Chapter Eight
I watched Goldbar roll by the windshield, my mind a whirl of the things Charlie had told us. I didn’t like the implications of danger and violence. Charlie wasn’t exactly a super spy, but he had his act together in most ways. I didn’t have enough clues to see the picture of what we were facing, but I had a lot of unrelated pieces. I wanted to talk with Katie about the things I was seeing: the stuff in Bellingham, the suicides, and that singer, Mimi, and the way Gletts was convinced there was a portal there somewhere. Add in the uncertainty of Bestellen von Mordred and the way Madame Gottschalk was not dealing with a full deck, and it all added up to danger for us.
Pulling up the long drive to Black Briar, I felt my ears pop when we crossed the protective wards. The main yard held several cars I recognized. Trish and her crew were hanging in the barracks. Each platoon took turns staying in the barracks, keeping Black Briar defended.
We piled out of the truck, Gunther and Stuart arguing about the merits of going dark, doing what they did back when Paul and Olivia died. I doubted that taking Black Briar off the grid would accomplish much. Nidhogg knew they existed this time around. Not like me killing a dragon would fade from people’s memories anytime soon.
We piled in through the kitchen door, the boys arguing for the joy of it. I was fairly convinced they were agreeing, just at a rather loud volume. Katie and Deidre looked up from the kitchen table, where they had been poring over books that they covered up when we came in. They both stared at me, as if daring me to ask them what they were doing. I smiled at them sweetly, walked to the fridge, pulled out a beer, and settled in the chair next to Katie.
She leaned over and kissed me. “How’s Charlie?”
She was distracting me while Deidre pulled the books into her lap and wheeled out of the kitchen. She had a hard time concealing the grin on her face, so I figured it was something that would embarrass me. I liked that grin. Her color was better, which helped alleviate some of my anxiety. Deidre, on the other hand, was looking wan. I’d ask our doctor friend Melanie to pop over and check on her.
I’d thought about suggesting some counseling, but Deidre had made it clear that she’d grieve Jimmy in her own way, her own time. Just went against my nature to see people I loved in pain and just sit idly by. Death sucked in all forms. I smiled at Katie, taking her hand.
“Charlie’s a pill,” I said, and she laughed.
The sound of anthropomorphized animals singing about brushing your teeth erupted from the living room, and I glanced over to see Jai Li and Bub huddled together on the couch. They whispered to each other, casting sideways glances our way. I thought about shooing them outside so we could talk in private, but they had turned the television up as if to block out the adult chatter. As I watched them, Jai Li threw me a kiss. Bub cocked his head to the side, and I got the strangest feeling he wanted to talk with me. Bub was my kobold familiar from the plane of fire, who was tied to the amulet I wore.
I was just deciding to go in there and sit with them a minute, when Deidre returned.
“Okay,” she said, taking her position at the head of the kitchen table. No one sat in the seat to her left. That was always Jimmy’s seat. The talk around the table came to an abrupt halt and we all turned to face her piercing stare.
“Tell me.”
Gunther began, giving her the details of the meeting, the place and circumstance. Stuart jumped in after a minute and began talking about Charlie and the agitated state he was in. They traded turns, going back and forth with an ease of many years of working together.
I admired the ease with which these two communicated. Katie had referred to them once as “Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser” after a long night of revelry, which led to me reading a bunch of older fantasy that I never knew existed. Stuart didn’t have the litheness of the Mouser, but he did have a similar disposition.
I didn’t speak up. While Jimmy had accepted me as part of the clan, I didn’t have the history the others did, so I practiced my active listening. It’s something Bub suggested, actually. He’s a smart little biter. Part of my taming the berserker, as he calls it.
I watched Deidre throughout. I was learning to pick up her tells. She had a way of flipping her hair back on the right side when she was growing impatient and tended to chew her lip when worried.
“What kind of games are they playing?” she finally blurted out.
We all exchanged glances. The twins had covered the meeting in full. There was nothing I thought to add. So, we were all a little flummoxed at her question.
“Which part?” Stuart asked.
“The part where they knew about the bastard who got Jim killed and didn’t warn us.”
Jimmy had been killed by one of the spirits the necromancer had captured, nourished, and freed upon the world.
“If Gottschalk or any of her people knew about the blood cult, I want to know,” she said, her voice low and tremulous. She turned to me, making eye contact for the first time since we’d sat down. “Sarah.” She reached past Katie and took my hand. “They need to pay.”
I nodded at her. The pain pulsed through her, making the runes on my forehead ache with her grief.
She held my gaze for another moment, then turned her wheelchair away from the table and rolled into the living room. I didn’t hear what went on, but Jai Li crawled into Deidre’s lap and Bub skulked into the kitchen.
