Notes: Let's thread in a bit more background plot, hmm? What has Esmerelda been up to lately?
Title: Quaint Escapes for Traitorous Bastards, Chapter Four, Part Two
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Chapter Four, Part Two
Troublesome Tidings
Hiram walked home by himself not long after lunch. Perhaps it was a sign that he was getting old, or perhaps he was more fatigued by his homemaking than he’d expected, but interacting with so many people in such short order had been exhausting.
Or maybe it was the shouting match at the end.
No matter. Hiram had had worst from better. Hells, he’d lived through torture at the hands of a dark priest of Belitune, the Night Mistress of Gowage Keep, and Phlox back when Phlox was Pyrax. He could handle Lollop’s irritable buffoons, even if it meant having to rethink his career goals.
“Stop sighing.”
“I’m not sighing.”
“You are. It’s annoying.”
“You’re annoying,” Hiram shot back, always amused by how easily riled the elemental was.
Sure enough… “You would be annoying too if it was your only source of amusement!”
“Are you saying you’re bored?” he asked.
“Terribly so.” Phlox made a pouty sound of discontent. “Is there a theater in Lollop?”
Hiram laughed. “A theater? In a town of less than five hundred people? No, I sincerely doubt they have a theater, Phlox.”
“Figures,” he said glumly. “What about going for a hunt?”
“We’re trying to lay low right now,” Hiram pointed out as they walked past their closest neighbor’s home. He could hear the woman of the house working in the back, and the babble of a few of their younger children playing together. Market days must be a great relief to her, getting to see the back of her husband for a time. Then Hiram remembered what Tilly said about drinking, and how disappointed she’d been not to make a sale.
Perhaps market days were a mixed blessing for this household.
“Laying low.” Phlox snorted. “You don’t know the meaning of the word. I’m convinced that trouble follows you like plague follows rats.”
“What, that little lark with the mayor? Pssht.”
“I was actually referring to your chance encounter with a young man of strange provenance,” Phlox purred, and if he’d intended it as a distraction…it was working.
“He was a bit strange, wasn’t he?” Hiram mused. The other man had gone from loud and engaging to quiet and shy as a little field mouse in the space of a second. Why? Just because of Hiram? Or was he like that with everyone?
“Very strange. You should have asked Mistress Tate about him.”
Hiram hummed thoughtfully. “I wanted to, but I didn’t quite know how to bring it up. ‘Tilda, do tell me about the handsome man with bright blue eyes and a changeable demeanor who happened to stumble into me in Master Spindlestep’s shop.”
“Don’t forget the thick, dark curls that make you want to bury your hand in them,” Phlox added. “Or those shoulders—you could hang your whole weight off those shoulders and I bet it wouldn’t even phase him.”
Hiram laughed. “I didn’t realize you were such a connoisseur of shoulders, my dear.”
“Are you serious? Do you remember anything about my body’s costume of choice?”
“Oh, right.” Pyrax had affected a very broad silhouette in his humanoid form, with shoulders stretching almost as wide as he was tall. “You looked ridiculous back then.”
“I looked imposing!”
“When you were actively on fire, you did,” Hiram agreed. “But that didn’t last long.”
“No. No, it didn’t.” They let their conversation fall into quiet, and in another few minutes they were back at the homestead. Hiram looked at it and knew he ought to go inside and ready things for his evening meal, perhaps do some more cleaning—he could finally tackle the cellar this time—or prepare a larger bed in the garden. But…there was something about the itch in his feet that demanded he keep moving. Even in the palace, he’d never lived a sedentary life. The idea of stopping for more than the shortest break had been anathema.
You’re going to have to get over that now you’re settling in here. Let yourself learn to be still, at last. Let yourself seek contentment rather than excitement.
Hiram would. He would, honest! Just…not quite yet.
“What say we go visit Esmerelda?”
“Must we?” Phlox asked in a long-suffering tone.
“Yes.” Hiram continued along the path, his mood rising a little more with every step. Yes, a visit to Esmerelda was just what he needed now. He could tell her about Lollop and his new house, maybe help trim her longer claws—she could do it herself but she always enjoyed being pampered—and see if she’d seen anything interesting on the road thus far…
Hiram arrived at the plinth not long later in a very good mood. That mood quickly evaporated when he took in the scene before him.
Esmerelda lay on her side on the plinth, her stomach distended, paws akimbo as she snored loud enough to wake the dead. Beside her, head down as it tried to nibble grass around the bit between its teeth, was a—
“That’s an imperial messenger’s horse.”
Hiram blinked in disbelief. “It can’t be.” He hadn’t even been here a week, there was no way he’d been found so quickly.
“Look at the saddle!” Phlox almost shouted. “It’s got the emperor’s insignia! Look at the saddlebags, the weave of the blanket! This is a messenger’s horse, a fresh one by the look of it.”
