Kill the Farm Boy

  They did not, unfortunately, escape the Braided Beard without confronting Konnan. He accosted them near the door while they were waiting for Yåløndå to bring them another jar of salty fish.

  “My lady Argabella,” he said, his dark brown skin newly oiled and scented with cinnamon and cloves, fully aware of how handsome he was. “May I inquire whither you are bound? I would like to offer my services.”

  Argabella raised one ear along with an eyebrow. “What kind of services?”

  “Many things. I have a bag of holding, a windwalker’s cloak, a torch, and many bonuses to my strengths provided by various potions and spells. But the main thing I’m known for is offering protection. I am an excellent fighter.”

  “Is that so?” Fia asked. “Then why were you the first one out the window when the soldiers came last night? I fought my way out the door.”

  Konnan scoffed and rolled his eyes at her. “There was no need to fight. You could have done the same. Instead, you chose to put your life in danger for no good reason.”

  “My sword was thirsty. And the point you’re missing is that she already has more than competent protection. She doesn’t need you.”

  “Who do you think you are, to speak to me like that?” Konnan demanded, amusement gone, his brows meeting in the middle as he scowled at Fia.

  “I’m the woman who will gut you if you don’t leave us alone right now,” Fia said, aware that she didn’t sound like the peaceful person she wished to be. But this Konnan guy, friend of Steve, wasn’t taking the hint.

  Argabella cleared her throat significantly as the two tall people drew closer, staring each other down. “Actually, Konnan, you could provide a valuable service to me for which I would be very grateful.”

  Both Fia and Konnan looked down at the bard and spoke as one: “He can?” and “I can?”

  “Yes. I need you to take the body of our friend down to the Grange, where you’ll find the hut of Belladonna the healer.” They followed Argabella’s furry finger to where she pointed and saw that Poltro was slumped over the table like she was passed out drunk instead of dead.

  “Why? Can she bring your friend back to life?”

  “No, not quite. But our friend’s former employer and guardian is buried near there, and we think she should rest beside him. We have urgent business in town or we would see to it ourselves. Would you do this tremendous favor for me? I will wait each night at Testy Tom’s Blue Orb Room so that I can thank you properly. Look for me there.” The bard smiled as winsomely as she could, that furry finger now tracking down his arm, which Fia observed with a flash of hot jealousy.

  Konnan saw Fia’s expression, gave a smug grunt of satisfaction, and then leered down at Argabella. “It would be an honor, my lady. It will take me a few days, but I look forward to seeing you at the Blue Ball—”

  “Blue Orb,” Argabella reminded him. “Tom gets testy if you get it wrong.”

  “The Blue Orb Room. Right. I will see you soon, my lady. I depart forthwith.”

  Konnan moved to take Argabella’s hand to kiss it, but the bard clasped her hands together near her cheeks, beaming up at the prince with a breathy sigh. “Thank you ever so much, Konnan. It is such a tremendous gift of your time! We must also depart forthwith, so if you’ll excuse us for now, we’ll see you soon!”

  “Of course.” He backed up and bowed, and Fia bowed back once Argabella nudged her. Yåløndå arrived at that point with their new jar of pickled herring.

  “Here ye are,” she said, extending it to Argabella. “A little something for the road. Do visit us again when ye can, dear. We generally offer less death and dismemberment, and here’s a coupon for ten percent off.”

  They had no choice but to exit after that since they had already said they really needed to. They bade farewell to both Yåløndå and Konnan once more and walked right out, Fia keeping a tight rein on everything she wanted to say until it was safe to do so. She pulled Argabella to the right once they were outside, and they circled the building, heading back to the rear entrance of the baths. Fia stopped them before the door, figuring it was a safe place to talk.

  “What was that all about?” Fia asked in an urgent whisper.

  Argabella shrugged. “I got rid of him.”

  “With a ridiculous promise! I can’t believe you’d do that!”

  “Do what? Make a promise or keep it?”

  “Make a—wait. What do you mean?”

