“Is that the plan then? Kill me?”
Barry shrugged, “It’s always been the plan. You know that.”
Beleg swirled his wine glass, looking nonplussed at the thought. “You’ve certainly tried over the years, but still I live.”
“And you’ll live at least a few days longer still,” Barry muttered. “I have other business to attend to here that cannot wait whereas you and I always seem to cross paths.”
“What business is this?” Beleg asked. “Still working on bagging rare and elusive wildlife for spoiled rich folk to stuff and hang on their walls?”
“It pays the bills between other things, but no… this one is different. In fact,” he said, snapping his fingers and jabbing his pipe at Beleg, “I might kill two birds with one stone… almost literally.”
Beleg raised an eyebrow and scooped a handful of nuts from the bowl in the center of the table. “Do tell,” he murmured, as if only listening because he was a captive audience and had no actual care for the topic.
Barry leaned in close then and whispered something that Kre and the other boys could not hear. Beleg simply listened and the two soon engaged in their own private, hushed conversation.
Eventually, Beleg called out loudly for Kre to attend him. “Boy! Go out to Master Barr… Master Joseth’s horse, grab his bag and get it settled in the room that the innkeeper tells you.” Kre could tell that Beleg hated using that name again, but he played his role well. Kre nodded and took off for the entry before he realized that he had no idea how to find Barry’s horse from among the others.
Luckily, the strange man’s horse was the only one in the stable anywhere near as large as Beleg’s. Wary of the fact that the horse might be as psychotic as his owner, Kre tossed a couple of old apples towards the stallion which, as expected, the horse caught deftly and nearly inhaled with only the briefest of chomps. Though the apples that the innkeeper tossed out here were a bit moldy and fairly bruised, Kre knew that they wouldn’t hurt the old boy at all.
Hoping that the stallion now regarded him as less of a threat, Kre showed him a third apple and spoke to him soothingly, just as his father had taught him. Although he knew that the actual words didn’t matter, he still chose to softly chant the words to a lullaby. It was a habit that earned him quite the teasing from the other kids in the village, and even from some of the adults.
It didn’t matter that his own father sang songs to the animals he handled. The townsfolk never made fun of him. Cootsman was the only other person that did something similar, though he generally seemed to be having actual conversations with the animals he tended. If the other villagers mocked him for it, Cootsman never noticed nor cared.
Armed with his promise of an apple and the soft words of his children’s song, Kre managed to get the saddlebags off the horse. Up close, Kre could see that the poor beast had been ridden hard and for a long period of time, with very little tending to.
“All right boy,” he whispered as he offered up the third apple. “I’ll return shortly and give you the care a champion like you deserves.”