Holst and Scarletta

                A moderate breeze, sufficient to bend the highest and most precarious boughs of a willow tree but too weak to lift brood mare, blew through the village of Coulton. It rattled the loose, cracked boards that comprised the floor of the inn, and coerced the dust within to form an eddy current of inadequate cleaning. The weather vane upon its roof, long since distorted by rust, tried its level best to turn in the direction of the wind, but didn’t really make it very far. It made an impressive grinding, squealing, and screeching noise however, so that showed a degree of willingness to please.
                Along bare earth roads and between modest homes the wind travelled, carrying shreds of grass and leaves into windows and onto rooves. Thatch, in general, held strong against the current of air, but loose shutters clattered and crashed against wooden walls.
                From the freshly fertilised fields beyond came the wind’s true cargo, its gift to all who would stand in the path of the gust. An aroma sufficiently ripe to peel the enamel off any but the strongest teeth was inflicted upon all of Coulton, and those in a smelling mood came to once again regret the layout of their homes and fields with respect to the prevailing wind direction. Planning had not been the strongest suit of their village’s founder, presumably someone named Coulton now lost to history, but they had managed to at least secure a source of water that didn’t run dry every three months. The people of Thirst Valley could attest to how much of a nuisance dealing with that situation really was.
                In the centre of Coulton was something rather out of place against the simple buildings, stony walls and stonier wells. It seemed to come from somewhere else entirely, compared to the rest of the village; somewhere more mystical, somewhere more tribal, and somewhere with a better grasp on how to correctly treat wood in prevention of damp and rot. It was a totem pole of sorts that stood a clear three metres high, showing not human faces or scenes of life, but a disembodied arm clutching a mighty hammer. There was no variety, accompaniment or context, just the same arm clutching the same hammer, repeated many times up the height of the pole. Due to a miscommunication with the carpenter who carved the designs, the arm template was made slightly too large and so the final one didn’t quite fit completely, but everyone decided that since they couldn’t be bothered to redo the whole thing, it would have to be good enough. The rune painter could begin work, and they’d just have to get on with it.
                Get on with it the rune painter most certainly did, because they had another engagement that evening and couldn’t be waiting around to complain about poor scale management for biceps. Their primary vocation was that of the town’s apothecary and Mrs Cartwright’s slightly bruised forearm deserved its due care. It had taken less than an hour for the runes to be painted, despite their greater variety than the single hammer arm of the totem, and while they still glistened wetly in the evening air the rune painter made good their escape.
                The runes had, thankfully, neither run down the wood nor been smeared by the action of curious wildlife, and so the totem stood as sort-of intended in the centre of Coulton. For months it had lingered there, starting to lean slightly while the paint began to fade from day after day of direct sunlight. It had never been envisaged as a permanent fixture by any means; all had assumed that it would need to stand for a week, two at most, before fulfilling its purpose and being recycled into either some decadent firewood or an overqualified toasting fork. Every now and again someone would walk up to inspect the carvings or the runes, expecting that maybe this time, in defiance of the last hundred times, they would notice some mistake that explained the lack of effect. None of them ever found the slightest problem, the partial upper arm at the top notwithstanding. All they could do was wait. Or, alternatively, they could build a new totem that might work, or try to resolve their problems the old fashioned way with honest labour. Both of those seemed a little too much like hard work.
                “Why do they not come?” Alderman James Woodman asked no-one in particular, staring up at the totem. It was quite rude to be talking without directing it at the only other person nearby, especially because he’d implicitly asked for them to be there, but they were a tolerant sort and let it slide. Alderman’s Assistant Charles Folly had experienced this before and never took it personally; when an Alderman never treats you as a person it makes that far easier to achieve. “Everything is as it should be. We can’t go on dealing with a ruined grain silo and failing well for much longer.”
                Had the Alderman’s Assistant seen any use in replying, or had he been asked to at any juncture, he would have observed that in the time since raising and painting the totem they could quite easily have performed the necessary repair work themselves, using perfectly mundane means. As it was, he simply held silence.
                “Tomorrow. Tomorrow must be the day when they arrive. I can feel that the totem is telling me such to be true.” The Alderman decided with a look of resoluteness. He’d said the same thing, or some variant on it, every day for the last three weeks. The Alderman’s Assistant nodded almost imperceptibly, just in case the Alderman was to look around and expect a reaction this time. After a moment more, the Alderman turned away from the totem and began to walk back to the town hall, with Charles Folly walking as a discreet distance behind him.
 
                “Strangers! Strangers walking into town! Two of them!” Rang the cry of Juliet Green as she ran into the centre of the village. How she still had breath enough to shout anything to anyone after, presumably, running all the way from her watchtower outside of Coulton, was both confusing and impressive. Her lung capacity had been a consideration in granting her the duty of crewing the watchtower, but none had expected such stellar performance.
                Doors and windows were thrown open to the night air, allowing the light of Juliet’s torch to shine inward and cast uneven shadows across what they might. Through these opened apertures came the faces and bodies of excited and anxious townsfolk.
                “Who is it? Some lost vagrants?”
                “It’ll be Holst and Scarletta! They’ve come!”
                “Yes! It was a man with a mighty hammer and a woman in a flowing robe!” Juliet confirmed excitedly. “I couldn’t see their faces but it must be them.”
                This questionably confident testimony was enough. Weeks-old cynicism transformed into months-old confidence in that moment. Those who had proudly declared that they'd never believed Holst's totem or Scarletta's runes to work now reminded their peers that they'd told them unerringly how much faith they had had. Optimists became smug, pessimists were pleasantly surprised, and the realists assessed the outcome against the probabilities they'd assigned to these events in their head. In short, everyone felt something about the occasion.
                "They have come at last! Praise be!" Shouted the baker from his bedroom window. His nightshirt billowed to reveal three other nightshirts underneath. He was ever-ready for bed. "Do you think they will start right away or want a bed for the night? I can have them three loaves apiece ready for sunrise."
                "For the last time, Joseph, there’s a limit to how much bread people can eat in a day!"
                "Yeah! You gave that travelling merchant ten loaves every sunrise! They were alone! Poor bugger was basically choking on bread, trying to get rid of it all before the next lot appeared on top of his caravan.”
                “Envy is an ugly thing.” Pouted the baker. “He must have loved it; he was eating ten loaves every day!”
