by T. R. North
in Issue 90, July 2019
The peddler adjusted the broad brim of his floppy hat and tugged at the reins in his hand. The horses pulling his wagon came to a halt, gears in their knees and shoulders straining at the sudden stop. A soft puff of steam escaped their nostrils, and the boilers feeding them hissed insistently. The peddler peered at the weathered sign on the side of the road that declared him to be a half-mile west of Shalebreak. If it was big enough to warrant a sign, it was big enough for him to visit. With any luck, he’d find someone of use in Shalebreak.
He snapped the reins, and the horses creaked back into motion, the syncopated clattering of their hooves masking the noise of the boilers. In and of themselves, the peddler didn’t think mechanical horses were worth the bother. They tended to bog down off a beaten path, they ran too warm to ride comfortably in any but the coldest climes, and they were in the habit of tipping over when used singly. But they drew custom and gossip, and the peddler needed all he could get of both.
The last two towns—scarcely worth the name, more like hamlets—that he’d been through had produced little coin and less news. He’d brought more new gossip than he’d left with, answering question after question about progress on more prosperous towns’ pneumatics works, and whether he’d seen any of the convict-crews working to repair the caravan roads, and if there’d been any word of bandit nests in the forests.
The peddler had tried slipping a few likely youths luck charms along with their penny-sweets only to have stern mothers and blade-faced fathers hand them back, too good to accept what they thought was charity. The one he regretted losing most was a handsome idiot with an easy smile. Transplanted to any city or decent-sized thoroughfare, the boy would have attracted admirers and accomplices like flies to a cookfire.
Hoofbeats from the sward behind him made the peddler half-rise in his seat and turn, then settle again quickly when he caught sight of the rider. The shaggy, low-slung pony slowed its pace from a canter to a comfortable walk when it drew abreast of the peddler’s wagon, and the goblin riding it pulled her hood back slightly. Her tail twitched beneath her cloak, and she regarded him with flattened ears and narrowed eyes. Orange and cat-slitted, there wasn’t much they’d miss, given the chance.
“Good-day, grandfather,” she said, nodding. “What news?”
“Middling weather and no sign of bandits.” The peddler kept a stiff, ingratiating smile on his face. Wiser men than he had been undone by regarding messengers as a comparatively harmless stripe of soldier. They set the rest of the horde in motion, tipped off toll guards, and chattered together like a flock of jackdaws, looking for patterns and secrets.
“Fair enough,” she said. “Where did you last sell?”
“Brookford, I think.” The peddler pursed his lips and made a good show of trying to recall. “I strayed too badly from the path by accident to be sure.”
“And where is it you go?”
The peddler stifled a grimace. There was no sense lying, not with his gaudy wagon. “Shalebreak, if the horses hold up.”
She grunted thoughtfully, sharp teeth sliding into view when she finally smiled. “I know a gatesman there.” She dug into her breast pocket, cloak parting to reveal worked leather armor and an impressive collection of daggers, and tossed a copper to him. “A sesame-stick for Jhent—he’ll be the one in the stupid hat.”
“My thanks,” the peddler said, bowing from the waist. So much for avoiding the kingsmen’s notice. The messenger put her heels against the pony’s flanks then and pulled away, back on her own business now that she’d satisfied herself about his.
He tucked the copper into his pocket, pausing for a bare moment to run his thumb over the bearded visage stamped on its face.
“Gods damn the king,” he said, shaking his head.
The peddler’s first look at Shalebreak was inauspicious. There was a ramshackle shantytown metastasizing from its thick stone walls and barely kept in check by the broad roads leading to the east and west gates. The town proper was doing well enough to have grown past its limits but not near well enough to have done it with any measure of planning or forethought, a victim of the centralized negligence that had characterized the last decade or so of the king’s administration.
The first promising idler the peddler came to was seated on a bench in front of a tavern, long legs stretched out in front of him and his fingers laced behind his head. His face was painted like an actor playing the Clown Imp, and the peddler tipped his hat.
“A bit late in the season to be holding a dumbshow,” he said, silver eyebrows climbing his lined face.
