by Jon Hollins
“So what do we do?”
And then, all of a sudden, there truly was joy in Firkin’s smile. Will felt his stomach swelling and getting light, and he felt the sun once more, as he leaned back against the apple tree.
“That’s why I like you, Willett Fallows,” said Firkin. He pulled out the flask he always carried with him and took a quick tug from it. “Always thinking right. And, no, I don’t think we can kill old Mattrax up in his fortress, but I know what I’d like to do.”
“What?” Will was all ears.
Firkin grinned as broad as the horizon. “Why, young Will, I’d like to steal from him.” He leaned in close. “And I know exactly how to do it.”
6
Worst-Laid Plans
The whole memory flashed through Will in an instant. Balur spoke and a moment later he had the taste of fresh apple in his mouth. And then, a moment after that, he tasted all the ashes of the broken promises that had come on that moment’s heels.
He looked over at Firkin, hunched over, staring at the fire, eyes and mind lost. And he felt anger, a clenched fist in his gut. It was another new experience, this rage that lurked inside him.
“Oh,” he said, turning to Balur, with a degree of aggression that the lizard man’s size should have dissuaded. “It’s that simple is it? Just take the gold from Mattrax. From a dragon in, wait… what did I say again? Oh yes, an entire fortress full of guards! Because that’s the first time anyone in Kondorra has looked at their shitty life and said, ‘Wouldn’t life be better if we just took all the gold from the dragons?’ Because not one evening has been spent in a tavern fantasizing about just that thing. Because we’ve all had better things to do… Actually I take that back. We have had better things to do. We call them ‘not being killed by a dragon.’ It’s a fun way we like to spend our lives round here.”
Balur curled back his lips and revealed his teeth for a moment. Will felt his stomach try to bore into the ground beneath him. “Be being a touchy little fucker, aren’t we?” the lizard man said.
Will swallowed, breathed, and looked at Lette in the faint hope of support. “It’s been a rough day,” he managed to get out.
“Well,” said Lette, looking at Balur, “if we’ve lost the fucking purse, and no one here has the coin to hire us, then we’ll have to find a mark or move on.”
Balur arched… Will wasn’t quite sure what it was. The bony ridge that stood in for his eyebrow, he supposed. “There is being no more baking for you, then?” he said, equal parts arch and nonsensical as far as Will could tell.
“Oh shut up and give me the flask.” Lette reached out and Balur tossed the thing over to her. She took a swig, and smacked her lips. She was graceful, in a way, Will thought. Not the way that courtesan’s were in the stories the tinkerman told down at old Cornwall’s tavern. The grace in stories had less… brutality to it. Still, Lette’s was a grace of sorts.
“You’d not be denying a man a wee sip of the nectar now, would you?” said Firkin, a wheedling edge sneaking into his voice, eyes large, round, and fixed on the flask. “Not just because he called all your mothers whores?” He smiled and showed the scattered remnants of his teeth.
“When did you…?” Will started.
“A man can mutter, can’t he?” yelled Firkin. Then he turned to Lette, stretched out his hands. “Please,” he implored. “I need it to live.”
Lette seemed unconvinced and glanced at Will. “Noisy drunk or quiet drunk?”
Will grimaced. He would like to give her good news at some point. “Pretty much just this all the time.”
Lette rolled her eyes and passed the flask.
“Hey,” Balur objected.
Lette waved him away. “There’s plenty for everyone.”
A faint glugging sound came from Firkin as he upended the flask. They watched him pour. When the growl from Balur began to make the cave’s rock floor vibrate, Will laid a hand on Firkin’s arm.
“Maybe—”
“No!” Firkin screamed. Alcohol sprayed across Will’s face, into the flames, where it hissed and spat. “The fire!” he went on screaming. “In my belly. My balls, man. I need it in my balls! I need the fire. I am the flame! I burn! In my balls!”
He hiccupped loudly, blinked twice at Will, went to take another swig, and collapsed backward. The only part of the performance that shocked Will was that he managed to keep the flask upright the whole way down.
