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.
FOUR
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.”
“Do you still have the knife?”
“ ’Course. Want to see it?”
I nodded. She went to a trunk-sized box shoved up against the wall and opened it. Light glinted from the blades of a dozen knives clipped to the inside of the lid, ready for the day the king’s soldiers came to arrest them, I supposed. She picked one, pulled it loose and closed the box.
She handed it to me: five inches long, perfectly balanced and sharp on both edges. If you didn’t know about knives you’d never pick this one, because it was about as visually impressive as a nice letter opener. But I did know, and it told me that if the screaming guy had wanted to hit her, he probably could have. This was a pro’s throwing knife.
But what it told me most was that I was on the right track: embossed into the black handle was a dragon emblem identical to the one I saw on the man’s boots.
I tapped the design. “Is this why you call them the dragon people?” I asked.
She nodded. “Why do you?”
“One of them has the same thing on his boots.” I put the knife on the table. “Can I buy this from you?”
She shook her head. “We don’t use money. Money feeds into King Archibald’s repression.”
Slowly so I wouldn’t spook her, I drew my own knife from its hiding place in my boot. It was almost exactly the same size and weight and, since I’d left the filigree along the blade, looked much more expensive. “Can I trade with you, then?”
She took both knives and held them side by side, scrutinizing them like two cucumbers at the market. Then she handed me the dragon knife. “Sure. It’s probably bad luck for me to keep it, anyway.”
I slipped the new weapon into my boot just as heavy steps thudded on the porch outside. “I got us a couple of wild pigs,” a rough male voice called. “Ought to be good for a week, at least. Got ’em strung up to drain.”
“Buddy, you know you don’t have to gut ’em; I’ll do that,” Bella Lou called through the door. She smiled and shook her head. “I’m a lucky woman, all right. He spends all day hunting and still has the energy to field-dress ’em and start the blood running out.”
The front door opened and Buddy stepped into the room. He was a short, round man with arms the size of my legs, dressed in ragged, homemade clothes patterned to blend with the light and shadow of the forest. He’d removed his boots on the porch, and his broad, pasty-white feet slapped the floor with each step. He wore a big knife on his belt and his hands were bloody. Intense little eyes peered from under the floppy brim of his cap and said he was not pleased to see a stranger. He looked me over for a long, tense moment. Finally he growled, “Who’s this, Bella Lou?”
“This is Mr. LaCrosse,” she said.
“And why is he in my favorite seat?”
She kept her eyes cast demurely down. “He was asking about the dragon people.”