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He stopped trying to explain. He only wished he could fade into the shadows in the shop the way, so conveniently, he’d been able to camouflage himself in the shadows of woodlands.
Before the Glikkuns outside could move on, the lane was filled with the stutter of drumming. The Traum Defense Brigade, no doubt. The goodwife looked hopeful at the thought of an encounter.
Not yet ready for a face-off—not with the baby troll drooling into its bibbing—Sakkali Oafish turned her group toward the doors of the shop.
“My virtue,” said the goodwife to the clerk. “Shut the door, can’t you?”
The clerk strode forward and said, streetward, “We’re closed to all but residents with town accounts.”
Sakkali put her foot in the door jamb. Her glance betrayed little fear. When she spoke, her voice was low and full of rasp. “Is that so? Then the Lion lives in Traum?” One hand settled on the infant’s scalp, the other one on the hilt of her dirk.
A silence ensued. “She has a point,” said the clerk to Brrr. “You’ll have to leave.”
“This is unseemly,” said the schoolmaster. “There’s no need—”
“I insist, or I’ll summon the merchant defense,” said the clerk. “I can’t tell the boss that his shipment of deluxe Dixxi House dinner services got shattered in a brawl.”
“I don’t have the stomach for shopping today,” said Brrr at last.
The door closed behind Brrr. He could hear the angry click of the bolt against the strike. Apparently that honorable schoolmaster had elected solidarity with his fellow citizens.
“You choose to stand with the aggrieved,” said Sakkali Oafish admiringly.
“I choose no such thing,” snapped Brrr. He looked up the way, and down. He wanted to get out of Traum before things became more unpleasant. “I don’t suppose you know the way to Tennikin? Where the soldiers are?”
“The Wizard’s soldiers?” Sakkali Oafish spat at their name.
“I knew a soldier who was—” But Brrr couldn’t think of how to describe Jemmsy.
She was quick, that Sakkali. “You knew a soldier who betrayed his orders by befriending you?”
The local militia turned into the high street. A motley mob of overweight merchants, nervous teenagers, that same miserable minister with his beard. Some pitchforks, a rolling pin, several guns looking all too dangerous.
“I have a job to do,” said Brrr. “I’m sorry for your trouble with soldiers, but I can’t stick around and sort it out. I have an errand of mercy for the father of a dead friend.”
“You’re not going to leave us to face this human mob unarmed,” said Sakkali. “What kind of Lion are you, anyway?”
At which question the Lion discovered the rhetoric of silence.
In any case, the trolls were hardly unarmed, he thought to say (but didn’t); fellow Glikkuns were showing up from an alley here, a chapel gate there, supplied with pickaxes.
The local militia raised their muskets. The Glikkuns stooped to loosen cobbles from the roadbed. From the stove of some upper-story kitchen, out of sight, a teakettle hissed like a small storm of rain beyond the hills.
Once again, thought Brrr, my chief talent: wrong place, wrong time, wrong key. “Not my fight,” he tried to explain. “I have a promise to keep…”
Backing up, twitching his tail in consternation, he heard a holy sound of bells splashing from the steeple. Like the Lurlinists’ music, only pretty. Brrr had not heard such melodic resonance before, and it sounded notionally of resolution, somehow.
Yet all around the town square of Traum, the hands of worried citizens were clanging gates closed, making an iron music. Wooden garden shutters slapped into place and were barred from the inside: You could hear the oaken music of the slats dropping. The free passage of the high street and the market square, within moments, became a pen. A closed run for an enemy trapped within.
This is how a market town defends itself when it lacks an army garrison, thought Brrr, and only then did he realize he had been pad-docked, too.
Sakkali Oafish hadn’t bargained on this reception. Perhaps this was a new maneuver, invented recently. “You, Lion!” she bellowed. “You smash a wall before they slaughter us, every one!”
“But—but—I have business in Tenniken—” He wasn’t refusing, he wasn’t—so what was he doing?
A barred iron gate right before him in his face, and all the pitching against it, to no avail—for it was strong, and he only a cub—
Before he could shake the thought free, return to language, a shot rang out, or two. Brrr was lately familiar with gunshots in the woods, but
