Never Trust a Dead Man

Page 9

"Not this pilgrim," Selwyn snapped.
"Hmpf," Farold grumbled. "Well, thirdly, I wouldn't want to share a drink with you, anyway."
But they did go to Orik's tavern, because Selwyn didn't know what else to do.
And there they found Selwyn's father.
Selwyn stopped dead in the doorway.
His father was in the same position as when he'd seen him last, tied to a chair, though that had been in the middle of Bowden's room and this was in the corner of Orik's tavern. At least the gag was gone. He sat slumped, looking simultaneously angry, sad, and very, very bored.
"Keep moving, keep moving," Farold muttered into his ear.
Selwyn wasn't sure whether Farold, once again dangling from behind, was urging him forward because he couldn't see and was still hoping for a drink, or if he was looking where they were going, had caught sight of Selwyn's father, and was hoping Selwyn wouldn't say or do anything to give themselves away.
Selwyn kept moving, once again because he didn't know what else to do.
There was no sign of his mother or grandmother. In fact, except for Orik himself, his father was the only other person in the room.
Orik, who'd been sitting at one of the tables, looking at least as dejected as Selwyn's father, jumped to his feet "At last!" he cried. "A customer!"
Selwyn forced himself to look away from his father. There was no way his father could recognize him in this magically made disguise - and even if he could, Selwyn didn't  want to be recognized, for that would be the end of everything, with Orik to witness it So he looked at Orik, and let Orik's words make their way from his ears to his mind. "Oh," he said, "no. I'm afraid not. I'm just a poor pilgrim passing through, without any money, willing to do work for a bite to eat and a corner to sleep in for a day or two."
Orik had begun wiping the table the moment he'd seen Selwyn, even though the table was already spotless. All the tables were spotless. The floor was spotless. The walls were spotless. Selwyn had never seen the place look so clean. But at Selwyn's words, Orik flung down his cloth. "Do I look as though I need to hire help?" he demanded. "To serve the crowds? To keep them from pushing and shoving to hand me their money?"
"Ahm...," Selwyn said. His gaze strayed back to his father, which wasn't necessarily a bad thing. There weren't men tied up in the corner of every tavern, so anybody would be curious.
"Yes," Orik said, seeing where he was looking. "You've identified the problem exactly." He went to one of the barrels, pulled out the plug, and poured a mug of ale. Selwyn thought he heard Farold licking his little bat lips, but Orik himself drank it down in one gulp. "Who wants to come in here, lay down good money, and look at a face like that?"
Selwyn's father glowered, and Selwyn said, "I...," and gestured helplessly.
"Exactly," Orik said, and poured himself a second mugful.
"So why is he here?" Selwyn asked.
"Because there's no place else to keep him."
"I see," Selwyn said, which a real pilgrim wouldn't have - couldn't have - from Orik's disjointed complaints. Selwyn realized he couldn't sound too knowledgeable or Orik would become suspicious. So he asked, "What's he done?"
Orik became suspicious, anyway. "If you're just passing through, you don't need to know."
"No," Selwyn agreed. Still, he tried to catch his father's eye, to indicate - somehow - that he was sympathetic, but his father wasn't looking at him.
"Go on, now," Orik told him. "I can't afford charity now."
But before Selwyn could leave, the tavern door opened. Selwyn hoped the arrival of someone to wait on would improve Orik's temper, but Orik - who'd looked up eagerly - said, "Oh, it's you."
"You" turned out to be Thorne. He came in, saying, "Just wanted to check on Rowe."
"Of course," Orik said. "Why else would anybody come in here?"
Thorne paused to glance at Selwyn. Selwyn read disapproval in his look, but at least nothing of recognition. Selwyn supposed there was much in his pilgrim's appearance to disapprove of - especially around the area of his hat, at which Thorne most definitely gave a second hard stare. But then the man turned away and asked Selwyn's father, "Everything all right? Need anything?"
Selwyn's father looked at Thorne stonily.
"Nelda will be bringing you your dinner soon," Thorne continued, just as though he'd been greeted pleasantly. "I just passed by Bowden's and saw her packing it up."
