It is a time of war, of a resurgence of things past; a time of instability and uncertainty.  This is not a “black and white” war, with clearly defined villains or heroes.  Each side has its fair share of villains, and each side has spawned just champions supporting its causes.

Eons ago, there was another such war, and it tore the world apart.  In those ancient times, powerful wizards ruled the battlefields.  They fought one another for supremacy, or to protect their kinsmen, or simply because they had been driven mad with unchecked power.  Entire nations burned beneath their conflict, and the race of orcs stepped forward, crawling out of the mountains and underground caverns where their race was born.  They had once been simple-minded, weak creatures like the goblins, but the uncontrolled magics tearing through the fabric of reality had changed them, made them stronger, smarter and, above all, war-like.  They rose up as one, and struck against the races of men, elves, hobs and dwarves, carving themselves a place in the very heart of the land.

Then came the Oath-Sworn.  This was a feared order of mages and warriors, jointly governed by elves, men and dwarves.  They vowed to stop the rampant, reckless abuse of magic, to restore the balance of natural order, and to end the bloodlust of the terrible orcs.  They were swift and true, and they destroyed most of the wizard warlords within the span of a single season.  But they were unable to thwart the orcs, for the orcs had also learned the ways of magic, and thought to use it solely as a weapon.

In the end, it was the orcs that destroyed themselves.  Their power grew far beyond their own abilities to wield and contain it, and their warlike nature turned inward upon itself.  War chiefs rose and declared themselves the rulers of all orc-kind, only to be taken down by other, stronger orcs.

The details of the end of the war are lost.  What is known is that the final blow happened deep within orc territory, in the very heart of the land.  There was a great burning, and the thick, ancient forests were turned to smoke and ash.  The gentle, rolling hills were rent into jagged, rocky wastelands, and the orcs fell silent.  That area became known as the Black Hills.

The dwarves were horrified by this.  They swore an oath to forever leave the surface world, which they thought had been utterly ruined by this terrible war.  They soon vanished from the surface, and were not seen again.

The elves retreated to their forests in the far east, where they turned their focus to restoring the balance of nature, and maintaining that order.

Men and hobs settled in the north, south and west, forming the three Great Nations (Norric in the north, Weyral in the west, and Arwei in the south).  Magic was all but forgotten to them, in part because of the workings of the Oath-Sworn.  Those who discovered magic independently were scrutinized by the elves, and their motives and actions carefully judged.  Those who passed the judgement of the elves and were considered stable and responsible were given permission to pursue their studies and were actively encouraged in their art.  Those who failed to meet the standards of the Oath-Sworn were stopped.

Eventually, the orcs rose up again from the wastelands known as the Black Hills, but they were somewhat changed.  They were still strong – much stronger than men – and were intelligent enough to survive the incredibly harsh, hostile conditions of their environment, but their bloodlust and fervor had quieted down.  They were still a warrior society, savage and brutal by human standards, but the ceaseless battle-rage had faded from their hearts.  The Black Hills returned to a natural, green state, and though it was nothing like its former glory, the orcs thrived there.

The Great Nations of Men took shape over thousands of years, defined by natural, geological boundaries, and this was generally a peaceful time.  Some conflicts arose from time to time, as they always do, but these were swiftly resolved.

After a time, the orc tribes began to grow and expand, and were forced to push beyond the borders of the Black Hills.  Some tribes relocated in the west, and the peaceful ones were permitted to establish new tribal ground within the nation of Weyral.  The nation of Norric, bordered on all sides by mountain ranges, refused to let orcs step foot on their lands and fiercely defended their borders, occasionally sending military campaigns into the Black Hills to crush the tribes on the fringes and keep them pushed back.  Arwei, which was a collection of soverign states nominally ruled by an emperor, did not allow tribes to establish lands in their nation, but did not discourage the immigration of displaced, tribeless orcs.

Occaionally, the ancient bloodlust would resurge in the orcs, and several tribes would unite under a single ruler to wage war with a neighboring land.  For the most part, these uprisings were short-lived and lasted only as long as the great warchief remained alive, quickly falling apart when he was dethroned or killed in battle.  One Great Warchief, Gudakh, stood taller than the rest, however; Gudakh was a wise and powerful general, who managed to briefly unite every tribe in the Black Hills.  His goal was not to wage war, but to expand orcish territory to accomodate his peoples’ growing numbers.  Unlike previous uprisings, his warriors were organized and disciplined.  He delegated power to his chiefs, gave the orcs a common goal and a means to achieve it, and gave all orcs a code to live by, which became known as the Axioms of Gudakh.  The Axioms set forth a rigid, hard code of honor, putting the tribe first above all other things.

Gudakh’s campaign was more successful than anyone would have imagined.  His armies pushed out of the Black Hills to the west and south, far past the borders of Weyral and Arwei.  His armies established themselves in the regions now called the Borderlands, and it is said that Gudakh is the only Great Warchief to ever die of old age, though this is probably false.  He is revered to this day by most orcs, and his teachings are followed religiously by some tribes.

The Oath-Sworn have, until recently, managed to keep the spread of magic tightly controlled, fearing that an uncontrolled spread would lead to another apocalypse like the one that happened millennia ago.  All non-elven wizards were closely monitored, forced to submit to regular reviews.  Those who were found unworthy were silenced – some killed outright, some taken to the elven homeland, Edann, and others entombed in the mountains where they could do no harm.

For thousands of years, this worked well.  However, a number of events transpired that changed the course of history.

Firstly, a powerful elven wizard, who operated independently of the Oath-Sworn and lived in the nation of Weyral, was killed in a bizarre conflict.  He had made friends with a dangerous man named Dereyn, unwittingly indebting himself to this person, and when that man’s personal and professional problems built to a head, they were both murdered by an ex-convict who had kidnapped and seduced Dereyn’s wife and turned her against him.  Some time after the wizard died, his lair was ransacked by a group of organized thieves.  The thieves studied his works and took everything, making many copies of his writings and selling them for outrageous sums to any that would pay.  They did this in the name of freedom, believing the elves and the Oath-Sworn to be tyrants who were bent on keeping all non-elves ignorant and powerless.  They truly believed their cause was jsut, and they found a great many people who supported these beliefs.

Elsewhere, the elves had been entombing people in the mountains.  What they did not know is that the dwarves had claimed the mountains as their home, and had carved an ever-expanding civilization out of the rock.  Some of the entombments happened to land inside the dwarven halls, and these rebel wizards soon found that the dwarves had vast stores of ancient, powerful knowledge.  The dwarven halls were an inescapable prison for some, a never-ending maze of corridors and passages and mine tunnels with no exit to the surface world.  Furthermore, the dwarves were now unaccustomed to alien visitors, having not seen a surface dweller for thousands of years, and they did not know how to deal with these strange, hasty people.

It is not known why the dwarves decided to eventually return to the surface.  What is known is that the dwarves did not feel that such a return was a betrayal of their ancient oath, and that when they did return, they came out in force.  The dwarves still remembered much of what was lost – the crafting of powerful magic artifacts, for example – and the power of their convictions made them nearly unstoppable.  They quickly overtook the nation of Norric, believing the rulers to be oathbreakers, and claimed that land as their own.

Many Norricians fled south and west from the mighty dwarven armies, but found themselves in hostile lands, as their rulers had declared hostility against the Oath-Sworn and a great war had ensued.

The dwarves sent diplomatic envoys to neighboring lands in an effort to restore peace and order, but the spread of magic had once again grown far too large.  Once again, the orcs had discovered magic, and the confusion of the Norrician war against the Oath-Sworn had proved to be fertile breeding grounds for orcish bloodlust.

To make matters worse, many of the rebels who had bought stolen lore had grown in power.  Some of them commanded cities in Weyral and Arwei, and declared themselves independent nations.  The Great Nations of Men shattered, and the entire continent once again found itself embroiled in a terrible war.

There are currently four factions:

1) the Oath-Sworn, led by the elves of Edann, the king of Weyral and the Emperor of Arwei.  Their goal is to bring down the power-mad warlocks and rebuild the Great Nations of Men, to re-establish peace, and to restore the balance of nature.  Some view their methods as needlessly harsh, but the elves are goverened by their pursuit of the greater good and natural order.

2) the Independents, rebels who believe the Oath-Sworn are oppressive tyrants.  These groups are only loosely affiliated according to the whims of the warlords who command them, and they are widely varied in ideology.

3) the Orc Nation, which is ruled by a Warband of great, powerful chiefs.  Some human settlements, particularly those in the borderlands, are affiliated with this group, some of them even by choice.  The orcs fight because there is fighting going on, though some will proclaim loftier ambitions.

4) the Dwarven Nation, led by Grand Steward Bengrd and the Guild of Smiths.  The dwarves believe that the Oath-Sworn have forgotten the meaning of their ancient oaths and no longer fight for order and justice.  They believe the Independents and the Orc Nation are agents of chaos and destruction and must be put down.  In short, they will not choose a side in this war, but will fight on all fronts to re-establish law and order.  Their ultimate goal is to restore lawfulness and peace to the continent, and then to return political power to the rightful rulers of men, elves and hobs.

Present Day: Odd Jobs

It had been many long months now, and they finally found themselves in Weyral, the capital of the kingdom of Weyre.  This was the city where lived King Audmont the Third and his royal family.  The castle could be seen from miles away, a massive and awe-inspiring structure with tall conical peaks on its towers.  From the tops of the tallest towers, one could see the ocean off to the west, a brilliant blue streak on the horizon separated from the city by a few miles of coastal forest and well-traveled roads.  The city sat on the north side of a wide, fast-flowing river which emptied out into Rayle Bay, the busiest shipping port in the entire kingdom.  Weyral was built a good distance from the bay to avoid any attacks from the sea; ship-mounted weapons could not reach the city walls unless the ships attempted to sail up the dangerous, well-defended river, and to do that, the enemy would have to make their way through most of the Weyrean navy, which was based in Rayle Bay.

The city of Weyral was a splendorous affair, the largest any of the three had ever seen.  It was surrounded by tall, marble-faced, crenellated walls with towers at regular intervals and at each corner.  Long, triangular flags bearing the royal crest (a gold lion on a navy blue field) flew from the tops of the towers, streaming and flapping in the sea-scented breeze.  Inside the walls, the buildings were all very tall and narrow, and jammed together tightly as though some kind of giant had packed and stuffed them all inside the great fortified walls, and had wanted to get as many of them in there as possible.

The trio arrived at the east gate, Durok and Eorian leading their horses slowly and Wil walking between them.  They had been riding all night and were quite tired by the time they arrived in the city, but the sights, sounds and smells of the place livened them up some as they walked.  They had been wearing the same clothes for three days in a row now; Wil wore a relatively simple bright green suit with a lilac collar and a broad-brimmed lilac hat with a long, green ostrich feather, stuck inside the green band, which nearly trailed on the ground behind him.  He wore shiny purple shoes on his feet, darker in color than the lilac accents but the closest he had to a match, and completed the ensemble with a cape of green silk with a lilac velvet lining.  Eorian wore a medium-length coat of sky-blue silk over his dark blue and gray linen suit.  He wore a hat similar to Wil’s on his head, tipped at a rakish angle, without a feather and dark blue rather than lilac.  Durok wore simple, sturdy, dark cotton trousers and a dark wool jacket, with big heavy boots and no hat.  He was dressed nearly the same as everyone else in the market, but when he stood near Wil and Eorian, with their flash and flair, he looked decidedly out of place simply because he was so unremarkable.

Wil surveyed his new surroundings with his typical wide-eyed wonder.  Sometimes, the others were not sure if his near-constant enthusiasm and child-like sense of wonder was genuine or a very skilled performance.  Eorian suspected that it was genuine, that Wil was indeed quite readily struck with dazzle and awe, but he couldn’t help but marvel at how frequently such a mood took the little hob.  To Durok, it made no difference; if it was an act, it was no more of one than Durok’s steady, unblinking tough-guy act (a face which Durok wore at all times, even when he himself was awestruck and wide-eyed), and it was performed with enough skill to fool anyone.  If it was genuine, then Durok was glad to know that some people were yet capable of such enthusiasm over seemingly so little.

