I looked at her and waved my left hand at Puck’s sword where it lay on the grass beside me. “Well, I suppose that’s good, since there’s not a bike anywhere on this world. Take that sword and strap it on. If we get into trouble, I still want you to run like hell, but at least if you can’t get away, you’ll be able to defend yourself a little bit. But the dudes around here that carry swords use them all the time, and they aren’t screwing around. Treat that sword just like you’d treat a gun—you don’t draw it unless you intend to kill something.
“Is that how you feel about guns?” Tamara asked.
“Yeah, it is. It’s what my daddy taught me when I was just a little boy.”
She stared at me. “Okay, when I was young, how about that?” That got a laugh, but I went on. “I shoot a lot of things. Usually, they’re like that alligator-slash-Care Bear in the sewer. They’re things that want to kill me or somebody that can’t help themselves. Critters like that, I’ll drop ‘em in a heartbeat.
“But I’ve killed creatures that are a whole lot closer to people, and sometimes that’s hard. I killed a fairy since I’ve been here, and I regret the hell out of that. I didn’t want to, and I sure as shit didn’t like it, but he was going to kill me, so I pointed Bertha at him and I killed his ass. But it wasn’t easy, and it won’t be easy to get over. I’ll see his face when I close my eyes for a long time. But I know what I did was right, and it was necessary, or you girls wouldn’t be reveling in the glorious smell of drying fairy poop on a bright spring day. Y’all’d be in some slaver’s wagon or ship headed off to who knows what kind of awfulness. That’s what helps me sleep at night.”
I looked back at the girl. “Sorry, didn’t mean to get all deep on you. Another minute and the violins come out, and before you know it, we’re in a damn Nicholas Sparks novel and my long-lost star-crossed love will step out from behind that tree over yonder. Then we’ll all have a good cry and go home and drink too much merlot and drunk text all our exes at three in the morning.”
“God, grownups really do that kind of crap?” Elle asked.
“I don’t,” I said. “I friggin’ hate merlot. I drink whiskey.” We had a good laugh, and then we got to our feet and started trudging through the woods in a generally northern direction. “Keep an eye out for a decent stream or something. We could all use some fresh water, and after we drink, I’d like to try to wash the worst of the poop off of us. But only after we drink.”
“Maybe you’re smarter than you look,” Tamara said. “At least you didn’t want to wash the crap off into our drinking water and then drink it.”
“I might not be the smartest man in Fairyland, but I know better than to drink poop water,” I replied.
We walked for a couple of hours until we finally found a creek deep enough to get into and wash off. I felt bad for putting sewage into what was a crystal-clear stream until we got into it, but I didn’t feel bad enough not to get the stench off. Besides, fish poop in streams all the time, so how much worse could it be?
We all waded out of the creek a while later, cleaner, but dripping water from our everywheres, and started back northward, still hoping to find a road that would be easier to navigate than tromping through the woods. The sun was starting to set when I heard the jingle of horse’s tack somewhere off to our left. We all ran toward the road but stopped a few yards back in the trees. I sent Maddie ahead to check things out, and she came back a few minutes later, breathless and grinning.
“We found the road!” she exclaimed in a loud whisper.
“Is anybody around?” I asked.
“Yeah, there’s an old dude with a wagon full of barrels pulled off the road in a clearing just up ahead. He’s kinda singing to himself and puttering around. It looks like he’s setting up camp for the night.” I looked up. It wasn’t going to be dark for a while yet, but if there was a camping spot nearby, it made sense to stop now rather than risk being stuck in the dark trying to follow the road or set up camp in the woods later.
Something hit me then. “This old dude, what did he look like?”
“I dunno. Old. Kinda fat. He wore a vest, and he couldn’t fasten it over his belly.”
That sounded really familiar. “Did he have a long white beard?”
“Yeah, really long. Like that old band, ZZ something?”
“Top,” I corrected absently. “And he had a wagon full of barrels?”
“Yeah, and maybe some other stuff in the back under some tarps, but it might have been empty. I didn’t really look. He looked harmless, though.”
