Fortune Favors Fools Part One: Jester

            Briar had never liked forests.

Well, no, that was a lie, he conceded, as he made his way through a wall of brambles. The catching thorns turned against his suit and the grasping branches slid harmlessly over his sleek form as he crept through the underbrush, his footfalls making no sound as they somehow found space between dead leaves and twigs time and time again.

No, there had been a time when he had had a more intimate relationship with the forest than he had with his parents. When the adults stopped ignoring and actually started looking and whispering, when the other children got bolder or bored of throwing stones, when running wasn't enough anymore he’d go into the forest. He’d go off the path, into the deep parts that other parents warned their children about, and he would hide. He could always hide better than anyone in the village could seek. He hadn't really understood just how much better, though, until he had met Figaro.

Sometimes, there would be searching parties. Some of the men, emboldened by drink, would band together and crash about the wood like rutting bulls, shouting for him. They would call his name and say they were looking for him, that his parents were worried.

He only fell for it once.

            Eventually, the deep, dark places would spend their courage and the men would leave. It was a different kind of fear that would send him home, however. The kind of fear that took more than one night and time to look inward at one’s self. When he could choose whether he wanted to be wet, or cold, or hungry and the reflection in the water had changed just enough to surprise him.

As he got older and his mask more fixed in human ways and thoughts, the forest became less a nest of safety and more a den of fear. The way he was, what it did to him, was unnatural.

Such as, Briar thought, the way he was walking through the tall grass now, the way he walked between the undisturbed stalks, between spaces less than an inch apart, it wasn't normal.

He found it horrifying in a way he could not quite articulate the doe standing mere inches in front of him was totally unaware of his presence. And in that moment, the cracks in his facade of civility were ripped open wide and wrath became him. It possessed him, riding him like spirits the shaman of old called into their bodies, shifting him like they into something more than human as he reached out and wrung the doe’s neck until its struggles eventually slowed, and then stopped.

When he removed his hands, they left behind crushing marks on the deer’s neck. Briar let out a shuddering, mournful sigh as he suddenly looked so very, very human for a moment, before steeling himself and beginning the back breaking work of dragging the carcass all the way back to the wagon.

Even as far off from the capital as he’d gone, he was probably still poaching off some lord’s land. But some corners simply had to be cut when you had to take a troll’s appetite into account to rationing supplies. Even with Figaro’s money, they couldn't afford to squander it on indulgences.

Briar flitted between the trees like a shadow, even bowed under the dead weight of the deer, like the wind he felt as frighteningly light and insubstantial as.

***

“Hmmm…”

As Briar had come to expect, the deer hadn't been enough to quell the troll’s hunger, regardless of the fact that it also consumed a thirty pound sack of horse-feed, plus the sack itself. It was going to be very troublesome to work with in a few hours when it found no more food forthcoming.

“Stand still, Lucky.” Briar murmured in what was an attempt at a soothing manner as he filled up syringe made out of a turkey baster with a chalky, white fluid.

The effect on the troll was immediate and apparent as it stopped swaying dangerously back and forth on its feet like an especially enormous and likely to fall tree, and seized up straight and still but for its panting breath. With a great degree of heft, Briar managed to pierce the troll’s rock-like flesh with the specially made needle

Lucky let out a sudden, braying sound.

“Quiet.” Briar snapped with a bit more bite than he meant to, looking hastily over at the wagon to which the troll was hitched up. He allowed himself to relax slightly after a moment when no one emerged and finished up the injection.

“Alright, relax. But you must behave yourself, Lucky, he has a lot on his mind right now and has no time for your foolishness.” The changeling man seemed to talk more to himself than the giant beast before him as he put away the supplies. The troll went back to swaying unsteadily, breathing heavily through its nose, but it made no sound. He afforded it one last look before opening the door into the wagon, only to pause on the threshold.

Papers. There were papers everywhere. An unruly nest of them sat heavily on Figaro’s desk, on Pozzo’s desk, he reminded himself. From there, a river of papers flowed off the side of the desk, across an impromptu shelf made out of a wooden board and stacks of yellowed newspapers, before spilling out on to the floor like fallen dominoes where they continued on a track around the whole of the wagon. Which included the kitchen, Briar noted with some slight irritation. The papers continued winding inward around various detritus, only stopping at the center of wagon which was occupied by its writer.

“Pozzo.” Briar breathed in obvious relief, though anyone else would have thought he spoke with his usual indifferent coldness, his shoulders relaxing perhaps a centimeter. He knew it was an irrational fear, but every time Pozzo sent him out on an errand, he felt a niggling doubt that he might open the door to an empty wagon.

Pozzo, on the floor on his hands and knees and muttering over a slightly trampled collage of papers, started, sitting up on his knees. Dressed in only his wrinkled undershirt and a pair of trousers held up by suspenders, he turned at the waist to look blankly up at Briar before his eyes lit up with recognition as wild as his uncombed hair. He rose his arms, motioning violently with the pencil in his left while trying to keep the boot in his right level, which smelled of gin and potatoes to Briar, as he mumbled emphatically.

Realizing Briar couldn't make out a word he said, Pozzo spat the protractor he held in his teeth out of his mouth and said;

“We need to get to Strangvia, immediately!”