Selwyn's father still said nothing, though Selwyn was relieved to learn that his mother, apparently, was staying with Bowden's family. His grandmother was probably there, too, for she could be difficult, and few would be willing to take on her care.
"Need to use the bucket?" Thorne asked.
Still Selwyn's father said nothing.
Thorne stooped down to examine the knots of the ropes that held him. "Not much longer," he said.
"That's supposed to make me feel better?" Selwyn's father asked in a growl.
Which told Selwyn they were waiting for a day beyond which he couldn't be expected to have survived. He had guessed it already, but it was a difficult thing to hear.
Now Thorne had nothing to say. He tried to lay a friendly hand on Selwyn's father's shoulder, but Selwyn's father shrugged it away.
"Hey!" Orik shouted. "Hey!" He swatted at the air around his head. "What kind of vermin you bringing in with you?"
Thorne looked around. Selwyn did, too, though he already had a good guess what was going on - and the name of his guess was Farold.
Orik was dancing around running his fingers through his hair - not that there was that much of it - and patting his clothing and shaking out his apron and looking up, down, and around. "Something just flew off him and right into my drink," Orik explained, presumably so Thorne wouldn't think him possessed. "For four days nobody comes in here except you and Nelda to visit Rowe, and now I get somebody with flying, ale-drinking vermin."
Selwyn decided to play the innocent. "What?" he said blankly, still looking around, not letting his eyes rest on Farold, whom he spotted hanging from the shelf on which the ale barrel rested, lapping up the drops of ale that dripped from where Orik had replaced the plug.
Thorne was looking at Selwyn with the expression of a man who's just bitten into a sour peach. He asked Orik, "You mean that nasty, disgusting thing he had hanging from his hat?"
Farold made a noise of protest, drawing Orik's attention.
"Hey!" Orik said once again, sighting him.
"My hat?" Selwyn said, trying to sound simple and harmless. He took the hat off and turned it in his hands as though examining it. "I don't see anything wrong with my hat"
Farold was dipping and swooping and making woo-whup sounds Selwyn was fairly certain no species of bat ever made.
Orik went after Farold with a broom, but - looking at where Farold was going rather than where he was going - he tripped over a stool and lost hold of the broom, which went flying and would have struck Thorne except that Thorne had the sense to move backward. The only problem was that Selwyn's father's chair was there, and Selwyn's father  couldn't move backward. He and his chair and Thorne all spilled onto the floor, joining Orik.
The door opened as someone new came in, and Farold darted out with a flourish of one wing that Selwyn was sure was the bat equivalent of thumbing his nose.
"Are you all right?" Selwyn rushed to help his father, ignoring Orik and Thorne - coming close, if truth be told, to stepping on Thorne to get to his father.
Lying on his side, his father was straining against the ropes that held him, obviously hoping they'd been knocked loose.
Thorne pushed Selwyn out of his way and worked to right the chair, and suddenly Merton was there helping him - he was the one who had just entered. Selwyn had seen him duck to avoid Farold and hadn't even noted who he was
"What's going on here?" Merton asked as Thorne made sure the ropes were still secure.
"I don't know," Orik grumbled. He was standing in the doorway, still brandishing his broom, looking right and left as though expecting more unwelcome airborne visitors. "This jackanapes comes in asking all sorts of questions, infested with some pestilent monstrosity that attacked us."
"Monstrosity"? Selwyn thought.
"He was asking questions over at Rowe's house, too," Merton said. "Made himself right at home before I got there. I followed him to see what mischief he was up to."
Selwyn tried to look innocent, though the act hadn't worked yet.
His father looked at him, really looked at him for the first time. Selwyn hoped Elswyth had done as good a job with changing his face as she had done with changing his clothes.
"Rowe's house?" Thorne repeated.
Orik, still on the lookout by the door, said, "Probably some kind of trained, flying, killer creature from France or someplace."
"It was a bat," Merton informed Orik. To Thorne, he said, "Think he's one of Rowe's kin? That they got word to that they needed help?"
"There was no opportunity," Thorne said. "Besides, Rowe doesn't have any kin. And besides that, look at him; he doesn't know him."
