Ena proved to have a very vast knowledge of the many ways unscrupulous sorts could attempt to deprive someone of their hard-earned coin. Anwar shouldn't have been surprised by the things she knew at this point, but found that he still was.
"I assume the people who do these sorts of things are punished?" he asked as she carefully checked the weights for the scale she'd located.
"It depends on how well they're connected, I suppose. I've heard some get away with it. But if you know who they are, then you can avoid them. Going out of business is a form of punishment." She carefully set down the weights. "Or getting punched. I've known that to happen. Might have done it myself."
Anwar couldn't help smiling. "Oh, you might have?"
"Might have. I won't admit to it and no one can prove it was me. Walked away too quickly to be caught and I don't think the man wanted to admit to anyone that he was punched by a much smaller woman."
"...was he a giant of a man?"
"No, I'm short for a woman." She tilted her head. "Can you not tell?"
He really couldn't. "Everyone is smaller than me," Anwar said. "I don't have anyone to compare you to."
"Fair enough. I'll show you if I find any women's clothing in..." She gestured around. "All of this."
Did he have women's clothing? He wasn't completely sure. He knew he had clothing, but he often just counted the pieces without taking into account what they were. "Your father must have been short, then. I don't recall you being that much shorter than him."
"Aye, but don't tell him that. It can be a bit of a sore spot." She smiled fondly—far more fondly than Anwar would've ever dreamed of smiling when thinking of his father. "What about your family, then? Did you come from a group of giants or small folk, like us?"
In truth, Anwar was having a hard time remembering. "My father was always taller than I," he said. That much he was sure of. "Taller than most we knew. I thought perhaps I would catch up to him, but..." he shook his head. "He'd be furious if he saw me in this state. For falling for a trick like that."
"Well, good thing he's not here to tell you off then, eh?" Ena shrugged and resumed counting gold. She had taken to staking the coins in groups of five—said the counting went faster when she counted stacks of five and not individual coins. Anwar kept close watch, just to be sure that she wasn't trying to steal anything.
If she noticed the scrutiny of his gaze, she said nothing about it. In truth, she was not too offended; it was not too much worse than the scrutiny she would get in any other circumstance, were she handling someone else's money. The only difference was that those people didn't have claws or fangs like Anwar did.
Then again, what were swords if not the fangs and claws people gave themselves?
"What did he tell you of the gods?"
"Some things. Not enough, apparently." Any acts of worship were done in an impersonal way, out of obligation more than genuine belief—or that was how it had been for him. Perhaps his father felt differently, and more strongly on the matter. Anwar didn't know. "What about you?"
"Oh, I was told many stories. My father could've been a bard if he weren't so busy with other business. He loves to tell stories. So did my mother, when she was alive."
Anwar wished he had known that when he first had Bronn in his clutches. He might have asked for some advice. "Perhaps....you might be able to tell me some stories, if you can. Something that could help me fix my predicament. You mentioned there were other stories about people who had been transformed?" Granted, her summaries had painted a bleak picture for him. But perhaps some context would make things better.
Ena almost asked if helping him would take some more time off her sentence. She refrained. She was no fool; she knew the temptation to be witty could cause her more problems. She already had enough to manage. "Certainly. Which one would you like to start with? Least violent or most violent?"
Anwar chuckled. "That's an interesting criteria for choosing a story." He adjusted his seat on the ground and considered his options. "Least violent. We can work our way up from there."
Deep in his soul, he felt he'd had quite enough violence in his life of late. But he would never admit to that aloud.
"All right. In that case..."
Ena began her retelling of the drunkard, the man who stumbled through life with little focus, living only for the next drink. He was known far and wide for his foolishness, his recklessness, his emotional outbursts when drinking. It was said that his endless chatter reached even the highest heavens, where Taran liked to rest among the clouds. The god, his rest having been disturbed, came down to investigate.
("So, he intervened because his nap was interrupted?" Anwar asked.
"True, but wouldn't you do the same? I know that I would."
"Fair enough." )
When he saw the drunkard wandering around the town, yelling at what was either a pig or a goat (depending on who told the story), Taran was disappointed to see a life left unlived. The man had great potential, left squandered at the bottom of several bottles. Taran spent the rest of the day following the man, confirming his suspicions, and learning where he lived.
Once the man had finally slunk back into his own home and crawled back into his bed, Taran acted. He took the form of the summer wind and drifted under the door, creeping into the man's room to whisper in his ear.
This form you will keep, until you come to see the beauty in life that you have ignored.
The man heard these words, though he was asleep. Any other time, perhaps he would have thought it was a dream. But when he awoke, he was a toad, small and squat and unable to communicate in any way but croaking.
His thoughts, for the first few days, were a combination of panic over his situation and a desperate need for the drink that had helped him drift through life for so long. He attempted to access some of the bottles in his home, but being a toad, had not the strength to open them. He was reduced to hopping—very slowly—to a drinking hall, in the hopes that he might be able to lick some of the drink from the floor. It was there that he spent the first several weeks of his transformation, imbibing only what was accidentally spilled to the floor and eating whatever insects came in or around the hall.
