by Logan Jacobs
Lizzy wound the dead rat’s tail through the rope tied around the crank from which the bucket hung, so that it dangled there, reminiscent of a corpse adorning a gallows for the edification of passersby. “There’s a warning then,” she said. “Them that ignores it has no need to breed more dumb whelps, in my opinion.”
“All right, well, we’ll pass on the word verbally as well when we go visiting huts,” I said. “And, we have to tell everyone the new rule about cats too, so they don’t all get shot dead by Elodette before the plague even has a chance to finish them off. Now, Willobee, why don’t you and I head back to the north well and start distributing water, so the sick won’t need to come out of their huts. And Lizzy, why don’t we start hunting down some bread ingredients?”
I remembered that the gnome’s initial preference when we arrived in Ferndale was to avoid interacting with live villagers in favor of dealing with only the dead ones, but I guess the level of hostility we experienced from the dead ones had probably changed his mind about that. And Willobee really was a social creature at heart. So I wasn’t that surprised when he began to enjoy the water-distributing task despite himself.
Even if they didn’t necessarily like or trust us, the villagers had heard enough rumors about me and my friends by now that they were either impressed enough to want to see us in person or too afraid to refuse us entry to their homes. And once we entered and poured water into whatever vessels they had available, Willobee started barraging them with conversation.
“I am Willobee of Clan Benniwumporgan,” he always announced first, “and this is my valiant master, Qaar’endoth the Unvanquished, destroyer of the malevolent, defender of the innocent, and perpetual seducer of women.”
I tried to convince him to omit that last part, since I felt like it struck kind of the wrong tone in relation to my current objectives in the village, but then in the next few huts he just started using synonyms that were far more obscene, so I gave up and allowed it to become one of my epithets.
The villagers stared at me with various combinations of fascination, admiration, and fear, but Willobee himself attracted his own share of their attention. After all, they were simple farmers who had probably never seen anyone as expensively dressed as Willobee, apart from members of their baron’s household, or heard anyone as eloquently spoken, and with some of them, these factors elicited an air of deference that the gnome drank up as eagerly as honey mead. Others smiled and repressed laughter in response to his peculiar appearance, with his diminutive stature, round knobby features, glowing eyes, and lavender hair, and instead of becoming offended, Willobee seemed to interpret any traces of hilarity as signs that his presence inspired happiness.
He tried many different tactics to win over the villagers to our cause, with mixed results.
“Do you know who saved you from all the ghasts that tried to rise last night?” he asked one elderly couple. Neither of them were sick, but they had lost children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren to the plague over the course of the last month.
“Yes, of course,” the great-grandmother replied. “Hakmut protected us.”
“No, no, Hakmut is dead!” Willobee retorted indignantly. He pointed at me. “My brave master slew him. And all those ghasts too!”
The elderly woman burst into tears. “How could you say such a terrible thing? In spite of everything, I know Hakmut has not abandoned us.”
“Get out!” roared her even more elderly husband. “And take your diabolical water with you, you bloody heretics!”
With a burst of exertion that made me fear for his frail bones, he kicked over the wooden jug that we had just filled from our bucket for them and caused the water to spill across their dirt floor.
We beat a hasty retreat. I knew anything Willobee tried to say to repair their opinion of us would probably just inadvertently make matters worse, and if they became too upset, they looked like they might suffer spontaneous brain bleeds and die.
A few huts later, Willobee tried a similar line of conversation, but as soon as he asked the young father of a family with two healthy children and one sick baby whether they knew who had saved them from twenty-five ghasts, the father demanded, “Ghasts? What ghasts? Ed said there wouldn’t be no more ghasts as long as we let him carry on his desecratin’ tactics!”
“Er, well, Ed helped us put them down, so they wouldn’t have a chance to harm any of you,” Willobee croaked as he realized he had miscalculated. Ed and Willobee still weren’t each other’s favorite people after their disastrous first meeting, but the gnome respected the fact that Ed was working as a member of our team for now, and I knew he hadn’t had any intention of turning Ferndale against one of our only two village allies.
