“You ‘suppose’?” Ren repeated, eyebrows arching.
“Stop! You know what I mean,” she said, laughing as she gave their arm a playful shove.
It had been barely more than a second of contact – and not even skin-to-skin at that – yet still Ren felt as if their entire world had been upended. They sucked in a sharp breath, their throatconstricting in time with their awareness, now narrowed to single, hand-shaped point atop their biceps.
Touch me again, they wanted to say.Lighter. Softer. Lower. But they couldn’t. Their mouth was too dry, their tongue too heavy. All they could do was swallow thickly, their fingers curling around the spot Pansy had touched, still pulsing with lingering heat, perfectly replicated in the flush that spread across their cheeks.
“If you’re interested in my books,” Pansy began, a hopeful gleam rising to her eye, “what if I read one of them to you? Like how my grandmother used to do for me. There won’t be any magic, and I certainly don’t have any potions. But so long as you promise not to laugh, I can at least try to do the voices.”
In truth, Ren hadn’t been interested in her books at all. They’d been nothing more than an excuse, hastily cobbled together – and rather poorly at that. But the warmth that suffused their being at Pansy’s suggestion was entirely genuine. Theywantedto listen to her, to learn more about her interests. The fact that those interests involved a halfling hero was… unfortunate, to say the least; no doubt this Wolf Banefoot, like the rest of his ilk, had skewered plenty of goblins on his road to fame. But Ren had weathered worse in the name of affection, including several-dozen hallucinogenic toads.
“I think I’d like that very much,” they said, their voice soft for fear of it turning into a hoarse croak.
“And you promise not to laugh?” Pansy asked, fixing them with her most serious look.
“I promise.”
For what it was worth, Ren kept their word; at least, until the eponymous hero ofWolf Banefoot and the Remarkable Raimentconfronted the story’s villain, a cruel human lord who’d taxed a halfling village into abject poverty. Pansy, true to her word,had done the voices. However, for some reason, she’d decided that the human lord ought to have a haughty, nasally way of speaking, which – fair. But she accomplished this by pinching her nostrils shut! How was Ren supposed to keep a straight face when she did that?
“You promised not to laugh!” Pansy huffed, indignant. Crossing her arms over her chest, she allowed the book to fall into her lap, where it remained, propped open against her thighs, sitting cross-legged as she was on the floor.
“It was funny!” Ren protested, palms turning upward into a sort of half-shrug that Pansy clearly didn’t appreciate, given the way she huffed a second time, her gaze pointedly turning away from them.
“I’m not reading to you any more,” she declared, chin jutting high despite the red tinge that had risen to her cheeks. “You’ll just forever have to wonder how the story ends.”
“Oh, I will, will I?” Scooting closer, Ren scooped the book out of her lap with a devious grin, ignoring the offended gasp that pulled from deep in Pansy’s throat. Granted, in her position, they’d have gasped too – albeit, for entirely different reasons.
Though they’d been sitting beside her the entire time, Ren had been careful not to get too close, the narrow gap between the two of them as much a lifeline as it was a curse. Now, that sliver of space was gone, swallowed by the joint seam of their thighs, where every inch seemed to spark with the charged air of an approaching summer storm.
It took everything in Ren not to react to it, the heat of Pansy’s proximity, new and wonderful and horribly distracting. Grateful that their hands didn’t tremble as they raised the book high, a perfect imitation of how Pansy had looked only moments before, Ren began to read.
Or, well, “read”. They hadn’t miraculously developed that skill in the half-hour Pansy had spent reading aloud to them. The text on the page still looked like indecipherable scribbles, lines of meaningless black flowing together into a never-ending stream. But the story had tugged at a familiar thread in the recesses of Ren’s mind, reminding them of a different tale. A goblin one, in fact, about a kind-hearted trickster named Aconite, who, like the hero in Pansy’s novel, had sought to free his people from tyranny.
Granted, the version Ren was familiar with featured significantly more necromancy, a natural consequence of casting a dark lord as the story’s villain. But the similarities were so striking that more than once Ren forgot which tale they were meant to be recounting, and Aconite’s name slipped out instead.
The first time, Pansy had kept quiet, allowing Ren to narrate the beginning of the story’s climax, where the hero, masquerading as a famous tailor, presented the cruel lord with a “robe” that was just as non-existent as the “rare, elven material” it was purportedly made of. However, the second time Aconite’s name slipped out in place of Wolf Banefoot’s, she stopped Ren mid-sentence with a light touch to their forearm, so quick they might’ve thought it their imagination if not for the lingering heat that bloomed in its place.
“Who’s Aconite?” she asked. “You keep saying his name instead. Also, I don’t remember the cruel lord secretly being a necromancer – or the villagers’ employer, for that matter.”
Ren winced. Another slip-up to join the first. “He’s… a goblin hero,” they explained after a beat of deliberation. Better to call Aconite that when introducing him to someone otherwise unfamiliar with the legend. Trickster could be such a loaded word, especially to a halfling’s ears.
“Who tricked a paranoid necromancer into wearing nothing under the guise of it being a Robe of Invulnerability?”
“It’s hard to boss your employees around when everything is on display,” Ren said with a shrug.
Pansy laughed. “Hard to tax people too, I imagine.”
“Is that how Wolf Banefoot’s story ends?”
“Oh, yes. The cruel human lord, thinking he’d be the center of attention at the king’s court, eagerly donned his new ‘outfit’ on a visit to the palace. He wasn’t entirely wrong. The moment he stepped into the Receiving Hall, all eyes were on him – just not for the reason he had in mind. You see, greeting one’s king in, well, nothing”– she giggled – “is generally considered poor form, and the king in question was not known for having a sense of humor. The cruel lord, therefore, found himself on a one-way trip to the palace dungeons, but not before being stripped of his title and lands, which were granted to the halflings instead.”
Ren grinned. “A happy ending, then.”
“Of course!” Pansy said, her chest swelling with pride. “Wolf Banefoot always wins.”
“As does Aconite. By stripping the necromancer of the fear he’d cultivated, Aconite was able to give the goblin workers the confidence they needed to advocate for themselves. For better pay. Better treatment.”
“You know,” Pansy began, her expression turning thoughtful, “it’s really interesting how close the stories are. Instead of a vain lord wanting to be the best-dressed noble at court, you have a paranoid necromancer afraid of death, which, in retrospect, is a bit ironic, isn’t it?”