Over time, a strange thing began to happen. While he was still drinking, it was far less than he had before. The lack of drink clouding his mind led his vision to become sharper, his awareness more acute. He saw the people he had once considered friends—drinking acquaintances, at the very least—come and go in the hall, just as drunk as he once had been. There was a time when their behavior would not have registered with him, but now, with the shroud lifted from his mind, he saw how truly boorish their behavior was. They spoke loudly, crudely, cruelly, and nearly stepped on him several times to boot, too lost in their drink to pay any heed to a creature as small as himself. He began to question why he was friends with them to begin with.
Over time, the men around him became grating, too loud, too rambunctious. He started spending less and less time inside the building—still coming back for drink and food, sometimes, but beginning to take refuge in the garden outside the hall whenever he felt too disturbed by the drunkards within.
From his place under the flowers, the man turned his attention to the comings and goings of the town he had lived in for many years, but never truly considered a home. He was surprised to find the people he had once disliked—mostly because they told him off for his behavior—seemed to be far kinder and more friendly than the men he had once considered his friends. He watched as they went about their lives, talking with friends, loved ones, children. It created a strange ache in his heart, to think that he could have had such companionship.
He still returned to the drinking hall, but only to satisfy that deep need still in his mind for the drink. A part of him hated to do so, but he wasn't ready to give it up.
Not yet, at least.
But as the days went on, this obligation began to feel more and more like a burden. He longed to leave his garden patch, to go among the people—even if they could not speak to him and would likely consider him a nuisance in this form. There was a forest near the town; a tame sort of forest, the sort where people could come and without fear of being accosted by the fae. A rare peaceful place that he had never appreciated as a human.
He wanted to experience that peace for himself, but he couldn't make himself leave. He tried, several times, but every time he got a few hops away, he would nearly be run over by a wandering goat, or picked up by a sticky-fingered child, or hit by the realization that it had been lucky that he found the drinking hall to begin with and if he left now he would likely lose it all over again. Again and again, he would turn around, hopping back much more quickly than he had departed.
He did not notice that each time he got a little further away. He would have found that thought encouraging if he had.
Eventually, there came the summer solstice celebration. Those who frequented the drinking hall were out in full force; the atmosphere, while initially jovial, quickly became volatile. There were so many people that the man knew it would be unsafe to enter, so he sat in a cracked window and waited for some of them to leave.
They didn't leave. In fact, a brawl broke out halfway through the evening, spreading rapidly across the hall. As the man watched, a feeling of disgust settled into his soul. He could have waited—a brawl like this usually meant a lot of spilled drink, and people would leave once it was done (one way or another). But, for the first time, he didn't want to take advantage of this chaos.
He wanted to get away from it.
The man hopped down from the window and towards the woods. The moon was full that night, illuminating a path into the woods. He hopped along, taking advantage of its well-trod path. By the time he reached the clearing in its center, the moon was high in the sky. The stars shone brightly alongside it. As he settled down under a mushroom for shelter, he looked up as best he could. He watched the stars.
For the first time, he really appreciated their beauty.
And when he awoke the next morning, there was not a toad lying in the grass, a creature that had spent weeks groveling on the floor for drops of drink and tethered to his misery. He was a man, clear-minded and ready to truly live.
This was the story that Ena told Anwar as she sorted and stored his treasures, though her version was a bit longer. She was a very good storyteller, as it turned out—she would argue she wasn't as good as her father, but she said every word as if it were of the utmost importance, and even came up with funny voices when necessary. Anwar listened to every word, taking them in with a curious look on his face. When she was done, he said, "It was that simple?"
"It sounds simple to us, but I don't think there's really any tale that can truly show the changes of the heart. They happen...slowly. Often in ways that cannot be summarized with words. That's my experience, at any rate."
"I suppose. What of the other stories?"
As the days went on, Ena continued telling him the stories of Taran passed on by her father and her mother. Many followed roughly the same format—ill behavior met with a transformation by Taran (sometimes one that logically followed from the misbehavior, sometimes a seemingly random choice). The person would live for a time in this transformed state, watching as the world moved on without them, sometimes encountering great peril (the bird flying from predators, the fox who had to chew off his own foot to escape a trap, the deer on the run from hunters). The moment of understanding always came, sometimes early (it did not take the deer long to see the sadistic ways of those who do not respect nature) or very long (the bitterness in the bird's life made her blind to her sister's tears for weeks, even as she heard them almost every day). But eventually the moment came—sometimes quiet, sometimes full of terror and blood and a sudden realization that they were wrong, that they were so very wrong.
Sometimes the change was shown through outward action—large or small. Other times, it was merely a change of heart that had fully settled in, as deeply rooted as the oldest trees in the mountain. But either way, they all turned back. One way or another.
