The Smiling Stallion Inn

by Courtney Bowen

Hastin tried to figure out where and when they were meeting, to catch them in the act again or to send Lapo after them, but Hastin couldn’t keep track of them. They kept slipping out and changing meeting places, while Jawen continued to insult Basha in public. But this was just a ruse, a cover for whatever they did in private.

  One morning, Hastin stood in the courtyard at his home, staring at the straw man Sir Nickleby had erected for practice. It was just the two of them, as Hastin was the last of the baron’s sons to be trained. The knight smoked a pipe, probably waiting for him to fail again.

  Hastin was hard to train, stubborn, and Sir Nickleby thought he was an idiot. Stubbornness was fine for the common foot soldier, who had to learn how to use force to overwhelm his opponents, but it made it more difficult for Hastin to learn the advanced, delicate maneuvers of a dueling nobleman. So Sir Nickleby had to do his best to make sure Hastin was ready for whatever might come his way, although neither one of them liked it.

  Hastin didn’t want to join the militia, not really, and he wasn’t going to if Sir Nickleby had anything to say about it. But likely enough, Hastin would have to join some other military force, like the Border Guards, since a baron’s son had to fight for his king, country, and father, and earn a wage, especially if he wasn’t the oldest son who would inherit the baron’s title and property.

  Hastin charged at the straw man and slashed, jabbed, and stabbed, deep into the straw man’s gullet. “That’s for you, Basha,” he muttered at the straw man lying in a heap on the ground and then he looked up at Sir Nickleby.

  The knight’s eyes had widened, and he nearly choked on his pipe stem. He hadn’t expected Hastin to be so savage in his attack. Normally, he would’ve delighted in the boy’s sudden and ferocious skill, but it bothered him to hear Basha’s name on Hastin’s lips as he viciously destroyed the straw man. Nevertheless, he clapped a hand to Hastin’s shoulder. “Good job, Hastin, good job.” But even as Hastin basked in his teacher’s approval, the knight’s lips thinned in disapproval. He snatched the sword out of Hastin’s hand and sent the boy inside, where he watched the old man clean up the straw mess he’d made. Frowning, he realized Sir Nickleby was more worried about what he might do to Basha than he was pleased by Hastin’s performance.

  Hastin couldn’t trust himself to be calm and to control his feelings of anger and frustration whenever his instincts told him to fight. “We can’t abuse our power and give in to our baser instincts, no matter how tempting it might be to do so,” his father Baron Augwys, had once told him. “To be a true nobleman, one must not force others into harmful action without just cause or take advantage of others just because they are of lower rank. One must not use his or her nobility for mean, selfish, or nefarious things.”

  Hastin tried to be good and noble, no matter how hard that was for him to achieve. Sometimes he failed, and failed miserably, like he did at the militia tryouts a few months later.

  Chapter 19

  Keeper of Secrets

  “The measure of a man is what you take

  Out of him. Learn his name, and learn

  Who he is, and you will know half

  Of his life. The other half is still hidden.”

  —Proverb of Manhood

  “There is no light in the dark without fire,” Old Man wrote, speaking to himself. “Fire keeps us warm at night.” The door flew open as I walked in. “It’s passion, it’s lust, it’s inspiration, and it’s destruction, destroying everything within miles at times,” he said, turning around. “Hello, Nisa, where have you been?”

  “These children can certainly be senseless at times,” I muttered to myself as I slammed the door shut behind me.

  Old Man laughed to himself. “Feeling old already, are you, Nisa?”

  It had been a few months since my twenty-sixth birthday, and almost seventeen years now, since we had started watching over Basha. “To put it bluntly, these children are beginning to try my patience. I was out by the river. Basha was there with his brother. Then Hastin, Sisila, and Jawen showed up. The way they fight and bicker, and fall in and out of love with one another, it makes me sick sometimes,” I said, huffing as I sat down upon the bed.

  Old Man glanced up. “Yet nothing can escape fire,” he said, still quoting the material he was writing. “It will pursue you, and you will be caught when you can’t live without fire.”

