A desperate scramble swiftly followed Kythos’s entrance into the squalid backroom, and the once sophisticated gamblers instantly took on the demeanours of trapped rodents instead. Without pausing to even consider the situation, they charged through the tubheads threatening the room, knocking a few down in the scramble.

Thanks to the sudden confusion, Holsley had been a little slow on retreating with the herd and had now become trapped with the slobbish tiefling and his subordinates.

‘Arrest Fox!’ Kythos commanded to the tubheads still graciously on their feet. ‘And don’t—’

He stopped. The tiefling’s eyes fell upon Holsley for the first time, who, in response, gave him a small sheepish wave. They became larger, fiercer, and full of unbridled rage.

‘YOU!’ he shouted across the room with an accusing finger. ‘What are YOU doing here!?’

‘Uh, passing the time?’ Holsley offered with a slight shrug.

‘GET BOTH OF THEM!’

Fox was far more capable than Holsley, which was evident from what happened next. The graceful creature dove across the room, springing over the table, claws on full display, and landed a few strokes on multiple tubheads in a single motion. Then, he went on the attack. This sudden spring into action had the fortunate effect of drawing the attention away from Holsley.

Kythos wasn’t distracted, however, and he shot towards the young bard.

Holsley acted quickly. He ducked behind and then pushed the table over with as much might as he could muster. Dice, booze, and everything else were sent flying into the air, and the table’s sudden trajectory landed with a painful crack on the Lower Warden’s foot. Kythos let out a howl, quickly nursing his toe, and was subsequently bowled over when he fell against another tubhead who had fallen in the scramble.

Holsley had seconds.

Running on pure instinct, he swept up his lute, fumbled for the ring, grabbed his leather pouch, and made a mad dash towards the door. A quick hop over a disgruntled Kythos and through his tubhead subordinates was all it took for him to stumble out of the doorway and into the ensuing chaos.

Everywhere he looked, he saw the betraying helmets and plate uniforms of the guards fighting against the lithe scoundrels of the Crooked Hat Inn. Maces were thrown about, daggers were brought up, and people rushed hither and thither. Holsley took it in for a second and then just ran and ran fast, dodging more blows and slices than he had ever been thrown at him before.

One tubhead saw the young bard and brought his mace around to meet him. The bard, who had been paying just about the right amount of attention to his surroundings, ducked the blow by falling to his knees. Good thing he’d done that, too, for the mace forged a crude window through the wall into the next room.

Just when he thought he’d have to fight this guard in order to escape, a tenderfoot, half his height, dove on the guard’s back and tried to get under their armour with a dagger.

He had to get out of sight.

Holsley leapt under one of the rectangular tables and was momentarily safe. Behind him, he saw Fox and Kythos going at it through the open doorway. Kythos swung his beast of a mace towards the agile Fox, who dodged the swing like he could see it in slow motion. They both seemed equally skilled.

‘Keep low.’ That’s what Holsley told himself as he crawled beneath the table. He’d avoid becoming a bloody pulp if he could just do that.

A loud THUD crashed above him as one of the gamblers was thrown haphazardly onto the table’s surface. This was followed by a scattering of bloody teeth and the trample of boots. Holsley just kept moving.

When the young bard came to the last table of the room, he faltered. He knew the door ten feet away led into the stairway room, which he guessed would be fairly safe. The problem was that a crowd of tubheads and gamblers stood between him and it. Painfully, he realised there was nothing for it, and he’d have to leg it.

He couldn’t tell who had been shouting, but he was sure it was him. Holsley flitted between bouts, joining one every few seconds or so. He ducked maces, dodged daggers, flew between strangers, and held up the redrose lute to deflect a punch he was sure had broken someone’s hand.

None seemed to care about him when he was out of their immediate area, as each had their own problems to deal with.

By the time he had reached the safety of the stairwell, he was panting like a dog inside a locked carriage on a warm day. His heart thudded furiously, and he was strangely aware of how thick his tongue now was. Still, he had made it without attracting too much attention.

That lasted about three seconds.

Foolishly, he decided to look through the gap in the door and immediately met the eyes of Kythos across the room through the heat of the chaos. He didn’t look like a person whose day was going the way they had planned it. Without faltering, Kythos pointed his mace towards where Holsley stood and commanded some nearby tubheads to apprehend him.

Directly behind the bard was a door leading into the main tavern room, but it was also full of gamblers and tubheads. The practical solution to this problem, at least from Holsley’s perspective, was to find an escape at the top of the stairs. He took wing up the steps and reached the top just as three tubheads emerged at the bottom.

They’d be on him in seconds. With that thought in his mind, Holsley searched for a weapon. He didn’t find one, but he did find a heavy chest of drawers close by. With the strength of half a man, Holsley forced his muscles past their limitations as he pushed the chest towards the stairs.

There was something wholly satisfying about watching this big, burly piece of furniture allow gravity to claim it.

