Sam

  "All right, let's go over some cover stories," Mongrel said as they stopped for lunch by a sparkling bank of the River Sterling.

  "Ooh!" Sam replied, unwrapping a packaged ration for herself. "Does that mean we get to come up with fake names and backstories and stuff?"

  Mongrel gave a shrewd grin, an unfolded ration packet in his lap and a cigarette between his teeth. "You know it, kid. Hit me with your best shot, and I'll tell you if it's good enough."

  "Hmm…" Sam chewed thoughtfully on some rabbit meat, savoring Will's Prepared cooking. It almost made her feel like he was still there. "I'll be Matilda Sprucewood, a former militia soldier who had to flee the city due to her gambling debts. Her favorite foods are minestrone, pizza, and chicken salad. Also, she has a dark secret she doesn't want anyone to find out about." She tapped her temple knowingly, grinning. "Not bad, huh?"

  "I suppose." Mongrel mulled it over while he had a bite of food, puffed at his cigarette, then took a swig from a canteen filled with spirits. "You know what, though?" He sized her up through one rheumy eye, the other pinched shut. "I think you should pretend to be a man. That'll throw people dead off your scent."

  Sam scoffed. She was not a fan of that idea at all. "It would never work."

  "What do you mean? You're halfway there already!"

  "Mongrel, did you know that you have a very punchable face?"

  "All right, kid, don't get your panties in a twist. All I mean is you got the height and build for it. Other than that, you're very, uh… feminine."

  "I'm girly!" Sam insisted. "You know, in a way. Sort of. Will thinks so! I mean, he hasn't ever said so, but he must, right?"

  Luckily for the structural integrity of Mongrel's face, though, pretending to be a man did sound like good fun. At the very least, it would let her try out method acting.

  The meal Will had made ran out far too quickly, but she had to admit that it was very filling. After workshopping her cover story for a bit with Mongrel, she was ready to try it out.

  After adjusting her clothes to de-emphasize whatever feminine curves she had, Mongrel stepped back to size her up, stroking his stubbled chin. "Give us a scowl," he said.

  Sam scrunched up her face a bit.

  "Yep, that's better." He rubbed a bit of road dirt into his hands and smudged it on her face with little artful flourishes. Finished, he hummed approvingly at his handiwork once he'd returned from washing his hands in the river. "Mmhmm. Nearly perfect."

  As they got moving again, Mongrel wanted her to find a hat to hide her hair under, claiming that the color was too recognizable. So to test out her new disguise, Sam jogged up to a peddler atop a moving cart and leapt onto the driver's seat beside him.

  "Hello there!" Sam said, pitching her voice down just slightly—not so much that it was obviously put-on—so that it would hopefully pass for a man's.

  The pudgy, round-faced peddler nearly jumped out of his own skin, and had to hold down his straw hat as he scrambled back to keep it from tipping off his head. "Who are you!? What do you want from me!?"

  Sam gently steered away the long dagger that was aimed at her face with one finger. It was difficult to both smile and scowl at once, but she thought she did a fair job of it. "I'm Fat John!" she said, "the friend you never knew you had."

  She threw an arm over the man's shoulders, hauled him upright to keep him falling off the wagon and hurting himself, and he dug his chin into the generous folds of his neck like a turtle trying to hide its head.

  "Okay!?" the man whimpered. "If you try to hurt me, I'll call for help, and the soldiers will hang you for banditry."

  "I'm sorry if I startled you, friend—I didn't mean to cause you any alarm. I want to do some business with you, that's all."

  "What kind of business?"

  Sam poked the brim of the man's straw hat. "I think that's just the handsomest hat I ever saw, and I want to buy it off you. How much for it?"

  The peddler quickly found his footing again, and a bit of haggling followed. In the end Sam parted ways with twenty glories for the hat and a pair of boots, not certain whether that was a lot or a little but reasonably confident that she'd gotten a good deal, and waved at the peddler over her shoulder as she jumped back to the ground, the hat having changed heads to adorn her own.

  "Say, stranger?" the peddler called to her. "I have something else that may interest you, if you'd like to have a little look-see."

  Sam was indeed interested, and had to hide her excitement when she found out what she was being offered. The peddler held out a glass bottle of vibrant, dyed-red liquid to her, proudly announcing that it was a sure-fire remedy for erectile dysfunction, and offering it to her at a special price.

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  The obvious conclusion, of course, being that her disguise had worked! He thought she was a man!

  She didn't buy any, though.

  That afternoon they passed a rest stop, a large patch of bare earth beside the road where people could spend the night in relative safety, protected by a small militia garrison. There was even a roadside inn. A few caravans had already unloaded there, a sprawl of people and vehicles and animals.

  Mongrel had them move right past it. Having gotten a head start due to starting from Millstone, a ways along the route, they made it to the town named Greensby that day, entering through gates of lashed-together logs in a tall palisade just before they were set to close for the nightly curfew.

  Sam could not make out much of the town in the weak light of the failing sunset. For food and board, Mongrel led them to a 'good place' he knew, which turned out to be a dive of an inn called The Three-Breasted Virgin, which attracted pretty much the clientele you would expect from an establishment with that name.

  It was cramped and smoky and crowded and loud, leering scoundrels in various states of inebriation pawing at homely serving girls.