“So they rose again?” the father snarled. “Never again, Ed promised, and we let him take the bodies! Instead of giving them proper burials! In violation of Hakmut’s law! All so there wouldn’t be no more ghasts. And now you’re telling me they coulda come knocking at my door last night, and I would’ve opened it thinking it must be a human, since Ed swore no more ghasts? That lying pox-cursed bastard! I’ll have his head.”
“Carl, there was no ghast attack last night,” his wife tried to calm him down. “We’re all safe. You’ll wake Rosie if you keep shouting, and this is the first peaceful sleep she’s had in days.” Tears ran down the woman’s gaunt face as she gazed down on the pustuled infant in her cradle.
But those unfortunate incidents were in the minority. For the most part, the villagers were too shy to speak much at all to us beyond one or two-word answers to our questions, and they tended to address both of us as “my lord.” Willobee was dressed like a lord, albeit an unusually short and eccentric one, but I certainly was not in my scuffed and torn leather uniform, so I guessed they must either believe I was a god, or some kind of crazy warrior nobleman.
Almost everyone thanked us for the water, and most of them did not object to staying in their huts once they understood that we would be bringing them food and whatever else their families needed. Some of them, the women especially, even smiled at us. I knew this village had been under the sway of Father Norrell for a while, but I didn’t think it would be hard to show them that I would treat them much better than their former god and his priest had.
Right after Willobee and I visited the last of the huts, a black cat ran across our path, pounced on a rat that I hadn’t noticed in the shadow of a hut’s wall, and tore its head off. As I noticed that the rat’s headless body was balding and pustuled like that of the one we had found in the well, I decided that this sighting was a very positive omen indeed. The cat glanced at me and Willobee without much interest, seemed to decide that we were not a threat, and turned its attention back to its meal. Ed and Maire hadn’t mentioned anything about cats catching the plague, or about plague-ridden animals coming back as ghasts, so I hoped we wouldn’t have to worry about those possibilities.
In the meantime, Lizzy and I had assembled all the bread ingredients we needed, either by scavenging through abandoned dwellings that she said did not smell like plague, or by soliciting contributions from villagers who had only one or two of the necessary ingredients in their possession, but not all of them, and promising to bring them bread in return. Not only could I not have located all the ingredients by smell without Lizzy, I also would never have been able to tell which were safe to eat.
Her only faults as a partner in this particular task were her tendency to get distracted by the scents of other food items unrelated to bread-baking, and her repeated requests whenever we discovered a cellar with home-brewed ale that had been missed by previous looters for us to “refresh our spirits a little” by drinking it together. Her mood was, all in all, inappropriately frisky under the circumstances, but I was as appreciative of her as I was annoyed by all the small ways in which she kept distracting me from the grim sights, smells, and consequences of the plague.
After both our respective tasks had been completed and the four of us reunited, I accompanied
Lizzy and Willobee to check up on the centaurs and start bringing back any medicines they had ready.
I also stayed behind to wait for Florenia, who arrived in the village soon after that with her stash of writing materials and greeted me with a kiss. Her tongue flicked mine, and she bit my lip as our mouths parted. I wasn’t going to let her fall asleep early tonight.
I showed Florenia the communal ovens where the village baking was done, and she tutted over all the ways in which their clay construction was inferior to that of the ovens at Nillibet’s temple. She admitted that she had no idea how they compared to the ovens at her father’s ducal palace, since she had never stepped foot in any kitchen until she was forced into the life of a vestal.
“All right, but will they function?” I asked. “Can you use them to bake bread, if I fire them for you?”
She laughed and replied, “Qaar’endoth, I can fire them myself. The elder vestals forced me to get my hands sooty first thing when I got to Nillibet’s temple.”
I went and fetched the driest wood that I could find among the nearest trees, and then Florenia and I fired both ovens together.
