Chương 15: Intermission 2: Man, Rick

"Rick! Stand still!" yelled Sarais. Rick was running at full tilt, frothing at the mouth, the plough harness straining against his shoulders. The plough went sideways through the field, carving a mess of diagonal lines through the dirt, ruining forty feet of straight furrow in the time it took Sarais to realize what was happening. Because Rick was chasing a rabbit. It had broken from the treeline, and the hobgoblin's eyes had locked onto it.

The harness and the plough and the field and the work had all ceased to exist. He was fully lost in his prey drive, thundering across the soil. Sarais, annoyed beyond words, planted her heels in the dirt, took a fistful of the trailing harness line, and yanked. Rick pulled against it. The line went taut, his collar caught his throat, and his feet flew out from under him. He landed flat on his back with a boom that shook the ground, the breath knocked out of him, legs in the air for a moment before flopping down.

The rabbit, unharmed and unimpressed, disappeared into the hedgerow. Sarais stood over him, hands on her hips, staring in annoyance.

"Okay. Easy, easy now," said Sarais, not sure it was wise to give him an axe at all. She put the haft in his huge hands and walked him through the motion.

"Just hit it like this." A slow, deliberate swing toward the nearest tree.

"Like that." He watched, going still as he studied the swing, the enhanced cognition behind those too-bright eyes working through it, then nodded.

"Rick do!"

"... Heaven have mercy," sighed Sarais, and carried a bundle of wood away to her pile. She needed her kindling ready for winter. She stacked the split wood, listening to the sounds of chopping in the distance. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. Steady. Rhythmic. Actually quite good, she thought, listening closer. He had the timing, the follow-through. Sarais felt the first warm flicker of something that might, in a generous mood, be called hope. She came back around the barn and didn't find him by the trees.

She heard the sound of his work, though, and turned toward it. Rick was standing by the barn, smashing its corner with the axe. Each blow landed square on the new stone-and-timber wall, shaking the whole structure, mortar chips flying. He was entirely focused, entirely committed, and entirely destroying her outbuilding.

"Rick! No!" yelled Sarais, running his way.

"Rick chop!"

"The trees!" she yelled, clutching her hair.

"The trees are for chopping! Not the barn!" Rick grunted, looking at her, then the axe, then the barn, then the trees forty feet away on the other side of the field, then back at her, lost, the chain of reasoning collapsing somewhere in the middle, his face settling into open, honest blankness. This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it"Give me that!" she snapped, taking the axe, and stormed off. Rick stood there, confused, scratching his head. His reasoning was simple.

Rick liked trees. Why would he chop them?

"Matthew, this isn't working," said Sarais. She stood, arms crossed.

"Your boy hasn't got a marble to roll around anywhere in his head."

"Now, now. Rick is a good man. Give him a chance. He's stubborn, so he'll learn," said Matthew, leaning against a tree, radiating the serene confidence of a manager who had never once had to repair a barn. Sarais sighed.

"Can't you do it? You look like you could pull a plow."

"I'm sure I could. But I'm in administration," he replied.

"Home would fall apart without me running it." She rolled her eyes. What neither of them noticed was Rick, standing behind a tree nearby, listening. His ears, sharp now, sharper than any goblin's had ever been, had caught every word. He stood in the shade of the trunk with the words sitting in him, and his head lowered a little. Then he lifted it again. It was late, and Sarais was in her nightgown inside the cabin when she heard noises outside. She looked out the window.

Rick was there, moving through the field in the moonlight, bent over double, pulling at the dirt. She choked on her tea and ran out, throwing a shawl over herself.

"Rick! The hell are you doing?! It's the middle of the—" Rick looked up. Slowly, he lifted one long hand and showed her what it held: a clump of weeds, torn out by the roots, tangled. Then he gestured at the row behind him. In the moonlight she could see it: thirty feet of field, weeded clean, every intruder pulled and piled.

"... Good job," Sarais said. She eyed him warily and went back inside. The crossbow bolt thunked into the target post, dead center. Rick ran over, ripped it free of the wood, and ran back to her at full sprint, holding it out.

"Thanks," she said, wiping it off and loading it again. He crouched, prepared to run and fetch it again, eager, a hound waiting for the throw.

"Get on out of here! Get!" yelled Sarais, chasing off a small shape with her broom. Whatever it was, rat, vole, or the ghost of the chickens she had given up on owning after their last escape, she never found out.

"Rick!" she shouted as more movement scampered along the far row.

"Varmints!" Rick's head came up from the watering trough. The word entered him like a command from the divine. The hunt was on. In a running dive, he cleared a fence. He went through a bush. He vanished into the hedgerow and emerged a minute later carrying, inexplicably, three of them, looking up at Sarais with an expression of pure, radiant triumph like a hounddog. All he was missing was a wagging tail. She stood on the porch with her broom, staring.

"Good job." Sarais sat on her porch. Nighttime, gazing up at the stars. Rick, tired, covered in dirt from a full day's work, ploughing, splitting, weeding, fetching, and hunting, slumped down next to a support post and exhaled. The two of them sat quietly. The night insects sang. The field lay still and dark and weeded.

"You ever kill a man, Rick?" asked Sarais, impromptu.

"Eh?" was all Rick could muster. He looked toward the sky, considering the question with the serious, unhurried attention he gave everything.

"Eat," he said.

"Right," replied Sarais. It was, she reflected, the most honest answer to that question she had ever gotten. The two of them stared toward the night sky. A long silence. The kind that takes a season of shared work to build.

"Rick good?" he asked. Sarais chewed on her mouth for a while.

"None of us." Then she nodded.

"But you're good enough for me." He seemed happy with that. Sarais watched the goblin sit there, his hand lifted against the dark, staring at the stars through his fingers, turning them over like a thing he'd never been given time to look at before. Slowly, Sarais rose from her chair.

"I'll see you tomorrow." Rick just grunted, just staring at the night sky, sitting on her porch and trying to hold the stars between his pinching fingers. It was almost like he was a person.