“Happily,” said Clio. “Or tragically. With a kiss or a death scene.”
“There’s been enough death,” he muttered.
She stared meaningfully at him. “Well, then?”
Egg looked at her, a little excited. “Don’t move.”
“What?”
“Stand right there.” He pulled out his sketching pad and a scratchy pencil, sitting on the bed. “I want to draw you.”
“Egg,” she said impatiently, giving up on hints altogether. “I was hoping you wanted to kiss me.”
He glanced up and grinned at her, his pencil scratching across the page. “I know. And I do. I just want to draw you first.”
She rolled her eyes. “Fine. I can wait.” A thought occurred to her. “Are you drawing me as a hero or a villain?”
“Wait and see,” he promised.
As the noon light shone brightly over Cluft and Drak, a sheep took flight out of a window of the administration cottage, his purple wings pumping wildly. He wheeled around in the sky, baaing triumphantly, relishing the glory of flight and freedom.
A few minutes later, clouds passed in front of the sun. Thunder rumbled, and the clouds cracked open. Live salmon tumbled from the sky, spattering over the two cities along with cold, hard rain and the occasional slice of lemon.
In Drak, the population stared in absolute horror at the weather conditions that they were going to have to get used to.
In Cluft, students ran for cover, laughing and screaming. Mistress Brim emerged from the Mermaid Tower, armed with several wide nets and a recipe for salmon pie. Across the river, three picnickers sheltered under the pine tree. None of them had stabbed each other yet, which had to be a good sign.
Singespitter just kept flying, dodging the falling salmon with practiced ease, grinning all over his fleecy face. Things were as they should be. Even the weather was back to normal.
This was going to be a really great semester.
BOUNTY
A Mocklore Short Story Collection
Part I
Bounty Fenetre is not a bounty hunter
Hobgoblin Boots
When I was thirteen years old, my mother ran away from home. No one was surprised. She had always been the flighty type. I was old enough to take care of myself anyway, always running off somewhere on an adventure or a scrape. Truth is, I was hardly home at all and when she left our village it is entirely possible that she just forgot about me.
Or maybe it was me she was running away from.
In any case, I was prepared to go it alone. I’d been planning to Seek My Fortune at some stage, so why not now? There was this cute little chainmail number at the smithy’s which would suit me perfectly—well, it would once I figured out how to fix it so it bared my midriff. And boots, I was going to need some serious boots if I was going to make my way in the world. Yeah, I had it all sorted out.
Ma Fortuna had other ideas.
Everyone knows Ma Fortuna and no one ever argues with her. She wasn’t born in our village: she just turned up one day, married old ‘Ticker’ Triclover and started producing kids by the bucketful. In the year my mother left, Ma Fortuna was a recent widow and just about the most respectable person in the cosmos. There was no way she was going to let a thirteen year old girl make her own way in the world—not without a good hot supper inside her, anyway. Minutes after the news of my mother’s departure spread through the village, Ma Fortuna was standing on my doorstep with a hot kettle, a handful of dusters and a look of extreme determination.
Before the tea was cold, I had somehow agreed to come and live with her family. Don’t ask me how it happened. I remember trying to explain what my plans were, but she just kept dusting things. The subject was closed.
So I was hustled with my few worldly belongings into the big, rambling house on the hill. I found myself in a kitchen teeming with the Triclover kids, ranging in ages from twelve to three years old. The one I was most wary of was Luco (Luc to his friends), Ma’s firstborn and the Triclover with the most right to protest me being dragged into his family.
We had always been on opposite sides of the playground, Luc and I. While I was causing havoc with the Void twins among the girls, he was kinging it over the boys. I had never been able to figure out what they saw in him, a skinny little nobody like that. What had he done to make himself leader of the pack?
That evening, with the Triclover kids crowding around to set the table, most of them jostling into me as if I was already one of the clan, I caught Luc looking at me. He had a funny little face, a long nose and very serious eyes. When he saw me staring, he smiled. Not the slow, strange smile of a boy discovering girls for the first time—I’d seen enough of those that year.