                “We’ll hear no more on the bread this evening, Mr Pitts.” The Alderman decided. He’d appeared from the town hall with the Alderman’s Assistant in tow, and was facing slightly to one side of the baker, just to make sure that the assistant was out of his eyeline. Aldermen’s assistants were to be present, not seen or heard, he always said to the empty air around him, never directly to his assistant. It was a shame really, because James and Charles had been close friends prior to James’ appointment as the Alderman. Unfortunately, even the power of friendship couldn’t break the bonds of deeply-rooted and unfathomably formed beliefs.
                "That's right! Your bread pedalling pushes visitors away. Clearly they're more in need of six kilos of carrots every sunrise, and I shall provide them with that!" Beryl Goldacre agreed, to within a certain definition of the word, producing a sack of carrots that was, apparently, already prepared for such an occasion.
                “No carrots either! Or, at least, only a few of them. They might want a carrot sandwich at some point I suppose.” The Alderman thought out loud.
                “They’ll have no room for carrot sandwiches after eating twelve dozen eggs every morning!” Cried Avril Hardstone from across the square. She was rushing out of her doorway with armfuls of delicate wicker cartons, each one containing seven eggs. Her eyes flitted between the Alderman, the baker and the farmer, while she barrelled toward the road along which the travellers approached.             “Apprehend her!” Bellowed the Alderman. A pair of town watch guards stepped casually into the road ahead of her and, without any unnecessary drama lifted Ms Hardstone gently into the air.
                Over the course of the following ten minutes every grower, producer or chef made clear their intentions of showering the visitors with their own favoured goods. Each of them was totally convinced that their offering would be the obvious and accepted choice, and each of them was eventually shouted down, apprehended or ignored until, finally, everyone agreed that the guests could be given a small portion of everything. Except celery; no-one could think of any reason why a weary traveller wouldn’t want to munch down on several kilos of celery each morning before they started work. So it was that a smug Mr Barnes loaded up his wagon with the impending morning’s delivery, while the Alderman and the Alderman’s Assistant led a procession to the edge of town. After months of waiting, they would be the first to formally welcome Holst and Scarletta, travelling heroes, to their beleaguered town of Coulton.
 
                Caleb Holst had come from inauspicious beginnings for a man who, to all intents and purposes, would come to be treated as a lesser deity, or at least a greater uncle. He was born into an already bloated family of porcine clothing specialists, and had spent the better part of his youth learning their noble trade. At the age of six he was already capable of matching the pig’s skin to the correct colour palette of tweed at glance, by ten he was taking sole responsibility for cuff production, and at twelve he’d mastered the art of making suit pockets lie flat, even on a pig of unusual shape.
                Had nothing changed, Caleb would have led a humble, unremarkable life on the Holst farmstead and tailoring site. It was steady work that followed generations of tradition. His mother’s family had been pig tailors, as had her father’s, and his father’s, and his mother’s, and presumably one of her parents’ too; the records were sketchy before that point. Money would never have spread itself far among him and his many siblings, especially because there were only so many pig farmers in need of fine evening dress for their livestock, but he liked to think he would have been happy. Fate had other ideas for him, however.
                During an otherwise unremarkable trip to offer pig tailoring services at the great farmer’s market in the nearby city of Yellingrad, Caleb Holst wandered his way off the road. He did not walk alone, but far from acting as a second set of eyes to recognise their deviation from the path, his companion’s conversation was a significant contributor to their lack of attention when it came to navigation. Joan Scarletta, childhood friend of Caleb’s, had been telling him of a particularly powerful curse she’d once witnessed, whereby a gentleman’s knees were cursed to forever bend to an angle two degrees more acute than he wished, when they lost their way. So engrossed were they in the narrative that they failed to notice a chasm in the grassy earth, covered as it was by long stems and seedheads, and subsequently found themselves sliding down a steep, earthen slope.
                Muddied and shocked but basically unharmed when they finished their descent, Holst and Scarletta regained their feet and took stock of conditions at the bottom of the chasm. Over a house’s height below the surface, they were standing in a long, thin chamber lit only by the light that could pierce the covering of grass from above. Most of the chamber had been lost to soil and detritus that had fallen from above, and among which Caleb and Joan themselves could be included, strictly speaking. What still stood out, however, was a gleaming metal hammer rested upon a set of ornate copper hooks. It hung from the rear wall of the chamber, a little over head height, and presented itself to them without expository plaques or helpful carvings to contextualise its existence. It was simply there.
                And so, Caleb simply took it.
                Over the course of much blind experimentation, discussion with Joan, arguments with librarians, and accidental damage, Holst became proficient with what he determined to be the enchantments on this hammer, and Scarletta made extensive notes on the magic at play. By the time they made it back home, Caleb Holst had secured a great many orders for pig tuxedos, as well as a new purpose in his life.
 
                “…so that’s why they call me Three-toed Bill.” Beamed the ragged man, leaning on his spade. His ruined boots, covered in spade-marks and tears, gave real credence to the tale he’d just spun Holst and Scarletta. “But you didn’t come here to hear about my lack of digits on the ol’ feet!” He paused, letting the statement linger and giving Holst an optimistic look, as if the travellers were on the cusp of contradicting him with pleas to hear more about his foot trauma.
                No such contradiction came.
                “See.” He continued, a little disappointed. “Welcome to Coulton! Many here have more toes than I do, of course. It’s the more usual ten for most of the Coulton folk, although I do have my suspicions about that Mr Pitts, the baker. He’s never got the leg-hands on display. Doesn’t wear sandals. Rarely even appears in socks, and we when does the toes are normally obscured by a flagstone or a dropped bucket or something.”
                With the patience of several saints, as well as a couple of respectable canons, Scarletta smiled and nodded along with Three-toed Bill’s vital welcoming information. Holst rested the hammer on his shoulders and waited politely.
                "Oh for goodness sake. Bill got to them first!" Hissed the Alderman, when he spotted the unmistakable toe-poor man from further up the road. He broke into a lollopping half-jog to show some vague effort at closing the gap more quickly. The Alderman's Assistant walked marginally faster to keep up without appearing to compete.
                "And then of course there's old Miner Stephanie. I can't imagine anyone swings a pickaxe for so many years without an accident or two of the toe persuasion. I’d give her six left at most. At absolute most."
                "Welcome to Coulton!" Cried the Alderman, hoping to drown out Bill's monologue. Holst and Scarletta both looked up to see who was shouting, but Bill seemed wholly unconcerned. “You can ignore the raving of this infirm friend of ours.” The Alderman added.
