"Do not," she said.
Bigby pulled his hand back as if bitten.
"I meant no malice," he said.
Poppy rose and walked away from the caravan. She was quickly swallowed in the sea of motion around the campsite as the gypsies went to work dismantling the tents and pavilions and packing them into the wagons. Bigby stepped out into the clearing and marveled at the efficiency. When he looked to find Poppy, she had disappeared.
* * *
They had traveled for three days before one of the matriarchs came to Bigby to request his services. They were a simple lot and merely requested alchemies of the restorative variety, along with some sleep aids and salves. Bigby had been pleased that poisons hadn't been requested. While he had certainly made his fair share in the past, they had generally been for people he didn't like.
He sat in one of the wagons as it bounced along the country road, grinding his plants and mixing them in preparation for when they stopped and he required a fire. They had very little in the way of implements for him to make some of his more advanced extracts, so he would have to satisfy them with simple reductions and balms.
On the third night of their journey, Bigby had made a small fire outside of the wagon he was sharing with a ropemaker, who drove the vehicle, and settled in alone to prepare himself a meal. As he sat, a figure emerged from the shadows and, almost instinctively, Bigby reached for the small coat pistol on the ground beside him.
"No need for that," a woman's voice chimed back.
Bigby recognized Poppy's soft, lilting voice and released the weapon's grip.
She sat down near him by the fire and looked from the roasting fowl to him.
"Did you catch that yourself?”
Bigby laughed aloud, and Poppy grinned.
"I may be able to survive on my own," he replied, "but I certainly could not catch my own food. No. One of your colleagues gave it to me as part of payment for my goods.”
Poppy glanced at the firearm as if to ask where that had come from. In truth, Bigby hadn’t thought he’d have need of the pistol on this trip until very recently. Something told him his timing in producing the weapon demonstrated his further lack of trust.
Poppy nodded. "They are good people," she said, "but they are not mine.”
"You seem to know them well.”
"A part of my job.”
"What, privy, would that be?" Bigby asked, increasingly suspicious of her intentions toward him, and his ability to trust her.. "What sort of job would have a woman blend in with a band of gypsies to such an extent that she would seamlessly blend in with them? I find that rather hard to swallow." Bigby popped a flake of cooked skin in his mouth to test it. He winced and nearly choked trying to get the piping hot fragment down. “Hot—yep, that’s hot.”
Poppy fought a smirk. “Government work,” she replied, not skipping a beat. Before Bigby could reach for the pistol, his heart racing, Poppy reached over to him and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Not the kind that's in the market of chasing down potion makers. Not everyone is as single-minded as you might think.”
Heart nearly skipping a beat, Bigby released the pistol—only after he had brought it closer to himself—and looked squarely at the woman. He did not know her: he had to admit that at least; as much as she said he could trust her, what her motives were remained a mystery. Bigby cleared his throat, trying to steady his breathing, and squinted in suspicious inspection of Poppy.
"You'll pardon me if I retain my earlier stance of distance," Bigby said.
"Abysspolis is west and a bit north of here," she said. "You can stop there if you want and go on your way. No one will know, and no one here will care.”
Bigby turned his attention to his meal and brought it out of the fire—a little overdone for his liking—and began to tear steaming pieces off to eat. He felt Poppy rise from her place next to him and pause. Out of the corner of his eye, Bigby saw her look at him, her head tilted in an almost pleading manner—the same one that he had seen back in Montrose, the same one he had conceded to amongst the gypsy elders—but he did not meet her gaze. With what was certainly an out-of-character gesture, Poppy curtsied and walked away from Bigby.
Bigby took his time finishing his meal. Then he returned to his wagon bed and fell asleep quickly in the quiet darkness of the secluded woods.
* * *
The trail through the woods—at times a well-paved, cobblestone road, and at others little more than a worn track between copses of trees—was monotonous, which Bigby did not mind at all. They traveled six days west, with the gnome keeping up his part of the deal both while they moved and during the long evening rests. Bigby knew the woods well, knew the types of trees, the types of hidden enclaves of zealots both religious and political that hid out amongst the pines and hardwoods, and he was glad for the path they took to keep away from Topper’s Highway across more civilized lands.
The land itself felt much like home: the trees were dense and old, the smells were of pine and oak and beech that were infused partly by decay and mostly by the fragrance of loam, and the days were warm but mild. Bigby longed for his house, the warm fire, the comfortable bed—all the things he had worked hard to obtain in his years away from the slave camps. It felt like a betrayal, a response from nature, that had put him so far from home without all of those things. As he worked, he found his mind wandering absently, without his consent, to the past.
Snatches of memory stabbed at him, setting off involuntary tweaks in his eyes and tiny jerks in his cheeks. Rough hands enfolded him, moving him blindfolded from carriage to wagon to raft. He remembered falling into cold waters, and the crude spike that had raked his flesh along the spine to fetch him back again. He might have died in that river, or after contracting patriarch’s disease from the exposure, but death, it seems, had never learned to say his name.
“Bigby."
The wagon was still moving, but someone was just outside his door, holding onto the handle on the wagon face. He slid across the pillow-laden floor and opened the door a crack to look out. Penelope smiled back at him through the opening.
