by J. M. Frey
Mandikin is just solid enough for the boy to puff against, like diving into an overfilled feather pillow. Her skirts flare and curl around his shoulders and head like protective fingers.
Kin stutters to a halt, tongue tripping over the final Words of the destructive phrase, and the world goes horribly, breath-stealingly silent. Foesmiter glows gold in the starlight, lit from within by the Words it waits to cut at their foe.
“Move,” Kin hisses at the boy.
“No!” Thoma spits back. “I won’t let you hurt Mandikin!”
“Hurt Mandikin?” another voice roars, and a man with mutton chops and a sash stretched across his rotund belly shoulders his way to the front of the increasingly horrified-looking crowd that has begun to condense around us. The town’s lord, I’d guess, and then I dismiss him to focus on my stubborn friend.
“No one’s hurting anyone!” I shout, but my voice is lost under the sudden wave of protests and noise from the people of Gwillfifeshire. Bodies shove forward, getting too close to Kin’s blade, and I wriggle myself between them. Kin’s broad hand lands on my back, using me to shepherd the incensed bystanders back, like I’m better for nothing but acting as his shield. Humph. Arse.
Shouting rakes against my ears, pierced by Mandikin’s ghastly wails. I want to clap my hands over them, but instead, I shove my arms out to the side, taking on the role of human barricade that Kin has foisted on me.
Thoma is crying now, clutching at Mandikin, and other children have begun to wail as well, one little girl screaming over and over, “Don’t kill her! Don’t kill her! Don’t make her go away like Daddy!” The town’s lord is trying to bully his way to Kin, and Mandikin is no help— the more the children cry, the more she screams.
“Enough!” I roar. This is my battlefield voice. “By the Writer’s left nutsack, that is enough!”
The expletive is harsh, but it works. Everyone on the hill falls silent all at once, the adults blushing and glowering furiously, the children muffling sobs or giggles behind their hands. Mandikin offers me an expression so poisonous I wonder vaguely if I’m now cursed to die at dawn, or something. She primly lays partially opaque hands over Thoma’s ears.
“Finally!” Kin bawls, puffing up his chest like he’s just killed a dwarven pimp.
I spin on my heel, duck under Foesmiter with extremely practiced ease, and stab my finger against Kin’s sternum. “I was talking to you, you thick-skulled tit!”
Kin gapes at me, blinking rapidly, Foesmiter wilting in his grasp. The Goodwoman of Pern applauds slowly, loudly. No other sound except the crackle of the nearby bonfire shreds the quiet.
“Now, what is this about harming Mandikin?” the lord blusters, and Writer, he sounds like a satire of a lord, all jowly vowels and burring consonants puffing out from behind his soup-strainer moustaches, like something from a play.
“It was a misunderstanding,” I say, taking a step back from Kin and waiting until my partner has caught up enough to sheathe Foesmiter. Then I make a very humble, very simple, but very low bow to the official. Not my court bow, not the one that I save for King Carvel, but the one that I really mean. “We apologize most humbly.”
“They were going to hurt Mandikin!” Thoma snarls, wiping tears from his flushed cheeks with the cuff of my short-robe.
The lord puffs up his own impressive girth to match Kin’s and rocks forward on his feet, ready to have a fight.
“We were, it’s true,” I jump in, hands up and placating, before Kin can open his mouth and doom us to another night on the road. Or to a lynch mob. “But you must understand, sir, that with our, um, extensive experience with malevolent spirits, we might have, ah, made some hasty assumptions. We now stand corrected and offer no ill will to, ah . . . Miss Mandikin. Or Gwillfifeshire.”
“Extensive experience?” the lord asks, eyes narrowed in suspicion.
The Goodwoman leans over and hisses, in a deliberate stage whisper, “That’s Kintyre Turn and Bevel Dom, Lord Gallvig.”
A ripple of murmurs and suddenly craning heads spreads back over the crowd.
Oh, thank the Writer, I think as I feel the last of the tension that had crackled in the air break and crumble away amid the buoyancy of the town realizing that they have heroes in their midst. Write a few dozen scrolls, and suddenly you can do no wrong. I try not to take too much advantage of our fame (Kin’s head is big enough without drinking and getting favors from brothels for free), but sometimes, just sometimes, it’s welcome.