                “Now, I would suppose that all of the soft professionals other than Mr Pitts, the other bakers, weavers, tailors and so forth, are going to overwhelmingly have all ten.” Continued the unsolicited census of toes. Scarletta turned between Bill and the Alderman as fairly as she could. “Eleven in some cases, if the rumours are to be believed.” Bill added conspiratorially, in an attempt to win some more attention, but Joan was made of sterner social stuff than that.
                “I’m Alderman James Woodman. This is my assistant, Charles Folly.” Persisted the Alderman, still on a rapid approach vector and raising his voice ever farther. “We are the ones who have brought you here.”
                “Twelve though? Well, I’ve no evidence of that ever happening, myself, but I have heard rumours. Stories from towns beyond Coulton that get shared by other travellers. They tell of a many-toed woman who struck six on either foot.” Bill said, raising his own voice in retaliation, but otherwise gave no acknowledgement to the approaching crowd. These two were his conversational victims and, as far as he was concerned, the others would have to find their own.
                "Bill, please! I am speaking and trying to welcome our guests!"
                "I'm speaking louder! Anyway the grain farmer's boy is always very careful with his feet so he’ll be fine…”
                “Please ignore-“
                “BUT OF COURSE THERE ARE YEARS AHEAD OF HIM AND SCYTHES CAN TAKE A TOE LIKE AN EAGLE TAKES A RABBIT!”
                By this stage Three-toed Bill was yelling at the top of his underused lungs, his hoarse, breathy voice slamming into a secretly disinterested Joan like wind into a cliff face. Over a number of millennia it would certainly start to show some signs of an impact, but there would be nothing for the foreseeable future.
                The Alderman reached the bellowing man and the two travellers. Bill, his shouting complete, stood panting and facing Joan, but with his eyes strained intensely to the side to watch the Alderman. With nostrils flared, his chest rose and fell rapidly, waiting for some speech to cut off and bracing himself for attack.
                Nothing came. Despite the tightly scrunched up face of the Alderman and the quiet, patient loitering of his assistant, there was no action taken against Three-toed Bill. He swallowed.
                “Hello there. I’m Joan Scarletta.” Said Joan, breaking the silence with a smile. Both men flinched as their stand-off was rudely interrupted.
                “Caleb Holst.” Added Caleb. “A pleasure to be in your fine town, and we thank you kindly for your welcome.”
                "But of course you are! You two are heroes who need no introduction."
                "Kind of you to say so. We've been hearing some fascinating insights into your village's recent cultural history. Toes are definitely important to everyone but few people stop to take stock of them. You must be proud of Three-toed Bill." Joan praised, in her earnest deadpan. Only Caleb could have recognised used the glint of mischief in her eye.
                "He's certainly a unique asset." Growled the Alderman through clenched teeth, while Bill puffed up his chest. "We do try to greet visitors more traditionally in the first instance, however."
                "It was a refreshing change of pace." Caleb told him. He'd receive a fist bump from Joan for his support in the matter of mischief later.
                "Quite so." The Alderman reluctantly accepted.
                “See! The heroes agree that I’m a national treasure. The toe census will be made real next year, Alderman, mark my words!”
                “Look, the ritual worked, and that’s the important thing!” He snapped, eyes and nostrils competing for width as he stared pointedly at the guests, trying to ignore Bill again. “You’re finally here! The power of Holst’s Totem and Scarletta’s Runes has manifested itself.”
                “We also received this note.” Joan added amicably, not wanting to tread on the toes of his happiness, but also presenting him with an account that wasn’t total codswallop. “It requested that we add this village to our path, and was signed faithfully by an Isabella of Coulton.”
                “Issy? Is this true?” He said, turning on his heels to face the crowd. A young woman rose onto her tip-toes and spoke.
                “Yeah. I thought it’d be easier that way. I mean, rituals are one option but it’s really easy just to send letters to places where famous travellers have recently been sighted.”
                “The totem must have ensured that the note made its way to their hands.” The Alderman decided. The Alderman’s Assistant rolled his eyes.
                “We’ve been trying to totem for ages and the note worked within three weeks.” Isabella observed.
                “Its powers are mysterious indeed.” He concluded, with a finality that was punctuated by turning back to Scarletta and Holst.
                Joan and Caleb smiled politely throughout the exchange and watched delusion root itself ever deeper. Neither one of them was called by the influence of mystical rituals, from totems, runes, chants or a fourth, otherwise unforeseen type of superstition. It was all some peculiar nonsense that had sprung up around them over the years. Every town had problems to solve, but Holst and Scarletta could only be in one place at a time, so whenever they arrived it felt like divine intervention. In truth, it was a banal combination of chance and geography. However, one such victim of statistics claimed that their totem and runes had done the business, named them after Holst and Scarlett respectively, and spread their ‘wisdom’ rapidly through the land. At first the heroes had fought it, but after a while the vagueness of it all became a convenient smokescreen; if they hadn’t turned up somewhere for several years then it must have been down to errors in the runes or woodworm in the totem.
                “But you must be weary from your travels, especially arriving at an hour such as this one. Please, come with us into Coulton and we will provide you with lodgings for the night.” Encouraged the Alderman.
                “That’s very kind, thank you.” Accepted Joan. Caleb nodded his approval also. The crowd of townsfolk that had swarmed behind the Alderman and his assistant began to cry out with offers of various spare beds, floors, piles of straw and stacks of loaves, and the two travellers smiled graciously at each of them. As they began to walk through the crowd it parted in order to swarm them, and then moved along in an unnecessary protective mass. As ever, from all around them they heard gasps of awe at Caleb’s enchanted hammer, resting casually across his shoulder and radiant even in the gloom of the night.

                Even by the severely distorted scale against which magic hammers were judged, Holst's was something deeply special. Far from simply hitting with more force than it should or withstanding more wear than seemed sensible, it could perform three perplexingly grand feats that defied explanation. First of all, the hammer could drive a nail through any object without shattering it, causing it to become perfectly bound to whatever else the nail pierced; emergency repairs or fortifications were therefore trivial. Secondly it could shatter any object by striking it once and thus held tremendous destructive power to either thwart a threat or clear an obstacle. Finally, it could strike any object by being hitting a picture of it hung on a nail. This went a long way to explaining why Caleb Holst always kept a roll of papers suspended from a nail on the outside of his packs, and offered a surprising amount of utility despite the oddly specific nature of the power.
                The great hammer had been forged by an artisan blacksmith known as Coal-Stained Echarius. She was the finest worker of metals who had ever lived, and therefore was the only one to be trusted when it came to crafting a weapon of such majesty.
