Yes. Sing song. Strong pony song.
Knowing I was beaten, I fished out a few more apple slices, held them out on my flat palm to Jagar, and watched her delicately take them one by one. Then, as she chewed, I turned to Smuta, who was climbing onto the back of her pony.
“The strong pony song,” I said before throwing a leg over the pony then sitting. My feet nearly touched the ground, but amazingly, the saddle fit well enough. Due to the generally stockier build of the dwarves, I assumed. I had to look a total fool. “Do you know the lyrics?”
“Aye, I do, but it’s in Dwarvish. How’s your tongue, Chirp?”
“Quite skilled,” I bragged as the males saddled up, Narub fitting his sword and shield to his saddle as his twin gathered the reins of the pack ponies, his daggers strapped to his thick thighs in scabbards festooned with dwarven runes burned into the leather.
“Bet you say that to all the boys,” Asdren flung out as he trotted past me to take the lead. The others howled in mirth.
If I did not kick that black-maned knob off the side of the Witherhorns, it would be a miracle.
Riding a pony when you had long legs was not the best ride.
Thankfully, Jagar seemed okay with my odd seat. Pity I could not say the same. Her gait was off, which made riding her seem unstable. By midday, my thighs ached from holding my legs up for so many hours. The leader of this band of high-paid thieves had decided we would ride on until nightfall to get as far as we could as quickly as we could. I rode beside Smuta, gnawing on some baked pine nut roll, the twins behind us.
“No, Chirp, you ain’t making your throat sounds right.” She sighed at the twentieth try of the strong pony song. “You’re hitting them fancy elven court inflections. Dwarvish is more about the power of the rock in our words than the airy-fart diction of your people.”
Klept, her pony, plodded along in step with Jagar, both waiting for me to get the damnable song right. Agate ponies had about as much patience as the gruff folk who rode them. And just about as much speed. They were painfully slow. Hasulett would have had me halfway to Kanazen in the time it had taken us to get to the farmlands of Celear. At this rate, we would be a fortnight, if not more, just reaching the Iron Gate, wherever that sat. Click was acting as our scout, flying ahead and then coming back to report that there was nothing to report.
“Your tongue is difficult,” I confessed around a mouthful of my midday meal.
“Aye, that it is, but once you know it, you feel the surge of hot rock in your gut. So, once more now, your pony is waiting.”
An hour passed, yet I was no closer to pinning down this song in their tongue than I was of touching the sun high aboveus. Several white and red goats watched us from the other side of a fence as we trotted along.
“For the love of the Hearthmother’s sweetly scented muff, just tell the boy the words in his damn tongue!” Asdren barked over his shoulder when I stumbled over the hard R sound in a word I wasn’t even sure was about a pony. “If I hear him butcher our language once more, I will toss both of you into that fucking creek and then stand on your chests.”
I looked over at the creek. It was not deep enough to drown with a dwarf on your chest unless you were face down, but then he would be on your back.
“You and which other fucker?!” Smuta shouted as her cheeks went red. The twins snickered softly at the rear.
“Look, Chirp, just sing the fucking song in your language,” Asdren barked once more.
“I could if I knew the lyrics in Elvish,” I fired at his back. His wild black hair hung down to rest between his shoulder blades, a tangle of bits of dead leaf, braids, and kinky strands that curled at the ends.
He yanked on the reins. His pony, a stallion by the name of Rotto, came to a fast halt in the middle of a quiet dirt road. Asdren wheeled the pony about to face us.
“It’s a song about Stonehoof the Stalwart,” Asdren informed me. The twins rode up to us on either side then stopped, short brown beards coated with road dirt as well as crumbs from the liver sandwiches they had eaten not that long ago. “Down in the mines where the tunnels wind and the lanterns glow like gold, there walks a pony stout and proud with a heart both brave and bold. There, that’s all you need.”
“But there’s more,” the twins cried out. Asdren said something in Dwarvish that sounded like several insults atop one another before pulling his horse back around. Off he went at a hearty gallop. I exchanged looks with Smuta and the twins.
“Is he always this charming?” I asked as Click dropped down from the sky to pick at some corn mash in a goat feeder. The goats ran him off.
“Meh, don’t pay him no mind. He’s just got a sore on his pucker that he’s got to go back home,” Smuta replied as she watched her leader bounce down the road. “Him and his da don’t agree on how Asdren should live his life, never did, so when he was—”
“Stop flapping your fucking lips and ride or you lose five percent of the reward!” Asdren’s bellow rolled down the road to us, startling some blackbirds from a cherry tree into the sky.
“He’ll settle once we get through the tunnels,” Smuta said and then tapped her pony on its sides with the heels of her boots. The twins and I sat there for a moment.
“Can you really talk to beasts?” Dulgar asked, and I nodded. “If we tell you the rest of them lyrics about Stonehoof, will you ask our geldings if they hold us in bad accord for lopping off their bollocks?”
“Oh! And ask them if having a cock as long as your foreleg is the blessing I think it is,” Narub rushed to say before they rode off in haste.
I wouldnotask that last question.
We rode for four days steady, pausing only at night to rest the ponies.
