CHAPTER 2

Caleb placed the tray packed with pints of ale on the largest table in the Dragon Inn, which was just actually three tables pushed together, but it was most certainly the largest party. The mugs were grabbed by the lumberjacks without paying him much notice, but that was perfectly all right. The ex-priest made his way over to where a middle-aged couple and their young daughter were seated. The husband was sending awkward glances towards the woodsmen, who were becoming steadily more and more rowdy, while the wife attempted to pry her daughter away from her breast with promises of food and a goodnights sleep just as soon as they got settled.

“Can I get you something to eat?” Caleb asked, as if he needed to.

“Yes.” The husband answered flatly.

“Oh, yes please.” The wife reiterated.

“Something sweet for the beautiful young lady, maybe?” he turned to their daughter with a bright smile, and the young girl nodded enthusiastically.

Caleb tucked the tray under his arm and started back to Jake, who was manning the bar. After a long talk with the bartender’s mother, she and Caleb had arranged for him to stay indefinitely. He had spent the last week working for his room and board and he was absolutely loving it. It wasn’t always tending tables, he and Jake also cleaned the rooms after patrons left, made the beds midday, and lugged barrels of ale from the cellar. There were constantly things to be cleaned, or carried, or managed. It was much like his life in the church, only it gave him a sense of self-sufficiency that the church never could.

“Dude.” Jake extended the ‘u’ until it was almost unbearable by Caleb’s standards, “I am so sick of this.”

“Hey, go get three meals and a small pastry.” Caleb offered in way of an answer, stepping behind the bar to take over Jake’s post while he did so.

Jake sighed heavily, grabbed the tray Caleb had been using (there was only one) and disappeared into the kitchen. A few minutes later he came out weighed down by a few slabs of meat, a loaf of bread, and jug of lukewarm tea, and a tiny spice cake. He all but slammed the tray on the bar as he turned to pin Caleb with a glare.

“You’re not sick of this?” he asked petulantly.

“Sick of what?” Caleb didn’t wait for an answer, he hefted the tray over to where the family sat, and set the food before them with a pleasant smile. “We can have a room ready for you when you need it.”

Caleb waked back to the bar and a very annoyed looking black man. They faced each other, Jake staring deep and hard into Caleb’s eyes as if he could make his point through gaze alone. Caleb just looked bored.

“How can you stand it?!” Jake exclaimed, “The same thing! Day after day!”

“I’ve only been here a week.” Caleb laughed, then shrugged, “besides, I used to be a priest, remember? Repetition is one of those things we do a lot.”

“Over and over and over again.” Jake grinned, and Caleb socked him in the arm playfully.

“Oh, that family needs a room for tonight, I think.” Caleb pointed to the couple with the little girl.

“Duly noted.” Jake made a little note in the registry. Something to the effect of: Remember to keep a room empty for the old couple and their kid.

Caleb rolled his eyes, and walked back towards the family’s table to let them know to talk to Jake when they were ready to bed down. Before he could reach them, however, the same man who Jake had knocked out his first night here pushed him to the ground in a senseless act of violence. Caleb looked up at him from the floor, completely flabbergasted. There was a resounding crack, and the man was on the floor next to Caleb. Jake sighed.

“We need to teach you how to fight, my friend.” Jake stuck out his hand and Caleb took it, intrigued.

Jake pulled Caleb to his feet, and instructed the two men from before that their friend would not be coming back to the Dragon Inn anytime soon. The friend he’d slapped around before, poured a cup of ale over the large man’s head, and kicked lightly against his stomach with one booted foot.

The man came up coughing and sputtering and cursing everyone within hearing distance. Caleb glanced over nervously at the family and their daughter. The three were cringing, cuddled up close together, eyes flitting to and fro. The mother had her hands over her daughter’s ears, the girl clinging desperately to her dress.

“We have a room for you, if you’re ready.” Caleb announced to the couple, who turned their shocked eyes to him for a few moments, before staring right back at the large, flailing man on the ground.

“Beat it, Meryl.” Jake said, sounding almost bored.

“Fuck you, Jakey-boy” Meryl cackled from where he sat in the pool ale at Jake’s feet.

“Don’t make me crack you over the head again, Meryl.” Jake warned; his foot made little splashing sounds as he tapped in impatiently on the ale soaked floor, “This time I’ll leave a dent in your skull that won’t wash out.”