Will plucked the drink out of the old farmhand’s fingers. Firkin started to snore. Tentatively Will held it out to Balur, who snatched it back with a sour expression. Then he looked at Firkin. “Least he is being quiet. Probably is being worth the trade-off.”
Quirk was watching all of this with a look of slight confusion. This was, Will gathered, not exactly how things went in the halls of academia. She shifted her weight and he half-expected her to get up and leave, but she simply leaned forward, looking back and forth between Lette and Balur.
“You wouldn’t seriously propose,” she said, “to steal from a dragon’s lair?” She paused, seemed to consider the corpses spread around them. “Would you?”
Lette and Balur exchanged a glance.
“I am not knowing,” Balur said finally, voice grating out. “I have been doing stupider things.”
Lette snorted. “Speak for yourself.”
Will’s brow furrowed. “Trust me, there’s nothing you could have done that is stupider than trying to rob a dragon.”
Balur’s mouth opened.
“Don’t you fucking dare.” Lette’s tongue lashed out as quick as one of her knives.
Balur rolled his shoulder in a tectonic shrug.
“It would be amazing to see a dragon actually guarding his hoard,” said Quirk with what Will could only call an inappropriately dreamy tone. “It’s very rarely been seen.” She smiled ruefully. “I suppose it’s because you’re eaten almost immediately after you see it.” She nodded to herself. “That does seem far more likely now that I know how big they are. Even if flight doesn’t.” She looked up at Will. “You’re absolutely sure they fly?”
Will looked to the others for support. “You study dragons for a living and you’re not entirely sure if they fly?” he asked.
“Dragons don’t live in Tamathia any more.” Quirk sounded distinctly huffy at this point. “The last one was killed before the Thirsk uprising ten generations back.”
“Killed?” At first Will thought he must have misheard her. But then she nodded.
Will reeled. That simple up-down movement of Quirk’s head was like a slap in the face. For all his life the impossibility of killing a dragon had been a given. Dragons were as much a part of the landscape as the mountains, as the earth beneath his feet. They were everlasting, immovable. The idea of one dying from old age was almost beyond his comprehension. But killed? That was even more insane than the idea of robbing one.
“How?” he asked. “Where?” Even the idea of dragons beyond Kondorra’s borders was lunatic.
“Oh,” said Quirk, without any acknowledgment of the violence she was doing to his worldview. “This was back in Tamathia around two hundred fifty years ago. You see, according to the records I’ve found, dragons used to be far more common in Avarra. Clashes between human settlements and dragons were quite common. But with our advancing technology we apparently got quite good at killing them. The assumption was we’d killed them off, up until the Kondorran incursion thirty years ago.”
Will was reduced to blinking. Killed them off? How come no one had ever mentioned this to him growing up?
“We still have accounts of the battles,” she went on. “They would go out with…” She trailed off, stared into space. “Gods, I always thought they had the numbers wrong. But groups of about fifteen hundred or so. A small army, I suppose. A thousand archers—five hundred for each wing. Arrows couldn’t penetrate the scales on the body, but the leather of the wings was vulnerable to them. Then there would be two hundred pikemen positioned to swipe at its guts when it came
in to attack. They would just have to stand in front of the fire and hope they weren’t too savagely burned when it was their turn to finally poke at the dragon’s guts. Horrific losses, of course. But they went mad for that sort of thing back then. Anyway, once they finally got the dragon on the ground, there were three hundred axe men to finish the job.” She shook her head. “They called it sport. A massacre isn’t a sport in my opinion.” She hung her head sadly.
“I think,” Will said, “that I would like to live in Tamathia.” He spoke with the same half-dreaming tone as Quirk had when she talked about live dragons.
Lette grunted. “You’ve got dragons. They’ve got gods manifesting. That’s why uprisings are so common. Knole and Cois showed up a decade or so ago, and there was a civil war. Took them years to build back up. Made them very insular.” She rubbed the back of her neck. “You have to buy your way in.”
“Another reason to rob that dragon,” Balur rumbled.
