1
Nettle
Unfortunately, the best seat in the tavern for Nettlewisp was in the dusty rafters. There, at least, she didn’t have to worry about the drunken patrons pulling out the chair she was occupying and nearly sitting on her again. Up here, she only had to fend off the occasional rat crawling across the beams.
Besides, this was the best place to watch the tavern door from.
For perhaps the hundredth time that evening the door pushed open–another stranger dusted with snow. The wind slammed it shut behind him, announcing his presence.
The stranger pulled back his cloak cowl, the icy fabric falling aside to reveal the shaved sides of his head, the scalp filled in with orcish tattoos, his green pointed ears were ragged and torn, suggesting many encounters with sharp claws and fangs.
For a moment, the crowded floor of patrons quieted.
It was him. The orcish bounty hunter. Nettle’s heart beat a little faster.
This side of the Chasm, there were many orcs, but Nettle only needed this one. He paid the other patrons no mind and rather crossed to the bar with a single-minded intent.
His shoulders were staggering to behold from even across the tavern as he hefted a full burlap sack over his shoulder. Murmurs crept up around the edges of the room.
Without a word, he tossed it down on the counter, likely containing some rare bird, if the iridescent feathers poking out between tears suggested anything. Within moments, the sack started oozing something black and viscous onto the counter.
The tavern keeper lifted the mouth of the sack a moment, eyeing the creature, then its deliverer.
“Erryc,”
the bounty hunter nodded to him, as he undid the leather tie on one of his belt pouches.
“Silver,”
the tavern keeper nodded in return, trying to conceal his queasiness at whatever gruesome mess was within the sack. “Back for another?”
Silver only grunted in lieu of a reply, pulling out a folded piece of parchment and handing it off to the tavern keeper.
Erryc unfolded the page, browning furrowing as he examined the page.
“One of these days, there isn’t going to be anything left on the job board.”
“Just get me my gold.”
Nettlewisp had heard of the bounty hunter’s prolific accomplishments in the field, but more importantly, she had heard he would take on any job for gold. Still, she was unprepared to see him in person, larger than life, thick muscled arms perfectly complementing his broad shoulders.
The stubs of a few snapped arrows were still embedded in his singular left pauldron, giving him the air of a grizzled, hunted beast. Though he stood a head shorter than the tavern keeper, he was easily the scariest being in a tavern packed full of knives and sharp teeth.
Nettle had been warned about seedy places such as these, where the patrons could range from thieves to murderers, hobgoblins and humans. It was so different from anything from the Court of Morning Mist.
Erryc peered into the bleeding sack on the counter once more, grimacing as he compared it to whatever was scrawled on the page, before he nodded to the bounty hunter again. He reached below the counter to produce a pouch of gold, which jingled as it landed on the counter. Another quest finished.
No sooner had Silver plucked up the payment and given it a couple shakes in his palm to feel its weight, he turned and headed towards the tavern notice board. One didn’t acquire a reputation such as his by resting on one’s laurels.
Many other scrolls of paper and scraped lambskin sheets were pinned to the wall, smeared with inky details, curling where they weren’t skewered by plain daggers and pins. There was even the occasional press-printed wanted poster, from more official decrees.
Nettle watched a moment, transfixed, as Silver extended one green hand, uncurling a roll of parchment to read it better.
Now was her moment.
Nettle couldn’t just sit here and wait until he had picked some other job. She’d been in here the other night, and her hesitation had cost her time. Thankfully, his last job hadn’t taken him long to complete, but as the tavern keeper had informed her the other night, sometimes the bounty hunter wasn’t seen for weeks at a time.
She couldn’t risk waiting that long.
Nettle flitted over to the orc, carving through the chains of hanging lamps— a path of glimmering sparks left in her wake.
Over the last couple of days, Nettle had learned that it was rude to just drop down in front of someone’s face, so she settled for hovering just behind him.
“Excuse me–”
He, of course, didn’t hear her. The voices of fey were more like whispers to larger creatures.
Face heating with the effort, she repeated herself, louder, more than she was ever comfortable with, “I said, sir, excuse me, SIR–”
He turned his head, meeting her eyes through dark lashes and the snapped arrows on his shoulder armor. “Is there a knight among us?”
The mere act of meeting his eyes seemed to pierce right through her. Nettle faltered, dipping a few inches in the air. Her first thought was to zip away, to flee back to the safety of the rafters.
No, she wouldn’t be frightened. She had come too far for that.
