Girl in the Bearskin

by C. L. Stone

  They freed his hands. Men surrounded him with blades pointed at his back, just in case.

  Thorne backed off of the door, and took a running start at it. With a strong boot, he hit just the right corner of the door.

  A click sounded along the edge. The door swung partially open.

  A tendril of smoke escaped the room, curling out toward us.

  A voice spoke, echoing in the cavern.

  “Who frees me?” it said, although the voice sounded like it came from several people at the same time, all speaking at once.

  Some men dropped their swords and ran. Some stayed, but their blades shook.

  Captain held on to me, and put me in front, like a shield. “You first,” he said.

  Cowards. All of them.

  I swallowed, trying not to look afraid myself. It wasn’t fear for my life. Only that I suspected Benzo was truly ugly.

  BENZO

  Captain had only two men follow us, and they brought Thorne between them. The rest were left to guard the cave entrance.

  The cave beyond the door dripped with moisture. A few dozen feet in, it widened up into a large cavern.

  At the very center was Benzo.

  He was as wild as Thorne had said, with several eyes around his face, multiple mouths, and he’d added a belly since Thorne had seen him.

  His multiple legs lifted the mass, turning, constantly moving in a circle, perhaps so all the eyes covering his head could see.

  Mouths licked the lips they were attached to. Noses sniffed the air. “Fresh,” one mouth said.

  “Dwarf,” another cried out.

  “Human,” another.

  Captain nudged me in the back, and I sensed the blade was being pushed through the cloak. He called out. “You’re Benzo? You’re the demon?”

  “We are,” the mouths said at the same time, some screaming, some whispering. It stood taller on its longest legs. “I am Benzo. You’ve freed me.”

  “I came to make a deal,” Captain said.

  “They all do.”

  My heart was beating quickly. I looked over at Thorne.

  He seemed to be staring at something else, something beyond Benzo.

  I followed his gaze, looking toward a corner in the cavern.

  A ledge. On it stood two people, clustered together.

  Watching us.

  I was trying to see how they were, their faces masked in shadow. Had they been trapped in here with Benzo?

  But suddenly, one of them glowed.

  Firefly light. It flickered once and then went out.

  My heart lifted, and as it did, I stepped forward.

  He was here! Who was with him? I couldn’t see his face, but I knew the glow.

  As I moved, Captain pulled me back, holding the knife to me. “I wish to make a deal,” he said. “The hull of my ship, the Faded. I want you to fill it with gold.”

  Benzo laughed. The echo of it coming from so many mouths hurting my ears. I covered them with my hands.

  “Always for the gold,” Benzo said. “What will you give me in return?”

  He shoved me forward. “I’ll give you her.”

  Thorne cursed out at him. “No!”

  The firefly glow at the top of the cavern illuminated again, brightening the whole room.

  Because of it, I wasn’t afraid. I spoke calmly.

  “I’ll give you a better deal,” I said.

  Benzo tilted one of its many heads attached to his forms. And then spun again on those legs, to look at me at all angles. “Do offer.”

  “Don’t do it, Adelina!” Thorne said. “It’s always a trick with him.”

  The men pushed him to the ground, and Captain pulled me closer to him.

  “What do you mean, trick?” he asked Thorne, keeping the knife at my back. “Tell me.”

  He grumbled and shook his head. “When I went to him before, I traded my beard for…bravery. The courage to fight in battle, like my fathers before me.” He lowered his head. “With the dwarves, I’d become a barkeep. I brewed beer and wine and I bedded women. Yet I heard the stories of our ancestors the other dwarves spoke about at my bar and thought I wanted that. To be heroic and to fight. So when I found Benzo, I asked him for the courage to go seek adventure.”

  “So?” Captain said. “Looks like you got it. You came to us.”

  “But he never truly tells you where he gets it from,” he said and he lifted his head, glaring at the beast that was Benzo. “That’s the trick with demons. They don’t really own anything. They just swap things around. I became brave in battle, but I lost my courage to talk to women. Approaching one would terrify me until I was a heaping mess.”

