“Um. I don’t mean to be rude, but you’re dead, aren’t you?”
The body neither confirmed nor denied this question. It merely lay there, as bodies tended to do when no longer animated. In the low light, Argabella couldn’t tell much about it other than that it seemed quite fresh and not cut in half or riddled with necrobees. It was head down, and she’d trod upon its back in a shadow behind a black rock. Its hair and cloak were also black, which didn’t help.
“I’m going to turn you over now, so please don’t be a zombie,” she said.
Clutching its black-clad shoulder with her hands, she gently pried the body up and discovered the last possible thing she’d expected, which was Poltro, the rogue.
Poltro, for all her faults, had never been dead before, and Argabella had never seen Poltro be dead before, either, so it was very awkward for both of them. The only thing that seemed right was for Argabella to scream, so she did that.
In her befuddled state, she was almost sure she imagined Lord Toby’s voice muttering, “Honestly, it was bound to happen sooner or later, so shut up.”
Argabella ignored her imagination and focused on the present. This was her friend Poltro, and Poltro was Deadful. And if Argabella hadn’t run exactly this way and chosen exactly this boulder to hide behind, she never would’ve known what had happened to Poltro.
But still, dead bodies tended to make one Screamful, and that was exactly how Argabella felt for a long horrifying while. Then her scream fell off to sobs. Her sobs turned into coughs. Her coughs turned into very choppy giggles. And then she was quaking with mirth, one hand over her mouth, trying not to burst out laughing.
“Madam, are you in travails?” a deep, manly voice asked.
Argabella looked up, cheeks puffed out with unspent laughter, to find the dark brown–skinned man from the inn staring at her. Even in the low light, his soulful eyes gleamed with kindness and understanding, and he had his hands out as if to calm her rather than reaching for his sword. He was almost like a masculine version of Fia, possessing the same fine cheekbones and lush lips, the same volume of muscles, and the same lack of proper costuming. He wore only a metal loincloth and a scrap of leather tied around his head. Almost Nudeful. Argabella’s eyes shot back up, and she swallowed down her laughter and cleared her throat.
“Well, it’s just that I’ve stumbled across a corpse,” she said. The giggle that followed her words might’ve been a hiccup.
The man’s eyes looked soulful and sad, like a particularly emotive pit bull. “Aye, ’tis a grave day at the Braided Beard. Løcher’s men are as unkind and vicious as their master, and many lives were lost this eventide. I followed your scream, assuming one of yon varlets had cornered a lady.” His eyes softened and shone, his mouth curling into a smile as he held out a hand as if to help her down. “Let me take you from here, rescue you from the dark deeds spreading in this land. I’m a prince in the east, searching for adventure and a wife. They call me Konnan. What’s your name?”
Argabella’s whiskers twitched. She didn’t take his hand.
“My name is Argabella, and I’m taken.”
“As am I. With your beauty and sangfroid in facing so horrid a scene. But why did you laugh?”
Argabella stood her ground and shrugged. “She was my friend. The corpse, I mean. I don’t know how she got here, although evidence suggests she fell off the cliff. But that’s the thing.” Another hiccupy giggle found liberation. “My friend was a rogue, and this is literally the first time she ever successfully snuck up on anyone. Ever. The irony is…oh, Pell!” Doubling over, she cackled, her mad guffaws echoing over the swamp.
Konnan reached for her, his eyes nearly incandescent with concern. “My lady Argabella, are you well? Methinks you’re in shock.”
Argabella stopped laughing, cleared her throat, crossed her arms, and looked down, stepping out of Konnan’s reach.
“I’m not in shock. This is just my life now. And if you’d like to be useful, you can escort me back to the Braided Beard, so long as you think the fighting is over.”
“If it is not, I will fight for you. I’d die for you.”
“Whoa, slow down your speedy horse there. You just met me.”
“True. But some moments arrive with such clarity that their significance is plain.”
“All right, I’m happy for your clarity. But I’m not seeing things that clearly, so give me some time and space, all right?”
