Chapter 3 Sage
Sage
Despite Sage’s fears that no one would be willing to embark on a late-season expedition with an untested leader, potential adventurers trickle (though they certainly don’t pour) through the Pearl and the Grit.
On the first day of auditions, Sage and the Agent sign on a healer from Tule, a tiny little fishing village up the coast. With their sun-colored hair pulled up into a small topknot, tanned skin, and muscled shoulders straining their tunic, Bramble has the look of the hirelings who paddle pleasure boats for the rich folks that migrate south to Lintonbury in summertime, more so than any healer Sage has seen.
But they come with references from their temple to a local god of salmon.
A bit niche, but one deity’s as good as the next.
She’d happily have taken a devil’s devotee; some of them can heal as well as any.
What are devils anyway but the arch-bureaucrats of the lower planes?
They can grant wishes and powers just like any patron, and with their unflinching practicality, their allegiances can be less fickle than those of deities and spirits.
Besides which, Bramble can claim experience surviving in rough terrain, making regular pilgrimages across the rocky coast to the wild outlying keys where fisherfolk will go to better worship the gods of the seas. They’re a practiced traveler, if not an adventurer.
“And your people won’t mind losing their temple attendant for a few weeks?” Sage asks.
Bramble shakes their head. “To speak plain, we’ve fallen on tough times at home. I’m not the only one striking out, hoping to bring back a little coin before a hard winter. I heard word of adventuring tryouts when I was passing through Aliceville, and headed straight here.”
“That’s the spirit,” the Agent says as he produces the contract for Bramble to sign. He doesn’t sound terribly concerned with the hardships of Tule, but then, it isn’t his business to care.
On the second day, Sage finds her fighter.
The tavern is wedged between Kingfisher’s market district—the pearl of the port city, where every language spoken in Harrow can be overheard in the shops and the bustling square—and the entertainment district, with its fighting pits, cathouses, and gambling dens.
That would be the grit. As she’d hoped, candidates for party muscle have been drifting out of the grit to audition, though none a perfect match.
One asks too many questions for the Agent’s liking, and is sent quickly on their way.
Another smells so strongly of ale, Sage wonders if he spent the night in a stout barrel.
His eyes keep shifting back and forth between Sage and the empty spot to her left, as though he’s seeing two of her, and can’t decide which one is real.
Maybe the pink-faced, red-bearded giant who shakes the table as he plants his palms on it will fit the ticket. “Name’s Babbock,” he growls. “I come to join the party.”
The Agent looks him up and down, then whistles. “I’d say you have,” he says as he fishes in his satchel for another copy of the contract to sign.
But Sage raises a hand in caution. “Have you got any adventuring experience, Babbock?”
“ ’Course I do.”
“References, then?”
“Not among the living.”
Sage blinks up at the giant. “Elaborate, please.”
“My party got ambushed by pirates in the bay beyond the Swamplands. We were after a cache that sank when an old Perpignese ship lost its rudder, drifted into the bay, and wrecked on the rocks. I brought it back to the Client all the same, safe and sound.”
Sage recalls the foggy details of an ill-fated party whose last mission was repeated in taverns until facts bled into fable.
“Pirates, you say. But it was a Perpignese sloop that found the shipwreck at the same time you did, wasn’t it?
I remember they had some claim beyond nationality.
The captain was the lover of the man who’d captained the crashed ship.
None of that crew survived, and the second came for the bones of their kin, as well as the cargo. Have I got it right?”
“No,” Babbock barks. “They were in Harrow’s waters, so they had no claim at all. The king of Perpignan said so himself.”
“He wasn’t prepared to start another conflict with Harrow, with the wounds of the last war still fresh,” Sage counters.
The giant sneers. “What do you know about it? Bet you were still in swaddling clothes when the war ended.”
He isn’t far off, but Sage won’t let herself be derailed, nor intimidated.
She leans back in her chair, arms crossed, doing her best to project unconcern while her fingers stray slowly toward the hilts of the long-bladed daggers strapped at her hips.
“I’m old enough to remember that one man made it back from that mission in the Swamplands, with the cache but without his party members. Died in the skirmish, didn’t they?”
“Aye. Good thing one of us was left to finish the mission.”
“Indeed,” Sage demurs, but badly. She has no interest in hiring a fighter who’d save the treasure before his own party members.