                It had been commissioned by Florane the Secure, a legendary hero of the Red Pine Woodland, to remedy the destruction being wrought by the armies of a neighbouring realm. Already notorious among the people she saved and dreaded among the people she defied, Florane’s reputation would be cemented as a champion of justice if she could bring an end to the struggle between those who sought peace and those who sought cruelty, and a magical artefact of her own creation would surely aid her in that task.
                Although this demonstrated a clear ability to plan for success, that planning never happened in particularly good time. As a consequence, she only set Coal-Stained Echarius onto the task of forging her hammer at the eleventh hour, when the legions of her enemies were already massing. It also happened to be right when Echarius was enjoying a well-earned break from work, therefore she charged Florane almost double the normal cost. Grumpily, during a night battered by wind and rain that made starting the fire even more difficult, she got to work on the metal while Florane went in search of an enchanter.
                It took the better part of three days, and a lot of searching around the less glamorous magical quarters, but eventually Florane returned to Coal-Stained Echarius with a magic wielder capable of imbuing the hammer with monumental power. Unfortunately, that magic wielder was Crispy Nathaniel, the only wizard she could get hold of at such short notice. It was from his loose grasp of the hierarchical rule of threes, the one that governs certain types of magic, that the hammer’s specific powers were derived. Under his guidance the final design of Florane’s hammer was specified, and the work completed.
                The hammer’s handle had a core of Jackpot Steel, so named for its source in the Jackpot mines of the far South, which was encased in polished hornbeam. Inset along the whole shaft was silver filigree which, for reasons that Crispy Nathaniel had insisted were both genuine and mysterious, ran in the shape of a mighty ram with a bucket stuck on its head.
                As fantastic as the handle was, despite its unusual symbolism, the hammer's head was where the true artistry shone through, even though it was, admittedly, yet another ram with a bucket on its head. Coal-Stained Echarius had never seen an enchanted weapon with any bucketed animals represented on it before, let alone the same one twice, and she had questioned the wizard as much as she dared regarding the necessity of the shape; rams and pails weren't the exotic and ornate forms she had originally envisaged upon being commissioned to craft a magical hammer. Nor, in fact, were they either easy to mould or practical for a hammer head. As with everything the wizard required, however, there was to be no compromise. The magic would only work if the form was ovine with a water receptacle upon its bonce, so she’d just have to get on with it and work the Jackpot Steel into that exact specification. Nothing he could do about it. The otherworldly powers were what they were, and no mortal could alter or defy them.
                However disarming the ram might have looked as filigree, once rendered in three dimensions it commanded a lot more respect than the inlay ever could. The flat bottom of the bucket formed the business face of the tool, with horns protruding from the back as a claw for pulling nails, and a masterful job had been performed of rendering steel wool to make it look fluffy without compromising on structural integrity. Within a week, Echarius had crafted a masterpiece for Florane to wield. It all came down to Crispy Nathaniel to finish imbuing it with the mystical powers that might help her seal away evil forever.
                In both name and nature was Nathaniel crispy. This, as Echarius and Florane found out the hard way, was on account of the violent conflagrations that broke out along his sleeves whenever he tried to channel the otherworldly powers. Grateful that they’d insisted on him not practicing magic inside the blacksmith’s workshop, he instead only set a local farmer’s stubble field ablaze, and everyone except the farmer agreed that this was an acceptable level of collateral damage. With broken vials of enchanting oils surrounding his feet, fires raging in a broad radius around him, and the remains of various apparently-magical objects scattered through the better part of the village, Crispy Nathaniel stood at the centre of a maelstrom of natural force. Had this force taken on the aspect of a hurricane then it might have looked rather intimidating, but instead it was a gale force wind blowing directly upwards under his feet, serving only to make the cut of his clothing look very odd indeed.
                Just as regret over not looking for a better wizard, and not planning her hammer further in advance, started to swell inside Florane’s stomach, Nathaniel declared himself to be done. Clearly struggling to lift the weight of the hammer, he carried it towards Florane, who saw no need to help him at all, and lifted it easily when he eventually reached her. She and Echarius then passed it among themselves a few times to make sure that Nathaniel knew they were stronger than him. Once that had been well established, however, Florane settled in a mood much more sombre, and much more pensive. Staring down at where the Ram’s eyes must have been, hidden by its unfortunate headwear, she pictured the world she would help to usher in with whatever powerful enchantments Crispy Nathaniel had placed upon it.
 
                Morning broke over Coulton like a carelessly dropped wine glass, shattering into uncountable pieces as Caleb and Scarletta emerged from their respective rooms at the town's Inn. They were hardly salubrious accommodations, what with gaps in both the floorboards and the mattresses, but there was to be no outright complaining since the rooms had been given freely and with kindness. Such were the circumstances under which they were often welcomed, and it was never a shock that people who needed the help of travelling heroes did not possess enormous quantities of material wealth.
                What did come as a significant point of shock and intrigue to both of them, however, was that they should be greeted by a month's supply of celery awaiting them in the bar.
                "Eat up as much celery as you like, friends. It's all yours, and you've got the same coming every morning so don't worry on rationing it." Beamed the affable innkeeper from behind his cold and stand-offish bar. As per the strict, inflexible Code of the Kept Inn, to which all such proprietors were held, he was wiping a tankard using a grey-white cloth while he talked. To Caleb’s expert eye, it was determined to be the same tankard and the same cloth that he’d been wielding the previous night. "The rest of your care package is underneath the green stuff."
                "Uh, wonderful. Very kind of you all." Joan managed. Even her famously powerful face struggled to hold back an amused smirk.
                "We thank you." Added Caleb, sitting himself down and grabbing a cluster of celery on which to chew. "Mmm." He said after a loud crunch. "Really strong flavour to this. Just what I like when I've barely awoken."
                "We knew that celery was the way to go. Mr Pitts wanted to give you three daily loaves apiece, but that would have been silly."
                Caleb looked down at the celery heap.
                "Yes. This, by contrast, is perfectly reasonable."
                The innkeeper smiled obliviously and Joan sat down next to Caleb. Some cursory searching through the heap revealed a single loaf that they could share to make celery sandwiches if, for some reason, they had learned to hate themselves overnight.
                “I’ll let the Alderman know that you’re up and about. I’m sure he’ll be eager to tell you all about Coulton, and how we would be grateful for your help around here, for as long as you wish to stay.”
                “As long as you don’t need help re-growing any toes, I think we’ll be able to sort something out for you.” Joan replied, deceptively earnestly.
