Ch 10: AFTER THE WYRM'S DEFEAT
The impact with the wall knocked the air from his lungs. For a second, Marten couldn’t move, trying to catch his breath. In that second, the wyrm was on him, crushing him between two coils, intending to either break all his bones or smear him into paste. Snaking its head around, it searched for him, half blind from the shears and mostly blind above ground to begin with. Marten held still as the wyrm sucked in air through wide nostrils and an open mouth, tongue flicking out as it scented for him. The knight was sealed up in metal; it wouldn’t take much effort to zero in on Marten, instead.
The wyrm came for him as Marten pushed himself to hands and knees with a gasp, the beast’s open mouth huge and bristling with tiny teeth like some horrible ocean fish. He flattened himself to the wall—the teeth snapped shut an inch from his face—and Fionnobhar leapt onto the wyrm’s back to loom over it, sword raised high in an arc, and swung down against its neck, right under the jaw.
He decapitated the wyrm in three blows, hacking through thick muscle like chopping down a tree, until the head finally toppled off to land at Marten’s feet in a pool of thick, clear liquid slime.
“Good job,” said Fionnobhar, the smile evident in his voice. “Look at that! You really got him with those things, huh? You’re a natural.”
At Marten’s feet, the sheep shears stuck out of the wyrm’s eye at an ugly angle.
“Made my part easier, I’ll tell you that. Good work, team.”
Fionnobhar held up one hand, waving it insistently until Marten stepped forward to clap his palm to the knight’s armored one.
“Fuck yeah,” Fionnobhar said happily, giving the head a nudge with his pointed toe.
“Is it dead?” Jon called nervously. “The tail’s still twitching.”
“It’s super dead,” Fionnobhar confirmed, reaching into the wyrm’s mouth to pick up the head like a hooked fish. Carrying it, he made his way out of the tangle of coils and mess of slippery fluids to join the farmer, where Fionnobhar had left his bag and his pack.
“Thank you,” Jon said reverently, as Fionnobhar stuffed the head into his bag of holding alongside his previous kills. “I can’t pay for your services, but I can offer room and board. There’s no bounty for the brute, obviously, since no one bloody believed me. Well—except for the witch, but her vote hardly helped my case.”
“What witch?” Fionnobhar asked, looking up from his bag to hone in on the farmer.
“She lives on the other side of town, as old as the hills. Mad as a cat, that one, but she had my back on this. Sort of wish she didn’t.” Jon brightened as a thought occurred to him. “We should take the head to Town Hall! You can keep it, of course—you can keep the whole bloody wyrm, if you want it—but I absolutely have to prove my story to folk first. In fact, after Town Hall, you should drag that bloody thing all the way up to Lord Renmore’s castle to show him how these things ought to be handled. He wouldn’t even send a man to look at my farm or hear my story! Just dismissed the whole thing out of hand as a load of bull. Your lord, though, he’s clearly a much more responsible sort. He ought to give ours a good talking to. What did you say his name was?”
“I didn’t,” Fionnobhar said, straightening up and flexing one hand around his sword hilt. “I’m not here on behalf of any lord or king or princeling.”
“Oh.” Jon floundered for a beat. “Well, that says even more about your strength of character, doesn’t it? A knight who doesn’t even need to act on orders to take care of folk! Our lord could use a man such as yourself to knock some sense into his skull, I think. A reminder of how to treat the people in his care.”
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“I’m not really into local politics,” Fionnobhar replied, slinging his pack over his shoulders and taking up his bag of heads.
“Stopping by Town Hall to clear the man’s name isn’t too much trouble, surely,” Marten said.
“I’ve got a good shank of fresh mutton with your name on it, if you do,” Jon offered with eager desperation.
Fionnobhar relented in the face of a good meal. “Fine. Feed me, and I’ll stop by Town Hall this evening if you can muster a big enough crowd to make it worthwhile.”
“Yes! I'll put the meat on the fire, and I’ll make sure people know to come out tonight.”
“I’ll come with you,” Marten offered. “I may be able to lend you some credibility until your neighbors can see tangible proof of the wyrm.”
“Make sure you talk up my heroics, when you do,” Fionnobhar said as the farmer pried a handful of scales off the wyrm’s body. “I was pretty good, right? You have to tell everyone how impressive I was.”
“I will,” Marten said.
“I’m doing this for my lady, but I want her goddess to hear tales of my success long before that. Really hype me up.”
After the farmer got a hunk of sheep roasting over the kitchen fire, he and Marten left the knight to supervise the cooking as they headed out to spread the word of the wyrm’s vanquishing.
“Perhaps I should break the news to your neighbor,” Marten said to Jon in an undertone. “So as to avoid stirring up any additional bad blood between the two of you.”
The potato farmer did not take it particularly well.
“What do you mean the wyrm was real?” Reb demanded, throwing his trowel down in the dirt. His wife stood behind him, leaning on her shovel as she looked back and forth between Marten and the sheep farmer with keen interest. “I would have seen a great sodding wyrm by now, tearing up my fields all this time!”
“What do you call this, then?” Jon asked triumphantly, stepping around Marten to slap his handful of scales against Reb’s chest.
Reb looked at it disgustedly, his lip curled. “Fish skin? Get that filth off me.”
“Fish skin! It doesn’t even smell like fish!”
It did, a little, but that was beside the point.
“The creature’s carcass is on the property now,” Marten said, intervening, “and the knight is bringing its head to Town Hall this evening, for all to see. Either should be sufficient proof that your neighbor has been telling the truth, and that you can rest easy knowing the troubles to your fields have been put to a stop. If you don’t believe him, you can believe your own eyes, surely.”
“This town has never had a wyrm, in all its history,” Reb said, with an air of finality.
“Well, I want to see it,” his wife said, handing him her shovel to approach Jon. “You’ll show me this carcass, won’t you, Jon?”
“I’d be all too glad,” Jon replied, offering her his elbow as he shot his neighbor a rather smug look, causing Reb to sputter in outrage.
Marten wished he’d stayed back at the farm to tend the fire, and sent the knight out about town to clear the farmer’s name, instead. He didn’t know what god he had offended of late, but clearly, no good deed was to go unpunished.
“Just come to Town Hall this evening,” he advised tiredly.
With Jon heading back to his farm to show off to Reb’s wife, a situation Marten was decidedly not getting involved with, Marten made the rounds to a few more households on his own. The wyrm didn’t seem to have strayed far from either of those two farms, so the other villagers were more invested in the gossip and the feud between Jon and Reb than in actually seeing proof of any monster. Still, they were amenable to dropping by Town Hall later in the day, so Marten encouraged them to spread the word to more of their neighbors, and considered his job done well enough.
It was barely noon, but he was exhausted. Fighting a wyrm was one thing, but beyond that, he was still drained from his earlier fever. The wound on his neck throbbed under its bandage, telling him in no uncertain terms that such exertion had been a terrible idea. He would advise any patient in the same situation to rest. If any of his patients were starved, besieged by a plague or horde of bloodghasts, physically assaulted, bitten, and then underwent a surgery that led to fever and cauterization, he would have absolutely forbidden them to get out of bed for at least three days.
Instead, Marten had slept in the woods, and then got up and fought a dragon. He hadn’t sat down since breakfasting at the inn, and that rest had been all too brief. He wanted to sleep for a week, and he very much wanted it to be dreamless.
Standing on a worn cart-path between two farmsteads, he looked down at himself. His clothes were filthy, still muddy and bloodstained from Drummondville, now coated with the wyrm’s fluids on top of that. What he wanted even more than a week in bed, or at least, what he wanted before that, was to get cleaned up.