3. What's a Boy Like You...

3. What’s a boy like you…

Tam was fighting the urge to hunch over and cover himself as Winnow glided away. He was also fighting the twin urges to pick up a stick and whack her, and to stare at her butt and drool. A small streak of resentment in his belly helped- sure, she’d caught him by surprise. But he hadn’t done that badly… He was, by all accounts, a quite accomplished kisser. He started to take a step forward, to chase her down and show her just what he could do with tongue, when Carter’s grip on his arm brought Tam up short.
“She’ll appreciate you more when you don’t stink of sweat and piss.” Carter’s grin was twisted oddly.
“And terror.” Tam was still watching Winnow disappear into the trees. “Don’t forget the terror.” The bandit leader had turned away to talk to Diggs, who shot a dark look at Tam, then headed off into the woods. Not after Winnow, Tam noted.
“Carter, it doesn’t look like the boy’s going to fall over now.” Carter’s hand didn’t loosen its grip on Tam’s arm. The bandit leader sighed. “He’s got no boots, no pants, and no chance of getting away without my leave.” Carter continued to stare impassively at the older man. “Look, if he tries to run, I promise to let you cut him in half with your absurdly large sword.” Carter’s hand released Tam’s arm slowly, as if not entirely sure that Tam wouldn’t try to take flight despite being in the middle of nowhere, half-naked, and surrounded by armed killers.
The bandit leader leaned in to whisper to Tam, “He can be so hard to handle sometimes, but the man does love him some violence.” In a more normal tone, he said, “Name’s Sol. The lads here follow my orders, more or less. Let’s get you cleaned up, and see what brings you to my camp. Carter,” Sol glanced sharply at the big man, “See that the boy comes to no harm, eh?”
Tam had a feeling that Carter was not there to prevent misunderstandings with the other bandits, but to make sure that if Tam did try to run, he would be brought back alive. Carter gestured off into the trees. “Let’s go.”
Tam picked his way among the dried leaves and twigs on the ground. It seemed like every third step landed his foot on something either sharp or squishy. He longed desperately for his boots. Of course, Higgins hadn’t been particularly considerate of Tam’s person, and he was pretty sure that his boots had ended up in worse shape than Tam himself. As they walked, Tam looked up at Carter. Well, Carter walked, Tam did more of a hopping shuffle trying to not re-injure himself or step in something particularly icky. Maybe talking would help. “So, aah, where’s the bath house, eh?”
Carter pointed ahead. All Tam could see was trees, leaves, and a few scrubby bushes. He could hear birds chirping, and something skittering around in the dead leaves on the ground.
“Yeah,” Tam said, “I’m more of a city boy, you know?” Carter had to be following some kind of path, from the ease and confidence with which he led Tam through the trees, but for all Tam could tell, the man was just making it up as he went along. “I mean, I’m not saying dancing maidens and hot springs, but how far do we have to walk to find a bleeding tub?”
“Not much further now,” said Carter in a flat voice. He gestured, and Tam saw a flash of bright orange through the trees. A minute or two and a squishy step that Tam prayed was just mud later, the orange turned out to be Diggs. It appeared that the man had changed out of his forest-green tunic and into… Something else.
Tam couldn’t help himself. He laughed. “What the hell is that?” The shirt was the brightest color orange Tam had ever seen. Embroidered all over it were small red flames and gold runes. Tam was still trying to figure out who would put so much effort into making something so spectacularly ugly when he noticed the riverbank behind Diggs. Tam stopped dead in his tracks, certain that he was about to be murdered and thrown into the river. His laughter cut off with a choke.
Diggs smiled in grim non-amusement. “Shirt of a firewalker. Impervious to magma.”
Tam’s eyes darted from side to side, looking for an escape route. Carter was still behind him, Diggs between him and the river, and thick trees choked escape to either side. Tam tried to keep the man talking. He had strapped his twin swords over the shirt, and still wore the strange hat. If Tam could catch him off-guard, maybe he’d be able to get past Diggs before he got his swords out. Carter wasn’t much of a threat with his enormous sword- there was no way he could draw it quickly- but if Tam wanted to get past him back into the woods, all Carter had to do was put his hands out to completely block the path through the trees. “Wow, really? Does it work?”
“Man said it does. Don’t know for myself, seeing as how I don’t tend to make a habit of chucking myself into volcanoes.”
“What pity. What’s that?” Tam gestured at the sack sitting on the ground at Diggs’ feet. Tam was really hoping it wasn’t supposed to be for his head.
“It’s called a bag. You put stuff in it. Here.” Diggs bent down to open the bag, and Tam flinched, rising on his toes to run. All that happened, though, was that Diggs pulled out a small cake of yellow-brown soap. Tensely, Tam stepped forward to take it, but Diggs didn’t try to bait him with it. Relaxing somewhat but keeping Diggs’ hideous orange shirt in the corner of his eye, Tam moved closer to the riverbank. It wasn’t as far down as he’d first thought to the water’s surface, only about four or five feet. The water flowed deep and clear. Tam could see little plants all the way down at the bottom, green fronds all leaning down river.
