The Boarder

I remember the sound of the boarder’s door opening that morning. It was still dark outside when I opened one eye and looked out the window. I wanted to go right back to sleep but I had to use the chamber pot. I crawled back in bed afterwards but couldn’t go back to sleep. I laid there awake, wondering why the boarder was going out so early. He usually got up with the household, even though he didn’t have chores like us. He liked to exercise in the morning while we scurried about starting the day and Ma cooked breakfast.

His room was separated from the rest of the house. His door was right under my bed on the second floor of the house. I snuggled down into my blankets that morning and started to doze off, thinking about the chores that awaited, when I heard the voices. Later I didn’t tell the Sherrif anything about the voices. I told him I was woken up by Ma’s screams that morning. She had gone outside to get eggs for breakfast and found the boarder’s body.

All of us came running out in our nightclothes, Pa and his older brother, Jerome, who had never found a wife, me and my two brothers (one older, one younger, and me sandwiched in the middle). Pa and Jerome got to the body and Ma came running back to stop us from seeing him laid out on the ground. All I saw was his dark boots; Pa and Jerome blocked our view as they yelled for someone to go and get a blanket. Teddy, my younger brother, got the blanket and said he saw the boarder’s throat with a deep red cut across it. The blood had soaked his shirt and the ground around him.

Later that day, I told my older brother, Johnny, that I had heard voices that morning when the boarder went outside. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but I knew one belonged to our boarder and the other was a stranger. The stranger had a low pitched voice, with a distinct lilt to the words that I recognized. Johnny didn’t believe I could recognize an accent, but I sit in Fattie’s store listening to travelers as much as I can. Then Johnny said he thought I had been dreaming and made fun of me for dreaming about the boarder.
 
I used to sit and watch the boarder practice his weapons in the afternoon. Both Teddy and Johnny laughed at me when I finally got up the nerve to ask if he would show me how to use a sword or a dagger.  
They said, “Who ever heard of a girl sellsword?” and told me to leave him alone.  
The Boarder winked at me though, as he sheathed his sword. Later, when my brothers were working their tails off rolling up bales of hay, the Boarder did show me how to hold his dagger. I thought he was a good man, but I know Pa kept a close eye on him.

I know what I heard that morning the boarder died; I heard the voice of a man from Westrunne. There aren’t that many travelers from there anymore, not since the wars started. But if you ask me, and no one did since Johnny wasn’t interested and I was afraid to tell anyone else, I think that sell-sword who rented our room had come back from the wars with something he shouldn’t have, something that someone from Westrunne wanted desperately enough to kill him for. I just hoped they didn’t want what the boarder had given me.

***

As the sheriff of a small farm town, I didn’t used to have to deal with murders. Borders disputes and fights over girls were the extent of violence in our little town. Then the wars started and sell-swords and soldiers started coming through our little town on a regular basis. So I’ve seen my share of murders and dealt with them as well as I could.

This murder was different from the beginning. I knew about the sell-sword boarding at the Kendall’s farm. When he first moved in, I had a few words with him to make sure he wasn’t bringing any trouble with him. He knew what I was after and promised me that he wouldn’t bring any trouble to anybody in town, especially the Kendall’s. He seemed confident enough and after a few weeks, I didn’t worry. I knew Joe Kendall kept a close eye on him, especially with his girl around. That was one major reason I didn’t worry about the boarder; those four Kendall boys would do anything for that little girl. She was just like her Mother, a spitfire in every way. To this day, I’m not sure how Joe Kendall managed to snag Maggie and convince her to settle down on the Kendall farm that had been in their family for generations.

In the end the sell-sword didn’t bring trouble to anybody except for himself. As I stared at the dead body and the blood, neither bothered me; I had seen plenty of those in the past few years. The flies buzzed around me and I wondered about the simple cut across his neck. There were no other wounds to indicate a struggle or fight. Somebody slit his throat fast; his sword was still in the sheath and his dagger was nowhere to be seen. I had seen the man practicing in the Kendall’s yard and I knew I wouldn’t have been able to attack him so quickly. It made me worry about whom or what had managed to take him down by surprise.

I think what really bothered me though, was the complete lack of motive. He hadn’t bothered anybody in town. The war was far away from our town now and few people traveled the roads these days. There were only a few visitors in town when the murder happened. The inn keep, a surprisingly useful man with the unfortunate family name of Fattie, verified that everyone staying in his inn was accounted for that morning. And Fattie claimed he had seen no one on the road to the farm that morning. I trusted Fattie’s reports; he seemed to know more about what went on in the town than I did some days.

