As if on cue, a crowd of cheering people rounded the corner and marched toward the wreckage of the Dancing Roc. Kethril Fentloque and his son Abril led the way. Jag met them at the barricade.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he asked. He made sure to keep his posture civil, but spoke in the voice he mastered as a Purple Dragon commander, the one that made raw recruits wet their tabards. Kethril flinched.
“W-we’re going to remove the head of that giant. The Dancing Roe may have been destroyed, but I’m going to rebuild the inn and name it ‘One Shot In The Eye.’ We’ll get the head stuffed and mounted to hang over the bar.” The frail man pulled his even frailer son close against him. “My boy killed that giant. We have the right to a souvenir!”
Jag knew it would come to this.
“I’m sorry, Kethril, but we’ve reason to believe the giant may have some disease. You wouldn’t want to hang a trophy that would poison all your guests now, would you?”
The sour old man looked unconvinced.
“If it’s so dangerous, why is that gnome touching it?”
As the constable turned, the pain in his head surged again. There stood Riktus, obviously at his wits’ end, helplessly trying to convince Ekhar to stand away from the corpse. The gnome, for his part, tut-tutted and poohpoohed the guard, continuing to merrily poke and prod at the cyclops.
Jag’s eyes narrowed. “He won’t be for long!” the constable muttered half to himself as he stalked over to the site.
“Sir!” Riktus almost whined. “I tried to stop him, but-”
“Don’t worry, son” Jag said. “Ekhar! What the hells do you think you’re doing? I already told you we think the thing was brainsick. How am I supposed to keep the citizens away from it when here you are sticking your damned hands in its mouth? By the gods, that’s disgusting!”
“Oh, my friend, that you’re here I am glad. I’m quite certain now, this giant was not mad.” He held a finger aloft and it was covered with some of the frothy yellow foam that still clung to the giant’s lips. “A brainfevered or sick thing might spew a white lather, but only a poison makes this foam I gather. It may seem I do this just to be bold and defiant, but the truth is I know someone murdered this giant!”
“Blessed Torm, give me strength-of course it was murdered! I shot it half a dozen times myself!!” The constable turned to the crowd. “How many of you shot the giant?”
Several dozen hands shot into the air along with a resounding “Huzzah!”
“See the arrow that sticks from the poor creature’s eye? It felled this great beast-who let that one fly?”
The crowd shouted, “Abril! Abril! Abril!” and the frail boy flushed with pride.
“That fragile youth killed such a monstrous attacker? Not a well-seasoned knight, not a slasher and hacker? Come now you Minroeans, you’re all genteel folk. Such an end to this battle seems like a poor joke.”
Jag looked at Ekhar in bewilderment. “‘Slasher and hacker?’ What the hell is a ‘slasher and hacker?’”
“It’s true!” came a shrill voice from the crowd. Kethril Fentloque broke the barricade and walked straight up to Ekhar Lorrent. Jag marveled at the fact that next to an elderly gnome, even the spindly Kethril looked hail and hardy. “My boy did it! Everyone else was shooting the blasted thing in the arms and chest and back. But only my Abril was smart enough and brave enough to wait until it turned to look at him, then shoot it square in the eye.”
“A Wise move it’s true, and not easily done. The boy stood and fired when most others would run. It’s an action to be considered uncommonly brave, since the boy’s family and home were in danger so grave.”
“Is that so hard to believe?” Kethril fumed. “That my boy has a backbone?” The innkeeper turned to face the crowd. “You all teased him so. Every day he would come home from school battered and bloodied, but he kept going back. All you did was toughen his spirit!”
Several of the young men who had earlier carried Abril on their shoulders looked abashed and scuffed their shoes in the mud, unwilling to meet the elder Fentloque’s gaze.
“Though brave he may be, and remarkably quick, neither of these two skills today did the trick. The giant died not from a piercing of marrow, instead he was poisoned by the tip of the arrow.”
Jag, who had been mouthing the Words ‘slasher and hacker’ over and over to himself, suddenly regained his focus. “By all that’s right and just, Ekhar, who cares? The giant attacked the town. Do you think it matters to anyone that the lad used poison instead of muscle to kill it?”
“Yes! Yes!” cried Kethril. “I think he showed uncommon sense. I’ve always said he was a bright one, my Abril. Not like you, Alon M’Greely, who gave him a job and snatched it away all in the same week. So he sometimes gave back the wrong change-bah! That was no reason to fire him, let alone embarrass him the way you did!”
Ekhar Lorrent nodded to himself. Of all those gathered only Jag noticed, but then he was also the only who knew the gnome well enough to guess at the gesture’s significance. He was sure now that the pounding in his head would never stop.
“But you, innkeeper Kethril, you believe in your boy. Have you filled his whole life with nothing but joy?”
Someone from the back of the crowd yelled, “What about when the lad wanted to go to Waterdeep to study at the bardic academy? I thought you were going to flay the skin off him right there in the main room of the Dancing Roc!” And everyone gathered murmured their agreement.
“Bah! It was for his own good!” Kethril snorted. “Bardic academy indeed! We Fentloques run inns, we don’t perform in them!”
“The murder is solved, I’m happy to say. I know who it was killed the giant today!” Ekhar bounced about like a squirrel with its tail caught in a bear trap.
“Oh, Ekhar!” Jag groaned. “Abril killed the giant. I’ve been telling you that since the minute you arrived!”
“The boy killed the giant, that much is true, but how and why he did it just might surprise you!”
The gnome had every eye in the crowd on him. As much as Jag wanted to tell him to close his fool mouth, he knew that at this point the citizens would demand to hear Ekhar’s wild theory. Best just to let him go, the constable thought.
“Wary was I of the giant’s foamy lip. The odd yellow froth gave me my first tip. You don’t care that the boy used poison to fell the cyclops, but the next thing I tell you may make your eyes pop. The poison he used is called yellow-root-brew. Inn cooks use but a drop to spice their stew. But if a man were to drink a cup full of this mix, he’d be dead as that giant lying still on your bricks. In order to kill such a tremendous beast, the boy would need use a gallon, at least.”
The crowd stood mesmerized by the gnome. His explanation was the best theater Minroe had seen all year. Between his excited hopping about and his rhyming cant, it seemed to be a mixture of ballet and opera. Only Jag shook his head ruefully. He prayed Ekhar wasn’t going to say something they would all regret.
“He couldn’t possibly fit that much poison on an arrow,” shouted a man from the crowd.
“Yes!” yelled a woman closer to the front. “How did he do it?”
“I’ll tell you,” the gnome continued, “but first I must pray, that you listen quite closely to all that I say. Look, if you will, at the monster’s still feet. The mud you see there will quite closely meet, upon closer inspection if you only stare, the same exact type found on Abril’s shoes there.”
Even Ekhar was taken aback by the volume of the gasp that escaped the crowd. It was true. The mud on the cyclops’s boots was a rich brown hue since it came from the dark soil of the creature’s mountain cave, very different from the tan-colored dirt found in town. And, when they looked, the same dark mud could be clearly seen on Abril’s shoes and pant cuffs.
“The boy has been spending his time in the hills, befriending the monster, bending it to his wills. He’d bring it food from his father’s own inn, to make it believe it could trust only him. But on the gift food he would liberally sprinkle, the yellow-root brew mixed with raw periwinkle. This covered the scent so the giant could smell just the food not the poison, he never could tell.”