Then we washed our hands using the lye soap that Lizzy and I had found during our search for bread ingredients, and the ex-vestal proceeded to instruct me in the finer points of the art of baking bread. As Florenia corrected me on the order in which I added ingredients, or the proportions in which I combined them, or the speed and amount of force with which I mixed or kneaded them, I began to feel a lot like the way I had when Elodette was coaching me in archery. Except of course that unlike the stern centaur, Florenia was sweet, patient, and highly physically affectionate. Also, I had to admit that I wasn’t quite as committed to improving my baking skills as I was to improving my archery skills. But I tried hard to be a useful baking assistant to Florenia this once and to help her produce results that would be palatable to the people of Ferndale.
“Nillibet’s vestals were wrong about a lot of things, but they did teach me a few things,” she remarked. “And one of them was that giving strangers something truly delicious to eat is a much surer way to make friends of them than any number of flowery words.”
“… Does rye bread qualify as ‘something truly delicious’?” I asked hopefully.
“According to Nillibet’s vestals, or anyone who would be deemed worthy of dining at my father’s table?” Florenia replied. “No. Not even close. It would be used as a trencher. But it’s all these people have, and I guarantee you I can bake superior loaves to theirs with the same ingredients.”
When we had finished shaping our first batch of loaves, we cleared out all the kindling from the ovens, slid the lumps of dough into the heated spaces left behind, and covered the openings with the bricks that were kept by the ovens for that purpose.
As the bread baked, Florenia took out a stack of broad, flat leaves, a couple of sharpened quills, and dark berry juice in a stoppered vial from Elodette’s packs. Together we started compiling a list of all the inhabitants of Ferndale, grouped by hut, and marked as either healthy, which was a relative term around here, infected with the plague, or deceased. Ferndale had exactly thirty-nine huts, but only about thirty of them were still occupied. As best as I could remember, I provided Florenia with the names and approximate ages of the villagers I had met yesterday and that morning as well as their health statuses. I didn’t know what information might end up being relevant later. Besides, even if the plague didn’t follow any notable demographic patterns, people tended to like and trust you more if you showed them that you cared enough to remember their names. While Florenia transcribed my report, I dipped another of her quills and used it to start sketching a map of the village.
While we were occupied in that way, Lizzy, Willobee, and I returned from the centaurs’ makeshift pharmacy bearing cauldrons of bone broth and sneezeweed tea. By the time we were done passing it out to the sick, Florenia’s loaves of superior rye bread had finished baking. The she-wolf, the gnome, and I started handing those out next, while I helped Florenia fire up the ovens again for the next batch.
Once we had provided every family with a loaf, my team paused in our labors for a midday meal together. Florenia’s bread was indeed the most delicious I had ever tasted. Although the available grain had made it coarser than the fine white bread I was accustomed to eating at the temple, I found that I actually enjoyed the hearty texture. But maybe that was just because it was fresh and warm, and I hadn’t eaten any bread that wasn’t stale since the inn where Willobee had won Ilandere at the gambling table.
“After this, I shall hunt some more game for the villagers while the Princess continues making broth and tea on her own,” Elodette announced.
“Don’t these woods belong to the baron?” Florenia asked. “I know we’ve hunted in them a few times for ourselves, but wouldn’t it be a lot more noticeable if we started taking enough game to feed an entire village?”
I hadn’t thought of that at all. I didn’t know very much about how secular land ownership laws worked. All I had known was that my temple and the surrounding lands belonged to Qaar’endoth. I’d never heard of anyone outside of the order attempting to hunt there, but I guess it was true that that probably wouldn’t have turned out well for the poacher.
“We’ll just chuck all the bones and incriminating bits in the pit with the corpses and dissolve them with barf,” Lizzy said. “That’s how the sheriffs always get you, by the leftover animal bits. Weren’t never a problem for me and my crews as long as they didn’t come for us before dark anyway.”
“How can a human own an animal that he has neither tamed nor killed?” Elodette demanded. “That doesn’t make any sense. The deer in these woods, they wouldn’t recognize Lord Kiernan if they saw him, would they? And he wouldn’t recognize an individual among their number?”