“Dumbshow?” the actor said, looking as affronted as possible behind the lurid red grin greased onto his features. “My good sir, I’ll have you know this is no costume.”
“No?”
“It’s a political statement.” The actor’s face betrayed no sign of levity, and the peddler nodded to himself. Every village had its own stripe of idiot.
“Making a political statement in this kingdom?” the peddler asked. He patted a red-and-green painted bin bolted to the side of the wagon. “Might I interest you in a luck charm, then?”
The actor pretended to consider it. “How many would I have to buy before I had the good fortune to make my home in a rolling fire-trap, comfort- and kinless, and take my meals by the side of the road? More than you have on you at the moment, surely?”
The peddler extracted his pipe from its pouch and took some time lighting it. The luck charms were one of his best sellers, after the sweets and ahead of the sugar-water love potions. Most people knew better than to ask pointed questions about how much good any of it had ever done him.
“You, my friend, seem possessed of a dangerous amount of good sense,” the peddler said finally.
“Gods’ sake, don’t encourage that ass,” a woman told him. She was draping wet laundry over a line strung across a straggling garden, her voice rising and falling in volume as she bent and straightened. “Gish, you owe the man at least a half-copper for putting up with your lip.” She looked to the peddler. “He’ll take two—one for him and one for whatever poor slattern takes enough of a fancy to him to let him in their bed.”
“Well, then, that’s one for me and one for her mother,” Gish said evenly, not budging from his spot.
The peddler tamped down a small, careful smile. Gish would do as well as anyone else he was likely to come across, he supposed. Political statement, indeed. He undid a catch, snaked his hand into the bin, and produced a glittering twist of silver thread wound and frayed around a bit of dried heart’s-nettle. He held it up, let it dance in the faint breeze for a moment, then tossed it to the actor. Gish caught it in one dexterous, long-fingered hand, examined it, and tucked it nonchalantly into a pocket.
“I don’t suppose either of you fine citizens knows a gatesman by the name of Jhent?”
“Aye,” the woman said. “Short bastard in a hat you could see from the capital. He’s on day-shift this month. Just stay on this street—you can’t hardly miss him.”
The peddler gave her his thanks and rode on.
Jhent was just as promised, an officious elf with a paunch and overly-shined boots in addition to an enormous, ornate hat that seemed deliberately designed to make him look even shorter than he was. The peddler took off his own hat and nodded gravely, wondering what had put the sour look on the gatesman’s face today.
“Courtesy of a messenger I met on the road here,” the peddler said, handing over a sesame-stick.
Jhent’s face lit up, and he went back to assessing the wagon’s contents in a much lighter mood. The peddler watched him, wondering if people were getting more ridiculous, or if he was just growing less tolerant of it in his old age. He slipped a luck charm into the gatesman’s pocket when he finally waved the wagon through the gates. It couldn’t hurt, the peddler supposed, and who knew what tale-tellers and rumor would make of such a figure if anything came of it? Besides, every pack of heroes needed someone to keep their spirits up in grim times, or, failing that, someone against whom they’d always show at an advantage.
He hoped it wouldn’t be too long before the fortuneteller followed his trail. If the peddler marked those who might be of use, it was his sister who taught them to dream of what they might do in other circumstances. The beggar saint would cast the final enchantment to activate the charms the peddler slipped into pockets, propel the youths and innocents and cynics who’d forgotten what it was to dream of better things into the stories the fortuneteller had told them. He selected the players, his sister gave them their roles, and their brother pulled back the curtain and fired the stage lights. And all of it was of no damn use at all if their marks scattered to the winds like so much chaff in the meantime.
The peddler made his way from one end of the town to the other, slowly and surely, selling his wares and the occasional extra charm or token into the bargain. It was a fine day’s work, if he did say so himself. That night he camped in the grounds outside the city marked off for itinerants and almseekers. The peddler sold little but listened much and slipped a few more promising gewgaws into unsuspecting pockets.
He stayed in Shalebreak a week, just long enough to weight his purse and make his leaving a matter of course, then moved on.
