We were playing a different game. Beau had set this stage and I was his stooge. I knelt at his feet in the mud of where I’d entered this world. I held his injured hand in mine and was being forced to heal him from the damage I’d done or be punished by the crowd at his back. This solution had been laid upon me by my own tank. This was the very definition of an epic defeat.
I could feel the loss. The very mana around us pulsed with it. I was on the very edge of defeat. I also thought I couldn’t heal him. Healing his hand would allow him to play again and he’d get enough health back that I couldn’t win that way either. I couldn’t win trying to beat down his health. I certainly couldn’t win by turning the crowd back against him. He’d painted me into a no-win scenario and yet the system hadn’t declared him the winner yet.
It was an uncomfortable silence as I debated options. I could only think of Auntie Mame. Please consider this a shameless plug for a very old movie that is so classic that I think it should be required viewing for every human on the planet with half a brain. Not the musical. That one is okay but it’s not the classic. Mame, a classical dame to her very core, had been painted into a corner more than once in her life. All I had to do was think, what would Mame do?
“Come to think of it, I’ve always been stronger on my knees.” I looked up at Beau through my lashes and saw him shudder at what he saw there. While Beau knew exactly what I’d said, and probably had a really good idea of what I meant, I have found, in my life, that when you say something that doesn’t fit into the conversation, people like to ignore it or simply replace it with whatever they want to hear. I’d tested it several times. I don’t know and don’t care what people thought I’d said, but none of them blinked at it.
“I’m okay,” he tried to pull his hand out of mine, but I held it firmly. I was channeling one of my favorite heroes now. The crowd tensed to come to his defense, confusion at the words undone by the tone of threat that emerged.
“I’ll heal you, kind sire,” I purred out. “I’m terribly sorry for my outburst.”
I softened the stone in his hand but laced the mana with the same poison the rabbit had used. It was just mana. Beau might have been able to weave the emotions of people, but I had learned to modify mana.
Spell Learned: Mild Poison
Beau flinched, but his hand looked beautiful, so he didn’t complain. He brandished his beautiful hand, “See? She was just confused, poor thing. No harm done. Let’s go sing some happier songs.” He strummed out his healing song with his beautiful hand. Now that he was the hero again, all was right in the world around us both. Fury boiled in my stomach like spoiled shellfish, but I kept it on a leash.
“Please sir,” I grabbed at his arm, stalling his song. He turned my action into his own of helping me up out of the dirt. “I’ve done something so terrible. Let me make it up to you.”
“No need,” he tried to shake me off, but I hung on, letting my eyes empty of all cleverness, as if I were now completely charmed.
“Oh, but I insist,” I hung on him as he’d always wanted me to. “I’m just a simple girl, really, but I can at least clean you up a bit.”
He shook harder and the crowd began to notice, so I let him go. Could I beat him at his own game? Without music on my side? Maybe not, but I could set the poison so that it did the job for me. Could he continue to play and be charming while swooning from it? I didn’t know, but since it was the only thing working in my favor, I used it.
“I can mend your clothes,” I sang sweetly, pulling at his puffy sleeve. My repair spell was laced with the poison.
Mild Poison +1
“I’m fine, really,” he played beautifully, but I could see he was starting to sweat.
“I can clean them for you too,” I insisted, patting at the frills on his vest. His clothing became spotless while his mana turned just a bit more gray.
“My wife wouldn’t like me playing around this way, dear girl,” he berated me loudly. “Please. I’ve been patient, but I’m just not that kind of guy.”
Mild Poison +1
“You’re right, of course,” I let him go with a whimpering pout. “It’s just that you’d made me so many promises before you told me of your wife and child.”
And the tide began to turn. I could play the soap opera with a dozen lies. I could turn him into the villain. I could. I’d just have to lie. Lie like he had lied. Lie like the rest of the world did. Lie to them and lie to myself afterward to justify it. It wasn’t like I was bad at lies. I knew how to lie with the best of them, except… I wanted to be better than that. Did I have to sacrifice my integrity to win? And if I did, had I won? I let it go. It was hard, but there had to be another way.
Will +1
“Nonsense,” he protested more to the crowd than me. “The poor girl is senseless.”
