A Past Life (Solo)

[Duffy]

A Past Life

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We are eternally learning to live with fire in the belly and darkness in the soul.

It took many years to reconcile the two, but when I finally did, I began, at least in part, to find peace. War had come to my homelands as I grew up, and though I had the luxury of a well accustomed lifestyle, slick in the homestead of my father’s keep, seeing the kingdom set ablaze in the name of patriarchy skewed my perceptions of Rodham’s beauty.

A city like ours requires tentative care. Leave it too long, like a flower, and it will grow wild and unfettered. Let it lose with a short temper, and its people grow weary and fiery. Balancing those two extremes had been my father’s gift before the unexpected birth of his second son. Until that day the lineage was settled, and he had financial obligations to only one protégée. With my arrival, or so I am told, things became complicated. Though I was trueborn, and not a bastard of alcoholic stupor born, I was every bit unintended and the love I received during my upbringing was of the unfrequented variety, half felt and humdrum.

Rodham swiftly fell into chaos as my father lost his focus, torn between a weary marriage with a wife who requested children of her husband when he had no spirit to sire another weakness, and between ever stringent borders with the Farrier’s to the North, and the Masonite to the East. All the furry of his wrath could not abate the storm that was coming, not only from his allies, political ties and enemies, but from nature itself as winter rode in. Together, they formed a metaphorical dagger that was his undoing, and my tool of inadvertent ascension.

It is sick to consider even daring to profit from such times. That is what I have been dually raised to believe. I do not think so now, looking back through time and forward to the pile of gold at my feet. On the one hand, my father used to say, one should always take advantage of opportunity, whereas on the other, when she dared speak to me, my mother suggested advantage only came when one learnt to turn a blind eye to those moments. A drunk in a tavern said years later, that true man learnt to do both. So I did, and my profiteering became paramount to dragging me from the long hard years of misery I was subjected to in the nobility of my father’s keep, and the sodden earth works that bedded my namesake.

Very quickly, I lost the name Adderbough Rodham, son of King Lucca Rodham, and took the swain’s name Gavel. Unto this day there is no Curtongue with a greater reputation through the burning remnants of those sorrowed days.

[Duffy]

Chapter One – Favours

“Dragmire, you’re looking old these days,” said the barmaid, supple lips and bosoms swaying to the beat of her foot padding to and fro behind the stained, oaken bar.

The old watch man rolled his eyes at the wall and went back to his ale, licking the edge of his battered steel tankard as was his custom. He went about the consumption of his beverage like an ogre might a leg of lamb, tearing into it with impatience. I watched Molly tend to another silent, dreary customer and collected my thoughts. She had acknowledged my entrance a few moments prior, but discretion and business came before our little arrangement. When she had settled half empty glasses and flagons with her wares, she lifted up the hatch and let me through into the small room to the rear of the inn’s bar. The sound of droning mumbles and the patter patter of dusk merchants and errand boys from the streets beyond left us, and we stepped into the kitchen beyond the store room for some privacy.

“You’re looking swelling as ever Moll’, I dare say you’re doing well from all this fame?” I tried to imply a friendly banter would be welcome before we got down to business, but put on a serious expression when I caught a glimpse of her stare.

“Let’s not be plentiful with the charm with me Gavel, I ain’t got time. We ‘aver to be done’ away with it and you knows it.” She wagged her finger at me and picked up a large carving knife on the table at the centre of the kitchen. She chopped handy onions to ease the tension, as if she could not stand still to just look at me. Given our history, or rather, distinct lack of, I didn’t blame her.

“Okay. You asked to see Thom about the Guard House, but he can’t get away.”

“What was his excuse this time?” She rolled her eyes, and hit the chopping board harder and harder. Her strength, delighting her feminine wiles cleaved the soup ingredients into symmetrical halves almost as if they weren’t there at all. The juicy red skin of the home grown produce offered no resistance.