                “Bill’s a man obsessed with toes.” The innkeeper said solemnly, shaking his head. “We’re not all so consumed by our feet, I promise you. Now I’d best be off or the Alderman shall be mighty ornery at me for keeping you to myself. Shan’t be long.”
                Caleb and Joan bade a temporary farewell to the innkeeper as he snuck out from behind the bar and made for the door, still wiping that same tankard. It was nice that the drinking vessels got to see something of the outside world, thought Holst.
                “So what do you think they wanted us here for? Well crumbling down and unsafe? Fences collapsed? Temple sinking into the ground? Mine shaft blocked by a fallen boulder?”
                Caleb chewed on the question. It was infinitely better than the bitter vegetables on which he would otherwise be employing his teeth.
                “There are lots of farm buildings in disrepair,” He observed. “so probably something to do with those. By the state of our lodgings last night I think this inn could do with some attention, to be honest.”
                “I had to curse my bed to stop it falling through the cracks in the floor.” Joan agreed. “And to stop the floor falling through the cracks in the ceiling below.”
                “Thought I heard something of that sort going on.”
                “And I heard you doing a lot of construction too.”
                “Well… I had to nail the door back into its hinges. And the hinges back into the doorframe. And the doorframe back onto the wall. What I’m trying to say, I suppose, is that the door and all of its components were in a pile inside the room when I arrived.”
                Scarletta cackled at the image. Her laughter was, for all intents and purposes, perfectly innocent and mirthful, but in her position as a powerful witch it had an unfortunate tendency to come out as a maniacal cackle, no matter what emotions lurked behind it.
                Caleb took another fistful of celery and bit down. He grimaced.
                “You could just eat something else from the pile.”
                “It seems a bit rude not to make a dent in the celery, though. You could do your fair share.”
                “Yes, I could.” Agreed Joan, academically. She made no effort to claim any vegetables for her own.
                “Or are you going to curse them not to rot, so that we can carry a wagon of food with us when we leave?”
                “That’s not a bad idea, you know. I could always curse the wagon to be self-propelled as well so that we don’t need to worry about lugging it around…”
                For a while the inn was quiet, except for Caleb’s dutiful crunching, while Joan considered the practicalities of a cursed food train that followed them around like a loyal puppy. Or at least a badger in indentured servitude. She was shaken from these ruminations only when the innkeeper arrived once more, bringing the Alderman and his assistant along in tow. The tankard, it seemed, was still neither clean nor dry.
                “Good morning, heroes! I hope that you found everything to your satisfaction both last night and this morning.”
                “Holst didn’t have a door.” Joan replied conversationally.
                “Scarletta cursed her bed.” Added Caleb.
                The Alderman was unsure of how to take either of those statements, and decided that the best course of action was to stand there, staring at them, with his mouth flapping open and shut uselessly.
                “But that’s what we do! Travel and resolve problems like doorlessness and beds that might collapse through to the lower storeys without the intervention of a few good curses.”
                “Good curses?” The Alderman asked uncertainly. Joan smiled. They always took the bait.
 
                Joan Scarletta had been Caleb Holst’s friend for many years, on account of the proximity of their childhood homes. The Holst porcine farm was, by necessity, situated outside of any township. The unique aroma of pigs, even those kept for suit fittings, was sufficiently powerful that it formed its very own antisocial bubble. It was a hard requirement that they were both a generous distance from town and downwind in the prevailing direction, so that their mere existence could be rendered tolerable. The Holsts themselves simply got used to it, an ability which seemed to outfox all others in the world until the Scarletta family came to settle nearby.
                The Scarlettas were similarly fated never to be permitted a space inside any normal settlements, but not for reasons for powerful stenches like the Holsts. Instead, the decision was made by their reputation as powerful witches and warlocks. Superstitions, fears about what curses might be doled out in the dead of night, and local authority regulations around the practice of magic in residential areas, all contributed to a general consensus that the Scarlettas should not be situated in a city centre. Or even a suburb or sub-suburb. When they saw on their travels that the Holst Farmstead was similarly ostracised from society they felt an immediate kinship, and settled down right away. A few simple curses lifted the foul smell of porcine emanations from their home, redirecting it harmlessly to a village down the way, and suddenly there was no reason at all not to call the Holsts neighbours.
                In the very natural way that requires very little explicit explanation, the young members of each family soon got to know one another and became firm friends, each one bringing the other into their family’s unique legacies and sharing in the trials of childhood. Young Joan Scarletta learned much about correctly fitting a waistcoat to a pot-bellied pig, and young Caleb Holst received an education on how to correctly curse a mayor for giving into the temptation of bribery and corruption. It was a collision of distinctly dissimilar worlds, but both involved fine needlework and therefore felt strangely familiar.
                Once Caleb had discovered the magical hammer, he felt that it provided something of a leveller between himself and Joan. No longer did she wield all the magical power and he all the knowledge of which cut looks best on a sow in the wintertime. From then on, he could hold his own with mystical abilities and, in fairness, Joan had learned an awful lot about dressing a female pig for the season. In every sense, they had grown together. The only sticking point was the conflicting nature of their magic; the ability to repair anything with nails, among other nonsense, was largely going to be applied for the good of the world. Curses, on the other hand, had rather a negative connotation. In a lesser magic user this would have been an insurmountable obstacle, but Joan Scarletta was made of sterner stuff than most.
                Curses, she posited, were only bad from one perspective. For the one who suffers the curse it is undoubtedly unpleasant, but for the one who commissions it the suffering of the victim is a good thing. Thus, she continued logically, the curse was neither inherently good nor inherently bad. It simply… was. The conclusion to which this drove her was that a curse could be used for good, as long as one was creative with the elements of magic they applied in crafting it. A wound could be healed by redirecting it into a nearby fence, and Caleb could fix a fence with a nail. Poisoned water could be made potable by cursing it to age rapidly, thereby killing whatever foulness lived within it. A business could be cursed to succeed by making its products supernaturally attractive to all comers. Aside from a few ethical niggles with the last one, the theory was sound, and that was all Caleb really needed to hear to convince him that they could be roving do-gooders together. A life of adventure on the road called to them, and they were all too eager to answer it.
 
                “Well, your methods sound intriguing, good lady Scarletta.” The Alderman assessed, having received a cursory curse explanation from Joan, over a tolerable celery sandwich. “I look forward to seeing the fruits of your labours throughout the town. If it pleases you to follow me and see what ails us, then we would gratefully receive any help you might offer.”
                “Of course, Alderman Woodman. We’re always eager to make the world better with our gifts.” Replied Caleb, the hammer once again over his shoulder.
