Chapter 11 #3
Noting my drained mug, the knight waved at the bar for a refill.
“Something stronger!” He turned back to me.
“You’d understand if you met the guy. Point is, our men were plenty pleased when the prophecy became broader knowledge.
Rid ourselves of a collective pain in our ass and off the mad sorcerer, all in one go. How’s that for two birds, one stone?”
“Birds?” I hiccuped, watching the progress of my fresh mug as it was carried across the dank room.
“Speaking of, you didn’t hear this from me, but apparently the idiot got himself turned into a vulture.”
I grabbed for the mug before it was fully placed, causing the bar help to jerk backward. “Oh,” I squeaked, taking a gulp, and only spilling a small amount down my front. “Poor guy!”
“Yeah, you mentioned his looks. Let’s just say the outside matches the inside now.” The knight’s hearty laughter surmounted all other noise in the bar. “And the way he dressed—”
“Alright, now you’re just wrong. In a purely objective sense, you are wrong.” I took another long swallow, nearly choking on its potency. “The, ah,” I coughed, “the thread count, of his tunics? I heard it was so high, they felt like air.”
“He—”
“The finest fabrics, the finest dyes!”
Gareth watched me upend my drink, overspill trickling from my mouth. “You alright there, miss?”
I slammed my mug down and stared into its empty depths. “I heard his clothes were stitched by blind monks. Who’d gone blind while embroidering. Because they were so good at it, and therefore so in demand. I heard all that.”
“That seems . . .” His brows sank with the effort of thinking. “Bad?”
“No.” I gestured for another mug, my arm whacking a passerby. “Sorry. No, no they love to embroider. It would be cruel to stop them. They”—I hiccuped—“they need it. They need to embroider.”
He scratched at his beard and grimaced. “Let’s talk about something else.” Wood screeched as he slid his chair closer to mine. Had I briefly hoped the sound was a construct?
Gareth’s plump upper lip rose in a leer. He had spittle on his beard, I noted, as a thick arm wrapped around my shoulder. Ah, this was what I’d done to Glenda . . . poor Glenda.
“Listen.” His stinking breath steamed in my ear. “We’ve gotten to know each other, had a few drinks. Why don’t you touch my beard now.”
I toyed with my empty mug, thinking. I’d badly miscalculated this entire interaction.
If Gareth was the sort to meet rejection with violence, there might not be a clear way out.
I had been in situations like this before, and it was not unsurvivable .
. . momentary discomfort passed, memories faded. Even so.
“I think I’ve drunk too much,” I said truthfully. “I’m sorry, but I’d like to leave.”
“A deal’s a deal,” the knight rumbled, and the arm around my shoulders tightened, pulling me in like a hooked fish. His red-cheeked face descended on mine, lips parted, and—
“Excuse me,” came a stiff, haughty voice. “That happens to be my . . . my sister.”
The scrawny sorcerer looked ridiculous in the dim bar, with his silver buttons and stupid hat.
I jumped to my feet, Gareth’s arm unwinding from my shoulders like a slain python, and eagerly skipped over to the mad sorcerer. We had the attention of other bar patrons now, all wet glowers and snickers.
“Alright, brother, time to leave.” I grabbed at his arm, clumsy from the drink, and pulled urgently. “I’ll uh, touch your beard another time,” I shot at Gareth, who responded by upending his mug and draining it in one gulp. “Let’s go, let’s go!”
After the stagnant warmth of the tavern, the cool dusk air was a balm on my skin. Merulo glanced over his shoulder repeatedly, marching us away at a hurried pace. “Is that what your best behaviour looks like? Drinking with—with scoundrels? In a bar?”
We’d only gone a few feet when it all caught up to me. Tears and snot cascaded down my face, dripping to dampen the front of my new dress. “I-I j-just wanted a pretzel,” I said between sobs.
“Must you always choose safety second to the pursuit of baked goods?” The sorcerer guided me to a grassy incline and motioned for me to sit. “Did he hurt you?”
It was the same place I’d seen the knights lounging before, a gentle slope that culminated in the rising stone fingers of church spires. Evidently it had rained again while I was in the pub; the damp grass chilled me through my dress.
“Why do you care? You hurt me all the time,” I said, wiping gobs of snot from my face. “Don’t act like it’s different because I’m a woman.”
“If you’re uninjured, then tell me what’s wrong.”
Behind the sorcerer’s head, the sun was setting, as if too embarrassed to stick around for what I had to say. “I’m, I’m . . .” I couldn’t get the words out, breath heaving in my throat. “I’m unpopular.”
“Is that it?” At my renewed wails, Merulo flinched and knelt before me in the wet grass. “Listen . . .” The sorcerer gripped my shoulders, and I blinked up at him tearfully. “Listen. Of course you are. Cameron, you are extremely annoying.”
Surprise knocked the tears out of me. As the sorcerer smiled—was that meant to be in reassurance?—I closed the distance between us and pressed my mouth to his. Merulo tensed, but didn’t immediately pull away. For a moment his face softened beneath mine.