“Of course,” Konnan replied, smooth as polished marble.
Argabella wasn’t sure what to do about Poltro, though. She was fairly certain some etiquette book somewhere had something to say about leaving dead friends behind to rot in swamps, and that something was probably “Don’t.” But she couldn’t ask this stranger to carry a corpse for her, could she?
She looked down at Poltro and let her gaze follow the rock wall up to the cliff where her friend must’ve suffered a nasty fall. Probably while being chased by a chicken or something that vaguely resembled one. It was a very Poltro-ish way to die. Something at the top of the cliff seemed to glow ever so gently.
Two words floated along in her imagination, sounding very much like Lord Toby: “Don’t bother.”
But she had to bother. If Fia thought Worstley could be revived, then surely the same spell could help Poltro.
“How strong are you?” she asked Konnan.
He grinned. “I can carry a boulder.”
“What about…stuff behind boulders?”
Soon she was following Konnan’s exposed buttocks out of the swamp, through the forest, and back toward the warm lights of the Braided Beard. Poltro flopped over his shoulder very much like a corpse, because she was one, but he didn’t seem to mind. He told Argabella that in his lands, it was no big deal to carry a corpse around, and Argabella realized she had a lot of questions for Fia about where she’d come from.
The route seemed longer than it had been under the influence of bunny brain, when she had been sprinting to safety, and Argabella spent her time playing around with various healing songs that might work for Poltro. Unfortunately, she couldn’t think of any useful words that rhymed with corpse, carcass, or cadaver. She did manage to work hen and fen into a chorus that also rhymed “You won’t get any older” with “Because you hit the boulder.” None of her tunes did Poltro any good, though. As they’d learned with Lord Toby and as she wished she could help Fia understand, magic was magic but dead was dead. Unless maybe a necromancer got involved, and from what Argabella understood, nobody wanted that. Especially not if it was Steve.
Still, she held on to hope. There was always hope.
It was dawn when they finally saw the Braided Beard. Although all the soldiers seemed to be gone from the area of the inn, aside from the dead ones being looted by enterprising rogues with better skills than Poltro, Argabella could tell that the fight was over. Living dwarves were everywhere, showing their usual enterprise by tidying things and removing the separate halves of their friends. They all seemed a little forlorn, whether because they were grieving or because everything was filthy now and nothing smelled like lavender, Argabella couldn’t guess. The two elves she’d noticed earlier sauntered back in through the front door, their clothes miraculously bloodless and their hair suspiciously spotless, muttering about cold soup and whether one was expected to tip when one’s meal had been interrupted by a bunch of state-sanctioned axe murders.
Konnan went inside first, but then again, in this short time, she’d learned that Konnan went everywhere first just to make sure it was safe. Argabella wanted to argue that if the whiny elves were going in, it had to be safe, but she just let him do his thing, his eyes darting to every corner as if looking for hidden assassins. Argabella didn’t care about assassins. She just wanted to find Fia. And the rest of her party, too, especially the witches and their magic wands. Unfortunately, it appeared that she was the first one back.
Konnan looked like he was going to start being annoyingly chivalrous, so Argabella chose a table that had already been wiped off and sprayed with bleach. She could barely see the bloodstains, and the hatchet marks only served to give everything a rustic feel. She sat down, and Konnan carefully placed Poltro on a bench, crossing her arms over her chest—or trying to. Just like when she’d been alive, Poltro’s arms flopped everywhere.
“Shall I dig a grave?” Konnan asked, his tone…grave.
Argabella was trying to flag down a waitress and didn’t look to see if his eyes were wobbling with unshed tears. “Not yet. There’s this witch. Maybe she can do something.”
Konnan tried to look sympathetic, but it was clear he thought nothing further could be done for Poltro. When the waitress appeared, Argabella requested two cups of tea, and Konnan put in his order for half a suckling pig and a tankard of mead.
