Salt in the Fire

Winter’s onset had yielded little snowfall but intense biting cold. Warden couldn’t remember the last time he had worn his shoes and buckskin coat to bed or spent most of his waking hours dangerously close to the fire. Cold was hardly something he noticed anymore; early in his childhood, his blood had thickened like tree sap against the mountain’s harsh winters. But this year, this winter, the nature spirits were restless. The pine branches buckled under the weight of their icy breath, crashing to the hard earth in the deepest part of the night, their death echoing in the following stillness. He would awaken with a start, his heart burrowed in his gut, sure the floor had given way beneath him.

Halfway through winter when the sun rose earlier but still disappeared under the horizon before its time, the blizzard came. It wasn’t a particularly bad one, not like the one five years ago that had ripped his roof off, but when it calmed and he let his goats out of the shack, his face numbed at the breeze’s first caress. The goats, Maple and Rock, refused to budge, and Warden hardly blamed them.

After a few failed attempts to coax the goats outside, Warden shut the door and returned to the hearth. His face stung at the sudden warmth. He pressed his fingertips to his cheeks and massaged the pins and needles away and then readjusted the pelt stuffed in the crack beneath the door. Some of the floorboards were pulling up, and mold spotted their edges where snow he had tramped in had fallen between the cracks. It looked like he would spend most of spring rebuilding his cabin.

A week after the blizzard, the sun was out in full force, melting snow from his roof and the narrow winding path that passed by his cabin. Blue expanded across the sky, bowing only for the sun at its zenith, and he decided today would be as good as any to take Maple and Rock down the mountain to the village at its base. He harnessed them to the wagon at first light, and they reached the village by mid-morning.

What little money he had left over from fur trading and selling smoked meat in autumn went toward salt, feed, and kerosene. He had enough cured meat, barley, and oats to last him the rest of the winter, all stored in the smokehouse next to his cabin, but the feed for the goats wouldn’t last long. He would have to hope he had prepared enough for himself and two damned goats.

He counted what he had left after stocking the last of the feed sacks into the wagon. Enough for an ale, not for a lunch, so an ale would have to do. He had an old friend to see, anyway.

At the end of the village’s main road leading down to rolling hills of loose soil and rib-thin bushes stood an inn and a brothel. They looked like the same building with how much they leaned on each other, the old frames buckling under ages of disrepair. Warden bound Maple and Rock outside, hoping no one would be drunk enough to try to steal the heavy burlap sacks of feed. The paraffin he could do without, and the salt was stashed on his person. Perhaps he should have come here before he bought anything.

Turning back might be best, he thought. He couldn’t afford to lose the feed, and Herry might be gone anyway—

A familiar voice called from the tavern’s window, “Warden, you haven’t frozen to death yet?”

Warden looked over his shoulder. Unsurprisingly, Herry hung out the window, his dark curls fluttering in the wind. He grinned at Warden and then shivered. “Forest’s tits, it’s cold out here. Come in before you do freeze to death,” he said.

Herry disappeared, and the shutters slammed behind him. The tavern door opened as Warden slid off the wagon. “Hurry,” hissed Herry, already shivering again, one foot braced outside and the rest of him leaning as far back from the cold as he could. He looked fucking ridiculous.

A small smile slipped over Warden’s face, and he jogged over, taking the door from Herry.

Tavern heat pressed into Warden as musty and stale as a fish market in summer. The afternoon’s small crowd was supplemented by the brothel’s staff next door. Long had the tavern and brothel been connected that they seemed inseparable, one’s patrons always eventually occupying the other’s. The Madam herself could be found in the tavern’s backroom as often as she could in her office next door.

“Good to see you, Herry,” Warden asked as he peeled off his coat and placed it on the coat tree.