“This is extremely odd,” he said, the nearness of his words tickling my cheeks. “And you are intoxicated. And possibly a masochist.”
“Shut up,” I growled, and pulled him down so that we sprawled in the grass. One hand clenched in his oily hair, my other guided his grip to my chest. His mouth moved frantically against mine with all the hunger of a lonely sorcerer virgin, and something hard pressed against my leg.
Alas, our writhing was not to be. “So thish ish how it ish?” a bellowing voice slurred from above. “Couldn’t find yoursh own womensh? And yoursh own shishter?”
Swearing, Merulo made to push himself off me, and was assisted by meaty hands gripping the back of his coat. The sorcerer was half thrown and half fell down the incline, where two of the knights who had previously been lounging with Gareth waited.
I heard the rising venom of a spell on Merulo’s lips, but before he could complete it, Gareth smashed a fist into his jaw.
The sorcerer stumbled backward into the waiting knights, his thin frame dwarfed by the burly men.
Gareth pressed forward, snatching the front of Merulo’s ruffled shirt and slamming that oversized hammer of a hand, again and again, into his mouth.
The same mouth I’d been in the process of kissing. Needless to say, this pissed me off.
With the men caught in their haze of testosterone, flesh smacking destructively into flesh, nobody paid poor womanly me any mind as I padded through the wet grass.
Dodging the backward swings of Gareth’s jackhammering, I reached for the broadsword at his waist, and pulled it free from its sheath with barely a sound.
One of his companions called a warning, but too late; I had the sword pricked into his back, with enough pressure to drive the tip through his shirt and an upper layer of skin.
He howled like a dog—but even through the cloud of alcohol, Gareth had enough sense not to move.
“I’ve always had passing adequacy with a sword,” I slurred proudly.
Freed from the barrage, Merulo did not waste time.
He completed his foul utterance, and Gareth toppled—onto the sorcerer.
While the other two knights scattered, shouting and near-tripping in their haste to escape down the empty street, I dropped the sword and pushed at the deadweight that was Gareth, using every muscle in my transformed body to roll him off the crushed sorcerer.
“I could so easily have bought you a pretzel.” Merulo lay stunned, but free of injury. Remarkably so, considering what I’d just witnessed. I could only imagine that he’d expended another dragon scale outside the pub, in anticipation of conflict.
“Is he dead?” I reached out a hand to help him to his feet. No longer a pastel wash, the clouds burned a lifeblood red behind him.
Merulo wrinkled his nose at the prone knight. “Unconscious. I applied the command word for ‘slacken.’”
“The same spell you used on me?” I nudged Gareth’s side with a tentative foot. “It doesn’t smell as though he’s shit himself.”
“Most people don’t.”
We stood in sudden awkwardness. Was the sorcerer expecting to resume . . . ? But there came William with his marionette strides across the deserted cobblestone street.
“I had him unloading groceries through the portal,” the sorcerer explained, with a hint of sheepishness.
“These trips are usually uneventful. Now, however, I’ll have to find a town of comparable size to fulfill my needs, which means trying new vendors, some of whom are bound to be low quality or otherwise disappointing.
” He sighed, a touch dramatically. “And of course, every minute spent on domestic matters is one in which I could have been attending to my constructs. The Order will certainly take advantage of that, with their constant advancements on my stronghold, the end result no doubt being an interruption of my reading. It’s fair to say, Cameron, that this chain of events will substantially delay the death of God.
For a pretzel.” The sorcerer brushed dirt and street filth off his clothing; given his unbroken skin, it was the only sign he’d been assaulted by a trio of knights.
“Not just for a pretzel. I also got the crucial intel that everybody hates me.” I kicked Gareth’s side again. This time, the burly man let out a low fart. “You see this? You see this? And you’re saying it’s not a shit-yourself spell.”
“Are you still on about that?” Merulo sighed, then straightened, his face attempting something poignant and solemn. “Cameron, listen. I have been an outcast my entire life.”
“Oh good, something to bond over.” I pried the sword belt off unconscious, farting Gareth. The world had begun to double, with two sorcerers, two Gareths, and four of my own hands manipulating the belt.
“Would you just . . . even when I’m making an effort, you’re COMPLETELY infuriating.” His fists had balled, like a child being denied a toy.
“Making an effort at what? Should I be forgetting I have a torture needle in my chest, just because you’re getting sentimental over grabbing some tits?
” With some drunken struggle, I buckled the sword belt around the waist of my already much-abused dress, so that the sheath fell down a hip.
I retrieved the deadly steel from where I’d tossed it in the wet grass, and (nearly impaling myself) sheathed it with a satisfying rasp.
The sorcerer threw his hands into the air with a shout of frustration. “This is immensely unimportant. I am SUPPOSED to be finding a way to slay God.”
“Well go on, then,” I said, with a shooing motion. “Go slay God.”
“I will,” snapped the sorcerer, and I imagined I could make out the gleam of his eye, even through the illusion.
“Fine.”
“Fine,” he spat, storming away down the cobblestone street. With a sigh, I followed in his wake, stopping only once to vomit up alcohol.