“Let me show you the way.” Caleb offered the family, motioning for them to stand.

They did, or close to it. The little girl was all but dragged behind her mother, as she was attached in almost a bear hug around her leg. Caleb smiled kindly at her. Children who were still clingy with their parents always brought a wistful smile to his face. These were not children who knew anything of life. They still believed that wrapped in their mother’s arms was the safest place on this earth.

Caleb and his fellow orphans knew better. Some held the information with a bitterness that made them lash out at any idealist who breached their perimeter, but not Caleb. To him, such innocence was something to be cherished. As naive as he knew himself to be, he would never be so innocent as to assume death was very far away. But the children who could face any negativity with the idea that those bad things would eventually go away, this was something he wished he still possessed.

The chubby ex-priest took a copper key from behind the front desk and began to slowly climb the stairs, family in tow. His butt hurt something awful, and his arm still tingled from taking the brunt of the fall. They would both have huge bruises in the morning, which Caleb wasn’t particularly looking forward to. The sleep, yes. The waking up, not so much.

---

James stood a few steps behind Taylor, farther away than he would have liked, but the beautiful blonde had requested he stop crowding him. The samurai/ninja didn’t like it, but Taylor was his patron, his new master, despite the young man in the dress’s insistence that he stop calling him that. James wanted, nay, needed to protect his new master.

Which was why, when Taylor had mentioned a need to travel to town for gardening supplies and a sack of sugar, James had jumped at the opportunity to guard him. Taylor seemed fine with this, so long as the tall Asian man agreed to carry the heavier purchases. So, strung over James’ back was a wide, leather sling. It held a pound of sugar, and pound of flower, a few spice jars, and from the stall they were at now, it looked as if it would soon be holding some various kinds of healing salves as well.

“Well need to get some gauze of some kind.” Taylor addressed James absently, before turning back to the eager saleswoman, “Do you know where we can get some quality fabric, Mary?”

“Only if you buy something.” Mary replied, with no attempt to be joking, or playful in her voice.

Mary was about a decade older than either Taylor or James, with black brown hair, and chocolate eyes. She wore her freckles like a grudge, and her tiny frame might have spoken of anorexia had she not plentiful breasts. She regarded them with the harsh eyes of a stall keeper, always on the lookout for thieves and polite shoppers who would buy nothing.

“I’ll need a small jar of these three.” Taylor pointed to a burn salve, one for rashes, and a third that promised to heal small cuts.

“That way.” Mary pointed to their right, humorless as always.

Taylor headed in the direction Mary had sent them, and James fell into step beside him. It was almost more than James could handle to know this secret and have no use of it. So Taylor was truly a man, and yet his cleavage was quite real. Even Chris had said that he was physically a woman. So how could he possibly be a man?

Magic. It was quite simple. The brothers lived in a fairy made house, and Taylor had remarked at one time that he was an orphan, much like James himself. The only conclusion to make was that Taylor had to have some magic blood in him. But why the deception of marriage? Why not simply be two brothers living together, so that Taylor might, as he’d said, be himself? This, James could not understand.

James chastised himself for his lack of Zen. It was truly deplorable. He should have faith in the cycle of Mother Earth, and not attempt to discern things that he could not possibly know the answers to on his own. But then again, that is what his old master would say, that he did not have enough focus. James knew the kind of focus his old master would have wanted him to have, and that was out of the question.

True, he was a killer, but a murderer, he would not be. A proper opponent is one that is of equal size and skill, or of greater size with less skill, of smaller size with more skill. Or maybe there was no truly fair fight, but he would be dammed if he would kill from afar for money. He had decided he would kill for Taylor and Chris, but especially Taylor. They had taken him in at great risk to themselves.

If he were a flunky of Baptista’s and had overheard their conversation, Taylor and Chris would most likely be in jail right now, perhaps even dead. It was relatively common practice for so called “betrayers of the throne” to be killed for trying to hide what they truly were. Baptista considered anyone hiding what they were to be insurgents, because no one who didn’t have an alternative agenda could possibly want to hide what they were from a prejudice king.

Baptista was a fool, this James knew for sure; in his heart he knew it. Anyone with any sense would want these powerful creatures to be at his beck and call, not hiding in the steady undercurrent of magic bellow the city. The man had made enemies of anyone with unusual talents of any kind, and it would cost him dearly. Maybe not immediately, maybe not for a decade or longer, but it would cost him.

