Elmwood #2
One afternoon, he had watched the Harrier humiliate a new recruit who had joined up without enough money to pay for all his gear.
He made the lad, who was no more than sixteen, clean the fetid mud off of each corresponding piece of the Harrier’s gear with his tongue until he hurled up his accounts.
No one who ranked highly enough to stop the Harrier or even chide him did so.
Bullies, as far as Elmwood was concerned at the time, were the world’s best candidates for humiliation.
The Harrier was a creature constructed of vanities, but the most mockable of them was undoubtedly his mustache.
Whether it was during the predawn scramble before a battle, in the middle of a sunny afternoon, or in the dregs of a fight while coated in blood and gore, the Harrier’s reddish-brown mustache was always impeccable, twirled into its two curving points.
Elmwood hadn’t the faintest idea how the man managed it, but he instinctively knew that it was the chink in the Harrier’s otherwise impenetrable pride.
So he wondered aloud to one of the chattier pages who ran messages around the camps whether the Harrier perhaps greased his mustache with a pomade made from rat urine and earwax.
The beauty of it was that it was quite impossible to protest such nonsense without sounding ridiculous.
And while the Harrier was the heroic darling of the broadside-reading public, he was not popular among the men, for obvious reasons.
So the rumor spread like wildfire, and soon everyone was snickering behind the Harrier’s back—even some of the other officers.
Soon the troops began referring to him as Lord Rat Piss.
Elmwood could have sworn he wasn’t the first one to say it, but it was hard to recall exactly.
It was only a matter of time before the Harrier caught wind of it, and Elmwood vividly remembered warming his soul upon the absolutely incandescent rage it had kindled.
He never knew how the Harrier found out that he had started the rumor.
Perhaps he had simply seen the satisfaction in Elmwood’s eyes.
In any case, Elmwood soon discovered that he would pay dearly for his attempt at balancing the scales.
He and his men were sent out on the worst, most dangerous missions that nearly got them all killed, only for the Harrier to ride in and save the day at the last moment, making the rest of them—especially Elmwood—seem completely incompetent.
It wasn’t that he minded the humiliation—he was so accustomed to being a disappointment that it hardly registered.
What he minded was the loss of men and the proximity to greater violence, and the fact that the Harrier’s heroic reputation grew when he was the furthest thing from a hero that Elmwood could imagine.
In fact, the longer Elmwood observed him, the more he began to suspect that the Harrier’s success was entirely smoke and mirrors.
By this point, he had been seriously considering selling his commission or even deserting, but the desire to get to the bottom of what the Harrier was up to outweighed his sense of self-preservation.
Then, by virtue of surreptitiously keeping a sharp eye on the man, he noticed something.
The Harrier was receiving regular, mysterious letters.
They were invariably delivered to him by his brutish aide-of-camp, Brumdorf.
The Harrier would disappear into his tent to read a letter and would then very pointedly not pass any information on to anyone else.
At first, Elmwood thought they must be letters of a personal nature and wondered if perhaps there was something scandalous in them.
Then he noticed that they were not delivered to camp by the couriers that delivered all the mail.
They were not delivered to camp at all. Brumdorf seemed to obtain them out of thin air.
It was a cold night when he shadowed Brumdorf through the scraggly pine forest that was slowly taking back land that had been cleared to build some border town, only for the town to be burned down in a subsequent skirmish.
He followed him away from camp, away from their line altogether, across the contested territory they were currently fighting over, and right to the edge of the Relancian line.
And there, Brumdorf had met someone, and that someone had given him a letter.
The Harrier was receiving information from the enemy camp. But what information? And to what end? And why was the Harrier keeping this information for himself rather than sharing it with the other commanders?
Elmwood had been determined to find out.
What a wretched fool he was.
Elmwood kept having episodes in the middle of the night where he partially woke up but couldn’t move because a great weight was pinning him to the ground, and there was terrible moaning all around and something was coming for him.
He would scream silently, unable to make himself come fully awake for what felt like hours.
Rollo slept just fine, wedged in his armpit and snoring. It wasn’t that Elmwood was becoming fond of the dog. It was only that it was a comfort to have another living creature breathing and heart-beating in the bed with him when he finally woke from his nightmares.