  “Old Man, please stop speaking in riddles,” I said, shaking my head. “For goodness sake, you can’t always have been like this.”

  “And so what if I am? Or was,” Old Man said. “What if I was always like this, even when I was an ordinary man?” He shook his head and continued to write. “Yet fire can be quenched, with the right amount of water, perhaps, or with a lack of air—”

  “Old Man, please listen to me,” I said. “I think Basha and Jawen are—”

  “Basha and Jawen?” Old Man asked, looking up. “Is that right? Basha and Jawen? The two of them together…Oh, that’s not right, not right at all,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t know what is, but I don’t think those two match well together.”

  “What can we do about it?” I asked.

  “Nothing, I suppose.” Old Man sighed. “Much as I’d like to, we can’t interfere with everything in Basha’s life; he’d get suspicious, and we can’t draw attention to him. Doomba must not know he lives here. It would be highly suspicious if I ever got personal with him. I never get personal with any of the town’s children, except for, well, you, and a couple protégés in the past.”

  “I’m not the first protégée?” I asked, appalled.

  “Well, no, to be honest. You’re the first to be my own daughter,” he said. “A long, long time ago, I had friends who sent their children, and then their grandchildren, and then their great-grandchildren to me to receive lessons, and…well, I eventually became the town’s storyteller by default, but in the beginning, in those first few generations, I was their school teacher and counselor as well as friend.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Well, they died, my friends, and their children, and no one remembered me as a counselor or schoolteacher. The townspeople remembered I told good stories, though, so they replaced me with someone younger to teach the schoolchildren, and I remained the katlin since no else would take that job.”

  I grumbled to myself before I said, “Well, Basha is full-grown now, or thereabouts. Surely if he were the you-know-what, it would’ve manifested by now.”

  “He still needs more time to develop,” Old Man said. “A few more years and he will be ready to take on the world.”

  “A few more years?” I exclaimed, even more appalled. How could I go on doing this?

  “What’s the matter? You don’t think he’s the…?” Old Man frowned.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “I just don’t think it’s possible, and I don’t think I can wait a few more years. I’m getting older, and I should act like an adult now.”

  Old Man sighed and stood up to walk over to me, resting a hand upon my shoulder. “Stay strong, Nisa. We’ve seen things stirring, searching for him, and I don’t think it will be long now before he’s called up to take his role. But I suppose I can’t keep you here forever. You’re a young woman, an adult of…” He hesitated.

  “Twenty-six years,” I said.

  “Twenty…oh.” Old Man asked, “I suppose…you’ve been dating?”

  “Off and on, but nothing that would lead me to the Courtship Ritual.” I sighed, sitting down on the cot. “I suppose you’re trying to act like my father now? Twenty-six years too late,” I added.

  “Nisa, I’m sorry, but I’ve never kept you here. You stayed here with me,” Old Man said.

  I sighed. “It’s just that spending all of this time watching over him, making sure the Followers know nothing about him, and that the Servants are kept away from him…it really makes me wonder if it’s all worth it, especially if Doomba ever discovers he lives here—if he’s who he’s supposed to be, then Coe Baba would b
e in serious danger.”

  “It will be worth it, Nisa.” Old Man squatted down next to me. “We’ll protect Coe Baba, as well as Basha. A few short years go by so quickly. Until then, we stay silent, and I’ll tell him then just who he is and what his destiny is. We’ll be able to do this,” he said, turning away from me. “There is something to be said, for water or for air; they can have such influence over fire. But this story isn’t about fire. It’s about death,” he said, reading from his paper.

  “Death,” I whispered, blinking, and that was the end of our conversation.

  The next evening, I woke up Old Man to tell him a forest fire had ignited, right next to where we had trapped a Black Wolf. “Was anyone hurt?”

  “Some of the town militia were killed.”

  “Sir Nickleby?”

  “He survived.”

  “Thank goodness,” Old Man muttered, breathing a sigh of relief.