It was perhaps two months later, on a road just southwest of the province’s kingstown, that he once again heard the hoofbeats of a lone rider behind him on the road. He rose on the bench and sat down again quickly, hoping the messenger hadn’t made much note of him. It was close enough to dusk that he could pull off with no notice paid, settle in for the evening and maybe escape question. He was steering the horses off the path when one clipped a hoof on the edgestones, tilted in its traces, and slipped its coupling.
The peddler swore, then touched a luck charm in his pocket and hoped. The cantrips weren’t meant to spend their power on him, but there was never any real telling, not with magic. And it wouldn’t be the first time one of the king’s minions turned a blind eye to someone who might demand assistance, suddenly unseeing where before they were all curiosity and attention.
The rider drew to a slow walk, then stopped at his stuck wagon.
“Hail, grandfather! Perhaps a well-met isn’t in order, though—it looks as if you could use a hand.”
The peddler schooled his face into an expression of gratitude when he looked up. The green-cloaked messenger was clearly in no great hurry, probably on her way to collect a message rather than deliver one.
“So it would seem, friend, so it would seem.”
The goblin dismounted easily, landing on the pads of her feet with a pleased bounce he didn’t like. As a rule, the messengers who found their jobs entertaining were to be avoided more scrupulously than the ones for whom it was merely insulation from the king’s abuses or a path into his favor.
With two sets of shoulders to throw into it, the peddler soon had the horse righted in its tack. He hadn’t even had to warn the messenger of the plates over the engine; she’d wrapped her cloak around her hands in place of the thick leather gloves he normally used. Their proximity had shown him that the jerkin he’d taken for snakeskin was in fact fine brocade.
“Clever bit of weaving there,” he said. “I didn’t think goblins went in for it.”
Her nose wrinkled. “That’s the Ouri that wouldn’t know style if it bit them. But since those tax-collecting, edict-canting bastards are all everybody sees, it’s an idea that gets around more than it ought.” She ran a clawed finger over it. “Got this at the capital during the high summer festival right before that mess up in Eagleshome Ferry. Figured I’d be buried in it, but the gods were kind.”
She guided the team safely off the road, and the peddler ran his tongue over his teeth, sorting through excuses which might get her back on her way. As if sensing his reticence, she scented the wind and rewrapped her cloak.
“Rain tonight, I should think. I wouldn’t pass up a bit of shelter, if you’ve got room.”
The peddler forced a thin smile. It didn’t feel like rain to him. “Of course. Anything for a loyal servant of the king.”
“Well said, grandfather, well said.” The goblin produced a small flask from a pocket, lifted it, and drank. She passed it to the peddler, who did the same. It wasn’t the first time he’d had to toast the king, but if their luck turned, it might be one of the last.
She at least lent an equal hand while he set up his pavilion and started his cookfire with coals from the horses’ bellies. Night fell as they worked, and the peddler resigned himself to her company.
“You know, I feel a bit foolish mentioning it now, but I didn’t catch your name,” the goblin said, ladling herself a portion of the stew he’d cooked. She’d produced a bigger bottle, this time of wine, from her saddlebags and poured a cup full to the brim for him, so he was in less of a mood to complain about her fishing out extra chunks of potato.
“Ageron,” he said easily.
“Ageron,” she repeated, tapping her chin. “You seem more of an Aberath, honestly. Or maybe an Even-handed Fen. Though Oashhur definitely wouldn’t suit.”
The peddler managed a strangled laugh. He hadn’t carried any of those names long enough to draw much notice. “Well. Sorry to disappoint.”
“No matter.” The goblin lifted the bottle.
The peddler considered his options. Messengers were prime targets if bandits or rebels were looking to disrupt communications, and most of them did what they could to make themselves less easy prey. Then again, he was no warrior, but he hadn’t spent the last fifty years at his trade without learning a trick or two. He blinked at his cup. She’d have already thought of that; this had been no chance meeting.
“Oh, stop glaring at your drink,” the goblin said. “I didn’t come all this way just to poison you.”
“You must know I can’t afford a bribe.”
“The satisfaction of knowing’s worth all the gold in the world in this trade,” she told him, rolling the bottle contemplatively between her thick gray palms.
“Really?” The peddler watched her.