“He’s better than harmless, kiddo. He’s the closest thing I’ve got to a friend over here. Let’s go, if we’re lucky, he’ll have some extra food. At worst, he oughta have some beer.”
We followed Maddie back to the road, and sure enough, there sat a familiar cart and a familiar round fairy with a long beard and a vest that hadn’t buttoned in years. I stepped out of the woods right in front of him, and Oakroot almost dropped the pipe he was smoking in shock.
“How did your issue with Redfart turn out?” I asked, just like we’d only seen each other yesterday. Of course, we had only seen each other the day before, but a lot had happened in that time.
“Red...oh! Haha, yes, Redfart! That’s a good one. The judge took less than a minute of listening to that prissy little shit to throw the case out and fine Redfern half a dozen gold crowns for wasting his time. Of course, Redfern didn’t have that much money with him, so he’s working off his debt to Titania by serving as a pack mule for thirty days and thirty nights.”
“What does that mean, working off his debt as a pack mule?” I asked.
“It means she turned him into a mule and he has to do hard labor for thirty days, what do ye think it means?”
I just stared at him. “She can do that?”
“She’s the Queen of the Summer Lands, lad. She can do anything she pleases.”
My stomach did a little flip-flop at the thought of how pissed she would be at me when she figured out that I was the one who broke the girls out of jail and cost her a pile of slave money. I reminded myself that I really did not want her to catch up with me.
“But what are ye doing here, lad? Last I heard, ye had to fight the queen’s cousin in single combat.”
“I did. It didn’t go well for the cousin. Then I beat up a guard, stole his uniform, broke into the castle, went into the dungeon, beat the shit out of everyone there, broke out all the prisoners to save these girls from being sold into slavery, beat up some gate guards, ran out of the city through the sewers, fought an alligator monster in the sewers—a pink alligator monster, by the way—then walked to here with a half-dozen hungry teenagers.”
Oakroot stood the for a moment, gaping at me, then busted out with a laugh that threatened the structural integrity of his belt. “Oh my good lord, lad! You have had an adventure since coming to the lands of the Fae, haven’t ye?”
“You could say that, I suppose. Come on out, girls, he’s a friend,” I called. Six ragged, still slightly damp human girls came out of the forest. One of them carried my pistol; another one carried Puck’s sword. The others carried branches they’d picked up in the woods. They looked tired, hungry, and even after washing in a creek, it was pretty obvious none of them had bathed seriously in a few days. But there was a determined look in every eye. These girls were not going back to that dungeon without a fight.
“Come, sit, girls, sit. I don’t have much food, and most of it’s jerky and stew, the kind of things that last a while on the road, but what I have, I’ll gladly share. I’ll be in Lamoranth tomorrow afternoon, and since my old friend Redfern won’t be needing any of the stores in his house, and since Titania awarded me any of his possessions that I wanted as compensation for having to deal with his foolishness, I can stock up there.”
Oakroot handed me a small pack and pointed me toward a tiny pyramid of kindling. “Start the fire, lad. There’s flint and tinder in the kit there.” He turned back to his cart, dropping the tai
lgate and rummaging around in the back.
I stood there staring at the pouch in my hand, looking over at the “fire” every once in a while. Finally, I looked at the girl I’d given the sword to. “What’s your name again?”
“It’s Beth, and it’s not again.”
“What?”
“You never asked the first time, so I can’t tell you my name again. But whatever. What do you need?”
“Did your D&D nerd parents teach you how to start a fire?”
“Did your jock education not teach you anything useful in the real world?”
“I can belch the alphabet and know how to spot the early symptoms of gonorrhea.”
She looked at me for a second, a little wide-eyed. “I guess that’s relevant. Fair enough. And yeah, my nerd parents taught me how to start a fire. Do you want to take back calling them nerds?”
“Can they argue for more than ten seconds about what’s better, Star Wars or Star Trek?”
“Oh yeah, they can go for hours. What does that have to do with anything?”
“Just proves that I was right. They’re huge nerds. Now start the fire.”
