Chapter Seven
Seven
The only good thing about nearly burning to death in the middle of the night and your best friend then being rude to an actual prince was that you did, at least, get to take a break from all the hiking and tramping about.
The food, however, was utterly soaked.
Juniper O’Reilly was not above eating soaked cheese (though he left the waterlogged bread), so he sat on the bank, naked as the day he was born, and ate all the remaining cheese, just so it didn’t spoil.
Mo had lost some of the coin he was carrying, but at the very least Juniper still had his.
They had made quite a bit on the sale of their barley earlier in the season, so they could replenish their supply of cheese as soon as they reached Filleadh, and even have a night at the inn there without having to worry about times being lean during the winter.
“Junebug?” Mo’s interruption was as soft as a summer breeze. He sat down on the bank beside Juniper.
Juniper looked at him and waited.
“I’m sorry,” Mo said.
Just that.
Juniper startled. “About the prince?”
“I should not have called you a fool,” Mo said slowly. “I don’t want to work with anyone else, though. Just you.”
That was a colossally bad decision, and Juniper could not begin to understand why somebody as smart as Morn Elmthorn would keep picking him.
There were hundreds of men more qualified for not only quests but for farming as well, come to think of it.
Why Mo kept Juniper around at all was baffling, but Juniper could only hope Mo never realized it.
“He was a prince,” Juniper explained, as if Mo was unaware.
He didn’t know how to say the rest of this: that this situation Juniper had gotten them into was a bad one, but some good could come of it.
Juniper could make this right. He could give Mo enough adventure that Mo would be ready to settle down, and they could befriend a prince, and—and—
Mo opened his mouth to say something and then seemed to think better of it.
“We’ll make it to Filleadh by nightfall,” he said.
“We’ll have to go fast, and I think we should stay off the road.
With the dragon sighted so recently, the mercenaries will be swarming.
And when news makes it back to the villages, and eventually to the capital city, more will be joining up and flocking this way. ”
“And?” Juniper swallowed the last of his soggy cheese and flopped backward onto the packed dirt and soft green moss along the bank.
It was more comfortable than his poor too-soon-departed bedroll.
Perhaps he could weave together bits of moss like the sidhe did to replace the lost trousers and bedroll.
“Won’t that help? Safety in numbers and all that? ”
Mo hesitated. “Ah,” he said. “I think we have different ideas about safety.”
Now what in the fuck did that mean? For being someone who appreciated directness, Mo often seemed to speak in fucking riddles. Did Mo mean Juniper was an idiot with no sense of personal or professional safety?
“We’ll circle back to that one,” Juniper said, a little coldly.
Mo arched an eyebrow at him and then put one hand under Juniper’s shoulder and flipped him straight back into the river.
Juniper surfaced, spluttering and hollering.
“If you say ‘circle back,’ I will push you in the water,” Mo said, before offering his hand to pull Juniper back out.
Juniper cursed again but allowed his friend to haul him back onto the mossy bank.
“Now,” Mo said calmly. “What part did you take offense to? Because I meant none.”
So Juniper had been wrong to go leaping to conclusions with the agility of a mountain goat leaping from rock to rock? So it had not been meant as a personally hurtful statement of fact?
Ah. Well.
This was news to Juniper.
A shame he’d had to be dunked to learn this lesson, but what could you do?
“We have different ideas of safety?” Juniper asked. He took a deep breath and steadied himself. “I’ll push you in the creek if you don’t explain to me how that is not an insult.”
“I meant,” Mo said, “that I do not think these mercenaries are safe, or our allies. They have been known to eliminate competition, especially successful competition.”
Juniper shivered at that. He had considered almost every possible opportunity to worry, and, as was his habit, made the most of his available opportunities and worried about all of them.
Wolves. Dragons. The cold. The heat. The fire.
Bill Bronson winning. Embarrassing himself in front of Mo.
Mo giving up on him after realizing Juniper’s true inadequacy.
A new worry unlocked that day: meeting a prince while looking like a dead wet rat.
But he had not considered, in all of his musings, that the other mercenaries would pose a true danger. Surely men like Bill would brawl with him, yes, but engage in any truly dangerous violence?
Back in Tús, the worst you could expect was maybe a broken nose or a headache from headbutting someone too many times.
