Priest (Ratcatchers Book 1) (7 page)

Heden came back to the Hammer and Tongs to find the heavy oak doors standing open. He’d left the doors unlocked and was happy to see that whoever’d come to confront him about whatever hadn’t broken in and cost him a crown for the repair.

He didn’t hesitate. He didn’t bother unwrapping the sword. He stepped up onto the boards of his inn, and walked through the doors.

Inside, taking a moment for his eyes to adjust, Heden saw a thick, heavily muscled man standing by the bar on his right, and the cat Ballisantirax, sitting on the bottom step of the stairs to the rooms above. Balli was licking a paw, and then washing herself.

The man’s face was scratched and bleeding. He was someone’s muscle, Heden had an idea whose, and he probably didn’t feel much pain. It looked like his nose and cheekbones had been professionally broken a few times, so he probably couldn’t feel the razor-thin cuts. Blood streamed down his cheeks and onto his neck and shirt. It looked bad but it was just a cat scratch.

Heden took note of where the cat was sitting, and felt, though he could not see, someone watching from the top of the stairs.

The man turned as soon as he heard Heden’s boots, and bellowed; “Is that your fucking cat?”

Heden smiled and looked at Balli. Ballisantirax went into what Heden thought of as her “cat statue” pose, sitting on her hind quarters, paws placed together in front of her. Her eyes were squinted half-closed, prideful and happy.

“I’m gonna kill that fucking cat!”

Heden looked from the cat to the muscle and said, “No you’re not.”

“You get up there,” the man tried ordering Heden, “and get me that fucking trull.”

Balli, assured that her Master had things well in hand, turned and trotted up the steps.

“What’s your name?” Heden wondered, looking askance at the big man. Trying to place him.

“My name don’t matter, get the girl,” he said.

“You work for Miss Elowen,” Heden said. He leaned the wrapped sword against a chair.

“That’s right,” the man said, on firmer ground, the cat apparently forgotten. “And she says ‘Morten, you go find that bitch and bring her back here.’ And here I am,” he said proudly. “Found you myself.”

“Sure you don’t want to tell me your name?” Heden asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Fuck you!” Morten said. Heden was quite a bit shorter and smaller than the big man. Morten sensed something was wrong. Small men didn’t usually give him any lip.

Heden shrugged. “Vanora?” he called out. “There’s a man here wants you to go with him. You’re free to go, if you like.”

“It ain’t up to her!” Morten said, angry and getting confused. This was not how things were supposed to go.

Heden stared at him and waited in the silence for a moment. When no response was forthcoming, he said, “I don’t think she wants to go with you.”

“She’s a fucking whore,” the tough said deliberately. “It don’t matter what she wants. She belongs to Miss Elowen.”

As he spoke, he walked toward Heden until he was standing within an arm’s length.

“I hate to say this, but I don’t think you’ll last long at the Petal,” Heden said.

“What?” Morten asked, confused.

“I mean if Bann finds out you came over here and tried to act tough with me, he’ll say ‘I’m going to have to fire that pigfucker because he’s too stupid to be muscle even at a brothel.’”

“Fuck you!” Morten said again, and swung a thick fist at Heden. A great roundhouse swing with his right.

Heden easily and efficiently ducked out of the way, put his foot out, and pulled on Morten’s right shoulder, half-tripping, half-throwing the heavy man into the table on which he and Gwiddon had drinks earlier.

There was a crash and a grunt. Morten was making a lot of noise.

“Did you come up with this idea?” Heden asked, looking at the man sprawled on his floor surrounded by the remains of the table. “Take the initiative? Or did you talk to Bann first?”

Morten turned over. He was trying to figure out what had happened. He looked up at Heden, a little stunned.

“You took the initiative, didn’t you?”

Morten pulled out a dagger. Heden sighed.

“Really?” he asked.

Morten lumbered to his feet and came at Heden in a kind of crouch.

Heden quickly lashed out with his right palm, turning his whole body and driving the heel of his palm into Morten’s face as the man ran at him. There was a loud crunch and Morten dropped the dagger. But Morten’s body kept coming, smashing into Heden.

Heden stumbled back against the bar, but Morten had collapsed on the ground. He was on his hands and knees, blood and spit pooling on the floor. There was a
huur, huur
sound as he tried to breathe.

Heden straightened up. “Alright,” he said.
Huur, huur
.

“You broke my fucking nose!” Morten yelled.
Huur
.

“It’s okay,” Heden reassured him.
Huur
. He waited. He went behind the bar and got a small glass and some port.

“Come on,” Heden said helping Morten to his feet. Morten shook off Heden’s arm and stood, swaying a little. “Here, drink this,” Heden said.

Morten took the small glass and drank the rich port. It wouldn’t do much except taste good and get Morten’s mind off the pain.

