Kaz handed Li another piece of the meat pulled from the skewer Raff had just handed him. It was still sizzling, but the dragon ignored the heat, swallowing the chunk whole and then burping out a little cloud of steam.
Kaz’s nose wrinkled, and he waved his hand. That was something he hadn’t expected about taking on a human form. Scents in general weren’t as sharp and clear as they should be, but more importantly, smells that had never bothered him before - some of which he actually even enjoyed - were suddenly disgusting.
Beside him, Raff gave a little chuckle, and Kaz looked back at him. The large male had been unusually quiet since the encounter earlier in the day, and rather than telling jokes or even just muttering to himself, he now watched the fire and the others without speaking.
“Why did you give that female the gold?” Kaz asked, then felt his face heat. He hadn’t really meant to speak aloud, but the question had been bothering him ever since it happened. There was no doubt in his mind that the strange female would have accepted less, and Lianhua had given Raff a number of the little discs the humans used as trade items.
For a moment, it seemed that Raff wouldn’t answer, or would turn the question away with a vague reply, but then he rubbed his hand over the stubble of fur on his chin and said, “She was a friend, once.”
He smiled, just a bit, and shook his head. “More than a friend, actually, though probably not the way you’re thinkin’.”
Kaz blinked. Had she been a member of his tribe, then?
Raff saw Kaz’s confusion, and his booming laugh echoed out over the campsite, making Kyla and Lianhua look back at him. Lianhua had already eaten, and now she had half a dozen of her little books scattered around her, and was flipping through them as she made notes in a seventh. Kyla and Mei, on the other hand, were playing in the small stream they’d camped beside, catching the tiny fish that lived there and eating them.
Seeing their looks, Raff waved at them apologetically, and grinned at Kaz. “Y’look so human now, I have a hard time rememberin’ that you still don’t think like we do.” He sobered, turning a skewer over the fire stone slowly.
“My Da is an important man. ‘Bout as important as you get, short of the King and his immediate family. He sorta… Look, if just one kobold controlled all of the other kobolds in your mountain, that’d be the King. Or Queen, I guess, eh? Then there’d be chiefs like Idla, Avli, and little Gram. Beneath them’s the lower chiefs, like Ija’s supposed to be, and those Goldcoats. Da is sorta like Idla.”
Raff snorted. “Not a bad comparison, actually. Anyway, Da and Mom had three sons, one after another, and in Holiander, that’s all most nobles put in the effort to produce. Lot of ‘em don’t actually like each other enough to try for more. Not my parents, though.”
He rolled his eyes. “They had six sons, twice the necessary, which already included two backups, and then added on a daughter as well. Da was a busy man, and Mom spent half the year at sea, any year she wasn’t pregnant. I still think all the babies were Da’s way of keepin’ her home a little more.”
The skewer was nicely brown now, so Raff pulled it back and blew on the end before biting into it with as little disregard for the heat as Li had shown. He chewed, swallowed, then said, “Th’ first three boys got all the trainin’ they’d need to be right little lords, an’ the next two worked even harder than the first, tryin’ to prove their worth in a family that didn’t need ‘em. The sixth, though-”
He paused before closing one eye at Kaz, lowering his voice for the next two words, as if imparting a secret. “That’s me.”
Returning to his normal tone, Raff went on, “The sixth was the spittin’ image of his wanderin’ mother. He ditched lessons to fight imaginary beasts, and climbed trees to avoid his etiquette and dancing masters. His Da thought gettin’ married might settle him down, so as soon as he turned sixteen, he started pushing the lad to take a wife. In spite of the boy’s wild ways, many girls would have been happy to create a connection between their families and his, so…”
Raff shrugged, dropping the pretense that he was speaking of someone else. “I ran away. I tried to join one of the mercenary groups where other noble sons went to waste their youth, but Da let it be known that if they took me on, they’d get no more jobs from him or anyone associated with him. That mighta discouraged some, sent ‘em runnin’ home, but I just dug in my heels and went deeper.”
He took another bite, then another, momentarily lost in memories, but Kaz could sense that he wasn’t done, so he didn’t intrude on the human’s thoughts. Indeed, for all that Raff talked almost constantly, he never spoke about himself, at least not outside of a few humorous stories about his adventures in the Adamant Reach, whatever that actually was.
“I finally joined the Adamant Reach,” Raff said, a smile still playing around his mouth, “by pretendin’ to be a farm brat who had picked up some training from a retired soldier father. I was th’ lowest of the low, not trusted to take on even the simplest jobs by myself, and I had to ‘learn’ to read an’ write, since I was foolish enough to claim that I didn’t know how.”