No, it was nice. He looked like he was considering the possibility of liking me—and suddenly I liked him right back.
–§–§–§–§–§–
My name is Bounty Fenetre—proof, if anything, of how flighty my mother was. Truthfully, it’s only a shortened version of the true horror she landed me with. The main benefit of losing my mother at the age of thirteen is that she isn’t around to blab my full name to anyone.
I was born in the Year of the Vampyre Aelves. A lot of kids were born that year. The Market Faire was cancelled due to union problems, and it became necessary to remind mortals why Mocklore held a Market Faire every year. It’s a tribute to the faerie folk of the OtherRealm—you know, the moonlight dimension, the unknown orchard, land of the fey—and when the Market Faire didn’t happen, all hell broke loose. The Faerie Quene sent a horde of vampyre aelves to punish the thoughtless mortals with their wild magic, their intense sexual charisma, and their powerful commitment to pretentious spelling choices. The aelves tore across the land, seducing maidens (hence the population explosion), biting and brooding on rooftops and being really pedantic about grammar. Most of the kids born nine months later had extra sharp teeth, or the trendy pale-skin, black hair look. A few actually came out as pure vampyres, which caused some fun and games. Bet you didn’t know it was hereditary.
Not me, though. My mum wouldn’t settle for any old common or garden pixie. She batted her eyelashes at the Lord of the Hobgoblins, who was supervising the raid. So I’m half-hobgoblin, which means I have a genetic predisposition towards big eyes, narrow hips, rock-hard abdominal muscles and hair that can’t settle to any style other than ‘chaotic tangle’.
My father died. No, not died exactly. He faded away. You see, the Faerie Quene captured this princess, and these heroes went to rescue her, as heroes do—one thing led to another, and they ended up sealing the Faerie Quene and her son up in ice forever. The Quene’s absence meant the vampyre aelves couldn’t return to the OtherRealm, so they just went on seducing and brooding and breeding and composing a whole school of angsty epic poetry that the mortal world would be so much better without. The heroes managed to banish most of the aelves through a magic door, so the story goes, but they never found my father.
Fullblood fey folk can’t spend more than a few days in the mortal world before they start to fade. That’s what happened to Lord Nanneke of the Hobgoblins. Trapped here, he faded away. And I never knew him. So, there I was, not even born, already stuck with a flighty mother, a non-existent father and hobgoblin hips.
I spent the remainder of my childhood with the Triclovers and loved them dearly, but by the age of seventeen I had to get away on my own. Luc was sixteen by then and his case was even more urgent than mine. Ma Fortuna wanted him to go into the family business—chasing rogue clockwork through the Skullcap Mountains. If he didn’t want to end up like his father, he had to find himself another career option—and fast.
–§–§–§–§–§–
There’s a pond outside our village: a large murky puddle, adorned with lilies of an unfashionable colour and inhabited by the worst gang of second-rate water nymphs in the known world.
Mocklore Survival Guide #1: Water nymphs.
Worse than dryads, worse than ice sprites—hell, they’re w
orse than graduates from Mistress Minx’s Finishing School for Terminally Silly Damsels. If you ever have an urge to ask a serious question of a water nymph, don’t bother. You’ll sacrifice three hours of your life for no good reason. She’ll giggle for two of those hours, and she’ll spend the rest of the time pulling your hair. For some reason, most straight mortal men find them incredibly attractive.
Not ours, though. Our pond nymphs don’t attract the local boys, or any boys. I wouldn’t want to be bitchy (gods forbid), but the sight of one of our nymphs would curdle wine. They go through all the traditional motions—they comb their hair with shells, and pout and giggle. But for some reason the poor lasses crawled out of the pond muck with the worst case of ‘murder face’ that the Empire has ever seen. They’ve been known to send full-grown men screaming into the night.