  His confession had me remembering about his firespit. How he’d come across it…he knew exactly where it came from. He knew because he had made it.

  And him leaving…For a long time, we were okay because he saw me as nothing more than an army buddy.

  Not until I made him look at me as a woman. And then he left…

  Captain laughed, his chest heaving as he did. “What? Is that why you came to me and told me you had to leave?”

  “You knew?” I asked.

  “He told me not to tell you,” Captain said. “And when he left, I had someone ransack your tent to make it look like he stole your stuff. He said he was heading north, but I told you south. He didn’t want you to follow him.”

  “I went to find him,” Thorne said, motioning to Benzo.

  “This is all very boring to me,” Benzo said. “I don’t want to hear about old deals. I want to hear about new ones.”

  “You can’t trust him,” Thorne said. “If you tell him you want gold to fill your ship, he’ll sink it, and take it from someone else anyway. Which means Adelina can then hunt you down and kill you, because you took it from someone else to get it. And you’ll have a sunken ship to deal with. Apparently he also took away my courage to ask him for another deal myself. I can’t even ask now.”

  I hadn’t noticed before, but he was visibly shaking, as if trying to withstand being so near Benzo.

  “I see,” Captain said. He laughed and then shoved me to the ground to my knees. “You talked like you’re better than us. That you had some sort of moral obligation to end us for stealing? Your deal is no different.”

  I kept on my knees, looking at the floor. I said nothing to correct him. He still thought I’d dealt with Benzo.

  Benzo had taken away Wilhelm’s ability to interact with demons or anything else that might harm him. He hadn’t expected to run into someone like me, with a demon I wished to keep with me.

  Benzo was tricky. This meant treading carefully with any negotiation.

  Captain moved away from me, sitting on the ground and putting his head in a hand. “Let me think. I need to think…”

  “What of you, Adelina?” the beast before us said. It shifted around, sometimes lowering itself to rest on a dirt mound it had made for itself. It tilted its body forward, looming over me. “I know what you want. You want to be free of that cloak.”

  “No,” I said. “Not yet.”

  It laughed. “You think so? Then what?”

  “I want you to reverse what you did to Thorne,” I said.

  “No, Adelina,” Thorne said.

  The men holding him shook him, but he fought them. There were only two. But they had the blades so he only just managed to keep upright.

  “Let him go,” Captain said. “He’s not going anywhere. The men outside will capture him if he tries to run off.”

  The men reluctantly let him go, one of them backed away to the door as if to guard it.

  Thorne stood beside me. “Don’t negotiate with him.”

  “I also want the curse lifted from Wilhelm,” I said, ignoring him to look at Benzo. “Give him back his eye.”

  Benzo tilted its body at a different angle, turning its bulk to look at me with different eyes. “I don’t give back,” he said. “A deal’s a deal. But I can…fix them. I can return them to what they were before
. Just not fully whole, you understand.”

  I sucked in a breath and then nodded. “Right. Then I want…” I used my words carefully here. “I want Thorne and Wilhelm to be as they were before you made the deal, but you keep what they gave you. Keep Thorne’s beard. Keep Wilhelm’s sight. Just remove the curses you put on them.”

  “In exchange for what?”

  I looked at Thorne. He was shaking his head rapidly. “Don’t. Please…”

  “Trust me,” I whispered.

  The firefly light along the edge glowed bright, more than before. The light distracted me. I didn’t understand what they were doing up there. And why was he signaling to me?

  But the heavy bearskin around my neck warmed. I looked down, noting it to be glowing.

  It all came to me.

  “I’ll trade you the cloak,” I said, swallowing, my feelings overwhelming me. “And you know what it can do.”

  Benzo came closer, until what looked like a woman’s face was presented to me. She spoke. “You know what it means to give it away?”

  “It means you can give Captain what he wants,” I said. “You can give him the cloak. Without me coming after him, because the gold…” I wasn’t sure of this part. “It wasn’t stolen, was it?”