It seemed that someone had spent a day hiking through woods to get to a little farm and murder a man who had come to town with only a small bag of gold, a duffel bag of clothes, and a sword and dagger on his belt. The gold was accounted for; Fattie kept it in his store and gave Joe Kendall credit each week for the Boarder’s rent. The clothes were still in the Boarder’s room. And the sword was still on the man’s belt when the Kendall’s found him. That left only his dagger still missing and I wondered if the killer had taken it, or if the stranger hid it before he was murdered.

I took the body back to town for burial and sent five deputies to patrol the woods and search for any sign of the killer. I gave the rest of the boarder’s gold to Joe for his troubles. When I gave the gold to Joe, I asked him if he remembered the dagger the boarder carried. Joe thought for a moment and said he recalled that the boarder didn’t have the dagger the day before he was murdered. Joe thought it was odd because the man always had his sword and dagger strapped on. Joe wondered if he slept with the weapons as well.
 
The whole time Joe was telling me this, little Mary was supposed to be cleaning potatoes for dinner. I saw that while her Pa was talking, she was holding one potato and scrubbing it over and over. I asked Mary if she knew anything about the dagger. Her head whipped back down to her work and she mumbled that she didn’t know anything about it. Joe glared at me and I ducked my head and made a quick exit. There was something I wasn’t being told, but I would have a little patience.

****

I saw the sheriff looking at me strange when I went to Fattie’s for our weekly order, but he didn’t say anything at all to me when he saw Johnny and Teddy on my heels. I worried about him for days; everyone said his big nose could sniff out a lie at a hundred paces. I was glad Johnny and Teddy were with me that day; they insisted on going with me everywhere since the murder. They had got it in their head that I wasn’t safe, even though I’ve been coming to Fattie’s by myself for years. Also, I could take them down in a fair fight. I remember when the war first started, I was just thirteen then and didn’t understand everything that was going on. Pa made the boys start carrying short swords and I wasn’t allowed to roam in the woods anymore. After the first year or so, we stopped worrying about it so much; it stayed far away. We heard the stories of how the war was going – first badly, then good, then badly again, but it never really touched the little town of Farisburg, except for more travelers on the King’s highway.Fattie bragged about the extra business at first, then it was a nuisance. Soon it just wasn’t worth talking about much.

Then the boarder came to town. I remember how he looked the morning he showed up at our little farm. Fattie had sent him to us because we had the extra room. His clothes looked just like our clothes, but his boots gave him away as a stranger. His boots were big and black and they had large tough soles on them. I had never seen boots like that and while he talked to Pa, I stared at the boots. Then I looked up and saw the sword and dagger on his belt. He didn’t try and show them off like some of the boys did in town with the swords Fattie sold. They seemed to be part of his clothes or part of him. He kept a hand rested comfortably on the dagger. Teddy pinched me and I noticed Pa waving us back to our chores.

That night we found out the stranger would be staying with us and living in Uncle Jerome’s room. Pa had built the house with an extra room for his brother; they had always planned to work the farm together. Jerome liked to spend most of his time outside and many nights he slept under the stars. Pa explained that the stranger would be a boarder and pay to live in Jerome’s room for a while. Ma introduced us all, giving him our names and ages. Teddy and Johnny nodded politely, but when it was my turn, I asked his name. Everyone looked embarrassed and Ma started to hush me. I didn’t understand what the problem was; I just wanted to know what to call him. After all, I told Teddy later, you can’t just call someone stranger or boarder. Anyway, the stranger didn’t seem to mind my question, he smiled at me and said, “You can call me Marin; it’s an old name that means ‘the last one’.”

****

The deputies were useless. They did a lot of tramping around in the woods and I’ve no doubt they scared many a wild rabbit. I finally told them to go back home after one was dragged by the ear into my office by the elderly Mrs. Crandall. She threw him at my feet and blistered my ears with a few choice words about his pedigree. Then she told us if she ever caught him near her chickens or pigs again, she would take his ears off.

I hadn’t really expected much out of them. They were good boys on a farm, but most were clueless about a sword and few had any woodskills. Someday, I would find a worthwhile deputy that I could teach. I sent letters to the nearest towns on the King’s Highway, but nobody had written back. There hadn’t been any more incidents, so the only thing I could do, was go back to why anyone would want to kill the boarder. I wanted to share my thoughts with Joe Kendall and see if he could get anything out of little Mary. There was something about that morning and the boarder that she wasn’t telling me. If only I could convince Joe that my big Sheriff’s nose really can sniff out a lie at a hundred paces like the townsfolk say.

