* * *
I thought it best to begin my search where the Puck had fallen, so I made my way to the path on which Blacktooth and the watch had carried me into town. It was easy going for a bit, a wide path under a canopy of massive trees, so I took time to note the annoying and uncomfortable things that filled the forest, ferns and thorns, all the time keeping watch for any wolves, bears, or dragons that might find a winsome fool delicious. I moved as nimble and spry as in my youth, although I could not say from where this vigor sprung, for I was still less than two days from starved and drowned. But upon my spirit I felt a dull ache, a hunger—no, a hollowness. Had it been so long since I had been on my own that a mere hour alone was making a shell of me?
“More of a bellend,” said the puppet Jones. (Yes, I was working him, but I pretended it was magic.)
“What would you know?” said I. “Nothing more than an empty head on a stick, you are.”
“In that we are of a kind. And both move at the whim of cruel masters.”
“That’s it, isn’t it?”
“Aye, you’re not lonesome, you git, you’re craving your freedom.”
I’d had no master but love for my two years with the pirates, and now, once again, I was doing the bidding of a pair of scheming royals, under threat of death.
“Oh balls,” I said to Jones, choking him somewhat to make sure I had his attention. “I am a fool.”
ENTER RUMOUR, PAINTED FULL OF TONGUES
“And with that, the bloody obvious rose like a viper to bite the fool on his bottom.”
“Ahhhh!” said I, jumping straight up perhaps a yard and controlling my fluids only just. He was an annoyingly tall fellow, thin and pale, wrapped in a robe and wearing a hat, both quilted with what appeared to be human tongues that moved even as he stood, his long scone of a nose so turned up I might have, with better light, seen his brain writhing in its den. Whether he had stepped out from behind a tree or fallen out of one, I did not know, for there was no crunch of leaves or brush of branch, he was just bloody there. “Who are you?”
“I am Rumour, planner of plots, seer of schemes, teller of tales, a humble narrator, at your service.”
“I smell a device,” said I. The tongues on Rumour’s robe waggled at me and I jumped away, holding Jones en garde. “Back, thou skulking loony.”
“Loony? Moi?” he said in barely passable fucking French. “You were the one talking to a puppet.”
“I thought I was alone. And besides, conversation frightens off bears.”
“No, it doesn’t. And you aren’t alone, silly fool.”
“Well not now, but before you crept up like some tongue-covered spider . . .”
“Not me. You’ve been followed this last hour by a squirrel.” Without looking, Rumour pointed a long finger up to a tree behind him. Indeed, a red, horn-eared squirrel peered down from a branch. It chirped and scrambled to the far side of the tree. “See?”
“You saw it there just now and you’re trying to be clever. That is a coincidental squirrel.”
“No, it has been over you since you entered the forest. You probably would have heard it had you not been nattering on to your puppet while you stumbled along aimlessly.”
“I have not been stumbling, and my stumbling has not been aimless. I am on a mission.” I produced my passport and waved it under Rumour’s prodigious nose. “From the duke.”
“You’re going the wrong way. You’ll find no clue to the Puck’s movements in that direction.”
“How do you know I’ve any interest in the Puck at all?”
“Rumour knows all, sees all. I am the agent of outrageous fortune and twisted narrative.”
“Well, that’s a bumptious barrel of bear wank.”
“Pardon?”
“You’re lying.”
“I do not lie, although I am notoriously unreliable. A hundred yards ahead the path will fork. You will want to take the branch to the right. That will lead you to a clue of what the Puck was doing in his last hours.”
“And you know what he was doing?”
“I do.”
“So you could just fucking tell me and save me the hike?”
“And deprive you of the adventure of a mystery and the joy of discovery? Never.”
I drew a dagger from the small of my back and held it low. “Or I could just start carving bits out of you until you tell me.” He was a thin and willowy fellow, even if tediously tall, and I am quick as a cat and well practiced with a knife—if it came to a fight, things would not go well for him.
“Oh, thou daft spoon,” said Rumour. “You’ll never catch me.”
“We shall see,” said I. And with that I flipped the dagger, caught it by the blade, and sent it a half turn toward skewering him in the foot. I didn’t actually mean to injure him but aimed so, at worst, I might nick a toe, and, at best, tack his soft shoe to the forest floor, but in a blink, he was ten feet to my right, giggling among the ferns.
“Ha! Too slow. The quick and the dead,” he said. “I am, at your service, the quick.”
“That is not what that means,” said I, retrieving my dagger from the loam, where it had buried itself to the hilt. He was frightfully fast, but the miss was mine. I was not a bully born—I am shit at forceful coercion.
“Yes it does. Nothing exceeds the speed of Rumour. ’Twas I taught the Puck to put a girdle round the globe in forty minutes.”
“I do not care.” I thought then to cast a devastating insult, a weapon more suited to my skills, but then thought a softer tack might be preferred. I bowed my head. “Good Rumour, I apologize for my temper, but I am desperate. If I don’t find out the Puck’s movement and who ended him the royals are going to kill my apprentice. He’s a dimwitted ox of a lad, but gentle, and my only friend. Have pity on a poor fool.”
“And tell me, when you tell the royals what they want to know, what is to keep them from killing you both?”
“Honor?” I ventured, realizing at once how weak it sounded.
“It seems to me you won’t know what each of them will do until you know what it was the Puck was doing, what it was that he knew that they are so eager to find out.”
“And then they’ll kill us?”
“Not if you can find the favor of one over the other. They each sent you separately, did they not?”
“That’s true.”
“And did either Theseus or Hippolyta seem eager to have the other find out about the other’s intent?”
“No, there appears to be no love nor trust between the two. The Amazon’s warriors are allowed no weapons. She is a caged bird, and he a captor afraid of his captive.”
“There you have it, then, you’ll have to find out the Puck’s intent and hope you can leverage that information of one of them against the other.”
“And if I can’t?”
“Then I’d say you’re right fucked.”
“I am not. What do you know? You’ve tongues all over your robe and cap.”
“Said the fellow dressed head to foot in black and silver argyle. You look like a sock with a single toe sticking through.”
“Touché,” said I, in perfect fucking French. I tipped my hat in salute.
“The lovers are the key to your quest, fool. When the path forks ahead, go right, it will lead you to what you seek.”
“Or you could just tell me.”
“No fun there,” said Rumour. “Adieu, fool.” And with a whirlwind of leaves he was gone.
“I am not fucked!” I called after him.
I was fucked.
The red squirrel chittered above.
Chapter 8
The Course of True Love
I took the right fucking fork in the path and as night lowered o’er the forest, I came upon a hollow of great mossy rocks where four young Athenians flirted and fought like loquacious kittens.
Two youths, the straw-haired wank stain I’d seen before, called Demetrius, and another fellow, more fit than the first, with a dark, closely trimmed
, pointy beard, were on their knees on either side of the tall girl, Helena, flinging woo at her like Jeff flinging monkey spunk on a day out at the hat shop. A second girl, petite and auburn haired, looked on, quite unhappy with the entire scene.
“Oh, good forest elf,” Helena called. “Help me, for these three conspire to make cruel sport of me for being unloved and unlovable.”
“Not an elf,” said I.