I crossed my arms over my chest tightly and sighed. We had this discussion almost daily for two weeks, so I made a show of preparing myself to go through the motions. “He is snowed under with duty because of the festival; he has to maintain a full guard with no support from the Dock Land brigade because they are over watching the merchant fleets from the Western kingdoms.” With that, she seemed to relent, and I let down my guard for a moment. Though we had been through a great deal, me and Molly Lanier, her marriage to Captain Thom Lanier was still something of an enigma to me.

She cleaved the last onion with a little more kindness than the rest and set the cleaver on its edge. She made a motion to wipe a tear from the corner of her eye with the sleeve of her free hand, and I tried to make out wherever or not it was the onions or the eroding presence of being abandoned. With a scoop, she deposited her work into a large pale and heaved it across the stonework kitchen floor to set it on the roaring open fireplace. The large, three tier grill that settled over the flames was already heaving with pots and pans, hissing and bubbling away, but she made room stubbornly.

[Duffy]

“If he don’t agree to it we ain’t done’ it.” That statement was expected, and I walked around the table to help her with the last adjustment with a hand of kindness.

“I would not expect you to take any other stance Moll, I am not here to try and twist your arm.” I smiled at her dreamily, before wandering back to the table to lean against it suavely. I did suave well, for all the wonder it did me, and Moll appreciated the show of effort even though we understood one another’s boundaries all too well.

“So why are you here?” The heady aromas of the kitchen took over my senses for a few seconds, with waves of stilton and brandy and chestnuts. They were an odd fusion, but the many patrons of the Antelope of Penny Lane had come far and wide to taste the food, and Molly always tried her best to accommodate her guests. I took up a large, red, juicy apple from the customary bowel at the centre of the table and rubbed it against my lapel.

“I have come to ask you for a favour, for once.” She looked at me in a way she had not looked at me for in a long, long time. “No, please, don’t raise your suspicions. I am not trying to trick you, it is as honest and, well, for me, simple enough.”

When my father died I had been given a choice. I had to choose between a life of my own, and the life my wretched mother wished to impose on me. I had fled that night, with nothing other than the clothes on my back and a whimper, and ran out into the cold rain of Rodham’s streets. Molly’s father had found me, and like all good Samaritans had taken me in. I became his son, and his daughter, the brunette vixen Molly my sister. When I became the Gavel, and took to the proffering of lucrative items beyond money, they had turned a blind eye to my ways as only family could. I had promised to never involve them short of necessity, and this was one of those times.

She scurried every inch of me, trying to gauge some sort of shenanigans in my otherwise rigid body language. As she observed my form, she stacked three plates of steaming vegetables, set out by one of the many servants who went periodically back and forth from the upper kitchen to the lower gallery and strutted back through the store room into the bar. “Spit it out Gavel!” She shouted back over her shoulder reluctantly, and as the swing doors swung their little rattle fanfare, I skipped after her with a grin that could spines, and quite often did.

[Duffy]

Chapter Two – Questions

When I appeared behind her, she was already doing a length of the bar, depositing each of the plates in front of their semi-lucid, languishing owners with a gentle bow and a pleasant smile. Pie, pot and potato aromas roused them rather swiftly, and I caught a good look of their faces before they disappeared behind a wall of gravy and lentil sauce.

“Tell me,” I began, following Moll around onto the floor of the bar, our heavy boots rattling on the floorboards as they bounced on their loose nails. “When we were young, what did you say to me on the rooftop of the cathedral, one very long and hot summer afternoon?”

She had her back turned to me, but as she pulled out the dusty rag from her belt and shook it, I could see the corner of her cheeks turn up into a reminiscing smile. The first few years of my upbringing in the Lanier household had been a heady mix of clandestine adventures and candle making, neither of which had stuck apart from the most perilous of events. We had climbed atop the city’s grand cathedral, and snuck about the verge of the statues that divided the apex reliquary and the bell towers. From that height, we could see most of the city, a patchwork quilt of brown, red and ochre squares, rhombus and rectangles.

