Fool's Gold

by Jon Hollins

  Balur snapped his gaze down to her. “What?”

  “Let him go, you gargantuan fucking idiot.”

  Balur curled his lip but did as he was told. Will landed, gasping, pawing at his bruised throat.

  “Why?” Balur growled. Whether he was asking for Will’s motives or hers, Lette wasn’t sure. Maybe Balur wasn’t either.

  “I didn’t claim it,” said Will, his voice sounding raw. “All I’ve done is tell people that it wasn’t me. I just found an eye you left on the ground. I was using it as a lantern. I didn’t even know what it was.”

  “The crowd,” Lette said, “did what crowds always do. They made a stupid assumption. And then someone did what people always do when crowds make stupid assumptions. They agreed with it, and took advantage of it.” That was, as far as Lette understood it, the entire principle of the political system.

  “Who?”

  Perhaps there was a little Fire Root left in Balur’s system. He was never at his best when he was monosyllabic.

  “Firkin,” she said reluctantly. If she didn’t give the name up now, it would just take up more time as Balur badgered her for it.

  “Then I am knowing who I must be killing next.”

  “No!” she snapped with more than a little vehemence. “He is surrounded by a crowd of a hundred or more, all of whom believe him completely.”

  “Then I will be killing all who are getting in my way,” Balur said, already turning.

  “No!” There was a shrillness in Lette’s voice that she regretted. But it stopped Balur. He turned, looked at her. “No,” she said again. “That’s not who we are… Not who I am anymore.”

  Balur stared at her. She saw disbelief. Disappointment. But she wanted to be a better person, not a weaker one. So she held his gaze.

  “We are tribe,” Balur growled.

  “Then our tribe is not killing a hundred innocents today.”

  Balur curled his lip. For a moment she thought it might come to blows. Analesian dominance patterns died hard. But then Balur shook his head, let his shoulders slump. “You are not being fun anymore.”

  Lette breathed. “We just need to get the gold and get gone from here,” she said.

  She flicked her gaze over to Will, checking that he was still on board. He was looking at her with a distinctly nervous expression. She arched an eyebrow.

  “I could go and tell them Balur killed Mattrax” he said quietly.

  She shook her head. “Shut up,” she told him, “and help me get rich.”

  Lette’s nerves tightened like bowstrings as they approached Mattrax’s cave. There was another crowd here. Not as big as Firkin’s, but big enough to keep her up at night if she had to cut through them to get to the gold.

  I’ll let Balur go in first, said the cold, calculating part of her mind. Shock and awe. Let him carve a path. They’ll start to flee downhill—the path of least resistance. I’ll cut them down just as they start to break. Five or six should do it. Women and children if I can. That paralyzes them, gives Balur more time to work. Then they flee backward, toward the mountain. I put a blade in anyone spilling off to the sides. Then we press them up against the rock, finish them. Less than a minute’s work.

  She half shook her head, half shuddered. She didn’t want to listen to that voice.

  It got you this far, she whispered back to herself.

  “Is that Quirk?” Will had stopped walking and stood squinting.

  Lette’s stomach did a slow gymnastic routine. Memories of fire and fear. The smell of cooking flesh in her nostrils. She looked over at Balur.

  “Wait,” she said. “Are you aroused right now?”

  Small purple frills had opened up along Balur’s neck, narrow vibrant lines of feathery color. Like a fish’s gills. Their display was involuntary, and only ever appeared when Balur was contemplating mating rituals.

  Balur brushed a hand at his neck, and failed to meet her eye.

  “No,” he blustered. “It is just being… I am just waking up. This is being the way I am in the morning. It is being nothing to do with nothing.” He looked away.

  She shook her head. “You sick bastard. You’re totally turned on by her body count, aren’t you?”

  Balur hesitated, then shrugged. “There were being a lot of torched bodies in that cave last night.”

  Lette grunted her disgust. Still, she was used to Balur’s depravities. A lot of his whores liked to share their stories with her. They seemed to think that some battle-scarred bond must now exist between them. She rather wished they wouldn’t.