Katie got up to wash the dishes, hiding her tears from me. I got up and hugged her from behind but left her to her nesting. It was something she did as a default mode when her mind was spinning. I found my peace at a forge, she chose dishes or her guitar. My da did the same thing, come to think of it. Doing dishes calmed him. Ma said it had something to do with making things better, even in a small, little way. She also thought the hot water had a calming effect. Funny how people respond to stress.
The rest of us began the awkward goodbyes that accompanied such moments. Gunther left to go meet Anezka, and Stuart wanted to find Qindra. Gunther ribbed Stuart about his sudden fondness for the witch and how much time they were spending together. Stuart didn’t deny it. He’d given Gunther crap for Anezka at first, so it was only fair.
Boys …
Before he left, I made Stuart promise to have Qindra return my calls. He hugged me and said he’d do what he could.
“Sarah?”
I looked down to see Bub, waiting patiently for me to return from my thoughts.
“Can we go for a walk?”
Katie half turned and gave me a smile. “Go on,” she said, grabbing a dish towel and drying her hands. She paused and kissed me before heading into the living room and sitting on the couch.
Bub opened the back door and escorted me out into the afternoon sun.
When we were far enough away from the house, Bub informed me that he thought Katie and Deidre had been planning to trap me in a human ritual referred to as a wedding. He looked so terrified and earnest that I almost laughed.
Once we got out to the memorial for the Black Briar fallen that the dwarves had erected for us, we sat on one of the benches and I explained to him all about weddings. He had been taken from his mother’s nest at such a young age, he had no real understanding of his own people’s rituals. And as a bound servant, he wasn’t privy to such things with his previous masters. It wasn’t until Anezka that he began to understand the human world beyond smithing.
It was easy to speak of a wedding in the abstract, sharing with him the generic details, but the whole time my stomach was doing flip-flops. In the end, I told him that the ritual was a thing of power that helped connect two people together in ways that were stronger than the average relationship. This led to a chat about people who love each other, and folks who don’t want to get married. He was especially confused about how marriage is a social construct and had nothing at all, really, to do with how much you could love someone.
“Humans are overly complicated,” he said.
I couldn’t deny it.
Mere months ago, Katie had been wounded by a powerful magical tome, and her spirit had fled to one of the Sideways realms. Her body had been in a coma for a long time, deteriorating near to the point of death.
We’d freed her spirit and battled a fiend known only as the Bowler Hat Man. That’s who had killed Jimmy. Only, even with her spirit reunited with her body, Katie had not woken. It wasn’t until Charlie had stolen Paul and Olivia’s wedding rings from Gottschalk’s private collection and I’d placed them in Katie’s unconscious hands, that she woke. I could see how and why she chose to interpret that as a wedding proposal. My original intention had been to jar her psyche into waking up.
It’s not that I didn’t want to marry her. I had no doubt in my mind I wanted to spend the rest of my life with this woman. I just didn’t think either of us stood a very good chance of living long enough to make it worth all the trouble. Dealing with dragons had wrecked my already glass-is-half-empty disposition.
On the other hand, as Bub pointed out, there could be no doubt how much I loved Katie.
“Based on what you have told me,” he began, taking my hand as we walked back toward the smithy, “you should marry Katie.”
I laughed. “I’m glad you approve.”
He beamed at that, and I debated the sarcasm in my reply, which he had either missed, or actively chosen to ignore.
Still, the thought of a wedding scared the daylights out of me.
I needed to figure out what I wanted in all this before things got too far out of control. Marriage wasn’t something I figured to be in my future once I started knowing boys, and with my social and cultural background I didn’t figure it would be allowed. Hurray for progress. Mostly.
I paced, letting my mind get twisted into knots.
“About Gottschalk,” he said, shocking me, “you must protect the family from her people.”
I stared at him, open-mouthed.
“The news of these Mordred people is disturbing.” He began to wring his hands, which was a sign of his nervousness. He thought he was in trouble.
“You heard us?” I asked, stunned that he had heard us over the blaring television.
He shook his head. “It was Jai Li. She reads lips very well.” He dithered for a moment, then blurted out, “Do not punish her, please.”
That shocked me more than the other. I’m not sure we’d ever punished her.
“Eavesdropping is rude,” I said, “but I won’t punish her.”
He nodded as if I’d made a sacred vow.
He took a deep sigh. “You must kill them if needs be,” he said. “Gottschalk’s people. They cannot be allowed to harm our family.”
I knelt and hugged the little kobold. He was such a child, in so many ways, that I forget how very old he truly is and his origins on the Plane of Fire.
He grew happy once more. With all the dangers and issues clouding my brain and careening around with the wedding march ringing in my head, I decided it was time to pound metal. Bub heartily agreed, of course.