Fool's Gold (44 page)

Still, mighty tribe leader that he might be, he found himself rising up and running forward to seize Quirk in a great hug that took her off her feet. He was surprised at how good it was to see her. But she was someone who had been there since the beginning, someone who had walked the same path as him.

“Quirk!” he boomed. Then to the startled-looking guards, “Ale! Much more ale!”

Still bundled in his arms, Quirk cleared her throat. Balur set her down with a twinge of embarrassment. “It is being good to see you,” he said by way of explanation. Though he wasn't sure a prophet should have to explain himself. “I am being excited by my vision of this happening,” he said to the guards, then realized he was explaining himself, which didn't seem prophetlike either. “Ale!” he shouted again for good measure.

Quirk was straightening her clothes as best she could. She was still dressed as a merchant, though now the clothes were ripped and stained.

“So,” she said when she had finished. “You seem to have made yourself at home.”

“These people are being my tribe,” Balur said. “And I am being their prophet, it is turning out. I am being as surprised as anyone is being. But it is being quite convenient.”

Quirk took that in without passing judgment. Balur liked that about her.

“Will?” she asked eventually. “Lette?”

Balur felt a cloud pass in front of the sun of his day. “They are not making it,” he said quietly.

Quirk seemed genuinely shocked by that. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, I didn't expect… It just seemed… He was so confident.”

Balur nodded. “He was being a prophet after all. I was seeing it with my own eyes.”

And so he explained it to her. How the wagons had been chased through the Consortium army by the dragons. How they had broken free. How the dragons had surrounded them, set them on fire. How the lead had come spilling out. And then how—

“Wait,” Quirk interrupted him. “Lead?”

Balur shrugged. “It was making the Consortium army crazy. Mad. Just like he was saying. Like he was
prophesizing.
”

“Lead?” Quirk said again.

“Yes,” Balur said, a little testily this time. “That is not seeming to me to be being the big point here. The army went crazy. He had prophesized—”

“Lead?” Quirk said again, her voice ratcheted up to an even higher notch of incredulity.

Balur threw up his hands.

Quirk shook her head. “I mean, I'm sorry, but that just doesn't make any sense. Gold doesn't turn to lead. Not alchemically. Not magically. It doesn't happen. It's impossible.”

Balur narrowed his eyes. “Impossible? You are meaning it was a miracle?”

Quirk hesitated, then shook her head again, more definitively this time. “No,” she said. “Not a miracle. It's just…” She paused again. “Impossible,” she said.

“Well,” said a voice over by the tent flap, “there may be a chance I could explain that.”

Balur spun. And then stopped.

Then the whole world stopped.

Mostly it stopped making sense.

Grinning, Will stepped into the tent.

Will's expression, Balur thought, could best be described as smug. Then after half a second he revised his opinion. It could best be described as the sort of smug that should be removed from someone's face by force. Balur stepped forward to do just that.

But then Lette slunk into the tent behind Will, gave him a half grin, and said, “Hey.”

The next thing Balur knew, he had her in a bear hug and she was yelling that he was going to break her ribs.

“You are living!” he cried.

“Not for much fucking longer, you arse. Put me down.”

She was turning a little blue, so he did as she asked. Still, it didn't feel to Balur as if quite sufficient a fuss had been made. He turned to Quirk. “She is being alive! They are both being alive!” he boomed. Try as he might, he couldn't get the volume of his voice to truly express the depth of the emotion welling in him. There had been a void and now it was full again. A piece of him he thought lost forever was returned to him. He thought his grin might split his face, and he didn't care.

“Yes,” Quirk said carefully. She was studying both Will and Lette, as if searching for flaws. “The thing I'd like to know is, how?”

Will's smug expression was coming back, but Balur found he didn't mind it so much this time. He placed a vast hand on Lette's shoulder, left it there even when her knees buckled slightly.

“Okay,” said Will, “about that.”

“Yes,” Quirk agreed, “about that.” She sounded like a disapproving Analesian brood mother to Balur's ear. What she had to be so sour about, he had no idea.

“So,” said Will, and Balur could tell he was bursting to tell them, but hesitant too. Most likely because he feared reprisal for jerking all their chains. Balur quietly reserved the right to beat Will's head down into his neck once all was explained to his satisfaction.

“Well,” Will started again, “obviously the plan was a little more complex than the one I told you all about. But in my defense my feet were buried in the guts of a spy when I came up with it and I was feeling a little bit paranoid. If the Consortium knew of any part of it…”

He read their expressions and clearly saw that he wasn't winning anyone over. “Look, Lette already beat about five or six shades of shit out of me over the whole thing.”

Lette nodded. Balur tousled her hair affectionately.

“Do that again,” she told him, “and I'll take that hand and use it for a spittoon.”

