Tarah Woodblade (19 page)

Nothing like cold wet armor in the morning
, said her papa dourly.

No kidding
, she thought as she pulled the leather cuirass over her head.

Djeri threw back the cover of his bedroll and began pulling on his own icy boots. He looked an impressive sight. Tufts of snow fox fur hung out from under each individual plate and Tarah figured his suit would make great camouflage in a winter campaign.

“Son of a turd, these boots are cold!” he griped, then returned his eyes to hers. “Just how far away is this house of yours? Will it take us out of our way?”

“No. Not at all,” she said, her face earnest.

Djeri gave her a dull look. “Come on. Be straight with me. How far out of the way is it?”

“Tarah Woodblade is always straight,” she said automatically.

He rolled his eyes.

“What? It’s just-. It’s . . .” Why couldn’t she get anything past him? Tarah sighed. “It’ll take us about a half day off course if we leave straight from here.”

He frowned thoughtfully. “Wizard Valtrek was pretty insistent we get to these tracks quickly. Why is it so important we go to your place now?”

“I got clean sets of clothes and winter gear there,” she said, which was true enough. “And I need to replace my broken bow.” She finished tightening the bracer on her right arm and nodded, feeling more like herself, despite the cold.

“That’s all?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said. Then added, “Well that and besides, I ain’t been back there in months. I really need to check up on the place. I . . .” she nearly said more, but stopped herself.

Never tell your clients more than they need to know
, Grampa Rolf said approvingly.
It’s never good to air all your secrets
. The image of Rolf’s impaled head flashed though Tarah’s mind and she shivered. What was the reason for that list of crimes nailed to his head? Could they have been real? Had her grampa really done all those things? Surely not.

“Hmm,” Djeri said. His eyes bored into her, his expression skeptical. Finally he shrugged and slid the handle of his great mace through the harness on his back. “Well, I guess those tracks have waited this long. What’s a few more hours delay?”

She gave him a relieved smile. “Thank you, Djeri.”

He smiled back. “We should hurry, though. Let’s get going.”

Tarah quickly began taking the camp down. While she did so, the details of her dream kept replaying themselves over and over in her mind. The moonrat man had been in her dream again; this time in her house. Why? And what was the reason for that giant? What had it all meant?

There was no need for them to cook, so she buried the coals and took down the clothes lines. Most of the clothes were still a bit damp, but not too bad. She packed them away, knowing that she would be able to replace them once she arrived at her house. Or at least that’s what she hoped.

While she worked, Djeri fed the mule and put the bedrolls away. Several times she turned her head in his direction and caught him giving her a calculating look. It was obvious that something was still bothering him, but she decided not to worry about it. Get home. That’s what was important.

They ate a quick breakfast of dried meat and fruit and set out. Tarah took them further down the path she had used the night before, heading deeper into the forest. A few miles later, she led them down a narrow fork in the trail.

Neither of them spoke for most of the way. With Neddy being so well behaved, Djeri didn’t even have anything to gripe about. Tarah knew she should have been happy with the quiet. After all, this was the way she preferred to travel. The thing she found most annoying about being a guide was talkative clients. But for some reason, with Djeri nearby, the silence was awkward.

Tarah found herself looking back at him often. The whole time they walked, the troubled look never left his face. To her chagrin, she had a rising urge to break the silence. She ignored this feeling for awhile. She told herself to focus on what they would find when they reached her house. The silence stretched out, seeming more and more oppressive the longer they went.

Finally, Tarah cleared her throat. Djeri looked up at her, but she froze. What should she say?

Tell a story
, Grampa Rolf suggested.
A good salesman often finds that a tale or two sets a client at ease
. 

“You know, I-uh guided a nobleman through this part of the woods a few years back,” she said lamely.

“Yeah?” Djeri replied.

“Yeah,” she said. “I took him out here to hunt a moonrat.”

The troubled look eased somewhat. “You found a nobleman that wanted to kill a moonrat?”

“Not exactly,” Tarah said. “He didn’t care so much about the killing of the thing. He just wanted to eat one.”

A smile curled Djeri’s lips. “Really?”

“Yeah!” Tarah said, encouraged by the dwarf’s change in mood. “I met him in Pinewood. He’d been boasting at the local tavern, see? Told folks he was a fancy eater. He said he’d eaten all the good meats of the world. Said he’d try anything that could walk, crawl, or fly. Of course some of the boys decided to call him on it.”

