Brown River Queen (10 page)

Darla beat me home. She was sitting on our porch swing, a cup of chamomile tea steaming in her hands, when the cab dropped me off at the curb.

Our neighbors were outdoors as well. The man of the house was watering their new rosebushes while his lady critiqued his pouring style. Darla hid her grin behind her cup.

“Well, if it isn’t my favorite husband,” she said, patting the seat beside her in invitation. “How was your day?”

I could smell soup cooking inside. I sat and my stomach rumbled audibly.

“Oh, lunch with the Regent, croquet in the Park, that sort of thing,” I said. “Deadly dull, I’m afraid.”

Darla nodded, all smiles. “So that wasn’t you who was attacked by a woman, saved by an Ogre, and hauled off to jail right after?”

“I’m glad you and Gertriss stay in touch.”

“She’s worried sick.” Darla balanced her empty cup carefully on the windowsill and settled close beside me. “I told her not to worry—that you had a plan, that you weren’t just stumbling through trouble hoping it all goes away. Was I wrong about that, dearest? Please tell me I wasn’t wrong.”

“Me? Stumble? Hope? You know better than that. I was in fact lying in wait for that crazed woman, knowing a pair of sturdy Ogres stood vigilant nearby.”

She pinched me.

“Ouch.”

“That’s for fibbing. Darling. Honey. Light of my life. You didn’t even draw your sword?”

“Honest, hon. I knew the Ogres would be getting involved. If they’d found me with Toadsticker drawn, facing a woman, they’d have raised their formidable Ogre fists and clobbered me first.”

She sighed. “That’s why they’re sending women, you know. Because they know you’ll hesitate.”

“Maybe I did the first time. But I didn’t today, and I won’t again.”

“You’d better not. I certainly won’t.” She stood before I could speak. “Supper is ready. Are you hungry?”

“Famished. The Regent sets a poor table for lunch. Nothing but tiny little sandwiches and parsley.”

“Still better than a tin cup of gruel at the Old Ruth.”

I stood and offered Darla my arm.

“Gertriss talks too much.”

“My husband talks too little.”

“Nonsense. I wished you a good morning just last Tuesday.”

I opened our door like a gentleman, and locked it tight behind.

Darla washes. I dry.

We both kept an eye on the kitchen window above the sink. The window looks out on the tiny fenced yard in the back of our house. There’s a poplar tree and a struggling young blood-oak back there. Darla wants a gazebo. I’m not sure what we’ll do with a gazebo but one of these days I’ll hire a couple of carpenters and we’ll build one where the poplar can shade it in fifteen years, if it hurries.

The sun set as I dried the last cup. Darla closed the kitchen window’s wooden shutters and locked them tight. I reflected that a single half-hearted punch would rip the latch apart and probably tear the shutters out of their frame as well.

“Did Gertriss mention Evis and his offer of a room half a mile under Avalante?”

Darla nodded. “I’ll not be chased out of our home by any crazed floozy,” she said.

“She was a floozy? I had no idea. How can one tell? Purely in the spirit of inquiry, that is.”

Darla used another word I’d never heard her pronounce.
 

“Such language,” I said.
 

“Would you be a dear and lock the rest of the windows, hon?” She reached into her apron pocket and withdrew a shiny silver revolver, a near twin to the inky black one I was waiting to give her. “I want to change and get ready for bed. Or battle. Whichever comes first.”

“Where did you get that?”

“Gertriss, of course. Isn’t it lovely? Much smaller than that clumsy cannon they gave you.”

I reached into my own pockets and put both black Mark Twos on the kitchen table.

“Evis sent these today. Belated wedding presents—”

Darla squealed—which she almost never does—pocketed her shiny gun, and snatched up both the Twos. “Ooh, I like these! I’ll take this one,” she said, bringing the one in her right hand up to a firing position. “Did you bring ammunition, too?”

“Indeed, sweetums.” I lowered her arm and stole a kiss. “My wife, the artillery woman.”

“I have to be, married to you.” She kissed me back and slipped out of my grasp. “I’ll be right back. If you shoot any magical assassins, make sure they’re not standing on my good red rug.”

“Yes, dear.”
 

She made for the bedroom, and I set about closing windows and locking shutters against whatever the night might bring.

Night took her time.

We listened to the neighbors for a while. They had company—two other couples—and they were all on their porch, laughing and talking and putting a couple or three bottles of red wine to good use.
 

They were indoors and quiet when the Brass Bell rang out, soft and nearly inaudible in the distance. Darla stretched out on the sofa and pretended to sleep, her hands full of guns. I took the claw-footed chair by her head and turned it so it faced our door and laid into my old Army knife with a whetstone.

The hours crept by, sock-foot and sneaky. Midnight, then one o’clock, then two. I heard Darla’s breathing change right after two and I let her sleep.
 

Three o’clock, shouted a distant Watchman. Three o’clock, and all is well.

The hairs on the back of my neck disagreed. The only sounds I’d heard were the ones every house makes when no one is stirring. Rafters creak, soft as a whisper. Joists stretch and groan. Floorboards pop, all with hardly more volume than the tread of a beetle.

Outside, nothing sinister stirred in the moonless shadows beyond my front window. An owl hooted softly. Someone’s dog yapped. I should have felt safe and secure.

But I didn’t. The air took on that peculiar breathless stillness that heralds storms. We’d all learned to pick out that stillness during the War. Sometimes it was all that saved us because the Trolls moved like shadows, silent and untiring and always, always deadly.

I put down my knife and took up my big old blunderbuss of a four-shot revolver. Maybe the new one was smaller and faster, but there was something comforting about holding a big, heavy cannon when you feel death ambling toward your door.