Having one more dream kicked out from under him was not what Will needed right at that moment. He landed back in reality, hard. “It’s impossible to steal from a dragon,” he snapped. Then he rounded on Quirk. “Or kill one. They’re like shit. No one wants it but everyone’s stuck with it.”
Balur regarded him coldly. “Can steal from anyone.”
Will’s bitter laugh was back. “Really?” he said. “Really?” He suddenly wanted to strip Balur of his arrogant ignorance. “All right then. Mattrax lives in a cave up in the mountains. And around the whole cave… I mentioned the fortress full of guards didn’t I? So the gold is in the cave. And so is Mattrax. All day. All night. Guarding it. Along with the guards. He leaves only once each day, to go and stretch for an hour and perform his ablutions on some poor unsuspecting bastard like me.”
Balur looked amused. “So—” he started.
“No.” Will cut him off. “You don’t. Because the cave’s entrance has a massive portcullis over it. An ironmonger’s wet dream. The whole thing operates on a pressure plate. And about the only thing big enough to trip the mechanism is the gods-hexed dragon you’re trying to steal from.”
Lette’s eyes were narrowed. Will could see the gears working behind them. Some sort of professional pride was at stake. “Wait,” she said, “it’s built on a castle. The guards must…” She trailed off looking at Will expectantly.
“Sure.” Will nodded, the bitter bite of his words still souring his mouth. “The guards have an entrance to the cave beyond just the portcullis. They use it to go into the cave once a day with a great big juicy oxen for Mattrax to snack on. But where is that entrance? Or do you people honestly keep forgetting about this giant, guard-filled fortress I keep mentioning? Because I keep on mentioning it.”
Balur was looking at him, a considering expression on his face. “How are you knowing so much about this cave and this fortress? Have you been casing it?”
Will’s eyes slipped to Firkin again. He tasted a mouthful of apples and ash… Suddenly he just wanted the conversation to be over.
“Casing it?” Will laughed awkwardly. “I’m a farmer. I told you, everybody around here wants to steal from Mattrax. Everybody talks about it. Everybody knows. Mattrax doesn’t care who knows these sorts of things. Because it doesn’t matter. He’s impregnable.” He spat at the fire. The phlegm—suffering the same fate as any hopes of robbing Mattrax—evaporated on impact.
Balur was still considering him. “You are telling me,” he said, “that everybody in this part of the land could be telling me that Mattrax is having a pressure plate to be operating his portcullis that is being keyed specifically to his weight? Every last one?”
He’d done it now. He’d let his anger—and, just maybe, his desire to impress Lette with his knowledge—get the better of him.
“Well,” he hedged. “Maybe not everyone.”
“Anyone?” Lette pressed.
“Well,” said Will again, trying to find a way to sidle out of the specifics. “I was told,” he managed. ”So, yes, someone else knew.”
“Who?”
This, Will thought, is why I can’t outsmart a pig. I never consider the next step in the chain of events.
Will chewed his bottom lip, then looked at the hairy, stinking man sleeping next to him. “Firkin,” he said finally.
Universally around the cave, eyes were narrowed.
“Him?” asked Lette and Quirk in harmony.
“Barph’s syphilitic ball sack,” said Balur.
“Yes, him,” said Will, defensive despite himself. “It was when I was a child. Before he”—he gestured vaguely with his hand—“took to drinking, I suppose.”
They all just stared at him. He sighed. He was going to have to go through it with them. Or at least some version of it. “This was back when I was a kid. We used to talk about it. Just a game or…” He shrugged, trying to shed the bitterness and the disappointment. “I don’t know what he thought it was. But it was all shit.” He looked down at Firkin. And still couldn’t quite manage with hate. Not quite with sorrow either. There was still too much nostalgia mixed in there with it all.