  Somehow, she found herself envying the chimps, who had to sleep under the stars outside of town.

  Surprisingly given the absolute state of the inn, it was completely booked up, and Sam had to bribe the skinny innkeeper with twice the usual rate to convince some of the other guests to shack up so that she and Mongrel could share a single room.

  "Is there really not anywhere else we could stay?" Sam asked as they wrestled their way to some seats in the common room, nearly having to shout to be heard over the din of rowdy men's voices. She was beginning to regret paying the innkeeper in advance.

  "Sure there is," Mongrel replied, putting his boot against a dead-drunk man on a bench and pushing him down its length to make room for himself. "But why would you want to forgo this authentic folksy ambience?"

  Sam took a seat on the bench opposite, a table of old hoary wood between them that was fuzzy with splinters. She gave Mongrel a doubtful grimace. At the moment, there was nothing put-on about her scowl.

  Mongrel laughed. "Consider this part of Uncle Matt's introductory course on Frontier living, kid. Just relax and try to enjoy yourself."

  "Whatever, dude," she replied with a snort. "Also, your name is supposed to be Ferdinand, remember?"

  "Yeah, yeah."

  There was an Entertainer sitting on a stool in the corner of the room, singing something and strumming a guitar, but Sam heard none of it over the noise. After several attempts, Mongrel successfully waved over a plump-faced serving girl to order some food and drink.

  Apparently the inn did not really offer anything non-alcoholic, and her bench neighbor laughed when she asked for water, the serving girl just frowning in puzzlement.

  "I'll see what I can do, sir," she said with a curtsy and weaved off through the crowd to fetch the things they had ordered.

  "She bought it," Sam mouthed at Mongrel with a double thumbs-up, and he cackled in reply.

  While waiting for her food, Sam watched her neighbor play cards with the woman opposite. The game was called roundabout, and Mongrel explained the rules as the strangers went through a series of games, the woman's mood brightening as her pile of bills grew, while her opponent's mood tipped in the other direction, jaw clenching and heel tapping impatiently on the floor, though he refused to stop playing regardless of how much he lost.

  "Let me show 'em how it's done," Mongrel said with a shrewd grin, holding out a knobbly hand. "Spot me a tenner, kid."

  "In your fucking dreams," Sam retorted. Will had been pretty clear on not letting Mongrel gamble for any reason.

  He hadn't said anything, however, about her gambling.

  Sam dealt herself in, and Mongrel quickly broke out of his sulking to coach her on some of the game's simpler strategies. As it turned out, she was not very good, and lost about four games for every one that she won.

  They were only playing for pocket change, though, as far as she could tell—Will had given her about 5 000G to work with, after all—and it was a great way of getting to know the people she was playing with. The woman, Florence, was a rather shrewd Scholar in a travel-worn suit who was originally from Octant Seven, but had fled her home after some unrest in a place called Boomtown and was seeking to resettle in Stormfront.

  The man, Chip, was a Builder heading the opposite way, having worked as a mason in Timbryhall for two years and earned enough that he hoped to buy a place in Drownport, where housing was apparently cheap, to settle down permanently. Rather ornery at first, he warmed up significantly over the course of a few games as he seemed to take comfort in the fact that someone besides himself was losing, too.

  Sam, for her part, got to flex her acting ability a bit, putting the intricate backstory she had spent the whole day cooking up to use.

  "You don't look much like a 'Fat John' to me," Chip observed, eyes turned to the hand of warped, discolored cards he was shuffling through. "Is it supposed to be one of those ironic names?"

  "Oh I assure you my friend, it's very accurate," Sam said with a hearty chuckle. "It's not my belly that's fat is all."

  Chip laughed at that, and Florence rolled her eyes with a put-upon sigh. Sam aimed what she hoped was a sleazy wink at the latter, emulating Mongrel as best she could. Based on the vaguely disgusted sneer she got in return, she figured she must've done a good job.

  The serving girl came out with food on platters, which consisted of bread, thin potato soup, and a hunk of hard cheese. Sam got a mug of milk to drink. When the girl returned some time later to ask what she thought of the food, Sam said that she liked it, even though it was really quite bad. Not that she would have said no to seconds. The girl apparently picked up on this, because she went and got Sam another helping of soup and bread, saying that Sam didn't need to pay on account of the fact that the stuff that was uneaten at the end of the night would just go to the pigs anyway.

  The serving girl, whose name was Apples—so-called because of her rosy cheeks, Sam imagined—was very chatty, and stayed by the table to talk for a while even after Sam made it clear that they had everything they needed.

  Not that she minded the company. Apples was quite friendly, asking questions and laughing a lot. She was almost… a little too attentive.

  They called it a night relatively early so they could start out at first light in the morning. The room they had paid so outrageously for was small, almost a cleaning cupboard. They did rock-paper-scissors over who would get the bed, and Sam ended up on the floor. At least Apples had been kind enough to send her up with an extra blanket so she had something to lay out beneath her, at least.

  "Hey, Mongrel," Sam asked once they had turned out the one candle and were tucked in for sleep, "do you think that girl back there might have been working for the people we're trying to avoid? Brimstone's men, or whatever?"

  Mongrel laughed, but didn't answer her question.

  She didn't know what that was supposed to mean.