Act of Will

SCENE XXXVII



Time for a Beer

My intention to abandon the party had been only temporarily suspended, but this new attempt on my life put a slightly different complexion on things. It bore thinking about.

On the one hand, of course, it made my desire to get away from the party and the arrowheads, lance tips, fire, and death that seemed to follow them about stronger still, but it also made life without the likes of Mithos at my side rather less appealing. And painfully brief. Without him, I would have been snuffed out like a candle, and not a particularly bright candle at that. Scattering crossbow bolts on the ground in a moment that called for absolute silence hadn’t been too bright, and it had been an act of unprecedented mercy that Mithos hadn’t killed me himself. His glower on returning from the empty street softened into a resigned sigh and the muttered remark that it “could have happened to anyone.” Perhaps so, but it had happened to me, and, to my mind, it usually did. The idea of running from the party, top though they were on someone’s unpopularity list, was, for someone with my combat skills, roughly equivalent to going swimming with three or four large rocks chained to my legs. I wondered absently if the party members thought of me as the rock chained to their legs. I made a mental note to be a little nicer to them, in case they should decide that this rock-lugging bit wasn’t worth the effort. If I was cut free of the party, I would sink. Fast.

“I wonder,” said Mithos in the voice of a man who had been hunted before, “whose idea that was.”

“The raiders’, obviously,” I said.

“You think so?” he asked pensively. “It takes more than a few red feathers to make a crimson raider. And until now they’ve seemed almost anxious to keep us alive.”

Mithos left me to think this over and I took out the map we had been looking at earlier.

“Hi, Will!” said Garnet enthusiastically. “I heard about the attack. We must be making progress.”

That was Garnet logic for you.

“I see you’ve got the map there,” he said, keen as mustard. “Considering tactics?”

“Er, yeah,” I answered, wondering what I had been doing and realizing with muted shock that he was sort of right. I had been having those Adventurer Thoughts again. In the circumstances, that was odd.

“So,” he said, sitting down.

“So?”

“Here we are,” he said, pleased again, “in a pub.”

“That’s right,” I answered, conscious of the way he was putting me on my guard again.

“Two mates out for a beer,” he concluded.

I thought “mates” was a bit strong, but I let it go. There was a pause and I sat back in my chair as he looked hopefully about him and then back to me.

“Garnet, is there something on your mind?”

“No,” he answered emphatically. “Not at all.”

“You want to talk about the guy who shot at us? . . . ” I guessed, reluctantly.

“No,” he said with a little gesture of defiance. “Let’s not talk work.”

So that’s what it is, I thought, when someone tries to skewer your jugular with a crossbow bolt: work.

“I just thought,” he went on, “that we could, you know, do what ordinary people do.”

“I’m an expert on that,” I said.

“I thought you would be. So what do they do? Ordinary people, I mean.”

“They drink, they talk, they play games, they pick up women . . . ” I said.

“Games?” he asked.

“You know, cards, darts, dominoes, or something.”

“Let’s play cards,” he said with an enthusiasm that said it was going to be a long night.

“What can you play?”

“Nothing,” he said, slightly frenetic now, “but you can teach me, right?”

This was getting seriously strange. But I watched the slightly hunted way he seemed to be looking around, the shifty nervousness, like a kid about to be deliberately naughty, and it made a kind of sense to me. Garnet had been with the party for years. In that time he had gone from child to dignified warrior with his ax and his honor code, and he had never had a second to sit back and be an ordinary kid, make a fool of himself, get a little wild, and have a good time without worrying if he was being noble or righteous. Now I was here, representing all he had missed, all he didn’t know of the ordinary world, and he was cautiously ready to give it a shot.

Fair enough, I thought. Endearing, really.

Time to educate him in some of life’s simple pleasures. We ordered beer, or, rather, I ordered it for him. He had no preferences.

We got six pints: a selection of ales, a lager, a wheat, and a milk stout. He gulped down one of the ales and was halfway through the lager when, with a sudden sense of alarm, it occurred to me that he had never drunk beer before. Even in those party meetings, I wasn’t sure I had ever seen him take more than a sip at a toast. The fact that he had finished one of the ales, the lager, and had made serious headway on the stout by the time the thought had fully registered confirmed both my suspicions and my panic.

“Let’s take it easy, shall we?” I said, grasping the beer in his hand and pushing it back down onto the table.

“This is great,” he said, apparently unaffected. “Let’s get some more. I didn’t know it would be this much fun, just sitting in a bar.”

I grinned and sat back as he got to work on another ale. I supposed I was overreacting. Things didn’t look so grim after all. I went to the outhouse and, on my way back, walked into Renthrette. She smiled at me rather warmly and I knew that I had somehow gained masculine adventurer points by nearly getting killed again. She was wearing a light summer dress and had let her hair down. It took about thirty seconds for things to get grim.

“I heard you were with Garnet and thought I’d join you.” She smiled, her eyes meeting mine. This rash of goodwill was a veritable epidemic. “I hope you’re looking after him,” she said coyly.

I chuckled and said, “He’s over—”

I had started to point to our table, which she had her back to, when I saw Garnet, sprawled across the table in a pool of spilt beer. He had drunk at least two pints in the time I had urinated away one.

“Er, I think he just left,” I spluttered. “Yes. You can probably catch him if you leave quickly.”

“You can come with me, then.”

“Yes. Yes, I mean, I could do that,” I said, thinking desperately. “But, well. But I have to settle the bill.”

“I’ll wait,” she said, nicer—damn her—than she had ever been before.

“Well, it could take a while. We had some, er . . . complicated drinks and—”

“Complicated?”

“Yes.”

“How?

“Well, you know. Complicated. Complex.”

She gave me a blank look.

“Mixed!” I exclaimed. “They were mixed drinks and it always takes a while for the barman to figure out how much they cost.”

“Oh,” she said. “I’ll sit down then.”

She turned, took a few steps towards the table where Garnet was now dragging himself upright with a bleary, vacant look in his eyes, and froze.

Then, very slowly, she turned and there was the look I knew so well: cold, cynical, murderous, and reserved entirely for me.

“He drank too quickly . . . ” I began.

“This is your fault,” she muttered in a voice like dripping acid.

“Renthrette?” said Garnet distantly. “I don’t feel well.”

As his sister turned to him, he seemed to reconsider this statement and amended it.

“I feel really bad,” he said, clearly surprised.

I made a run for it, slamming a few coins on the bar as I left. I could handle a lot of things, but Renthrette protecting her cub from the evil Mr. Hawthorne wasn’t one of them. I had reached the door when I heard the guttural surge and splash of vomit, followed by Renthrette’s imperious yell:

“William Hawthorne, come back here!”

No chance. No chance whatsoever.