The Flute Keeper's Promise (The Flute Keeper Saga) (32 page)

“What was his name?” Valory asked,
suddenly engrossed.

I had never used Hugo’s fake name
to Valory. Over the last few months I’d made peace with Lev’s memory. He was a
part of my past that would never go away, and that was all good and well so
long as I could hate King Hugo the way he deserved.

“His name was Lev,” I said quietly.
“He was big and dark and mostly unpleasant to be around.”

Valory snorted. “Sounds like a
winner.”

“He had other qualities,” I said. I
remembered how his fleeting smile could make me feel invincible. “He was
fearless, always throwing himself into battle. He was brave and confident. He
answered to nobody.”

Valory stopped grinning and became
reverently wide-eyed. “I don’t know much about menfolk, but that sounds like a
good’un. What happened?”

A painful tremor made me wince.
“He’s gone.”

“Like, dead?” Valory asked. “Or did
he just skip down river to find a new fishing spot?”

“Yeah,” I said, and didn’t offer
any more explanation.

The rain stopped by the time we
came upon the town. By then the scents of civilization were so strong that they
overwhelmed me.

“Phew!” I exclaimed, pinching my
nose shut. “Did they name it Feegman’s Boot because it smells like someone’s
foot?”

“It’s a good guess,” Valory said.
“Hullo, what’s all that?”

We had crouched behind a woodpile
near the entrance to the muddy little town. Valory zeroed in on a nasty-looking
Fay man in a red cape.

I ducked lower behind the woodpile
and hissed, “That’s one of the duke’s men! What are they doing all the way out
here?”

“I dunno, but he’s not alone,”
Valory said, tossing her head in another direction. “There’s some more patrolling
the town border on the other side…and something else. I don’t see it but I
smell it.”

I heard a note of worry in her
voice. “What’s it smell like?”

“Death.”

Not sure what to make of it, I
surveyed the parts of town I could see. The place was nothing like the orderly
village at Ivywild. Layers of grime covered all the streets and buildings in
Feegman’s Boot. Most of the buildings were made of split timber that should
have been torn down years ago. Livestock and poultry roamed the streets,
leaving piles of dung everywhere. Over the unpleasant aroma of animal waste
floated the sickly bitter scent from the pubs.

“Halt!” said the nearest red cape
to a Hobgoblin man trying to enter the town. “What business do you have here?”

The Hobgoblin stomped his hoofed
feet. “Come off it, Mister. We go through this every time I come down from my
homestead for a bit o’ drink at Natty’s bar.”

“Be off with you,” said the duke’s
man, waving the Hobgoblin through.  

“Criminey!” Valory whispered.
“They’re interrogatin’ everyone who comes through!”

“Not to worry,” I said, pulling the
hat down low over my eyes. “Just do like I said and don’t draw attention.
You’ve still got your furs, right?”

Valory held up her catch.

“Good,” I said. “Then let’s do
this.”

We walked nonchalantly onto the
main road. Valory’s wings made nervous twitching sounds underneath her coat. I
tried to keep my head low without looking too suspicious.

“Halt!” said the guard. He had
crooked yellow teeth and pockmarked skin.

“The duke sure doesn’t spare the
handsome ones for these sorts of places, does he?” Valory mumbled.

I jabbed her in the ribs with my
elbow.

“Name and business,” said the
guard.

Valory straightened up. “We’re fur
traders. My name’s Valory and this is my cousin, Rachel.”

“Cousin, eh?” the guard said. He
gave Valory a suspicious glance and then leered at me. His breath almost made
me gag. “How come she doesn’t look like you?”

“She’s been dreadful sick this
winter,” Valory said. “It’s given her skin a funny color. I reckon she picked
up one of them wasting diseases from a traveling sailor, you know? She’s been
coughin’ and wheezin’ and she’s pretty much had to live in the outhouse, if you
know what I mean.”

I squirmed uncomfortably and fought
the urge to punch Valory in the arm. The guard bought it, though. He gave me a
disgusted scowl and waved us through.

“Ouch!” Valory said after I had
given her another none-too-gentle poke in the ribs.

“You deserve it,” I said. “Don’t go
making up wild stories. You shouldn’t have said I was your cousin. In case you
hadn’t noticed, I’m not a Slaugh.”