Which, in a way, was very comforting. Ena knew of no stories where the person never learned their lesson. "I like that," she said, as she carefully folded a tapestry for storage. "I think most people are capable of change, if they're just given the right push."
"You don't think there are some people too set in their ways to change?" Anwar asked.
"I did say most didn't I?" Ena smiled slightly. "Some aren't. Too stubborn, or maybe something in them just...isn't right. But most people are just kind of stupid for a while. That's fixable."
That made sense, he supposed. "And what about me?" he asked suddenly. "Do you think I'm capable of change?"
Anwar was surprised that he had asked the question out loud. Even more surprised that he suddenly, deeply cared about her answer.
Ena looked up at him, her eyes narrowed. "If I answer you honestly, do you promise not to eat me?" she said.
Anwar wasn't sure he liked that. Her honesty had been refreshing, and while she had often been blunt in her asides and commentary on stories told, she had never been cruel. That much was true. But he was still terrified of what that honesty might mean when pointed at him. "I won't eat you," he promised. He could, at least, promise that, even if he didn't like her answer.
"I don't know you well enough to say for sure," she said. "Based on what I know and what I have seen of your actions...you have been both fair and unfair to me and my family. You seem stubborn but you're also listening to me right now. If this were a story, I would say you were at the crossroads. You might learn. You might not. That's your choice to make and I can't predict which way you're going to go. I want you to change, but I cannot say if you will."
It was a fair assessment. Anwar couldn't help feeling disappointed, though he tried to take some comfort in her assessment that the potential for him to change was there. It was far better than saying that he was a rock, trapped in place, stuck forever. "You want me to change because it will mean your freedom?" he guessed, feeling strangely resigned by that.
"...in part. Aye. But I do want everyone to understand their vices and move past them instead of succumbing to them. Especially those with power." She set down the tapestry and looked him in the eyes . "You could do a great deal of good if you figured this whole thing out. You know that, right?"
Anwar didn't reply. It was the first time the thought had occurred to him. He just didn't want to admit that.
They didn't talk much for the rest of that day, or a part of the next. The cave was much tidier by this point, many treasures carefully stored, easily accounted for at a glance. As Anwar's eyes traced their new holding places, a thought occurred to him.
"I understand that you are doing this as part of your servitude," he said, "and not because you care. But your work has been admirable. So, thank you."
Ena thought for sure she had misheard, or that perhaps the dust and who-knew-what-else of the space had finally gotten to her head. But Anwar was looking at her with genuine gratitude in his eyes. She was not one to treat genuine sentiment dismissively, even if it was coming from someone she felt neutrally about, at best. "You're welcome," she said. "I hate it when a task is done badly. Even if you're only doing something out of obligation, that doesn't mean you should do it poorly." After a pause, she asked, "Do you know any good stories?"
"What?"
"I have been talking a great deal lately. You probably know quite a bit about me by now, but I still know very little about you. I've often found that you can learn a great deal about someone based on the stories they tell, so...do you know any good stories?"
Anwar struggled to think of an answer. He wasn't sure how to admit this, but... "Most stories I have told as a child, I have forgotten. And at any rate, many of them were...less fantastical than yours. My parents preferred that I know of the world and how it works."
"Historical stories, then. That's all right. There's a lot of value in that. You don't remember any of them?"
Anwar didn't speak for some time. He was thinking, trying to remember. He had not thought of those stories in some time, after all.
"...there was one story," he said finally, "about my own family. My grandfather was the leader of our people. He was a great protector, but he died when my father was young."
"How?"
"Pride was what my father always said. Really, he was stabbed, but he was stabbed because of his pride, so I suppose Father wasn't wrong." Anwar's face grew somber as he spoke. "His honor was insulted by another chieftain. The other chieftain was much stronger, and it would have been better to simply take the insult and continue with his life. It was only petty words, Father said, not a genuine threat. Nothing worth losing your life over. But Grandfather insisted on facing the man in single combat. He didn't win. Our people were nearly driven to destruction in the wake of his death, but my father managed to keep them together. He always sought alliances after that, because he said it was better than facing dangers alone, and he dedicated his life to protecting our people so they would never be in that position again."
He paused, unspeaking for some time. And then...
"I suppose I undid that work."
It was true. He was the protector of no kingdom—no people, other than the woman in the cave and mountains of treasure.
The treasure suddenly felt much less significant.
He expected Ena to mirror those thoughts. That initial gut impulse was correct—unknown to him, Ena had thought about agreeing. But she saw that moment of realization growing in his eyes, the droop of his wings, the way he began to bow his head. It would be cruel, she thought, to make him feel worse. Not only cruel, but it might make him defensive, and undo what seemed like progress. So, instead, she simply patted one clawed hand gently and went back to sorting through the treasures.
Anwar was taken aback by her lack of judgment. Her kindness.
He didn't say it aloud—he was not at a place when he could. But Anwar appreciated that more than she would ever know.