Darla’s eyes opened suddenly, two points of light glinting in the candlelight.

I blew out the candle and we waited in the dark.

We didn’t wait long. Two minutes, maybe three, and we heard footsteps beyond the yard, out on the sidewalk.
 

Light, small treads. With the click of heels and the dainty scrape of a woman’s fancy shoe.

I tried to count feet and divide by two, got lost somewhere in the teens. Darla mouthed the word “fifteen“ at me and sat up, facing our door.

Outside, someone tried the gate. I’d locked it. She pushed. Iron scraped and groaned and gave with a sharp rasping snap.

And then they came, in no hurry at all, down our cobblestone walk and up the three wooden steps to our porch and across it right to our door.

They gathered there, spreading out across the porch, silhouetting themselves in our windows as darker shadows against the night.

They did not speak. They could not.
 

One laid her pale hand on my door, turned the knob, and began to push.

I rose. Darla did as well. I motioned her to stay behind me and I made my way quickly to the door. I know which floorboards creak. I made it without treading on one.

The shadows at the windows moved, converging on the door that was straining in its frame.

I put the barrel of my four-shooter right against the door, just where a petite woman’s forehead should be, and I squeezed the trigger.

The gun roared like thunder. The pressure on the door eased, but only for an instant, and I felt the door strain as many more hands fell upon it and pushed.

I emptied the remaining three rounds into the door. If one of the women fell, she did so without any fuss, and without reducing the pressure on my door frame, which was beginning to pull away from the wall.

Darla came rushing in from the hall. “There are more at the back,” she said, her voice a tad too calm. “They aren’t trying to force the door, but I can see four of them waiting there.”

“They have weapons?”

“I think so.”

“Probably poisoned. They’re hoping we’ll make a break out the back, get nicked. Then all they have to do is wait.”

Glass broke in front of us. A hand reached in, perfect fingernails scratching against the shutter, trying to find the latch.

Darla fired. The wounded hand withdrew, but more glass began to shatter and the shutters began to shake.

I shoved the empty gun in my pocket and grabbed a loaded one. “Pantry,” I said, grabbing Darla’s elbow. “No windows there.”

She spun out of my grasp.

“You’re not locking me away in any pantry, Mr. Markhat.” She took aim at something behind me and fired. “This is my house they’re defiling.”

I opened my mouth to explain that it was me they were after, me they wanted. Just me. If I made a dive through a window and took off running, it would be me they’d chase.

But before I got the first word out, the front door gave, slamming open like a gunshot and letting in a crowd of smiling, well-coifed ladies.

Each held a blade. Kitchen knives, fancy daggers, even a silver letter opener. Each was silent.

None hesitated, not even for an instant.

Darla and I emptied our guns. Between us, we managed to bring down six of the smiling women, which left nine converging on us, their smiles never wavering.

The back door splintered and gave. I shoved Darla toward the kitchen. Toadsticker and I got lucky and took away the fingers holding the knife that was speeding toward my gut.

Dainty feet crushed broken glass in the hall.
 

“Go!” I said.

Damned if Darla didn’t shut the kitchen door,
 
put it to her back, and pop the cylinder out of her revolver to start filling it with rounds.

Three black-haired beauties rushed me.
 

I slashed at the foremost. She stepped nimbly away from Toadsticker and her twin darted in behind my blade. I heard Darla’s gun clicking as she struggled to seat the cylinder. I knew, even as I threw up my left arm and charged, that I was about to find out exactly what kind of poison they smeared on their blades.

The smiling women might have solid bones and extra muscle, but I’d spent the years since the war drinking good honest beer and dining on the finest ham sandwiches One-eyed Eddie had to offer. I hit them hard and lashed out with my legs and grabbed hair with one hand and flailed away with Toadsticker in the other, and we all went down in a tangle of blades and elbows and knees.

I got in a good solid stab with Toadsticker. I slammed another head hard against the floor. Then I rolled and leaped and hit a wall and managed to come to my feet about the time Darla opened up again, dropping four more brunettes before going empty.

It only took a few heartbeats for the numbness to spread. I stumbled, put my hand down to my gut. It came away sticky and wet and warm.

I hadn’t even felt her cut me.

“Damn,” I said. I felt movement behind me, so I whirled Toadsticker in a wide arc at petite head level. Toadsticker bit, connecting with something solid.

She went down.

I managed three steps toward Darla before my legs just gave up and folded.

“Sorry about the rug,” I heard myself say. “Maybe Mama knows a magic laundry spell.”

The dark room got suddenly darker. I heard, as from a great distance, Darla shout my name. And I saw, dimly, shapes move in the shadows, circling me, wary and silent and in no hurry at all.

I realized I was face-down on the rug, and I pushed myself up, heard the rustling of fancy black gowns.

Darla snatched Toadsticker out of my hand.

And then came the scream.

We all heard it, even the quiet ladies with their perpetual smiles and their shiny bright knives. It was a peculiar sort of scream—one that started out small and distant and faint, but quickly grew into a breathless, ear-piercing howl that, impossibly, managed to sound from a place directly behind you, moving with you if you turned.

I struggled to remember where I’d heard that scream before as the numbness spread to my chest and began to inch and ooze its way up my neck.

The smiling women’s skirts grew still. They no longer walked. A tiny portion of my mind recognized this as a very good thing, though I couldn’t place the significance in context just yet.

Buttercup appeared in front of me, her tiny hands lifted, her small but powerful banshee lungs filling the room with a keening, rising howl that filled every nook and cranny until the volume threatened to make your ears burst and bleed.