They had arrived early in the morning in the dying hours of autumn, but the city bustled and clamored as much as any other city any of them had ever visited during peak business hours.  Though the sun was still orangey-pink and sitting low in the eastern sky, all kinds of people were out and about; everyone from the obviously wealthy to the miserably poor, the merchants and the customers, the watchmen and the thieves.  Most of the reputable inns, taverns and public houses were just now opening their doors for the day’s business, and some of the less-reputable places were finally ushering out their last few drunken, stumbling patrons and closing up until later.  A few merchants, bundled up against the cool morning, were setting up their stalls in the open-air market just inside the gates, laying out their wares and hanging their placards.  The city watchmen, wearing tall, conical helms and navy tabards over their hardened-leather cuirasses, strolled around rather lazily, keeping their eyes out for any signs of trouble.  Well-dressed men and women hustled through the area, heading for their upscale shops further in towards the city’s center.  A few scruffy beggars reclined on the cobbled walks, lying on filthy blankets and blinking at the morning light with bleary, yellowed eyes.

The three newcomers pressed through this thin swarm, taking in all the sights and feeling a strange sense of hope.  This looked like a place where they could make some proper money for a change, with all manner of pubs where they could perform.  There was a little park just off to the south, with a handful of manicured trees and a lovely little gazebo, where they could put on a grand show with very little preparation needed.  Purses, pouches and pockets fairly sweated with coin, like ripe fruit covered in morning dew, ready to be harvested by willing, skilled fingers.

“This place is great, boys,” Wil said, staring up at the high buildings and really not watching where he was going.  “Good place to winter down, I bet.”

“I agree, Wil,” said Eorian, his gaze fixed on an attractive woman as she breezed past, leaving a faint trail of soft perfume in her wake.  “I could settle in here for quite a while.”

“It’s crowded,” grumbled Durok, who had never been entirely comfortable around large groups of people.  He scowled around at everything, bunching his meaty shoulders and keeping his fists tucked away under his cloak.

“Crowds mean money, Durok,” said Wil happily.  “Winter’s coming, and these fine folks will need positive, uplifting entertainment to warm their hearts during the coming cold.”

“And perhaps their beds,” remarked Eorian, spotting another very fine-looking young woman in a pink dress.  He tipped her a lascivious wink, and she blushed and turned her grin away from him with a toss of blonde curls.

“Father of hell,” Durok grumbled, shooting Eorian a glare.  “Take your brain out of your trousers and stick it under your hat where it belongs.”

“A place like this is bound to attract the hob families,” Wil said, grinning at Durok’s grumpiness.  “We’ll need to petition to set up a franchise here.  It won’t do to be stepping on any toes if we mean to stay here a while.”

“A franchise?” asked Eorian with a note of disappointment in his voice.  “That means we have to cut someone in on our business.  We lose money that way.”

“Nah,” said Wil, waving his hand dismissively.  “The man upstairs only gets a taste.  It’s different when we’re traveling through an area; the local Gaffers don’t want to bother with drifters like us.  Even if we stay a few days and make a couple of scores, it’s best not to bother the local boys because we can create more problems for them than we’re worth, financially speaking.  We just make a point not to hit any of their protected operations and we never have problems with them.  If, on the other hand, we intend to stay for an extended period — and I highly recommend it in this case — it is only proper to announce ourselves to the local Gaffers and petition for a temporary franchise.  They don’t get too sticky about the rules, they only take a small cut, and they keep our names out of the mouths of the city watch.  It’s just good business sense.”

“You hobs,” muttered Durok, shaking his head.

Wil paused a moment and really took in his surroundings.  This was a commercial district, and any hob family worth their salt would have interests here if nowhere else in the whole city.  Local businesses would negotiate contracts with a hob family for protection services above and beyond the scope of the local law enforcement; the city watch could catch and imprison a thief who had stolen from a store, but they couldn’t always restore the financial losses suffered by the victims.  Also, the city watch was bound by the laws of their human king, and hobs were not.  As such, the sight of a wandering city watchman tended to have less of a deterrent effect than the mark of hob protection on a storefront’s window display. 

Wil searched the storefronts for such marks, and found a number of them.  These marks were usually painted in the lower right corner of a main window, large enough to be plainly visible but not so large that they obscured the view.  In this market, there were three distinct crests: a stylized green diagonal arrow, pointing up and to the left, with the letter C top right corner; a small blue hand with the fingers splayed, above the letter R; and a stylized red fiddle with the letter A beside it.

“Hmm,” Wil mused.  “Decisions, decisions.  I don’t know any of these crests.  Which one do you reckon we oughtta go to first?”

“How about this one?” asked Eorian, pointing at an upscale ladies’ boutique.  It was marked with the green arrow.  He looked back at Wil with a broad grin on his face.  “I think I should like to peruse the merchandise here.  Or at least some of the customers.”

Wil grinned up at his friend and tipped him a wink.

“I’ll just bet you would,” he said.  “And I’m liking the green arrow over the other two.  But I think a public house or the like would perhaps be more appropriate for us.  And I really can’t imagine Durok in a shop like that.”

“Not in this bloody lifetime,” Durok muttered, sneering at the shop with rather comical contempt and perhaps a touch of uneasiness.

They searched around until they found a nearby public house with a green arrow painted on the front window, a homey little place called the Fullabeans Inn.  The cheeky name appealed to Wil immediately, and the décor inside was just as cozy and inviting as he had imagined it would be.

It was a fairly small common room with a big fireplace on the left-hand side.  The fireplace was surrounded by overstuffed chairs and small sofas, and had a number of stuffed animal heads hanging on the wall on either side like a little hunters’ lounge.  The tables were of dark, varnished wood, all of them round and many of them low enough for groups of hobs to dine at.  The bar at the back of the room was well-stocked with all manner of different bottles, and the appetizing scent of breakfast — eggs, bacon, sausages, fresh bread, griddlecakes, muffins — was nearly thick enough to eat.

The proprietor of the Fullabeans was a man who looked like a half-blood hob-human: shorter than an average human, taller than an average hob, but he could easily pass for either.  He had curly brown hair worn in the shaggy, loose hob style, but he also sported a wide moustache, which was more of a human thing.  He wore what could be considered the standard uniform of the urban bartender: white shirt with dark trousers and a matching vest.  He stood behind the bar at the back of the room, flipping a towel over his shoulder and beaming at the day’s first customers.

“Aren’t you a fine-dressed lot,” the man grinned.

“I thank you, sir,” said Wil, sweeping the hat from his head and bowing deeply with a fluid, showy motion.  “And you have a keen eye for fashion!”

“Entertainers, are ya?” asked the bartender, chuckling mildly.

“Indeed, sir, most observant of you, and kind of you to inquire,” Wil agreed.  He smiled broadly and began what Eorian jokingly referred to as Sales Pitch Number Fifteen. “My name is Bil Wheatly of Elmsbrook, and these are my associates, Misters Dentanius and Urdo, both from the borderlands.  Mister Dentanius and myself are, as you may have surmised, the talent, and Mister Urdo is our equipment manager.  We provide a variety of entertainments and amusements, but we specialize in songs of hearth and home, soothing melodies to ease the weary heart during the long, cold months of winter.”

“That so?” asked the bartender, still smiling.  “Well, my name is Festus Dinsby, the owner of the Fullabeans Inn.  I’m afraid I ain’t got the gift of the gab like how you got, there, Mister Wheatly.”

“I should think that you hold a fine conversation regardless, Mister Dinsby,” Wil said, bowing again.  He sauntered over to the bar and hopped up on one of the regular-sized stools, and the other two followed suit.  “I have a short series of questions for you, good sir, and I am sure that your answers, though brief, will be satisfying and edifying.”

“Go ahead an’ ask ‘em,” said Dinsby, chuckling softly.  Eorian always enjoyed it when Wil got into his sales pitches; the rapid patter of dialogue was always amusing and never failed to elicit at least a grin from the participants.

“My first question, Mister Dinsby, is in regards to your nightly entertainment roster.  Do you have a show for your fine patrons, and, if not, would you be open to the idea of a reasonably-priced attraction that is sure to fill the seats and encourage your cashflow?”

“Well, we used to have a fella,” said Dinsby, leaning over his elbow on the counter.  “He come in a couple nights a week an’ played a flute in exchange for a hot meal an’ a place to bed down for the night.  He ain’t been around in a long while, though.  Reckon we could use a house act, provided you guys are, as you say, reasonably-priced.”

“Oh yes, reasonable indeed, sir!” Wil exclaimed.  “For the meager sum of modest lodgings for three men and two horses, and one daily meal apiece, we will happily provide you with our invaluable services.  As an added bonus, our equipment manager, Mister Urdo, will be more than pleased to extend his services as a doorman, a task at which he is quite proficient.”

“Hrm,” Dinsby mused, stroking the ends of his moustache.  “Lodgings for three men… reckon I can swing that if ya don’t mind a single room with three beds.”

“Gentlemen?” asked Wil, turning to his cohorts with raised eyebrows.  “Is this agreeable?”

“Of course, Bil,” said Eorian, nodding to Festus and smiling warmly.

“I guess,” said Durok with a shrug and a scowl.

“Mister Dinsby, you have hired yourself a troupe,” said Wil, extending his hand over the bar.  He had to stand on his stool to reach, and he had to strain every last ounce of his meager supply of willpower when he saw that the hand with which Festus Dinsby shook his own was bedecked with a pair of half-decent rings.  It was a quick, firm shake, and Wil quickly withdrew his hand afterward.

“Good to have ya, lads,” Dinsby said.

“My second question, if I may, is perhaps a tad more… delicate,” said Wil, his voice slightly softer now.  “It is the nature of our profession, sir, that we often fall under the undue scrutiny of the local gendarmes.  I’m sure you understand; traveling entertainers — strangers, as it were — are often the first suspects when local cads and scoundrels cause trouble.  As such, it behooves us greatly to introduce ourselves to certain local businessmen, kindly gentlemen of short stature, who provide certain protective services to those in need.  I could not help but notice, as the three of us came in here, that your fine establishment is under their beneficent, watchful eye, and I should like to make the acquaintance of one of their associates.”

Dinsby nodded as Wil spoke, smiling knowingly.

“I hear ya,” he said.  “You want to talk to the Culroys.  I can introduce you to the Godgaffer himself, if ya like.  Wayn Culroy is a cousin of mine, on my mother’s side.”

Wil tipped the man a conspiratorial wink.

“I thought I detected a hint of down-home in this place, Mister Dinsby,” he said.

Dinsby laughed at this, a friendly guffaw straight from the belly.

“You detected right, Mister Wheatly,” he said.  “I hope you got a couple of jigs in your repertory.”

“Indeed I do!” said Wil.  “It took me forever to teach Dentanius here how to step-dance, but by now he can do it as though he were three feet shorter!”

“Excellent!” said Dinsby, laughing again.  “I can’t wait to see it.”

“My third question,” Wil said after a beat, “and perhaps the most important yet: what is your breakfast special?”

The meal was as delicious and filling as only hob cooking could be, and the three of them wolfed it down.  Dinsby refused to take their silvers for it, saying he would throw this one meal in as a down-payment for the show tonight provided they played “Old Stagger-Man” as part of their set.  Wil promptly agreed — he knew no fewer than five different versions of that particular song.

After breakfast, Dinsby left his cook in charge of the place while he introduced “Mister Wheatly” and the boys to his cousin, Wayn Culroy.  The Godgaffer lived only a few blocks away, above a shop called “Cozy Nostrums” which sold a variety of tonics, tinctures, cooking oils and other potions imported from the south-west Black Hills.

The Godgaffer had a very sophisticated, urban air about him.  He dressed in scaled-down human fashion, with shiny leather shoes and a black tailored suit.  His dark curls were slicked back with perfumed oil, and he wore a neatly-trimmed beard on his chin.  His manners were all city: somewhat impersonal and very professional.  He was quite different from Festus Dinsby, who still carried that down-home warmth despite his big city clothes.

Even his office was citified.  It was all dark stained oak and leather upholstery, very classy and expensive.  He had a large, dark desk on one side of the room, with two big sofas facing it.  Presently, Wayn Culroy was seated behind the desk, Wil and Eorian occupied one sofa, and Durok towered behind them, too large to fit in any of the hob-sized furniture.

“So you boys are looking for a franchise,” Culroy said, leaning back in his chair and folding his hands together over his belly.