Valory’s lower lip jutted out.
“Slaugh, Hobgoblin, Fay, Gnome—what difference does it make? We all have to
eat, sleep and breathe just the same.”

“It makes a world of difference
when we’re trying to stay out of trouble,” I said. I paused to take in the row
of pubs and shops on either side of the street. Each one sounded more unruly
than the last. “We should probably pick one of these places and see if anyone
inside knows anything okay, Valory…Valory?”

She had spotted someone down the
street. “Hey, that looks like Trapper Toussant. HEY MR. TOUSSANT!” She jumped
up and down and waved wildly.

An old man turned, appeared to
recognize her and waved back. He wore a ratty old fur flap hat and he had so
much facial hair that I couldn’t tell if he was a Fay or a Hobgoblin.

“Well I’ll be jiggered,” he said,
limping towards us. “Is that little Valory of Signal Mountain? Where’s Almyra?”

“She passed away last spring,”
Valory said. She squeezed the man’s mittened hand. “It’s been ages! Why didn’t
you come see us after the thaw last winter? We sure could’ve used some of your
Yeti hair rugs.”

The old man spit a wad of brown
juice into the street. “I didn’t get no Yeti hair last winter, nor this one
either. Those danged critters started wanting too much trade-in for a bag of
hair. In my younger days I’d a snuck up on em’ while they was sleeping an’
shaved it off their backs, but that ain’t for me no more. Nope, I’m just an old
layabout now. I’m real sorry to hear about Almyra, though. Who’s this?”

Feeling unimportant in the midst of
their Yeti hair discussion, I had turned my back in order to better examine the
town. Valory grabbed me by both shoulders and shoved me in front of Trapper
Toussant like I was a prized fish.

“This is Rachel. She spent the winter
with me. Rachel, this is Trapper Toussant. He used to visit me and Almyra.”

Our conversation had drawn the
interest of one guard. I caught him watching us over the collar of his cape.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Toussant,”
I said. Then I leaned down low and whispered, “Is there a better place we could
talk?”

The old man’s eyes slid sideways to
the watchful guard. “Aye. Follow me.” He hooked his arm through Valory’s and
said in a loud voice, “Let me buy you girls a pint! I know the fur trade can
make you real thirsty!”

He made a show of whistling
gleefully all the way down the street as he led us to the loudest, most rickety
building of all. A faded sign out front said “Natty’s Bar.” The roof sagged.
The large front window only had one pane of glass. The rest were broken out and
patched over with boards. Years of mud and dung caked the front steps. The
smell of potent drinks wafted through the broken window along with raucous
shouts of customers who had already drunk their fill.

I hesitated. Natty’s Bar didn’t
seem like the kind of place to have a peaceful conversation.

“Don’t be a tree stump,” Valory
said, tugging my arm. “Let’s see what’s inside!”

 “I don’t know. Maybe we should try
somewhere else.”

Trapper Toussant turned and winked
at me. “There’s no need for
resistance
, honey. Natty’s has the best brew
in town!”

I checked behind us to make sure no
guards were paying attention. Satisfied, I gave a little nod. The old man
strolled through the swinging doors. Valory and I followed him into a smelly,
smoky room with grizzled Fay men slumped over a bar and Hobgoblins and Gnomes
arguing in dusty corners.

“Good Afternoon, Natty,” the old
man said to a Brownie woman behind the bar.

Natty held a pipe between her lips.
She removed it and exhaled a cloud of blue smoke. “Good Afternoon, Trapper.
What’ll it be?”

“The usual,” Trapper Toussant
yelled over the racket.

Natty grunted and pulled on a tap
lever. No liquor came from the tap. She nodded at Trapper Toussant.

“This way,” he said. He led us to a
booth in the back of the room. There, beneath the table, a trap door lay open.

Beneath the main pub was a whole
other room. It was just as filthy, but much quieter. It held a table with six
chairs and one dim lantern. Against the backmost wall sat a bench with a pile
of dirty rags atop it.

Trapper Toussant removed his hat.
Brown, pointed Fay ears sprung out from beneath his gray hair. “I apologize for
the secrecy,” he said, “But y’all came into town at a bad time. Pull up a chair
and I’ll spell it out for you over tea.”

I almost declined the offer of
until I spied a clean teapot and cups waiting beside a clay stove. I kept my
mouth shut and slid into a chair.

