Hasty Departure

I wake the next morning with a start to the sound of not a so distant shout and the panicked squawking of chickens. The breaking dawn is leaking in through every crack in the old wooden stables and a hefty **** goblin is splayed out on top of me dead to the world and snurfling in my ear. As gently as I could given she was as limp and inert as a Colly shaped sack of wet sand I shift my goblin down and off of me. I cover her then quickly rise to stretch and pull on my tunic and sandals.

Dashing outside my eyes pan across the farmyard made golden and glistening by the early sun and morning dew to settle on a cloud of dust and feathers rising up from the hazel wattle fencing that surrounded the chicken coop near the house. One of my cousins was positioned at a break in the fence with a shovel held ready to strike as two farm hands ran around the perimeter of the pen stabbing down into it with sharpened wooden poles. Voices rise across the farm as the ruckus awakens my slumbering kin, most calling out to ask what was happening.

A man cries. “Fox in the henhouse! We got the little bugger trapped.”

“Fuck!” I hiss under my breath as my trot breaks into a full run. Through the gaps in the woven wattle I see a familiar flash of orange zipping through the chaotic whites and browns of terrified poultry. “Wait! Wait, wait, wait!”

Things escalate quickly as suddenly from within the main farmhouse there comes a ear-splitting noise, half snarl and half shriek. “QUIN!” A distraught Rosa cries out for me.

“I’m on it, Rosa!” My long legs swallow the distance between the stable and coop swiftly, but not swiftly enough. “WAIT!”

I am just arriving and pulling back my cousin with the shovel when out of nowhere, literally the thin air itself, a figure clad in fluttering white appears about four feet off the ground inside the pen and plummets awkwardly to the earth. In her night dress Rosa stumbles to her feet snarling, ears back and fangs bared! “RRRRR!!!” Rosa lets out a crackling inhuman snarl as she blindly swings and twirls to defend the fox gifted to her by mighty Silvanus whom she believed was her reincarnated sister. “LEAVE HER ALONE!”

“By the Lares! Protect us!” The two with the poles stagger back in the face of this savage horned demoness, who just last night had charmed them with lilting voice and soothing song, but now had materialized out the aether in front of them all fangs and fury. “M-Magic!”

“Fuck!” I spit as suddenly people were appearing bleary eyes and confused. “Everybody calm down!”

“Run, sister!” Rosa cries, directing Danae toward the sound of my voice. “Flee!”

From among the chaos Danae darts for the gap in the fence previously covered by my cousin, a limp dead cockrel in her jaws. She wriggles through the gap and in flurry of dust takes off across the stubble of the recently harvested fields.

The fox having made its escape Rosa’s defensive furor devolves into fear. “Master!”

“I’m here!” I call. “I’m here, Rosa.” Rosa shuffles through the dirt and chicken shit toward my voice I lift her up and over the fence to set her down in front of me. Wrapping her up in a hug I pet her soft hair. “I’m right here.”

Rosa buries her face into my chest, eyes clamped shut. “I’m sorry.”

“By Ceres, what is going on out here?” Tiro bellows as he comes storming out of the house, still adjusting his loincloth around his hips. Close behind him follows a grim faced Cassie, her hair tousled from just rousing like the rest of them.

“Tiro! The demon…!”

“Rosa heard the commotion and came out to see what was happening.” I cut in. “The fox is her pet.”

“She called it sister! She’s in league with beasts.” The three that had witnessed Rosa’s appearance huddle up around Tiro, pointing at my ****. “She…she just appeared. In the air!”

“She flew like Icarus and growled like Cerberus!”

“She hopped the fence in the bedlam!” I bark back. “And…”

“I heard the snarling.” Says a young girl named Antonia who had been kneeling by Rosa’s feet by the fire all of last evening. “Like out of a nightmare. I never heard nothing like it! Like a monster.”

“I heard it too!”

“Me too! No human mouth made that sound I tells ya.”

“Because she’s not human, you rubes!” Cassie says, hurrying to join us. Standing to shield Rosa’s back she puts a hand on my arm and turns to face our hosts. “Rosa was scared you were going to kill her pet. You know how rare a trained fox is?”