Nettle steeled herself, crossing her arms over her chest. “I have a job for you, bounty hunter.”
He had a wolfish smile, his tusks looking terribly sharp within it. “Do you, little flea?”
Nettle frowned.
She swallowed down her offense, not just at being called a bug, but that he felt the need to throw ‘little’ on there. ‘Flea’ already implied as much. Redundancy was not the sort of quality she cared for in a companion. Besides, she was much larger than a flea, nearly as tall as his thumb.
Nettle eyed the rest of the pub. Rowdy as it was, it still did not feel wise to discuss her plans out in the middle of the floor.
“Join me for a drink, and we’ll talk,”
she said, lifting her chin towards the far end of the bar.
Perhaps it was too forward, too assuming, too bold from her. But she held his gaze, and after a moment, he nodded.
“I suppose one drink is enough for the size of you,”
he said, and the corners of his mouth twitched around his tusks. “Do they charge you by the thimble?”
Nettle pressed her lips together, and flitted down to the emptier, quieter end of the bar, taking one of the empty stools for herself. “Unfortunately for me, they don’t. Besides, I don’t know that I trust them to wash the thimbles.”
She watched as he swung a leg over one of the empty wooden stools, a dusting of snow trickling down the folds of his cloak from the mountains of his shoulders.
Then the orc hooked the toe of his worn leather boot under the rung of her barstool. Her seat nearly jolted out from under her as he tugged her closer to him. He settled an elbow against the bar, looming over her and taking up her entire field of vision.
Nettle felt utterly insignificant as his eyes drifted over her, assessing her. She watched a line between his nose and the corner of his mouth deepen as he frowned at her.
“What’s this job, then?”
Silver asked, only to be interrupted by the tavern keeper approaching them on the other side of the counter. The bounty hunter rolled his eyes, waving to Erryc, “Bring me a flagon, and…”
“A sparkling pollen wine?”
Nettle asked, her voice losing whatever edge it had. She had heard another patron ask for it the other night, and thought it sounded delicious.
“A sparkling pollen wine,”
the orc repeated slowly, like he’d never used that combination of words before.
Suddenly, Nettle was all too aware that it wasn’t something a little tougher, like the hops-bitter brews all the brutish adventurers tended to.
“It was on the menu,”
she muttered, more to herself than to him. Her cheeks and the tips of her wings flushed bronze.
“Is this your racket? You trick patrons into buying your drink for the night?”
Nettle did not dignify that question with an answer. Even if she did, it wasn’t any of his business. She did not intend to share anything unrelated to her business with him.
Shortly after, the tavern keeper brought over a flagon of ale in one hand, and in the other, her glass of wine.
Nettle was honestly a little surprised that an establishment with as many rough edges as this one could manage to produce a perfectly normal wine glass. But Erryc seemed a little proud, even, that he did.
She wasn’t sure how to go about drinking from this. The high-stemmed glass was taller than she was. She could flit up over the edge to lean down over, that was no way to drink. If she choked or gave herself the hiccups trying to sip her oddly dainty drink, she wouldn’t be able to maintain her mysterious air in front of the big tough bounty hunter.
She needed him to take her seriously, at least a little.
Silver thumbed the scratchy bristles on his chin, clearly he didn’t bother to shave every morning. “So, mosquito. Tell me this job before you bleed me dry.”
Nettle huffed a breath, and tried not to put her hands on her hips like she meant to lecture him. She needed to get along with him until the job was done, at least.
Of course, her self restraint did not keep her from asking, “Do you have to make the same joke over and over? It gets terribly boring.”
The orc lifted his ale to his mouth. “I’m not here to entertain you.”
“Good, because I’m not paying for all these second-hand quips.”
Her wings buzzed, bringing her to hover over the delicate rim of her glass. She placed her hands on the rim, chewing her lip. Perhaps she could scoop up handfuls of it. No, that wouldn’t work.
After a moment of being unable to figure it out, she simply folded her legs under her, sitting down on the rim of her wine glass like some kind of elaborate garnish. It was a precarious balance, but her wings continued to flutter slowly, adjusting as needed.
The orc was watching her closely, she realized when she looked back up at him, probably just as curious as she was on what the best method was for a fey to drink out of full sized stemware.
Not for the first time that night, she felt out of place.
Nettle fumbled for words at first, staring up at the grizzled orc. She had thought the hard part would be getting his attention or convincing him to take on her job over others.