“Of course not.” She snorted and filled her own cup—almost as much as she’d given him, he noticed. “But nobody else is parting with coin for nothing, either, so I’ll take what I can get.”
“Good to know,” the peddler said, sipping his wine. He’d already drunk enough that he was a dead man, if she had poisoned it. His eyes narrowed in sudden recognition. “Shalebreak.”
“Aye.”
“You were dressed differently.”
“That really how you folk tell the difference between us? No wonder you can’t run a rebellion worth the name.” There was little heat to her words, though, and she leaned back in her seat.
“You were wearing a different outfit’s colors, I mean.”
“Ah. Well-remembered.” The goblin worried at her lower lip. “You’re always sporting the same colors, the same wagon.”
“Well-remembered,” the peddler echoed. Less of a feat on her part than on his, given what he was driving, but then perhaps if one’s business was prying into other people’s affairs, they all bled together after a while. Gods knew he wouldn’t be able to tell which hearty young adventurer he’d picked out from which town, or when, at this time in his life.
“It’s damned stupid to keep changing your name if you’re not going to change your rig, is what I mean,” she told him. “It raises suspicion where there wouldn’t have been any before. There sure as hell aren’t two idiots galloping around the vale with a team of mechanical ponies selling snake oil at a loss.”
“I see.” The peddler tapped his chin. He’d been more concerned about local wags and informants tipping the messengers to them than the messengers themselves looking into it. “Can I ask what saint or star I have to thank for you not turning me in?”
The goblin’s eyebrows rose, then she let off a hoarse bark of laughter at the night sky.
“Gods’ bones! Not turning you in? Ha!” She settled after a moment, then shook her head. “You’ve got the pigheadedness of my former commanding officer to thank for your freedom to operate. He thought I was mad, told me I could either drop it or go back to herding goats for a living.”
The peddler looked around slowly. “I see no goats, friend.”
“Haven’t got the knack for it,” she confessed. “Great shame to my ancestors, but nothing I can do about that.”
“Returning with proof would hardly endear you to him,” the peddler pointed out. It didn’t hurt his case any that he was right; some of their deadliest threats had been undone not by the peddler or his accomplices but by jealous superiors and ambitious inferiors. The royal bureaucracy was as often as not very unkind to those who were inconveniently correct about things better left unacknowledged.
“Hardly endear me? He’d figure some way to have me owing them interest on my severance pay,” she said. Her orange eyes glittered in the light of the cookfire. “I wasn’t entirely joking about wanting to know. You know it’s a dog’s life sometimes, before you sign up. Nobody ever mentions how that not-knowing can prick at you in the quiet moments.” She drained her cup easily. “Besides, I’m in no hurry to do His Majesty any favors at the moment, and all the minor, sloppy little uprisings you three wheel around fomenting have fired a righteous demand for those of us with an embarrassment of training and no current demands on our time. Hardly an inconvenient thing for someone in need of a second career, if you follow.”
“We three?” the peddler asked, feigning confusion. It was futile, surely, but he still felt the need to try. So much of his life these past decades had been guided by the same sentiment, that melancholy attempt to stop the inevitable.
The goblin blew on a spoonful of stew to cool it and gave him a withering look.
“You know how many travelling fortunetellers there are left? Practically none. It’s a dying breed. The roads’ve gone to pot, the tolls have all gone up, and none of the burghers are willing to make up the difference locally. The capital’s not feeling the pinch yet, but the outlying boroughs you favor? There’s less peddlers and tinkers than there used to be, too, but enough of them left for you to hide in. Her following your path all by her lonesome’s going to raise questions to anyone paying attention.” She chewed thoughtfully. “If you’ve got some way to communicate, she should join up with one of those little rat-circuses hawking miracles and portents for a copper a gawk. You go wherever they’re heading first, solves the problem neatly.”
“That’s only two.” He almost missed the cagey, taciturn bravado the goblin messengers tended to cultivate when they were out among civilians.
“Hard to overlook the brother wanted for rebellion, espionage, and whatever else anybody feels like testifying over,” the goblin returned, matching his tone. Her smile showed her teeth. “It’s practically admirable, his dedication to fanning the flames. Knifing priests, interfering with livestock. Like fire, famine, and plague, you lot all following each other around.”