He took to drinking too much wine in the evenings, in hopes of deadening his mind.
So when one morning, a week after the disastrous dinner with Lady Croft, he woke entirely too early to the sound of numerous voices outside in the yard and a vicious pounding in his head, it took him a moment to corral his thoughts and realize what it might mean.
“This is the end, Rollo,” he said. “Lady Croft has given me up after all.”
Clad only in his shirt, he went over to the window to meet his fate.
Below were several carriages and a bevy of carts, and the yard was swarming with people and dogs.
Dogs? And was that…yes, that was Binty, a lawyer Elmwood had met once or twice through Winthrop. There was Binty’s wife, and his sister. Everyone was laughing and chatting, which seemed odd if they were there to enforce Elmwood’s banishment.
“Not dressed yet?”
Elmwood spun around. Nimsby was standing in the doorway.
“The sun has barely risen! Who in seven Charmers’ hairy assholes are all those people?” Elmwood demanded.
“Renters.”
“Renters?”
“Hunting party. Bunch of rich merchants and such up from Neck.”
“I think you’d better explain, and use lots of words, Nimsby.”
Nimsby sighed. “They come here to hunt, a few times a year. The payment covers upkeep. Candles. All the wine you drink.”
“That’s absurd! The estate covers all of that.”
Nimsby snorted.
“Well, I don’t care about the payment!” said Elmwood. “I insist that you cancel this immediately.” Binty might have been a friend of Winthrop’s, but he’d still turn Elmwood in if he saw him.
“Too late.”
“What do you mean, too late? Tell them to go away!”
“Can’t. Already spent the money.”
This was truly a disaster.
“How long will they stay?”
“Two nights.”
“Two nights?”
Nimsby shrugged.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” demanded Elmwood.
“I did, last night.”
“Well, I was drunk last night. If I hadn’t been, I would have told you it was unacceptable!”
Nimsby only shrugged again.
There was nothing for it. He would stay out of sight and hope for the best.
“I’ll forgive you this time, Nimsby, but you’re going to have to bring me meals up in my room. And let the dog out occasionally. I don’t want to see these people.”
“Can’t stay in your room. They’ll want it.”
“Tell them it’s unavailable!”
“Can’t. They’ve paid for all four bedchambers.”
“Where the fuck am I supposed to go, then?”
Nimsby shrugged again.
“Better get going if you don’t want to talk to them,” he said, then turned around and left.
“Nimsby!” Elmwood called after him, to no avail. Elmwood decided that he would be quite justified in dismissing Nimsby for this, except then there would be no one to cook and keep the fires going and haul water and all the other thousand things Nimsby saw to.
He glanced back out into the yard, now empty. Which meant the house was filled up with people he needed to avoid.
“We have to get out of here,” he said to Rollo, who was still lying on the bed, licking himself.
Then he heard female voices outside in the hall.
“Over here are the Lord’s chambers…”
“Come, Rollo,” Elmwood whispered, grabbing up his boots, his cane, and a greatcoat. He dug frantically through a pile of clothing but couldn’t seem to find any breeches. The main door to the room began to open.
Scooping up the dog with his free arm, Elmwood slipped away through the servant’s door just in time.
Merewyth’s grounds and outbuildings were full of people and animals. There was a near catastrophe when Rollo caught wind of one of the renters’ deerhounds and almost got into a scuffle.
It was clear that nowhere at Merewyth would be safe for a few days.
Elmwood set off through the woods, half-naked, with Rollo trotting happily at his heels.
Elmwood had slept in a barn before, shortly after he’d enlisted. He’d commandeered it to provide his men with someplace warm to sleep for once. So barns featured high on his list of potential places to hide out for a few days.
The building that he stumbled upon at the edge of the forest was…not a barn.
It was a sort of round tower, with a wall branching out of one side of it and a funny little cap on the top like a second, tiny tower emerging from the main tower’s tapered roof.
The tiny tower was ringed with little arched holes.
The whole crumbling structure was absolutely coated in twisting vines of some sort of plant that had not yet woken up for the season.
It looked, he thought, like a tiny palace built for woodland creatures. Badgers, perhaps. Or stoats.
As if he had heard Elmwood’s thoughts, Rollo gave a sharp bark and made a mad dash for the building.