“But then where is the—” Oh. Oh no. Hiram turned to the sleeping sphinx and poked her in the side. “Esme! Esme, wake up!”
“Mmmrr…”
“Esmerelda Shayin, Glorious Burning Desert Star, wake the fuck up right now.” Hiram accompanied his declaration with a harder poke to her side, agilely dodging the lazy paw she lashed out with.
“Oooh,” Phlox whispered with delighted horror. “You used her full title! She’s going to be ma—”
“Be helpful or be quiet,” Hiram said, watching as Esmerelda blinked into wakefulness.
She turned her head to look at him and growled. “I was having a good dream,” she huffed, “and you woke me up. Brute.”
“Who’s the brute here?” Hiram demanded, gesturing at her belly. “Tell me that’s not what I think it is.”
“It’s not…not what you think it is.”
“No riddles! Did you eat an imperial messenger?”
“Mmmaaaybe,” Esmerelda purred. “But to be fair, he had it coming.”
“How could he possibly have had it coming?”
“He attacked me first,” she said. “Stopped and demanded a riddle, like I’m some sort of silly busker and not an avatar of death, then he looked closer and the next thing I knew, bam! He pulled his sword and demanded I tell him the whereabouts of the Wizard Xerome.”
Hiram’s angry words caught in his throat.
“Well, I wasn’t going to have that, so I gobbled him right up. He twitched for a good five minutes,” she remarked, rubbing one paw across her tum. “And then I was tired, so I decided to sleep it off, and then you showed up out of nowhere and were rude to me for possibly saving your life. You’re welcome.”
“It’s got to be a coincidence,” Hiram muttered. There was no way he’d been found so fast. Even the sharpest magic-sniffer would have a hard time tracking him right now, with all the obfuscations he’d laid on himself and his belongings. He went over to the horse and, after disarming the traps meant to keep its contents safe, pulled out a sheaf of notices.
BY ORDER OF EMPEROR ANDURION SEVALERRE
WANTED: THE WIZARD XEROME.
DO NOT APPROACH DIRECTLY—EXTREMELY DANGEROUS.
ANY INFORMATION DELIVERED TO THE NEAREST IMPERIAL OUTPOST
THAT LEADS TO THE SUCCESSFUL CAPTURE OF XEROME WILL BE AWARDED
5000 GOLD SLIPS.
Phlox whistled. “That’s…a lot of money.”
“Yeah,” Hiram agreed hoarsely. “It is.” It was the sort of money that could change a life. There was a sketch of himself at the bottom of the notice, and he was pleased to say that it looked very much like how he used to, and very little like he did now.
The sheer number of notices was reassuring. “He didn’t know I was here,” Hiram said. “He just got lucky and chose the right road.”
“More like the wrong one.”
“Ugh.” They both turned to look at Esmerelda, who’d gone from smugly pleased with herself to frowning. “I feel…I feel…hrrk—” She opened her mouth, and a moment later a steaming mess of chainmail, a helmet, and several weapons spilled out onto the road.
“Whew!” She wiped her mouth with a paw. “That’s better!”
“Esme, manners,” Hiram chided her even as he edged away from the non-digestible remnants of the messenger. “You could have done that in the forest.” She shrugged.
“Hiram,” Phlox said, “what are we going to do now?”
Hiram took a deep breath and stared down at the depiction of his own face. The messenger was likely one of many, the result of Andy not knowing how to let go. There was no way he’d known Hiram lived in Lollop now, but there was also a high likelihood that someone knew where the messenger had gone. They’d be looking for him, which meant Hiram needed to construct an alternate narrative to explain the man’s disappearance.
Bandits. Bandits was good, there were always bandits about. But he needed to make sure the “incident” occurred far from here, at least twenty miles distant. That meant taking the horse and backtracking, all while maintaining a foolproof disguise so that he wasn’t discovered by accident.
Shit. This was going to take all day.
“Bury that,” Hiram said, pointing at the gooey equipment.
Esmerelda frowned. “Tell Phlox to burn it.”
“It’s metal, Esme, it won’t burn quickly and we don’t have that kind of time. Just bury it.” He put a polite smile on his face. “Please.”
“Oh, fine.” She slunk ungraciously off her plinth. “Not even a thank you,” she muttered.
She had a point. “Thank you for looking out for me,” Hiram said. “I genuinely do appreciate it. We’re just fortunate no one saw the horse—” or you after eating that man “—and started asking questions before I could get here. Please, contact me the next time this happens and I’ll come right away.”
Esmerelda paused, then inclined her head. “I shouldn’t have fallen asleep,” she admitted. “Are you going to ride the horse away?”
“I am.” But first, Hiram had to go and get Mule because he was going to need someone to ride back on, never mind that Mule loathed imperial mounts more than almost anything after the trauma he’d been through as a foal…
Forget all day, Hiram was going to be lucky to finish this in a single night.