“And you trailing along after like a hound with a fox.” The peddler had considered the possibility of someone divining their efforts in spite of their care, once upon a time. He’d imagined it would be the king, and he’d imagined it would come early if at all, when they’d been young and formidable and full of themselves. He recognized at least a small amount of his irritation as disappointed grandeur. He’d have thought that the years had worn the polish off their charge, the three of them giving up their names and titles and living like beggars, aging and toiling with nothing to show for it, but apparently there’d been some last little bit of self-importance to which he was clinging. The messenger had come along and punctured it like a wineskin.
She shrugged. “A little too much credit there, I think. Shalebreak was likely, and I knew the garrison there. And then you’ve got a penchant for self-important fops.”
“The elf with the hat.” The peddler sat back, marveling at his own myopia. His sister would never let him live it down. “He was bait?”
“Most useful he’s been in ages, I should think,” the goblin said. “You know he’s got a hat that’s honestly bigger than he is? He wore it to a ceremony where he got a medal for never missing work. All I had to do was give you a name and sure enough, now he’s destined by ancient prophecy to unseat the usurper and restore the rightful government of the land. Terribly portentous, that love of hats.”
“Amazing,” the peddler sighed. He hadn’t thought of any of it as so transparent, and here this one little messenger was laying it out like pieces on a board.
“Never did catch where you fell on that last bit, though,” she said, scratching her chin in mock contemplation. “Are they supposed to be restoring the oligarchs that overthrew the last monarchy, the royal line that was installed by our eternally benevolent and wise neighbors to the east after the tyranny collapsed, or the democracy the tyrant dissolved when he seized power?”
He glared at her and waved the hand not occupied with his wine. They’d never gotten that far, honestly. It had begun to feel like a question for the younger and more optimistic. “Whichever they like. The point is to get that monster off the throne.”
“Given that the oligarchs had certain opinions about the usefulness of racial scapegoating when it came to weaseling out of responsibility for military failures, I don’t suppose I can put in a vote for the monarchy?” the goblin asked. “Reasonable tax policy, not terribly keen on punitive applications of the draft, stability for generations if you keep the line of succession clear and aren’t fussy about pruning rotten branches off the family tree. They even introduced that thing with the panel of elected advisors—that was fairly forward-thinking, don’t you think?”
“I suppose.”
“All in all, you could do a lot worse than scrounging up some whelp with a plausible lineage claim. Gods know the oligarchs’ assassins couldn’t have run them all down, as much byblow as they left scattered across the kingdom.”
“You have any other opinions about my affairs you’d like to share?” the peddler asked. He’d shifted from irritated to almost amused by the time she’d suggested finding an heir. There was a certain ludicrousness to it that he could embrace, if he couldn’t have respectability.
The goblin leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees and gazing into the fire. She seemed to be taking the question seriously, and the peddler finished his wine, then took the bottle uninvited and refilled his cup.
“You seem strangely unappalled by the rank treason you’re describing,” he said. As grateful as he was for it, as much as he’d done over his long life to encourage it in the general populace and certain of its more charismatic members, it was a question he couldn’t help but ask.
The king had come to power through treachery, dark magic, and darker alliances. He’d kept the throne over the ensuing generations by mostly conventional political and military tactics, it was true, but surely such foul beginnings couldn’t have been papered over to such an extent that his minions now served out of habit and coin? Surely the dark lord that the peddler had spent his life trying to unseat was not now kept there by bureaucratic inertia—men and women bound to him not by fear or loyalty or ambition but by custom?
The goblin scoffed. “His Majesty’s hardly paying me to care, now, is he?”
The peddler’s lips twisted, and he put his face in his hands for a moment.
“No,” he said quietly, once the urge to laugh wild and long had passed. “No, I suppose he isn’t.”
“Besides, like I said. The rank treason’s good for business. The more rumors of unrest are flying around, the more coin the pettier nobles and greater merchants are willing to part with for scouts, spies, bodyguards, and the like. Can’t have their goods or heirs falling to some stray mob or some flea-ridden pack of thieves, now, can they?”
