Goldeline

or even just something pretty.
“Hey, Gruff,” says one of Gruff’s boys. His name’s Pugh and he’s old and scraggly and only got one eye. Pugh doesn’t like me much, which is fine by me, because I think he’s the closest thing to wicked we got. Still, Gruff trusts him, so I guess I got to also. “You want to take a guess as to what all these barrels are full of?”
“I’d wager it’s nothing less than the northern vineyards’ finest,” says Gruff. “A quality drink indeed. Illegal too, seeing as how the Preacher done banned the stuff.”
He wipes some of the scary off his face, till he looks a bit more like my own Gruff. Tall and dashing, like a bandit king from a fairy story. He’s fortyish maybe, with his hair going a little in the front and pulled into a long ponytail in the back. He’s got a little bit of a gut too. But his mustache is long and elegant, and his forehead looks noble, his eyes laughing under the thick black eyebrows.
“Best to let me check it myself,” says Gruff. “Wouldn’t want one of my boys getting himself poisoned.”
Gruff takes his knife and stabs it in the top of one of the barrels. He cups a hand in the rich dark purple of it and brings it up to his lips. Then he spits it out and makes a sick face.
“Chuck it,” he says. “It’s gone bad.”
“Got to be kidding me,” says Pugh.
“You’d think we’d get a break now and then. Just a little something to sip out in these woods, where it’s so dull,” says old sweet Leebo, wiping sweat off his forehead.
“Don’t nothing ever go right for us,” says Mince, whose dad was a butcher. He robbed half our knives from his pop’s shop back in Templeton. “Luck of a bandit.”
“Aw, I’m just messing with y’all,” says Gruff. “It’s the best we ever had in these parts. Guessing old Mr. Greencoats here was doing himself a smuggling business. Guessing he was trying to run this under the nose of the Preacher, make himself a little profit.” Gruff cuffs another handful of the dark purple and slurps it like a dog. “Well, I figure we can say we were the instruments of justice for once.”
“Yeah,” says Pugh. “We carried out the law right and proper, didn’t we?”
“Let’s huff this junk back down to the camp,” says Gruff. “A barrel to a pair of men. No whining. You’ll be complaining plenty when all this is drunk up and you’re wanting more. Gonna take us all day if we ain’t quick about it. Come on now. Get to it.”
“What should I grab, Gruff?” I say.
He jerks his head back to me, swift and fierce, like he forgot I was even there. He looks scary, lips purple, face smeared with berry juice, and for a second I’m scared, same as how Mr. Greencoats the Townie must have felt right when Gruff and his boys burst out of the woods. It makes me feel pretty low, if you want to know the truth about it. But then his face unscowls and his eyes soften and he wipes his mouth and he’s my own sweet Gruff again, the one who took me out to the woods, the one who saved me. He bends down on a knee and looks me right in the eyes.
“Goldy, my angel,” he says, “you ain’t got to grab a thing. You just carry yourself right back to camp and see if you can get some of the other boys up and moving. Lazy bums might hop off their butts for once.”
“Will do, Gruff,” I say, and he laughs.
I like this part. I get to bring good news to Gruff’s boys. “Blessed be the messengers,” says the Book, “when the news is good. But woe be unto those who bring bad tidings to the King.” I think I can ignore that second part for tonight. I know all about the Book from when I was little. It’s rare folks even get to read a copy of the Book on their own. I hear most towns don’t have but one copy, and that’s the one that’s locked up tight in the reliquary, where only the higher-ups can get to it. But me, I probably know more Book stuff than any other bandit in the whole woods. I take off the cloak and fold it over my arm, happy to skip my way back to the camp, singing the nothingsong Momma taught me, a messenger with nothing but good news to bring.
Tonight the camp is quiet. We’re all pretty worn-out from the job today, even though we got some good stuff, even though we got plenty to eat tonight. Gruff’s boys are talking, telling stories by the fire. About fifteen of them total, the good-for-nothings, that’s what the Townies called them. All the lazy ones who never help with the jobs, who just loaf around all day. Gruff always says the only thing you can count on everyone showing up for is mealtime. We even got a couple of women too, like Murph, who’s six feet tall and has one front tooth, and Lemon, who used to be Mince’s wife. She’s shorter than me but mean as a bobcat, and I’m a little bit scared of her.
Gruff just calls them all his boys.
You can hear a few men just out of the reach of the fire, and their laughter explodes from the dark like their own kind of light. Sometimes even Murph will sit me down and tell me a story. She looks tough but her stories are the best, about her days as a sailor slinking up and down the coastline, about storms at sea, about rogue waves higher than the treetops. I’ve never seen the ocean. I’ve never even seen a mountain.
Gruff comes strutting out of the tent in his evening robe, a tattered velvet thing pilfered from some rich guy in a job a few