“Now,” Heden said, slowly. “You’re going to go back to Miss Elowen and tell her you couldn’t get the girl. Tell her I was, ah, you know, waiting for you. Ready. Whatever. Doesn’t matter. But you didn’t get her,” he spoke like he was explaining something to a child, “and I beat the shit out of you.”

“She’s going to fucking kill me!”

“Nooo,” Heden said. “She didn’t know it was me. You tell her the girl is at the Hammer and Tongs, and she’ll know it’s me. Probably feel bad she sent you. She won’t kill you. I promise.”

“What?” Morten said. It was getting hard to understand him as his face swelled up. When he talked, Heden could see his white teeth stained red.

“Tell her I promised she wouldn’t kill you.”

“Why am I, uhh…” Morten began, but didn’t continue.

“Okay,” Heden said. “Time for you to go.” He took the now empty glass from the stunned muscle, and guided him to the door. He opened it, and the man stepped outside and looked around, confused.

Heden stood in the doorway. “Find someone to take care of that nose,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the crowd walking by. People were studiously avoiding looking directly at Morten, while just as studiously glancing covertly at his ruined face.

“What?” Morten said, holding his nose.

Heden closed the door.

Heden looked at the mess, the broken table. He waited a moment.

“He’s gone.”

Vanora danced down the stairs, still in her blue dress, and stopped once her bare feet hit the common room floor. She stared at Heden. There was a hungry look in her eyes. She was scared, but she also needed something from Heden, and was resisting whatever it was.

“He’ll be back,” she said, accusing Heden of something.

Heden shook his head. “No he won’t,” he said.

“Someone will be back!” she demanded.

Heden nodded. “Yeah,” he said. She was having trouble keeping her breathing from turning into sobbing.

“She won’t try and take you again though.”

“You don’t know that!” she said, almost yelling. “She won’t just let me go!”

Heden sat in a chair next to the demolished table.

“The Petal is a nice place,” Heden said. “Respectable.” This was, he concluded, why Vanora still seemed like a fifteen year old girl. Elowen took pride in getting them young, and training them. Treated it like a real apprenticeship. Even at fifteen, Vanora may only have had a dozen clients. And they’d be rich.

It wasn’t illegal, most of the churches had no stricture against it. But Heden couldn’t shake the feeling that, in a better world, girls like Vanora wouldn’t have to fuck strange men for money.

“Did you like it there?” Heden asked, as if this was a normal thing to say.

She looked at the table next to her and shrugged. Almost imitating Heden.

“Do you want to stay here?” he asked.

She nodded. “I want to stay,” she said, she seemed desperate. She was desperate.

Heden accepted this.

“I don’t want…I want to learn to read.” Heden knew what she had been about to say.

“Okay,” Heden said.

“You said you’d teach me,” she complained, as though he’d already reneged on the deal. Literacy was not valued among the people Heden knew growing up, but was valued in the city. Almost everyone in the city could read well enough to make out the common words and phrases used in legal documents, but even people with money paid others to do their reading and writing for them. The nobility, of course, considered it a necessity. For someone like Vanora, it could be a doorway to better things.

“I will,” Heden said. “And if you don’t want to leave, I promise you won’t have to.”

“It’s not that simple,” she said darkly.

Heden took a deep breath. “If I don’t want someone to take you from here, there’s maybe five people in the whole city who could do anything about it. And Miss Elowen is not one of them.”

She dropped into a chair and crossed her arm, eyes downcast. “It’s not that simple,” she repeated, with less conviction this time. But with a level of resignation that Heden noted. They were sitting on opposite sides of the common room.

“You’re probably going to, ah….” Heden said. He stood up and crossed the room. She wasn’t going to like this part. She didn’t look up at him. He took a deep breath. “Okay,” he said, settling on directness. “I’ve got to leave the city.”

Now she looked up. “What!?” she asked, panicking.

“You’ll be okay,” he said.

“What are you talking about? How can you….”

“Vanora,” he said, lowering his voice, she stopped panicking and stared at him. “If I tell you you’re going to be okay, you’re going to be okay. Do you understand me?” His calmness seemed to stun her. She just nodded.

“When…when are you leaving?” she asked.

“Soon. Today.”

“Let me go with you!” she said, jumping to her feet.

Heden just shook his head. “You don’t know where I’m going.”

She waited a moment and when there was nothing else, she asked what seemed the obvious question.

“Where are you going?”

“I have to go into the Iron Forest,” he said, unable to keep the drama out of his voice.

It did not have the intended effect.

“Where the fairies live?!” Vanora asked, and clapped her hands together.

This girl
, he reminded himself,
has slept with more people in more ways in three years than you have your entire life.
It seemed important to him to maintain some context.

“Yes,” he admitted. “There are fairies in the forest.”

“Why do you say it like that?” she asked, not happy with his tone of voice.

“They’re not…what you imagine.”