"Let me in," she whispered.
"Why should I?”
"I have to speak with you.”
Bigby stared back at her.
“Please?"
She smiled more broadly at him. It was practiced, staged. Bigby thought she was being at least partially sincere, however, and he opened the door wide enough for her to slip in beside him in the cramped space of the covered wagon.
"Be quick," Bigby said. "I have work to do.”
Penelope looked believably crestfallen, and Bigby sighed. He motioned for her to sit on the pillows.
"We are getting off at the next town," she said. "I believe we may have worn out our welcome with the gypsies.”
"How so? I have been kind to them and done as they asked.”
"We're being followed, Bigby. Whether it's your pursuers or mine, I am not certain.”
"Your pursuers?”
Penelope matched Bigby's gaze and cleared her throat.
"I am not quite as ingratiated with our government as I may have implied.”
"So, you're a rogue agent.”
"Of a sort.”
Bigby turned and began working on his latest concoction. He could hear Penelope behind him shuffling, almost physically willing him to turn around.
“Bigby."
He did not turn around nor did he continue with his work.
"Bigby, I need your assistance.”
Bigby looked over his shoulder. "Go on then.”
"I'd like you to come with me. It will help in our escape.”
"How so?”
"I don't have any money," she replied. "You have applicable skills.”
"So you want to use me to get you out of here.”
"I can help you, too, Bigby.”
Bigby pursed his lips. It wouldn't do to simply discount her. She had, after all, practically saved him in Montrose. Since then, she had helped him to
integrate with the gypsies, had been a friendly ear to voice his concerns to and confide in, and had even shared her full name with him—all pretense of secrets dropped. Save for this one, he thought. Turning around he looked at her and nodded.
“On one condition, ‘Poppy,’” he said.
“Fair enough. Go on.”
Bigby leaned in with a conspiratorial glint in his eye. “I want to know what you really do.”
Chapter 4, or, “Keystone-Harmonia-Sunderland Border Country: Every Man’s Land.”
The morning after they slipped away from the gypsy caravan, Bigby and Penelope were already down the hills and into the valley, heading west along Poglot Creek. Bigby had hardly spoken to her after she had admitted to him that she was on the lam from the government. Her desertion of their agency service had gained more than a few foes, given the information she knew, and it had become her goal to reach the Great River, near the frontier, in the hopes of outrunning them. It meant that Bigby was in as much danger with her as he was without her, and he hoped to be able to stealthily part ways with her before it was too late.
Several miles out, abridging the creek, they spotted a small outpost settlement—not anywhere large enough to be accounted as an official township like Montrose—where the gypsies themselves were headed, but Bigby and Penelope hoped to slip in and out before anyone was the wiser. As they began to make their way through the sparse farmland, where the pungent smell of loose manure and dead crops from an old haunt once kept by greenskins—slang for goblin expatriates in the region, Bigby knew—still held firm, he noticed that there were more people and more traffic than ought to have been on such a narrow trail through the mountains.
“What's going on,” Bigby asked a traveler at the end of the long line of others.
The man sat seated on a fallen log having a meal. He looked to Bigby at the question and shrugged. “I keep hearing something about a checkpoint,” the traveler replied. “Something to do with a local border dispute? I'm not certain if that's true, but I already got a thrashing for trying to slip past the lot of them.”
Bigby looked at Penelope. “Back to the hills?”
With word of the border dispute, she knew how close they were with neighboring Harmonia to the south and Sunderland to the west. Too close to turn back. “I think we'll be able to slip through this,” she said.
Bigby did not have her same sense of optimism. He knew too well the outcome of trying to lie his way through without a backstory. He had no goods, no extra money, and no true lay of the land, considering how far he had come. In fact, Bigby guessed that this was as far west and south as he had ever been.
He eyed the line, stepping out of it for a moment to look along the road toward the outpost. Farmers and traders mostly, with little but their possessions or a handcart full of goods. It seemed odd that they would stop such people. Even a government so strongly bent on ferreting out anarchists and bootleggers.
“Have there been smuggling problems here?” Bigby asked the man.
The man looked dumbfounded. He shook his head emphatically. “I wouldn't think so,” he replied.
Penelope was silent as she looked at him. She knew about the history of Cresape’s War: a longstanding border rivalry between families and independent settlers who dwelled near the converging state lines of Keystone, Harmonia, and Sunderland. Bad blood between the settlers here was probably older still than Bigby, and showed no signs of abating. That’s why the government was here.
“They're looking for someone. Either you or me,” the traveler quipped. “Either way it's not good.”
“We'll be fine,” Penelope said. She knew better than to risk Bigby’s confidence and trust in others by revealing the truth of the border dispute. Better to play her cards close to the chest, for now.
“I do not share your optimism,” Bigby stated flatly.
* * *
As the sun began to crest the hills in the west, casting a long shadow over the valley, Penelope and Bigby reached the front of the line. Bigby's heart had begun to beat increasingly faster as they stepped further toward the front. Now, he felt it might climb right out of his mouth and launch itself onto the ground for all to gawk at. Penelope was calm. Calmer than Bigby thought she ought to have been, but the temptation to trust her as she had said was no illusion.