                Outside of the inn and through the town Joan and Caleb were led, receiving a running commentary from the Alderman as to who lived where and what profession they each held. Whilst none of it was explicitly interesting, and much of it was decidedly disinteresting, they did at least manage to learn that the town somehow managed to sustain no fewer than ten loriners, all of whom were perpetually inundated with work. It was curious to both Holst and Scarletta, on account of having seen very few horses and very little ironwork in Coulton.
                “Oh you know how it is.” The Alderman had said when questioned on the subject. “The people just can’t get enough stirrups. Every time you think you’ve got yourself covered you remember that you don’t have a pair stashed away besides the Lower Gully ditch, and if you come off there, your stirrup leathers break, your stirrups come clean off, there’s been enough rain to cause a rapid flow, and your stirrups then enter that flow and get washed away, then you’d be really stuck! You’ll probably see that the more cautious residents of Coulton have a hidden pair every ten paces.”
                “I see.” Caleb replied, not wholly honestly. He began to suspect that there were some problems in Coulton that a well-placed nail might not be able to fix. Joan would undoubtedly be able to curse the people to have a slight revulsion to buying excessive quantities of small iron objects, but that would then put a number of loriners out of business. Doing good, as they had quickly found out when setting about their adventures, was far trickier than at first it would seem.
                “I assume that the loriner population is not one of the problems with which you are seeking our help.” Joan said.
                “Oh goodness no! We’re proud of our booming industry and their high demand. If anything, our loriners are the only people in Coulton who I wouldn’t change for the world.”
                Behind them all, at his typical discreet distance, the Alderman’s Assistant rolled his eyes. Once upon a time James Woodman, before he was known as the Alderman, had personally told him that, as his best friend, there was nothing he’d want to change about Charles Folly for anything in the world. Hollow words, it seemed. Or perhaps his efforts to ignore were turning into genuine forgetfulness.
                “Just checking.”
                “Our problems, with which we require your divine assistance, are far more banal in nature. I’m sure you can’t have failed to notice our barns and grain stores? Our fences and community buildings?”
                “We saw them.” Caleb confirmed.
                “It was good to know you had some. You must be very proud.” Joan added with a smirk.
                “Proud? You must have seen their disrepair!” Cried the Alderman, with an oblivious earnestness that would have made most good people cease their mockery.
                “So many of them still standing despite it!” Praised Joan. “How well made they must have been in the first place.”
                “Would you like us to nail a plaque to them, commemorating how well constructed they were?” Asked Caleb. He liked this game.
                “Er, no, I-”
                “We can certainly do that, you know. I could curse the plaque to always shine bright and never tarnish in the damp air.”
                “I really wouldn’t-”
                “It’d be no problem at all. We’ll get an order in at one of the loriners to make the plaque up and have a nail through it in no time. Our treat.”
                “No plaques, please!” Shouted the Alderman. The Alderman’s Assistant smiled; James’ anti-plaque stance, at least, had remained constant upon taking up the mantle of Alderman. “We would not waste your time on such trivial matters.” He added in a more conciliatory tone.
                “Then please, what would you have us do?”
                “I will show you. That’s what I was in the process of doing by coming out here. The most pressing need is back along the road on the Miller farmstead.”
                “The Miller farmstead. And what do the Millers do?” Joan asked innocently.
                “They are millers. They grow grain and grind it into flour.” Explained the Alderman, slowly and suspiciously.
                “Oh I see. And why are they called the Millers?”
                Caleb shrugged when he caught the Alderman’s gaze. He wasn’t sure why Joan had chosen a path of such devilment with this man in particular, but she always had her reasons and it wasn’t his place to question them.
                “Because… because that’s what his parents were called?” The Alderman speculated by way of reply. He’d built up a certain expectation in his head about the great heroes Holst and Scarletta, including not having to explain how names were passed down from one generation to the other. After a perfectly reasonable first impression the previous night, he was beginning to feel the first notes of disappointment.
                “I suppose that would make sense if the profession has been in their family for every generation since profession-based naming was introduced. It would be an enormous coincidence otherwise, wouldn’t it?”
                The Alderman frowned. He supposed it would be, if one was to think about it like that. He just couldn’t think of a reason why they would want to.
                It was only a few minutes’ walk to reach the Miller farmstead, and aside from a few throwaway remarks about the state of the road, and some observations of places where Three-Toed Bill might have been hiding in the bushes, there was comparatively little conversation. Between the criticisms and accusations, Caleb thought he was starting to understand the motivation behind Joan’s attitude.
                “This, heroes, is our grain silo. The building which is to safeguard our food supply for the coming winter.” The Alderman said, gravely, after letting himself into the Millers’ land through a squeaky gate.
                “Wait, what is?” Caleb asked, confused.
                “That is. There.” Clarified the Alderman unhelpfully.
                “I see the wheat fields, some dilapidated fences, and a vast pile of rotting wood.”
                “Yes, that’s it.”
                Caleb looked at the pile. Then he looked back at the Alderman. Finding nothing of any further use from him, he looked at Joan who was, unfortunately, looking to Caleb for the same reassurance that he sought. Both of them then proceeded to look back at the pile of rotting wood which, on closer inspection, did cover approximately the same area as a grain store. This was a source of some distress to both of them.
                “You’re going to store your grain underneath the pile?”
                “We have, unfortunately, been forced to for the last year, yes. It’s a bit of an inconvenience, what with the damp from the rot, and also from the rain, and the lack of protection from rats or deer. Or wind.” The Alderman lamented. “The Millers are naturally deeply concerned not only about their livelihood but also their lives. No-one wants to starve this winter.”
                “Don’t you think you let things get a bit far?” Asked Joan disappointedly. “How many months ago did you say you tried to get us to visit you?”
                “Four years.”
                “Four years! You’ve lived with this for four years?!” Blurted Caleb.
                “Well it wasn’t this bad to begin with!” Snapped the Alderman. All the while his assistant was nodding in agreement with Holst. “We started trying to get you in when the roof was leaking and the walls were getting gaps, but time will take its toll, especially when the structure is already decaying.”
                “And you just let that continue while you waited for us?”
                “You’re talking like we weren’t trying to fix the problem! We raised the totem and we painted the runes; I don’t see what else we could be expected to do.”
                “You could have just fixed it the old fashioned way. Four years would be enough to build another dozen grain silos all by yourselves.” Joan pointed out. Behind her the Alderman’s Assistant clasped his hands together in thanks that he wasn’t alone in that opinion.