Another memory. This one with sharper edges than before. Sitting on his mattress, the curtain that gave him privacy from his parents pulled tightly closed. The paraphernalia of rebellion was laid out on the cot before him, scavenged from the farm and his mother’s kitchen. He examined his treasures with intensity: a rusty old butter knife, the stub of a charcoal pencil, a scrap of wax paper, a fistful of sticks sharpened to points, a trowel—
Rustling behind him made him sweep up his sheets to hide everything, but when he turned around and saw his father peeking around the edge of the curtain he knew it was already too late. He’d been caught.
“Hey there, young’un,” said his father. “What have you got there?”
His father had a round, open face, sun-bleached hair, and hard, tan skin. To Will he seemed more enduring than the rocks in the hills, more powerful than any of the gods. Only his mother seemed to know more about the world.
Resistance was futile.
He explained slowly, in stops and starts. What it was. What it was for. “Firkin has a plan, Da,” he said finally. “A way to fight back. ’Cept not fighting like with fists. Like you told me not to. But like a way that’ll hurt the dragons without us getting hurt. He’s figured it all out. He has.” He tried to get his da to understand with the intensity of his emotion.
But his da smiled, that indulgent smile of a parent amused at his son’s foolishness. And Will seized up his trowel and wielded it defiantly, uncertain of what he could actually do with it, but desperate for a totem of his certainty, his defiance.
“He does, Da. He does.”
His father’s smile faltered, and he nodded his head, and sat down on the edge of Will’s bed. “How about you put that down and we talk about this?”
“He does, Da.” But Will put the trowel down. More than a little of him was glad he had not gotten into trouble for that.
“Firkin told you about the fighting when the dragons first came, did he?”
Will nodded fiercely.
“That was a scary time. A whole way of life changing. A whole way of life being ripped away from us. And we were all scared, and we all fought—”
Will might be six, but he could see where this was going. “I know he didn’t fight, Da. He told me.” His da was about to tell him about how Firkin was a coward, he knew. He was about to say Will shouldn’t put his trust in the man, but Will had listened to Firkin. They had talked about this as men. His da had no words to dissuade Will of what he knew of Firkin.
Will’s da nodded, slow and steady as the season’s ticking over. “Aye, lad. Do you know what he did do?”
Hesitantly, Will shook his head. Firkin had remained tight-lipped on this subject.
“Firkin didn’t go to the fields or the forests to fight, Will, that’s true enough. But he didn’t stand by. He didn’t run or hide. He wasn’t a coward. He was… The word people use is, strategist. He told us h
ow to fight, if you understand me. He was the one who knew where we should be. How we should get there. What we should do when we got the there. How best to achieve our goals. He knew things that no one else knew. And I still don’t know how. If he had other men and women who told him things. Sometimes he would go off and wander, and maybe then he found things out. I don’t know. But round in this part of the valley, he was the most important man in the fight.”
Will’s da put his arm around Will, pulled him close.
“We lost, Will,” he said, and there was a world of heartbreak in his voice, a sadness that at six years old Will could only just begin to understand. “That’s what all Firkin’s plans came to. Mattrax sitting up in his fortress sending his guards to take our money. And it’s not that they weren’t good plans, Will. They just weren’t good enough.”
And with those words, Will understood a little more about heartbreak. His da looked down, and understood, and he held Will a little tighter.
“I love Firkin like a brother, Will. I fought for him too back in the day. But the dragon war, our loss… that broke him a little Will. Like a plow that won’t give you a straight line.”
He looked down at Will, and his words died out. There were none left that could help.
Will looked around the cave, focused on Lette’s expectant face. And he wanted to please her, to tell her what she wanted to hear.
That’s probably what Firkin felt, he thought. But Firkin was passed out drunk on the floor. Firkin was a weak man. Will wouldn’t be like him.
“So,” he said, “because of everything I know, you’re probably thinking I know how it can be done, and you can use me to plan something.” He grinned at them without an ounce of mirth in his body. “Except, all my knowledge does is tell me that it can’t be done.”
There was a long pause after that. Will finally began to relax. Maybe he could salvage a decent night’s sleep, and plan out the rest of his life in the morning.
Then Balur looked over to Lette, and said, “What are you reckoning?”