  “I mean I’m never setting foot in Testy Tom’s Blue Orb Room.” Argabella squatted down on her haunches and placed her hands on top of her knees, making herself as small as possible while peering up at Fia, looking very much like a wild hare. “What? Cute li’l ol’ me can’t ever tell a lie? Of course not! That’s why he believed me. Put down the herring for a second.”

  Fia complied, and as soon as she stood up, Argabella launched herself into her arms, wrapped her legs around her midsection, and held on to her shoulders. She put her soft forehead against Fia’s and said, “I rather thought that was a situation where we didn’t have to kill anybody, so I used my tricksy rabbity wiles. Hope I didn’t foil your plans.”

  “I had no plans except to be with you.”

  “You sure? Looked like maybe you were planning to start a fight.”

  “Well—” Fia thought back and recalled clearly that yes, she really had wanted to fight him. “Maybe just a friendly kick to the groin,” she admitted.

  “And if he escalated?”

  “I might have been forced to kill him.”

  “Yet here we are, all alive and unstained. Will you try to always make that happen first, before you resort to violence? Just try?”

  Fia could not even begin to argue. She didn’t want to. “I will try.”

  “Thank you. Let’s get this done and go grow some leggy roses together.”

  “Yes, let’s.”

  They entered the baths and called to the rest of the party to meet up in the back when they were ready. No need to risk any of them running into Konnan and alerting him that they were, in fact, still on the premises.

  “I think we’ll finish this one way or another today,” she told Argabella.

  “Those are the two most common options,” her bunny agreed. “Though sometimes there is yet another way to finish things, or a way we had not even thought of, or this really weird way you’d only consider if you had ingested some dodgy gnomeric mushrooms first.”

  There were, Fia supposed, many ways the evening could go, not just one way or another, and she hoped she’d get to experience one of the ways in which she was alive and happy at the end of it.

  “Let’s begin the end, then,” Fia said, and put Argabella down as Grinda and Gustave emerged from the bathhouse in a lavender cloud.

  “All right, stop stalling now,” Gustave said. “Y’all said there would be a bunch of nanny goats without any other billies around. Take me there to meet my destiny.”

  The nanny goats were not heavy with kid, for which Argabella was profoundly grateful. That was still a couple months away, most likely, as was the act of animal husbandry that would get them there. Grand nannies could be grouchy, but just now, Gustave would be like a slice of pie sitting on the windowsill.

  When they approached the fencing that surrounded Løcher’s estate, a few of the enchanted nanny goats were having a nice scratch against the wooden posts, and they started talking about him, assuming he was the normal sort of goat and wouldn’t be able to understand.

  “Mmm-mm, looky what’s coming our way, girls. A fine-looking billy on the hoof. Got himself a righteous beard,” one said.

  “Oh, my, cut me off a slice of that.”

  “Only a slice, girl?”

  “Well I was going to share, but if you’re going to make comments about my appetite, I can just keep him all to myself.”

  “Ladies, ladies. There’s en
ough for everybody,” Gustave assured them. “You can all have a slice of the Gustave.”

  The nanny goats froze for a few seconds, trying to decide whether to scream or run or faint away. Argabella could sympathize, because she’d frozen in exactly the same way many times when addressed by erstwhile suitors.

  “Am I hearing things, or did that billy just say we could all have a slice?” the first one said.

  “That’s right. I’m a free-range, organic talking billy,” Gustave replied. “Tastefully accessorized with a very tall human, an irascible possum, and a singing bunny woman.”

  Argabella’s ears drooped at her description, but apparently she was a point of interest to the other goats. “Where’d you get the singing bunny?” one of the nannies asked.

  “Up in Borix,” Gustave replied. “They’re everywhere you go. Head up there and you can have one for free.”

  “I don’t know if I even want one yet. What does she sing?”

  “She croons tunes you haven’t heard in many moons. Say, what’s your name? I’m Gustave.”

  “I’m Beatrix,” the nanny said. She was mostly milk-white except for a single black patch on her back and black tips to her ears.

