Chapter 2 An Explosive Visit
An Explosive Visit
Dear Diary,
It is day two hundred and forty-eight, and I am still not dead LIKELY TO BE DEAD BY NIGHTFALL.
Progress on the lute has been going melodiously well DOESN’T MATTER ANYMORE, and Benjamin has finally given birth to two kids.
OH MY GODS THE CHILDREN. Their adorable bleats woke me up first thing this morning, and I can tell already tell it’s going to be a splendid day AN AWFUL DAY BECAUSE
The tip of his quill snapped. Morfran seethed out a profanity and tried to chuck it across the room, but since it was essentially a feather, it only floated at a frustrating, devil-may-care pace to his feet. So he stomped on it with his boot.
She knew. She knew where he was. How could she possibly? He was clear across the kingdom. He’d avoided the main roads, the large cities, and his men who were maintaining command over these lands. He was even wearing hose, for hell’s sake. Did she know that as well?
Embarrassment flushed through him in addition to panic.
She was so fussy about his appearance. For the past ten years he’d been outfitted in one style and one style only: one (1) white billowy shirt, one (1) pair of knee-high boots, and (perhaps the most important) one (1) pair of tight, black, seductive leather pants.
Sexy and stylish for sure, but it was sweltering in the summer, and he stunk like sweat six months out of the year because of it.
Now she was going to see him in hose. Now she was going to give him that tiny, judgmental arch of her eyebrow, a gesture that had the uncanny power of seemingly robbing a person of all dignity. That realization decided it.
I have to leave.
But he couldn’t leave. This plot of land was prime real estate: swaths of green hills, fertile soil where he’d already planted his chickpeas and chives, and a little stream of cold mountain water that quaintly cut through his property line.
It even burbled. He thought all the poets and bards were liars whenever they sang about burbling little streams—he’d even outlawed the word and lopped the heads off anyone who was heard speaking it.
And then there was Benjamin. She was in no shape to travel with the kids, and she screamed and fainted easily when overstimulated. How was he supposed to hit the road with a screaming, fainting goat with two kids in tow?
He looked darkly at the malicious letter he’d tossed onto his kitchen table. Did it have to arrive today? Why not next week, or the next, or perhaps maybe even never?
He plopped into his rocking chair, shoulders slouched, fingers fidgeting for his sword as he contemplated his options.
He wanted to doubt she’d sent a troop across the kingdom to capture him, but this was Ravana.
She once ate a full chicken—bones included—because a visiting monarch had the audacity to doubt her word, and after he dared her to eat the roasted poultry from atop the dining table, she did it without taking her gaze from his, and when she was finished, she politely dabbed her delicate lips with a napkin and demanded he be removed from the table immediately, forcibly, and painfully.
Yes, she would come for him. She’d bring his men—though he supposed they were officially her men now—and together they’d stomp out his eyes, or carve out the veins from his arms with a thimble, or any number of other creatively wretched things.
And they’d probably go a step further and make Benjamin and the kids watch.
Morfran went to fetch a shovel.
His sword was by the burbling mountain stream, buried six feet deep beneath a mount of rocks stacked up like a cairn.
He was sweating by the time he’d moved the stones and dug up his sword and scabbard, irritated that he was yet again unburying the weapon he kept trying to keep buried.
By then Benjamin was out on the cobblestone path leading up to his house, watching him, her two wobbly legged kids tethered to his front doorknob by rope.
They absolutely could not step onto his yard.
It’d taken him weeks to train Benjamin to avoid it.
“Keep your eyes peeled,” he told the she-goat as he scanned the foothills. “They could be out there watching us as we speak.”
He went back inside and began scrounging for items to pack.
An extra set of hose and a tunic and his leather pants—definitely.
The shabby cloak he stole from a clothesline up north near Tarlsbrook—yes.
His journal, an inkwell, and an extra quill that wasn’t stomped on—yes.
Jars of his jams, his water skins, half a dozen apples, and two loaves of bread—yes, yes, yes, and yes.
His old crossbow that shot powerful, armor-penetrating arrows?
Nah, he’d leave that, but he’d bring his lute.
He rolled these into a pack, secured his lute to the back, and brought Benjamin and her two kids inside the house, where they proceeded to eat Ravana’s letter, wax seal and all.