“For what good it’ll do me, I remember.” She forcefully tossed the rag between her palms a few times to ease off the last of the dust and went about polishing the first of many tables. She moved the central candle aside with one hand and wiped with the other in a rudimentary, skilled fashion. Her backside wobbled slightly as she went, and I admired it with a cheeky grin whilst plying my vocabulary to the acquisition of what I hoped would be her consent.

“I asked you, or rather, I told you who my parents were.” The conversation had been rather one sided, from what I remembered myself, and I had talked for many an hour about how I’d dreamed of being something more than what was prescribed by my birth right for months. I was thirteen, and she twelve, so we hardly had a true scope of what the future would bring, but I felt fondly that the dream was the reward for escaping my mother’s decrepit clutches. The chasing of that golden moment on the other hand, was another matter altogether. “Do you remember what I asked you after that?”

[Duffy]

She moved with gusto the next table, and the next, all the while the sound of the last vestiges of the day’s trade shuffled past the tavern’s open windows and the clattering of cutlery on plates from behind filled the gaps between our little word dance. Though I could make out wherever or not she was smiling or scowling at me from supposed secrecy, I couldn’t feel what she must have been feeling. I had asked her something very personal and something that might well now threaten her safety. Hindsight had a horrible way of playing you for a Fool, I had come to realise.

“You asked me, in no uncertain terms Gavel, to do one favour for you in the future, that you would never ask owt of me and my pa except for chores except on one, explicit occasion when you ‘ad no choice.” Our feet had been dangling over the parapets at that point, and the sun was setting over the horizon and exploding colour everywhere our young, fascinated eyes could look. Down on the street level, you never really got a good look at the sunset, unless you went for hours to the suburbs and caught a half rendered glimpse of it between the boulevard trees.

“I am afraid that time is now, and I must ask of you some questions.” I rested my hand on her left shoulder with a friendly application of a squeeze, and she paused hesitantly, before turning on a sharp heel to face me head on. She knew all too well what I was doing, and how I would go about getting her approval, but that did not mean she liked it or had to accept it readily.

“You be gain’ putting your wiles on me it better be for a good reason Gavel, mark my words. I know what I said and I promised to do you this…favour, but let it be said,” she thought for a moment as she wound through the tables to slip back behind the bar. With a clank, she piled up the already empty plates and stacked them in a mausoleum tower of chicken bones and crockery next to the storage room door. “I don’t want no shenanigans or harm to me, my pa or this establishment, you hear?” She wagged that laminable finger at me again and I practically fell drunk into a stool in front of it.

“Yes sister. I understand, and I have been the victim of those boots of yours enough times to know you will take great delight in following through with your threat.” I pulled my riding cloak back over my shoulder to compose myself, and pointed with a digit of my own at a pale lime green bottle on the shelf immediately behind Moll’s semi-flustered grimace. She scooped it up and deposited it on the bar with a heavy thud, and disappeared beneath the counter to rummage for my usual glass.

“So tell me,” her voice echoed through the ageing oak. “What is it you want?” Her head bobbed back into view and she placed the crystal cut whiskey glass in front of me. As she poured the Luvinelle liquor into it, and sniffed it appreciatively before handing it to my eager paws, she kept a keen eye on the man she had referred to as Dragmire in case he tried to pilfer the coffers again, or worse, fall of his chair.

“What I require, good sister is the use of your most treasured possession.” She started to frown before I’d even mentioned its name, but I had expected her to take such a tone. I looked to my right and raised my glass to the patrons to ease their furtive suspicions, before resuming my approach. “I would like to use the Dawning for one evening, no more time, and no less. I will not corrupt it, or take it from its pedestal, or even, for that matter touch it.”