“Yes, sir,” said Wil, the showman gone from his voice.  “A three-man operation.  We have a good show for the pub which will attract some business and keep the wrong eyes off our other pursuits.”

“Alright,” said Culroy, leaning forward.  “What’s the other pursuits?”

“Dentanius is a card player,” said Wil, motioning to Eorian.  “He can fix pretty much any game, make some good money.  Urdo is an inside man, but we don’t know the city well enough for that just yet.  Maybe in a couple months.”

“Can never have too many good gamblers,” said Culroy, smiling faintly.  “Burglars have a lot of competition in Weyral.  There’s been a lot coming in from the east over the past few years, and all the juicy places are locked up tight.  Especially since the Salryn people moved in.”

“The Salryn people?” asked Eorian.  “Who are they?”

“Humans, mostly,” Culroy sneered.  “From the east.  A real tight bunch of grapes, they are; somethin’ like a family, they all dress in the same dark clothes and they don’t much talk to anyone.  They got a taste of our business a while back, during the troubles in Amear-on-the-River.  I understand they worked for that guy there, the one that got killed in the duke’s country estate.  From what I understand, the Salryns have been around for a long time, some kinda cult thing.  We can’t get a guy inside because they’re all humans… and elves.”

“Elves?” asked Wil and Eorian simultaneously.  Culroy stared evenly at Eorian and nodded.

“They got a handful of the pointy-ears workin’ for them,” Culroy said.  “Look, lads, if you want to work for me, I’ll grant you a franchise, but I have conditions which are non-negotiable.  First, my take is ten points.  That comes off your pub earnings as well as any other work you do in my city.  Second, you work only for the Culroy family, and not for the Argles or the Doils.  Third, and most important, stay the hell away from the Salryns.  I ain’t gonna say no more about ‘em except that they’re dangerous and we don’t want any kind of bad blood between the Culroys and the Salryns.  Just forget about ‘em altogether.  Understood?”

It was understood by both Eorian and Durok (and, indeed, by most people who had ever gotten to really know Wil Magee) that the best way to convince Wil to do something was to tell him to stay away from it, and that the best way to start him thinking about a thing was to tell him to forget about it.  Furthermore, they understood that as soon as Wayn Culroy had warned them away from this dangerous group that it would very soon become one of their top priorities to investigate it further.  Both Eorian and Durok had to stifle an inward moan of dismay as soon as Culroy uttered the words.

“Understood, Godgaffer,” Wil said.  “We accept your conditions.”

Wil and Wayn Culroy shook hands, sealing the deal.  Culroy gave them the name of his liaison who would pick up the family’s percentage at the end of every week, and the meeting was over.  The trio was escorted out of the house and sent on their merry way.

They had not gone more than half a block before Wil finally lost control of his bubbling excitement and snatched the other two down a narrow alleyway.

“The Selryns!” he hissed, his face eager and sweaty and excited.  “A dark and silent family!  The rooster is here!”

“Wil,” said Eorian patiently.  “I thought we had given up on that idea months ago.  There is no rooster that lays golden eggs.”

“That damned Oracle was as big a liar as you are, Wil,” Durok grumbled.

“No, listen!” Wil rasped, a rather desperate look on his face.  “We just haven’t had any good leads since Bixtry.  This has all of the elements of the Oracle’s prophecy: ‘a far-off place,’ she said, and Weyral is about as far as we can go!  Winter is just around the corner, and there will be the Winter Festival, which corresponds to the ‘time of feasting!’  It’s not something that happens at dinnertime, like I thought before.  ‘A dark and silent family’ is probably these Selryns, who dress in dark clothes and nobody knows hardly anything about them!”

“Was there a ‘dark and silent family’ in Bixtry, Wil?” asked Eorian, more out of curiosity than anything else.

“Well,” Wil said, his expression losing some of the excitement.  “The guy I lifted that rooster from… he had a pretty good tan, and his wife had dark hair.  Dark-ish.  And they didn’t say much.  But this is different!  Tell me you can’t feel the difference in the air!”

“I feel the cold,” Durok growled.  “And I feel annoyed.”

“Wil, please consider this very carefully before you go jumping to one of your mad conclusions again,” Eorian said softly.  “I know that there is no stopping you now, but I ask, please… please try to be cautious this time.  Think this out.  We stand to make a decent living here, and every time you get stuck on this idea of the magical rooster…”

“I know, I know,” said Wil, almost peevishly.  “So far, it has only led to trouble.  But this time is different, Eorian!  As soon as Culroy said the words, I knew.  Without question, I knew.  The rooster is here.  We’re finally going to find it, and I will finally have my answers.”

There was something about his tone of voice, a firmness and a finality, that neither Eorian nor Durok could question.  Not for the first time, Eorian wondered if perhaps Wil was using one of his tricks on them, a subtle weave of magic that eased doubt and made the speaker’s words seem more convincing.  And once again, he dismissed the idea; as devious as the little hob could be, he was also incredibly loyal to his friends.

“Alright, Wil,” Eorian said quietly after a moment’s reflection.  Durok sighed and threw his hands up in the air in resignation.

“Very well,” the orc-blood said.  “But mark my words: this is going to lead to serious trouble.”

He spoke from experience.  Wil was the most gifted thief that Durok had ever met, and a frighteningly-skillful performer, but he had one fatal weakness.  For whatever reason, he could just never manage to steal a chicken without getting caught.

The Early Years: Wil Leaves the Family Home

He had had a happy childhood, full of all the things that make for good, simple country living.  Wil was the youngest of three; his oldest brother was named Tom and the middle brother was named Lyl.  His father, Silas Magee, had built a fine family farm in the borderlands near the crook separating southern Norric from the Black Hills, in a small community run by Godgaffer Arn Dillard.  His mother, Milell, had come from “Away,” some distant hob homestead far to the east in the Black Hills, but the Dillard Family had welcomed her readily as one of their own.  Silas, a respected man and a family friend of the Dillard Family from five generations back, had brought her home after one of his long, far-off adventures, and the two had built their little farmhouse on good land.

The Magee family was well-liked in their community.  Silas would hold a barn dance every fall, and hobs from three ’steads over would come for the food and the dancing and the music.  Every year, Silas would take the stage and play his fiddle with the band.  Everyone agreed that he was the best fiddle player any of them had ever heard, and he knew just about every song anyone could ask for.

Milell Magee (formerly Milell Connol) was a brilliant cook.  She could whip up most any dish imaginable, everything from spicy eastern Arweian cuisine to southwest Weyrean pastas and sauces to plain old broiled chicken and taters.  The family always ate well; Silas grew all manner of vegetables on the family farm, and he raised chicken, sheep, goats, ducks, pigs and even dwarf cattle.

Tom, Lyl and Wil were, of course, expected to help with the raising of the animals and the tending of the crops.  Tom and Lyl ended up doing most of the work, while Wil followed his erratic fancies elsewhere.  As the youngest, he was given a lot of leeway.  The older boys sometimes resented this, but Silas would always take them aside and remind them quietly that Wil was sort of… special.  He didn’t have the presence of mind that it took to take care of animals, and he simply could not be forced to spend hours pulling weeds or picking beans.  He would get a start on the task and almost immediately lose patience and wander off to chase butterflies or catch frogs down at the pond.

In point of fact, Silas Magee thought his youngest son to be rather slow in the head.  Tom and Lyl had taken to farming like proper hob lads, almost before they had learned to walk.  They even enjoyed their chores. 

Wil, on the other hand, was a fidgety, restless daydreamer.  It was nearly impossible to get the boy to sit still for any length of time, except when Silas was telling one of his stories from the “Great Book.”  During storytime, Wil would sit very quietly and attentively, his little green eyes very wide and shining, absorbing every detail.  As soon as storytime was over, Wil would scamper off to chase butterflies or catch frogs down at the pond.  Or he would scamper off to his toys and re-enact the stories he had just heard in great detail.  Or he would scamper off to the woods nearby and play at being the hero of a story, either the one he had just heard or one that he had particularly enjoyed from days ago.  Or he would simply scamper.

Silas did not immediately recognize young Wil’s intelligence for what it was.  He saw that the boy had clever moments, but he assumed that Wil was perhaps something of a savant; the boy had an uncanny knack for recalling, word for word, Silas’ stories, even tales he had told months ago.  He was also quick to learn music, and could play the fiddle, banjo and harmonica by the time he was ten years old; he played well enough to join his father and the band on stage at the annual barn dances, and most everyone was quite impressed with his skill and his precocious showmanship.

By the time Wil was twelve, his father had begun to recognize the strange, undisciplined intelligence that bloomed in his youngest son’s mind.  It had taken a lot of patience, but he had finally taught the boy to read, and by the age of twelve, Wil could read any book in the house and recite it back to his mildly stunned father, almost word for word.

For all his brilliance, however, Wil was always very easily distracted.  It never took much to draw his attention away from any given task; a fluttering butterfly, a shiny knickknack sitting nearby, motes of dust floating around in a shaft of sunlight streaming through a window… the slightest thing would send Wil scampering away from any task he found boring.

Eventually, Silas came to recognize that some of Wil’s rebelliousness and distractability came from his overpowering sense of curiosity.  Wil was often poking into things and exploring here and there, and the best way to convince him that he ought to do something was to tell him that he really shouldn’t — his desire to figure out why such a thing should be restricted over-rode any kind of caution or even common sense.

As Wil got older, Silas had assumed that his restless, curious nature would settle down into something more hob-like, but, of course, this was not the case.  Wil’s quests for knowledge took him farther and farther from home; the little homestead was simply not big enough to satisfy his enthusiasm for exploration and learning.  As far as he dared wander, however, he almost never missed a meal.  It was almost certain that he would be home by suppertime, no matter how far out he had ventured that day.

Eventually, Wil’s adventurous nature began to get him into trouble.  The Magee farm was not terribly far from the human town of Fort Unthro, and Wil had found his way there a number of times.  Having been raised in a hob community, with hob values and a hob’s understanding of property and commerce, teenage Wil caught trouble several times for shoplifting and other petty acts of theft.  For the most part, the humans understood what had happened and the treated Wil with leniency and patience, but eventually his welcome in Fort Unthro wore quite thin.  Shortly after he turned sixteen, he was caught taking candy from a merchant stall and escorted home by armed city watchmen.

It was then that Silas had begun to realize just what kind of person his youngest son was growing into, and he began to worry.  Two days after Wil had been brought home by the armed humans, Silas took his son aside and had a serious, sit-down talk with him in the empty kitchen.

It was larger than a typical hob kitchen, big enough for a human to walk around comfortably without knocking his head on the rafters.  The walls were covered with shelves and cupboards and mantles and sills, all loaded with knickknacks and spice bottles and clever little tools and spices and dried foods.  The table was wide and round, with five little chairs evenly spaced around it.  It was early afternoon, and warm, bright light filtered through the west windows at a steep angle, painting little square pools of brightness on the dark wood floor.

Silas sat in his chair, the slightly larger one at the head of the table, with a serious expression on his face.  He had a square-shaped face with a dimpled chin, and well-defined, handsome features.  He had clever green eyes, framed by faint lines that crinkled merrily when he grinned.  Of all the sons, Wil looked the most like his father; the other two boys took more after their mother, with narrower faces and hazel eyes.  Silas and Wil even had the exact same curly chestnut hair.

Wil sat miserably in his smaller chair.  He knew he was in trouble from the other day, but he was still not entirely sure what, exactly, he had done wrong.  Judging from his pa’s expression, it had been something big.  Possibly big enough that it would merit a switching.

“Wil,” said Silas, choosing his words carefully.  “Me an’ you gotta have a talk about what happened the other day there.  I want you to pay attention an’ listen real close, now, because this is serious business.  You understand?”

“Yes, pa,” Wil muttered, unable to look up at his father.  He thought he saw a mouse running under one of the cupboards out of the corner of his eye, and he struggled to ignore it and pay attention.  The tiny flash of movement nagged at his mind, and he had to fight hard to ram the thought away and focus on the conversation.

