Chapter Three #2
The light in his eyes was the drink, Juniper told himself. And not an eagerness to leave their farm and their life behind.
Juniper was not nearly so cheerful as he followed his best friend, his shorter stride a burden especially when he was tipsy. Even inebriated, Mo seemed to move with an elegance that Juniper envied.
“Apparently,” Juniper muttered, scowling at Mo’s broad back.
Mornings were earlier than they used to be. Juniper was sure of it. He was a farmer, for Divona’s sake.
But mornings in springtime, when the days were endless and the sun shone far longer—well, those felt different. He could rise early and drink a bit of black caife with a splash of milk from the fluffy brown cow they’d named Pip and walk among the dew and flowers before the day began.
Waking before first light as a chill grew in the air? When his blankets were this warm?
It should be outlawed.
“Junebug,” Mo called from the kitchen. A rattle of pots and pans, intermingled with Mo’s merry whistle, greeted Juniper. Nicknames were also illegal before dawn, Juniper decided.
“Surely the quest can wait until the afternoon,” Juniper suggested. His head ached worse than it had in the middle of the night, when he had woken on Mo’s lap.
His rough-hewn oak bedroom door creaked open.
Mo’s grin was slight, his smiles always understated and hidden in his dark brown beard.
He was dressed already, in a pair of dark gray trousers and a loose white shirt with a few buttons at the top, none of which were buttoned.
Mo was always forgetting buttons, and Juniper was always buttoning things for him.
His thick wool cloak was slung over his arm, Juniper’s beside it.
It looked freshly cleaned and no longer smelled of taverns and bad decisions.
Juniper was always forgetting cloaks, and Mo was always bringing one for him.
“You ready?” Mo asked. “Garreth said we had to leave at first light.”
“I—” Juniper pushed himself up, pulling his quilt over his bare chest. “Do I look ready, Morn? Half-naked and half-asleep?”
“Maybe you like your quests half-naked,” Mo said with a shrug. “Who am I to judge?”
A snort escaped Juniper despite himself.
“I made breakfast,” Mo told him.
Juniper took a deep breath. Mo had indeed made breakfast—he could smell it, caife tangled with the scent of warm spices and fresh-baked bread, the sizzle of eggs and the thick-cut sausage they bartered for from Farmer Abernathy across the river.
And was that his very favorite spiced honey plum pudding he smelled?
“Mo,” he said. His voice sounded very small to his own ears, but perhaps Mo wouldn’t notice.
Or if he did, he would let Juniper save face and they could both pretend Juniper was being very brave about this whole thing. That was more likely, because Mo noticed everything.
“Junebug.”
“Is that plum pudding?”
Mo’s grin broke across his face like the sunrise unfurling over the river. “Sure is,” he said. “And bread for the road. I packed cheese, too, extra for you. And lots of snacks.”
Snacks would make anything better. It was tried and true, in his experience: So perhaps here, snacks could turn camping into glamping, and a troublesome quest into a culinary foray.
“What happens if we don’t leave this morning?
” Juniper asked with a deep sigh. He swung his feet over the edge of the bed, feeling a bit as if he were jumping off a bridge into a chasm of cold water as he did.
He was up, at least. And very cold, in nothing but his sleeping drawers and the thick wool socks Mo had knit for him last Yule.
Mumford slipped in through the open door, bumping his head against Juniper’s leg until Juniper picked him up.
“Stupid Gary and his stupid quest. Mumford doesn’t want us to go, do you, Mumford?”
“Are we calling the recruiter Gary?” Mo asked thoughtfully. “Mmm.”
“Mo, mmm isn’t an answer when it’s not even dawn,” Juniper said, closing his eyes for a brief moment when Mumford tucked his soft orange head directly under Juniper’s jaw. “Will he really send the constables after us?”
“It won’t come to that,” Mo answered. “Come on, Juniper. I’ve got us breakfast, and I put everything we need into our packs.”
Mo had insisted that they have packs to begin with, long before Juniper had pummeled his way into a quest the previous night.
Juniper had thought him silly at the time—and, of course, had thought about how his stupid drunken father used to keep a knapsack packed by his bed, threatening to leave if Juniper couldn’t stop being noisy and misbehaved and all the other things Juniper always seemed to be.
But at the time, Juniper hadn’t said any of that, of course. He had just asked Mo where would they possibly go that they would need more than a small knapsack and a pocketful of snacks?
But, as usual, Mo had planned better for the future than Juniper was capable of.