The two dodged hurried shoppers down the lane, weaving in and out through the crowd. There were older women with well worn baskets filled with produce, young newlywed wives looking nervously through that dinner’s options, children with spending money buying ribbons and sweets, farmers from the outskirts, probably living in the JuJu Grasslands, buying everything in bulk to last another month or so, not to mention the rickety, fragile-looking old men with various old livestock like goats and pigs, trying to sell to every person who they passed.

Taylor grabbed James’ hand and tugged him through an opening in the crowd, toward a stall weighed down at every angle with bolts of fabric. Some were shiny and heavily embroidered, and obviously expensive, while others where rough and plain, with no dyes or embellishments, then some that were in between. Taylor got several yards of the second kind, explaining to James conversationally that there were plenty of roots and leaves in the forest that could be used as dyes if they wanted to make clothes from them.

“Plus, there’s no reason for us to have died cloth we might use for bandages.” He said folding up some gauze that he had made sure had absolutely no dye or anything else that might hurt an open wound.

James just nodded. And Taylor shook his head at that. The shape shifter was okay with quiet people, even respected them for it sometimes, for being able to hold their tongue in situations where he himself most certainly would not have been able to. James, however, was on a whole other level of quiet. Stoic was the word. James was decidedly stoic in all of his mannerisms. Tall, quiet, and serious looking, that was James. Everything seemed to hit him like so many waves, just washing over him while he considered them, waiting until he was absolutely sure to react. Taylor severely hoped that he was like that with surprises as well, because very soon they were going to have to tell him the truth and he would prefer to not see the dangerous man snap. No telling what would happen.

“Wanna grab a pint at the Inn?” Taylor asked him pleasantly.

“I don’t drink.” James replied flatly.

“Of course not.” Taylor said quietly, a small, funny little smile falling gently across his lips.

They headed in that direction anyhow, stepping off the dirt street with all the stalls and onto the main cobblestone street, where all the major business were. It was a new experience for Taylor, walking on the cobblestones with slightly healed shoes. Firstly, not all the stones were even, and they were rather slippery. More than once he lost his balance and had to bat away James’ constantly helping hand.

Standing in the doorway of The Dragon Inn, Taylor waited for a few moments for his eyes to adjust to the light. He knew that James was probably hesitating for an entirely different reason. The slightly older teen seemed to think of himself as Taylor’s bodyguard, and was no doubt checking the tavern for possible signs of a threat. It was commonplace for most people to carry weapons for various reason, and Taylor couldn’t help thinking the threats were, well, everywhere. To his right, were a group of hunters, armed to the nails with bows, arrows, swords, and throwing knives. To his left, a shady looking man nursing a pint, no weapons in sight, but his clothing was too loose to tell. And directly in front of them, sitting at the bar, was a man with a long sword hanging from his belt down the side of his bar stool. James didn’t seem exactly nervous, but he was most certainly more alert.

They made their way towards the bar and sat down in two adjacent bar stools.

“A half pint and some water please.” Taylor informed the friendly looking man behind the bar.

“Coming right up, my sweet.” Jake grinned flirtatiously. Taylor rolled his eyes and James gave the young man a hard look.

Taylor sighed. It wasn’t as if he were actually interested in the young barkeep. It was almost a definite that the pretty black man wasn’t gay; after all, he had hit on Taylor thinking he was a girl, but the point still remained. Getting out of the house, away from protective older brother, was a chance to spread his wings. He didn’t want to start being promiscuous or anything, but it would be nice to have the option of starting a relationship. He spared a glance at James. It was stupid. He had married Chris. Anything outside the marriage was adultery, no matter what the truth about their relationship was; marriage consummated or not.

Jake returned with the cup of water and pint of ale, half full. He set the water in front of Taylor and the ale in front of James. They smirked, and switched cups. Jake’s grin increased exponentially.

“I like a lady who can hold her liquor.” He chirped, “Almost as much as a lady who can’t.”

“Keep pushing it, buddy, and I’ll have the ninja snuff you.” Taylor said, grinning rather broadly himself.

“If he is bothering you,” James glared pointedly at Jake, “I will make him stop.”

“That’s not necessary, James.” Taylor smiled shyly, but groaned internally, knowing the smile was interpreted as something quite girly.

“Glad to hear it.” Jake grinned and stuck his hand over the smooth surface of worn wood that was the bar, “The name’s Jake, by the way.”