“And you were after the ghost?” another woman calls out, startled.
A man raises his arm and makes a sort of panicky hand gesture over the heads of the crowd. “But Mandikin is the town babysitter. You can’t banish her!”
“We need her!” says another. “She’s one of us!” More voices join in, a chorus of parents as desperate not to lose Mandikin as the children.
That deflates Kin a bit. “We apologized,” he mutters.
“I apologized,” I correct, under my breath, just enough for Kin to hear. Kin ducks his head and nods once. My friend is stupid sometimes, but he can learn, too.
“I am deeply sorry for my mistake,” Kintyre says, using his Eldest Son of Turnshire voice and executing the matching bow. It’s a bit showier than mine was, as befits his station and fame, but it’s not his peacockish court bow, either.
Good, I think. At least he’s taking the apology seriously.
Kin turns to Mandikin, taking a deep breath for another formal apology. Thoma puffs out his chest in defiance of the hero’s attention on his friend. Kin is wounded by the boy’s lost worship. It manifests as a small twitch in the corner of Kin’s mouth, but only I see it because I know him so well. Gutted, Kin swallows back the flowery words I know he would have said and simply bows again. Mandikin nods solemnly, slowly, just once.
When she raises her head, it is wreathed in smiles, and the chill of ghost-breath seems to have warmed into a summer breeze, rather than the sharp snap of winter. A spill of children push past and around us. They all crowd around her, and their parents seem happy to let them go.
“Well then, back to it, back to it!” Lord Gallvig roars, belly shaking with the force of the laugh that follows as he ushers people back toward the bonfire and the food stalls pitched haphazardly against the walls of the ruin.
Mistress Pern sidles close enough to pluck my short-robe off her son. She shakes out a bundle of fabric that proves to be the waistcoat we’d left behind in our rooms, wraps it around him, and then sends him off after Mandikin and the other children. She pats down my short-robe, a motherly gesture that I’ve seen women everywhere perform, and then hands it to me.
“Thank you,” I say.
“Thank you for wanting to protect him,” she replies. “Even if it was misguided.”
I scratch the back of my neck and fight the flush I can feel trying to crawl up my cheekbones. Usually I’m the one making other people blush, and it’s a nice change. It’s also a nice change to come out the other end of an adventure unhurt, unbloody, and unbruised for once. I nod to the Goodwoman, feigning humbleness at her gratitude, and she cants a hip at me. Oh, she’s flirting. With me. That’s lovely.
That is very good, indeed.
Kin cuts a look between us, and his eyes widen fractionally. Realization is followed by a small smirk of anticipation and triumph. Oh. He expects me to share.
After all of this? After everything that could have been avoided if Kin had just listened to me? Not bloody likely.
“Thoma left one of your cooking knives in the square,” Kin says, abruptly charming again. “I’ll fetch it back to the tavern.” He jogs down the hill to give me space in which to work, dodging around a group of pretty young women and men trying to get his attention. Followers of my scrolls, most likely. Adoring youths like these are always pie-eyed in Kin’s presence, cooing and making offers that they’re all too young to really understand.
I take a deep breath, taking a moment to watch Kin go, giving myself time for my face t
o cool.
“So,” I venture, playing at harmless and polite. I reseat my sword in its sheath to give myself an excuse not to meet the Goodwoman’s gaze. Acting a bit nervous makes women want to coddle and protect, which are feelings that are more easily translated into “taking care of me in bed” than those engendered by approaching them with overconfident arrogance. I duck my head, look up at the Goodwoman through my lashes, and fiddle with my pouch, rearranging things so they’re all laying correctly. “A ghost?”
“That’s both supremely unsubtle and a fair bit more narrow-minded than I expected from one as well traveled as you,” the Goodwoman replies with an unladylike snort. Startled at having my ruse caught out, I look back up. And I only now notice that her mop cap has been replaced with a crown of intricately braided golden hair and wildflowers. The smile lines beside her eyes deepen as she grins at me. “You’ll not be charming me with your wiles and your false coyness. I know you, Master Dom. And I know your habits. If you want the story, just ask. Your scrolls say you’ve consorted with nixies and sirens, nagas and ogres. You should know better than to assume. You’ve taken dinner with wolves.”
