“So you know Elennath, too?” said Franziskus.
By way of reply, the scarred halfling made an obscene gesture.
“Look at the sword I had with me,” said Franziskus. “Do you recognise it?”
The halflings searched the grass for the dropped elven blade. Scimitar picked it up and handed it to Poxy. She studied the runes on its blade.
“You’ve seen that before,” Franziskus said.
“So what if I have?”
“If you knew that haughty fey-man at all, you’d know he wouldn’t give that sword to anyone, under any circumstances. Am I right? Especially if he needed it to ambush you down the road.”
“He was overweening proud of it, Reecie,” said Curly-Locks. “Always saying it was forged by Elfy Such-and-Such by the Elfy smiths of So-and-So.”
“I took it from him the last time we fought them,” Franziskus said. “My possession of it proves we’re no friend of his, nor of Toby’s.”
“You beat them in combat?” Curly-Locks asked. “Why did you let them live, then?”
“At the time, we didn’t know them that well.”
Curly-Locks stowed her hatchet in one of the belts on her back. She interwove the fingers of her tiny hands. “I must ponder this,” she said.
“I say, never mind what they say about Toby,” said Poxy, or Reecie, as her name seemed to be. “They burned our place, and that’s a good enough reason to skin them alive.”
“We’ll confer on it,” said Curly-Locks, waving the others to follow her out of earshot.
Attempting to hear what they said was once again fruitless. Angelika tested her bonds. “They tied these tight,” she said.
“Are you hurt?” Franziskus worked his own wrists, but they were too tightly knotted together. He tried his ankles; the rope seemed to have a little more give in it there.
“I’m sore. My head has started ringing again.” She tried to read the direction of the halflings’ deliberations from the postures they’d adopted. Poxy alternately waved her fist and pointed her fingers: that was bad. None of the others provided any signs, one way or the other.
Tired, she sank to rest with the back of her head in the grass. The smoke from the fire had thinned; it blew gently across her field of vision as she gazed up into the sky. It was a summery blue now, strewn with fleecy clouds. One cloud looked like a haunch of mutton. Angelika wondered what kind of omen that would be.
Franziskus cleared his throat. Angelika pulled herself up until she was sitting. The halflings approached them deliberately, in formation, Curly-Locks at the head. Their faces said nothing of their decision.
Curly-Locks stepped in front of Franziskus. “Here it is,” she said. “You saved Arthie’s life, so we won’t beat you beyond recovery. But all the same, we’ll have to beat you.” She withdrew the hatchet from her back, flipping it so that its head pointed to the ground. She swung its haft up past her shoulder and then brought it down on the back of Franziskus’ head. He dropped down sideways, onto the ground. Hands seized him from behind—they belonged to the one with the scimitar, the one whose life he’d saved. They forced him back up, to receive another blow from Curly-Locks’ hatchet handle. Franziskus tried to twist himself free of the restraining hands, but they had him in too strong a grip. Curly-Locks skipped back and swung the haft across the right side of his jaw. She brought it raining down on the bone above his right eye, then on his left. She cracked him in the upper lip, making his teeth cut into it. He tasted his blood; it filled his mouth. Scimitar hauled him up to his feet. Curly-Locks used the haft like a battering ram and jammed it into his sternum. She cracked it along his ribs, first down the right side, and then up the left. She smacked him on the knees. He heard a squeaky, burbling sound; through watery eyes, he saw that it was Poxy, laughing. It was the same laugh he’d heard his playmates make, when he was a child; they taught themselves about flies and beetles by pulling their legs off.
He felt his right eye close up on him. The other fluttered shut.
“His hand. The right,” he heard Curly-Locks say. He tried to open his eyes but they refused him. He heard himself scream, and then connected that sound with the sudden pain that now curled through the fingers of his right hand, which Scimitar was holding by the wrist. He was screaming, and feeling more blows land on his hand. Then it stopped, momentarily, only to switch to the left. He spat, so as not to choke on the blood welling in his throat.
“Oh, so you want to spit on us?” he heard. He felt more hits land on his legs, and in his gut. He knew he was falling, and that the halfling behind him kept yanking him back up for more.
Time ended. He was still being hit.
“Open your eyes,” he heard.
“Open your eyes,” he heard again.
“Open your eyes, I say!” The blows had stopped.
He strained his left eye open. Swirling in front of him was Curly-Locks’ face, so large, so close to him, that it blotted out the sky and everything else. “There you are,” her monstrous teeth somehow moving at a slower speed than the words coming out of them. “I have a message for you to take to Toby, when you see him.”
He tried to say that she should take her own messages to Toby, but his tongue wouldn’t work and he had no air.
“When you see him, tell him he’s a father—and that Lela Mossrock has sworn his doom!”
He was then finally allowed to fall. His eyes closed themselves. He could still hear, though there was a buzzing sound, distant yet at the same time loud, overlaying everything else. Even through this, he could tell: they had moved on to Angelika, and were giving her the same treatment.
CHAPTER NINE
The bloody welts on Angelika’s face glistened in the bright moonlight, as she loomed over Franziskus. Starry pinpoints surrounded her in the dark sky. He was flat on his back. His image of her blinked in and out as his eyelids trembled shut, then open, then shut. Everything hurt.