The thing rolled down just as the guards found themselves halfway up. They didn’t have time to turn around nor even think. The chest caught them, making short work of their plate armour, and crushed them beneath it at the bottom of the stairs.

Holsley didn’t catch much of the aftermath. The young bard was away the second gravity had taken the wheel. Blessedly, the rooms were all open, and he found a quaint one to hurry into. A breeze caught him the second after he had come through the door. This was followed by a quick realisation that the window, luckily, was open.

Escape seemed imminent.

‘Thank the Gods,’ he muttered happily.

Holsley galloped across the floor without a second to spare, his spirits soaring. If he’d known more about this misshapen pub and its history of accidents, it wouldn’t have been such a shock when he tripped over a misaligned, popped-up plank. Suddenly, he was careening downwards. The ring flew out of his hand, and just as he hit the floor, he watched it roll away from him.

If he had known many profanities, this would’ve been the time to say them. Instead, he simply screamed ‘OH NO’ as the ring rolled through a tiny crack in the floorboards and disappeared from sight.

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Holsley acted quickly enough to see where it landed. Looking through the gap in the floorboards, he spied the tavern underneath. Specifically, he saw a table in one of the backrooms filled with half-empty tankards and watched helplessly as the ring sailed into one of them with a comical splash.

‘Of course,’ he moaned, rolling his eyes and returning to his feet.

With a great deal of reluctance, he rushed back the way he had come. Holsley dove through the door, hit the landing wall with his momentum, dodged down the stairs, and leapt over the still struggling tubheads lying beneath the burdensome drawers.

This time, Holsley didn’t have the patience for crawling under tables. Things were getting too dicey. Instead, he would just have to rush through, praying that everyone would be too distracted to turn their attention on a weedy bard with next to nothing in intimidating qualities.

More dodging, ducking, and, at some points, diving to get through the belligerent crowd.

The room he had seen through the crack had been lit by a lambent glow, so when Holsley turned into a room brightened by a warm hearth, he knew he was in the right place, especially when he saw a circular table full of tankards at its centre. There were perhaps thirty of them, and inside one of those was the ring.

He took a single moment to catch his breath.

That was a mistake.

One second, he was standing in the relative safety of the doorway. The next second, he was screaming in pain as a clawed hand swiped across his abdomen, cutting his new shirt to shreds and leaving four distinct scratches across his belly.

‘You think you can cheat me and walk away!’ Fox snarled, pressing him against a wall, his snout an inch away from Holsley’s nose. In the name of good, Fox was fast. And drunk. The young bard could smell the rotgut he’d been ingesting throughout the night. ‘Is that what Roland told you to do? Cheat me!?’

Holsley would’ve answered if he’d had the chance to. Instead, he gasped. Another development appeared. Unknown to Fox, a mace was sailing through the air towards the back of his head. Forced to do the one thing he had control over, Holsley threw his head and his body downwards as if to duck.

Did foxes have cat-like reflexes? He supposed they must have something similar — some kind of sense that helped keep them out of harm’s way anyway.

Seeing Holsley drop, Fox let go of him in an instant and dodged out of the way of the oncoming weapon. The effect was impressive. The mace barely grazed him and instead made a sizeable dent in the wall. Fox rolled over his back onto his side, and when he came back up into a crouched position, two daggers materialised in his hands like magic.

If Holsley hadn’t been so terrified, he would’ve clapped for how awesome the move had been.

Kythos held up his mace threateningly. ‘Where is it, Fox?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he snarled. ‘You shouldn’t be here, Kythos. We’re paid up till the end of the month!’

What did he mean by that?

‘Yeah, you kind of forfeit your exclusion from the law when you steal high-value items from my mother’s vaults.’ Kythos strode forward. ‘Don’t deny it! We’ve got eyewitnesses, and I don’t see many bloody werefoxes hanging about!’

‘Slander!’

It was that ruby, Holsley guessed, the one that Kythos had mentioned in the dungeon. The one that he thought Holsley himself might be carrying. Rubies were valuable, he knew that much, but this seemed a little excessive to him? There was more to this than what was on the table.

Kythos swung the mace at the werefox. Fox easily sidestepped around it and stole out of the room. This left the Lower Warden with a choice. He looked down upon Holsley first, weighing the options, and then, with an exasperated groan, he went striding after Fox.

Holsley didn’t think twice about it. One moment, he was on the floor; the next moment, he was upturning tankards.

The fight was still happening around him, but this seemed to be the one room that hadn’t been affected by the tumult. It was a small, quite cosy room with only a couple of tables and an armchair beside the fire. It was also, for whatever reason, where all the patrons had left their drinks? There were over thirty tankards on that sizeable circular table, each one filled almost to the brim as if they had been placed there for safekeeping.