  “Shh! Don’t disclose your personal info!” another said. She was a salt-and-pepper gray. “We ought to tell Blurt about this.”

  “Sure, have Blurt come over,” Gustave said. “Who’s Blurt, by the way?”

  “He’s our keeper. He gives us little snacks,” Beatrix said.

  “Kind of like a pooboy?”

  “No, he’s not a pooboy. We have so much room on the grounds that we don’t need a pooboy. He just jokes around with us and feeds us, gives our coats a nice brush once in a while.”

  “You’re living the high life, Beatrix. What are the snacks like? Little rolled-up pieces of leather?”

  “No, they’re mostly oats and dirt stuck together with some syrup and bugs, I think.”

  “Ah! Trail mix, then.”

  “Right. So where are you headed, Gustave?” Beatrix asked.

  “Here, actually. I heard in town you nannies were talkers, and I wanted to come over and have a chat. How’d you get the gift of gab, anyway?”

  “Some filthy pixie did it to us. She has only one blue sock.”

  “Hey, me, too! Meaning I’m a victim of Staph, not that I have a blue sock. We’re on the same team. Any idea why she has only one?”

  Beatrix bleated in amusement. “I ate the other one. She nearly blasted me to bits, but Løcher stopped her.”

  Gustave bleated back, and the other nannies joined in. And then they just kept going for the count of a hundred, at which point Argabella couldn’t stand it anymore.

  “Are you talking in some kind of goat language now?” she asked, and the ungulates all stopped and stared at her.

  “No, we were just laughing,” Gustave explained. “When you can eat a sock with so much sentimental value to the owner that they want to kill you for eating it, you’ve had a rare victory. Beatrix here is a legend.”

  The nanny goat preened and blinked her yellow eyes a few times, then whispered audibly to the other nanny goat, “He gets it. We gotta get this guy inside the fence.”

  “All right, I’ll go get Blurt,” the salt-and-pepper nanny groused, and she gamboled away, hooves tearing up turf and udders swinging pendulously as she headed for a larger collection of goats milling about in the distance and a lean silhouette standing among them.

  Beatrix took a couple steps closer to the fence and peered through the slats up at Fia. “Where’d you find the big one?”

  “Oh, she fell out of the sky and crushed my pooboy,” Gustave explained, and Argabella saw Fia wince a little at that stark reminder. Her warrior was fierce and merciless when in battle but had a soft spot for the innocent. “Now she protects me from meat eaters. You’d be surprised how many people look at me and think of dinner.”

  “Wouldn’t be surprised at all. Does she sing, too?”

  “Not that I’ve noticed.”

  Argabella thought the goat’s version of small talk was infuriating and didn’t think Fia liked it either, but she kept her mouth shut because it was all part of the plan. A plan that was going spectacularly well so far in that they had not yet set off any magical alarms. Was this, she wondered, what it was like to be an adorable little dog that people talked about all the time but that got punished if it made any noise?

  The tall, rangy goatherd ambled over soon enough, his herd of nanny goats accompanying him, all excited to see this talking billy goat who was outside the fence. As soon as he turned in their direction, Fia threw back her cloak. She’d taken off her slightly more substantive armor and was wearing only her chain-mail bikini again. And she brought out the jar of pickled herring and rested the base of it on the top strut of the fence. Her sword was hidden behind her back.

  Blurt squinted as he drew near, uncertain that he could believe his eyes. He looked, Argabella thought, as if he squinted quite a lot. His face was tanned and cracked from a life spent out in the sun, with wrinkles spreading out from his eyes like dry riverbeds cutting through desert sand. As he neared the fence, those squinting eyes widened to ogle Fia properly and Argabella had to clamp down on something Shoutful she wanted to say.

  “Hel-looooo,” Blurt said in a wheezy sort of voice that broke into a whistle whenever he had to pronounce an s. “It’s a good day to get some sun.”

  Fia beamed at him. “Indeed it is. Are you the Blurt we’ve heard so much about from Beatrix?”