“Eat up, my friends.” He knelt down beside them, stroking their fine-haired heads. “We’ll have a long journey ahead of us.”
The statement only reminded him that such a journey was a death sentence for them.
The kids couldn’t walk for miles on end.
What was he thinking, that they weren’t born yesterday?
Tearing the sheet off his bed, he fastened a type of baby-holder for them across his chest and gently lowered them inside.
Their little bodies warmed him, their heartbeats as gentle as the beat of fly wings.
Although his mind was in low-mode panic, their cuteness calmed him. He smiled, rubbing his finger alongside the mottled-brown-eared one, while the snow-white one peeked its head out from the sheet to peer around the room.
“I’ll name you both,” he whispered. “As soon as I know what genders you are. Wouldn’t want to misname you like I did your mother here—”
BBBLLLAAAAAAAHHHH!
Morfran jumped, nearly upsetting the kids from their baby carrier, and swung towards Benjamin’s high-pitched, humanlike scream.
She was facing the window, her red bristly tail pointed up like an exclamation point.
He gawked at her, perplexed. “What is—”
BBBLLLAAAAAAAHHHH!
His gaze flew past her, through the window to what she was staring at.
Sneaking out from the tree line where his burbling mountain stream burbled were several men dressed in black armor.
The sun gleamed down and caught the magpie-and-marigold emblem molded into their breastplates and the silver glint of their long, unsheathed swords, which were sharp as bear teeth—
BBBLL—
Morfran silenced Benjamin’s mounting scream with his free hand. In his other was his sword, already unsheathed. He knelt beside her, seething out, “You’ll keep quiet if you don’t want those swords lopping off that precious head of yours. Now, follow me.”
Of course, Benjamin understood none of that and ignored him to continue watching out the window. The men were coming closer. Morfran sighed, slipped the rope leash over her neck, and lured her out the back exit with a wad of goat cheese.
Morfran chose this five-acre homestead over a dozen others on the market for three reasons.
One, it looked like a common farm; two, because he’d always wanted to retire next to a river and decided the stream would do given his current situation; and three, there was a tactical advantage the sloped hillsides behind the cottage gave him in case of an invasion just like this one.
Luckily for him, if the soldiers were going for stealth, it meant Ravana was not here. She’d have ridden in on his old horse, making the weather rage behind her with her magic ring, all while cackling in a way that’d always shriveled his eardrums.
Behind the house a footpath switchbacked up the hill, hidden from view by several tall oaks. He traveled this path now, weighed down by his pack and the kids in the baby carrier. Benjamin trotted behind him, chewing contently on her cheese.
At the top of the hill he knelt low behind a bush, watching the soldiers cross his lawn with quicker speed. Any second now. Any second now, they’d—
The soldier closest to the house stepped on one first. As soon as he neared the grassy space Morfran was eyeing, one of Morfran’s armor-penetrating crossbow bolts he’d buried tip-up weeks ago to create covert booby traps pierced through the leather of the soldier’s boot, and very likely spiked straight into the meaty part of his foot.
The soldier went down with a surprised grunt. All at once the remaining soldiers went on high alert.
“What is it?” one asked, half whispering.
“I stepped on somethin’!” the soldier groaned, grabbing his foot and bending his knee to look at what had just stabbed him from the grass.
“Damn it, Jerry,” he heard one of the soldiers gripe. “You could’ve given away our position.”
“It hurts…” Jerry moaned.
Of course it hurt. Morfran had coated the bolt tip with a mixture of black boomberry poison and preserved it with a wax resin, and when it’d gone into Jerry’s foot the poison had instantly mingled into his bloodstream.
He’d coated every bolt tip of his with boomberry elixir and buried each in the ground tip-up in case of moments just like this one.
In about ten seconds Jerry would start foaming at the mouth, erupt into violent seizures that’d make him do a strange dance like a flopping fish on dry land, and then the worst would happen.
“Jerry, get up!” a large soldier half yelled, half whispered. “We’re going to need every last one of us to take him.” His gaze darted towards the house, and Morfran gloated, pleased to see that there was fear in the man’s face. “Our queen warned us that he—”
“Whoa, wait, Jerry’s foaming like a rabid dog now.” The man nearest to Jerry stepped backwards—and proceeded to step on another hidden bolt tip.
“Yow!”