Nothing is Free

The Lower Tavern sat halfway down the hill from Obissian Castle, in the part of Blackswain where people still had enough coin to drink but not enough to care who watched them do it. Issah had been here three days, listening. That was the job before the job. You found work by finding problems, and problems talked loudest where the ale was cheapest.

Two krosah for the corner seat. One for the ale I won’t finish. Half for the server to keep the chair facing the door.

The sums ran on their own, the way they always did. Three and a half krosah for four hours of other people’s troubles. Worth it, if the right trouble walked in.

So far it hadn’t. The room held the low, constant murmur of talk that went nowhere because there was nowhere left to go. Laborers stared into empty cups as if answers might be hiding at the bottom. Near the hearth a man lifted his drink with both hands, not drunk, just weak, and set it down again without drinking.

Nobody here could afford him. Three days, ten and a half krosah, and not one problem with money attached.

“The Dragon Slayer! Here!”

A muscle jumped in Issah’s cheek. He didn’t turn.

Don’t.

“Somebody buy the man a drink! He killed a…”

“Working.”

The footsteps came anyway. A body dropped into the seat across from him, eager and unsteady, breathing sour ale across the table. “Just one story. The part where you cut off its head. That’s all I want.”

Issah looked at him and said nothing. Let the silence stretch until it turned uncomfortable, then past that.

The drunk leaned closer. “Come on. Everyone wants to hear it. You’re a hero.”

I’m not.

He could usually wait a man out. Most people would rather leave than sit inside a silence that long. But this one had the glazed persistence of someone too deep in his cups to feel shame, and every moment it went on, another head turned their way. Attention was the one cost Issah had never learned to price.

He stood, picked up his ale, and crossed the room without a word.

Three and a half krosah. Gone.

The new seat was worse. Back to the door, poor sightlines, a draft at his neck. But it put him an arm’s length from the far wall, where two men hunched together with the particular intensity of a shared secret. A scribe, by the ink ground into his fingers. A fishmonger, by the smell. Both thin the way Kraeta’s working poor were thin.

From here, their voices carried.

“…went looking for the unicorn. I know what that means. I know. But I came back.”

Issah’s cup stopped halfway to the table.

Looking for the unicorn. Everyone in Kraeta knew the phrase, and nobody said it above a murmur. It was what people did when they had nothing left: walked east after a myth and kept walking. Nobody came back. That was the point of it.

This one had.

“…green like you wouldn’t believe…”

“…fruit piled higher than my head…”

“…beasts eating it, heads like goats, but wrong…”

Fruit. In a kingdom where a grown man needed both hands to lift a cup.

A man who knew where food grew could name his own price.

The drunk had cost him three and a half krosah. He might have just paid it back a thousand times over.

Issah waited until the fishmonger went out back to relieve himself, then crossed to the scribe’s table and took the empty seat without asking.

The scribe looked up. Took in the armor, the bearing, the face that gave nothing back, and went rigid.

“Tell me about the green.”

“I don’t know what you…”

Issah set a krosah on the table between them. The coin caught the lamplight and threw it back, and the scribe’s eyes followed it the way hungry eyes always followed money.

Desperate. That makes this cheaper.

“The green,” Issah said again. “The fruit. The beasts. All of it.”

The scribe’s jaw tightened. He looked away. “I can’t.”

Issah gave him three heartbeats. Then he picked up the coin and stood.

“Wait!”

A hand closed on his arm.

Issah didn’t decide anything. One moment there was a grip on his sleeve; the next, the scribe’s wrist was pinned flat to the table and the knife was resting under the man’s jaw, and Issah had no memory of drawing it.

The tavern went quiet.

He held there. Blade steady, pressure exact. Enough to feel, not enough to cut. He made himself look at what was on the other end of it. Not a threat. A thin, frightened man who had grabbed at the only money he’d seen all week and was only now understanding what he’d grabbed.

And the whole room watching. Again.

He let go of the wrist. Put the knife away. Sat back down.

The scribe didn’t move. Just sat there breathing too fast, staring at the place where the blade had been.

“What do you need?” Issah said. Same voice as before, as if nothing had happened between the two questions.

The scribe swallowed. Held up two fingers. They shook.

Issah set two coins on the table and said nothing more.

Around them the murmur slowly found its feet again. The scribe looked at the money for a long time. When he spoke, the words came out quiet.

“It was wrong. All of it.” He swallowed. “Fruit everywhere. More than I’ve ever seen. More than should exist. And it was just there. Growing. Rotting on the ground. While we starve.”

