Chapter 184: Out of the Way
Simon didn’t miss a lot of things about the Broken Tower, but after a week of sleeping on rocks and damp grass, he did miss the bed he’d had there. It was almost as hard as the stone floor it sat on, but at least he’d slept like the dead. So, most mornings, he used his recently returned ability to speak, and sang a little song, or at least talked to himself as he continued on, and as soon as he had the chance to splurge and get a room at an inn, he did so.
The little village of Elbenval was too small to matter; in fact, it was barely big enough to be noted on his ever-widening map. It was little more than two dozen homes and a few fields next to the neglected trade road he was walking along.
What it was good for, though, was information. For the price of a few beers spread around the small common room, he heard every scrap of gossip in the county. Mostly, that was about people who didn’t matter and feuds that would never go beyond the families who held their grudges for generations, but it was entertaining, at least, and he did learn a few useful facts. The two most important things he learned were that he was approaching the western limits of Brin and that the Viscount was a petty old weasel with a bandit problem.
While Simon didn’t have so little money that he had to go track down assholes like that, he definitely wanted to. He could use the funds to get a mule and a backpack, or maybe even a horse once he could hike for a day without wanting to die.
In the morning, on the way out of town, Simon checked the notice board, promising three golden crowns for information leading to the whereabouts of the Bandit leader, Ennis, ironically enough. The notice had a picture of the man on it, but it was a likeness drawn by what appeared to be a child. Beyond showing that the man in question had a mustache, it was less than useless.
Still, after Simon had finished feeling wounded by the sloppy handwriting of the man who had written the wanted poster, he folded it up and pocketed it. It might be useless for identifying his target, but it did say where his men had been recently seen, in places that weren’t so far up the road from here. More importantly, it spelled the reward out very clearly, which was what Simon was really after. His experience with Varten and the centaurs had taught him to get things like this in writing.
Simon spent two more days traveling through the area. He approached every roadside grove of trees with caution, though he needn’t have. When he finally found his bandits, it was he who caught them by surprise. Toward sunset on his third day north, Simon smelled wood smoke on the wind and followed it. While he’d found the bandit camp, it was just a dozen half-starved farmers, not the rogue's gallery of bloody-thirsty killers he’d been promised.
This disappointed Simon because he’d been looking forward to a real fight. He thought he might even get the chance to throw around a few fire spells. Sadly, that turned out not to be the case. Instead, when he sat down at their fire and asked about the fire, he got more humor than hostility.
“If that skinflint has the three gold coins to actually pay that reward, I’ll give you my thumbs!” Most of these men couldn't read, so Simon read the thing aloud before he gave the flyer to the man on his left, and it slowly passed around the fire. When it reached Ennis, the man had a hearty laugh at the illustration.