Despite our united front nothing could change what the three chasing the fox had seen with their own eyes. Standing close to Tiro and some of the elders than had now appeared the three report in awed tones what they’d seen, or believed they’d seen, loud enough for all who had gathered to hear them. In the span of just a few minutes all the good will and kindness the Rosa of last night had earned evaporates like the drying dew to be replaced by something far more ugly. Murmurs begins to ripple through the farmers and eyes once wide with curiosity were now narrowed in suspicion.

“Get your stuff from out of the house.” I whisper. “Be swift.”

“On it.” Cassie says, sensing the shift among ‘our people’ as keenly as me. Slipping away from us she hurries back into the house. She does not go unnoticed as three women follow her inside.

“Tiro.” I say. “You’ve traveled with Rosa. You all listened to her tales and her songs last night. She is my branded ****! She is not this…creature of legend these three are claiming. Do you think it’s more likely she flew through the air or that in the chaos these three, focused on the fox, just happened to miss her slipping from the house?”

Understandably the three I was besmirching raise their voices in their own defense. That was fine. I would do the same in their position as they had truth on their side. My goal wasn’t to win this argument but to buy us time.

“Friends, please…” Rosa says, her voice soft and melodic once more.

“Don’t let her speak!” The pair with the poles spin and raise their tips our direction. Out of the corners of my eyes I spot others beginning to wield tools and sticks. “She’ll hex us all!”

“ENOUGH!” I shout. “We will be on our way. We will pay you for the precious chicken you lost. For that is what this is all about, an ill-disciplined pet and one dead bird.”

Leaving them with that to mull on I hold Rosa to my side and hurry toward the stables. The few people in our way scatter like flies as the approach of the ‘scary’ demon. Behind us the witnesses are shaking their heads and swearing on their ancestors that what they saw wasn’t natural but I’d left just enough doubt among the others to give us a chance to put some distance between us. I just prayed Cassie made it out okay.

“I’m sorry, Quin.” Rosa whispers, clutching to me. “This is all my fault. I never meant…I was half asleep. I didn’t know what was happening. I just knew she was in trouble.”

“We’ll talk later.” I say, glancing behind us to see dozens of familiar eyes staring at me as if I were a stranger.

Inside the stable I find Collywaddle dressed and hurried packing our packs. “Breakfatht on the road I take it?”

“Colly, I could kiss you.”

“I’ll hold you to that.” Colly chortles, unfazed by the real peril we were in right now. “But I get to choothe where!”

“I can help.” Rosa peeps. “Please let me help.”

“My love, please. We don’t have time right now.” I stand her next to a post and put her hand on top of it. “Just…stay.”

Her face contorts in helpless frustration and guilt as her head bows. “Yes, Master.”

I jog to Catalus’ stall and hastily get the grouchy equine ready to travel. As I pull the bridle onto his head I am peering back and forth between him and the open doors to watch what was happening out in the yard. I let out a great breath of relief when I see Cassie break through the gawkers in a full stride carrying both her pack and Rosa’s. That relief is short lived however as I also see the more able bodied men of the family following in her wake. I glance briefly to my covered sword then shake my head. There was no problem here that could solve. Instead I find an axe handle and go to meet the group at the doors.

Without even slowing down Cassie blows right past me, whispering. “We gotta go. Now!”

“Tiro…” I step forward.

“Stop!” My cousin says as the other men go to close in on me. “Quin is clan. Quin is family.” He reminds them, before locking eyes with me. “And Quin is on his way. You won’t be heading back this way, will you cousin.”

I pan around at the furrowed brows and tense jaws of the men. “No, Tiro. I suspect I won’t be. We’re happy to pay for the chicken and the trouble.”

“Your coin is no good here.” Tiro says, raising a hand to signal me not to take a step closer. “We’re family after all.”

“Yeah.” I throw the axe handle into the dirt in front of me. “Family.”

“Goodbye, Quintus.”

“Be well, Tiro.”

The men stand their ground but approach no closer as I back away into the stable.

“I’m sorry.” Rosa whimpers as the rest of us bustle around her. Her ears drooped, tail hanging limply, she fidgets in place beside the post where I left her. Her unseeing eyes cast left and right as she ties to make sense of the noises around her to contribute in some way to what we were doing. “I’m so sorry everybody.”

“Come along, my Lady.” Cassie puts her arm around Rosa and leads her out the opposite doors of the stable.

Taking my pack and grabbing Cat’s halter I pull our steed along and follow behind them, Colly at my side.