“Taylor.” The young shape shifter shook his hand, pale skin against Jake’s chocolate skin tone.

“And how about you, my oriental beauty?” Jake propped his elbows on the bar and leaned forwards, chin propped up on his elbows, face much closer to James than before.

James’ eyes got almost comically large, and he leaned back, almost far enough to fall off the stool. Jake laughed and back away evidently pleased with the reaction. Taylor grinned happily, and a laugh escaped him in spite of himself.

---

Her name was Eleanor. Her name was Eleanor and she was hungry. Her name was Eleanor and she knew about fire. Eleanor could build a fire. Her name was Eleanor and she knew how to build a fire. Eleanor did not know how she knew she could build a fire.

The girl named Eleanor found two trees with fruit. Eleanor knew the green fruit was good to eat, but the red fruit was not. Eleanor ate and ate and ate. Her name was Eleanor and she ate seven sweet, green fruits. Her name was Eleanor, and she could count.

The girl named Eleanor saw a small brown rabbit. Eleanor was quiet and the rabbit was trustful. Eleanor saw a rock next to her right hand and she picked it up. Her name was Eleanor and she knew she could kill it. How did the girl named Eleanor know that the rabbit was food? It didn’t look like food. It looked fluffy and trusting. But the girl named Eleanor knew if she hit the rock against the rabbit’s head it would die. The girl named Eleanor could take the skin off the soft, brown, trusting rabbit and roast it over the fire she did not know how she knew how to build.

Her name was Eleanor and she was petting the rabbit. The girl named Eleanor could not kill the rabbit. The girl named Eleanor tried to think of a name for the rabbit, but she knew no names other than her own.

The girl named Eleanor cried.

The girl named Eleanor cried and the rabbit with no name ran away. Eleanor’s tears had scared the rabbit. The girl named Eleanor was scared too. The girl named Eleanor watched the rabbit hop away, nervous and scared. The brown, fluffy, soft, rabbit, with no name, jumped across the forest floor covered with leaves and disappeared behind some leafy shrubbery. Her name was Eleanor and she was in a forest. The girl named Eleanor knew that the reason the forest floor was covered with leaves was because she was sitting underneath a tree, the tree with the sweet, green fruit. The girl named Eleanor wondered if the tree was supposed to have a name. Did trees have names? The girl named Eleanor thought that maybe trees should be called something. Her name was Eleanor and she knew that trees had names. Trees have names, and they bare fruit, and leaves fall from them onto the forest floor, which she knew was a forest floor because there were so many trees.

Her name was Eleanor and she collected the leaves from around the edge of her fire and dumped them into it. The girl named Eleanor’s fire surge red and orange from the extra fuel. The dirt was soft and moist beneath the leaves, and the girl named Eleanor smoothed her fingers over the rich, black earth. She took a deep breath and inhaled the sweet smell of the earth. The girl named Eleanor liked the smell.

It was getting dark in the forest and the girl named Eleanor buried herself under a blanket of leaves. The leaves were plentiful and kept her a little warmed than she would have been, but she didn’t feel right. The girl named Eleanor wanted to be in a tree. The girl named Eleanor knew the tree would be safe. If she could get into the tree she would be safe.

The girl named Eleanor climbed the tree with the sweet, green fruit. Her name was Eleanor and she climbed the tree like she was made to do it. Eleanor was good at climbing the tree, and she found a nice wide crook in the branches. Knees pulled up to her chin, her butt placed squarely in the rough crevice where the two large branches of the tree with the sweet, green fruits, met. The girl named Eleanor did not feel comfortable, but she felt safe.

The sun set, but Eleanor could not see the light directly through the lush forest. It filtered through the trees in pillars that seemed to bounce from leaf to leaf. None of the light touched upon Eleanor’s face, and before long all the light has disappeared altogether. The only light was the fire below dwindled to ambers glowing faintly in the dark. They twinkled out of being, just as the stars began to appear, like cold sparks in the night sky.

Eleanor was woken in the middle of the night by a loud sound. It was a wolf at the base of the big tree, with wide branches, that grew the sweet, green fruit. The wolf howled. Was it howling at the girl named Eleanor? She didn’t know. She was glad she was in the tree, snuggled, although uncomfortable, in the tree’s wide branches. The girl named Eleanor was still scared. But she was less scared in the tree.