Chapter 3 Forest Folk and a Sob Story #2
Though the man next to her didn’t have the same biting stare, he did have the same bright green eyes and brown hair. Siblings, most likely. No woman spoke with such exhausted dismissal to a man unless she’d had to bear his lame jokes and idiocy since infancy.
“I don’t know why you’ve bound me, or where we’re going,” he said. “But I’ve been lost in these woods for days and I just want to reach the Sea of Biscuitte.”
The woman flickered her gaze down him unhurriedly, as if judging how ridiculous he looked in hose. Then she leaned forward. Her tone was cold. “When I am done with you, you’ll no longer have hands to hold a sword, and you’ll no longer have a tongue to speak any lies.”
He blinked at her blatant hostility. “Yes. Well. All right. Look, if you could just release me, I promise I’ll get out of your hair. I only ask for my sword and my goats back.” He thought for a moment. “And everything else.”
The man—Hugh—snorted a breathy laugh. “Looks like your intimidation doesn’t work on this fellow, Bronwen.”
She scowled and stalked forward. Benjamin trotted along beside her. Morfran’s goatly friend didn’t even look back at him. Betrayed by a goat, he thought, miserable. I’m pathetic.
“Please.” He tried again. “I don’t know what you are. Thieves, forest dwellers, homeless bums with anger issues, I don’t care. But I just want to go south. I mean no harm, and am no threat—”
“No threat?” She scoffed. “You carry one of his swords while you’re in our lands, all while there are soldiers of his that we’ve spotted just a few miles outside the forest.” Ah, the he in question was himself.
He wisely chose not to interrupt. “You’re either here as a spy or a scout trying to play the part of a silly little peasant, all so you can get close to our home.
I bet you stole these goats to help create an alibi.
I bet they don’t even have names.” Turning around again, she raised her left arm, where Baby Goat One had snuggled against her chest. “What’s the name of this one? ”
He went pale, scrambling for the words. “I…”
“Or this one?” She raised up Baby Goat Two.
“Well, you see—”
Her eyes flashed again. “What about this one?” She gestured her chin roughly at their mother.
“Benjamin,” he sputtered, frantic to get a word out. “It’s Benjamin.”
Bronwen gawked at him in disbelief. “You named a female goat Benjamin?”
Anger flared within him. He hadn’t known at the time of naming her that she was a female, not until he looked closer and saw that—Oh, my male goat Benjamin isn’t just overtly fat, he’s actually actively pregnant.
But really, would these two believe that?
Did he want them to believe that? What type of idiot didn’t know a pregnant goat when he bought it? “I call her Beni for short.”
Behind him, Hugh was laughing. “You’re pathetic. Even I don’t believe the lies you’re trying to sell. Dibs on his sword, Bronwen.”
“After the others get a good look at him, you can take whatever you want.” She stalked forward, jerking Benjamin by her rope. There was something familiar about the way she moved, her steps lithe and purposeful. For some odd reason it set him on edge, kept him from looking away from her.
“I’m not going to repeat myself,” he warned. “If you hurt my goats, I’ll kill you.”
She snorted. “I was slightly intimidated before you opened your mouth. But threats coming from an idiot who can’t tell a female goat from a male one, and one who can’t think fast on his feet, tend to fall flat here.”
He bristled at the insult. How dare she talk down to him like that?
“You’re making a mistake.” He stomped after her.
“I know you’re going to toss me in a dark room and torture me into telling you what you want to hear.
But I won’t, because I can’t.” Feeling as though he was going to hit a good stride, he continued.
“I’m just a goat farmer who lost his farm due to his soldiers burning it down.
I managed to kill several of them—which is why I have that sword you’re holding now—before they grouped together and chased me south.
I fled into this hellish place looking to escape, and now I’m being heckled by two idiots who can’t tell a good man from a bad man, and if you think—”
“Bronwen,” Hugh interrupted, tone casual, as if Morfran hadn’t been speaking at all. “We could always, you know, gag him.” They exchanged a look before gazing towards him, contemplative.
After they gagged him, the rest of the early morning flew by. They stopped only for a quick sip of water by a gurgling stream—he silently wept for his burbling stream—and then led him into a clearing occasionally broken up by massive trees.
He scowled as he took it in. So there was a forest dwelling hidden in these woods.
Small huts and houses had been built among the trees, like children’s forts.