I snort and resist the urge to shove my hands in my pockets like a truant child who’s been caught out. For I absolutely have been caught out. Instead, I shrug on my short-robe and roll my eyes theatrically, willing to banter. It seems I should focus on a more forthright, mature approach with the Goodwoman. Fine by me. I prefer it when no one needs to be persuaded. “It was bloody.”
“It was still dinner.”
“True.” I look over at the ghost thoughtfully. “She’s sweet with them,” I decide. I’d trust her with the twins.
“She was in life, also,” the Goodwoman says softly, taking the whispered confession as an excuse to step closer, to brush the tips of her fingers against the inner curve of my elbow. “She wanted nothing more than to be a mother.”
I obligingly tip my head down toward her. “How did she . . . if it’s not impertinent to ask—?”
“Childbirth.”
I nod grimly. “The babe?”
“Gone to rest on whatever shelf the Writer places our books when our story is over. Or not quite begun.”
I nod again, brushing my nose against the shell of her ear, the one that earlier today had a marriage bob. Which is now missing. “And the father?”
The Goodwoman grimaces slightly. “You know as well as I that fauns don’t mate for longer than a season.”
Oh. Oh. I sigh slowly. All the excitement of the adventure drains out of me, leaving only hollow, empathetic sorrow. That poor woman. “So, he’s likely forgotten her name by now.”
“If he ever knew it,” the Goodwoman agrees. “It was a good love, though. A solid love. And Mandikin had no illusions, no imaginings that what she had was other than what it was: just a season.”
“You knew her well, then?”
“My grandmother was her sister. I know her better than most, but not from firsthand experience.”
“Still a treasure,” I say. I reach into my pouch for a pencil and some scrap parchment, and then pause. “Before I . . . do you mind? I mean, do you think the gh—Mandikin would mind if I wrote her story down?”
The Goodwoman’s eyes shine. “Mandikin’s tale told by Kintyre Turn’s bard? I think all of Gwillfifeshire would be quite, quite honored, Master Dom. So long as you tell it honestly.”
I chuckle as I retreive my writing tools. “So, making a fool of Kin and myself, am I?”
“Aye, Master Dom, that you will be. Come, I haven’t forgotten that I offered you two a place in my family circle.” The Goodwoman pulls me off to the side of the festival fairway, where people have begun to clump and cluster on the grass. There is a blanket there, and Thoma has already deposited his stiff, formal waistcoat in a crumpled heap on the knitted wool. The Goodwoman sighs fondly, scoops it up and refolds it, and then seats herself. I sit beside her, deliberately pressing my side against hers. She doesn’t move back. Progress. Excellent. I lay the scrap of parchment against my knee.
“Very well. Go ahead, please,” I say.
The Goodwoman’s tale enchants me, and I take every opportunity to encourage her to rest her cheek against my shoulder and whisper it into my ear. I turn my face only a few times, when I want clarification, and make it seem as if brushing my lips against her nose or chin is an accident. If she wants to kiss me, she will—I’ll let her initiate that.
I don’t know how long it is before my notes have filled up both sides of the sheet, and she’s placing her hand on my shoulder and saying, “Ah, Master Turn has returned.”
I twist to look. Kin is climbing the hill slowly. He’s still wearing Foesmiter, but he’s carrying my writing box under his arm. As he passes stragglers carrying torches, the light gilds his hair and the embroidery on his jerkin with gold. Writer, Kin looks edible—flushed from the earlier adventure, windblown and confident. And better than all of that, my pipe is in that writing box. Now that is a true hero.
“He’s handsome,” the Goodwoman admits, clearly admiring the view as much as I am.
I feel my guts twist with the small jealousy that always curls there when someone else openly admires Kintyre the way I can’t.
“He is,” I say carefully. The last thing I want to do is reveal the extent of my wounded heart to a woman who is, by virtue of her occupation, probably the proud spider at the center of Gwillfifeshire’s gossip web.
