For Free (Ardent Cashail)
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There was once a young girl who danced in the sun wearing a dress made of colored scarves. Her skin was the color of the cinnamon they unloaded in the bleached docks, rolled scrolls of the rich smelling bark . Her hair was the color of wood burned to charcoal in the hearths of her tavern home. The sailor’s threw her coins but she would have done it for free, perhaps the only free form of joy in all of Calimport.
The trap wire was catching on her sleeve and she carefully brought a bandaged hand over to plink the wire with her nail and free it from the worn leathers. She was lying face down on the eternally wet grass laying a series of trip wires and snares connected precariously to vials of acid kept in cheap glass. The cheaper the glass and the easier it broke when the snare snapped into it. The merchant had been insulted when she complimented his glass as cheaply made and in that brief awkward moment she had been unable to explain exactly why she was happy for poor quality. Not with the Peltarch guards lingering so close to the black clad woman.
The girl who had once worn colorful skirts and bright white blouses painstakingly maintained by her thrifty mother now wore black like life was the eternal funeral. A macabre thought, she was always laughing. Even now as she worked, a grin lit her features as she snapped the final catch in place. By now the water had soaked from the ground into her clothing beneath her armor. A year ago she would have noticed but she could scarce remember being dry anymore. Were it not for the sunlight, the kuo toa would find Narfell an optimal place to live. The air filled sea.
Even as a child she had not been very much more than a wisp and a shadow, she was skinny and all limbs now. Her half elven blood robbed her of the rounded hips and generous breasts of her mother, it created edged where there should have been curved, and let her long ago abandon the luxury of skirts and blouses. For the best, now her days were filled with fleet legged retreats from hobgoblins and skirts were ill suited for that. Plus, the dark colors of the leathers tended to hide the blood so avoiding awkward conversations in towns when one looked like a butcher shop exploded.
Oh exploding, what a pleasant thought and it brought a smile to her dark lips. That would be the snare to spend all of one’s gold on! Just to see it! The misstep of her enemy, hopefully a goblin, and then nothing left at all but the smoke rising from a crater. She almost giggled and clapped a hand over her lips to prevent it from coming out. Her work was done and she crawled away silently as the shadow of a ghost through the wet late summer grass toward the treeline. The smile on her face mirrored the deep wondrous joy of that little dancing girl from so long ago. It was happiness without self consciousness, it swelled the chest and ached behind the ears.
Then it was the hard part! She sprinted from cover on the other side of her snare and did an odd little circular jig in full sight of the armored hobgoblin with his nasty scythe and worse demeanor. She hooked her fingers on either side of her lips and stretched her mouth open and made a horrid face before yelling.
“Your mother is a law abiding Peltarch citizen!”
Certainly, he understood common because his monstrous face contorted with rage and he surged forward, not so much as any hint the trip wire his boot caught and the acid vials were torn asunder to splash their terrible cargo upward in a spray of burning liquid. He screamed and screeched and felt for his ruined eyes but barely he had time to raise large meaty hands as the arrow thunked into his chest. A quick pattern of arrows slamming through the armor as if it was a lace curtain. He dropped to his knees with a last garbed strangled cry of agony and rage and died there amidst the snapped wires and cheap glass.
Then there was a girl who danced in the Narfell rain. Her skin was the color of the battered wooden gates and her hair was as black as the heart of Norwick’s enemies and she would have done this for free.