“When you go to a human town like you did, and you take stuff from boxes in human houses or from the little stands they got out in the street, you have to pay for that stuff.  If you don’t give them money for it, it’s called stealin’.  It ain’t like here, son.  Humans don’t know you, don’t know your family, don’t know your homestead.  They won’t just come over later and take some taters and call it done.  They gotta have coins, or they call it stealin’.  And when you get caught stealin’ stuff, those men with the swords take you to jail.  Do you know what jail is?”

“Not really,” said Wil, trying hard not to look at the cupboard in the corner.  He was sure that mouse was there.  He could almost feel it there.  The tension made him fidgety, and he had to swing his feet underneath the chair to vent off some of the nervous energy.

“Jail is a bad place, where bad people go,” Silas explained.  “They got locks on all the doors, the kind that’re real hard to open unless you got the proper key.  Jails are cold an’ damp an’ dirty, an’ you only get fed once or twice a day there, an’ that’s mostly just porridge or nasty soup without a sammich or anything.  You have to live in there with real bad people, the kind that hurt an’ kill others.  An’ they make you stay in there until they figured you learned your lesson.”

“Why, pa?” asked Wil.  This jail stuff sounded terrible, but it was also terribly intriguing, like one of Silas’ stories.  It was much easier to pay attention to the lecture now that something interesting was being discussed.

Silas shrugged.  “I dunno, Wil,” he said.  “That’s just how humans do things.  They don’t do things the way we do ‘em.  They don’t have Gaffers or Godgaffers to make things right.  They have… well… kings an’ mayors an’ tax collectors an’ watchmen.  It’s all pretty complicated, really, but the thing to remember is, when you’re caught doin’ somethin’ bad, you get put in jail.  And humans figure stealin’ is pretty bad.”

Wil thought about this for a moment.  The way his pa said things, it sounded like it was only bad when you got caught.  After a bit of thinking, he nodded and said, “Okay, pa.”

“I think I know what you’re goin’ through, Wil,” Silas said, his expression softening a bit.  “The world is an awful big place with so much to see an’ do, an’ I reckon you want to see as much of it as you can as soon as possible.  You ain’t like Tom an’ Lyl; they’re happy with farmin’ and simple things, and they’re good boys for it.  That don’t make you bad, Wil.  No, sir.  You just ain’t cut from the same cloth as Tom an’ Lyl.  You’re cut from the same cloth as me.”

Wil quirked an eyebrow, unbelieving.

“You, pa?” he asked skeptically.  “You never leave the farm.”

Silas smiled broadly and leaned back in his chair.

“Not no more, that’s true,” he said.  “I got all my wanderin’ and explorin’ done well before you was born.  But I tell ya, Wil… I done plenty of it.”

“Sure, pa,” Wil said, grinning and shaking his head.

“Tell ya what,” Silas said.  “You go on into the study there an’ get my big story book.  You know the one.  Go fetch that an’ bring it here.”

Wil brightened up.  Even at sixteen, he still loved storytime.  His pa always read such colorful, adventure-filled stories, and he told them with such vivid expression and lurid detail that Wil sometimes felt like he was right there in the middle.  He hopped down from his chair and scampered into the den, straight over to the big bookshelf on the back wall.

He scanned the spines of the books arranged there, finding the thickest one right in the middle on the top shelf.  He had to climb up to get it, dragging a stool over and hopping up to reach the high shelf.  The book was big and heavy, with a sturdy, plain leather cover and thick yellowing pages.  He had never taken this book down before — it was an object of nearly religious reverence, and he had never dared to open its sacred pages.  He carried it out to the kitchen now, holding it in both hands like a holy thing, and carefully handed it to his father.

Silas grinned down at him now, and pushed the book away.

“You go ahead an’ open that, Wil,” he said.  “Have a look through it.”

Wil reached out with a hand that almost trembled with glorious anticipation, folding back the cover.  The first few pages were blank, so he flipped through a bit to find one of the stories that he had so loved.

To Wil’s confusion, every single page in the book was blank.

“Where are all the stories?” he asked, flipping rapidly through the pages.

“Up here, Wil,” said Silas, tapping his forehead with one finger.  “Most of them stories were memories of things I done in the past.  The book was nothin’ more than a prop, really.  Your mother didn’t want me fillin’ you boys’ heads with crazy ideas from my own adventures, so I pulled down a blank book, changed some names, added an allegorical dragon here and there and told ‘em anyhow.  Yes sir, your borin’ old man has seen some things.”

Wil was still very confused.  Surely his pa was testing him somehow.  He had never known his father to outright lie, so maybe Wil was supposed to find the nuggets of truth, like some kind of scavenger hunt.  Maybe the stories were invisible, hidden from sight by some kind of magic.  While his father continued speaking, Wil tried to puzzle these things out, and he more or less entirely missed the whole point of the conversation.

“All I mean by this, Wil, is that I understand what’s goin’ on with you,” Silas said.  He saw Wil’s brow furrowed with concentration and assumed that it was because Wil was trying hard to absorb the conversation.  “I know all about that little voice in the back of your mind that tells you to go out an’ look for new things, the big piece of your heart that needs the excitement.  But you got to be smarter than what you’ve been.  You gotta learn the rights an’ wrongs of the outside world if you want to go off an’ be a part of it.  If you keep on like you been, you’re gonna wind up in serious trouble, an’ Allewall forbid you don’t bring it down on the family with ya.  You understand what I’m sayin’, Wil?”

The sound of his name caused Wil to snap back to the conversation, albeit far too late to have really caught the gist of the lecture.

“Yes, pa,” Wil said solemnly, delivering one of his many generic rote responses to chastisement.  “I’ll try to do better.”  To his credit, he was already a fine actor at such a young age, and Silas believed (or chose to believe, or at the very least wanted to believe) that Wil had learned his lesson.

“Alright, then,” Silas said, grinning and ruffling the boy’s hair.  “Now I got some chores for ya, an’ you’re gonna do ‘em with no complaints an’ no funny business.  And you ain’t gonna talk Lyl into doin’ ‘em for ya.”

Wil sighed dramatically and tried his best to look utterly deflated.

“Okay, pa,” he said.

Later on, as he pulled weeds in the big vegetable garden, he had time to reflect on his father’s lecture, or at least on the parts of it that he remembered.  He had picked up three rather important pieces of information, things that would have a profound impact on his life from that point on.

Firstly, he had come to realize that his pa was something like his hero.  If his stories were true, then he had indeed lived an incredibly active and adventure-filled life.  If the stories were false and the thing about the book had been untrue, then Silas Magee was a pretty terrific liar, and that, also, was something to be respected and admired.

Secondly, he had come to believe that stealing was only bad when the thief got caught.  As far as Wil had understood, that had been Silas’ point. 

Thirdly, he had discovered that all anyone really needed was a good story and a reliable prop.  With those two things in hand, a person could make magic.

As a result of that day, Wil Magee spent the next two years of his life teaching himself how to become a proper thief and storyteller.  At first, he practiced on his own family, swiping little things and hiding them in secret places.  He would always return these little things later on, or “find” them when the original owner needed the item and began searching the house.  He independently discovered the art of palming almost by accident, and he practiced and practiced until the movements became second nature.

Eventually, he took his little one-man-show on the road, paying frequent visits to the local public house and parlaying his quick fingers into free dinners and pocket money.  At the pub, he learned a few simple card and coin tricks from some of the more well-traveled hobs that frequented the place, and over time he even invented a few of his own.  Wil’s tricks were often quite showy and theatrical, though the principles behind them were the same as everybody else’s, with simple false-shuffle techniques and easy sleight-of-hand.  It was just as he had mistakenly learned from his father: with a reliable prop (usually playing cards and coins) and a good story (the theatrics behind the show) to make it all seem believable, Wil was able to parlay his skills into a steady gig.  He lined his pockets with busking money and usually earned a free meal.

He became good enough that the owners of the public house asked him to perform there twice a week.  When this offer came up, Wil decided to expand his repertoire.  First, he added music to the act, playing lively fiddle and harmonica tunes and dancing jigs along with the songs.  When that proved successful, he also added storytelling, reciting some of the adventure stories he had read in his father’s books.

There was a rather darker side to his teenage endeavors, however.  During his off-days, he would sneak off to Fort Unthro and practice “not getting caught.”

In many ways, it was an ideal place to perfect his larcenous arts; the market was always busy, and there was a constant flow of strangers from western Weyre and other places in the east.  Fort Unthro was one of only a handful of borderland towns that saw any kind of traffic from Norric in the north, and the local lawmen enforced peace between the stern Norrician soldiers and the local orcs.  With all these people milling around and conducting their business, it was quite easy for Wil to escape anyone’s notice.  He was small, even for a hob, and could easily dart around the legs of the big humans and burly orcs should the need arise.  His fingers were quick and agile, and there were so many potential easy targets that the only problem Wil faced most days was where to begin.

Nicking sweets from the outdoor candy stall became too easy after a while, and Wil graduated to filching coins from people’s pockets.  He devised a number of methods for this, and eventually that, too, became too easy.  From coins, he moved on to rings and bracelets and other jewelry, and then to larger objects like sheathed weapons or hats or packs or purses.

With the exception of the sweets and other bits of food, Wil never actually kept anything that he stole.  Usually, he would steal things and return them to their rightful owners after an hour or so; returning the items was often at least as difficult as swiping them had been, and it seemed to Wil to be better practice for honing his skills.  Sometimes, he would not be able to find the person from whom he had stolen, and he would simply drop the items on the road on his way out of town.  It was never his intention to use these skills to gain material wealth; indeed, such an idea had failed to even occur to him at that age.  For teenage Wil, the only goal was to get good at his craft and have loads of fun doing it.  Stealing was a thrill, plain and simple, and Wil could honestly not see the harm in it.  While his father may not have approved of his methods, he would have surely understood the mindset behind it all.

After a while, he grew bored with picking pockets altogether.  It was simply too easy, and he no longer felt challenged.  As such, he decided it was time to move on to bigger, more difficult heists, the kind of challenge presented by proper burglary and large-scale shoplifting.

These endeavors typically involved a lot of very careful, precise planning.  Wil would spend days mapping his targets out, covering every possible escape route and each potential point of discovery.  He would track every city watchman, every shopkeeper, every tavern bouncer, and anyone else that might present trouble if they found him out, and he kept very precise schedules for these people.

The first heist — stealing a velvet cloak from a high-end clothing store — took two weeks of planning, and went off without a hitch.  Returning the cloak the next day turned out to be much more difficult; he was spotted carrying the thing into the shop, and the proprietor had, for some reason, assumed that Wil had bought it the day before and was bringing it back to exchange for a smaller item.  This was one contingency for which Wil had formulated no plan, and he had ended up leaving the store with a very expensive, hob-sized velvet cloak, which he snuck back into the shop two days later.

Over the course of three months, Wil staged a great number of daring and elaborate heists, each one trickier and more dangerous than the last.  There was no shop, no house, no government building, no structure of any kind that could keep him out during those months.  Even the fort itself was not safe from young Wil Magee.  In fact, his very last heist, the most dangerous of the lot and the one that eventually led to his exile from the family home, was a plan to rob the Fort Unthor treasury.

His plan was brilliantly formulated and flawlessly executed; it had taken three full weeks of careful planning, painstaking observation and meticulous calculation.  He had had to fashion a set of very specialized tools for the job — lock picks, a harness and pulley system, snippers and cutters and files and hooks, and a number of other small things — and he had drawn a detailed, quite precise map.  When he left Fort Unthor that evening, he had half of the gold in the treasury in a pack on his back and a very sound plan for returning it the next day. 

That night, Wil slept in his comfortable little bed in the family farmhouse for the last time.  He drifted off with a wide, pleased smile on his face.

The next day, things went very badly.  The first half of the day went swimmingly; Wil managed to sneak the money right back into the treasury, despite the dramatically increased number of guardsmen protecting the vault, and he had had a fine lunch in the rowdiest public house in town, basking in the afterglow of his incredible success.

The trouble started after lunch, and it started with a chicken.

There was a vendor stall at the edge of town, a human fellow with a great many caged fowl from his poultry farm in the west.  This part of the market was quite busy and loud; many livestock vendors were set up here, and the animals seemed to sense their peril.  There were a great many humans here, all wearing the plain, sturdy clothing of local farmers, and also hobs and orcs.  The orcs were busy buying and butchering their meat, the humans were crying out their sales pitches, and the hobs seemed to be simply standing around watching everything.  Wil saw no one he recognized among them, so he paid them no mind.