“You’re a lucky man,” the Goodwoman say guilelessly, and it takes a second for me to remember what she said in the taproom. She thinks Kin is my lover. We’re not wearing the same colors, so it’s clear we’re not Trothed, which means she must think . . . Writer, what a scandal that would be, if Kin and I were carrying on like that, the eldest son of a lord and a blacksmith’s boy.
Yet, we’re both knighted, both men of titles and wealth now. Both men of renown, and to be frank, the bedsport we engage in with women is already extremely close to actually making love.
I feel my cheeks go hot. I lower my face, making a show of putting my notes away in my pouch to avoid having to answer. The Goodwoman clears her throat expectantly, and I have just enough time to murmur, “He doesn’t love me,” before Kintyre reaches us.
Her face slips into an expression of shock, which, for his sake, she quickly shutters. Then she stands, and my whole side feels suddenly cold. I try not to take that as some sort of portent.
The Goodwoman is formal and polite when she offers Kin a seat on a second blanket that she shakes out next to her own; the flirting and the geniality has stopped. She is still kind and warm while the three of us chat idly, and I realize that she was never really flirting with me. She was just trying to see if she could get a rise out of Kin, see if he and I might . . . might what? Put on a show? Reveal ourselves?
As lovers? As husbands? Maybe goad me into pledging my troth now, before the whole village, in a romantic gesture inspired by battle and burning flowers? The Goodwoman must be one of those faithful readers who seems sure that there is more happening between me and Kintyre than I put in my scrolls. Of course.
What an absolute minx. I’m supposed to be the charming one who talks people into things they didn’t realize they were agreeing to.
I refrain from pinching the bridge of my nose and dig through my writing box for my pipe. I clench it between my teeth and try not to hiss as I pack the bowl; adrenaline spent, my wrist is throbbing again. Kin has edged closer to the Goodwoman, mistaking her warmth for genuine interest, the same way I did. When his hand edges up the pool of fabric that is her gown to brush one questing knuckle along the Goodwoman’s ankle, I take a breath to stop him. Before I can, the Goodwoman shoots to her feet and crosses her arms under her bosom, taking a step back.
“Shame on you, Kintyre Turn,” she says, glaring first at Kin, and then shooting a meaningful, sympathetic glance at me.
What, does she think he’s going to take that as an opening for a love confession? Absolutely not. I take a puff of
my pipe and blow out a ring, trying to figure out how to command my brain to say any sentence that doesn’t start with “Come back to the inn with me, Kin. Just us.”
Uhg! I’m a stupid, foolish, desperate, hopeless sop, and it’s really starting to infuriate me. Murder. Death. Killing Dargan. Killing him slow.
“Where’s she going?” Kin asks, eyes trailing after her like a puppy left tied up in the yard. There is actual petulance in his tone. “I thought that you—”
“No,” I interrupt.
“But she—”
“No!” I can feel the rage rising from the knot in my chest, sliding up my face like mercury in a thermometer. “And to be quite frank, Kin, I’m not really in the mood tonight.”
“But you said—”
“Well, that was before you made a fool of us in front of a whole town, wasn’t it?”
Kin splutters and his face crumples into that calculatingly adorable look of surprised hurt. “Before I made a—”
“Oh, Writer, just stop!” I slam my pipe down hard enough against the ground that the embers scatter all over the dew-damp grass and splutter out. I toss my pipe into my writing box and stand. I haul Kintyre to his feet, and this time, Kin goes with me when I grab him by the bicep and drag him far past the back of the festival stalls, out of the ring of firelight to where the din of the people will cover the shouting match we’re about to have.
I wouldn’t want to sully Kintyre’s reputation by screaming at him in public, after all.
“How is any of this—? Where is this coming from?” Kintyre asks with a pouting mutter. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Wrong with me?” I snarl. “My problem is that you never bloody well listen to me!”
“There’s no need to be womanish about it!”
“Did you really just . . . ?” I gawp. “Womanish? Really? When you know Captain Isobin, and Cassiopith and . . . by the Writer’s balls, Kin! You don’t really think like that, do you?”
“Like what?” Every line of his body screams defensive and deliberate ignorance.