But how best to send him on his way without starting a brawl, which would surely get them tossed out of the tavern?
The Agent, lost in thought beside her, doesn’t offer any suggestions.
Well, she is the party leader, isn’t she?
Just as her fingertips find the hilts, a girl half Babbock’s size peers out from behind his chest to ask, “Are these the party auditions?”
Wild-eyed, the giant spins to glare down at the girl, giving Sage the chance to appraise her as well.
With her dark hair gathered into twin tail braids, a spray of freckles across her warm brown skin, and a thick walking stick taller than she is clutched in one worn mitten, the girl looks as though she’s slipped out of school to steal away to the tavern.
“Piss off home to your parents,” Babbock sniffs. “This is my audition.”
“No harm meant,” she says, flashing a bright toothy smile. And then, with no less cheer in her voice, “Only, sir, pardon me, but since it doesn’t seem like these folks plan to fill the position with you, perhaps fuck off?”
Babbock seems to swell even larger, his pink face darkening toward the color of his fiery beard as he lunges toward the girl. “You little whelp—”
Sage leaps to her feet, drawing her daggers quick as a flash.
But faster even than that, the girl has vanished from her eyeline, dropping to crouch on the floor.
She spins on her heels, staying low, and as Babbock staggers past her to grasp at nothing, she sweeps her walking stick into the giant’s ankles from the front, sending him tumbling.
He lands in the straw and spilled ale with the grace of a felled tree.
By the time the barkeep has found the source of the commotion through the crowd, the girl is standing in front of their table, her cinnamon-colored eyes wide with youthful innocence.
“You lot, what’s happening here?” the barkeep demands as a well-built woman with a handsome scar across one high cheekbone helps him grab Babbock under the arms and haul him up.
He mutters half-sensible curses through the waterfall of blood from his broken nose.
“I’d guess a few too many ales and not enough biscuits to soak them up,” offers the Agent, who never budged from his chair.
Sage watches as the pair drag the giant toward the tavern doors to shove him out. Only once the heavy wood thuds behind him does Sage sheathe her daggers and sink cautiously back into her own seat. Then she frowns up at the girl. “What’s your name?”
“Nura,” the girl chirps.
“How old are you, exactly?”
“I’ll be twenty soon.”
“Twenty?” the Agent scoffs. “In three weeks or three years?”
Nura’s brows knit together as she eyes the Agent’s graying beard, then studies Sage. “How old are you two?” she asks, a bit of the cheer slipping from her voice for the first time.
“That’s valuable information,” he answers coolly. “Can you afford it?”
Rolling her eyes, Sage volunteers, “I’m twenty-six.”
“I bet you started out young, though.”
Ignoring the insinuation that she’s young no longer, Sage confirms, “Too young. And I wouldn’t have made as many mistakes if I’d waited.
” This is truer than the kid can possibly know, and pondering it makes Sage physically itch for the road.
For rocks and roots and loam beneath the soles of her boots, cold air scraping through her lungs, a forest full of threats and possibilities on which to focus her every waking thought…
“But you’ve seen I can fight,” Nura insists, jarring Sage back to the present.
“And ask around the pits. I’ve been sneaking out to enter myself in matches since I was fifteen—and winning.
But they won’t put me in the high-stakes matches, and I can’t make enough money in the opening rounds to settle my family so I can leave Kingfisher.
How else am I supposed to see the world, if nobody ever gives me a chance? ”
Nura can’t possibly know what she’s getting into.
Nor is she prepared for the towering pines and opaque mist of the Graywood, judging by her threadbare overcoat, which is both too small and too big at once.
Her shoulders strain its fabric while the sleeves are cuffed thrice over, and the hem falls below her knees.
Sage really isn’t as tall as her long limbs suggest when seated, but even so, Nura barely comes up to her chin.
She sighs. “Come back tomorrow with your match record. You can get it from the bookmaker of the pits. And…and bring a parent. Or a guardian. Your milkman. Any grown-up in your life, okay? Bring me that, and I’ll front you a portion of your pay for supplies.
You’ll need much warmer gear for this trip. ”
Once Nura leaves with a last giddy smile, breaking into a run even before the tavern doors swing closed behind her, the Agent slumps over the table.
“Look,” he says with a groan, “it’s your party, your choice, as promised.
But this district is teeming with fighters who could use that girl for a toothpick. ”