Selwyn's father had been studying him as though trying to figure out who he could possibly be, but now he made his face blank so that Thorne couldn't get anything from him.
Thorne finished, "He's just some clumsy, dirty, busybody pilgrim."
Selwyn was stung. The clumsy one was Orik, and the dirty part was due to Farold - who'd left bat droppings all over his back and shoulders after Elswyth had specifically cleaned him up. Busybody he couldn't argue with.
"Well," he said before they changed their minds and decided to tie  him to a chair, "since there's no work or hospitality here, I'll be on my way." One year, he thought. I paid one year for this disguise, and I've learned nothing.
He put his hat back on his head, straightened his pilgrim's robe, and left the tavern.
Behind him, he heard the door open.
"And keep your filthy French rodent with you," Orik shouted after him.
Selwyn would have called back, "Bats aren't rodents," but he guessed Orik probably wasn't really interested. He kept on walking, aware that Thorne and Merton had come out to stand next to Orik, to make sure he truly left this time.
As he passed Bowden's house, he spied Farold, trying to catch a glimpse of Anora through the window. But when Farold saw that Selwyn was leaving, he swooped down and grabbed hold of the front of his hat so that he dangled in Selwyn's face. "Excuse me if I'm acting a little silly from being overtired," he said. "I warned you bats are nocturnal."
"Drunk," Selwyn corrected, furious but quiet so his voice wouldn't carry to the villagers who stood by the road watching him. "You're drunk, not tired."
Farold shrugged, closed his eyes, and almost immediately began to snore.
Chapter Twelve
Selwyn was no better off than he'd been last night, when he'd decided he had no choice but to have Elswyth magically change his appearance. No matter how far he walked, all he could figure was that he had chosen the wrong disguise. He fought the idea of yet another disguise, berating himself for a fool, urging himself desperately, "Think!" Seven years he had bargained away already. He thought back to when he'd been ten years old, to fix in his mind exactly what seven years was. A big difference, that between seventeen years old and ten. He tried to think ahead to twenty-four and couldn't.
He walked and walked, knowing he eventually had to go back to Penryth, and knowing he couldn't go back as the pest-laden, suspicion-raising, troublemaking pilgrim. Yet he could no more think how to alter his magically created disguise than he'd been able to think how to make his own disguise last night.
There was no way around it: He needed Elswyth's help.
He stopped and took a shaky breath. I will not fight it, he thought. One year more on top of all the rest means nothing.
Well, not nothing.
He took another deep breath, and this one was steadier.
The first thing he needed was to find Elswyth. But before he could do that, he had to determine where he was. He had been walking for quite a while now without paying attention, concentrating on his thoughts; and somehow or other he'd wandered off the road and was in a meadow.
The sensible thing to do was to try to find the road again, to go back up into the hills, to the back entrance of the burial caves, where he had last seen Elswyth. Once there, if he was lucky, he would be able to track her.
Not that - as a farmer - he'd had that much experience in tracking.
The sun was low in the sky after a late start and time wasted, and he realized that soon it would be the hour for bats to start stirring. With that thought, Selwyn hoped one bat in particular would wake up with the pounding headache it fully deserved. Still, that was not the important thing. The important thing was that almost one entire day had passed since he'd made his bargain with Elswyth: one day out of the week that she had allotted him. Gone. To no effect. That didn't bear thinking about. Neither did the fact that - even assuming he could again find the place where they'd parted - he'd be trying to track her at night.
What else could he do?
From where he stood in the meadow, there was no sign of the road, no matter which direction he looked. He turned around, for the reasonable thing was to go back the same way he had come, assuming the road had to be nearby, assuming he couldn't have been walking long over rough ground without noticing. And assuming he had walked more or less in a straight line.
But he stopped after only three or four steps.
Somehow that didn't feel right.
Silly, he chided himself, and took another step. He couldn't bring himself to take another.
He turned again, to the way he had been inadvertently walking - the one way he knew for sure was not the way he had come.
You're wasting time, he told himself. Never having traveled more than ten miles from home, he knew he shouldn't trust his sense of direction. There might be a road at the far end of this meadow, or there might not. Almost certainly there was one behind him, and surely a road was a reasonable landmark to make for.