  The head shook. I wondered if this was Benzo’s original face. “No,” she said. “We’ve plenty in our realm. He just brings it to this one. I don’t always do that. I’m a little lazy. It’s harder to do.”

  “So we have a deal? No tricks?”

  She smirked at me and then turned to Captain. “You wish to be rich for the rest of your life, right?”

  “I do.”

  “Then you will wear the cloak,” she said. “You will not wash, or clean yourself. Nor cut your hair or nails. For the rest of your life. In exchange, you only need reach into your pocket and all the gold you could ever want will be yours.”

  “I just end up looking like her?” he asked. “That’s all?” He laughed and then nodded. “Hell yes. I’ll take it.”

  “If you ever take it off, you’ll die,” Benzo said. “In exchange, when you’re dead, I’ll claim every part of you. Your whole body.”

  “Right,” Captain said.

  He was willing to give his body after his life ended for all the gold, and also to always be dirty.

  He’d no idea what he was asking for. But I was willing to be rid of the cloak and the gold and let him discover his fate now.

  Benzo turned back to me. One of the limbs came out from her, a gnarly old man’s hand. “Do we have a deal?”

  I shook.

  A green glow overtook the entire cave, the firefly light expanding beyond the ledge where I’d suspected Shaytan to be.

  It blinded me.

  When I could see again, Shaytan was in front of me, beaming.

  “You kept your part of the deal,” he said. “You did very well.”

  I blinked rapidly. The cloak on my shoulders had gone. Beside me was Captain, and he wore it. I hadn’t seen how caked with mud, the sticks, the growing grass and moss along the back. I’d been a walking hill.

  The weight off my shoulders was surreal. It was like I was floating.

  Captain reached into his pocket, pulling out the gold inside. “Yes!” he said. He pulled out more and then again. When he realized what he had, he shouted with glee. He called out to his men in the cavern. “Let’s get out of here!”

  They left. Thorne joined me, brushing at his face and then looking at his hands. No beard at all.

  But he looked at me.

  He looked at my face.

  I was still dirty. My hair was still matted to my head.

  He reached out to me, holding my cheeks.

  And he kissed me. Just once.

  He backed off, his eyes closed, and he sighed. “I’ve not felt a woman’s lips since…” He stopped himself and opened his eyes to look at me. “I’ve dreamed of doing that since I first met you. Only I ignored it while we were in the army…until I couldn’t ignore my feelings any longer.”

  I sighed and nodded. The well I’d felt in my heart before, it had been repairing itself since the ship. With his kiss, he filled it.

  And with Shaytan near me, he made it clean and fresh and overwhelming.

  There was an echo of rocks falling from the ledge of the cavern.

  “Hey!” Wilhelm said, waving down to us.

  Shaytan laughed and rolled his eyes. “Maybe I should help him down.”

  “Can you?”

  “Of course,” he said and snapped his fingers.

  Instantly, Wilhelm was floating down to us. Once he was on solid ground, he could walk again, and he limped toward me.

  I went to him. He was as thin as ever. His one good eye went to my face. He moved as quick as he could to encircle me in his arms.

  His strong embrace filled me. “I can’t believe…how did you end up here?” I asked him.

  “I can’t believe you found me,” he said. He backed up and looked beside me. His eyebrows went up curiously. “Are you…are you Shaytan?”

  “The one,” he said, bowing his head once.

  “You were with me?” Wilhelm asked him. “This whole time?”

  “I followed Klaus for a bit,” Shaytan said. “I guided him to making good choices for investments. He’s doing well now. He had to get over his father trying to tell him what to do, but he managed pretty well with the gold he was left with. After that, I went to find you.”

  “When I couldn’t find the men that had ran off,” Wilhelm said, turning to me, “I went to find Benzo. I found it in the cave, but…I couldn’t see…” He turned now, looking over at the looming beast.

  Benzo had pulled away from us, resting on its mound. “You said you didn’t want to. I only gave you what you wanted.”