Tam felt the movement behind him a moment too late. He twisted just in time to see Diggs’ grin break into open laugher as Carter pushed him off the ledge and into the water. Tam hit the water butt-first, and immediately felt the water close over his head. He flailed under water, trying to get his feet under himself. He felt mud and plants with his toes and kicked. Tam gasped as his head broke the surface of the water. Clawing the hair from his eyes, Tam realized he still somehow had hold of the soap. Spluttering, he located Diggs and carter, still a good twenty feet upriver. Diggs was cackling, arms waving, doing what Tam recognized as an unflattering impression of himself, falling into the river. Carter’s full-bellied laughter boomed through the trees, loud enough to wake the dead. Tam snarled and launched the soap at Carter’s head.
“You motherless sons of-”
Diggs’ hand shot out and snatched the cake out of the air. He and Carter stared unblinkingly at Tam, all mirth gone from their faces. In their places was a pair of implacable masks, two men prepared to commit some seriously imminent violence. Tam shifted his feet, trying for some better footing in the muddy bottom of the river. Could he make it across the river before the two men got to him?
Carter snorted, and Tam flinched, turning to run. Both men on the riverbank exploded into laughter again. Tam flushed, and tried to wash himself back to dignity.



Sol settled himself into his chair. Overstuffed and covered in faded red velvet, it was the only decent piece of furniture in the entire camp. He’d captured it from a merchant train, oh, five or six years ago now. Supposedly, the chair had been intended as a gift for the king, a bit of back-end flattery to grease the merchant’s way through customs. Gregorovich would have liked it, too, though the chair was too plain for a proper gift. He had a liking for the low-backed, over-padded sorts of seats, though Sol didn’t know of a single piece of furniture in the king’s inventory that wasn’t crusted with gilt and jewels. The chair was comfortable, though, and Sol used it like his throne.
The rest of the furniture in Sol’s little palace was of much meaner stock. Rough-hewn planks were cobbled together to form a table and benches. The firepit, built into the floor, had a plain cast-iron tripod supporting a matching and equally plain black cauldron. Sol’s clothes, all drab forest-greens and browns, hung from pegs on the wall, except for his good coat, which had an honored spot on a bedpost. The other bedpost supported his cloak.
His bed was more of a shelf built onto the wall, with a post at either end for support, and a couple of blankets packed together for a mattress. A small shelf holding a few battered pewter dishes and one fine silver goblet completed the totality of his possessions, save for the triple-locked, iron-strapped chest stuffed under the bed-shelf.
“My palace,” Sol thought sourly, “And what a court that attends upon me.” Seated before him, on the benches around the table, were his lieutenants: Dixon, Bonn, and Rushleigh. They were all three good men; trusted by their squads, experienced raiders. Sol was not foolish enough to think the Band could stand up to a single charge from the King’s heavy cavalry, but they were more than up to handling a merchant’s guards. Hard men, with no illusions to the work they were about, even Rushleigh.
“I think you’re playing with fire, Chief.” Dixon’s voice was low and gravelly. He fingered his eyepatch as he spoke. He always played with the blasted thing when speaking to Sol. Dixon had lost the eye when he’d lost control of the Band to Sol. Dixon was also the most likely of the three to object to any of Sol’s plans without first considering its merits. “What if he doesn’t pay? What if there is no stash? What if he’s upset about the fact that we just killed four of his guards?”
“What, were you planning to tell him that part?” Sol worked hard to keep his voice level. Something about Dixon always put his teeth on edge. Maybe it was the constant challenge to his authority, maybe it was the blood between them. Or maybe Sol just couldn’t stand Dixon because Dixon was such an ass. “If the man was willing to put so much effort into causing the boy pain, there must have been a reason. I intend to find out what that was tonight. The lad will serve my ends, one way or another. Have we any other business of the camp to handle?” Bonn noted that with the fall rains approaching, some of the huts still needed re-thatching, and Rushleigh reported that the few women in camp had requested that the men provide more thread and spices, which meant Rushleigh’s wife had requested more thread and spices. Sol sighed, and began planning another raid on the textile merchants. Gods, this was getting tiresome. “Very well. Dismissed. Rushleigh, I want a word alone with you.”
Dixon remained silent, fingering his eyepatch.




Washed, dressed, and (finally!) wearing boots, Tam was beginning to feel human again. No longer was he the almost-corpse, reeking of sweat, urine and blood. Of course, the possibility of ending up a corpse still seemed very real. One of the bandits had come up to Diggs and Carter while Tam was dressing, and spoken in tones too low for Tam to make out more than one word in five. Something about “dinner,” “Chief,” and “show.” Tam had guessed that he might be interrogated by the bandits’ leader over the pretend cordiality of dinner, but show what? Tam’s injuries had been soaked up by Winnow so completely that not a scratch or scar remained, nor any ache or tiredness. Tam quite doubted that Sol was unsure of how well Winnow’s power worked, which meant Tam had nothing to show Sol there, unless the older man wanted to see Tam’s birthmark. Was there something that the bandit leader wanted to show Tam? Equally preposterous; Tam was new to the camp, had not earned their trust. The order might be for Diggs and Carter to show Tam something- maybe they were to show Tam the camp for dinner. Or maybe he had mis-heard, and was trying to string together a web of fallacy. Tam shook his head, and stamped his feet into the only slightly too-small boots.