Herry’s grin looked joyful, punctuated by his ruddy cheeks. He was wearing tight black pants and a soft linen shirt buttoned only below his navel. He cocked out a hip and put his hand on it. “I won’t ever understand why you won’t move to town,” he said. “I think one of these days we’re going to lose you in a snow drift. It’s happened, you know. One of my regulars, the milkmaid who lives out by the old sawmill, said she found somebody frozen to death on the road. Stuck right to the tree he’d used for shelter.”

“How did she see him if he was buried?” Warden asked. He signaled the innkeeper, Charl, who gave him a nod. Nobody ordered anything here but ale, especially in the winter.

“Well, he was half-buried, but my point still stands, Warden.”

“What was the point?”

“You know what, never mind. I try to say something friendly, and you poke holes in my friendship. You’re a friendship poker.”

Herry pouted playfully and poked Warden in the stomach and then rubbed his finger, his pout deepening. “What do you do all day, chop logs? Spirits, you think you’d have a little softness to you,” he said.

“What made you think that?” said Warden, his smile growing. He poked Herry back, and his friend jumped back, batting Warden’s hand away.

“Ah-ah,” he taunted, smirking. “The goods are for paying customers only.”

Warden rolled his eyes and caught the mug the bartender pushed over to him. “What goods?”

“That’s what I’ve been saying,” said another familiar voice, one almost as recognizable as Herry’s.

Warden turned on his heel and behind him stood Camilla, her hair in its usual tumble of velvet curls. She cocked a hip, looking identical to Herry, even though the only thing they had in common was that they were both orphans and worked in the same brothel. “Camilla,” he said, unable to stop smiling.

“Say it with any more reverence and the spirits will anoint me,” she said, returning his grin.

“Anoint you? As what? Their personal whore?” said Herry.

“Whore, spirit, what does it matter? Who doesn’t get fucked in the end?” Camilla said.

Someone in the inn shouted, “Here here!” A few of the drunker patrons echoed the sentiment, and Camilla flashed her seductress smile at them, the one that brightened the hedging lines in her face but darkened her eyes. She looked older than the last time Warden had seen her a couple seasons ago.

“You’re the one who wanted to be anointed,” Herry reminded her. He stole Warden’s mug and dragged a big pull from it.

With quick hands, Warden swiped the mug back, and a splotch of ale spilled down Herry’s bare chest. The ale beaded along the dark hairs that painted a V down to his navel. Something stirred in Warden, something that had begun a year or so ago and had kept him from coming around as often as he could. He looked away.

The trek down from his cabin wasn’t necessarily long or arduous, and he could come and keep Herry and Camilla company for a while. They were often stationed in the tavern, like shiny baubles passed around for everyone to see, hinting at what else might be lurking next door for the small price of a silver. He wanted to be with his friends, but spirits-be-damned, keeping Herry close frightened Warden. What if they ended up in love? Childhood friends turned lovers was not an uncommon tale.

If Warden was being honest with himself, he couldn’t stomach the idea of Herry sleeping with scores of people during the day and coming home to Warden at night, with already swollen lips and bite marks along his thighs, and Warden didn’t have near the kind of money to pay off Herry’s debts to the Madam.

Fuck, but he’d dug himself a grand old hole.

“Oil me up next time, why don’t you?” quipped Herry as he shouldered past Warden to grab the polishing towel and wipe himself off with it.

However, Charl saw him coming and whipped the towel away. “There’s a washroom downstairs,” he grunted.

“You’re such a cock wrinkle sometimes, Charl, you know that?”

“A dream fulfilled, then.””

Beside Warden, Camilla snickered.

Herry sulked down the narrow staircase that led to the cellar, mumbling to himself. Warden watched him go, knowing Herry wasn’t truly upset but still unable to release the absurd sting of rejection nibbling at his heart. Oil me up next time, why don’t you?

Don’t tempt me, Warden thought.

“Did you hear about Madam?” Camilla asked, tugging Warden out of his head.

He turned. “What?”