His hands trembled on the table. “And the grass. Green. Real green, not…” He gestured at the door, the hill, the whole tired world beyond it. “I didn’t know it could look like that. I kept shaking my head, trying to wake up.”

He looked up. “Then I saw what was eating it. Chimeras. That’s the only word I have. Goat heads, and other heads. Bodies that bent wrong.” His voice dropped. “And the fear. It wasn’t normal fear. It locked every muscle I had. Like a rabbit when the hawk’s shadow goes over.”

“And then?”

“I hid until I could move again. Waited for dawn. Ran.”

“Where?”

South, the scribe told him. Beyond the forest, where the land started climbing toward the mountains, then west through the meadows till he’d hit the roads again. Days on foot. Manageable, for someone with provisions who knew how to move through wild country.

Issah had provisions. He knew wild country. What he didn’t have was a single paying job, or a reason to spend a fourth day in this chair.

“One more thing.” The scribe’s voice dropped further. “I’d be grateful if you didn’t tell anyone where you heard this.”

“Why?”

“I have a daughter.” The shame in it was raw. “She doesn’t know I went… looking. If you know what I mean. If she found out her father tried to…” He couldn’t finish. “She can’t know.”

“I don’t talk about other people’s business.”

Relief flickered across the scribe’s face. Issah stood, found a third coin in his fingers, and put it down beside the other two.

“For the daughter.”

He was back in the bad seat before the fishmonger returned. The two men finished their talk at a lower volume and left soon after. The scribe didn’t look at him on the way out.

Three and a half for the seat. Three for the story. He turned that last coin over in his head, looking for the column it belonged in, and didn’t find one.

Information, he decided. Put it under information.

The tavern door opened. Issah had to twist in the bad seat to see it, and knew the silhouette before he saw the face. Aris, his scholar’s robes dusty to the knee from the walk down from the castle. A second man hung back in the doorway behind him. Aris scanned the room, looked first to the corner where Issah should have been, found him in the wrong place, and crossed over at the measured pace of a man who’d learned long ago that rushing solved nothing.

No panic in his face. But something in the set of his shoulders, the way he carried himself a little more carefully than usual. Like a cup filled to the brim.

Something’s off.

“Issah.” Aris lowered himself into the opposite chair. “I want to hire you.”

That was off, too. Aris asked favors. In all the years Issah had known him, the old man had never once opened with money.

“For?”

“One of my pupils went out to look at something the day before yesterday. She hasn’t come back. I’d like someone to make sure she’s all right.”

“Which pupil?”

Aris glanced at the nearest table. When he answered, it was barely a breath. “Eri.”

The princess.

Issah raised an eyebrow.

“A scav named Gregor found a cave mouth up near the Digryph. I made the mistake of mentioning it where she could hear.” Aris sighed, and years of familiar exasperation went out with it. “She was gone by morning.”

“You don’t sound surprised.”

“That she ran off toward something dangerous without telling anyone?” His voice was dry. “I raised her. Nothing about it surprises me. But Gregor says the caves run deep, and if she went far enough in…”

He didn’t finish. Didn’t need to.

“The king?”

“Doesn’t know. If she’s home before he notices, it stays simple.”

“Where’s the entrance?”

“North, where the Digryph begins. There’s a gray boulder in a field, big as a house. The opening is at its base. Gregor covered it over with sod when he left, and it isn’t on any map.” A pause. “She’ll have dug it out.”

Issah named his price. Thirty krosah, half now. High. The opening move of a haggle, because Aris haggled over everything. Issah had once watched him argue a candle-seller down by a quarter krosah and look pleased about it for a week.

Aris counted thirty onto the table without a word. All of it.

There it is. Not off. Afraid.

Issah slid fifteen back across the wood. “Half now. That’s the rate.”

The truth was he’d have gone for nothing, and they both knew it. Aris had looked at him once, back when Issah had nothing but blood on his hands and a story he couldn’t tell, and had seen something worth knowing anyway. The old man was the closest thing to a friend he had. But a job had terms, and terms kept things simple.

“I’ll leave now.”

Aris exhaled. Relief, kept under composure, visible only if you knew where to look. “Thank you.”

They clasped hands, briefly. Then the old man went out to the one waiting in the doorway, Gregor presumably, and the door swung shut behind them.

Issah stayed a moment longer, putting things in order. Equipment. Supplies against urgency. No room tonight; he could reach the Digryph before dark.

The scribe’s story sat at the back of it all and would not settle. Food rotting on the ground while a kingdom starved. Wrong, in a way he couldn’t put a number on yet.

Princess first. Green later.

A simple job. In and out. Back in Blackswain by tomorrow, fifteen krosah richer, and then south.

He almost believed it.