“Of course,” Djeri said.

“They asked him, ‘Have you eaten snakes?’. He says, ‘Yes sir I have.’ They said, ‘You eaten bugs?’ He says, ‘As long as they aren’t poisonous.’”

“He liked eating bugs?” Djeri asked.

“One of the boys asked him that. He said, ‘It’s true, my good man, that most of them don’t taste very good. But crickets are quite tasty. Snails can be quite good too if you cook them just right.”

“Snails!” the dwarf laughed out loud.

Tarah nodded. “Hey, don’t knock it! My papa was into teaching me how to survive. He made me eat some strange things growing up and I tell you that nobleman was right. Snails can be pretty good.”

“No thank you,” Djeri said, waving a gauntleted hand. “I don’t think surviving’s that important to me.”

“Yeah, well this nobleman wasn’t eating those things to survive. He was just eating ‘em ‘for the experience’, as he put it,” Tarah explained. “That’s when I heard one of the boys ask him if he’d eaten moonrat. He says, ‘Dear sir, I have eaten many different types of rodentia. Each has their own flavor and some are finer than others.”

“Rodentia?” Djeri said, laughing again.

“Yeah, that’s how he put it,” she said. “One of the boys had a clever idea. He decides to play a little trick on the nobleman and goes, ‘Yeah, but you ain’t eaten moonrat. Moonrat’s a delicacy.’ ‘Course everybody in the room understood the joke and no one told the nobleman any different.”

“Who was the prankster?” Djeri asked.

“Jono, son of Pell.”

“I thought that might be him,” Djeri said, nodding. “He was one of the ones you saved during the attack on Pinewood, wasn’t he?”

“Yeah,” Tarah said, her smile fading a bit.

“I met him during the siege on the Mage School,” Djeri said. “He got himself into some trouble with his antics. I thought he was funny, but the leaders weren’t too happy with him.”

“Yeah,” Tarah said. Jono wasn’t one of her favorite people. “Sounds like Jono.”

“What was the nobleman’s name?”

“He was from House Stots,” she said. “I think it was Wilson Stots, or something like that. It was a long time ago.”

“Oh. I haven’t heard of him, but go on,” the dwarf said.

“Anyway, so Stots says, ‘If anyone here has some moonrat I can try, I would be most happy to.’ Jono says, ‘Well the thing here is we have a local tradition regarding eating moonrat. See, you gotta hunt one down and eat it yourself.”

“No,” said Djeri, his eyes wide with amusement.

“Stots seemed kinda flustered. He says, ‘Well, I would do so if I knew how to obtain this beast.’” Tarah’s lip curled mischievously. “That’s when I decided there was an opportunity to make some money and I spoke up. I said, ‘I’ll tell you what, mister nobleman. I’ll take you out and help you find a moonrat to hunt.’ The boys went crazy laughing. Jono says, ‘Yeah! Take Woodblade! If anyone can find you a moonrat to eat, it’s her.” In truth that wasn’t the way he put it, but Djeri didn’t need to know all the details.

“Of course at this point, the man couldn’t turn you down,” Djeri surmised.

“He had no choice,” she said. “His very pride was on the line. So he hired me. I took him out that very night. It was just me, him, and a couple Stots family guards. Now I could’ve taken him across the wizard’s road and found him one right away, but he was paying me hourly and like my Grampa Rolf always says, ‘Don’t let an hourly hire off early.’”

Tarah paused, her cheeks reddening. Why had she said that? She knew better. Never say anything to a client that could make it sound like she’d cheat him.

To her relief, Djeri just chuckled. “Sounds like something my uncle would say.”

She cleared her throat. “So anyway, I took him out in this direction. It was a good area mainly because the moonrats were much fewer on this side of the road and I didn’t want to end up surrounded. You know, for his safety.”

“Right,” Djeri said knowingly.

“Well, we weren’t one mile from town before Stots hears his first moonrat moan. That noble went so pale, he nearly glowed in the moonlight. Let me tell you, he was ready to abandon the whole hunt then and there. But I promised him I knew a good spot right close where we could find a rat and do it safe.”

“Yeah right. Probably five miles away,” the dwarf surmised.