“Why would I do anything for you after you insulted my parents?”
“One, I didn’t insult your parents, I just pointed out the obvious. And two, you probably want the stew that Oakroot’s going to make to be hot, so it won’t taste like shoe leather. So you’re doing yourself as much a favor as you’re doing me.”
“You’re an asshole.”
“Again, not an insult, just an observation. Now get going, Firestarter.” She knelt by the kindling and opened the pouch. I figured I needed to watch somebody start a fire with rocks about as much as I needed to learn calculus at this point in my life, so I walked around to the back of the cart.
“What ya looking for, buddy?” I asked Oakroot, who was rummaging around in his Sack of Stashing Stuff.
He looked at me for a moment, then his eyes widened and he broke out into a wide grin. “Found it!” he crowed, pulling his arm out of the bag. His hand came out wrapped around the end of a smaller sack, and as he pulled, more and more sack came out of the other sack/magical portal. After long seconds of pulling, he finally reached the end of the other sack and pulled it completely out. He staggered once, and I stepped forward to make sure he didn’t fall.
“Here, take this. And tell your girl to make sure the fire’s big enough.” When he handed it to me, I realized exactly what he had pulled out of the magical bag. I carried the biggest damn rack of ribs I’d ever seen over to where Beth stood looking critically at her fire, and put it down on the ground next to her. Even in a bag, it was an impressive slab of meat. Kinda like me.
“I think we’re gonna need a bigger boat,” I said. She stared at me, nothing even approaching recognition passed through her eyes. “Come on, kid. Jaws?”
“Oh, yeah. I saw that once. I’m not much into old movies. But that’s a damn big chunk of meat.”
“Just make the fire big enough to cook the ribs,” I said, taking my old ass and my pop culture references off to sit down and tell someone to get off my lawn.
Chapter 17
We slept through the night scattered around the clearing. A couple of the girls slept in the back of the wagon, a couple slept under it, and the smallest of the girls, a redhead named Allyson, spent the night sleeping on the bench up front. Oakroot and I took turns standing guard, but the sun rose without incident.
I came back from answering the call of nature to find Oakroot sitting on the bench seat of his wagon, grinning down me. His wagon, once loaded down with empty barrels and wine casks, was now loaded down with human females.
I looked up at him. “What in the hell are you doing, Oakroot?”
“Well, lad, I reckon ye have no idea how to get back to where the Goodfellow left ye, nor any chance of finding enough forage close to the road to be able to feed yourself and all these young mouths. So since I have a daughter close to this age, I thought it would be mighty unfeeling of me to let ye wander the countryside all alone. So ye will all be riding instead of walking. Do ye still have that mighty wee cannon tucked away somewhere?”
“Bertha? Yeah, she’s always with me.” I pulled the big pistol out of my sling. “But I doubt we’ll need her help this trip since Scar’s dead and most of his boys are scattered to the winds.”
“Aye, I don’t expect trouble. But that’s how ye avoid it, don’t ye know? Ye don’t expect it, but make damned sure ye’re prepared for it. Now climb on up here and let’s get rolling. There’s a hunk of jerky on the seat for ye. I want to make it to Lamoranth by midday so we can have a good meal on the sit-down instead of in the wagon.”
I couldn’t argue with his logic, especially since it was his cart, so I hauled myself up onto the seat beside him, and we rolled north toward Lamoranth and my meeting place with Puck.
The morning was pretty uneventful, as long as you ignore the torture of several hours’ worth of “Hundred Bottles of Beer” screeched by teenage girls. But even that loses its luster after a while, and eventually the girls drifted to silence and just watched the forest roll by on either side of us.
We pulled into Lamoranth just about half an hour after my stomach started to growl, and Oakroot parked the cart near the same cluster of tables in the center of the village where we’d first met Redfern. We all hopped down and stretched, and Beth and Tamara walked over to Oakroot to help him get the food ready.