Wooden bridges sashayed from one tree to the next, connecting hut to hut, and there were multiple vertical stairs spiraling around these trees to lead up into the sky-high village.
Down below on the ground were numerous campfires that smelled of roasted pheasant and baking bread that made his stomach twist in hunger.
There were small gardens—he pined over the chickpeas—and barrels of collected rainwater and pens full of an assortment of animals: pigs, geese, goats, and even several horses.
And the people! There were hundreds of them.
Many bustled by carrying baskets of thread or pots of wheat or bolts of cloth.
Children darted around them as they walked and several called out to Bronwen and Hugh, though the two said, respectively, “Can’t talk now, sorry” and “Check it out! I go in to forage and come back with three goats, a sword, and a lute! Can you believe my luck?”
You better believe how delightful it’ll be when I slit your neck and let pigs drink the blood the moment I get my hands fr—
Benjamin gave him a side-eye as if she could read his thoughts. He released a heavy breath. You’re right, Benjamin. I’m better than this. There will be no more killing of peasants, no matter how agitating they are.
You did make your men go boom earlier, he imagined her reply.
They were in league with Ravana, and therefore not innocent.
Whatever you say, Morf.
They led him into a ground-floor hut full of nothing but crates and barrels and fat sacks overfilled with what looked like grain. A storehouse of sorts. In the room’s center was a tall beam, and they made him sit with his back against it.
Bronwen knelt beside him, unbound his gag, and began fastening him to the post with a bundle of scratchy rope. She smelled like fresh flowers, which he thought was false advertising. “Tighter,” he said mockingly as she finished the knot. “I still have feeling in my fingers.”
She smiled, and with a rough tug, cut off the circulation to his hands. “Now, you stay here while we bring in someone who’d love to meet you. And don’t worry—we’ll take good care of your goats. We might even give them proper names, too.”
He didn’t let her get the last word. Right as she rose and took a step towards the exit, he straightened his leg and hooked his boot around her foot. She came down onto a coarse-spun rug with an ungraceful thud.
He smiled back nastily. “Sorry. I suppose you should have bound my feet, too?”
Her stunned shock quickly faded into fury as she stared back at him, pushing up to her elbows. She growled, “Or perhaps I’ll just cut them off.” With one fluid motion she’d flicked her wrist, and a wicked little knife slipped out from her sleeve and into her grip.
It was a move that hinted at great skill, and to his surprise, the knife wasn’t mere iron—it was stishovite iron.
The exact type of iron that his armor-penetrating crossbow bolts were made from.
The exact type that only someone high up within his Dark Lord of Ruthven? entourage could get their hands on.
What pleasure he’d derived from knocking her down faded into wary wonder. Where did you possibly get that?
Before she had the chance to act upon her urge to maim him, an older man the size of a bear stepped into the hut’s doorway, nearly blocking out the pale sunlight spearing in.
His head was full of dusty, black-silver curls, and his face was coated in a thick beard.
His blue eyes, which sparkled cheerfully—there was no other way to put it—landed on her first, and though he looked a merry man, his voice was despondent as he asked,
“Did you fall down again, Wen?”
She hastily pushed herself up to her feet, wiping the dirt from her skirts. Morfran saw her stash the stishovite dagger into a pocket before she faced the burly man, ignoring his question and saying, “I tied him up as you wanted.”
“Thank you, my dear,” he said, and waved her away. She left, but not before shooting Morfran such a scathing look, he vowed upon his mother’s grave—at this point she had, like, twelve of them—she’d regret ever ambushing him in the woods and insulting his naming decisions.
The massive man lowered himself onto a crate in front of Morfran, looking him over with a deceptively casual glance.
“So,” he said. “My daughter told me you’re a spy of Lord Morfran’s they found waltzing in the woods.”
As satisfying as it’d be to tell them that he was Lord Morfran, Morfran chose to remain quiet in terms of that accusation. “Those two were your children?”
The man nodded.
“Well, your son is a thief, and your daughter is anti-goat. Now, who are you? Where am I? What will it take to prove to you that I’m not involved with him?”
He said him ominously, with the slightest disgust, awe, and fear, as Bronwen had said it in the woods. If it’d win him points with this large man, he’d happily disown his own name. He’d happily do most anything if they’d just let him go.
The man studied him, ignoring his questions before asking, “Hugh explained you said something about traveling south?”