Anyway, there’s a secluded patch of water separated from the main pond by a big clump of spiky reeds. We call it the Lagoon, and this is where the locals swim—mostly to avoid the nymphs, since they stick to the main pond (although their giggles are shrill enough to carry for leagues in every direction), but also because every now and then, a stranger passes by and decides to go for a dip. When you live in a tiny village, you have to get your entertainment where you can.
That’s where Luc and I were that afternoon, floating lazily in the Lagoon (two swimming strokes wide and two swimming strokes long, three if there’s been heavy rain) and contemplating our future. Ma Fortuna had not given up on Luc joining the family business, though she was temporarily placated when his younger brother Franc volunteered himself for clockwork duty.
Luc and I had been reluctantly granted permission to Seek Our Fortunes, as long as we vowed that if we didn’t succeed at something within a year, we would come home, get married (either to each other or to equally suitable partners, we knew she had a list somewhere but didn’t dare ask) and start producing Ma’s first wave of grandchildren.
Needless to say, we were both pretty anxious that the whole Fortune Seeking thing would work out.
Luc ducked his head under the water, wetting his hair—he hated the way it curled up in every direction, even when cut as short as humanly possible. “What are you going to do, Bounty?” he asked me. “What do you want to do with your life?”
I pretended to think about it. “There’s always my namesake to consider.” He looked at me in that familiar, half-puzzled way. I grinned and mouthed the words ‘bounty hunter’ at him.
“You wouldn’t really.” He sounded offended by the idea.
I splashed him. “Why not? I can’t sing, I can’t swoon, I hate dressmaking, I’m lousy at blacksmithing and the job of Emperor is already taken. What else am I qualified for?”
“You could be a hero,” he suggested, and something in those thoughtful, dark eyes of his almost made me believe him.
I laughed it off. “Are you kidding? That’s too unselfish for my style. Bounty-hunting will suit me down to the ground. Fewer overheads than piracy, less career pressure than the Profithood…” I mostly said it to wind him up. The whole point of Seeking my Fortune was to put off making any decisions about my future as long as possible. I was used to improvising.
Luc, though, I worried about Luc. What skills did he have that would keep him alive in the big bad world out there?
“Is that what you want to be?” I asked lightly. “A hero?”
He didn’t answer, which made me nervous. He wasn’t seriously considering it, was he? Suddenly he held up a hand. “We’ve got company.”
I splashed the single stroke it took to reach the reeds and peered through to the main pond. “Speaking of heroes!”
Mocklore Survival Guide #2: Heroes.
You can see them coming a mile off. In Zibria they wear lion skins and sandals. In Axgaard they wear leather and beards (everyone wears leather and beards in Axgaard). Everywhere else, they dress like overblown actors with a fairy tale fixation. There are always a few common factors. A sword—heroes have to have a sword. It’s the law. And a smug, self-righteous expression. But it’s the horse that really gives them away.
Despite my tender age of seventeen, I had done my fair share of travelling. I’d even climbed the Skullcaps and lived to tell the tale. That particular round trip takes anywhere from a week to six months, depending on how many magical catastrophes, alternate dimensions and mutant goats you run across—and this was in the days before the Glimmer made everything a hundred times worse.
Anyway, I had been around enough to know that if you’ve got yourself a good pair of boots, the only places in Mocklore you can’t get to on foot are not the kind of places where you take a horse—ravines, swamps, sentient jungles, that sort of thing. Apart from spring ploughing (if you can’t afford oxen) and the occasional carriage going up and down the Great Mocklore Road, there isn’t a lot of use for horsepower.
If you see a man sitting on the back of a horse: chances are he’s in the hero business.
The fellow visiting our pond on that particular day was dressed like Prince Charming gone bad. Very, very bad. I peeked through the rushes at his ruffled whiter-than-white shirt, his shiny black leather trews (leather should never be shiny), his long dove grey boots, his shoulder-length curly tresses, his hat with a feather in it. I whispered to Luc, “So this is your future, boyo?” I swallowed back the words, ‘are you sure?’ because Luc was a lot like me—the quickest way to talk him into something was to suggest it was a bad idea.