The thing that caught his eye was the chicken cages.  He had never stolen a live animal before, and the challenge it presented lit his brain up like a candlelight vigil.  It looked like it would be a quick and easy job: pop the cage open, nick the bird, duck away with the animal tucked under the jacket.  And this is exactly what he did.

He made it to the edge of town, the chicken quiet under his bulky jacket and not struggling, when he was stopped by a voice at his back.

“Oi, there, young fella,” the voice said amiably.  Wil stopped dead in his tracks, knowing that he had been caught out.  He turned with a wide, charming grin on his face and prepared a story, but the words died in his mouth.

It was not a town guard who had caught him out.  It was a proper mob, and every man among them was a hob.

The man in front, a broadly-built fellow with a serious face and expensive, dark clothing, stood with his fists planted on his hips.  He looked ready to throw a punch, and Wil was pretty sure that he wasn’t in any mood for jokes or wild stories.

Slowly, Wil pulled the chicken out from under his jacket.  The bird snapped alert when it emerged from the warm darkness, and immediately began to struggle and protest.  Wil tried to hand it over to the serious-faced man, but that fellow simply shook his head and stood firm.  Wil dropped the chicken to the ground and it bolted off, squawking and clucking madly.

“You gotta be kiddin’ me,” the serious man said, shaking his head.

“This can’t be him, Dan,” said one of the hobs in the back.  “He’s just a kid.”

“It’s him,” the serious man said.  “I’m havin’ a hard time believin’ it myself, but it’s him.”

“I was gonna put it back,” Wil said, his voice little more than a terrified squeak.  “Honest I was!”

“After what I seen today, I believe ya, kid,” the serious man said.  “Unfortunately, it don’t make a difference.  Do you know who I am?”

“No, sir,” said Wil, shaking his head and fighting the urge to flee.  There had to be twenty hobs standing around him now, and they all looked angry.

“I’m Dan Cuddy, boy,” the man said.  “These fellows here call me Godgaffer.”

Wil felt a terrible sinking sensation in his guts.  This was trouble for sure.

“What’s your name?” Dan Cuddy asked.

“W-Wil Magee, sir,” Wil stammered, struggling to hold back the tears that threatened to leak out of his eyes.

“Magee,” Cuddy repeated.  “From Dillard’s neck of the woods?”

“Yes, sir,” Wil said.  “Godgaffer Arn Dillard.”

Cuddy nodded curtly.

“You’re gonna take me to your home, boy,” he said.  “The rest of you, get back to town.  Don’t tell no one about this.”

The men nodded and said “Aye, Godgaffer,” and headed back into town, leaving Wil and Dan Cuddy standing in the middle of the road, just outside the town gates.

“Start walkin’,” the Godgaffer said.  Wil forced his trembling knees to bend and his watery legs to move, and led the man back to the family farm.  Neither of them spoke a word the whole way, and Wil tried his best not to cry.  To his credit, he mostly succeeded.  Only a few hot, shameful tears escaped.

Silas was out in the big vegetable garden when they crested the last hill and watched them approach, shielding his eyes from the afternoon sun with a hand on his forehead.  Cuddy marched Wil straight over to his father and greeted Silas with a firm handshake.

“Dan,” said Wil’s father, looking down at his son with a worried expression.

“Silas,” said Cuddy.  “Good to see you again.  I wish it was under better circumstances.  Me an’ you need to talk.”

“My boy in trouble, then?” asked Silas.

“Aye,” Cuddy said, frowning down at Wil.  Wil could not meet either man’s eyes, and he looked down at his feet trying not to cry out in miserable fear.  “Let’s talk inside.”

“Wil, you wait in your room,” Silas said, dropping his weeding fork and leading Dan Cuddy to the little farmhouse.  Wil followed behind at a distance, shuffling his feet, and went dutifully into his room, closing the door behind him and waiting for the sky to fall on his head.

It was a long, endless wait.  Neither man raised his voice, and Wil didn’t care to listen at the door.  He paced around his little room, debating whether or not he should pack a bag and just leave before his father was finished talking to their “guest.”  He ultimately decided against it; he would face his punishment like a man, and be done with it.

An eternity later, Silas opened Wil’s bedroom door and stepped inside, closing the door quietly behind him.  The older man had a strange expression on his face, somewhere between sad, angry and terribly amused.  To Wil’s dismay, though, it was mostly sad.

“Wil,” Silas began, but he had no idea where to go from there.

“I was gonna put the chicken back, pa,” Wil said quickly.  “You gotta believe me.”

“Look, lad, let’s not worry about the chicken for now,” Silas said.  “Well… let’s worry about it a bit, I suppose.  I got about a hunnerd questions to ask you before we get to the part about the chicken.  But let’s start with the treasury.”

“Oh,” said Wil, sitting down on his bed.  It was actually more of a collapse, because his knees gave out in shock.

“How… Wil… why… boy, what in the name of Jullavall is goin’ through that head of yours?  You robbed the treasury?  And then… then you… you put it all BACK?”

“I didn’t want to keep it, pa,” Wil protested.  “I just wanted to nick it.  Then I wanted to put it back.  Putting it back is much harder!”

Silas stood goggling at his youngest son for a moment, shaking his head in disbelief.  He opened his mouth several times to ask another question, but nothing seemed right.

“It was a test, pa,” Wil explained.  “Sort of.  Just a practice.  I just wanted to get in, take some gold, get out, come back the next day and return it without getting’ caught.  And I did!  Well, mostly.  I guess you wouldn’t know about it if no one saw me do it.”

“Allewall preserve us all,” Silas breathed.  He slumped down on the bed next to Wil and shook his head again.  “Wil… I don’t even know what to say to none of that.  Just… just give me a minute here to get my thoughts straight, lad.”

“Okay, pa,” Wil said.  This wasn’t so bad, he figured.  At least his pa wasn’t calling for a switch again.

Silas was quiet and pensive for a long moment, and when he did finally speak, he spoke quietly and with great care.

“I’ll tell you how this happened, Wil,” he said.  “How it come to be that I’m sittin’ here with you tryin’ to decide whether to be angry or sad or damned proud.

“First off, you woulda got away with it if you hadda just took the money an’ run.  Nobody had any idea what had happened there.  They reckoned it was a team of thieves that broke into the treasury, an’ they expected that the money was long gone.  But you tucked it away in a hollow stump, and it got found last night. 

“Lord Meinstre, the guy that runs Fort Unthro, he got in touch with Dan Cuddy when his men found out that the treasury had been robbed.  Wanted to use hobs to catch the crooks, on account of hobs have more leeway in certain matters than human officials. Dan Cuddy’s boys kept a close eye on that stump, and when you got there this morning an’ carted it straight back to the city, they was gonna turn you over to the law.  But they didn’t, because they saw you hauling it back to that tunnel you used to get it out.  They knew that you was puttin’ it back, so they went back to Dan Cuddy an’ asked him what they oughtta do.  Cuddy went to Lord Meinstre, an’ they found out that all the money, every single coin, had been put back in the treasury.  Lord Meinstre told Cuddy to find the fellow that had done it an’ bring him in for some human justice.

“Now… Dan Cuddy is a good fella, Wil.  He meant to deal with you in the hob way, he wasn’t never gonna turn you over to Lord Meinstre.  In fact, he was gonna let you go altogether, figurin’ it was just a prank or somethin’.  But then you stole that chicken, Wil.  An’ you weren’t careful about it.  People seen you do it, an’ not just hobs.”

Silas placed his hand on Wil’s shoulder and looked at the boy rather sadly.

“This is real bad, Wil.  Real bad.  You’re in very real, very serious trouble; Cuddy has to take you to justice.  It ain’t somethin’ he wants to do, an’ he wanted to give you a chance here.  That’s why he brought you home like he did.”

Wil frowned up at his father, growing worried now.  Perhaps this wasn’t going nearly as well as he had thought.  Silas’ face was long and miserable, and he had difficulty meeting his son’s eyes.

“You have to leave, son,” Silas said quietly.  “Pack up an’ go.”

“You’re kicking me out?” Wil asked, stunned.  “But I’m only eighteen!”

This was indeed a remarkably young age for a hob to leave home; eighteen was more of a human standard, the time when a human boy became a man and struck out on his own.  Hobs, however, were slightly longer-lived than humans, and tended to mature at a slightly slower rate.  An eighteen-year-old hob was still a child, and would be considered a child until his thirtieth birthday.  Most hobs didn’t marry until well into their fifties.  A hob at the tender age of eighteen was roughly equivalent to a ten- or twelve-year-old human boy in terms of maturity.

Wil, however, had already proven himself to be rather precocious; the way that Dan Cuddy had explained things, the boy had managed to arrange and execute a job — robbing the treasury — that would normally have taken a four-man team with a lot of nerve.  And the fact that he had done it twice in just two days told Silas that his youngest son was a rather exceptional case.

“Aye, Wil,” Silas said.  “That’s how it has to be.  I won’t send my boy to a human prison, no matter what fool thing he done.  Better to send you out on your own, where you can learn the hard lessons just the way you need to.  You’re a clever boy, Wil — much more clever than I ever was.  I know you can handle yourself out there in the cold, hard world, and I know you’ll learn the lessons you need to in order to become a man.  All the stuff I could never teach you; some things just can’t be taught, but they gotta get learned anyhow.”

Once again, Wil was on the verge of tears.  He felt like his whole world was sliding out from underneath his feet.

“I just want ya to know, Wil,” Silas went on, both his hands on his son’s shoulders.  “I ain’t mad at ya for what you done.  Just the opposite; I’m right proud.  I oughtta not be, but I am.  It breaks my heart to send ya out like this, but it’s how it’s gotta be.  And ya gotta leave tonight.”

“Tonight?” Wil wailed miserably.

“Aye,” Silas said.  “Before your mother gets back from her visit with the Settons.  She’s gonna be awful sore when she finds out, an’ seein’ her will only make it harder for you.  You can leave a note if you like, but you gotta hurry.  I’ll help you pack.”

Stunned and shocked beyond the ability to speak, Wil wandered around his little bedroom getting his belongings together.  He absently rummaged through his dresser and armoire and hauled out some of his clothes, not really seeing what he was picking out.  He hauled a buckled case out from under the little quilt-covered wood-frame bed and began stuffing clothes into it while Silas scavenged around on the shelves and in the closet for some of the other assorted things his son would need on the road.

After a short while, they had assembled what would be the totality of Wil’s personal effects for the next several months: one big buckled case full of mismatched (and sometimes inappropriate) clothes; one backpack full of food, blankets, toiletries, camping tools and some of Wil’s “specialty” items (improvised, home-made lock picks, sharp-edged coins, assorted dice, several decks of playing cards, bits of string, a small bottle of sticky resin, and a number of other small things); and one small case containing an old hand-me-down fiddle, a bow, a block of rosin, and a harmonica.  The trunk full of costumes and stage props would have to stay behind, as would the huge assortment of hidden, potentially-incriminating things that had been secreted away in various places around the room.

At the end of it, Wil stood in the front doorway, his shoulders slumped and his face a mask of misery.  Silas stood behind him looking nearly identical, though slightly stouter and taller than his son.

“Can I ever come back, pa?” Wil asked sadly, looking out at the world beyond the cozy little dooryard and feeling incredibly lost.

“Of course, Wil,” said Silas quickly.  He rethought the statement, and muttered an addendum.  “Some day.  Not for a long while, I reckon.”

Wil nodded sadly.  The round-topped, saggy-looking farmer’s hat he wore on his head flopped a bit in response to the movement.  He fought back the tears again, and spared one last look over his shoulder at his father.

“Bye, pa,” he said.  “I’m sorry, I guess.”

“Don’t be sorry, son,” Silas said, gently patting the boy on the cheek.  “Just be careful.”

“I will,” said Wil, turning away and starting slowly down the little laneway, dragging his luggage rather dejectedly.  After a few paces, he stopped and called over his shoulder.  “Tell ma I love her.  An’ don’t let Tom or Lyl touch my stuff.”

That said, he soldiered on, facing his destiny with slumped shoulders.

