Blood For Wages

3: The Proposition

Fia walked into the township of Last Hallow, driven on the blustery wings of a rising storm at her back. It was only a little after noon, the day after she'd left the drunken assailant to bleed out under the hanging tree, but it was dusk dark and getting darker. Fia instantly saw that the settlement was in the grips of a manic, festive atmosphere, which she recognised and could instantly attribute to a single cause.

"Fucking witch burning," she muttered to herself, absently touching the sword at her side.

It was the strange, loose madness that often overcame the villages and trading posts considered to be at the arse of nowhere whenever a witch was rooted out. Fia had seen it a few times before on her travels; a unique macabre jollity. People drinking and gorging and fucking in the streets with animalistic abandon. Fighting, cursing and laughing as if they only just realized how extraordinary it was that they should be alive at all, living in the unpredictable world of the Five Isles as they did. Relieved that it wasn't them tied at the stake. Relieved it wasn't their own particular brand of sin being punished.

The township of Last Hallow straddled a swift-running river that acted as a border between two tribelands; Arifold in the east of Kallaros and Kynthwaite, the home of the Painted Kyn, that snaked down the centre of the island. Like many of the border towns on Fallaros, Last Hallow was the sort of amiable backwater settlement where life might've been cheap, but death usually came at no cost whatsoever. A person who needed to get lost could do so with relative ease there, and that was exactly why Fia had made a beeline for it. It was the perfect place to lie low, due to the settlement being filled with a combination of tight-lipped locals, who wanted nothing more than some easy coin and the freedom to die from the bottle-rot, and the sort of swaggering, brash longriders who wouldn't have known how to lie low even if their lives depended on it—which they often did.

Fia had hobbled her horse in a copse on the edge of town. She'd considered stabling it, but Last Hallow was unfamiliar to her except in reputation and she'd no notion as to whether any one stable she picked could be trusted not to doctor her horse and sell it to the wandering horse clans of Kynthwaite.

She hadn't much of a plan. If she'd been any other random feral dog roaming the Fallaros tribelands she doubted whether she would have bothered to relocate after knifing the drunk. The fact was though, that it was precisely because she wasn't just some stray that she had been obliged to. A young woman with her history, her connections, could not be expected to hang about and catch the eye of some overzealous patrolling guard captain, even if all she had been trying to do for the past ten years or so was keep her head down and do right by people who needed help.

It would only take one wanderer or soldier of Frekifold, the tribeland she'd been born and raised in, to recognise her face and she'd be caught and marched home to face whatever judgement or justice awaited her. Thunder growled lazily across the plains; the sound of demons playing skittles—or so Fia's father had always told her.

Fia strolled sedately through the main market of the heaving settlement. The scent of herbs, smoke and spilled beer was sharp on the chilly air. Most of the stalls that she passed were trying to flog bread and vegetables, chutneys and cured meats, but the ones doing the snappiest trade were those selling ale and home-brewed spirits, pre-rolled smokes, powdered rabbit's-foot root, or the favours of desperate and amenable men and women.

It was to these kiosks and counters that Fia stayed closest to, for these booths were the homes of those with lips that were most prone to flapping. While drunken rumour couldn't be relied on solely for veracity, Fia had found that it was a fair yardstick for the sort of shit that was generally floating from mouth to ear to mouth in a trading post. The idle talk of professional piss-artists was like a barometer for the mood of a settlement or a tribeland, and Fia was good at finding the seeds of truth that lay hidden amongst all the shit.