Trinket (Reverse Harem)

Whatever Plans There Were...

My nameless creepy companion insisted on having me sip water out of the ladle after the donkeys had had their fill. The slimy green water curdled my stomach but I managed to not throw up, although I really wanted to.

"Now I smell you," he said on the fourth day, like he'd said the previous three.

I sat obediently on the packed dirt in the shadow of the wagon, trying not to puke around the water coating my insides with slime. He grasped a handful of my hair—which was filthy and unwashed, like everything else—and pulled it to his nose. He inhaled deeply, holding the breath in his lungs before expelling it to get another.

"Ahhhh," he said, his voice trembling and thick on the third inhale.

I stared at the horizon.

He released my hair and scampered around to the other side of the wagon. The sound of spitting, then schlick schiklk and groaning for a few minutes, then ahh! before his efforts left a small amount of white on the dusty ground, and the shuffle of his pants getting hiked back up concluded our transaction.

While he was doing that, I stole a peek under the canvas at his mysterious cargo.

Sticks. Nothing but sticks. A mountain of kindling.

Perplexed, I shut up and got up onto the seat behind him after his little morning ritual. I never asked about the kindling. I also didn't ask when we came to a fork in the road, and instead of heading towards SandHaven he kept the donkeys straight on the road, towards Haven.

Haven was a city by the sea. I smelled the salt air miles before we got there. My companion told me it was the ocean, amused by my ignorance. There were also a cluster of wagons and riders and shifters in their animal forms carrying bags on their backs and a thousand scents.

But under it all? That familiar thick stink. Even worse here, because it mixed with all the stench of livestock and people and ocean. It was muddy too. I didn't ask if it was muddy—there were plenty of clouds in the sky. Huge thunderheads coming in off the ocean, laced green and purple.

"Storm coming," my companion cackled ot himself, pointing with a bony finger to the horizon beyond the massive city walls.

"Eh," I said, feigning indifference, although the size of the clouds wasn't what disturbed me. It was their color. Deep purple but tinged with a sickly green, and periodically they flashed with light.

White birds with webbed feet squawked and flew around, landing on everything and pecking at what might be a meal. As I watched, one swooped down and stole the bread out of a child's grip. The child started to wail.

Towers rose even higher than the city wall, and the city itself clung to the side of a massive stone hill, with the harbor down below.

The donkeys stopped in front of a guard house, where a couple of guards in sharp uniforms, waited. Two of them were barefoot: wolf-shifters. The human one came around to my companion, while the other two stared at me. I pretended to look bored and tired.

"Business?" the human guard asked as he rapped on the buckboard with his brass knuckles.

"Delivery, delivery," my companion said. He pulled out a filthy, stained piece of paper with a wax seal and shoved it at the guard.

I kept staring at the donkeys, but the bright purple wax seal on the paper caught my eye. What noble or high-house paid this guy and gave an official passage document to haul a card full of kindling twigs eighteen days from the mountains?

The sick feeling that pervaded my insides worsened.

Whatever it was, it didn't concern me, I tried to assure myself. There was no way he could have known I was out there, there was no bounty on my head, nobody cared about where I was or what I was doing. I'd been days out of my home enclave before I'd bumped into him, and he hadn't passed me on the way north just to turn around to pick me up going south.