The journey was agreeable in all save duration, which made Pirvan think yearningly of flying on dragonback, even precariously strapped to the exuberant young bronze Hipparan, except for one disagreeable incident. That came on the fifth night out, when lowering clouds that promised rain induced them to stop early, at a sprawling inn called the Chained Ogre.
The name itself rang harsh on Pirvan’s ears, and he decided that making the innkeeper a trifle uneasy would only be fair pay for the man’s dubious taste. The knight had not forgotten his old night work skills, including finding concealed routes into and about any building, being quiet and invisible, and picking locks.
The only difference was that now Pirvan put on the simple, patched garb that any manservant might wear, and he looked as if it had been dragged behind a wagon over several days’ worth of road. Add a little work by Haimya on her husband’s hair, and no one who had not seen him more often than the innkeeper and his servants would have been able to recognize him.
He had been about the inn for nearly an hour, and was beginning to expect to be disappointed in his suspicions. He promised to continue his search until the rain stopped, then retire. They would need to start early tomorrow, to make a decent day’s progress over muddy roads.
Pirvan was now in the attic, which, from its mustiness, dustiness, and burden of useless articles, must be visited about once in the reign of each kingpriest. Then he heard a sneeze, and as he raised his lantern and drew his dagger, he saw something moving.
It was a small figure, and his first thought was some apprentice potboy or stablehand, eking out night after night amid the dust and debris of the attic after a day’s exhausting labor. That was bad, but not something where Pirvan’s duty or the law allowed him to interfere. Mutual recognition of each other’s laws was part of the Swordsheath Scroll that bound Solamnia and Istar, and the laws of Istar said nothing against making apprentices sleep hard in filthy attics.
Then Pirvan looked more closely. The small figure was not a boy, but a kender-sex impossible to tell. Moreover, the kender had one eye half-closed in the middle of a purple bruise, and both its feet were chained to a log that must weigh as much as Grimsoar One-Eye.
Pirvan walked over to the kender so noiselessly that he was standing over the other before the kender noticed him. Then the kender gasped, went white, and covered his face with his hands.
Pirvan’s first reaction was the impractical one of wishing to slaughter on the spot whoever had abused the kender this way. Kender had more than their share of annoying and even bad habits, but to make one this fearful-and thin as well-required brutality that no crime could justify.
Or at least no crime that the kender themselves would not punish readily. There was no part of Istar where one could not find within a day’s ride enough kender to administer justice to one of their own. Why had the person responsible for this brutality not thought of that?
Pirvan decided it would be well to find out who that person was, and to assist his memory.
“I am Sir Pirvan of Tiradot, Knight of the Crown,” he said. “I feel I am in the presence of injustice. Would you care to tell me your story?”
This took a while longer than Pirvan had expected, but not because the kender rambled and backtracked and generally made a hash of the story. It was because the first thing the kender did was to burst into tears. This made Pirvan resolve to find some way of killing the kender’s persecutor slowly, but accomplished little else.
Finally the story came out. “So many things wound up on high shelves around here, the night I stayed, that it’s no surprise that some of them fell into my pockets. I never thought anybody would put a brooch like that on a shelf, even if it was just pretty. When I heard that it was valuable, the first thing I thought of was returning it. That was what I was doing when they caught me.”
Reading between the lines, Pirvan caught a tale of a kender staying in a human-owned inn where his kind were none too welcome, with fellow guests who openly hated nonhumans. Add a bout of handling that got a trifle out of bounds, even by kender standards (which was to say that the kender might have stripped the inn to the bare walls if he’d been able to carry that much), and the wrath of a good many humans descended even faster than a kender could run.
“I suppose you know that you have the right to appeal to the principal kender of the area, or at least inform them.”
The kender looked away. “They know. I appealed.”
“And-they left you like this?”
“There are not as many of our folk about as there used to be, not since the Brongon Hill fire.”
Pirvan remembered that vaguely. It had wiped out a whole kender community-not killing many, but leaving the survivors destitute and forced to flee. Most went all the way back to Kendermore.
“That was a forest fire, though, wasn’t it?” Pirvan added.
The wide kender eyes were suddenly as hard as granite. So was the voice, rasping through the dust.
“That is what they want humans to believe.”
“They?”
“The ones who started the fire.”
Pirvan filled a whole tablet with mental notes about pointed questions to ask in a variety of quarters. None of those would help the kender here in front of him, at least not tonight.
“Are there no kender left at all?”
“Few who think of fighting back. More than a few who think that if the humans go on this way, there’s always the next hill and safety beyond it.”
Pirvan noticed the kender’s unusually forthright and direct manner of speech. But then a long-dead knight had said, “It concentrates your mind wonderfully to know you’ll be beheaded in the morning,” and no doubt starvation, exhaustion, and beatings could do the same to a kender.
“Uhh, there’s more,” the kender said. Kender could not really blush-fortunately, some said, or they would spend all their time blushing-but the kender suddenly could not meet Pirvan’s eyes.
“How much more?”
“Ah-the real power among the kender are the Rambledin-I suppose you can call them a clan. I was courting Shemra Rambledin. You’ve never seen, or even imagined, anyone so lovely. She could sit on my lap for hours and-”
Pirvan coughed. The intimate details of the kender’s courtship didn’t matter so much as the fact that it had obviously gone awry. “So whatever happened, it turned the Rambledins against you. They wouldn’t help you, or listen to your appeal, or pass the word on to Kendermore or anyplace else where they could help you without worrying about human opinions.”
The kender seemed half-asleep, as if exhausted not only by the day’s work, but also by telling his story. He still managed to nod.
“Well-and what is your name?”
The kender shook his head. Pirvan felt like shaking the kender.
“Not everybody may refuse to help you, even if you think you’re dishonored. Those who want to help will need to know whom they’re helping.”
“Gesussum Trapspringer-and no, I’m not anybody’s uncle. It’s a real kender name, and I’ve heard all the jokes about it that you know and all the ones you don’t besides.”
Pirvan took a deep breath, then nearly coughed himself into a fit from the dust he inhaled. “What you need is some real solid food,” he said when he could speak again. “I think it’s time we improved the innkeeper’s hospitality.”
If it could have been done without danger to anyone, Pirvan would have cheerfully used his night work skills to burn the inn to the ground. The next best thing was using them to visit the kitchen, undetected, and return, also undetected, with a bulging sack.
“There’s a meat pie and some apples for now, and hard bread and cheese for an extra meal a day until they run out. Better find some place to hide the bread and cheese-”