“Be that as it may, we’ll do it Lizzy’s way to avoid any unnecessary quarrels with the baron,” I decided. “Thanks for volunteering to help get the villagers more nourishment, Elodette.”
“The other way the sheriffs could get you is if your neighbors ratted you out,” Lizzy continued. “So you’d better let me deliver the steaks. I’ll make sure these farmers understand that it wouldn’t bother me none to make steaks of them, pox or no, if they got it into their thick skulls to sing a song to the baron.”
“No, no,” I said quickly. “They need to be terrorized out of interacting with each other and catching the plague or spreading it to others. They don’t need to be terrorized out of enjoying perfectly good steak. Just tell them that if the baron finds out and gets upset, send him to me, and we’ll sort it out.”
“Oh, yes, Qaar’endoth,” Florenia purred. “You should kill the baron and claim his lands. You would be a much worthier ruler.”
“What?” I sputtered. “No! That’s not what I meant. That’s not what I’m trying to do here. I don’t have any problem with Lord Kiernan.”
“Hmm, all right, I suppose a minor barony with only two villages would be beneath you,” Florenia conceded. “But it’s not like you’d have to just stop at the one. This wouldn’t be your permanent seat. You could install a vassal here and then continue your quest for world domination. I would rather enjoy being a queen.”
“Ahhh, my goal isn’t really world dom--”
“Just consider it, my love,” she interrupted. “The nobility is so useless. The citizens of each country would flourish under your divine leadership.”
I groaned. “Is that how aristocrats think about each other? That they are useless?”
“Well, you can continue to make copies of yourself, correct?” Florenia said as she raised an eyebrow.
“They aren’t copies,” I corrected. “They are me. They are extensions of my mind and body.”
“Yes, even better,” she cooed. “Then you could rule over every town, city, and kingdom. Would that not be wonderful?”
“First, we should deal with this village,” I chuckled, but the beautiful woman’s words did make me think.
Despite the bloodthirsty impulses of my female companions, the rest of the day went relatively smoothly. I lost count of how many trips both my selves made back and forth between Ilandere’s medicine station, which also slowly included Elodette’s steak-roasting station, Florenia’s oven station, the north well, the burial pit, and the thirty occupied huts. Lizzy and Willobee followed mostly the same routes I did, but Willobee also returned to Hakmut’s temple periodically to care for his beloved ponies.
By evening, people were already responding to our knocks at their doors more promptly and with warmer greetings. They had started to associate us with food, water, and medicine as well as with engaging conversation, pretty faces, and a distraction from their woes. And I hoped that soon, they would also come to associate us with the recovery of health.
When my friends and I retired to the blue-painted temple to sleep, we first conferred and agreed on numbers. We believed that there were one hundred and four villagers still living in Ferndale, and Lizzy, whose opinion I trusted most on this particular point, declared that of those hundred and four, nineteen were infected with the plague.
“I can morph now if I want to,” Lizzy announced once we had reviewed the numbers and our plans for tomorrow. “So, should we go patrol for ghasts, Vander?”
“Good idea,” I agreed, and one of my bodies left with the wolf-girl while the other stayed behind to watch over Florenia, Willobee, the centaurs, and the ponies.
Lizzy and I strolled down the dim paths of Ferndale leading between its huts. There wasn’t another soul in sight. Everything seemed quiet and still. It would have seemed like a peaceful village, at least for someone who had not witnessed the events of the last two days.
Even my she-wolf was uncharacteristically quiet as she tuned in all her senses to our surroundings. I had expected her to morph before we left, as she usually did at night, but instead she chose to stay human. I didn’t mind that one bit. There was just enough moonlight to motivate me to fall a step behind her and watch the sway of her hips and the swish of her tail and think about all the barely hidden contents of her surcoat. After about fifteen minutes of companionable silence, when the sky had already darkened past the pitch that it had been when the ghasts started climbing out of their grave the previous night, Lizzy finally spoke.