Luc didn’t laugh. He was too busy staring at Prince Charming. “He looks it,” he whispered to me, quite seriously. “He looks the part. That’s got to be the first step.”
When Luc puts his brain in gear, it’s amazing the things he can come up with. On that particular balmy afternoon, he came up with a doozy of a plan. He tore his eyes away from Hero Boy and flashed me that sudden cheerful grin, the one that was starting to have a serious swoony effect on the other girls in the village. “Let’s steal his clothes.”
–§–§–§–§–§–
Separating a hero from his clothes is easier than you’d think. Don’t forget, I have these big, long-lashed hobgoblin eyes going for me. Plus a handy pond. To be honest, the pond did most of the work for me. It was warm, and Hero Boy had already decided to go for a swim. He swung a leg over the back of his horse and jumped down to the bank, pulling off his dove grey boots. I could conquer the world with boots like those.
The whiter-than-white ruffled shirt and the feathered hat followed the boots, then Hero Boy eased himself out of his shiny black leather trews, which took quite a long time. I could have averted my eyes modestly, but I didn’t.
Mind you, I had to stifle a shout of laughter when Hero Boy’s curly black wig joined the rest of the clothes pile.
Once he was stripped (apart from an oversized pair of long-johns which didn’t match the hero aesthetic but provided vital protection from leather chafing), Hero Boy plunged with a meaty splash into the middle of our village pond.
Under usual circumstances, three things would happen at this point:
1) The water nymphs would appear, as if from nowhere.
2) They would pounce on the hapless stranger and attempt to seduce him.
3) The hapless stranger’s response would be to run screaming from the pond, taking his clothes with him.
To prevent this from happening, I whistled softly beneath my breath, my mouth half in and half out of the water at the point where the pond meets the beginning of the Lagoon. It was a tune my mother used to sing to me and I think it has some magic in it because it’s worked a few times.
It was working now. Instead of terrifying our visitor with their murder faces, the pond nymphs drifted towards the Lagoon. They raised their aggressive eyebrows up out of the water and stared at me. Even at a distance they gave me the chills, their writhing watery veins trapped under see-through skin, and their chins sharper than pick-axes. “Whass you doing?” hissed Globula, the bluest of them.
“We goss a hero ssoo pounce on,” comp
lained the greenish one (I can never remember her name) in a wet whisper.
“I know,” I said. “But just this once, could you let me do the pouncing? I fancy a go at it.”
The watery pond nymphs all looked at me suspiciously.
“Whass for?” said Gremmla finally. She’s the one that’s almost yellowish, but not quite.
I knew what she was asking. Fair trade. Like most fey folk, water nymphs use promises as their currency. “What do you want?” I asked her.
“Whass you willing ssoo promise?” she belted back, looking pleased with herself for her stellar negotiation skills.
I tried to think of something they might like. “I’m going out into the big wide world this week. I promise that on my first visit home, I’ll bring you some water lilies in a decent colour.”
This had the desired effect. The poor things had been living with beige lilies for far too long. Their eyes lit up—a scary sight, since their eyes look angry swirls of muddy water on a good day.
“Purple?” choked Globula as if she could hardly believe it.
“Blue, pink!” clamored the greenish one.
“Crimssssson,” said Gremmla in a firm voice.
“All colours,” I said extravagantly, then stopped myself. “Wait, I don’t want to be held to that one. How about if I promise at least three reasonably exciting colours of lily?”
They hesitated, but agreed to it. We kissed each other’s noses to seal the deal (not something I recommend anyone do with nymphs who belong to a stagnant body of water). I pulled off my bathing chemise. “Okay, ladies. Watch and learn.”
Hero Boy was splashing around in the water with his back to me. Unfortunately, he was facing his pile of clothes. I could see Luc hovering in the trees to my left, unwilling to make a move until Hero Boy was suitably distracted.
Mocklore Box Set (Mocklore Chronicles) Page 89