[Duffy]

Chapter Three - Answers

The Dawning was Molly’s family heirloom. She had been given it by her mother; much like my namesake and royal blood was given to me by my own parents. Whereas I had scorned my gifts and squandered them on the Curtongue’s Way, she had embraced hers with a passion I could only dream of. It’s monetary worth was without measure, for it was not made of jewels or gold, nor did it have value to the black market or the treasure hunters of the Faulding Mountains.

“Why do you want to use it?” Her line of questioning was as dry and uninspired as her tone. There were only two times in her life when she used the expression she plied her question with, and the last time had seen her pointed heel in my swiftly retreating groin. For a moment, I half expected her to launch across the bar and tear my throat out with jealous fingers and a well-placed frying pan, but she didn’t, at least, not yet.

“I need to ask a question, to get some answers to things I’ve been wondering about for a very long time.”

By now, the sun had dropped below the nearest vantage point, leaving the inn in a golden husk of light that resembled the more secretive and untoward districts of the city. The cold air was slowly seeping in through the open windows, and Moll eyed them with a routine need to close the blinds and set about tending to the dying embers of the late afternoon fire. She had been the owner of the tavern long enough to know that a cold bar was an empty one, and an empty bar made for emptier pockets.

“What sort of questions?” She rattled off the words as if they were a series of dagger strikes, and I tried my best to look wounded. I languished in the contemplation whilst she moved around the counter and hooked closed the shutters with a long shank pole she kept by each opening. Her movements were sharp, accurate and without question, carrying weight of threat in every thrust.

I lolled around on the stool and leant back on the bar, shoulders splayed wide and casual. My Curtongue words might not have measure with my sister, but the application of body language and bribery in tandem with these tools would wear her down eventually. She closed the last window in quick time and let the hook’s end drop heavily onto the floorboards with a sigh. What I gathered she meant was, ‘what questions could warrant using something so dangerous?’

“They are the sorts of questions nobody alive has the answer to.”

[Duffy]

“That makes it all okay, does it?” She flicked her auburn locks behind her ears and wiped her hands on her apron, before scuttling back behind the counter to stand face to face with me. I turned stubbornly and picked up my half empty glass. The aniseed and walnut after taste of my first draught still lingered on the tip of my tongue, but I refreshed it all the same with a tentative sip, to see her patronage was taken upon and I remained lubricated enough to not start frothing at the mouth.

“No, but this is the one time when I have no one else to ask. I certainly have no one else to turn to, and most important of all, no other choice in the matter.”

Dragmire took it upon himself at that moment to raise his hand feverishly with a wobbling, semi-sober head, and craned his neck to dare to interrupt us. Molly caught his movement out of the corner of her dutiful eye and she gave me a look that suggested I wait a moment. I nodded as she walked off and took to my surroundings like a duck to water. Behind the counter there was a long shelf unit, six levels tall and as long as the bar. Each shelf was crammed with bottles from every far flung corner of the city and much further beyond. Like her cooking, people came to taste fine wines and liquors from the deserts and seas of the places they could never hope to visit. The third shelf was my favourite, as that was for the whiskey and the brandy and the dark edged liquors from the Numara Provinces.

“I think you be ‘avin’ enough Dragmire,” I heard her raise her voice and pulled myself from my observations. The drunken man had seemingly perked up, and was sat upright in his stool with a sudden look of logic about him. My skin tingled with the possibility of conflict, as ever it did. It had kept me alive long enough and I muttered a prayer as I turned to level with his position, in case a run was in order.

“I am quite alright Miss Lanier, it has come to my attention that the bargain has not been kept. I will tell my master of your insubordination,” he tipped his grubby hat and slovenly dragged himself from his position. I noticed an idle gait to his left leg as he exited, and the tension faded as Moll’s shoulders eased and her chest stopped thundering with heavy, nervous breaths.