****

I knew I was in trouble when the Sheriff came to talk to Pa that morning. It had been two weeks since Marin was killed and he had already called off the Deputies searching the woods. I smiled to myself; deputies, he called them, those kids didn’t know anything. The Sheriff would not have come all the way out to our farm just to chat with Pa; there was something he was after. Pa was talking to him while I fed the chickens in the yard. I could see Pa looking at me while they talked and began to think they knew everything – what happened the morning Marin was killed and what I was hiding in my room.

I tried very hard to just breathe and not pay them any mind. After a few minutes, they headed for the side of the house and Pa used his big key to open the door to Marin’s room. They went inside and I threw down the bucket and chickens squawked at me as they swarmed for the food. I ran into the house, hoping they would stay in Marin’s room long enough. Ma was already cooking lunch for us. I told her I had forgotten something and walked up the stairs. Halfway up I realized that the Sheriff and Pa were right below me. I tried to walk softly the rest of the way. In my head I could imagine them hearing my steps and coming to find out why I was in such a hurry.

I got to my room and pulled it out from the bottom of my bed. I rolled it up in a shirt and stuck it down my shirt. I didn’t think the Sheriff would search a young girl’s shirt but I wasn’t sure about Pa. I tried to arrange my clothes where it wasn’t noticeable. Then, deciding they had already heard me go up the stairs,I ran down the stairs and banged my way out the door as quick as I could, ignoring Ma’s questions. Outside, I looked around, expecting to get caught right away, but the Sheriff’s big nose wasn’t anywhere in sight. I rushed to the woods, skirting the dirt that had been stained by Marin’s blood. We had washed it away but it still lingered in my mind. I could picture exactly where the blood flowed across the ground.

In the woods, I ran as fast as I could through the trees. I didn’t want to take too long, but I also didn’t want to stay too close to the house.I broke through the trees and looked around a clearing. I could just make out the smoke from the chimney through a break in the trees. I recognized a bush with white flowers; I knew this place well.  I did not mean to come here but my feet had done my thinking for me.

I remembered the last day Marin taught me. It was the day before he died; we had met there in the late afternoon, while my brothers were resting and Ma was busy with dinner. I had done well enough that day, though he still threw me down to the ground several times. I saw the bush with the white flowers up close the last time he threw me. I also had thrown him down to the ground once and managed to disarm him three times in a row. He smiled after the third time and told me I had earned his dagger. I tried to protest but he insisted, saying it was a traditional gift from a teacher to a student. He would buy a new one someday if he ever needed it again, he said.

I choked back some tears and dug a small hole in front of the bush and carefully put my package into the hole. Then I tried to smooth over the dirt as much as possible.  Standing back and looking at my work, I decided no one would notice it. I ran back to the yard and picked up the feed bucket, which was now completely empty. Pa and the Sheriff emerged from the house; they did not even look in my direction. The Sheriff shook Pa’s hand and headed back toward town. He waved and smiled at me as he passed. My breath caught in my throat but he kept walking down the road in the opposite direction of the little clearing. As he disappeared, I breathed a sigh of relief, thinking I was safe.

****

It didn’t take me long to backtrack around the Kendall’s farm and meet Joe in the woods. We had seen little Mary run to the house and then to the woods from the side window. I had to keep reminding myself that she wasn’t little anymore. Maybe that’s why Joe didn’t seem very surprised; she was more and more like her mother every day.

We followed the trail she took and Joe never said a word, just grunted at me while I chatted away. People tell me I never stop talking and that may be true, but I’ve found that you can tell a lot from people by their reactions. For example, when I started talking about Mary and what she might have been doing out here in the woods, Joe stopped even grunting at me. Well I just kept talking and told Pa Kendall that I wasn’t worried about Mary; I just needed to know what happened to their boarder. Joe never said a word and that told me quite a bit.

The trail led us to a small clearing. We walked around it a bit and poked in the bushes. Joe called me over to a spot where the dirt had been disturbed. We got down and dug a small hole. Joe pulled out a shirt with something wrapped up in it and handed it to me. He sat back on his heels and glared at me.

“Now, Joe, this isn’t my fault, but I just need to know what Mary knows. You and I know she didn’t do anything wrong, but she isn’t telling me the truth either. I’ve got to know what happened to that boarder.”

Joe said, “She was obsessed with that sell-sword.”

I raised my eyebrows.

Joe shook his head. “Not like that, I’ve put more sense in her head to worry about that sort of nonsense. She thinks she wants to be a sell-sword herself. She’s had that idea ever since she was strong enough to beat her brothers in a fight. She can take down Teddy and hold her own with Johnny. I’ve discouraged it, even though I get no help from her Ma. I thought that Marin was tired of that life. I didn’t know he’d be out there every day swinging his sword around and putting more ideas in her head.”