Camilla drifted over to a less crowded corner of the tavern where no one would pull on her skirts and interrupt them; he followed. Her voice dropped to a low murmur, “She retired after catching a really bad bout of boils that scarred her all over. She left Taisiya in charge, but Siya doesn’t want a lot of people finding out. I don’t know if she thinks it’ll be bad for business or what, but… Well, I thought it would be safe enough to tell you since the only things you talk to are your goats.”

Warden ignored the insult. He thought about the last time he’d seen the Madam: she had been cinched in a tight red corset, her hair a dimming pile of stiff auburn curls. She had been smoking in the brothel’s parlor when he had dropped off a wasted Herry. She’d had unblemished skin, white as cream. Every boil would have showed and, once drained, faded into purple-green bruises as sallow as a starving dog’s eyes.

As nasty as she was, volatile and prone to bad breath and head-swimming perfumes, Warden felt a mite of sympathy for her. She had lost the one thing she had to be proud of, but she had also always been a sack of shit and deserved the comeuppance.

Taisiya, however, did not deserve that shithole of a brothel. She had a temper like the Madam, who she regrettably shared blood with, and the same auburn curls, but she had a softness to her that the Madam lacked. She was also Camilla’s partner and had been for three years, so any critical assessment of her flaws died at the hands of Camilla’s barbed tongue and death-eye glare.

“How is Taisiya doing, running the brothel?” Warden asked. Imagining her mending dresses and slippers and doing the younger girls’ hair and thrashing them when they snuck out to meet a lover was impossible. She never cared for the brothel and had done her damnedest to distance herself, even going so far as to run away to university. She had returned a few months later, to her mother’s distant shock. No one had officially confirmed Warden’s theory, but he determined she had come back for Camilla because they had started their clandestine relationship a week or so after.

“It’s different now,” murmured Camilla. “At least, in the brothel itself. Herry and I are the only ones allowed to come over here because we’re the only ones able to protect ourselves if things go… wrong.” She glanced over her shoulder at the people crowding around the tables, throwing down pints upon pints of ale, faces slack and bright and thoughtless. Her jaw tightened. “We have seniority now. Lionel and Kazima left with the Madam.”

Everything had changed since the last time he had come down. “You shouldn’t be over here,” he said quietly. “What if it’s more than one against one? What if three people gang up on you? Four? Five?”

“Better than standing on a freezing fucking street corner,” Camilla hissed, her tight jaw turned on him, anger flashing across her face. “Somebody has to bring in the business. We can’t all hide in a fucking cabin.”

Warden sighed. He supposed he deserved that. “You’re right,” he said.

“Damn right, I’m right,” she said.

Someone called her name, cajoling her over to him. She turned, that seductive smile wrapping around her anger like a fog, and without another word, she went back to work.

It was time for Warden to take his leave, and he headed toward the stairs to say goodbye to Herry when Herry reemerged. His shirt was now completely unbuttoned, and the sudden urge to button it slammed into Warden like a goat’s kick. He squeezed the mug in his hand fast. “Sorry about the ale,” he said.

“Oh, you’ve done worse,” Herry said. “Remember when the Madam had finally found a pair of slippers my size and you vomited on them because you’d had too much mead?”

“And who stole the mead and made me drink as much as him?” Warden asked.

“Hmm, funny. I can’t quite recall.”

“How convenient.”

Herry flashed him a cheeky grin. “Isn’t it just?”

Herry saw him to the door with no small amount of dramatic sighs and bargains such as “I’ll suck your dick if you stay” and “I’ll suck your dick really good if you stay.” Warden rolled his eyes and shot his friend down each time, and though Herry pouted and whined and shivered at the door, he watched Warden walk out to the wagon where, surprisingly, the burlap sacks of feed still sat.

Once Warden climbed onto the wagon and gathered the reins, he glanced back at the tavern. The door was shut. He thought he saw Henry’s shadow in the window, but it could have been anyone, really. A pang dashed against his heart like lightning on a mountaintop. He shoved it down, clicking at Maple and Rock. They took the cue and started back up the road.