Slowly I walked along the counter, and peered a happy smile into her devilish vision. She had thrown daggers at the man’s back for every second of his retreat, only stopping to breathe when she was sure he was not going to return. I stood upright after she acknowledged me, and crossed my arms over my chest in my customary patronising manner. With an embarrassed blush that mirrored the red opal shade of the glasses she tried to polish to brush the matter under the carpet, she told me that business was not all as well as it seemed.

“What was that about, Molly?”

“It doesn’t concern you.” She said flatly.

“I…rather think it does. You can’t make demands of my motives for using The Dawning and not be truthful and honest with me in return.”

“Well for once, this is something your petty little tongue won’t wag out of me!” She slammed the glass onto the bar, flopped the cloth down next to it and stormed through the storm room exit with a measure of malice behind her. I was left somewhat drained by the experience, and eyed by the remaining two patrons, who were too nervous or cationic to decide wherever or not it was required of them to leave.

[Duffy]

Chapter Four - Reasons

There are not many Curtongue’s left in Rodham. There is a simple reason for this; one does not talk one’s way to promiscuity, fame and fortune without earning a few jealous well-wishers and outright enemies along the way. In my short years, I had not considered it possible that Molly too could deserve a similar misfortune. Her birth right, The Dawning, must surely have attracted the attention of others in her time. You see, though I waited several minutes for her to return, bruised of the ego but composed once more, Molly Lanier did not re-emerge from the storage room. I stood slowly, and remembered the aroma of half eaten pie as it washed over me as I moved through into the kitchen.

By that time, I had shooed away the remaining patrons and bared the door with a carefully and cunningly placed chair under the handle. The silence was broken only by my nerves, which was something my own set of peculiar talents could do nothing to abate. The kitchen table was set with a wide array of foodstuffs, brought up from the galley anew since my previous visit. There were oranges and apples spliced with cloves, roasted in fig wine and ready for the evening dessert tray. Flagons of tea and politer drinks bubbled in large kettles between the pots of stew and broth on the burgeoning fireplace, but no sister tended to them.

The reasons I had for asking after The Dawning were quite simple. I wished to enquire as to the nature of a series of disturbances. Murders were scattered amongst the disappearances, and a strange air was afoot. I half wondered if Molly, by that point, had gotten herself embroiled in whatever scheme was afoot, but could only jump at paranoid conclusions in the twilight of the cooking house. If they had taken her, then I could not ask The Dawning, and the Dawning could not test my reasons.

“Molly?” I roared, half hoping she would appear from behind a flour vat or pop her head up from one of the fruit cellar hatches with a scouring glare of annoyance. The only thing that moved amidst the hubbub was the mice at the foot of the great table, peddling squeaks for scraps and fighting amongst their brood.

“I hope you’re not playing tricks on me Miss Lanier, harsh my tone may be in asking, but this is uncalled for!” I snapped my hand to the brooch of my riding cloak and undid it with a swift unreeling of the cloth. I set it onto the table in a neatly folded tumble and set my hands on my hips. By now I had settled on her disappearance, and curiosity got the better of me. Reasons were powerful weapons in the wrong hands, and if I had done her injury with my reasons for selfish deeds, then I would need to rectify the matter.

[Duffy]

I had not acquired my wealth and position in the black market hierarchy of Rodham’s Under Class establishment on the merit of being nice. If someone had dared to take my sister from me of all people, it would not be long before a ransom note or a threat came, by brazenly open courier to my very shaking hands. Stiff words ran amok in my mind as I inspected the flag stones of the floor and the patterns in the dust. There were no obvious signs of disturbance, except those heavy footprints of the elderly cooks who had worked in the galleries and slum cook houses all their lives. I traced out a woven pattern of movements, haggard and crooked like the cook’s weathered skin and watched them fade into confusion or out through the rear entrance or down the galley stairwell.

Molly had a lighter step, and none of the markings foretold of an exit. It occurred to me, that in all the mess and the chaos of her culinary citadel, she could have simply disappeared and her tracks might’ve been erased. She sometimes limped, so I tracked her recent movements with a one two traipse to the fireplace and back to the table several times.

