“According to you they are starving, diseased, and naked,” Lette bit back. “That is close enough to a degenerate for me to make no distinction,”

This was devolving fast. “Exactly how much are we spending?” Will cut in. Perhaps it was not that much. And against the backdrop of the vast quantity of gold they had taken.

“At the current rate,” Quirk said, “we'll run out of gold after eighteen months. But given that the crowds are growing, I think it will be before then.”

“Eighteen months?” Will was apparently the only one of them who could speak. He looked at the vast fortune behind them. How could that last only a year and a half? “Mattrax sat on this wealth for years,” he spluttered.

“Because he spent almost nothing,” Quirk said. “He took. And took. And took.” Each time she repeated the phrase it felt more and more like a slap to the face. “He taxed everything and gave nothing. His wealth only accumulated.”

“So…” Will started, then realized exactly what he sounded like.

“You want to rule like Mattrax?” Quirk leaned into the cart from atop her horse. He could see the fire licking at the back of her eyes. “That is who you want to be?”

No. No. Gods no. Every reason he had had for starting this—whatever
this
was—was so that he could be exactly the opposite of everything Mattrax stood for.

But… eighteen months.

He turned to look at the gold again, to try to comprehend it. He made it halfway but then his head jerked to a stop. He pulled, but Lette had him by the scruff of his shirt.

“They threaten our lives. They fucking steal from us. Speak to them. Stop this. Before I take whatever passes for your manhood and cram it so far down your throat you end up shitting your own balls.”

Dismembering people seemed to have given Lette a comprehensive overview of human anatomy.

“Okay,” Will said. He could feel the anger coming off her in waves. “All right. I'll speak to them, see if I can dissuade them. Get them to… disperse or whatever it is.”

Lette nodded, short and sharp. It felt less like a sign of approval and more like a kettle letting off steam.

“Just,” he went on, “if they start to rip me limb from limb, I'd sort of appreciate it if you could step in and stop that.”

He waited for confirmation, for reassurance. Balur shrugged. Quirk didn't meet his eye. He looked to Lette, waited. He waited a long time.