  * * * *

  “I don’t know what it is you’re looking for, Sir Nickleby, but whatever it is, you’ll find it down here,” the constable said, leading the knight down into the basement of the courthouse. “Welcome to the tomb of records. These are the last fifty years of cases that have been tried and investigated in Coe Baba,” the constable told him, showing him a room full of boxes of old papers. “Most of the time, the records are tossed out after fifty years to free up space. This way, please.” The constable strode toward one edge of the room.

  “I wanted to know if you had any information about…murders or other strangeness in town,” Sir Nickleby said. “Something unsolved, without any logical explanation.” The knight had been having trouble sleeping for the past month, disturbed by nightmares of the night the forest had burned. He’d experienced battle all over again, with Berevus and Erroco, and he didn’t like it. Now he wanted to find out what had caused this horrible trouble in the first place and how to stop it from happening again.

  “Then you’ve come to the right place.” The constable pointed down an aisle. “Most records are for common complaints, but this is the aisle of the crazy and unsolved atrocities,” he said. “These records are from the genuine mysteries and mayhem,” the constable said, looking down. “And maybe you’ll even find the truth of whodunit in some of these cases.”

  “What sorts of things?” Sir Nickleby asked, glancing over at the constable.

  “Madness is what I believe,” he said. “I call it the Doomba factor. A woman kills her husband, says he was a Follower of Doomba. Another man kills some people, blames it on Doomba. These things are not common, thank goodness, but they’re becoming more prevalent. Twenty cases in the last fifteen years alone, with forty cases in the fifty-five years before that. I looked through them before we threw some out.”

  “Why haven’t I heard about these cases before?”

  “Our district goes for about a hundred miles outside of town limits,” the constable told him, drawing a circle in the air. “Small farms and small communities, not really towns, fall under our jurisdiction, areas where a few houses are clumped together and call themselves a commune.” The constable shook his head. “Most of the wildest cases happen in those areas. The townspeople aren’t even aware of, or try to ignore, news of such happenings. It’s been less than one crazy case per year for most of recorded time; now it’s become at least one crazy case per year on average. I had a backlog of these cases when I first joined up about fifteen years ago,” the constable said, “and I wasn’t able to do much with them then. Mostly we just prosecute those we can and hope for the best with the rest before they’re thrown away.”

  Sir Nickleby slowly proceeded down the aisle. “So, all of these, or most of them anyway, are tied to Doomba somehow?” he asked, staring around.

  “Hmm, not all of them, definitely not most, but you get a few murders, vandalism, disappearances, sacrifices, and rape cases that are supposed to be the work of Followers, or were caused by people who thought Doomba was coming. Real or imagined, Sir Nickleby, Doomba is the major instigator in these events.”

  Sir Nickleby shuddered and then was silent. “So, these things started happening more frequently within the last fifteen years?” he asked after a moment.

  “Yes, I suppose.” The constable slowly nodded and then smiled. “Hey, I’ve one you might be intrigued by.” The constable went over to one box near the end of the row and rifled through it. “This is about where the trend seems to start. Notice all of the new files coming after it…” He pointed them out. “…although it does seem to have little in common with any of these other cases. Anyway, here it is—the hunter in the snow,” he said, opening it up.

  “A hunter?” Sir Nickleby asked, coming over.

  “Aye. You didn’t hear about this one?” the constable asked, turning toward him. “Well, it was before your time, about seventeen years ago. I suppose we don’t really talk much about what disturbs us beyond the present time. He was from the south, we think, according to the cut of his clothes.” The constable showed him the file. “They were made for milder weather, and we think he was hunting a woman.”

  Sir Nickleby stared at the file in the constable’s hand, which contained sketches of the murdered man, the woman, and the items found in their possession. The constable handed the file over to Sir Nickleby.

  “The hunter was killed, and the woman died in childbirth, but it was one of the oddest cases we’d seen up to that time. There have been people found frozen in the snow, but this man had been stabbed and left to die. And as for the woman, she talked about being nearly killed, but survived in the hour or so before she gave birth and died.”

  Sir Nickleby stared at the sketch of the dead woman and couldn’t help feeling there was something odd about this, something he should remember about it.