“What brings you to Tinsdelve?”
The guards were abrupt. They weren't Summit City sent from the looks of their rustic uniforms, but neither were they Ulleran Army.
“Just passing through,” Penelope answered. “On our way west.”
“Where to?”
Penelope choked. She looked to Bigby quickly and then back at the guard.
“We're not sure,” she said. “We are simply heading west to find work.”
The outpost guard gave them a sodden expression and turned to the partner at his side. They quickly conferred with one another. When he looked at Penelope again, there was a squint to his eye that was dangerous. Bigby began to look around for a place to run, but they were hemmed in: behind them was the restless group of travelers eager to get home; on either side of them was ranging wilderness. They would not get far without being captured or gunned down.
“Do you have traveling papers?”
“Traveling papers?”
Penelope either acted the part well or knew nothing of such things. To Bigby it was news, but not surprising. He sighed. There was little to stop them from being held for some backwoods bureaucratic reason merely to extort money out of them for these papers. It was one more thing Bigby did not need. He chastised himself for not leaving Penelope behind. She was baggage, and baggage always weighed you down.
“A land deed, perhaps?” the guard said. “Why come this way if otherwise? Wouldn’t Topper’s Highway have suited your travel needs more ably?”
Bigby saw Penelope start to say something—most likely some snarky comment—but she closed her mouth. That, at least, he could thank her for later.
“Go on and find camp space in the commons,” the guard continued, penciling something in on a tag of paper then handing it to them. “The exit officer will see you across either border in the morning.”
“Of course,” Bigby said before Penelope could respond.
He grabbed her elbow tightly and led them past the guards. Bigby did not turn to see if they followed them with their gaze, but he knew they would. Knew by instinct alone that they were being watched even as they wandered through Tinsdelve Outpost toward the commons where a quiet patch of ground or a private lean-to would be their accommodations for the evening.
* * *
“How the hell did he get outside of our range?”
Val Daart slammed his fist on the desk, scattering pens and toppling a small statuette of the president. He quickly grabbed it and righted it on the desk and then looked across the room to the young intelligencer still standing in the doorway. Val Daart waved for him to enter, biting back a wince as his spine protested the sudden movements, and the boy stepped toward the desk.
“Go on, then,” Val Daart said.
“Well, sir,” the boy started and stopped, swallowing hard under Val Daart's gaze. “Well, he slipped out of town with the gypsy band that was camped in the woods. They made good time, I suppose, and were spotted at Tinsdelve Outpost in the Uplands.”
“They?”
The intelligencer stiffened. “He is with Penelope Herford.”
Val Daart’s stern visage tightened. “That is not what I needed to hear.”
He stood. The boy jumped back, and Val Daart shook his head.
“I need a motorcade and fast,” Val Daart said. “Inform the army detail to stay here and keep an eye on Marlby. Keep tabs on the wires. And have Fitz assign three others to the motorcade.”
The young man nodded and darted out of the room.
“Oh, Poppy,” Kard said, “you are too smart for your own shoes.”
* * *
The other shoe had finally dropped.
Bigby ha
d fought hard with Penelope, trying to convince her that their best plan of action was to slip out in the night. Penelope had apologized for not sharing all the details with him earlier, but was steadfast in her claim that she was trying to look out for both their interests. “And what are those?” he had blurted. “To stay alive,” she had answered. That they could cross back over the creek and trailblaze into the woods was the alchemy smuggler’s best alternative. Bigby had eventually lost the argument, and Penelope had left early in the morning to wander the outpost’s commons and seek out a chaplain or some other neutral party whom they could trust.
“Meet me on the south end of the outpost,” she had said before she left. “I'll be there in an hour.”
Meet me on the south side of the camp, the words echoed in Bigby’s memory. An hour more and we’ll be on our way to freedom! Too similar. Bigby shook his head. “Alec!” he said the word like a curse. He wouldn’t allow himself to be given to such optimistic thinking again. The last time he had been so hopeful, he wound up with broken arms and legs in a Rageaic infirmary for three months for conspiring in that breakout attempt. He preferred to do things his way. After all, that’s ultimately what had led to his freedom.
On a whim—or perhaps out of distrust—Bigby had dressed quickly after Penelope had left and followed her. The meeting with the chaplain had been quick, quicker than Bigby would have thought feasible given their situation, for she emerged from the cozy log house at the chaplain’s heel not more than a quarter hour after going in.
The chaplain was a peculiar sort. Dressed from top to tails in solid black—except for a slim leather satchel he carried under one arm—the chaplain strode with a lightness of step that somehow seemed incongruous to his severe look. The chaplain wore a weird expression under a short-brim top hat that seemed to change colors from black to gray to brown as he walked. His eyes betrayed both supreme confidence and a tweaked—almost painful—sense, like that of a child lost in an imaginary world of his own design. Little to no one in the commons seemed to take special notice of the chaplain until he tipped his hat to them. Bigby had dealt with chaplains of the Trefoil Laurels long before—gifted healers who had helped him and others after they escaped Atanak—but this fellow was a bird of another feather.
The Alchemist's Run Page 4