He smiled happily to himself.

“I really was worried about the spies,” Will said. “I swear.”

Balur was getting tired of this. “Be stopping making the excuses and be telling us how you are being alive before I am making you dead again.”

“Well,” Will said, “all of you know bits of it.” He pointed to Balur. “You knew I'd come to you and said I'd changed my mind and that you should mobilize the whole army to attack. You must have suspected I'd gone to other people?”

“Why must I have been suspecting that?” That seemed like an unreasonable leap of logic to Balur.

Will gave him a pleading look, but before Balur could explain to Will that assumptions made asses out of you, and anyone else Balur chose to blame, Lette hit him with “I still don't see why a whole attack was necessary. And I still don't see why you didn't tell me.”

“Because spies!” Will looked shocked that he needed to explain this again. “We're so large a group that people didn't know who the prophet was. How was I supposed to recognize a spy? The only reason we found that one was because he was terrible at his job. What if there had been a better one? And then when we were away from this camp, we were literally surrounded by enemies. It's the same reason I told Balur to launch the full attack. I figured if a Consortium spy had overheard about the feint then their army might not respond to the threat, which wouldn't let us steal the pay wagons. But the Consortium couldn't ignore the whole army coming forward.”

“So why didn't you tell me when we were on the way from our camp to theirs?” Lette had that slightly murderous look in her eye that Balur always found so charming.

“Well…” Will shuffled his feet. “I didn't think you'd like the bit where I told Quirk to betray us.”

“You did what?!” Lette momentarily looked as if her explosion would put anything Hallows' Mouth could muster to shame.

Balur stared from Will to Quirk. He wondered who he should kill first.

“It worked, didn't it?” Will said, managing to hang on to a scrap of his outrage. “We're all still here. The dragons are dead. Remember that before you judge me!”

Balur scratched at his head. “Be explaining to me why you were having Quirk betray you.” He turned to Quirk. “And you be explaining to me why you did it.”

Quirk met his gaze without flinching. “I did it because he told me to,” she said.

“He was telling you to be going and being a merchant,” Balur snapped back, “and you were having no problem to be telling him no. Then he is telling you to be pretending to be being a merchant and to be betraying him to the Consortium and suddenly you are having no problem?”

Quirk finally glanced down at her feet. She looked up, clearly resentful he had forced her to do that. “He said it would let me study them up close. He said it would help him save everybody.”

“And it did!” Will put in.

She wheeled on him. “There are ten thousand dead out there!”

“And fifty thousand people still alive.” Will showed as little chance of bending as Quirk herself. “I will take those numbers, and I will skip happily to my grave.”

“I thought it was some sort of noble sacrifice, you arse,” she said. “I thought you would give yourself up in exchange for all the other lives.”

Will threw his hands up. “Have you not been paying attention at all? Do you think the Consortium would have let anyone from our army walk away? And even if they had we would just have been condemning this valley to endless years of oppression. They had to die. And they are dead. And at risk of sounding a bit braggy: because of my motherfucking plan! Which worked!”

This, Balur suspected, was not quite how Will had hoped his explanation would go.

He pointed at Will. “Okay,” he said. “She, I am understanding. You, I am not.”

“I needed,” Will said, with an exaggerated slowness that Balur found, quite frankly, a little rude, “to piss them off, to tempt them out into the open. I needed them to be exposed. So I told Quirk she would likely be captured and dragged before them. And I asked her, when that happened, to tell them all the insulting things I had said. And then, when she heard sounds of fighting, to tell them I was stealing the gold.”

Quirk nodded, a little of her fire dampened. “It did happen that way,” she said.

Will nodded as if it were obvious. “And that was perfect because Lette and I had been telling everyone all day that the pay wagons were full of lead.”

Balur held up a hand. He was still trying to sort everything out.

“You had the dragons attack you on the wagons on purpose?”

“Erm…” Will said, his defiance deflating a little

“This,” said Lette, interrupting, “is where I kicked his arse. Because yes, he did. Without telling me, he had me jump into a wagon knowing full well that five dragons would attack me.”

“Well,” Will said, “that was the other bit of the plan I thought you might object to. But I thought you'd make for the safety of our army straightaway, not just run away.”

Lette rolled her eyes. “Oh yes, because that's where every thief heads—toward the armed combat.”

“Well, the dragons turned us around,” Will said, “so it all worked out.”

“Don't make me kick your arse again.”

Balur was starting to get a headache. “Why were you wanting to head back toward us?”

Will shook his head as if he couldn't believe they didn't get it still. “So that everyone could see the dragons breathe fire on the wagons.”

“You wanted everyone to see you die?”

“No.” Will sighed. “I wanted everyone to see the dragons torch the pay wagons. That was the important part. Because of the lead.”