  From the poorly stifled sounds of revulsion coming from behind her, it rather sounded like Will didn’t want to hear about the depravities either. She wondered what that was like—to still have innocence left to lose.

  “If you’re so hot and heavy for her,” she said to Balur, ignoring Will, “then why don’t you go in first, and make sure she’s feeling less murderous than last night?”

  “Murderous? Body count?” Will, it seemed, had gotten over the mental image Balur had summoned. “What are you talking about? Quirk wouldn’t even kill Ethel last night because she’s a pacifist. I think she’s treating the wounded up there.” He pointed. And, Lette saw now, the women and men were almost universally bandaged and hobbling.

  Lette turned and smiled. “Ah,” she said. “Yes. Well, you know how our thaumatobiologist has given up magic? How she’s moved on and made herself a better person?”

  Will nodded.

  “Yes,” Lette said. “So that was horseshit.”

  “She…” Will started.

  “Roasted a score of people alive?” Lette finished. “Yes, she did that.”

  “Oh fuck.”

  Balur cut in. “It was being like a firestorm in the night. Ribbons of fire were dancing about her.”

  “Keep it in your pants,” Lette told him. He brushed at his neck.

  “She’s treating the wounded,” Will repeated.

  “She probably wounded most of them herself.”

  “There must have been… I don’t know. Some sort of extenuating circumstances.”

  “Like her being a psychotic, magic-using arsonist and lying to us about it?” Will was cute and all, but it was possible to push the naïve thing too far.

  “How about we are going over there and just asking her?” Balur put in.

  “I told you to keep it in your pants.”

  “I think ‘just talking’ is pretty close to keeping it in your pants,” Will put in.

  Lette breathed. She had started to calculate whether she could stash Will’s body before the crowd noticed. She was not going to be that person.

  “Fine,” she said. “Let’s talk.”

  They pushed through the crowd. Quirk kept her head down as they approached, focused on the stitches she was putting in a young boy’s arm. Her fingers made short, precise movements. Strands of pig gut tightened, sealed fleshed together.

  “You don’t know a… ‘better way’ to help with that?” Lette asked without preamble. She and Balur loomed over the spot where she sat working. The young boy looked up at them. He was biting on a strap of leather while Quirk worked.

  Quirk didn’t look up. “I told you,” she said. “I’m reformed.”

  None of them said the word magic. None of them mentioned spells. The crowd hadn’t put it together yet. There was no need to help them along the way.

  “Reformed?” Lette allowed acid to etch the edges of her voice. “You were reformed last night?”

  Quirk cinched a stitch tight with a sharp jerk of her wrist. The boy winced, let out a slight moan. Quirk blew out, put a smile on her face.

  “Sorry,” she said to the boy. “That’s the last one, though. You go on to your mother. Tell her how brave you were.” She flicked a glance at Will. “As brave as the prophet himself.”

  The boy’s eyes widened along with his smile. He ran off, grinning.

  Will was looking about anxiously. “You’ve heard?” he asked Quirk quietly.


  “When it’s all someone will talk about despite the fact that you need to amputate his hand, then you work out that it’s important to a lot of people.”

  Will shook his head.

  “This is striking me,” Balur rumbled, “as being a fairly transparent attempt to change the subject.”

  The small grin that had graced Quirk’s face fled. She looked down at the ground. “I have more people to treat.”

  “Cauterizing wounds?” It was probable, Lette thought, that antagonizing someone who could cook you in your clothes was unwise, but… gods, she sat there so calmly, trying to pretend it hadn’t happened. She had lied, had killed. Lette would not be satisfied until there was some blood in the water.

  Yet when Quirk looked up, Lette was afraid she had cut too deep. Something flickered in the mage’s eyes. Something bright and dangerous.

  “What else would you have me do?” Quirk hissed, with the intensity of a flame. “I caused half these wounds. I cannot go back. I cannot undo them. I slipped. Sometimes I slip. Not often, but last night I did. So I can stand up, and say, Yes, it was me, I did this. And they will string me up and burn me, or something else more inventive but equally vile, and I shall die. Or I could keep my mouth shut and actually do some good healing the hurt.”