I sat down at a picnic table and pulled Bertha out of my sling. I set the spare magazines out on the table, popped the mag from my girl, and ejected the round from the chamber. I counted up my ammunition and reloaded my magazines. I put the last few cold iron bullets in one magazine on top of the remaining white phosphorous rounds, then loaded the regular bullets into one clip, put the silver ones in another, and slapped the silver-loaded mag into the handle of the pistol. I chambered a round, safetied the pistol, and slid it into my sling. I slipped the spare magazines in my back jeans pocket instead of the shoulder holster pouches because my bound right arm made it very difficult to reach over underneath my right armpit.
Elle sat down next to me and held out the Judge, careful to keep her finger off the trigger and the barrel pointed at the ground. “You want this back?” she asked.
“Eventually, yes,” I said. “But not yet. I can’t really draw it left-handed the way the holster is made, and if you’ve made it this far without shooting me in the ass, you might as well hang on to it until we get back home.”
“Thanks,” she replied. “I haven’t had to use it, but it does make me feel a little better knowing I have it. I thought I was going to have to empty it into that pink alligator-man-back in the sewers.”
“Yeah, we got lucky on that one.”
“We all got lucky when you came to rescue us. I don’t want to know what those slavers would have done to us if you hadn’t gotten there when you did.”
I put on my best bashful face. “Aw shucks, ma’am. It weren’t nothing. I just—”
The sound of horses approaching fast made me cut off, quick. I stood up on the table to get a better look down the road, but all I saw was a cloud of dust. “Y’all hide in the wagon,” I yelled to the girls. Elle looked at me, startled, but ran to the wagon and jumped in back without a word of protest.
“Some of you can hide in Redfern’s house,” Oaktree said. He pointed to a neat little house facing the square. It has window boxes and a freshly painted door.
“How did I know his house would look perfect?” I grumbled. Allyson and Tamara were on that side of the clearing already, so they ran for the house. The other girls slipped into the back of the cart and pulled the tarp over themselves. I barely had time to hop off the table and pull out my pocketknife and sharpener before four city guards galloped into town, their horses in a lather and their armor gleaming. Each man carried a sword, shield, and two of them had bows slung over their shoulders and quivers on their saddles. These guys were ready to scrap, in a mix of chainma
il and plate armor, way more serious stuff than the leather and chain the guardsmen in town wore. Didn’t matter. If worst came to worst, Bertha would punch through plate mail like it was tissue paper.
One of the men had a plume on his helmet, and he rode straight into town and pulled his horse to a halt in front of me. He yanked the reins, and the horse reared, pawing at the air. I took an instant dislike to him, not just because he had a stupid-looking hat. Any man who needed to teach his horse to rear up on two legs not only wanted to show off, he also had no qualms about maybe hurting his animal to do it.
He looked down at me, his armor gleaming in the midday sun. The two riders with bows stopped at the edge of the village, drew their bows, and put arrows to the strings. One pointed his bow at me while the other aimed at the ground as he scanned the doors and rooftops. The last rider took up position on the other side of me, out of line of the archer if he missed, but in just the right spot to cut me off if I tried to run out of town in the opposite direction.
But I wasn’t running anywhere. I wasn’t even moving. Because I had a plan, and for once it didn’t include punching or shooting everything in the vicinity.
“Stand up,” the prissy little fairy with the plumed helmet commanded, glaring down at me. He had a prunish face, perpetually twisted into a scowl that either says “I hate you and everything like you,” or “I’m really constipated and just want a really good poop.” I’m never sure which.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because I am a lieutenant in the Queen’s Guard and I command you to stand!” His plume shook as he shouted. It was kinda cute, actually. His face went all red and his feathers wiggled. It was kinda like one of those old troll erasers I used to have in school. I put them on the ends of pencils and spun the pencil between my hands to make its hair go all frizzy.
I let out a deep breath and stood up. I couldn’t look him in the eye when I stood up, because of the horse, so I stepped up on the bench, then onto the table. Now we were eye to eye. I leaned an elbow on the horse’s neck and scratched him behind the ears. The horse, not the bitchy lieutenant. Although maybe that would have improved his mood.
Midsummer - A Bubba the Monster Hunter Novella Page 12