Balur decided that he didn't care about the explanation that much and he would settle for just caving Will's head in. He curled his fists.

“Oh!” Will threw up his hands. “I forgot a bit. I'm sorry. Of course. I'm an idiot.”

Balur looked over at Quirk to get a read from her. She was dancing a small flame along her knuckles. He didn't unclench his fists, but he didn't advance either.

“We'd told them that dragon's fire turned gold to lead,” Will said.

“But it doesn't,” Quirk said quickly.

Will nodded. “No. Of course not, but they didn't know that. They just knew everyone was saying that the dragons were out of gold and that one of the possible explanations flying about was that dragon's fire turned gold to lead. And then we took the pay wagons out so everyone could see the dragons breathe fire on the wagons. And then they all saw the lead. And suddenly the main reason the Consortium soldiers were all there was gone. They were being robbed basically, by these arsehole dragons. And they knew that the dragons could die, because of the skull you'd been dragging about all day. And they were all ready for a fight. So when they saw that, they lost their shit, and they attacked.”

“But,” Balur said, “you were driving wagons. So that the dragons would be destroying them. So that everyone would be seeing you die too.”

“Which,” Will said, “I thought was pretty clever, because if there's one way to stop people coming and looking for you, it's dying in front of them.”

“But you would be being dead,” Balur insisted.

“Yes,” Will agreed.

“But you are not.”

“No,” Will agreed again.

“This,” Quirk put in, “comes back to the ‘how' part of the question that we started with.”

“Oh,” said Will. “Yes, of course. Well, I mean, if you get a horse panicked enough, if say you steer it into an angry army and have dragons chase it, then at some point you can be pretty sure it's just going to keep on going and you don't have to steer it much anymore. So you can jump free and let nature take its course.”

“Which is why,” Lette inserted with enough heat to sear a steak medium-rare, “you should have let me know the fucking plan.”

Using his keen powers of detection, Balur detected something unspoken. “If you were not knowing the plan,” he said to Lette, “how were you knowing to jump?”

“Because,” Lette said, wheeling on him, “this jackass,” she thumbed at Will, “leapt from his wagon onto mine, then carried me off it, and used his body to cushion my fall. Which”—she allowed her expression to soften infinitesimally—“is about the only reason he's still alive.”

“It worked,” Will said, shrugging.

“Jackass,” she said, but Balur could see she was smiling.

Quirk wasn't. “It worked?” she said, sounding peevish. “You mean you planned for Balur to crash a dragon into a volcano destroying all the gold you were so concerned about?”

Balur couldn't help but smile smugly at the memory. He checked Lette for her reaction. She rolled her eyes.

“Fine,” she said in response to his outraged look. “I will admit that riding a dragon into a volcano and being the only one to walk away is passably impressive.”

“I was escaping in its cooked head,” Balur pointed out. “That is being what the bards are calling fucking epic shit.”

Lette shrugged. “Fucking bards.”

Balur's grin was threatening to do some serious damage to the integrity of his skull again.

“To be fair,” Will said, “that was not exactly part of the plan.”

“Not exactly?” Quirk arched an eyebrow so high it almost left her forehead.

“Not part of it in any way, shape, or form,” Will conceded.

“You mean we were meant to be able to walk into the volcano and plunder every last penny, don't you?” said Lette, with a less than charitable look in Balur's direction this time.

Will nodded again.

And yet, Will was still grinning. And truly, Lette was not as upset as perhaps he would have expected her to be at this point.

Of course, there was the chance that Will had not noticed Lette sliding the knife into his back. That had happened to Balur once, though if memory served he had been drunker than a lord at the time.

But from the look in Lette's eyes, that was not what was going on. “What is it being?” he asked them.

“What?” said Lette.

One day,
Balur thought,
she is going to have to be learning to do a better impression of being innocent.

“The thing that you are not saying.” Balur's impatience was returning.

“Rrright.” Will dragged the word out. His smugness has resurfaced like a corpse that refused to stay tied to its anchor. “So the lead thing.”

“Because,” Quirk said, “dragon's fire doesn't turn gold to lead.”

“No,” Will agreed. “It doesn't. I thought we'd discussed that.”

Balur cracked his knuckles. Loudly.

“Why don't you all step outside,” Will said quickly, and pushed open the tent flap.

Balur looked questioningly at Lette. She nodded. “Don't worry,” she said. “You'll like this bit.”

So they pushed out into the camp. The sun was high and the wind had changed. The plume of smoke from Hallows' Mouth blew away from them now, stretching off toward the horizon, leaving clear skies above them. The sound of celebrations rose up all around.

And parked directly outside the tent were Quirk's two merchant wagons, with their colorful silk coverings. A man with a hard face whom Balur didn't recognize sat holding the reins of one wagon.