“Carrying corpses makes a man hungry,” he said, rubbing his nine-pack to demonstrate.
“Uh huh,” Argabella said, eyes pinned to the door.
“In my land, there is no aphrodisiac like a hirsute woman,” he said, casually eyeing the soft fur of her arm.
“Great.”
“My friend Steve said—”
But Argabella only squealed in excitement.
Someone had just walked through the door.
If there’s one thing goats are good at, it’s evading capture while loosing droves of slippery pellets and screaming their fool heads off. In this way, Gustave was indeed an exemplary goat. As soon as the fighting broke out in the Braided Beard, he nimbly leapt onto a bench, catapulted himself off a dwarf’s beer belly, ricocheted off a bulbous nose, and sprang out the window with a bleat of victory behind the rabbit woman. He did ram into a soldier and knock him over, but that helped Gustave as much as it helped Argabella, because he had some room to run around in circles and bleat some more.
But his thinking brain thought that maybe he shouldn’t make any more noise that might draw attention, and he noticed the herd of tightly packed goats milling around in their pen—regular, nonspeaking, nonquesting goats—and he scrambled through the fence and head butted his way into the throng. The ground was knobby-knee-deep in emergency pellets. Gustave began to understand why others might not value his own contributions.
“Bleat,” he said. “I mean, for real, BLEAT.”
The other goats looked at him in confusion, tongues hanging out and mad eyes jangling every which way.
“Oh, yeah. I can’t bleat when I’m thinking in words. Um. BAAAA.”
“BAAAA?” another goat asked.
“Yes, I clearly said BAAAA. Don’t patronize me, Deirdre.”
But he had the good sense to say it quite softly just in case any of the soldiers could hear a whispering goat among the other fifty screaming goats and the thirty people loudly dying on the ground around the inn.
“So this isn’t fun,” he said to another goat, a rather attractive white nanny.
“BAAA.”
“I know, right? You try to have a nice meal, and there are suddenly soldiers everywhere. Like we live in a police state. And they didn’t politely ask us to disperse or read us our rights or anything. They just waded in with swords and started stabbing people. And don’t think I didn’t notice that they went for my friend Fia first. They obviously have something against vegetarians who protect goats like us. This happen a lot around here?”
“BAAA.”
“That’s fascinating, Cynthia. What a unique perspective.” He wiggled around a bit until he was facing a different goat, this one a lovely tawny brown that reminded him of a delicious belt he’d once eaten. “How about you? Any thoughts on the rise of fascism?”
“BAAA.”
Gustave nodded thoughtfully. “Excellent point, Meredith. It’s all about the shadowy plots of halflings who have infiltrated the postal system to cause chaos in the kingdom. If you want to destabilize a country, everyone knows all you have to do is mess with their water supply or their mail.”
Heaving a deep sigh, he squeezed through the crowd, hunting for some sign of intelligence in the fellows of his species. He found none. He tried to remember what it was like just being a goat, but everything in his memory went sort of muddy, like looking into a fast-flowing stream. He’d always enjoyed leather and pooping, but honestly, who didn’t? It was a lifestyle unto itself. Yet when he tried to think back to the first spark of genius, his first intelligent thought, all that came to mind was staring at Worstley’s sodden boots and thinking, “Man, I want to eat that and excrete that, the ol’ one-two, the number two following some hours later.”
On the upside, no one had threatened to kill him in at least twenty minutes, and outside the fence no such deal had been struck. But staying inside the fence, as he’d done most of his life, meant he’d just be killed at a later date for a hearty supper served with soda bread and a refreshing tankard of ale. Self-awareness had its downside, for he had lost the bliss of ignorance.
Butting his way around the throng, he muttered, “Excuse me. Pardon me. Hey, pretty mama, how you doin’? Your friend seems like she’s into me. Oh, that’s not an udder.”