“...There’s an underground gauntlet nearby, only the elders of my Fey Court know its secrets. I’ve been there before, I’ve seen the treasure that it holds,”
she said, finding it much easier to divulge Fey secrets than what she needed him to do. “I’ve made it through the passage safely before, but the final stone door is… well, I’m supposed to, well, you see— it’s um, it’s too heavy for me to move.”
“And what makes you so sure I’ll be able to move it?”
She did not answer out loud, rather glanced over the top of her drink. He followed her gaze, temple furrowing, to his tensed bicep, his arm braced on the bar. It was, perhaps, more muscle than she had in her entire body.
He straightened in his seat, meeting her eyes again, looking slightly perturbed that she would so blatantly objectify him.
Nettlewisp gave her head a prim little shake. “Perhaps for you, it is simply a regular door. But it manages to keep all little, winged things like myself out.”
At least, now it did. Once upon a time, she’d been able to open the door without any help at all.
He seemed to take the hint from her sour tone. He took another long draw from his flagon, and then set it down with an empty-sounding thunk. “And how do you propose to pay me? It doesn’t look like you carry coin.”
Nettle shook her head and waved a hand. “You’re a treasure hunter, there’s plenty of treasure in the gauntlet’s end. You can have what you can carry. There’s only one thing I want from it.”
Silver raised a brow at that, but made no comment towards it. “When do you need this done?”
“As soon as possible. I’ll show you where the gauntlet starts tonight.”
He grimaced at that, taking another draught from his stein. “You’d have me working the holiday.”
“Is that a problem?”
He grunted. “Guess I’ve got nothing better to do.”
A noise almost like a chicken clucking started from the sack Silver had left further down the bar, drawing the attention of several people. Nettle frowned at the noise, brow creasing as she watched. Whatever had been in the bag wasn’t dead after all.
The tavern keeper pulled back the fabric, obviously trying not to touch it too much as he dealt with it.
There was barely a heartbeat between the burlap falling away to reveal the creature and it lurching down the counter, flinging drops of inky black ichor with every slapping footfall. Everyone within reach of it recoiled, wiping the splatter from their cheeks. The creature squawked and flapped its wings, turning this way and that, the spines along its neck raising up. A toadbird, she realized. She had only glimpsed them from afar before.
The instant Nettle realized its yellow eyes were on her was the same second her balance slipped.
For the first time that night she tasted the burn of alcohol, a completely unpleasant sensation up her nose. All the fruity and floral flavors were rather unwelcome.
Nettle sat up in the glass, the wine coming up to her shoulders while she gasped for air and coughed a mouthful of wine out. She had not swallowed too much, but as she looked up again, Nettle realized she had bigger problems.
The toadbird had flapped its way down the counter, leaving an oily path behind it. A couple of patrons tried to grab it with their hands, only for it to slip out, one after another.
Nettle threw out a hand, reaching for her magic, what little of it she had left, but even in her veins it stayed dull and brittle. The pull of magic felt dim within her hands.
The toadbird crouched, readying to pounce. Its teeth-lined gullet open for her, as the creature leapt towards her– only for a handax to slam down on it. Its middle was pinned to the bar, the blade buried deep in its iridescent feathers.
The toadbird croaked, life oozing out of it.
Nettle gasped, and nearly slipped back under the wine again. She looked up at the bounty hunter again. She’d been so concerned with her impending doom that she hadn’t seen him move at all. His barstool was knocked back against the ground in his leap to stand, his fist still curled around the handle. A thrum of need pulsed through her body.
Nettle’s heart pounded in the quiet aftermath as she and the rest of the tavern watched Silver scoop up someone else’s tankard of ale and finish it off on one swig. Then he rummaged through his pocket, grunting and humming something to himself. He produced the little bag of gold the tavern keeper had paid him for the creature, and tossed it back on the bar.
Silver turned his gaze back on her, the glint of adventure in his eyes and a wicked grin revealing the points of his teeth.
The little bubbles in the wine ran up her skin.
He then plucked her up out of the glass by her wings, and a jolt of sensation went through her whole body. His fingertips were rough and calloused, unlike anything she had ever known.
He set her down on the counter, not ungently, but she fell back on her side when he release her, terribly unsteady from the whole ordeal. The living flower petals of her dress were almost translucent, dripping with wine as it puddled around her.
“That one you can have for free, firebug,”
he said, voice low and gravelly, eyes lingering over her. Nettle watched him lick his lips, and wondered if he was contemplating cleaning every drop of wine off her with his tongue. Then she felt that jolt of need throb between her legs again.
Oh, no.