“So I can trust you’ll keep my secret?” The peddler couldn’t, of course, but he might trust to spite for her former employer giving him a bit of extra time to warn the others. He could sell the horses, repaint the wagon, refashion himself in some way or another. Magic might make him look a bit less like himself, if he asked the right person in the right way, if the gods favored them. Then again, if the gods favored them, he wouldn’t still be doing this.
The goblin chuckled, low and mirthless. “I did the only thing I possibly could to stop you a full year ago, and it didn’t even make it into writing, so you could say I’m deeply disinclined to pursue it any further. You performing whatever duty it is you think you’ve got means I have my pick of lords and charges. I’m a spent quiver, as far as you’re concerned.”
“And yet, here you are,” the peddler observed. He almost wished there was more to it; her curiosity had gotten the better of her, or perhaps her need to have the last word with someone.
“Like I said, you do this job long enough, mysteries start to eat at you,” she said simply. “The proclaimers, the tax-grabbers, the sword-swingers—they fill those ranks with them that volunteers. You can train any idiot to do what they do, so long as they’re willing to learn. Messengers have to prove they’ve got the right mind for it, before they’re given colors and signed on with a company. Has a few drawbacks down the road, though.”
“Sounds like you’d solved it pretty well before you invited yourself in for dinner,” the peddler pointed out.
“Solve a mystery and not crow about it to anyone?” she asked, smirking. “Where’s the fun in that?” She finished her stew. “Besides, this—what you’re doing—it’s impressive. You’re running a confidence game on the entire kingdom, right under the nose of a man most wouldn’t cross for love or honor, and you’re doing it out of a wagon, a tatty little silk tent, and a donkey’s saddle. Though, if you were sincere about asking for advice?”
The peddler did laugh then, his wrinkled face transforming in the firelight. He imagined he could hardly stop her, and there was at least that tacit admission that the king was a formidable adversary. “By all means.”
“Times are getting hard,” she said, spreading her hands. “Fists are tightening from the treasury all the way down to the aldermen, and the peasants are feeling it.”
“The kingdom’s turning into a tinderbox,” the peddler said, stroking his beard. “Aye, this could be our chance.”
The goblin dropped her hands back to her lap and fixed him with an exasperated look. “I was going to say the old religions are experiencing a sudden and coincidental increase in popularity. Wrap some claptrap about the barley god or the mother of the grapes or the green child around yourselves, and you’ll be closer to a needle in a haystack.”
The peddler’s face slackened, and then he tipped the brim of his hat up. Using the gods and people’s desperation for comfort from them as camouflage—he’d sooner steal right from the altar. It would have at least been honest.
“You know,” he said after a moment, “you’re possibly the most amoral person I’ve ever met.”
“That can’t be true,” the goblin said. “You spend half your time setting up idiots to get executed for insurrection and half your time haggling with the flint-hearted, gimlet-eyed citizenry of the lesser townships. I’m probably not even the most amoral person you’ve met this week. Hell, what about that cat’s paw of yours that caught an arrow in the hip last week?”
The peddler frowned. He’d heard no ill news of anyone who could be traced back to them in months; most of their loose network could take care of themselves. The ragged little bands they inspired were a different story, but then the peddler reasoned that he was only responsible for the sort of trouble that found them—they’d have gone looking for it on their own, otherwise.
“Does this cat’s paw have a name?” he asked.
“Dozens and dozens,” the goblin said. “One for every bastard he’s left piled up around the realm, at least, and no telling which ones are true. Likely he’s forgotten himself by now.”
He raised his eyebrows in question, no closer to an identity than he’d been before she’d launched into her description.
“Favors red, fancies himself a prodigy with a flamberge?”
The peddler’s face fell. It could only be Hart that she spoke of. He was as big a scoundrel as she’d described, certainly, and the peddler was sure he’d only thrown in with their cause all those years ago out of self-interest and their appeal to his vanity, but he’d ever been a king among outlaws. He’d come to be a true friend, and even past that, the peddler liked him. There were few men as colorful and as sure of themselves in a world grown drab and timid.