He shook his head, threading more rabbit meat and some of Kaz’s gathered mushrooms onto his now empty skewer. “Ellie was in the party I joined when I was finally raised to copper rank. She was a few years older, an’ she came from exactly th’ sort of background I was pretendin’ to have. So I followed her around, copyin’ the way she walked, talked, drank, an’ gambled. She noticed pretty quick, an’ thought I had a crush on her.”
Seeing Kaz’s confused expression, Raff explained, “She thought I wanted to, uh, mate with her. An’ she was fascinatin’, in that way some women can be, but she turned me down flat. Walked on the other side of th’ street, y’know?”
Kaz shook his head, indicating that he didn’t know, and Raff rubbed his face again, muttering, “It’s gonna take longer to explain than it did to live it.” Sighing, he said bluntly, “She was attracted to women, not men. Do kobolds have folks like that?”
Relieved to have it explained, Kaz nodded almost eagerly. “Some kobolds, male and female alike, find companionship with members of their own sex. Some to the point where it becomes like a mate bond, and they choose not to take a mate, or, if they do, they only produce pups with that mate, and otherwise spend little time together. Those who choose not to mate at all often take in orphaned puppies, or pups from families who have too many to care for properly.”
Raff actually looked a little surprised. “Well, I guess you do know what I mean, then. Anyway, we became friends, an’ when I found out she was in trouble from gamblin’ too much, she gave me that look-” He fluttered his eyelashes at Kaz, who just nodded, choosing not to question yet another strange human custom.
“She talked me into stealin’ from the next merchant who hired us to guard their caravan. It wasn’t supposed to be much. Just enough t’ pay off her debt, eh? I kept watch while she snuck into the wagon carryin’ the gold, but that wily old bugger had a bedamned wyvern in there. Pellis-cursed lizard woke up the whole camp.”
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Kaz’s eyes were wide now, and he noticed that Kyla had crept up beside him. She, Mei, and Li were all watching the human with rapt attention. Raff looked around at his little audience and gave a twisted smile.
“D’you know what that woman did?” he asked, and they all shook their heads. Raff sighed. “She took all the blame. Said she acted alone, with never a mention of me, even when a few members of the Reach asked her directly. She covered for me. Gave me another chance, even though I knew full well what I was doing.”
He tilted his head back, staring up at the starry sky, with a sliver of a moon visible just above the treetops. “So, yesterday, I returned the favor. Finally. With that much gold, she could buy herself a home in the city. Not a nice one, mind you, but not in the slums, either. She can pay off whatever debts she has, an’ live quietly for a year or two, while she finds somethin’ else to do, and everyone forgets about ‘Two-face Ellie’.”
“But you had me injure her,” Kaz said, curiously. Raff had been very specific that if he called for Kaz to help him, he didn’t want that help to be lethal, but it should hurt.
“Mmm,” Raff agreed, eyeing his new skewer thoughtfully as it spun slowly. “Ellie was always stubborn as an ox. Give her money and health, an’ she’ll drink it away in a month. But with an injured hand? She can’t hold a weapon, so she can’t fight. Just might make her take a break, think for a bit, before she goes back to doin’ what she’s doin’.”
Kaz grimaced, wondering if he should mention that he was fairly certain the female had lost a good bit of her right thumb. She hadn’t made a sound when it happened, just clamped down on the injury with her other hand, but she wouldn’t be able to hold her weapon in the same way again. It probably didn’t need saying, though. Raff was experienced enough to have seen the same thing.
With a grin, Raff pulled his skewer back and offered it to Kyla, who was the only one who hadn’t had one yet. “Y’want one, puppy?” he asked. “Or did you manage to catch enough minnows to fill up after all?”
It looked a little underdone to Kaz, but Kyla accepted it, trying to look as if she was doing Raff a favor, rather than the other way around. “There were a lot of fish,” she said, “but I suppose it’s good to eat more than one thing. Ija always said we needed plants as well as meat.”
Kaz gave Li the last piece from his own skewer, which had been his third. He’d created a sort of sweet sauce by mashing up some berries and other plants Raff said were safe to eat, and the flavor complemented the meat and mushrooms. It was gone now, but there was still one rabbit remaining to be eaten.
Raff looked around at them. “If you’re all done, we should get some sleep. It’ll take a bit of work to break down that wagon in the morning.”
Kaz turned to look at the covered cart. It was made of wood and cloth, rather than bone and leather, but otherwise it was very similar to the carts in the mosui city and the Deep. The wooden wheels were flimsy compared to the carved stone ones he’d seen before, but they were also lighter, and probably easier to make.
“Why are we destroying the cart you traded for?” he asked. Raff had tried to explain it before, but he’d stopped halfway through and just said, “I’ll tell you later.” Well, it was later, and Kaz still hadn’t figured it out.