“Senseless,” I agreed with him.
I didn’t know how else to twist that knife. The poison was working down his health, but it wasn’t fast. Would I even win if he died a martyr? I’d likely be run out of town, tarred and feathered, if he fell now. I was wracking my brain for more fodder as we all walked back into the tavern. I trailed behind.
Beau, the Bard – Level 10 (Health 90/320) (Mana 90/280)
What was an epic defeat anyway? If I asked Sammi, would they answer? I didn’t bother. The rules had been twisted to allow Beau to get to me long before he was supposed to, so they wouldn’t help me now. One didn’t beat a cheater by the rules.
“I tried to bite him, but he almost fell on me,” Terra told me, her sweet voice a balm.
“You did fine,” I reassured her, reaching low to pet her. “I wouldn’t want you to get hurt anyway.”
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“I should have let him kick me,” she sulked prettily. “The crowd would have turned on him then, for sure.”
“You’d think,” I muttered, thinking that what applied to dogs, didn’t necessarily apply to cats in stories.
I was the last one into the kitchen. In the dim hearth light on the back stairs, I caught Lily and Chester arguing. “I told you to do something, but I didn’t mean that!” she seethed at him.
“What did you want me to do?” he squeaked out in a hushed tone. “The crowd was all against her!”
“He’s right,” I admitted, startling them both into silence.
“I’m so sorry,” Lily rushed to my side, careful not to bump into Terra.
“No, he’s right,” I patted the hand she laid on my shoulder. “I didn’t realize I was fighting the wrong fight.”
“We still hate him, don’t we?” Lily insisted, sending a glare at Chester.
I admired her loyalty. I didn’t even really fault Chester. He was a knight in shining armor type. He could only do the honorable thing, no matter how misguided. It made me really miss my husband. My husband would have socked Beau right in the jaw and kept hitting until Beau was a bloody mess of bodily tissue while I held off the crowd. My daughter would have scratched his eyes out and stolen his hat as she stomped on his lifeless corpse. My best friend was one of these knights though, and he would have done just what Chester had done. He’d have rushed in to dissolve and distract from the situation. This is why we didn’t allow that best friend of mine to fight for or against me.
“I don’t blame you, Chester,” I said, liking how the honesty felt coming out of my mouth. I was glad I hadn’t sunk lower in the Beau game. “He’s tricky. But, can I ask you not to go back in there?”
“Uh, sure,” Chester hung his head like I’d grounded him. I rolled my eyes at Lily, who also looked a bit guilty.
“We just don’t know how to help,” she admitted glumly, her hands flopping uselessly at her sides.
“This has got to be a personal battle,” I told her. Beau might not have followed the rules, but I did. I might still warp the rules into pretzels the way no knight ever could, but I still followed them to their messed up letters. “Just go somewhere else, so that he can’t use you against me again.”
I could see the hurt in her eyes, but she nodded, “We’ll be out back in case they try that pig thing again. We can at least stop that.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her how much worse Chester had made it. Some part of me knew exactly how close I’d come to epic defeat. I needed to get back into the fight before he got a bigger toehold on victory. I flicked my hands in a shooing motion to get them out the back door. With a resigned sigh, I headed back into the main room.
It was a party in the tavern, and I would have felt more defeated except that Beau was barely keeping his health levelled off by twisting the healing song into the lively jig he was playing. Mabel shot me a glare from the other end of the bar, but I mouthed an apology, and she turned back to just grumpy. For the rest of this fight, she was not my friend. If possible, I’d fix that later. If not, I’d find another perfect place to live. I had to face that I didn’t have any friends. Not really. There wasn’t a person here who wouldn’t twist whatever happened to me into a fairy tale that made them feel it was justified. It just ached so badly. It didn’t matter how good of a person you tried to be, the story would always be twisted so that someone else won.
People were dancing to Beau’s merry tune and didn’t even notice me walk in except for Mabel. Marlo had shown up and was bustling to bring out bowls of rabbit pot pie. Marlo’s besotted eyes never left Beau for more than a second. There was a much larger crowd now. I sank down on a stool and sulked, my mind churning for any idea that could get me out of this. It looked hopeless. It wasn’t an uncommon feeling for me, but it was unwelcome.