The Dark Times: A Night of Mourning

The common room at the Misty Maiden was mostly deserted that night.  Wil and Aleister sat alone in the corner by the big fireplace, their faces terribly drawn and exhausted-looking.  They both still wore the black suits they had worn to the cemetery that rainy, miserable morning, but their collars were open now.  Howiss had said they could take all the time they needed.  It had been a long, sad day for everyone.

Neither man spoke much.  The empty snifters in their hands said enough for now.  Wil had stopped crying hours ago, but his eyes still burned and his throat was still swollen and a bit sore.  Even Aleister allowed a hint of his grief to show through.  He looked tired, and his eyes were red-rimmed and somewhat glassy.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do, Al,” Wil said softly.  He struggled to contain his tears, and only the slightest quiver in his voice betrayed his grief.

Aleister said nothing, but smoothed a hand through his silver-gray hair.  He was a human in the later part of his middle years, but just now he looked much older than that.  His piercing blue eyes lacked their usual keenness, and his chin and cheeks were dark with the day’s stubble.  He was normally impeccably groomed, but just now he looked haggard and worn, nothing like his usual self.

“She was… she was everything.  My whole life,” Wil continued, unable to look up at his dearest friend.  His gaze was fixed on the narrow silver band he wore on the third finger of his left hand, the simplest and most meaningful piece of jewelry he had ever worn.  He spun it around just below the knuckle now, a nervous gesture he had been doing a lot these past few days.

“I know, bub,” said Aleister softly.  He turned his glass slowly, watching the little circle of dark liquid shift around inside.

“My whole life is gone now,” Wil said, his voice quivering a bit more, near the edge of breaking.  “Just… gone.  Taken.  And no one knows how or why.”

There was nothing Aleister could say to that.  The how and why were as much a mystery to him as they were to anyone, including the healers who had tried so hard to figure out what was going on, where the problem was and how to fix it.

“My poor Khelshie,” Wil moaned, unable to contain the fresh flow of hot tears.  “My poor wife.”

It had all started very abruptly, several days ago.  Wil and Khelshie, his beautiful elven bride, had been eating dinner at the Misty Maiden Inn, and she had suddenly gone quite pale and told him that she was feeling unwell.  Wil had taken her back to their room upstairs and she had lain down and fallen asleep, which was very strange for an elf.  She had never awakened.  Wil had fetched a healer right away, and the healer could find no sign of illness or injury.  The next day, she had taken a terrible fever, and the healers had sent out for special help.  Khelshie was not a hob or a human, after all, but an elf, and the only ones that knew how to mend a sick or wounded elf were other elves.

The next day, a pair of Edannese healers had arrived.  They had shooed everyone out of the little room and set about their work, but even they had come out befuddled and worried.  They had been unable to break the fever, even by magical means.  They had vowed to Wil that they would stay with her until she was either cured or dead.  Wil had not taken much comfort in that sentiment.

The next day, the fever seemed to break.  At first, the Edannese healers were relieved, sure that she would come out of her torpor and that they would be able to puzzle out the strange malady.  After a short while, though, they began to worry.  Her temperature had continued to plummet after the fever had broken, and had not stopped falling when it reached more normal temperatures.  It had continued to fall until she had grown cold to the touch.  The healers were just as unable to raise her temperature as they had been unable to cool it.

The illness lasted five days.  On the fifth day, the healers had insisted that Khelshie be taken out of the human city and into the natural surroundings of a nearby forest.  They had no hope that such efforts would cure the affliction; this was something more like last rites.  Her pulse had been steadily weakening, and the elves wanted her passing to occur in a beautiful, serene, natural place rather than a dirty, smoke-filled human inn.  Wil had been too distraught and shaken to protest, and likely wouldn’t have argued even if he had had all of his wits about him.  He helped the Edannese healers carry Khelshie out into the woods, helped them lay her out on the moss-covered ground in a comfortable position, and he stayed with her until the end.  When she breathed her last, Wil was there with her in the forest, holding her hand.  Aleister had been there as well, offering what comfort he could.

That had been just yesterday.  Today had been the funeral, if one could call it such.  The elves had taken her body back to Edann moments after she had passed on, and had refused Wil’s request to join them.  Wil had not liked the idea — had, in fact, been quite hurt — but he understood.  The elves were an intensely private people, and non-elves, even those who had taken an elf as a mate, were not permitted to discover anything about their spiritual or religious practices.

The funeral, such as it was, had been nothing more than a gathering of saddened friends, placing flowers on the mossy mound in the forest where Khelshie had breathed her last.  There had been a surprising number of people there; Wil and Khelshie had made a lot of friends in the area, and everybody had come to pay their respects.  Chief among the mourners had been Aleister, Wil’s best friend (besides Khelshie), mentor, and best man at the wedding.

“I can’t believe she’s gone, Al,” Wil sobbed.  “It doesn’t seem real.  It can’t be real.”

“I know, Wil,” Aleister said softly.  “It feels like a dream.  A nightmare, really.”

They fell silent again for a while.  Wil steadied his emotions and sniffed back his tears, and Aleister refilled their glasses with dark brandy.  They sat back in the large, comfortable chairs, neither man drinking or speaking for a very long time.

“I feel lost, Al,” Wil said after a while.  “Like there’s nothing left.  No more life to live without her.”

“That’s enough of that kind of talk, bub,” Aleister said, a dark warning in his voice.  “If Khelshie heard you talking like that, she’d slap the words out of your mouth.  Reckon I should as well.”

Wil said nothing for a while again.  Such long, drawn-out silences were completely contrary to his nature, and Aleister found it rather disturbing.

“I’ll allow that this is perhaps the greatest loss you have ever suffered, bub,” he said softly.  “It’s quite high up on my own list as well.  You know that.”

“Aye,” said Wil very quietly.  He looked up at his old friend, dismayed at the grief and loss he found on the man’s face.  Aleister would never admit it, but Wil knew that Khelshie was like a daughter to him.  Just as much as Wil had become something like a son.

“Listen, Wil,” Aleister said, shifting in his chair so that he faced his friend.  The old man’s eyebrows were knitted together in thought, and he paused a bit before continuing, choosing his words very carefully.  “I am fortunate in that I have my studies to occupy my thoughts and distract me from the loss.  Tomorrow, I will fully engross myself in my work, and I won’t likely leave my workshop for perhaps a week or more.  When I finally do emerge from my workshop, I will have enough of the grief behind me that I am able to function again.  I will still grieve, in my own way, and you know that better than anyone.

“You, on the other hand, will wake up tomorrow to an empty room.  I imagine that you will weep and cry for a few hours before you head over to my house to bother me while I work.  You know I don’t mean this in a cruel way, and you know that I enjoy your company.  You will likely stay for the day, and we will eat supper together and converse into the wee hours.  Then you will probably excuse yourself and come back here, to this empty room in the inn.  Or ask to stay the night and end up sleeping on my sofa.

“My point is, Wil… what will you do the next day?  Or the day after that?  Right now, you don’t know the answer to this question, and that is perfectly understandable.  But you will eventually need an answer.  As hard as it seems to believe just now, your life must go on.  You must move forward.  Your life doesn’t stop just because hers has ended.”

Wil took it all in, nodding slowly as Aleister spoke.  Had a stranger been eavesdropping on the conversation, he would have perhaps found the human’s words to be rather harsh and cold, perhaps even tactless.  The hob had just lost his wife the day before, after all!

Wil knew differently, though.  Certainly, Aleister tended to be quite blunt and plain-spoken, sometimes even to the point of seeming quite cold and rude.  But Wil had gotten to know the man quite well over the past ten years; Aleister firmly believed that one should strive to end a problem before that problem had begun.  He had heard trouble in Wil’s words, and he would not allow that trouble to bloom into a proper dilemma.  The man was simply less concerned with tact and courtesy than he was with results.  Wil had found that this was often the case with people who were terribly intelligent, and especially so with wizards.  Aleister was both of these things.

As a wizard, Aleister cared very little for the things that existed outside of his workshop.  He took no interest in politics, cared nothing for the goings-on of his neighbors, and refused to listen to gossip.  These things had nothing to do with achieving an understanding of the weave of magic, and were, in fact, quite distracting.

He did, however, care for Wil and Khelshie.  Wil was certainly a distraction, even at the best of times, but he was a welcome one.

“You need to find a direction, Wil,” Aleister continued.  “Something to drive you, something to motivate you.  A hobby, maybe.  I don’t know.”

Wil nodded sadly, thinking it over.  After a long reflection, he spoke softly.

“Can I sleep on your sofa tonight, Al?” he asked.  “I don’t think I can face the empty room, now that you mention it.”

“Of course, bub,” said Aleister, rising from his chair and smoothing out the front of his expensive suit.  “Just as long as you remember the rules.”

Wil slumped out of his chair and nodded again.

“Don’t touch anything that might touch me back,” he said, reciting the rules, a rather long list of strict codes that had continued to grow ever since the two men had first met.  “Stay the hell out of the pantry.  Don’t mess up the papers on the desk or sit in the desk chair.  Don’t even look at the books on the top shelf.  Fire is not a toy.  Don’t tease the homunculus.”

“Homunculi,” Aleister corrected.  “I’ve been busy.”

They left the inn and trudged through the dark streets to Aleister’s large, old house on the edge of town.  It was a solidly-built structure with thick stone walls and a sturdy slate-covered roof, surrounded by a massive herb garden and a low stone wall.  It looked more like the country manor of a wealthy baron than a wizard’s lair, but Aleister had always looked more like a wealthy baron than a wizard.  The house was in better repair than the surrounding buildings, which were mostly large, ramshackle slums and run-down tenements.  Aleister rather liked the neighborhood, though, because none of the neighbors ever bothered him.  In fact, most of them went well out of their way to avoid walking in front of his house, lest he see them from inside and put a hex on them.

Wil stayed with Aleister for the next month.  The two men mostly kept to themselves inside the big, roomy house; Wil didn’t care much for the dank and spooky basement laboratory, and Aleister was too absorbed in his work to come out of it much.  Wil moped around for a few days, feeling empty and blue and missing Khelshie terribly.  He tried to lose himself in some of Aleister’s books, but even the forbidden books from the top shelf — the ones with the terrible, dark secrets and the clever magical traps holding them shut — failed to hold his interest.  He cooked four big meals a day, but he was never hungry enough to eat more than a few nibbles here and there. 

Occasionally, he would venture out into the city streets to try to walk his misery away, but it followed him around like a lost kitten, constantly demanding his attention.  Everything about the city held precious memories of Khelshie; it seemed that they had walked down every street together, had eaten in every inn and public house, had admired every garden, had played with every stray dog and fed every stray cat, had trespassed in every back yard and stolen down every back alley.  There was nowhere he could go and not remember her, not feel the strange, terrible emptiness in his heart.

After a month of this, Wil made up his mind.  He could not stay in that city any longer; it was too full of her, and he couldn’t think of anything else while he stayed.  If he needed to find some kind of direction in life, as Aleister had said, he would need to find it elsewhere, where Khelshie’s memory wasn’t so thick and overwhelming.

He brought this up at dinner that evening.  He had spent most of the day in the kitchen and had prepared a fine meal of honey-glazed ham and sweet potatoes with three different side dishes.  The two of them sat in the large, comfortable dining room, just off the kitchen, at the big wooden table, the food artfully arranged and pleasantly aromatic.  Aleister ate in his regular serious silence, enjoying the meal without needless commentary.

“I figured something out, Al,” Wil said from across the table.

Aleister looked up at Wil and raised his eyebrows curiously, but said nothing.

“I have to leave the city,” Wil continued.  “Like you said, I guess I need some kind of new direction.  The problem is, when I’m here, my compass keeps pointing to Khelshie.  I can’t seem to think of anything else.  She’s just… everywhere.  Ya know?”

Aleister nodded and grunted, not wanting to speak with a mouthful of food.

“I guess I’m gonna have to wander around for a while,” Wil said sadly.  He didn’t much care for wandering anymore; he had thought that he had finally settled into a nice, comfortable life, something like his pa had wanted for him.  “Follow the road and see where it takes me.”

“Some would call that a ‘geographical cure,’ Wil,” Aleister said, dabbing a cloth napkin at the corners of his mouth and settling back a bit in his chair.  “Thinking that, by leaving one place for another, you leave your old problems behind.  It almost never works.”

Wil frowned a bit, and started to protest, but Aleister stopped him with a raised hand.