He could barely recognise her. Gummy, drying blood matted her hair. Her left eye was puffy, protruded, sealed shut, and purple. The skin of her cheekbones had parted to reveal tributaries of exposed red flesh. Her lips were split. She brought a hand to his forehead, to move aside his long, blond locks; its fingers had curled into a crooked ball.
“Franziskus,” she choked.
“Unh,” he said.
“Franziskus,” she gasped.
“Unh,” he said again.
“Franziskus.”
“Unh,” was all he could manage.
“It’s nuh-night. We—we—” She stopped to breathe. “Have to find shelter. Wolves.”
He listened for wolves. He didn’t hear any.
“I can’t move,” he said. “Wolves,” she said. “Unh.”
Sun shone in his eyes. He dragged himself into the shade. It hurt to move. He put his head against something and hoped sleep would take him. The angle strained his neck. He leaned up. Only one of his eyes could open: the left one. He was down in the pit, propped against a charred beam. Angelika lay across from him, her eyes open. As he wakened, pain crept up on him. At first, he felt the agony in undifferentiated form: each part of him was just as wracked as any other. Gradually, his awareness gained exactitude: his hands throbbed worst, then his shoulders, then his legs, then his gut. The head floated above this, buzzing, drunk and detached. Franziskus was no medic, but he knew enough to reckon that this was probably the worst sign of all.
“Oh, gods—please, in Shallya’s name…” he said, invoking the mercy goddess. It even hurt to talk. In order to speak, he had to move the muscles of his chest and neck, and this sent ripples of ache through his back and torso, and he shuddered and groaned.
He surveyed Angelika’s injuries. Her face was swollen, unrecognisable. She showed barely an inch of skin that wasn’t either purple with bruises, or etched red with cuts. She lay awkwardly against the same blackened beam that propped him up. Her right thigh was folded under her leg; her torso jutted up from her waist at an angle of forty-five degrees. “Your ba
ck,” he said. “Did they break it?”
“No. I don’t think so.” She spoke so quietly, Franziskus could barely hear her, above the rushing in his ears. “Just moved. Like this.” A jolt ran through her. Franziskus felt a jarring twinge, in sympathy. “Because it hurts less. This way.”
Franziskus thought about nodding.
For a long time, neither spoke. Franziskus closed his one good eye, hoping to persuade his body to go back into unconsciousness. It would not go. Now that he was awake, the pain was too strong to release him.
He examined his new surroundings. The pit was about thirty feet deep. Its sides were lined with timber that had suffered nothing worse than superficial scorching. The rest of the place, though, was now just a mound of ash, black mixed in with grey. He saw the remains of dresser drawers, of bedposts, of chests. There were bits of burned fabric and blobs of melted glass, already hardened and intermixed with ash. Long copper rods, bent by the heat into the shapes of snakes, lay scattered throughout. Franziskus surmised that the halflings had made rooms in their fortress with a system of curtain rod frames, and that the thin copper tubes were their remains.
He looked up: another hot, bright day. The position of the sun told him that it was inching up on noon.
He checked Angelika to see if she was awake. Though her eyes were shut, the pattern of her breathing indicated she wasn’t asleep.
“How did we get down here?” he said. The utterance cost him a little less pain than his last attempt to speak. He was learning the limit of exertion; how much he could move before his torn and pummelled muscles would punish him.
“Don’t know.” She kept her eyes closed.
“We couldn’t have got down here on our own.”
“Don’t remember.”
“I’ll be quiet.”
“No. Talk. Distract me.”
“Were there wolves?”
“Remember something about wuh—wolves.”
“Were there truly wolves, or did we just think it?”
“We came down here—to—get away from wolves.”
“Were there truly wolves?”
“Not sure.”
“Would wolves not have finished us off?”
“I suppose they would have.”
“Then there were no wolves.”
“Don’t remember.”
“But we couldn’t have got down here by ourselves.”
“Don’t know.”
“The half-folk couldn’t have come back, could they? And taken mercy on us, by carrying us down here, so the beasts of the woods wouldn’t finish us off?”
“Them?” She loosed a derisive snort, then paid the toll for sudden movement. She tried to settle herself back on the beam, in the least uncomfortable position she’d found for herself. She winced. Wincing hurt, too.
“You’re right. They wouldn’t help us.”
She agreed with him, without moving, using only her eyes.
“Maybe we fell in.”
They looked at the drop.
“We must have done it ourselves. Somehow.”
It all seemed very doubtful.
“We’ll probably never know,” Franziskus surmised.
Abruptly, the sun was on its way to setting. Franziskus realised he’d been unconscious, again. Shallya had heard his prayers, and granted them. Angelika had moved closer to him and was now lying flat on her back, hands behind her head.
“Is that more comfortable?” he asked her.
“For the moment. Every so often I stiffen, and have to shift again.”
“That hurts, I suppose.”
“Yes.” The whites of both her eyes were no longer white, but red, with blood. The swelling on her face had gone down; he could once again make out the natural shape of her cheekbones beneath her facial muscles.
“Have you slept?”