Raff groaned. “I’m tryin’ to be sneaky,” he admitted. “It’s not somethin’ I’m really good at, but hopefully it’ll work this time. Y’see, Ellie and her buddies are gonna be mad as wet hens about losin’ their wagon. They’ll tell everybody they know, an’ I guarantee, the King’s Guard has spies among the kind of folks Ellie calls friend now. There’s no way they won’t put together the description of our group and their lost horses, and figure out we’re the ones who bought the cart.”
Everyone nodded, and Raff went on.
“So the last thing we want to do is show up together, riding a wagon. What they won’t be expecting is a group on foot, with a couple of pack horses. Better yet, two or three small groups, if I can talk Lianhua into it. I want her an’ Chi Yincang to head in alone, lookin’ as fancy as fancy could be. You, me, an’ Kyla will go in with one or both horses, pretendin’ to be a family moving after our farm was lost in an incursion.”
He rubbed his chin. “Or maybe I’ll be a Mariner, fresh from the sea, only to find that my wife died while I was away, leavin’ my kids alone. Or-” He was clearly growing excited, but fortunately Lianhua broke in. At some point, she, too, had begun to listen to Raff’s story, and now she shook her head at the male.
“So your idea is to convince them to focus on groups of five or more, in a wagon. Then you’ll use me and Chi Yincang to cover your own entrance as a small, poor family. It’s not bad, as far as it goes, but how does that allow us to keep in touch?” she asked.
Raff pointed at Kyla, then Li. “We have two members who can go invisible, and Blue here can see through the eyes of one of ‘em. If the pretty little flower of the Empire makes a habit of going for walks in parks or somesuch, I reckon we can communicate well enough. You tell Li or Kyla whatever you find out, and we’ll use that to track down Jinn.”
“And the princess,” Lianhua said, brows rising.
Raff waved a hand dismissively. “Sure, the princess, too. Jinn’s been takin’ in wounded animals and lost souls since she was knee high to Blue here. I bet she decided to give her sweet, quiet little friend an adventure, and now they can’t figure out how to get back without everybody makin’ a big fuss.”
Kaz had a bad feeling things weren’t going to be that easy, but he didn’t have any better ideas, and from the looks of it, neither did Lianhua. She sighed and nodded, beginning to close her books and return them to her pouch.
“Well enough,” she said. “All I want at this point is a long, hot bath, and to see Yingtao.” Some indescribable emotion crossed her face, leaving her looking both excited and terribly worried. She stood up, shaking out her robe.
“I’m going to sleep,” she said. “Raff, how much longer until we reach Cliffcross?”
Raff had answered this already, but he said, “Tomorrow. Late.”
“Good,” Lianhua said, then, “I hope.”
Turning, she entered her tent, which was almost completely clear of the lingering scent of Kaz’s cultivation. He was still not, however, welcome inside.
Kyla gulped down the last bite of her meal, tossed away the stick, and scampered after her. Now that Kaz no longer looked or smelled like a kobold, the pup had taken to sleeping in the comfort of the tent, among piles of pillows and blankets.
Raff gave a snort, reaching out to pick up his fire stone, which was rapidly cooling now that it was no longer needed. “Guess it’s just you an’ me, then, Blue.”
Kaz glanced at Li, who looked back at him. “We’ll be there,” Kaz finally said, pointing at a nearby tree with broad, spreading branches.
The big male stood, tossing his stone from hand to hand. “You really like sleepin’ in trees?”
Not really, but Li did. She had convinced him to try it after Lianhua said Kaz was no longer welcome in the tent. He did feel safer above the ground, but he had nightmares of falling off, even though logically he knew it wasn’t far enough to seriously injure him any more.
Kaz shrugged, reaching up to stroke Li’s head, and Raff chuckled. “Hang on, then,” he said, and pulled out a length of fabric with ropes attached to each end. Holding it out, he said, “This is a hammock. You tie each end to a branch, then sleep in the middle. Kinda stretch it out, like this.”
Raff held his arms as far apart as he could, holding the ropes in his hands, until the fabric in between swayed gently in front of his chest. His grin was equal parts triumphant and sad. “I went on one trading run with my mother. Got sick as a dog, but I loved the hammocks the crew members slept in. She never let me go again, but I rigged one of these up in my room and slept in it for years.”
Kaz accepted the hammock, which was much heavier than he’d expected. The material was very sturdy, and the ropes looked like they could hold up under the weight of a dozen kobolds. “Thank you,” he said.
Raff waved him off. “It takes up a lot of space in my pouch, an’ I never use it any more. Might as well give it to someone who will. Now, I have to figure out where Chi Yincang is, so I can take a watch.”
Kaz pointed off to their right, where a blur of ki gave away the other male’s location. Raff waved a hand at his forehead in his odd farewell, and walked off, yipping quietly, then laughing at his own poor attempt at mimicking a kobold.