“You think they’ll hunt…us?” he asked. This was preposterous. If Juniper weren’t riffraff himself, he’d be filing a formal complaint to the nearest town regent.
“Well, no,” Mo said. “I don’t think they’ll hunt us yet, and not unless we find the dragon ourselves.”
Juniper wanted to say that this seemed unlikely—usually, the trained bands of mercenaries were the ones who completed the quest and won all the money. But Bill Bronson had won a quest once, and Juniper and Mo had already encountered a dragon, so…
Mo continued, folding yesterday’s shirt carefully with those big hands of his. “But mercenaries have often stolen slain beasts, killed the mercenaries who captured the beast to begin with, and claimed the glory as their own.”
“Shit.” Juniper stood, shaking water droplets from his curls. He padded across the soft moss toward his nearly dry clothes. “You think Bill lied about those werewolves?”
“I don’t think werewolves are real,” Mo answered, following suit.
He was already mostly dressed, wearing his dry trousers and boots, knives remaining strapped to him.
He was still shirtless, which was rather rude of him, especially when he looked like that.
It was fucking distracting. “At least not in the way the kingsquest described them. I think Bronson and his men stole a glamoured dead dog and passed it off as a mythical beast.”
“You don’t have to wear a shirt,” Juniper blurted.
Mo’s hand stilled where he’d been about to open his pack, the calloused pad of his finger just brushing the strap. Juniper’s skin felt warm at the sight. “What?” Mo asked.
Juniper coughed loudly. “Nothing,” he said.
“We’re talking about monsters, Mo. Keep up.
So do you think Bill killed someone to get his werewolf?
” Juniper asked, but the discomfort snaking through his stomach and roiling like a pot of water over the fire had less to do with the idea of Bronson as a murderer and more to do with his realization that Mo had been paying closer attention to the kingsquests that came and went than Juniper had known.
Of course, they had always talked about a quest that would pull them from their sleepy village into the mountains, the highlands, the strange and cruel caves beneath the capital city, or even across the gap to the northern sea and the desolation beyond. They had told fine stories.
But Juniper had never been serious, until he had to be serious to save his hide, and even then it was only an unfortunate accident.
They were supposed to stay by their cozy hearth fire until they were both very, very old, and Juniper would weave more blankets and card more wool and plant more seeds and they would go on as they always had, their doors carefully shut at night and their beds comfortable.
“Bronson seems more like a thief than a murderer to me,” Mo answered in that slow, thoughtful tone that usually put Juniper’s mind at ease. But now it made his thoughts jumble faster, because Mo had thought about this, and deeply.
Had he spent every winter dreaming of leaving? And if he had, why did he stay at all?
“Either way,” Juniper contributed as he pulled on his shirt, groaning at the soreness in his shoulders when he raised his arms above his head.
The sleeve tangled, and Mo tugged it back into place, those fingers brushing Juniper’s forearm as he did.
For a moment, Juniper’s words trailed off into silence.
“Either way?” Mo prompted.
Juniper cleared his throat, his forearm still prickling where Mo had touched him. “Either way,” Juniper continued, “we avoid Bill, and not just because his face is unpleasant and his manners are worse.”
“And I think he is the mildest of the mercenaries we will encounter,” Mo added. He tossed Juniper’s trousers toward him. “So are we in agreement? Best to go this alone, just the two of us?”
That was fine by Juniper. But if the actual crown prince, who was rumored to have very thick thighs and a deep voice, showed up to hunt a dragon, Juniper may have to renegotiate this arrangement.
“All right,” Juniper agreed. “But I still think we shouldn’t be rude to princes. They might decide to behead us.”
Mo grunted, all the answer Juniper would get about princes and beheading.
And then they were off again, packs just as heavy, shoulders just as sunburned, but with an incredible new layer of chafing tormenting Juniper’s inner thighs as he walked.
This walk was a quieter one, great swaths of the forest burned beyond recognition, land that had once been covered in growing things laid to waste.
Juniper spent most of it thinking of their own farm, of golden wheat and cheerfully waving barley that could be reduced to charred remains in minutes, and all the soft, friendly animals that would be so much roast meat if the dragon had their way.
Mo, for his part, was even quieter than usual, so if Juniper was not babbling like a brook, nobody was going to talk.