Alex Bledsoe - Burn Me Deadly

A stout, broad-shouldered woman in a threadbare dress stood in the doorway holding a spear ready over one shoulder. It was the short kind used to hunt wild boar, and her bare feet were spread in a practiced throwing stance. I said, “Hi. I think we’ve got a misunderstanding in progress here.”

“I’ll skewer you if you breathe wrong. Misunderstand that?”

I raised my hands. “No, ma’am. I’d just like to ask you if you’d seen a friend of mine, though.”

Her eyes narrowed in her weathered face. A strand of limp hair hung between her eyes. “What friend?”

“A girl named Laura. Would’ve been about ten days ago.”

“I don’t know any girl named Laura.”

“Do you know anyone who wears boots with dragons on them?”

Her brow creased with thought, and with her free hand she tugged at her uneven neckline as if it had suddenly grown tight. Then she motioned me forward. I was very cautious and stopped well out of arm’s reach. The spear stayed aimed at the center of my chest, but she held it wrong for such a close jab and I was pretty sure I could dodge it if I had to. Then again, I might end up on a spit over their dinner fire. “You know about the dragon people?” she asked.

I nodded. “Ran into three of them out on the road a while back.”

She looked me over carefully. “You’re not one, are you?”

“No, ma’am, not me.”

“Good. You wouldn’t walk out of this yard alive if you were.” She looked past me at the kids. “Go play!” she snapped, and they scurried off into the woods like upright squirrels. She returned her attention to me. “You swear you’re not one of them?”

“Do I look like one of them?”

“They’re sneaky. How do you feel about King Archibald?”

I raised my chin and put on my most sincere face. “I’ll leave Muscodia before I’ll submit to his tyranny,” I said, adding equal parts outrage, courage and the fear that comes from espousing a lost cause. And technically my words were true. Of course, since I wasn’t a citizen I felt no patriotic loyalty, and from what I’d heard King Archibald was far too disconnected and flighty to ever do well as a tyrant.

She didn’t answer for a long, tense moment. I crossed my arms, which put my sword hand close enough to the hilt that I could draw it quickly if needed. Women, I knew, could be just as vicious as men, and if she attacked me I had no compunction about defending myself.

Finally she said, “My husband will be home soon. He’s the one you should talk to. Come on inside and wait for him, why don’t you?”

I nodded at the spear. “You going to keep pointing that at me?”

She lowered the weapon until its butt end touched the ground. “No. But this isn’t the only sharp thing I’ve got handy, just so you know.”

I bit back every single snide comment and simply said, “Yes, ma’am.” Then I followed her inside.

Her name was Bella Lou, and her kids were Toy (the girl) and Stick (the boy). “We named them after the first thing my husband saw when he walked outside after they were born,” Bella Lou said. “The people who were native to Muscodia before we came along used to do the same thing.” I resisted the urge to say the choices could’ve been much worse. She was not as old as she first appeared, her rough-hewn lifestyle having aged her prematurely. Her husband she simply referred to as “Buddy.”

The shack’s inside was just like the outside. Everything had the look of being homemade or scavenged, then stuck together with no concern for style or safety. The table and chairs were big, square, solid creations that, because they were too large to go through the door, must have been built in the room. Animal skins, some with heads still attached, hung on the walls and covered the uneven floor. The place should have smelled atrocious, but flowers bloomed in window pots and various herbs dangled from hooks, making it actually rather homey. There was even a pleasant breeze through the windows to offset the summer warmth.

I sat at the crude table, drank tea that could tan leather and listened to Bella Lou tell me everything that was wrong with Muscodia and old King Archibald. She and Buddy were convinced Archibald was preparing a return to the old days of iron-fisted royal dominance in preparation for the eventual succession of his diffident son, Prince Frederick. And never mind that Muscodia’s capital, Sevlow, was about as geographically far from Neceda and the Black River Hills as it was possible to get: Bella Lou believed that people like her and Buddy, whose independence posed some vague sort of threat to this new royal order, would be rounded up and enslaved once the coup happened. So they’d retreated to the woods, where they lived basically in hiding from the outside world.

I’d met people like this before, and there was no convincing them with logic. So I just smiled, nodded and drank as much of the corrosive tea as I could manage despite my stomach’s increasing protests. I wondered how late Mother Bennings stayed at her office, and how extensive was her collection of antidotes.

“I’m sorry for the mess,” Bella Lou said as she put the kettle back on the hearth. I noticed she drank no tea herself.

“It’s still neater than my place,” I lied. “So tell me about these dragon people.”

She sat opposite me. “I thought you knew about them already,” she said suspiciously.

“I do; I’d just like to compare notes.”

She smiled. She had all her teeth, although a couple appeared destined for the dentist’s pliers. “You first.”

Well, no way around that; smoothly done, LaCrosse. So I gave her the sum total of what I knew. “There aren’t very many of them, they’ve got a place hidden around here somewhere and they aren’t afraid to hurt people to get what they want.”

She nodded. “That’s them, all right. When they first came here, we tried to be friendly and get to know them. In the woods, you always like to find out who you can trust, because you never know when you might need a hand. But whenever we’d run up on one of them, they’d get all crazy and chase us away.”

“How long ago did they come here?”

“About a month ago, I reckon. The first time I saw one, I was out gathering berries up near the tree line. The dirt’s all washed away there, and there’s places where it’s nothing but boulders. That’s where he was, at one of those rocky spots. He didn’t see me at first. He had a stick, like a fishing pole, about twice as tall as he was, with a rag tied on the end the way you’d make a torch. He even poured something that looked like lamp oil all over it. But he didn’t light it; he just started shoving it into the cracks between rocks, as far as it would go, real carefully, like he was… I don’t know, painting the insides of those crevices and things.”

“What did he look like?”

“He was a young guy. Had on nice clothes under a big camouflage cloak. The clothes made me think he was town trash-no offense-but he moved around like he was used to being outside.”

“Then what happened?”

“He kept painting cracks for a long time, very methodically, like it was his job or something. He didn’t notice me. Finally he stopped, and I decided to say hello. I thought maybe he’d lost something down in the rocks, and I could get Toy or Stick to wiggle down and get it for him. I asked if he needed any help.”

“What did he do?”

She chuckled. “He screamed at me and threw a knife. He called me a nosy whore and said he’d kill me if I ever told anyone I’d seen him.”

“He threw a knife at you?”

“Yeah. He just missed me. It stuck in a tree right by my head. I grabbed it and ran. Luckily I know these woods like I do this tabletop, because he came after me. But once I got out of sight, there was no way he could’ve found me. He looked for quite a while, though, screaming and cursing at me the whole time.”