“Hey, let me tell the story,” Tarah said, then shrugged. “But you’re not far off. I didn’t find him a good one until I’d say maybe two hours after midnight or so. At that point, the moonrat moans had been echoing pretty steady for a long while and all three men were shaking in their boots. Now he didn’t know it, but I’d been doing my best to steer us around all the big groups of rats. This was my first chance to get him one all alone.

“When he saw those glowing yellow eyes, I swear he nearly died in surprise. He wasn’t in no shape to battle the thing and I sure didn’t want a dead noble on my record. So I whispered to him, saying, ‘Hey, you can kill the thing if you want to. But if you’ll pay me one extra silver, I can kill him for you and I won’t tell anyone it was me who done it.’ He says, ‘My lady, I don’t care how the beast dies. I just want out of here.’”

Djeri laughed again.

Tarah continued, “So I pick off the moonrat with a single arrow right through one of its ugly eyes. Stots has one of his men carry the thing and it stinks so bad, he makes him carry it downwind of us. Now here’s the dangerous part. I knew the other moonrats could smell a corpse from far away. So I started leading the men all around the forest looking for ways to get back to Pinewood without being chased by a moonrat army.

“It was a long stroll, I’ll say that right now. Stots gets nervous and he says, ‘Pardon my asking, my lady, are we lost?’ I say, ‘Naw, I know exactly where we are.’ Which was true. It was sunrise by the time we got back to Pinewood. Stots was so glad to see the place he paid double my asking price.” Tarah ended the story with a wink and kept walking, satisfied that she’d changed the dwarf’s mood around.

All was quiet for a few moments before Djeri burst out, “Well, did he eat it?”

Tarah nodded. “Oh yeah. He made a big deal of it. He brought out his personal cook and invited all the boys that’d been in the tavern the night before. He bragged about how dangerous the hunt had been and how fierce the battle. ‘Course everyone knew it was me that killed it, not him.”

“And what did he think of the taste?” the dwarf asked.

“Well it stank bad when they skinned it. His cook tried all kinds of spices and herbs, but when it started cooking over the spit, folks started gagging. Whoo, the smell was so wrong. It smelled like skunk spray mixed with baby poop and garlic.”

Djeri started laughing again, this time so hard his face went red.

Tarah found his reaction encouraging and added some detail. “Not only did it smell bad, it looked nasty. The cook left the head and the tail on and everything. Then he started basting it with butter and somehow that made it smell worse. Folks started leaving at that point. I’ve gotta give it to Stots, though. He was determined. I left before it was done cooking, but Jono swears the noble ate an entire moonrat leg before he started losing it,” Tarah said with a disgusted shake of her head.

“Anyway that smell hung around Pinewood for days. Stots got so sick that his guards finally had to take him back to the Mage School to see a specialist, but then he . . .”

Tarah trailed off, slowing her steps. She looked at the forest around them. Djeri was laughing even harder at that point, but something didn’t feel quite right. The air smelled funny and there was a sound that bothered her.

“Ugh,” Djeri said, wiping his eyes. “I’d feel bad for the poor guy if he wasn’t so stupid. That reminds me of the time two dwarves from Wobble tried to cook up a moonrat. Their names were Kharl and Broose. They decided that-.”

“Shh!” Tarah said, placing a finger against the dwarf’s lips. She crouched, her staff at the ready. Djeri understood. His face grew deadly serious and he reached back and grabbed the head of his great mace, ready to pull it from its harness.

Tarah focused on her hearing and finally she made out the sound she was looking for. Something was running away from them through the leaves. She took off after it, running hunched over, her staff held out parallel to the ground. When she caught up to its tracks, she ran alongside them, her free hand dragging through the impressions as she went.

“It’s a gorc!” she said. “And it’s heading off to tell others we’re coming!” She didn’t wait for Djeri’s response, but picked up her speed, having a good idea where it was going. The evil thing was headed towards her house!

Tarah had faced gorcs before, but this was the first time she had seen one in her forest. They were nasty creatures; one of the goblinoid races. Gorcs were larger and smarter than a goblin, but smaller and less intelligent than an orc. They were smart enough to make crude armor and weapons, but they preferred to fight with weapons and armor stolen from villages they raided or soldiers they’d killed.

Luckily, Tarah knew the area better than it did. The gorc weaved around trees and plunged through undergrowth, trying to slow down any pursuit, but it couldn’t hide its intentions from her. Tarah took a straighter path. She passed the gorc unseen and stopped to wait for it on the far side of a long patch of tangled briars.