“How badly was he injured?” he asked. Perhaps there was hope—men like Hart prided themselves on living through worse with nothing but a tall tale to show for it. The peddler didn’t think his part was yet played, not the tatterdemalion lord of the shunned and the forsaken.
“Steel arrowhead sank right into the bone,” the goblin told him. “The armor’s got to have joints so you can still move in it, right? Turns out archers’ve noticed that, too. Sounded like he’d live thanks to that healer he’s bedding down with of late. Also sounded like he might not be too happy about it by the time she’s done with him.”
The peddler tried to get the shape of what the loose confederation who looked to Hart for their ideas would do without him. Disband, most like. Hart had never had much stomach for rivals, and the men and women who’d followed in his wake making sure his grand plans could be put into effect without getting them all killed had been content with their roles. They didn’t inspire, and they had little grand vision of their own place in the realm. Perhaps…
The peddler’s shoulders slumped. No, no. There was no one at hand who’d suit. They’d lost a good haven and a ready source of help, if Hart had been taken out of the fight.
The goblin got to her feet and stretched, tail curling idly at her calves. “Thanks for the meal, friend. Best travels.”
“You’re not staying, then?” the peddler asked, surprised. He’d assumed she meant to impose on his hospitality as long as possible, perhaps to impart some more bad news.
“What, take shelter from the rain we both know isn’t coming?” she returned, grinning. “No. I already wasted too much time tracking east to look you up.” She caught his mood and let her smile drop. “Here, now—cheer up. Men like your cardinal are a dime a dozen. I could give you directions to and descriptions of four-and-twenty of the villains less than a week’s journey from here. You’ll have him traded out for some other windbag with no love for paying his taxes or obeying the laws in no time.”
The peddler watched as she saddled her pony. She could do just as she’d said, he had no doubt of that. He picked up the bottle of wine again, filling a cup that he’d taken no more than a few last sips from. What they really needed—what they’d needed for some time now, really—was someone who had a bit of cunning. Someone sharp-eyed and sharper-witted, with no love for the king. Someone who could go where she pleased with no one taking note. Someone useful.
The peddler corked the bottle and got to his feet. He made to tuck it into a leather sleeve tied to her saddlebags, then waited a moment. The cookfire was dying down now with no tending. The light was low and flickering. The goblin was satisfied with what she’d told him, satisfied with what she’d learned. The twist of silver thread bundling up a tuft of dried heart’s-nettle was barely noticeable, hidden as it was between his index and middle fingers. He’d never been much good at sleight of hand, but then perhaps the situation didn’t call on him to be good, only lucky.
“I don’t suppose you’d care to part with the names of any of those four-and-twenty?” the peddler asked.
The goblin threw her head back and laughed, and the peddler slipped the luck charm into the sleeve ahead of the bottle. It might sit there at the dark bottom of the bag, stuck to the leather, for months. It might come back out with the bottle the moment she felt a bit thirsty. Luck, he thought. All he needed was a little bit more luck.
“The closest one’s a great pillar of a man goes by Hoarfrost. Got a beard as gray as yours down to his collar and hair black as a moonless night. Head to Birch Copse—if he’s not in the stocks, any of the drunks in the local tavern will tell you where to find him for a generous donation against their tab.”
She swung herself up into the saddle, pulled up the hood of her cloak, and rode into the night at a measured clip. The peddler took off his hat and ran his fingers through his thick shock of white hair, then returned to his wine.
“Damn it all,” he finally muttered. He doused the fire and climbed the steps to his wagon, swaying only slightly. The goblin’s wine had been good, and she hadn’t been stingy with it, at least.
He’d need to call a conclave, for all the small handful of attendees that it would draw. The others would need to know about Hart, and a reassessment of their methods was apparently much overdue. The peddler thought of the little pile of gewgaws with their carefully-barbed cantrips, so many of them handed out already and the latest one cantering away across the grassy fields with an unlikely bearer.
They were going to need a bigger supply of luck charms, if this worked.
©July 2019, T. R. North
T.R. North has been published in Persistent Visions, PseudoPod, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. North’s work has not previously appeared in S&SM.