                “We hardly need that many, Lady Scarletta. It’s not loriners we’re talking about here!” He scoffed. Despite himself, the Alderman’s Assistant chuckled at the notion of needing more grain stores than loriners. “Besides which, it would have been wasted effort for all we knew. With the totem and runes in place you were surely just around the corner, and every morning would be the one when you finally walked into town and worked your magic for us.”
                “We’ve really got to stop people trying the totem and runes, haven’t we Caleb? It’s spreading too far.” Joan said. He nodded. “I suppose it’d fall to me to curse them somehow…”
                “This is why I sent a letter instead.” Said Isabella. She had apparently followed after them. Either that, or she’d spent the night lurking in a nearby hedgerow and waiting for the Alderman to bring Caleb and Joan to the Miller farmstead. “Much easier and, critically, it actually works.”
                “She’s got a good point there.” The Alderman’s Assistant couldn’t help but add. The Alderman’s nostrils flared and his gaze at the pile of wood intensified. Ignoring the fact of Charles Folly’s existence was much easier when he was silent and stood at a moderate distance. Desperately he wanted to give his assistant a stern talking to, but that would be an even more flagrant breach of their code of ignorance. It was a real catch 22.
                “Look, we are where we are. This is the help we need most desperately from you right now.”
                “The help that could otherwise have been provided by the several carpenters and barn builders you pointed out to us on the way here. The ones you said were fairly light on work at the moment.” Caleb asked, just to be clear.
                “I can’t be held responsible if the people know that magical heroes are coming and therefore decline to hire carpenters to repair their wooden structures.”
                “Of course you can, friend! You can be anything you want to be.” Joan told him warmly, patting him gently on the shoulder. “But until then, I suppose we’d best make sure you don’t all starve or eat rotten grains during the winter.”
                They all looked towards the pile of useless lumber once again.
                “I can’t nail rotten wood together, and shattering the pieces hardly feels like a useful application of Florane’s Penitence.” Holst assessed, patting the hammer.
                “But I can curse them to rapidly de-age, and then you can fix the non-rotten planks together.”
                “That still involves me building a whole grain store by myself. Can we fetch the carpenters and barn builders once the wood is repaired?”
                “The nerve!” Cried the Alderman.
                “I’ll get them right away!” Isabella announced, rather undermining the Alderman’s position. Amid some official blustering from James Woodman she dashed back towards the centre of Coulton, while Joan rolled up her long, woollen sleeves and prepared to curse some timber.
                “What else would you have from us?” Caleb asked while Joan took some effigies from her satchel. Made from loosely bound yew twigs and adorned with various ribbons, bells and dried flowers, the effigies evoked an instant sense of dread within the Alderman. Even his assistant took a further step backwards, which sent him pivoting over a low fence and into a peculiarly misplaced bucket of stagnant water.
                “That depends. Do you intend to solve uur next problem yourselves, or have my own townsfolk do it?”
                “It depends on whether it’s a problem more easily solved by your townsfolk than by us.” Countered Caleb, calmly. He always found alliteration helpful in establishing a position of dominance.
                Whispering some vaguely threatening nothings under her breath, Scarletta placed effigies in a ring around the wooden ruins.
                “How about the dilapidation of our town’s well? The collapsing brickwork, the crumbling walls within and the low water level at is base?” The Alderman sneered. “We are on the cusp of needing to walk to the river banks to find fresh water, but some days the river water is soured by floods from the mines. It could spell the end for us.”
                “The same mines that Miner Stephanie frequents?”
                The Alderman sighed.
                “Yes those some ones. I really wish you hadn’t listened to Three-toed Bill so closely.”
                “He’s a man with a passion. It’s infectious.”
                “Then I hope that your own toes survive the disease.”
                Joan’s whispering became louder. It was still clearly a whisper, but now erupted at screaming volumes. Like waving fronds of seaweed in a turbulent current, strands of wispy white smoke rose from the rotting timber thrashed in the cool morning air. They seemed to pulse gently while the wood beneath them yielded the many years it had accumulated, and bright green veins appeared in the smoky wisps as the timber healed from the ravages of time.
                “My goodness…” Muttered the Alderman. “I can smell the foul taint from here…”
                Behind him, the Alderman’s Assistant had extracted himself from the bucket, and was standing upwind. He decided not to correct him as to the source of the smell.
                “Now all this rot has to go somewhere, dear Alderman.” Joan said. The whispering continued without the input of her mouth or lungs, and the Alderman tried not to think about it.
                “Right.” He answered.
                “So where would you like it?”
                “I… I don’t want anything rotted! That wasn’t part of the arrangement.”
                “For the love of… why can’t we have Isabella back…” Scarletta muttered to herself. The whispering repeated her words for the whole farmstead to hear.
                “Do you have no manure piles nearby? No fertiliser being prepared?” Caleb asked, impatiently. The question seemed to take the Alderman by surprise.
                “Oh. Well now that you mention it I think that… er… that round building does.” He said, pointing towards a short, dome-roofed cylindrical building nearby.
                “Fine.”
                With a grand sweeping of both arms, the smoky tendrils, now luminous with the rotten corruption, formed grand arches through the sky and passed through the roof of the dome. Like mashed potato being squeezed through a narrow trouser leg, something that Three-toed Bill had been caught doing on several occasions, the corruption pumped itself into the round silo. Within moments it was done, the smoke died away, and Joan dutifully began to pick up her effigies again. They now surrounded a messy pile of pristine planks of barn-building wood.
                “There you are, Alderman. Your grain silo is now fit for rebuilding. So please take us to this well.”
                As he watched four figures leave his farm and walk back towards Coulton, Mr Miller stepped from his farmhouse and stared gratefully at the pile of fresh timber planks where his ruined grain silo had been. This gratitude was, however, tainted by the eldritch tentacles that he’d witnessed channelling something bright and foul into his store of maturing firewood.
                By the time he’d opened the door to witness what had been wrought inside, the heroes were too far along the road to hear his despairing wail.
 
                The well, it transpired, was back in the centre of Coulton. Irritably they marched their way along the road they’d now trodden twice, while the Alderman repeatedly expressed his surprise and disbelief about what he’d witnessed at the farmstead. Apparently he was all too ready to accept that building a wooden totem of biceps and adorning it with the alphabet of a dead language would summon two strangers, but witnessing the very works for which he’d summoned those strangers was utterly shocking.