“On and off.”
“I’m going to have to move soon.”
“That so?”
“My bladder demands it.”
“Hrm,” she said.
“But I don’t want to.”
She turned her head from him.
“When I move, it’ll hurt.”
“If you wet your trousers here, I’ll finish you off myself.”
“Do you think any of your bones are broken?”
“They’re all intact, I think.”
“The same is true for me. I believe.”
“They did as they said. They hurt us just badly enough. Took us right to the threshold of permanent harm, but no further.”
“Excuse me if I fail to admire their skill.”
A noise came out of her. Eventually, Franziskus identified it as laughter.
“Get up,” she said. “It’ll do you good.” He stayed put.
“You’ll have to sooner or later. The quicker you get the muscles working, the better.”
“I wish I was dead.”
“Get up and do your business.” He got up. He screamed. He fell. She stood. She held out a hand for him. He rose.
It was morning. They were black all over now. Not from bruising, but from all the ash they’d kicked up as they’d dragged themselves around. Soot coated them, so they could not tell how well they were healing. Franziskus sat against the timber walls now, knees up. Angelika lay face down a few feet from him, in a bed of dead embers.
Franziskus was reasonably sure that this was the second morning, but he had gone in and out of consciousness so many times that he had lost track. He did not want to ask and make himself sound like he was dazed from concussion, though he imagined he probably was. At his foot, he suddenly spotted a small barrel of ale. “Where did this come from?” He clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. It tasted like stale beer. So he must have been drinking from the cask, he deduced blurrily.
Angelika pointed feebly to a corner piled high with half-burned boards. “Behind there. Some provisions escaped the fire. There’s even some dried meat, for when you’re feeling up to it.”
She rolled over, so he figured there was no harm in talking again. “When I was a child,” Franziskus said, “my maiden aunt, Trine, used to read to me from storybooks. About the Moot, where the halflings dwell.”
Angelika grunted an unintelligible reply.
“I loved those stories,” he went on. “They were my favourites. In the stories, the Moot was always a green and tender place, with rolling hills, and meadows dappled in white hissock and blue fire grass. And the halflings lived in shingled cottages, with fresh-painted walls, and they ate red-berry pasties and soft cheese. During the day, they would shade themselves from the sun, and at night they would gather to play the pipes and dance jigs. Yet, lazy and charming as they were, somehow the work would always get done. And they didn’t like to fight, fighting was not in their nature. Though they would sometimes make war for the Emperor when they were needed, in truth all they wanted was to return to their quiet, rolling land to eat scones with honey and sit telling jokes, with sprigs of straw between their teeth. There was this one character in the books, my favourite, Jarmo Appleday, and he would always outsmart himself but in the end all would…”
Franziskus trailed off.
“I liked those stories,” he eventually concluded.
“I’ve never been to the Moot,” said Angelika.
“Neither have I.”
“It could be just like you say. The halflings we’ve met, they could be the exceptions.”
“It goes against what I have learned, since leaving home.”
“And what is that?”
“That to treasure any beautiful thought is to hold fast to an illusion.”
“It isn’t necessarily an illusion.”
“You’re usually eager to part me from all my false and foolish beliefs. Don’t spare me now, just because I’m hurt.”
“Remember what that Lela Mossrock said—the whole lot of them, they were exiles. The Moot can still be like the one in your storybooks. Those peaceful, law-abiding types, they’d be quick to rid the
mselves of halflings like her—and Toby too—for being too savage and different.”
Franziskus craned his neck abruptly upwards. He patted at his waist. His belt was gone, and the scabbard, too. “Those miscreants!” he protested. “They stole my elven sword!”
Drops of liquid hit his face, waking him. The sky had greyed and light rain was leaking down into the pit. Franziskus blinked. The raindrops hurt when they hit, but they were also refreshing, so he turned his face up to meet them.
“This is as close to a bath as we’ll get for a while,” he said.
“You’re up,” she said.
He felt the droplets as they gathered, pooled, and ran down his neck and into the fabric of his tunic. They were cold, and he shuddered, but it was a good feeling anyway. He realised that it was no longer so painful to move his neck.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “This is all because of my own accursed foolishness.”
“No,” Franziskus said. He tried moving his hands. That hurt, but not as bad as before.
“What do you mean, no?”
“Please relent.”
“I’m telling you that I am sorry, and you bid me to—
He retreated from her, dragging his legs through the ash. “I can’t think. Let me enjoy this rain.”
“You can’t think? I was the one who couldn’t think, when I stormed out here, and said set the place on fire. Without checking. Without stopping to make a plan or learn the facts. I was the one who got us into this state. Beaten like dogs. It was my damnably stupid conscience eating away at me. Whenever that happens—I should know by now—it’s prompting me to do something idiotic. I broke every one of my own rules. And all the precepts of common sense, besides.”
“Vou thought he might be in immediate danger.”
“I shouldn’t have thought any such thing. Why would he be in more danger then, than the day before, or the day after? No, it was all my desire to make good, and to do it quickly and get it done with, so I could stop feeling—I let my head cloud up with virtue, and this is the result. It’s right that I should suffer, but to you I apologise.”
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