and clothe them! You’re to blame for this even more than
he is. You brought him among us, and you blinded
everyone to his evil nature. You let him work his evil on us,
and now he’s had his way, and good people like myself are
destroyed! I’m ruined!” And then she called Ark some
names that I’m not going to write down here, because they
were awful and I don’t think I could spell them correctly
anyway. I might ask Ark about them tomorrow.
When Goodwife Filster stopped for breath, I heard
Widow Muffin say, “Goodie Filster, please, listen to us.
You need to go back to the inn and rest for a while. If you
do anything to hurt us, you’ll feel terrible about it. You’ve
had some terrible things happen to – ”
“SHUT UP!”
The wall I was leaning against vibrated when Goodwife
Filster yelled, and among other things she called Widow
Muffin a prostitute, only she didn’t use that word.
“You can’t talk to me!” Goodwife Filster finished. “You
have no right to say anything to me! You deserve the same
fate that the kender should have had years ago! He should
have died out there, eaten by rats and wolves. It’s your fault,
Arskin, for dragging that demon child in among good folk.”
“He’s not a demon,” Ark said, his voice shaky. “You’re
just upset, now. He’s a kender, and they’re just like you and
me, even if they cause a little more – ”
“The Abyss take you!” screamed Goodwife Filster.
“The evil gods delivered him into your hands to destroy
us!”
“Goodie, he was just a little baby, and his mother was
dead. She’d been wounded by goblins or bandits, and she’d
carried him all the way through the wilderness to get him to
safety. I couldn’t leave him there after I buried her. If you
had been me, you would have done the same. You know it!”
Ark sounded like he was trying to reason with a swamp
viper he’d almost stepped on.
I was shocked to hear about my mother, because Ark
had never said a word to me about her, and for a moment I
couldn’t think of anything else until Goodwife Filster
laughed.
“I would have known what to do to the little bastard,”
she said, and my insides went cold when she said it. “I
would have spared us all this torment. But because of you
and that kender, I lost everything I ever owned. It’s only
right that you should suffer as I have, just exactly as I
have.”
I slowly moved around the door frame. No one was by
the door, but I could look into the wall mirror nearby and
see part of Goodwife Filster’s back and one of her arms. She
was holding a torch in one hand and had a meat-cutting
knife stuck in her belt. That was bad enough, but, being so
close to the door, I could also smell something like lamp oil,
only it couldn’t have been – or so I thought – because Ark
doesn’t own any oil lamps, because he says the local oil
burns too fast and smells awful, like burned fish, which is
what it comes from (we call them greasegills).
Of course, my next thought was that Goodwife Filster had
brought her own lamp oil, and that she meant what she said
about Ark suffering exactly as she had, and suddenly all I
could think about was my growing up in the shoe shop and
how it was the only home I had ever known and how Ark
and I, and later Widow Muffin, had always had so much fun
here. I realized I had no idea how much lamp oil Goodwife
Filster had brought in with her, but it smelled like enough to
burn up my memories and the shoe shop and maybe some
people with it.
I stopped listening then so I’d have a chance to think.
Think first, Ark always tells me, even if it’s just for a
moment. At first I thought I should run for help, but I didn’t
know if Goodwife Filster would behave herself long enough
for me to find Magistrate Jarvis and get back without