I unrolled the bundle of clothes. “Well, that explains this little buried treasure.”

I held out the dagger in my hand. It was a fine piece with a sharp edge and a plain brown hilt wrapped tight with worn leather. We both recognized it as Marin’s and that answered one of the lingering questions for me. When a well trained soldier gets into a close quarter fight or is taken by surprise, he won’t take the time to pull out his sword and try to fight his enemy. Instead he will pull out his dagger to defend himself. When they found Marin’s body, the sword was in its sheath and there was no sign of his dagger. I had wondered if his murderer had taken it. Now I thought Marin had tried to defend himself, but his dagger wasn’t there. He must have given it to little Mary or she had taken it. I didn’t think she had taken it. I guessed that Marin had done more to encourage her ideas than Joe had realized.

****

I finished cleaning up the mess the chickens had made with their feed and was about to go help Ma with cooking, when I saw Pa and the Sheriff coming out of the woods. The Sheriff was carrying Marin’s dagger wrapped up in my nightshirt and I froze as I realized that their actions earlier had been a ploy.I had been tricked and now I was caught.

I remembered what Marin told me that first day he taught me in that little clearing. He had showed me how to hold the dagger and even let me try to hold his sword, but it was too heavy for me. He had just laughed and said there were swords made for women that would suit me just fine when it was time. Then we sparred with wooden sticks and he knocked mine out of my hand each time. I started to get angry, but he told me I was doing better than he was at my age.

Then he sat down and said, “Mary, you’ve got to look past your opponent’s actions. His actions will deceive you; look to his thoughts, then you will always know where he is going to be instead of just where he is. Now, take a minute to focus and look at me, not just where I am but where I’m going to be.”

He stood up and held out his branch. I took a deep breath and waited for him to come at me. I could see him standing there in front of me. As he moved toward me, I saw him in my mind coming toward me from the right even while his body seemed to be moving to the left. I did not think and shifted to the right, pivoting on my foot, and swinging my stick as he had taught me earlier. His branch hit mine with a solid whap that hurt my hands and seemed to vibrate my entire arm.

Marin pulled back and laughed. “You might make it yet, young Mary.”

As I looked at Pa and the Sheriff, I realized I had only seen their actions earlier but not their thoughts. I made a vow to myself to never forget that mistake again. Now I had to face the punishment, which I thought would be a lot worse than a branch bruising my side.

Pa didn’t say anything to me as they approached, he just motioned me inside. Fortunately, my brothers were off in the fields with Uncle Jerome, so at least they wouldn’t see me getting in trouble. They would hear about it later of course, but that wasn’t as bad as them watching while it happened. Inside the house, Pa looked at me for a minute. I held my head down, knowing better than to look back at him. Then he turned to Ma and ignored me. This was going to be bad, I thought, very bad.

“Ma, come look at what the Sheriff and I found in the woods.  Your daughter can finish what you’re working on.”

Ma looked at me as I came over to the stove. There was no hint of a smile, but she pinched my side as she passed me her apron. She always pinched my side when she wanted me to keep quiet about something while she dealt with Pa.

“Well, I believe the Sheriff managed to find our boarder’s missing dagger. That’s a wonderful job Sheriff, how did you manage to sniff that out in the woods?”

I snuck a look at them, thinking the Sheriff would be upset, but he just had a grin on his face as he tapped his nose and said, “The nose knows, but it wasn’t difficult, a pretty little bird led us right to it.”

Ma turned toward me and I quickly turned back to the potatoes I was peeling. “I just bet she did,” Ma said.

The Sheriff said, “It seems to me that whoever was out hiding this dagger probably had something to do with Marin and his murder. We should lock them up until they tell us the truth about the boarder.”

I couldn’t believe what he was saying. I figured they knew about Marin giving me the dagger, but I didn’t think they would lock me up. I snuck another look over my shoulder and saw Pa nodding and examining my night shirt that the dagger had been wrapped up in.

Pa said, “You’re right, Sheriff. This is a very serious matter. I wonder whose shirt this could be; Ma do you recognize it?”

I cringed. Of course Ma would recognize it; she sewed and mended all our clothes.

Ma said, “Let me see, it does look familiar.”

I put down the potatoes and turned around. “It’s mine. You know it’s mine,” I tried to speak in a strong voice, but it came out as a squeak.

Ma and Pa glared at me. The Sheriff turned around and said, “Why little Mary, I didn’t notice you back there. It’s certainly good to see you, but what on earth would you know about this dagger.”