  “My predecessor talked to me about this one,” the constable continued. “The woman must have had a very strong maternal instinct if she survived being hunted down and nearly being killed before giving birth to her baby. In any case, we’ve nothing definite linking this case to Doomba, but it’s definitely a pretty good place to start in my opinion.” The constable smiled. “I’ll leave you to it.”

  “Wait, what about…” Sir Nickleby started to say, but he stopped as he got a closer look at the written report and saw a name.

  “What?” asked the constable, turning around.

  “Never mind,” Sir Nickleby said, turning away as the constable nodded and left.

  Basha. Sir Nickleby knew the name well. Basha had been a pupil under Sir Nickleby’s tutelage for the past four years, ever since he was twelve. This coming season of Reda, he might graduate into service with the town militia, if not the Border Guards themselves. But even before that, Sir Nickleby had been aware of Basha’s name.

  * * * *

  “Father! Father!” Iibala cried, running into their home. She was just nine years old and was caked in mud and turnip juice. “Jawen called Basha a balnor, and she didn’t even know what it meant.” She laughed over that, splattering mud-ball turnip dollops everywhere she danced about.

  “Hold still—what are you talking about?” Sir Nickleby asked, trying to chase his daughter down and make her go bathe.

  “She said it when she was mad at him, thinking he called her an evil, snot-nosed girl or something like that. Anyway, Jawen called Basha a balnor because she heard her father say that about him!”

  Sir Nickleby stopped. “Who is Basha?” he asked. He knew Lapo—everyone in town knew Lapo, and by extension his daughter—but that name Basha wasn’t familiar to him.

  “You should know him, Father!” Iibala said. “Basha is the youngest son of the innkeeper Geda, the one with brown hair. I didn’t know Geda and Habala weren’t his real parents; did you?”

  “Enough of this,” Sir Nickleby said. “Don’t talk about the private affairs of others. I don’t think you should question anyone’s parentage. It’s indecent gossip, and I don’t want to hear you utter such words in front of me again. Do you understand me?” Iibala nodded, bow
ing her head. “Now go clean up,” he said, and Iibala marched off toward the bathing house.

  Two days later, Sir Nickleby heard more about Basha when the boy ran off. Geda himself came to Sir Nickleby’s house to ask him to organize a search party. He told him the story of Kala and Basha to a certain extent, just to explain the reason behind the boy’s disappearance. Sir Nickleby gladly led the search party.

  “The boy was last seen yesterday afternoon playing in the street by his older brother, Oaka,” Sir Nickleby told the group gathered in front of the inn. “The boy was severely depressed upon learning the circumstances of his birth just the day before, and apparently he took up the idea of running away. Neither Oaka nor his parents had much conversation with Basha yesterday morning, the boy being unresponsive, but Oaka said Basha kept talking about the ocean when they were going inside for lunch. It’s believed the boy is heading in that direction now.”

  The ocean, of all places…He shook his head. “Yesterday evening when the boy didn’t come home, Basha’s parents questioned Oaka and several of his friends,” Sir Nickleby continued, “until it was concluded this morning that Basha is no longer in the village.” Sir Nickleby paused. “You all know what that means. I’d like some volunteers to undertake a search party. We shall scour the forest for any sign of the boy until we find him.”

  “I really don’t see why we have to waste all this time and energy trying to find a boy stupid enough to run off. He’ll probably come home on his own; you wait and see,” Lapo whispered to his wife, Mawen. But when he looked up again it was obvious by the look on the faces of Sir Nickleby and others that what he’d meant solely for his wife’s ears had been heard by many others. “What?” he asked, clearly uneasy.

  “You will apologize to Geda and Habala,” Sir Nickleby said, “whose son you’ve disparaged, and you will apologize to Basha when he gets back. You will also apologize for calling him a balnor for your daughter to overhear and pass on.”

  “No, I will not,” Lapo said, shaking his head. “I was stating a private opinion just now, an opinion meant only for the ear of my wife,” he said, raising his voice when the others started raising theirs in protest. “And not intended for anybody else’s ears. I didn’t deliberately intend to insult anybody within earshot.”