  “Right. I couldn’t see you anyway. Only I became trapped behind the door. Yet somehow I always found food and water to survive. Well, that’s done now.” Wilhelm turned to Shaytan. “I didn’t realize you were here.”

  “I thought it better to go after you once you changed course and headed to find Benzo.” Shaytan scratched at his chin. “I knew Adelina could take care of herself. But there wasn’t much I could do once the dwarves trapped us all in here. It was all I could do to stay and make sure you were fed. Until someone else came to make a deal and free us.”

  I was still feeling like I was floating where I stood. I wiped at my face, at some dirt, and brushed it away. I looked to Shaytan. “I guess I broke my deal,” I said. “Do you have to kill me now?”

  Thorne growled and stood in front of me. “What’s this?”

  “That’s right,” Wilhelm said and then looked angry. “Adelina, why did you…”

  “Don’t panic, don’t…stop,” Shaytan said. “She didn’t lose the bet. She’s a week out of seven years now.” He rolled his eyes. “It’s not my fault she can’t keep track of time. All she did was give up the thing she’d won out of the bet. The cloak with all its gold.”

  I looked at my hands. My dirty hands. I felt my body, my chest. “My soul. I keep it?”

  “You can. I mean, if you want to.”

  I laughed. I shook my head, the hair on my body heavy.

  Seven years.

  I did it.

  I was free.

  Returned

  The capital was overcast with low hanging clouds, dark and threatening to burst at any moment. We approached it with a carriage, through town. The driver knew the way.

  We. Thorne. Wilhelm. Shaytan. Myself.

  Weeks before, on our journey south from the mountain cave where we left Benzo, Shaytan spent days with me at a river side.

  He cleaned my body, starting at my feet, working his way up. With a gentle cloth that he replaced often, he took care of every crevice.

  Thorne trimmed my nails, my toenails.

  Wilhelm chopped off my hair short. It was the only way to really get rid of all the matted hair atop my head.

  By the time I was completely clean, it was
like pounds of dirt and hair had been lifted from me. I was lighter than ever.

  It was a feeling not even Shaytan could give me. Glorious and bright. Every few seconds, when dirt would drift onto me, I felt it, and wiped it away.

  Thorne took one look at my clean face and he kissed me. Over and over.

  “That’s the face I remember,” he said. “Beautiful beyond words. Water to a dying man in a desert.”

  The well constantly refilled around him. And with Shaytan and Wilhelm reunited with me, I’d felt more filled than ever.

  We were on our way to the city within a couple of weeks. We had to get to a town, first. Shaytan managed to secure a carriage for all of us back to the capital.

  “Are you sure you want to go back for him?” Shaytan asked me one night.

  Thorne and Wilhelm slept in another room, just for tonight. Shaytan stayed with me. Now, while we traveled together, Shaytan revealed himself to not just them, but also people around us. He acted as our servant at times, ordering us food and making arrangements.

  Shaytan lowered himself next to me in the bed I was resting in. I was luxuriating in sheets, feeling them with clean skin. It was titillating.

  “Klaus won’t know if you’re dead or alive,” he said. “You don’t have to go.”

  “I wish to,” I said. “I…” I didn’t want to say it out loud.

  “You miss him.” Shaytan rolled his eyes. “I know. But we’ve already got Thorne and Wilhelm. One more…”

  “Shouldn’t matter,” I said. “Does it?”

  Shaytan grunted.

  “Who’s being selfish now?”

  “You are,” he said and then rolled over and touched my nose briefly. “But I’ll tolerate it. For now.”

  I blinked at him, and then sat up. “Wait, I fulfilled my end of the deal. I got Wilhelm out from under his curse.”

  “So?”

  “So don’t I get your…power?”

  “Of course you do. You’ve been using it ever since you’ve gotten clean. Only on yourself.”

  A warmth spread through my body, something I wasn’t expecting. “How…how do I?”

  “You only need to feel it,” he said. “You feel the sensation you want to feel. In your mind. A spring day, naked in a cool pool, warm by a fire. Let it illuminate inside of you.”