Now that he was clean, booted, and clothed, Tam re-considered his options. Sol, from the little Tam had seen, was not quite like the other bandits Tam had met so far. Walking back to the center of camp between Diggs and Carter, Tam tried to ignore Diggs’ patently untrue story while he surveyed the bandits’ home base.
“So there I am,” Diggs was saying, “surrounded by water nymphs, each and every one of ‘em with these little tridents pointed right at me. Looked like a bunch of forks, and they meant to stick me for dinner. So you know what I did?”
Diggs let the question hang in the air for a long, awkward moment. Tam, seeing the edge of the bandit camp ahead and trying to fix the positions of the huts in his head, was momentarily distracted. Who would break first? Finally, Carter sighed and said in the slightly sing-song voice of rote memorization, “You reached into your pouch…”
“I reached into my pouch,” Diggs said at the same time, “and pulled out my spoon!” Diggs actually struck a pose, and mimed pulling something out of his pouch. Carter shook his head silently, and kept walking. Tam hesitated, watching Diggs but still half-following Carter. The two men hardly seemed to be paying Tam the slightest bit of attention. If he made a break for it now, could Tam get away? He still didn’t know his way through the woods, but the camp couldn’t be that far from the road.
Just then, Diggs broke off his pose to jog back up to Carter, and the opportunity was lost. Besides, Tam was ravenously hungry. Escape would go far better with a full belly. Carter glanced over his shoulder at Tam, and his eyes seemed to read Tam’s thoughts. The corner of Carter’s mouth twitched up in a half-smile. Diggs, wrapped up in his tale, was, of course, oblivious.
“So all these water nymphs, they just stopped, dead in the water, and stared, right? And I’m thinking, ‘well, if I’m gonna die, it might as well be the right way,’ so I say, ‘and here I figured we’d be having soup for dinner!’” Diggs roared with laughter at his own story. Tam stared at him, confused. Carter started to say something, then hesitated. They’d come to the center of the bandit camp, where a good two dozen men were drilling some sword technique. They were less finely dressed than the magistrate’s guards Tam had watched practicing, but each man yelled convincingly, and looked plenty ready to put his sword in another man if need be.
The huts were arranged in a rough double circle, with the men practicing at the center. There was no wall, no moat around the outer ring of huts. Carter led Tam halfway around the circle, in the wide mud track between the inner and outer dwellings. The huts of the inner ring were generally larger than those of the outer. This was made simple by the fact that most of the huts in the outer ring were little more than low thatched roofs over a pair of straw pallets. They barely qualified as shacks. The huts of the inner ring, by comparison, the inner ring dwellings seemed almost livable.
Carter led Tam to the largest of the huts. This one even had a proper door, on which he knocked twice, loud and firm. Diggs was standing between Tam and the men drilling in the center of the ring, shifting constantly from one foot to the other, failing miserably to block Tam’s view. While Tam was still trying to figure out if this was on purpose, Sol himself answered the door, wearing not the woodsman’s garb he’d sported earlier, but a fine red silk coat and tight breeches. The coat had thread-of-gold embroidery along the cuffs and collar, and was obviously hard-used, but Tam saw no knife holes. Interestingly, a patch of embroidery on Sol’s left breast was unbalanced by a missing patch on the right.
Sol gestured Tam inside. “Please, do come in Tam.”
Tam bowed, entered, and said automatically, “I didn’t realize this was a formal occasion, or I should have dressed.” Only after the words were out of his mouth did Tam realize how ridiculous they sounded. He tried to keep his face straight, but Sol barked a laugh, and Tam found himself grinning.
The hut was almost as large as Enara’s bedchamber back home, with bed, table, chair and fire pit packed into the tiny space. Enara had complained to her father at length that her chambers were too small, with barely room to breathe. She would have put up a fit of epic proportions if asked to endure conditions such as these.
Sol gestured Tam to one of the benches at the table, then sat across from him. A bandit Tam hadn’t noticed before stood next to the fire, wearing an eyepatch, freshly scrubbed clothes and a scowl. Evidently, one-eye didn’t appreciate being pressed into service as a butler. Sol made a show of observing the same formalities to which Tam had grown accustomed in Magistrate Higgins’ household. The proper manners seemed out of place, here. Sol waited until his man had sloped stew into the rough-cut bowls, then raised his cup to Tam, a gesture half-toast, half-salute. Tam raised his mug in kind, wondering if he would have to come up with a toast. At the moment, all he could come up with was, ‘As you slide down the banister of life, may the splinters always point the other way.’ It seemed a little too apropos, considering the condition of his bench. Tam very carefully did not shift his weight.
He was spared any further embarrassment when Sol cut short the formalities and drank. “Relieve my curiosity,” the bandit leader said. “How did you come to be in that box?”
Tam grinned in spite of himself. “Well, Higgins has this daughter, y’see…”