“I said ‘almost never,’” he said.  “It could be that, in this case, a change of scenery is just what you need.  The two of you spent ten long, happy years here, and I imagine that you see her face around ever corner.”

Wil nodded.

“Yup,” he said.  “Just about everywhere I look.”

“It’s a distraction,” Aleister said, leaning forward a bit and studying Wil seriously.  “When you need a clear mind, you must eliminate distraction.”

“Erm, yes,” said Wil.  “Something like that.  I just can’t think straight when I’m so sad all the time.”

“However you want to say it,” Aleister said, shrugging.  “I agree with your decision, Wil.  It is wizardly thinking; you recognize that your environment is a distraction, and you must make a change.  You cannot alter the environment, so you must remove yourself.”

“Ya,” said Wil.  “I suppose I would say it differently, but you have the meat of it there.”

“When will you leave?” Aleister asked, resuming his meal.

“Tomorrow morning,” Wil said.  He actually felt quite relieved just saying the words.  “Bright and early.”

Aleister nodded.

“Do me a favor,” he said around his mouthful of sweet potato.  “Make a big breakfast before you go.  I doubt I will have time to cook tomorrow.  And leave me some of your recipes.”

“Sure thing, Al,” said Wil, grinning.

The next morning, after preparing a great meal of blueberry pancakes, sweet potato pie, omelets, biscuits, sausages and strawberry halves, Wil stuffed a few belongings into a big, bulky pack and prepared for a long journey.  Aleister saw him off, munching on a biscuit as he stood on the porch in the bright morning sun.

“Take care, Wil,” he said, leaning against the post beside the steps.

“I will, Al,” said Wil, shouldering the straps of his heavy pack.  He picked up a pair of bags, one in each hand, and turned towards his old friend.  “I’ll probably be back.  Not sure when.”

“I’ll be here,” Aleister said, sparing a quick, watchful glance around at the neighboring houses before retreating back into his house.  Wil smiled at this; Aleister could be quite odd sometimes.  He wouldn’t want anyone to see him actually being friendly to someone.  It might spoil his reputation.

He started off down the path to the street, once again leaving his home and feeling lost and alone.  It had happened once before, years ago, and that time had not been his decision.

Present Day: A Long and Winding Road

It had been several weeks since the Midsummer Feast in Bixtry, and the ride had been long and quite uneventful.  They had ridden through many towns and small cities, heading generally northwest, looking for any kind of work along the way and finding nothing of any interest.  They could have busied themselves helping farmers harvest their crops, but none of the three was suited to that sort of work. 

Wil was perhaps the nearest thing they had to a genuine farm hand, having been born and raised on a farm, but he had never much taken to that kind of labor.  He had done his chores grudgingly at best, when he had actually done any at all.  Usually, he had been able to convince one of his brothers to do the work instead, or he would simply shirk his duties and take the switching later on.

Durok was a warrior.  He had no patience for picking peas or beans, or for carrying baskets, or for threshing wheat, or any of the other countless, dreadfully boring tasks that farmers often hired out to willing workers.  He was not much use as a butcher, either; he refused to use a butcher’s cleaver or any of the other knives normally used for such things, always preferring to use his own axes.  It was never a problem when he was preparing his own meat, when he could simply hack off a limb and roast it on a spit over an open fire.  But when it came to cutting steaks or chops or other finer cuts, most normal, civilized people would have found his culinary arts to be lacking any kind of finesse.

As for Eorian, well, it was just not something he could ever imagine himself doing.  Farm work for humans was a far cry from tending elven gardens back home in Edann, and the farmers would get grumpy when Eorian tried to juggle their turnips and beets and potatoes.  Also, there was always the temptation of the fabled Farmer’s Daughters; Eorian was something of a ladies’ man, and he was never much good at resisting temptation.  It had gotten him into trouble many times, especially since he had taken to traveling with Wil.

When they stopped in the odd town or city, they always left with a few extra coins in their pockets.  This was never the result of legitimate employment, however. 

Sometimes, they would perform for their suppers.  Wil was an ace with his tiny fiddle and a handful of other hob instruments, and he had a sizable repertoire of down-home hob songs.  He was also a decent dancer, and he would perform mad, energetic jigs as he played.  Eorian had no skill with any instrument, but he had a lovely tenor singing voice which was particularly suited to singing slow, aching ballads that made the ladies swoon.  Durok had no musical skill of any kind, but when the three of them set a hat or fiddle case on the ground, Durok’s presence ensured that the make-shift coffer would not wind up missing at the end of the day.

If they judged that the current settlement would not have much appreciation for music, Wil or Eorian would recite one of their many long, dramatic stories at a public house.  Wil’s tales tended to be action-packed, bawdy adventures, the kind that appealed to a more rough-and-tumble crowd.  Eorian’s tales tended to be more romantic, and he leaned more towards tragedies than comedies.  His stories, like pretty much everything else he did, appealed more to the ladies and to a more sophisticated crowd.

If tale-telling failed, they still had money-makers.  Both Wil and Eorian could juggle, and they had a well-rehearsed two-man show.  Eorian had a trunk full of marionettes and ventriloquist’s dummies and other assorted puppets.  Will had four big, leather-bound books full of jokes he had collected during his travels, and he had most of them memorized.  The two of them had a number of comedy routines worked out, with costumes and everything.  They both shared a love of stage magic and card tricks, with the sleight-of-hand and misdirection and all the theatrics of simple illusion, and they were both quite skilled.

Durok had no kind of performing skill whatsoever.  When the other two decided to stage a performance, Durok would set things up and stand off to the side, making sure no one messed with his friends or their equipment.  They did not have a lot of equipment — only what they could carry on the backs of two horses — but what they did have, Durok kept well-guarded.  Sometimes he quite enjoyed the shows, especially when Wil started telling his dirty jokes at the end of the evening.  Mostly, though, he sat sullenly in a corner, drinking and watching.

Sometimes, a town was not receptive to any kind of performance.  It would happen that the three travelers blew into town just after another troupe had blown out, and no one was in the mood for more of the same.  Sometimes, the people were just grumpy and sullen and didn’t want to be entertained.

The trio still managed to make money in these towns, however, for there was one particular skill at which all three of them excelled: outright theft.

Each man had his own methods and areas of expertise.  Wil was a confidence man and a pickpocket.  These skills were the exact things that had made him such a consummate stage illusionist; he had an uncanny ability to convince the willing mind and distract the unwary eye, and his fingers seemed lighter than air.

Eorian was a gambler, and he had considerable charm with women.  He was not quite as gifted a performer as Wil, but he was an incredible card player and he knew how and when to cheat.  Often times, when performance was not an option, Eorian would somehow find an, open card game with juicy stakes, and they could walk away with a tidy stack of gold and silver.  If he could not find a card game, he could usually find a well-to-do (and usually very attractive) young lady that was more than happy to share a pleasant evening with such an attractive, charming half-blood elf.  When she woke up the next morning, she might find a few choice pieces of jewelry had gone missing, and a perfumed thank-you note had been left on her pillow.

Durok was a surprisingly good thief.  His large size and fierce demeanor lent itself naturally to thuggery, but none of the three held such tactics in very high regard.  Thuggery was the same as banditry, and even Durok felt that banditry was very low work. 

Durok’s specialties were burglary and locks.  Despite his size, he was quite light on his feet, and he could move through a dark house without making a sound — if he wanted to, he could slip the pillows out from underneath the homeowner’s head without waking him.  And despite his crude heritage, he had a good eye for expensive finery.  He always seemed to know just what to take, what items would fetch the best price at a hob fence in the next town, even when the other two did not.

When no amount of entertaining could earn the three of them a meal or a roof over their heads for the night, they could always fall back on good old Plan B.  Plan B always paid the bills.

The three of them made an incredible team, despite their strange mix of heritage and temperaments.  Where one was weak, another was strong, and they all complemented one another’s talents quite nicely.  Wil had always been the “face-man,” the spokesman for the group and their principle performer.  He was also the one who dreamed up the various schemes and plans, although his ideas were sometimes terribly impractical and sometimes downright impossible.  Eorian was possessed of a cool wit, and it often fell to him to make Wil’s mad plans work.  He was inventive and creative, always collected and methodical in his thoughts, and he always seemed to know the odds. 

While Wil and Eorian were the collective brains of the operation, Durok was unquestioningly the muscle.  When Wil’s schemes and Eorian’s plans called for heavy lifting, Durok lifted.

However ideal their strange union, though, they had now come upon a dry spell and hadn’t been able to find any work.  Things had been tight since Bixtry; no one seemed interested in any kind of entertainment, pockets seemed to be lighter than usual, and barely any of the houses in this particular region held anything of value to a band of burglars.  This was not one of the wealthy regions like the far-western provinces or the eastern farmer-baron towns. 

The closest thing to a big, wealthy city around here was Culmer, the market city.  Barely anybody actually lived in Culmer; most of the buildings there were empty storefronts rented out to seasonal or traveling merchants.  The few people who lived in the city were the caretakers and the street sweepers and the local militiamen, and none of these people had much in the way of proper wealth. 

As for the shops, they were mostly trading stations with little in the way of stock.  The traders that worked there swapped contracts for shipments of food, mined ores, crafted goods, clothing, raw materials and that sort of thing.  None of this was of any interest to a trio of thieves looking for easily-lifted swag to fence a couple of towns over.

They continued on west, taking their time and following the long, lonesome road.  They had been forced to ride well north of Amear-on-the-River, a city they had visited a while back and where the authorities possibly still had standing warrants for their arrest.  Rumors reached their ears as they passed wide of the place, stories of unrest and reformation, a great riot and some kind of civil war and tumultuous political restructuring.  One farmer said that the law was no longer bothering to pursue old warrants — many such records had been lost during the riots — but Wil and the others agreed that it was probably best to play it safe.

And so they continued to ride.  It had been a long journey for all of them so far, a long and winding path full of strange crossroads and lonesome, empty stretches.  For all three of them, this journey had started with an unexpected and tragic death.  For Wil and Eorian, that death had taken the same person.

Present Day: The Chicken Thief, Part III

It was a festive evening in Bixtry.  Midsummer Feast day had started out with the fair, where farmers showed off their prize animals and local athletes participated in various sporting events.  The warm, sunny afternoon brought about the great, savory meals, served on long cloth-covered tables in the bright sunshine, and after the feasting came the drinking.  It seemed that the whole town was drunk now, all the taverns and inns and public houses filled to capacity with revelry and merriment.

The streets were filled with the noise of celebration: minstrels and musicians playing rowdy songs at top volume; jokesters and clowns telling wild, comical tales and eliciting bright laughter from their audiences; storytellers relating their oral traditions with grand, expressive voices; joyful, inebriated shouting, the wordless kind that all sounded like “HEY YA!”  There was even an orcish drum circle a few blocks over, hammering out an intricate, high-tempo rhythm that quickened the listener’s pulse and emboldened his spirits.

One of the evening’s celebrants leaned against a railing surrounding the porch of one of the many public houses.  He stood on the end just at the mouth of a dark, narrow alley, barely able to stand on his own unsteady feet.  It had been a long, wonderful day for this fellow, and he had decided to top it all off with a bottle of decent Edannese wine.  Not the best stuff, of course — he wasn’t made of money, after all — but the decent stuff.  He had downed nearly the entire bottle all by himself, and it had snuck up and walloped him over the head when he wasn’t looking.  His chief concern now was convincing his left foot to find its way in front of his right foot, and thus begin the long stagger home.

He had just managed to complete the necessary mental transmission to his uncooperative limbs when he heard a small commotion behind him, from the street on the opposite side of the porch.  He slowly turned his head, squinting and frowning and trying to make sense of it all.

He saw a small blur of vibrant color, briefly illuminated by the light spilling out of the front windows of the public house.  No one particular color stood out as the dominant one; it looked like someone had crumpled up a rainbow into a little ball and given it a pair of legs.  That little rainbow ball was hurtling towards him at what seemed to be an unreasonable speed, and it gradually took the form of a fleeing hob in very colorful clothes.  The hob appeared to be carrying a rather large parcel under his arm, but the parcel was wrapped up in his colorful patchwork cape.

