The 11 year old sat up slowly, weakly. Dark, greasy curls fell over her face, interspersed with iron gray spikes, shutting out some of the harsh morning light. Phoenix looked down at the dead dwarf underneath her, his face cut open and drawing flies. She nodded to herself, grimly. She was alive, Montaron hadn't cut her throat with her own dagger. She didn't smell his form as a source of food as a ghoul would, but she had a body to ache and force into movement, like a wraith or ghost would not. But the coldness she felt was from laying on a body that had been losing heat, and her stomach felt queasy.
Gorion would have moved her to a bedroll. But Montaron didn't care if she got up again or not, most likely. Or he didn't want to be accused of caring. Or perhaps he didn't want to risk waking her from sleep. After all, she had a knife in easy reach and if she was having a nightmare, he could reason she might attack.
She rose to her feet, fighting the stiffness of dried blood that had soaked into her robe, and the pain and weakness spread in her limbs. An enormous headache throbbed in her mind, newly felt with every beat of her heart. She wanted to think about it, but she didn't want to think about it. Not yet. Now, she would busy herself with necessary details until she could think about it.
She walked over to where Kagain's thick leather many-buckled pack lay, riffled through it, and found a bar of soap and a bounty notice. She stripped off his armor and helmet, dragging those into a pile some short distance away, grimacing as the metal clanged and clinked. Then she gathered sticks around him, and used the bounty notice to light the fire. She watched the fire burn his flesh away from his bones. This fire wouldn't be hot enough to burn his bones too, of course, but that was fine- they would cook out the moisture and dry them out and she would take over from there. She had no intention of seeing the dwarf again.
What had he meant about her not being pretty enough to make it fun to kill her? Did it really matter how pretty a person was in how fun it was to kill them? Did he feel bad needing to kill someone ugly like her? Her mind flashed back to her regret at having to kill the ogre. Maybe he'd felt something like that.
Her grim silence was broken by the sound of Xzar heaving somewhere behind the brush. With as queasy as her stomach felt, just the sound of it demanded that she do the same. She headed to her own set of bushes, choking back a flood of last night's stew. She made it to the bushes, and lost her battle with her body over the matter. She struggled to breath in between surges of bile and stew.
She'd been told that people drank alcohol to forget, but she could remember last night with disturbing clarity. She'd threatened Montaron. She'd admitted that she liked him and didn't know why. She would be less ashamed if she'd ripped off her clothes and danced naked like Hull had once, and had never heard the end of it. But it was worse than that. She'd thought that people who could remember it would remember as though it were a dream, but it had been as though she'd been dreaming her whole life and had really woken up last night. She'd liked it. She'd hungered for combat. She'd welcomed the challenge. She'd been ready to pry an eye out of Kagain and feed it to him. As if it were natural. And last night, she'd known that it was fun to kill- something that she'd been adamantly denying to herself since she'd found out by the killing wild dogs- killing was not supposed to be fun!
She'd known that when she lost control of herself as a five year old, she'd killed Mae and she'd done her best to control herself for the last six years. She'd embraced any measure of self control anyone offered her. She controlled her breathing. She controlled what food went into her body. She controlled her face expressions. But last night, she hadn't controlled herself. Last night, her mind had danced naked. It was so much worse than if it had been her body doing it. After all, that would have merely made her look like a two year old. Instead of a monster.
Gorion would be aghast. It was as if she were merely brass under gold gilt, that if you scratched away a thin surface layer, she was evil underneath it all. She deserved to be sick. She deserved to be worse than just sick.
Her body seemed to be as thorough as she, it emptied bile on top of all the soup it had managed to clear from her system, and then she heaved dryly for several minutes. After a few moments of panting uncertainly, she sat back, trembling from lack of energy and cold sweat. She caught her breath, then tried to regulate that with breathing exercises until she brought it back under control.
She may deserve to be sick, or destroyed, but she still had responsibilities before she died. She had agreed to deliver the message to that family, and Firebead was trusting her to do it.
What was it Jaheira had told Marl to do in order to get better? Drink three pitchers of water and go to sleep? She could never drink three pitchers of water. But she was also probably less than a third of his body weight, as well and probably hadn't had as much alcohol as he had, so she decided to just sip one of her waterskins until it was empty, after filling them both up, of course.
After she did so, she took the bar of soap with her further downstream. First, she looked carefully around, listened, and made sure no one or nothing seemed inclined to come tromping through the area she was about to use. She scrubbed her robe first, then wrung it out several times and hung it on a branch. Then she got into the water and scrubbed herself in a fit of self hatred.
* * *
Overall, the travel was silent, except for Xzar who became more and more cheerful as night approached. As they wound up through a fairly thick area of trees, Xzar snapping every fallen branch he found 'to deprive them of their strongholds', a man in shadow grey leathers came out of the woods with a short bow.
"Whoa, slow down! I'm trying to plan the grandest of heists here. With all your tromping about, I can't hear a word I'm thinking!"
Xzar leaned in, raising his eyebrow. "Your thoughts can be blocked by mere sound?" His vivid green eyes widened, and his grin deepened mischievously. "Or perhaps you are a slave to the mind control crickets, and we are blocking their orders! Fly away like a butterfly before you hear their high pitched voices!"
The man did a double take, "Wha?" He said, then he got a good hard look at Xzar, his tatoos, his robe, his enormous grin and his brown haired bodyguard, lurking in his shadow with his short sword already drawn. "You two? What are you doing outside of Zhe-"
Phoenix knew that to be successful at any sort of heist, a criminal needed to have sharp wits, careful planning or luck, and frequently, grand heists needed all three in abundance. He seemed to have none of the above going for him. Whatever he was trying to do was most likely doomed to fail. After all, no sort of criminal with any sense at all should confess his attentions to numerous strangers randomly.
"Shut it." Snapped Montaron. "We got legs." He growled. "Don't be jabberin', if ye like yer own legs. Now ye be plannin' a heist. Talk."
"Right." The man said nervously. He then settled eyes on Phoenix, as if he'd not noticed her before. He smiled a nervous, fake smile, probably appraising her as Xzar's new apprentice. "Well, here's the plan. There is a big time mage living just over that rise. Magic items scattered all over the place, I'm betting... Trouble is, he's got these two hideous flesh monsters guarding him and no shadows to lurk in. Brute force is useless. There must be a way to outwit the witless but damned if I know how..." He looked at the group again, and smiled at Phoenix as though he'd suddenly acquired suicidal courage. "Ah, well, I guess I'd be better off just finding a halfling village somewhere to pick on. This dive is all yours." He flashed Montaron a vengeful grin and turned to leave. Montaron cut his achilles tendon and then his throat. Looking down at the pile of body and blood on the ground, Phoenix knew she should be horrified, but she wasn't. Deep down, under the gilt, she approved. But her coal black eyes still locked onto Montaron's face critically. She shouldn't approve. It shouldn't be acceptable.
"Bloody fools like that shouldn't be allowed to live." Montaron said, wiping the blood off his short sword. "Don't try ta say ye don't agree, lass." He smirked. She wasn't the only one that remembered last night.