  “Indeed I am, miss. Who might you be?” He flashed a yellow-brown grin at her that sported several black columns that had once been teeth.

  “I’m Fia. My goat wanted to meet your goats. But now that you’re here, maybe you can help me with this jar.”

  “Jar? You mean jugs?”

  “No, this jar. Right here. Look here, Blurt. At the jar. The jar of pickled herring. Over here.”

  “Hm? What, pickled herring? Oh, there it is! Right in front of me.”

  “Precisely. This is a jar of top-shelf fish from the Braided Beard, and I’ve had the worst trouble trying to get it open.”

  “What, a strong woman like you having trouble with that? I bet you have more muscles in your hand than I have in my whole body!”

  “I’m strong, but this is tough for some reason. Maybe my technique is lacking. I don’t suppose you could give it a try? I promise to share if you get it open.”

  Salt-and-pepper nanny goat spoke up: “You can’t eat those, Blurt. You know that.”

  Fia blinked. “What? You can’t handle a few fish?”

  Blurt scoffed. “Aw, sure I can.”

  “You ca-a-a-an’t,” the nanny goat insisted.

  Argabella saw that there was a possible panic building. She nudged Gustave to signal that he should say something.

  “Hey, ladies, what’s the wildest thing you’ve ever eaten?” he said. “I ate a kumquat once with a snail on top. Not a combination I’d recommend, but at least it was different!”

  The goats immediately shifted off to one side to discuss gustatory adventures while Blurt did his best to open the jar of pickled herring. Fia had given it an extra twist closed to make opening it a challenge, and he grunted and sweated for a while as he tried to get the top to budge. He succeeded eventually and Fia clapped, which made jingling chain-mail sounds that so distracted Blurt that he nearly dropped the whole jar. Argabella was close enough to reach out and save it from ruin. Her nose twitched at the powerful fishy funk wafting from within.

  “Oh, those smell good,” Fia said. “You first.”

  “No, no, it’s your jar, you go first,” Blurt said, smiling his gap-toothed grin.

  This was not part of the plan. Fia was a vegetarian. She wouldn’t want any of the fish, but she had already said how delicious they must be and had ind
icated how much she wanted the jar open.

  “Thing is, I’m not hungry right now,” Fia said. “Just ate, in fact. But I figured if I couldn’t get this open I’d never eat again. Please, Blurt. You try. It would be rude of me to take one when you worked so hard to open the jar.” She thrust the jar toward him. “Go on. Tell me if they’re any good.”

  “Well, all right, if you really want my opinion.”

  “I do.”

  Argabella tried not to show any of her revulsion as Blurt dipped his dirty fingers into the jar and plucked out a shining, stinking herring. He made slurping and smacking noises as he closed his eyes and chewed it, interspersing those sounds with running commentary on the bursts of salty revelation traveling across his tongue.

  “Moh,” he said, smacking away. “Muh. Whoo! Unh. Oh.”

  “They’re that good, huh?” Blurt nodded enthusiastically. “Well, have another.” Fia extended the jar to him, and he fished out another fish, cramming it awkwardly into his mouth.

  “Wow. Nuh. Mmm.”

  “Tell me, Blurt,” Fia said as his jaw worked. “What makes them so special?” Argabella noticed that the goatherd’s eyes were already beginning to droop.

  “Deesh?” He swallowed with effort. “Jesh, omah gawwwd, yinnow. Hnngh.”

  “I see. Well, you’d better have another, then.” Fia slipped another slick fish out of the jar and handed it to Blurt.

  “Dangoo.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Blurt did not bring the herring to his mouth so much as smash it inside, swaying a little as his fingers lingered in his maw. He did remember to remove them before he started to chew, but just barely.

  “Ohhhh,” he moaned, and his eyes rolled up in his head as his knees buckled and he fell squarely upon his buttocks. His mouth cranked up and down twice more, then he flopped on his back and ceased to move.

  Argabella checked on the goats. They were all gabbling away about some disgusting thing they’d eaten that one time and hadn’t noticed that Blurt was unconscious.