Drinks of ale, lager, cider, and more swirled together on the tavern floor as Holsley poured them out one after another. It was just his bloody luck that the ring had rolled onto the only tavern table in Tressa where the patrons hadn’t drained their drinks. The word typical came to mind more than once as he searched.

On the seventh upturned tavern, a tubhead charged him.

Holsley had seen him enter from the other room, rushing in like he was leaping out of a housefire. The guard was young but a little older than Holsley, with a pimply face and wispy facial hair. He seemed determined too and was perhaps, if Holsley thought on it, one of the guards that had initially rushed into Fox’s personal gambling den.

Actually, he was pretty sure this had been the tubhead Kythos had fallen over.

Holsley rushed to the opposite side of the table to avoid him, which sparked a frustrating game of cat and mouse. The bard would run one way, and the wispy guard would run the other, going about in circles with neither gaining the upper hand.

In that time, the young bard had a quick meeting with his brain and decided this was as good a time as any to test out the redrose lute. As he rushed about the table, he brought the instrument around and frantically searched his mind for the right melody. The two black circles on his little finger told him he had two spells to hand.

The redrose lute was easy to play, although one string gave him a little trouble. It didn’t sound quite right, and he thought it might be because his pinky finger couldn’t quite reach it. All the same, though, he did manage to get out the right tune through trial and error. At the third pluck, the wispy guard thankfully came to a stop and became transfixed by the music.

‘You’re a guard,

I’m a bard,

Life can be kinda hard,

But so is lard,

We are but two peas in a confining pod,

Don’t be daft, or dumb, or a right ol’ sod.’

Not exactly lyrics to capture the people’s hearts, but they did the trick. The young tubhead swayed from side to side like a lovestruck puppy waiting for a treat. Holsley smiled at his success.

The redrose lute had been a joy to play, even in the stresses of the moment. As satisfying as running a hot knife through hard butter. His fingers magically knew precisely what Holsley wanted to do, and he didn’t even need to guide them to the correct positions. Very little thought in return for good music.

One of the circles on his little finger turned red.

‘Uh,’ he stammered, realising then that he hadn’t devised a plan for the guard. ‘There’s a ring in one of these tankards. Help me find it and give it to me!’

‘Sure thing!’ The guard said happily and got to work. He stopped briefly. ‘I just want you to know that I love you.’

‘Uh, thanks.’

There was still no abating to the battle going on around them as this odd pair of souls conducted their methodical search. The occasional scream would tell them someone had been stabbed. An odd thunk here meant someone was either hitting a table or being hit by one. The clang of manacles were arrests being made.

Minutes passed.

Typically, the ring was finally found in the second-to-last tankard. Holsley turned it over, and the ornate jewellery dropped like a pin to the floor. Thank the Gods. He bent down and picked it up with a grin spread from ear to ear. The glint of the ruby eyes reflected the light pleasantly, and he found himself, despite himself, admiring the craftsmanship.

Even if this ring hadn’t been magical, it still belonged in a place of high value.

URK!

Holsley’s body spiralled in pain as it was rammed into the table at waist height, his head quickly forced into the ale-laden surface. The lute flew out of his hand, and he heard the familiar twang as it hit the floor. He really had to learn to start paying attention to his surroundings, especially when there was a mad werefox running around.

‘Gods, you need to start wearing a bell or something!’

‘That’s mine, you cheat!’ Fox hissed in his ear as he pulled Holsley’s arm up against his back.

Holsley let out a groan.

‘I didn’t cheat!’ Holsley protested. ‘YOU knocked over the tower!’

‘You brought the guards!’

‘By the sounds of it,’ replied Holsley. ‘You’re the one that brought the guards.’

‘Did not.’

‘Did so.’

TWANG! THUNK!

The conversation could have gone on for another hour, going around and around until the morning sun crested the cliff upon which Tressa stood. The wispy guard didn’t fancy that, though. Instead, the enchanted tubhead had found Holsley’s lute and brought it down upon the werefox’s head.

Holsley straightened up. Fox was laid out on the floor. Blimey, Holsey thought, he’s been knocked out cold. With an air of pride, the wispy guard handed Holsley his lute back and then saluted loyally. ‘Saw you were in trouble.’

‘Uh, yeah, I was. Thanks.’

It was time to go. With the ring now in his possession, Holsley could make a cleanish getaway. With the tubhead’s help, he managed to get the stuck window of the room open and then stumbled out of it. The fresh air hit him like a sleet of hail, and he saw, for the first time, the extent of the damage Fox had left on his shirt.

It was torn from where the claws had struck it and covered in the blood from Holsley’s wounds. He had one spell left and reminded himself that he could use it to heal the vicious marks once he managed to get to safety. To him, that meant not stopping until he was back at the Fetch Inn.

Before moving away from the window, he told the loyal guard to stay there and ensure he wasn’t followed. Then, he was away under the cover of night with the ring still held firmly in his palm.