The billy goat in question nudged the nannies apart to step closer to Gustave. The herd had been tightly packed, but now it spread a little, the nanny goats softly bleating to one another as if whispering, “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
As for the billy, he was a beastly specimen, probably one of those more expensive goats that looked very fine up until the day they went in the stew pot and their horns appeared on some feisty warrior’s helmet. He was filthy white, his eyes a lurid gold, but all goats had lurid gold eyes as far as Gustave knew. Worst of all, the billy looked furious.
“BAAAAA,” he growled, and Gustave noted the extra A for emphasis.
“Who, me?” he said, stepping backward and finding his path blocked by yet more goats. “Look, I was just passing through and making conversation. Have you met Deirdre and Cynthia and Meredith? I have so much respect for…”
The billy lowered his not inconsiderable horns.
“Ooookay, now. Let’s be reasonable. You’re maybe three times my size, and your horns have got to be hormonally enhanced. Nobody gets muscles like that from standing around in a pen. Let’s talk this out, bro. I’m not threatening your herd or leadership abilities—which, by the way, great job at spending your entire life inside this tiny fence without going insane. I’m just looking for an exit here. There’s no need to…”
The billy reared back a little, and Gustave’s goat brain took over. Screaming a bleat of his own, he lowered his head and ran for the billy. But instead of crashing his skull against the other goat’s skull, he veered around him, picked up speed, and bounded into the air. Hopping off a stump, he sprang right over the fence and into another pen, landing in thick, cold mud.
The mud sucked at his hooves as he struggled toward firmer ground. Enraged bleating from the other pen suggested that the billy was still looking for a fight when no one was interested, a condition he’d noticed many dudes often suffered. The wooden boards creaked dangerously as the goat rammed his substantial horns against the fence.
“Like that’s going to work,” Gustave muttered, heroically clambering out of the muck. “Just like a goat, bashing your head against whatever gets in your way. Hey, billy! You don’t have to be what they tell you to be!”
Gustave immediately realized his error as a soldier outside called, “Oi, Petyr. Did you hear somethin’ from the goat pen?”
“Baaa,” Gustave muttered out the side of his mouth. “Dicks.”
As the soldiers approached the fence, the billy was kind enough to transfer his rage to them, ramming the post nearest the new interlopers with his horns.
“Barmy little nutter,” one soldier said.
“Right?” Gustave muttered.
“Did
you say something?” the other soldier said.
Gustave finally hit higher ground and swore he would be better about pretending to fit in around the farmyard, at least so long as there were stupid people standing about with swords. Navigating a huge pile of moldy hay, he ran afoul of a bloated pig splayed out pornographically in the mud.
“Oh, gross,” he muttered.
“What, and you’re a prince?”
Gustave had to do a double take. The sow’s eyes were closed, her belly and bits exposed to the moonlight.
“Did you just talk?” he whispered.
“An idiot says what?” she whispered back.
“What?”
“That’s what I thought.”
Carefully traversing the mud that he now recognized as being at least half pig excrement, he maneuvered his way around to behold the sow’s enormous jowly face. Her eyes blinked open, looking annoyed and yet also like tiny raisins in a very large pudding.
“It’s rude to stare,” she said.
“Yeah, well, you take up most of my vision field, so it’s kind of hard not to.”
“You smell like goat.”
“There’s a really good reason for that.”
“Why are you in my pen?”
“Why are you talking?”
The sow grunted and wiggled, rolling this way and that until she was able to gain her feet. She had to weigh as much as fifty Gustaves and had a solid if pungent sort of power about her.
“I’m Gustave.”
“I’m a pig.”
“Okay, but what’s your name?”
The sow shrugged and waddled to a vat of slop. She daintily nibbled at an apple core before addressing him. “Look, son. Pigs don’t have names. They call me things like Piggy and Bacon and Porker and Sooey, but that’s more like calling you Curry or Glue.”
“Who enchanted you?”
The sow huffed a laugh. “Nobody. All pigs can talk. We’re one of the five most intelligent animal species in the world. And that means we’re smart enough not to let the humans know our little secret. Unlike you, who almost blew it out there.”