Barnaby the Wanderer

Chapter 18: She Gets in Your Head

Matilda

Never been to St. Silvanus, where folk have eyes like mine, hooves like mine, hearts like to mine. Was born in Pomona, king's seat of St. Demetia. Pleasant old lady of a city, full of brick streets for a kid to stamp and run upon, with plentiful flower gardens setting eyes and nose twitching for the wonder. Quite like to Persephone, excepting without that shadow of dark past, dark present.

It were my parents as kept memory and custom of the forests. Taught me to shoot a bow, kick a boy, gather herbs. Then it was off you go now, girl.

Sounds a mite rough, but they were thinking in Silvanian. In that grand eastern wood, when a child grows tall enough to pick their own spring apple blossoms, why you send 'em off through the trees to find their own grass to stamp. In a year or three the happy thing wanders back with kids and tales. Then comes a grand party beneath the woods, all the relatives singing and dancing, with maybe Sainted Silvanus himself fetching the communion wine.

My folks saw all the world as forest, with trees or without. Gave me the seven blessings and off I went, west and north, looking for fun and trouble. Finding both, oft enough.

Fun or not, one can't just wander through towns as one would trees. I needed purpose, occupation. Upon quite sober and mature reflection, I decided to become... an assassin.

Tavern tales are stuffed with the creatures. Call themselves the Friends of Friar February, a nicely sinister name when you recollect February is St. Plutarch's reaping monk. Fascinating work, the friends do. Meet in crypts and masked balls, learn to crawl on ceilings and undo locks with just a curly hair from their crotch. Why, your proper assassin gets paid in diamonds to climb a tower, dance past guards, slip poison into a king's cup and then vanish 'poof' up the chimney.

But how to join such happy folk? Asking the whereabouts of a secret tribe of killers seemed tomnoddy as wandering the night woods calling for wolves and witches. Best I could do was keep eyes peeled, ears pricked for mysterious strangers. For sure they'd lurk in tavern corners, faces shadowed, smiling with professional pride as someone important turned green, fell dead.

Which led me to be wearing an apron in a tavern on the shadowed side of Persephone. Pouring beer, ale, wine. Seeking dark mystery in grumbling tradesmen, blue-nosed clerics, staggering tipplers. Bah! Dull as counting flies on a plow horse's ass.

I started putting pepper into the mugs of customers overfond of pinching a girl's person. Silly old sots never noticed. If it'd been poison and they'd been kings, why, they'd have turned green and tumbled from their thrones. And serve them right.

I decided to move on from Persephone; maybe south to the Spice Isles where folk are said to be more openly criminal. Oh, but then the tavern door opened and in came the muddy and bloody, mysterious and delirious magic and tragic folk of the Society of St. Benefact.

Not assassins, but glorious treasure hunters. Excellent; that suited my sensible sensibilities fine. They had a map and a mission, plus a magic cat and a glowering ghost. Not to mention all kinds of tangles of flirtation and argumentation with one another, and with the law and even with the saints if you can believe. They weren't your usual folk at all. Excellent, neither am I. I jumped right in.

So came the morning in St. Martia when I woke to Mister Hypo shouting loud 'shine and rise' at the door of the barn.

I disliked the fellow. Always cheery but keeping eye to the distance twixt your throat and his knife. Seems all the folk of Martia think so. Even our bard.

He had a servant lady put down some baskets of food for breakfast. Bread and sausage, mostly. No coffee, curse it. But also some water and cloths for a washup, which would be twice useful for four of us Benefactors.