“What’s this room for?” Valory
asked as she tested one of the wobbly chairs for herself.

“This?” Trapper Toussant said.
“Just a store room me and my buddies have used for conducting business for
years. We used to have gambling tournaments down here, but now it comes in
handy when we don’t want to be bothered by those muscle-heads from Larlaith.”

“How long have they been here?” I
asked.

Trapper Toussant dropped a ball of leaves
into the pot. “Two full moons ago, I think it was. One of em’ showed up with a
message from the duke. Some nonsense about improving quality of life through
better protection. We didn’t think much of it at first until more of the duke’s
men came. They disbanded our local deputies and said they’d take over law
enforcement themselves. Then they started collecting ‘protection taxes’ from
all the shops. Bunch of malarkey if you ask me. What us rugged folk couldn’t
protect ourselves from, we’ve always made peace with. Well now these red-caped
goons have got the whole region like a rabbit caught in a snare.”

Anger warmed my blood. “Do you
think this group of men is rogue, or are they still taking orders from the
duke?”

Trapper Toussant shrugged. “We
don’t get no news from Ivywild.”

I sagged in disappointment.
“Nothing?”

The old man plinked a teacup down
on the table in front of me. His mouth twitched as he filled it. “If we did,
what would you want to know?”

Valory leaned her elbows on the
table, causing the whole thing to tilt.

“Don’t be playing around with us,
Trapper,” Valory said. “You know something.”

He shook a finger at her. “Never
could get anything past you. I know
of
somebody who knows something.”

“Well don’t hold out!” Valory said.
“Where is this person who knows what you don’t know that we want to know?”

Trapper Toussant gestured towards
the bench. I realized then that what I’d mistaken for a pile of rags was actually
a man lying down in very tattered clothes. He was horrifically thin with
scraggly white hair.

“Looks like he’s sleeping,” Trapper
Toussant said. “Poor fellow. That’s all he does.”

“Who is he?” Valory asked.

“Don’t know,” Trapper Toussant
said. “Some of the town chaps found him out in the woods a few days before the
duke’s men showed up. He was near thirsted and starved to death and crazed
right out of his mind. We got him inside and patched him up the best we could.
For days he rambled on and on about the strangest things—weird stuff that would
make your skin wanna crawl right off your bones. Gave me the jitters, I tell
you what!”

“Like what kind of stuff?” I asked.

“Yeah, what stuff?” Valory echoed,
tipping the table again.

Trapper Toussant took a deep breath.
“It’s like this,” he said in a low voice. “That vagrant thinks the duke is
doing experiments on people. He claims he escaped from a prison in the eastern
marshes where they torture folks. Half of what he said was so mixed up we
couldn’t make heads nor tails of it, but there’s something amiss all right.
When he was halfway in his right mind he had one of them city accents—kind of
like you.” He gazed at me. “One day he mentioned Ivywild, so I reckon that’s
where he’s from.”

I studied the sleeping figure. He was
nothing more than skin on bones. There was something unnatural about it,
though. He didn’t look like a normal person who had been hit by old age or
illness.

“Did he say anything else?” I asked.

“Two names,” Trapper Toussant said.
“He mumbled em’ over and over for hours one day.”

Valory and I both tipped the table
as we crowded close and listened with wide eyes. “Well?” Valory demanded
impatiently.

All of a sudden there was a loud
bang upstairs. The floorboards over our heads creaked as someone in heavy boots
stomped towards the bar. All of Natty’s customers fell silent.

“You know what day it is,” said a
pushy voice. “Pay up, Natty. Your fee is overdue.”

The floorboards creaked again as
the big Brownie woman shifted her weight behind the bar. “What fee would that
be, sir?”

“You know what I’m talking about,”
the pushy voice said. “The duke’s protection tax! Pay now and we won’t have to
raise your price.”

There came a displeased rumble from
some of Natty’s patrons. There also came a rustling from the bench where the
vagrant lay. Awoken by the sounds from upstairs, he lifted his scraggly white
head and peered around blearily.

“Who goes there?” he said in a weak
voice.

“Shhhh!” Trapper Toussant said,
hurrying over to him. “Quiet. We don’t want that red cape to know we’re down
here.”

“I demand to see the king at once!”
the vagrant said. “This is an outrage!”