  Lette hesitated. There was some sense to the words.

  “That is being all well and good,” said Balur, “right up until you are doing it all over again.”

  Quirk nodded, short and savage. “You’re right. I should just end my life. A knife across the wrists is effective, I hear. Maybe I should find a ledge. Just let my past beat me. Just let the person I was win. Or maybe, if I’m going to do that, I should just torch you all. Watch you all burn.” She eyed Balur. “The meat would be peeling off your bones before you even got that hammer above your head.

  “Part of me wants to do that, you understand? Since I’ve met you, there’s been just a little piece of me that wants to know what you’d smell like if I cooked you.” She turned that slow, big-eyed stare on each of them in turn. “But I don’t. Because I’m better than that. Because I still have things to offer. Because I am holding on to the dream of who I could be.”

  Lette honestly felt bad for the woman. Her heart went out to her, in fact. They were alike in many ways. She had forgotten that somewhere along the way. Possibly when her hair was on fire the night before.

  However, of more immediate concern was the fact that Quirk’s hands were shaking and letting off smoke.

  “How close,” Will asked, “would you say you were to slipping right now?” He was stepping back as he spoke.

  Quirk clenched her fists. “Just let me tend to these people,” she said. “Just let me undo a little of the damage I’ve done.”

  Lette exchanged a glance with Balur. He shrugged.

  “So she is being sorry,” he said. “Plenty of murderers are being sorry. It is not stopping us from being the ones who are stringing them up from trees or from being the ones who are then hitting them until they are stopping moving.”

  Quirk was on her feet in an instant. Lette allowed blades to drop into both her palms even as the curse formed on her lips. Balur was widening his stance. Will was making a round O with his mouth. Firkin’s shrill voice was carrying thinly on the wind from where he preached. Sounds of laughter and pain were coming from the crowd, mingling in the air.

  “Lawl’s breath, it’s him! It’s really him!”

  A girl’s cry, breathy and excited, shot into the moment, ricocheted off several walls of inappropriateness, and struck Lette right in the frontal lobes.

  “Oh by the gods. Look at him!” Another girl. Just as breathy. Just as excited.

  Slowly, keeping her eyes on Quirk for as long as possible, Lette turned her head to look in the direction the voices had come.

  Charging, mouths wide, nostrils flared, pupils blazing, with all the energy and ferocity of a pack of wolves hurling themselves straight out of the mouth of the Hallows, two teenage girls flung themselves at Will.

  “You’re the prophet!” one babbled. “Like the actual prophet.”

  “Oh gods, he has his axe!” the other girl babbled. She reached out, touched the handle. She was fourteen, perhaps, black curly hair gathered up in two loose buns on either side of her head. She wore a bloodstained smock cut, in Lette’s opinion, far too low. Her friend filled out her smock to a lesser extent, but she had eyes the size of saucers, and they were fixed on Will’s own.

  Will, for his part, looked a lot like he had just stepped in something unpleasant while visiting a much-honored elderly relative—horrified but unsure of whether he could actually say anything.

  “Can I… Can I touch you?” said the one with her hair in buns.

  Lette watched the refusals form on Will’s lips but none of them made it into the audible realm. She glanced back at Quirk. The thaumatobiologist was watching the exchange with a mix of bafflement and disgust.

  “For the sake of the gods, Will,” Lette said, since obviously someone had to take hold of the moment, “tell her to get gone before her father finds you and accuses you of something indecent.”

  Too late.

  “’Ey up,” said a man approaching from farther down the slope of the mountainside. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing with my Maisy?” He was large, heavyset. There was fat on his gut, held in place by a tightly cinched apron, but his wrists were thick and his shoulders broad. He wore a flat cap on his head and an ill-advised mustache on his upper lip.

  Will flinched away from the girl, arms going wide, palms up. “I didn’t. I swear… It wasn’t… She… I mean not to suggest that she… Except… Well…”

  Lette grit her teeth. She was still holding her daggers. She had been trying so hard to be good. And she knew Balur would be no help. He was grinning too much.