The more people danced, the more Beau’s health rebounded from my machinations. I silently kept casting the poison to keep his health below a hundred, but he had enough will to perform through it as if nothing was wrong. It was sickening. I also knew that even as I was groping around in my own mind for strategy, he was already enacting the next section of his plans. He’d had three nemeses to practice on before me.
He was still winning somehow, and I just didn’t understand the rules enough to know how. How were these people so enthralled with him? I was like a Stevie Nicks fan at a Taylor Swift concert. I wanted a mosh pit, some stomping, and to rock out my angst in a rebellious riot. This was… not that. It wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t… that.
I thought about music and watched how it affected the mana in the room. As it stood, if I focused just right, I could see that he owned most of the mana in the room. I didn’t need any more mana, so I wasn’t fighting for any more than I had. I didn’t want to overcharge. That wasn’t to say that he had that mana in his mana pool. In fact, his mana was about to bottom out. It was just that the free mana in the room seemed to resonate more with Taylor Swift instead of Stevie Nicks.
There was something in what I was seeing, I just hadn’t figured it out yet. I was working on it, while I waited to see what would happen when his mana bottomed out. Would he still control the crowd with his mana depleted? If there was a time to attack again, it would be then. I waited and lightly petted Terra, who sat next to me on the bar glaring at Beau. She could get away with it. I had to sit back and pretend I was happy about it all.
“Ah ha!” Beau shouted out, strumming the end of that song. “I can’t sing another note without libations!” He fell back onto his stool with a dramatic groan.
People fell all over themselves to buy him ale. Marlo had two on the table nearest him, and another five on a tray before I’d even blinked. It was like they’d practiced the move. Maybe they had, last night. Beau took an ale and downed it happily, and I found out what his version of Terra was. Every sip of ale gave him a surge of mana. He downed his second one staring me in the eyes with a huge grin on his face. He’d known what I was waiting for.
“Mabel, Marlo,” he called out gayly, pointing at me with his empty mug. “An ale on me for my poor girl in the corner.”
Several people scowled, but Mabel set the ale down at my elbow and gave me a stern look as if I was bound to rebel somehow. I rolled my eyes at him and lifted the mug in a salute. I wasn’t stupid enough to drink it, but I could pretend to be a good sport about it, just like I’d pretended to take a bite of my rabbit pot pie earlier.
“And pie for my foe,” I called back, pulling out a copper coin for the pie.
“Pie?” came a call from around the room. “There’s pie?”
“Cherry pie!” I asserted loudly, smacking my lips dramatically.
If he could win them over with song, I could ply them with pie. It wouldn’t help enough, but it was something. At least it made folks less hostile toward me. A half hour later Beau hadn’t touched his pie, but I really couldn’t blame him. He had no idea how I was continuing to poison him, but I’d managed to change the general attitudes toward me from hated to tolerated and still keep his health down below a hundred. I had even managed to light his pants on fire twice with a surreptitious cast of Flare made to look like it came from the fire behind him.
Beau was not amused. Whatever he’d planned, I didn’t think he’d expected me to last this long. Maybe none of the other nemeses had, but I wanted to flatter myself by thinking that I’d at least foiled him into a stalemate so far. Was there a time limit? Would there come a point when the winner was declared as the one with the most of something at a certain time. Who would judge?
After another round of drinks, I finally saw Beau change tactics and become the aggressor. It was still very subtle. The poor helpless bard of his stories became the heroic savior against overwhelming evil. The problem with this tactic was that it didn’t change what I was doing in the slightest. It also didn’t egg me into doing something stupid. I was waiting for him to do something stupid, and he was waiting for me to do the same. In the meantime, he got experience from his playing, and I got experience from every plate of food delivered to a crowd made hungrier by his performance.
Again, we had a stalemate. He had the hearts of the people, and he had charge of the ambient mana. I had his health in the palm of my hand. I’d taken him down to single digits once just to see if I could. His breathing had become labored enough for someone to suggest he quit for the night, but he had stubbornly said, “The show must go on!”