“They don’t fly around on little butterfly wings?” This was obviously important to her.

“Well, okay,” Heden said. “They are what you imagine. But they’re dangerous. They ensorcell people,” he said.

“What does that mean?” She was deflating with every question. He answered, looking at the floor, avoiding her pleading eyes. She wanted the fantasy, but he couldn’t give it to her.

“They trap people. Forever. They were made to serve the Celestials and when they left, the fairies had no one to serve. They went mad without their masters to tell them what to do. So any people stupid enough to go into the wode, any wode, they want to serve them. Forever. They’ll magic your mind and you’ll never want to leave, and they’ll feed you rich food and sing songs in your ears and pretty soon you’ve been there weeks and you’re starving to death because their food doesn’t…it can’t be digested the way ours can, and you’re shitting and pissing yourself because you forget to go to the privy but you don’t notice because you only see what they want to you to see. Only hear what they want you to hear. And then you die, and they don’t know why. It confuses them. But only for a few minutes. Then they’ve forgotten you ever existed.”

He looked up at her. Her mouth was open.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s worse when you’re watching it happen to someone you know.”

“I’ll stay here,” she said in a small voice.

Heden nodded. “Good. There’s food enough in the pantry in the kitchen to last all the time I’m gone. Just don’t be too picky. If the bread gets moldy, just pick the mold off.” He remembered his father telling him exactly the same thing when he was a boy.

“I don’t want to be alone” she said, quietly. Then appeared to have a thought. “Who was that man I saw down here before you went out?”

“His name’s Gwiddon,” Heden said. “He’s probably my best friend.”

“Maybe he could come by…” she began, and stopped when she saw Heden shake his head.

“He’s complicated,” Heden said. “I can’t ask him to do things like that.”

“You said he was your friend,” Vanora said.

Heden shrugged. “I’d trust him with my life,” he said. “Yours too. But he has his own things to take care of.”

“How long will you be gone,” she asked, looking out the window. She was thinking about something.

“I don’t know. Could be a long time. Could be a month, but I really hope not.”

She shrank more into herself.

“I’ll talk to some friends before I leave. I’ll have them come by and make sure you’re okay while I’m gone. I know it’s going to be tough.”

“A month? What am I going to do?” she asked, mostly to herself.

Good question,
Heden thought. He looked at the shelves of books.

“Hang on,” he said. “I have an idea.” He stood up and walked toward a door set against the stairs. She padded behind him in her bare feet. “Have to go down here anyway,” he said.

“What’s down there?” Vanora asked.

He swung around and looked down at her. “You have to promise me something,” he pointed at her, it just having occurred to him.

She looked up at him with eyes wide and nodded.

Heden peered at her. She smiled at him.

He sighed and leaned back against the door.

“You remember when I said that if I don’t want anyone to take you from here, no one could take you from here?”

She nodded.

“Do you believe me?”

“I….” she said and her face screwed up with doubt. Then she remembered something. Her face changed into a look of determination. “Yes.”

Heden nodded. “For the same reasons I can say that, you can’t go downstairs.”

“What?” she asked, confused.

“It’s dangerous.”

“How dangerous?” she asked, trying to look behind him.

“You can stay here as long as you want,” Heden said. “You’re safe. I’ll have someone come by and check on you. And Balli will keep you company. But if you go downstairs…you will not be safe,” he said. He kept his voice neutral. Like he was describing a simple fact. He didn’t want her to feel like he was threatening her.

“I get to play with the cat?” she asked.

Heden waggled his head back and forth, weighing the question. “You can try,” he said, half to himself. “But if you break your promise, she won’t have anything to do with you.”

Vanora put her hands behind her back, stood up straight, and nodded. She was so…young and shapeless and normal, Heden often forgot what she’d done for a living. Probably because that’s what she wanted.

“You promise?” he asked.

“I promise,” she said.

Heden looked at her hard for a second. She seemed to blanch.

“Okay,” he said. “You’re telling the truth.”

She relaxed. “You can tell that?”

“Yep,” Heden said. He pulled a small keyring out from a pouch on his belt and flipped through it for the key to the basement door.

“The door’s locked?”

Heden nodded.

“Well, then why…”

“I’ll have to leave it unlocked,” he said, “when I go.”

“Why?” she asked.

“It’s complex,” Heden said. He found the key and looked at her again. “If you see anything weird while I’m gone…don’t worry.”

“What’s weird?”

“A lot of things. You’ll know it when you see it.”

She shook her head slowly and looked scared. Heden sighed. Gwiddon wanted him to open the inn and his life was already unacceptably complex with only one guest.

“Just watch Balli,” he said. “If she gets angry or afraid, then there may be a problem.”

At that moment, the cat came downstairs and sat on the bottom step, resumed cleaning itself. Vanora looked at her and smiled.

“Okay,” she said.

Heden turned and unlocked the door.