  But then the girl’s father got a better look at Will. “Oh,” he said, and then again, more bashfully. “Oh it’s you. I, err, didn’t realize, your, erm… prophetness. Didn’t mean to get in the way. I mean.” He pulled his cap off his head, started to work it in his large hands. “If you’ve taken a shine to Maisy there, well she’s a fine girl. And if you, well… It would be an honor to me and my family if you wanted to… you know… with her.”

  Will’s hands, if anything, got farther apart and farther away from Maisy. The look of horror on his face hadn’t left. “She’s only fourteen,” he said. “Or…” He checked Maisy. “Thereabouts.”

  “Fourteen exact,” said the man, who looked not even slightly abashed. Rather it was a look of admiration on his face. He glanced at Maisy. “See that?” he said to her. “He knew your age right off.” He tapped his head, just next to his right eye. “Got the vision, he does. Just like the Voice says he do.”

  Lette rolled her eyes so hard she almost snapped her head from side to side. The girl couldn’t be more fourteen if she tried. That said, at this point neither could the farmer. He was still advancing on Will.

  “Would it… erm…” He worked the cap in his hands harder than ever. His broad cheeks blazed red. “Would it be okay if I touched you?”

  Will backed up fast, making inarticulate noises.

  Lette had had enough. “All right,” she said, stepping between Will and his admirers, “that’s enough creepy time for today. His prophetness needs a break from all your weird shit. He’s decreed you all fuck off for a bit before I shove my foot up your arse.”

  Beside her, Balur nodded. “Prophetic,” he whispered. She ignored him.

  The man, his daughter, and her friend all backed away slowly. The man attempted to bow, almost tripped over himself. Lette turned her back on him, put herself between the trio and Will.

  “This is only going to get worse,” she said, trying to put all the urgency she felt into her words. “Right up until the point when they realize that Firkin is full of shit. And then it’s going to get downright terrible. So let me repeat myself: We need to get some gold, get a wagon, and get the fuck out of here.” />
  Quirk looked up from where she was sitting. “You’re just going to abandon these people?”

  Lette felt her fists clench. Had these people never heard of haste? Balur had his faults, to be sure, but at least he was already moving toward the cave.

  “I am not going to just leave them. I am going to actively flee from them, and I am going to discourage anyone who wants to follow using the edge of my sword blade.”

  “But when the Dragon Consortium finds out what happened here, when they find out they were all here…” Quirk’s eyes were wide with shock. “You have accused me of killing these people…”

  “Yes,” Lette said. “Because you did.” She had been told tact was not her strong point. Personally she had never seen the need for it. The world was the way it was; you either accepted that or pretended it wasn’t until it put the knife in your gut and showed you exactly what color your spleen was. “But I did not lead these people up here last night. I did not even suggest doing it. I did not kill Mattrax. I did not fuck up my part of the plan in any way.” The smile on her face felt small, savage, and justified.

  “But they’ll be killed.”

  Lette nodded. “More than likely.”

  Will put a hand on her arm. “Wait. Is that true?”

  So pretty. So naïve. “What do you think the Dragon Consortium will do when they find out someone killed one of their members? Shrug, put it down to bad luck, and have another sweetmeat? Or come here raining down fire and vengeance so that nobody ever dares fuck with them again?”

  Balur snorted a laugh next to her. They all looked at him. “Sorry,” he said. “I am just thinking that there is probably being an underappreciation of sweetmeats among dragons. It is being inappropriate. I am being aware.”

  “We can’t just let this happen,” said Will. “We have to do something.”

  Lette decided to try to take the time to explain it simply once. Maybe then they could just move on to the fleeing bit. “How,” she said, “do you think we will manage that? We got incredibly lucky last night. The plan just about worked because we surprised Mattrax in his lair. And still many, many people from your village were hurt.” She swept her hand about them, at the injured and bandaged all around them. “Or they were killed,” she went on. “So how do you think it will go if one, or two, or three, or four members of the Consortium swoop over our heads, looking for trouble and revenge?”