“Oh dear,” I concluded, ducking to run a finger through the thin layer of dust that had recently fallen onto a cracked flagstone.

Before I had been exiled from the castle, I had relished the task of finding all the old secret passages and tunnels that had been built over time. In the dark web way I became something altogether sub-human, relishing the adventure and the joy of being able to observe through portrait eye holes and partisan tapestries things I should never have heard. As a consequence of my deviance, I had grown adept at spotting similar constructs elsewhere.

“Something tells me I’m not going to like this…” I said aloud, half-heartedly trying to lighten the mood. I rose to pick up the fire poke from the hearth and drove it firmly into the cracks of the flagstone. With a kick down of my boot, I eased the flagstone up and away. The gaping black hole beneath immediately cast doubt on my logic, and I felt suddenly alone and without purpose. My reasons felt so insignificant, if it had led to the loss of the one thing that was dear to me. I peered furtively over the edge of the hole, and sighed with relief. There was a drop of no more than twenty feet into a similar paved room, lit by unseen torches and possessing no other defining features that I could see.

I set the poke down gently, and eased the flagstone clear away from the secret passage. Was it a sewer? Was it Molly’s stronghold, to hide away her valuables in case the tavern was ever raided, burnt or ‘acquired’ by some other means? Rodham had a long history of roving innkeepers, staking their claim on many inns with rough measures to expand their chain of profit across the boardwalks. Molly had remained stoutly against the notion of ‘franchising’, as they had called it. I pieced together the possibility of a hostile take-over based on her encounter with Dragmire and shook my head in disbelief.

“Never in my lifetime,” I shook my head, and with a sharp breath to jolt my nerves into fully accepting my impending actions, I dropped through into the unknown with plenty of reasons to do so.

[Duffy]

Chapter Five – Motions

I landed heavily, but escaped a sprain with a tuck of both knees and a roll. The aroma of the kitchen was swift replaced with a heady moss scent that reminded me of a sewer. The room I was now in was perfectly cube shaped, and the most exciting feature was a simple wooden door with an iron frame in what I supposed was the East facing wall of the tavern. There were to torches, one to the right of the door, and one mounted on a wall bracket on the wall behind me. They burnt brightly, which suggested recent passage through this room or a recent retreat into whatever lies beyond.

Lock picking was something I never did. I always managed to talk my way through doors, around walls, under grates and certainly, into knickers. Without a face to speak to, however, I could only walk towards the door and reach out a shaking hand for the lion shaped handle which adorned it.

“Dead end,” I re-affirmed, until I was stricken with shock as the handle turned and the opened. A small rush of cold, fresh air fell about my feet as the door swung open on its own dead weight. I moved aside to let it, and stared into the passageway beyond in disbelief.

“Why does this never happen to me when there’s an armed guard in pursuit,” I questioned begrudgingly. Wishing I’d kept my cloak, I stepped into the cold corridor and advanced along it. With two quick flicks of my wrists I pulled down the two iron daggers I kept concealed up my sleeves for moments were sharp wit needed to be deposed by sharp quips of a blade, and held them at the ready in an easy position in front of me. The dying light of the torches scintillated up and down their blades as the passageway extended and extended into the unknown, and the safety of the tavern and the kitchen’s heady comfort was left swiftly behind.

I always wondered how I would meet my end. The sorts of company I kept and the sorts of things my particular set of talents got me into did not lend itself to a peaceful death at the hands of a far flung old age. If somebody were waiting for me in this laminable dark, there would be little I could do to prevent a dagger to my heart or between my shoulder blades to knell me there and then. Though adept with the Curtongue gift, I could not talk an enemy out of conflict that I was not fortunate enough to see. Several minutes of this dark thought passed until my blades connected with a surface, and I reached out to examine it curiously. The passageway came to what seemed like a dead end, until further investigation pointed to a sharp corner turn to the left.