“What does the constable do?” Juniper asked. “And did those guards last night work directly for Gary?”
His experience of the constable was that the man was often drunk, and occasionally rounded up rowdier drunks (but only if he was sober), and sometimes hung around at the business hall, trading in gold coins with the other little businessmen Juniper so disliked.
Sometimes, of course, he collected taxes, or did other unpleasant things.
“The constable rounds up the runners,” Mo said. “I imagine the guards help. They bring runners into the capital city.”
He was very purposely not saying something. Juniper pulled on the trousers Mo had set out for him, a pair of worn buckskin he had made for himself a few winters back.
“No shirt?” he asked Mo, which was awfully ungrateful of him.
Mo shrugged one shoulder, smirking a little as his dark eyes swept across Juniper’s chest.
Juniper was not as generously hewn as his friend, so the look made him turn away quickly, setting Mumford down before he went rummaging in his bedside drawer for a good thick wool shirt.
“That’ll take longer to dry,” Mo told him conversationally.
“Are you planning to dunk me?” Juniper asked him. It wasn’t out of the question, of course. Sometimes, Juniper needed a good dunking. It sorted him right out.
Of course, Mo often needed the same. Or rather, Juniper liked getting him back for all the times Mo had dunked him.
“Not at the moment,” Mo said. He had picked up Mumford now—Mumfy never seemed to stay on the ground for long—and was petting him absentmindedly. “But there are river crossings to think about.”
Were there?
“I’d like a word with drunk Juniper,” Juniper grumbled.
Mo chuckled. “It’ll be all right,” he said. “This quest won’t last that long. I heard one of the princes has his own hunting party, and I’m sure they’ll have some glamoured cow slung over the back of their cart, claiming it’s a dragon, within a few days at most. We’ll be home in no time.”
“What if they don’t?” Juniper blurted as he shoved his feet into his boots. “And wait—what exactly are we going to do if we find this dragon? Do we have anything to hunt it with? I’m not hauling that old pitchfork with us, Mo. I won’t do it.”
Now this was why nobody from Tús should go on quests.
They could fight, and Juniper could track, and Mo could hunt.
Those were skills they had. But holding their own with other bands of mercenaries?
Capturing a dragon? Juniper hoped Mo knew more about this sort of thing than he did, or they were in for an even worse time than previously imagined.
“You really didn’t listen to a word that was said last night?” Mo stared at him with disbelief. “There have been dozens of dragon sightings, so yes, we probably will see one at some point.”
Juniper swore at length, including some words he wasn’t even sure were curses, just to cover all his options. “So how are we meant to do anything about it?” he asked.
Mo lifted his shirt to reveal his hunting belt, a piece of thick brown leather with a row of knives sheathed along it.
“You’re going to fight a dragon with a knife?” Juniper asked in disbelief. “We’re fucked.”
“It’ll be an adventure,” Mo said cheerfully.
“Besides, we might not need to fight? Historically, dragons are pretty peaceful. Bring your knife, and we’ll wander around the woods, up the river toward the mountains, and as soon as we hear word someone else has got there first, we’ll traipse on home again. ”
“What if nobody finds the dragon?” Juniper rubbed the sleep from his eyes reluctantly. “And did you just say dragons are peaceful?”
“I asked about the quest last night once you’d gone to sleep,” Mo told him, shoving Juniper’s cloak into his arms. “Garreth couldn’t give us the little scroll with all the details, apparently. You’d vomited all over his clean copies, so he told me what I needed to know, and I wrote it down.”
He held out a small scroll, which Juniper took. Most scrolls—the kind you’d buy at the market, the kind they used in schools or recruitment offices—were in the common tongue. But Mo still wrote, in careful script, in the old tongue, something his grandmam had taught him to do.
Juniper followed Mo out into their small main room, yawning widely. It was a cozy place, this cottage they had built together ten years ago, at eighteen winters and nineteen winters, respectively.
There were two little bedrooms right next to each other—Juniper’s a bit bigger, because he had wanted a closet for his fine garments, not that there were many of them.
The main room was the coziest and best thing Juniper had ever had in his life, with a fire glowing merrily in the hearth, and a tall bookshelf that ran the length of one wall, filled with all the stories of adventure and romance and magic he and Mo had collected along the way and saved for with the coins they’d earned from the wheat and barley and wool they’d sold.
Ropes of dried flowers and herbs hung from the rafters, intermixed with braids of garlic and a hook that held the iron pots and pans they’d bought over the years from the peddler.