I took the dagger from the table. “It’s mine. Marin gave it to me.”

The corner of Ma’s mouth turned up just a little, but Pa’s face was thunder and storm clouds.

The Sheriff said, “Mary, you’re not very little anymore are you? You better come in here and tell us what you know.”

I felt very small sitting down with the adults. I looked at just the Sheriff, trying to see his thoughts and not just his actions. It occurred to me that their entire conversation was for my benefit and they had been just waiting for me to respond. Even more, the Sheriff was no longer looking at me like a kid; he was looking at me like I was an adult now. I breathed; now was the time to tell them everything I knew.

“Marin was teaching me to fight. We weren’t doing anything else; I just wanted to learn from him. He gave me the dagger because he said I was doing well, and my first weapon should be a gift. He said I would have to earn my sword, though.”

The Sheriff was sitting back now, his hand over his mouth as he listened. “Did he ever talk about his life or the wars?”

I shook my head. “No, he didn’t talk about himself at all. I asked once if he had been to the wars and fought any dragons. He said no, but his hands started shaking. Then he kind of laughed and said something about never being prepared. He was kind of weird about it and didn’t want to teach me anymore that day.”

The Sheriff nodded and put a finger by his nose.  “So, he gave this to you before he was murdered and you don’t know anything about the morning of the murder. Is that right?”

I started to nod my head but once again I saw the Sheriff’s thoughts behind his actions. He already knew I had more to tell, he was waiting to see if I would tell the truth or not. At this point, I didn’t see what difference it made anyway; I thought maybe they would believe me instead of just poking fun at me like Johnny and Teddy, so I told them everything about the morning Marin was killed. How I heard him leave and heard the man from Westrunne. I told them I thought Marin had something he wanted, but I didn’t know what it could have been. I had examined the dagger over and over since the murder but I didn’t see anything about it that could have brought about Marin’s death. And that, I told them, was all I knew.
 
The Sheriff stood up to stretch. “Thank you for telling me, Mary. Now I can tell the other towns to keep an eye out for a man from Westrunne. That’s better than looking for anybody strange, but I would have already heard about anyone from Westrunne, so I don’t expect we’ll find this man now. I’ll need to borrow your dagger for a few days to show it to a few people and see if they know anything about it. It could be why the boarder was killed.”

I said, “Wait a minute, I remember what he said when I asked him about the dragons. He said, ‘You think you’re ready. You’re body and your mind are ready, but the spirit quails at their fire and breaks at their laughter.’”

The Sheriff left, nodding his big nose toward my Pa, and I realized he was not going to take me to jail. It was worse; he was going to leave me with Ma and Pa instead.

****

I left the Kendall’s farm, chuckling about little Mary. I was sure she would be busy in the next few weeks with extra work around the farm, as Joe tried to drive all thoughts about being a sell-sword out of her head. Maybe I could take her on as a Deputy one day. I knew that between her and her Ma, they would convince Joe to let go sooner or later.

I had a few answers about the murder. I didn’t think we’d ever get any more answers though; it was a tricky business. Even the name, Marin, wasn’t real. When Joe told me he had said it meant, ‘Last One’, I had a good chuckle. It did mean ‘Last One’, but it was an old army term for the last man on a patrol through enemy territory. That man might be the only one who survived the patrol, and it was his job to erase their tracks and watch the backs of everyone in front of him. There was a jungle cat in the western badlands called the marin that was known for leaving no tracks and being almost impossible to hunt. I knew several ‘marin’s’ long ago and they were all tough men, impossible to surprise and very hard to kill.

As I walked back to my peaceful little farm town far away from the wars and the dragons, I pulled out the dagger, a gift from a dead man. Mary didn’t have much experience with weapons, which is why she had never tried to open the hilt. It was a very well balanced blade with a large silver knob on the end. I unscrewed the knob easily and a small leather sack fell into my hand. As I opened the bag and looked inside, my thought was that this was indeed worth killing for. Out of the corner of my eye, a black blur flew from the top of the trees straight toward me. I didn’t have time to duck or scream, or have any more thoughts.

The End

Kenneth L. Darter is a writer and musician in the Atlanta area. He writes fantasy stories and composes classical music with a rock beat and lyrics that are sometimes based on ancient literature. He has started many novels over the years and believes that one of them  might be pretty interesting if it were finished. In his spare time, he works as an IT project manager, is a father to two precocious children and husband to a woman who transcends adjectives, and often thinks about writing a musical. He can be found at  http://kldarter.wordpress.com/