The hob spotted the drunk man just in time to avoid bowling the poor bugger over.  He skidded to a halt mere inches from the man’s legs, almost dropping his parcel.  When he had regained his balance, he shot a quick glance over his shoulder and another, longer one back up at the much-taller human fellow.

The drunk man finally recognized this hob: he was an entertainer from the fair that day.  He had been juggling and telling silly jokes just before the feast.  The man remembered that the hob had been very entertaining, and the children especially had found his little show to be quite captivating.

The hob was looking up at him now with something like panic and wild, exuberant joy written on his handsome little face.

“Which way did I go, buddy?” the hob asked, his voice low and conspiratorial despite his labored breathing.  The drunk man thought about the question for a moment and finally realized that it didn’t make all that much sense.

“Huh?” he asked, badly confused.

“I ran past just now,” the hob explained rapidly.  “You saw me run past.  Which way did I go?”  He tucked one of his dainty-looking little hands inside his brightly-colored jacket and yanked out a little purse of red velvet.  He gave it a boisterous jingle and grinned madly.

“I don’t…” the man began, but he was terribly confused now and couldn’t finish the thought.

“Gotta hurry, bub,” the hob said quickly.  “You tell me which way I went, I give you this and run the opposite way.  Then when those guys behind me get here, you tell ‘em just what you told me.  Understand?”

“Oh,” the man said after a moment.  “Someone’s chasin’ you?”

“Mercy,” the hob muttered, sparing another quick glance over his shoulder.  “Aye, someone’s tromping right on my tail feathers.  I’ll make this easier for you.  I went east.  Say it back to me, real quick, and this bag is yours.”

The drunk man frowned, but he did as the hob said.

“You went east,” he repeated.

The hob tipped a crazy wink and tossed the little bag, which the drunk man barely managed to catch.

“Perfection!” the hob said, and he sprinted off to the west.

The poor, confused drunk man had barely had the time to right himself from his stumbling grab at the coin purse when four large, angry-looking men came bounding around the corner.  They held truncheons in their hands and wore scowls on their red faces.  The man in front saw the drunk and pointed at him, shouting.

“You!” the angry man said.  “Did you see a hob run by just now?  He was wearing brightly-colored clothes!”

“Oh, aye, I seen him,” the drunk man said, smiling crookedly.  “He went east, he did.”

“East,” the angry man repeated, scowling seriously.  “You are sure of this?”

“Oh, aye!” said the drunk man, feeling the sweet weight of the little coin purse in his hand.  “Straight east he run, like all the devils in hell was nippin’ at his arse!”

“East!” the angry man hollered, streaking off in that direction and followed by his comrades.  And then they were gone.

The drunk man stared down at the little red velvet purse in his hand, and gently pulled the string to open it.  The top opened up like a strange, alien flower, and revealed the purse’s gleaming contents: gold coins, a dozen or more, all shining brightly in the dim evening light.

It was an odd thing; if the man had not been nearly drunk enough to pass out, he would have passed out at the sight of so many gold crowns.  As it happened, he just smiled wide and stumbled home.

The hob, on the other hand, could not afford to stumble.  He ran full-tilt through narrow alleys and down unlit side-streets, streaking towards the town limits.  The bulky package beneath his cape was an awkward thing, and the poor, miserable creature inside it continued to struggle towards release, but the hob clamped down and kept on running.

A short while later, he saw the two horses up ahead.  They were standing just outside of the circle of warm, orange light created by the little campfire.  He saw the two figures seated across from each other on either side of the fire, wearing their cloaks and keeping their eyes on the road nearby.  Of course, the hob wasn’t coming from the direction of the road.  That would have been crazy.

He slowed his pace a bit and jogged up to the campfire.  His little hob feet were as silent as shadows on the soft, grassy ground, but the outlandish colors of his clothing gave him away quite quickly.  The two figures snapped erect, their hands going beneath their cloaks and ready to draw steel.

“It’s me,” the hob said quickly, scampering up to the fire.

“Oh, Wil,” said the figure on the left.  This man was by far the smaller of the two, and his voice had a distinctly Edannese lilt to it.  “We were beginning to worry.”

The other figure, a very large, bulky fellow, said nothing. 

“We gotta go, Eorian,” Wil said.  “Right now.”

“Not again,” said the very large figure, shaking his broad, hooded head.

“The festival was pretty much finished anyhow, Durok,” Wil muttered, moving towards the horses.  “I think we tapped that keg dry.”

“True enough,” said Eorian, pulling back his hood.  He had very long, black hair, tied away from his narrow, handsome face in the fashion of the elven people.  He was broader and stockier than a true elf, and his ears were small and round like a human’s, but his face looked distinctly elven.  He trotted over to his horse as he spoke, getting it ready for a hard, fast ride.  “But please, Wil… tell me that is not another rooster beneath your cloak.”

The squirming bundle beneath Wil’s arms uttered a cluck of protest.  That was answer enough for anyone.

“Father of hell,” Durok grumbled, drawing back his own hood and revealing his shaved and tattooed scalp.  Like Eorian, he was of mixed blood; he had the fierce mien and massive, powerful build of an orc, but his nose had a small, fleshy point and his lower canines were too stubby to be considered proper orcish tusks.  His skin was gray; not greenish like an orc’s and not brownish or pinkish like a human’s, but somewhere in between.  He had a great, bushy beard framing his jaw, and his thick black eyebrows were drawn together over his deep-set, mud-brown eyes.  “That’s the fifth damn time.”

“I really think this is the one,” Wil said urgently.  He dashed over to Durok, who lifted him up and set him on the back of his big grey steed, Thunder.  Durok climbed up into the saddle and spurred the big animal into action, snapping the reins.

“You said that the last four times as well,” Eorian called from behind.  His roan stallion, Windracer, was quicker than the orc’s, but Eorian never pushed his mount as hard as Durok pushed Thunder.

“Well, this time, I’m really really sure,” said Wil confidently.  He held onto Durok’s cloak with his left hand and secured his stolen fowl with his right.  “You’ll see tomorrow.  Just you wait!”

They rode for several hours, stopping to rest just before dawn.  They were all too tired to count the previous day’s earnings, so they sacked out on the ground.  Wil collared his kidnapped rooster before he lay down, tethering it to a nearby bush.

It was afternoon by the time they woke up.  They had slept through the rooster’s crowing at first light, and through the subsequent crowings throughout the day.  It had been a long, exhausting week, and the Midsummer Feast in Bixtry had been an excellent cap.  It had been as much fun as it had been profitable.

When Wil woke up, the very first thing he did was check on his rooster.  It was scratching around in the dirt beneath the bush, acting perfectly ordinary.  There was absolutely no indication that this particular rooster was special or magical in any way.  Wil was a little bit dismayed but not entirely put off; it would be a cold day in the hottest part of hell before Wil Magee could be anything like completely dispirited.  He had been damned close a couple of times, and one time he was within touching distance of abject, hopeless despair, but it took a lot more than an ordinary, non-magical rooster to really give him pause.

“Is it the one, Wil?” asked Eorian from his bedroll.  He yawned widely and sat up, looking over at the hunkered-down hob and smiling faintly.  This was further evidence of his racial admixture: true elves did not require sleep.

“Well, it certainly seemed that way last night,” said Wil, rising from his crouch.  He was still wearing that conspicuous patchwork outfit, though it was a little dirty now from sleeping all night on the ground.  “But I guess this isn’t him.”

“We can eat him, then,” said Durok grumpily.  He climbed out of his sleeping bag and had a good, long stretch.  He was wearing only his breechcloth, and almost all of his tattoos — he was covered from head to toe, in a variety of different styles — were visible now, stretching over his massive warrior’s muscles.  Durok was easily the biggest person Wil had ever seen in his life, almost seven feet tall and so wide across the shoulders that Wil could lay across them with room to spare at either end.  He knew this because he had tested the theory one night while the big warrior had been sleeping.

“What made you so certain that this was the one, Wil?” asked Eorian, drawing on a pair of green linen trousers.  His deep green eyes glittered like emeralds, a smile within the smile he wore on his handsome, angular face.

Wil looked down at the rooster.  Now that he saw it in the daylight, he couldn’t really recall why this one had caught his attention so.  It was a rather ordinary rooster with golden-brown feathers and a long, dark, curling tail.  It was actually a little small for the breed, just like Wil.

“Oh!” he said suddenly, the memory slapping back into his brain.  He turned to his friends with a wide, proud smile on his face.  “The owner said his name is Golden Boy.  He’s a prize winner!”

Durok stared down at the rooster with a slightly contemptuous look on his face.

“Wil,” he growled.  “Look how his comb and wattles are trimmed to almost nothing.  See the sharpened spurs?  The scars on his face?  This is a prize-winning rooster, alright.  I bet he’s won a great many cock fights.”

Wil looked down at the rooster again, his proud smile fading away quite quickly.  If anyone knew how to spot a fighter, it was Durok.  And now that these things were pointed out to him, Wil felt rather foolish for not having noticed them earlier.

“Hrm,” he mused quietly.  “Bugger.”

Durok grunted his disapproval.

“I imagine he’s no good for eating, either,” he muttered.  “He’ll be all stringy and tough, no matter how well you season him.  Might as well let the damned thing go.”

“We could try to sell it,” Eorian suggested.  “Keep it for a while until we get a few towns away and sell it to a gambler or the like.  We might even make some real money from the deal if we let Wil do the bargaining.”

“Maybe,” said Durok.  “The hob can sell kindling to a man who’s house is burning down.”  He paused a moment, regarding Wil and the stolen rooster, then shook his head.  “No.  The bird is a liability.  I don’t intend to go back to jail for another goddamn stolen chicken.”

“Durok’s right.  We oughtta let the poor little fella go,” Wil said.  He undid the little leash from the rooster’s neck, calming the disturbed bird as his fingers worked.  The rooster flapped his wings and dashed a few steps away, and then stopped once again to scratch at the dirt, ignoring his captors in favor of bugs and seeds.

“Go free, little buddy,” Wil said, standing up and dusting off his knees.  “No more fighting for you.”

“We’d best get a move on,” said Durok, bundling up his gear.  “Next town is nearly twenty miles from here.”

“Aye,” said Wil, watching the rooster with a strange, sad expression on his face.  He couldn’t help but feel some kind of weird kinship with the misplaced bird.  He turned away slowly and began packing his gear.

All of the stories written here will take place on a continent called Arnsmul.  This is a “sword & sorcery” world modeled after innumerable other such worlds, with mythologies, creatures and cultures drawn from various medieval occidental and oriental lore.  There are European-style castles and governments and militaries, though these references will generally be very broad and indirect.

Magic plays an important role in society, as significant as technology and religion.  The Merle Chronicles will not have all that much magic in them, but other stories will deal with magic in some detail.  Magic is a strange and mysterious creature in Arnsmul, and its practitioners are figures of myth and legend: wandering mystics and wisemen who are at once reviled and worshipped.  These men commune with devils and spirits, and have the ability to shape the elements with fleeting gestures and strange incantations.  Most magic is quite subtle, and a great many people know at least a few minor feits and spells.  True wizards, however, with the power to immolate their enemies in magical fire and conjure up great demons from the Hells, are rare indeed.

The Merle Chronicles take place in the kingdom of Weiral, the westernmost nation on the continent.   Weiral is a large nation with diverse terrain and is largely populated by humans living in fortified cities and large rural communities. 

To the south is Arwei, a nation ruled by a man who claims to be a living god.  Arwei is most famous for its southern port towns, which are havens for pirates and smugglers. 

Norric is the northernmost nation, ruled by a hereditary king and his council of advisors.  Norrician people are known for being rather severe and uncompromising. 

To the east lies the nation of Edann, ruled by the elves.  The Edannese are reclusive and mysterious to the denizens of other lands.

In the heart of Arnsmul is a region known as the Black Hills.  This is a large area of rolling hills, rough mountains and vast plains, and consists of numerous tribal lands and independent communities of hob farmers who refuse to take part in the human-style politics of the other nations.  There are few towns in the Black Hills.

 To Be Continued…

I will be posting original short works of fiction here.  They will be in the form of serial short stories based in a “swords & sorcery” type fantasy world and feature recurring charcters.  These characters were born out of online roleplaying games, but my goal is to remove them from that proprietary setting and give them a home of their own.  Read on and enjoy.