                Along the road they crossed paths with Isabella and her assembled barn-builders. At Joan’s request Isabella joined them on their walk into Coulton, feeling sure that the barn builders would know how to recognise timber and build a grain store. This seemed to be to everyone’s satisfaction except the Alderman’s. The Alderman’s Assistant wished dearly to give his friend a supportive hug, and tell him that it was alright to admit fault once in a while, but he knew it would fall on deaf ears. He consoled himself by smiling unseen at the back of the Alderman’s head.
                Once they had arrived at the well, they began to question the Alderman’s priorities in life. Much like the barn, this well was primarily the victim of general ageing. Mortar had eroded away between the bricks, sending some of them tumbling into the blackness below, and others were roughly heaped to one side, covered in algae. The small pitched roof had gaps in the tiles, and its supports were cracked. Next to it, standing tall and clearly regularly treated against weathering, was Holst’s Totem, covered in Scarletta’s runes. Both heroes sighed.
                “Why did you let it get this bad?”
                “We’ve waited four years for-”
                “Yes, yes.” Dismissed Joan with a sternly waved hand. “You were waiting for us so long that you couldn’t possibly do anything for yourselves. Except apparently look after the totem pole. We all know your poor logic there.”
                “I tried to convince him that we should just take care of it ourselves.” Isabella defended. “But his mind is hard to change once made up.”
                “He’s stubborn as a mule and twice as hairy!” Came a shout from across the square. A small crowd of curious people was starting to form, all of them eager to see Holst and Scarletta in action. Rushing towards them from that crowd with a strangely unbalanced, loping gait was Three-toed Bill.
                “Oh no...” whimpered the Alderman. “Bill! Go home. We don’t need you distracting the heroes while they’re working.”
                “I have every right to be here. This well claimed my second toe and I want it back!” He defied.
                “What? How do you lose a toe in a well you old crank?” The Alderman demanded, immediately regretting the invitation for him to keep speaking.
                “It was a stormy morning in the springtime, going many years back. I knew that something was awry when the cockerel wouldn’t come out to greet me; a grim omen of things to come.” Bill started, waving his arms around expressively and teetering from one under-toed foot to the other. “Poultry has a sense for these things, for when doom approaches…”
                “Does this story end with one of your severed toes being in the well?” Isabella interrupted, sounding pre-emptively disgusted.
                “It does! It claimed one from me while I was trying to shift a brick back into place with my foot.”
                “That’s revolting! We drink these waters!” Cried Isabella.
                “Ah, it didn’t do anyone any harm. It was one of my cleaner toes.”
                “Why were you moving bricks with your bare feet?” Asked Caleb, trying to unpack everything in his mind and not doing very well.
                “My hands were full with the cockerel.”
                “What?” Repeated the Alderman.
                “You’d understand if you let me tell the damned story!”
                “I don’t think I want to hear any more.” Said Isabella, turning an unhealthy shade of green. “Can we please get the toe back out of our drinking water?”
                “Yes.” Joan said. Her mind was too preoccupied to be any more expansive than that.
                “Three-toed Bill is at the heart of this town!” Cackled the old, toe-poor man, to the sound of retching from the crowd around the square. “Oh, come on! How many of you can say you haven’t suffered the same fate?”
                There were no takers, and Bill cursed under his breath. He’d been so sure that he’d have been able to trick them into revealing some kind of toe-loss secrets en masse, thereby increasing the validity of his toe census, but Coulton’s residents were clearly too savvy for that.
                “I know what we can do.” Caleb said. He rested his pack on the ground, squatted down, and pulled a pencil from a pouch on its side. “Give me a minute or two to sketch something.”
                “Drawing up some plans for something?” Asked Isabella. Joan shook her head on Caleb’s behalf.
                “You surely must know of Florane’s Penitence; the hammer that Caleb wields.”
                “I know that it’s magical.” Offered Isabella.
                “It can strike any object that is drawn and hung from a nail.”
                “Oh. Erm. I suppose that’s… useful?”
                “It is.” Caleb said. “You’ll see in a minute.”
                There was silence for a moment, except for the distant murmuring of the crowds. Joan suspected that it was largely the presence of Three-toed Bill that made them reluctant to come any closer, and for that she was reasonably grateful.
                “You said the well runs low, yes?” Joan asked. The Alderman nodded. “I believe that I can curse this well to run upwards; the water level will sit always at the top and you’ll always be able to reach it.”
                “That would… that would be incredible!”
                “Such is the power of the Scarletta family.” Joan said with a theatrical bow. Beside her Caleb leaned back from the canvas that hung from a nail on his pack.
                “That ought to do it.” He decided, taking Florane’s Penitence in hand. Joan looked down at his drawing.
                “You’re getting better, you know. You can really tell from the perspective that it’s the underside of a toe, viewed from beneath the water level.”
                “Thanks. It would have been easier if I’d been born into a family of artists, but at least if I ever need to strike a porcine tuxedo pattern from afar I’ll be fine.”
                Holding the handle of Florane’s Penitence close to the base of the head, which is to say the legs of the upper ram, Caleb gave the sketched toe a firm whack with the hammer, sending the canvas swinging pendulously from its nail. A ricocheting impact sound rang from the inside of the well and, like a bullet of bone, a stripped-clean toe shot upwards. It struck the underside of the well’s shelter and landed on the cobbles beside Isabella.
                “Urgh.”
                “My toe!” Exclaimed Bill, happily snatching it up from the ground and staring at it with fascination. “I thought I’d never see it again!”
                “I hope you’re sure that it’s Bill’s.” The Alderman said with a frown.
                “Yeah. I labelled it, see.” Caleb confirmed, pointing to an arrow on the sketch labelled ‘Bill’s toe’.
                “Get it in place then, Bill. I’ll reattached it for you.” Joan offered. Bill’s excited squeals were immediately silenced.
                “Reattach it?”
                “Yes. I can pull my de-aging curse again to restore the flesh, and then curse you to be fused together with it.”
                “But… but I wouldn’t be Three-toed Bill anymore!”
                “No.” Joan said. “No, you’d be Four-toed Bill.”
                “I can’t go back to those dark days. My four-toed years were fraught with sorrow and peril; they brought me nearly to ruin. I beg you, please do not put this toe back on my foot. If we find another then… then perhaps we could consider it. Five-toed Bill was a happy man. But never four. Never four.”
                “I… as you wish, Bill.”
                “Never.” He reaffirmed, in case there were any lingering doubts.
                Lost in speculation as to what could have been so bad about the four-toed years of Bill’s life, Joan once again scattered her yew twig effigies, this time around the well. It struck her, as she dropped dandelion leaves onto the water’s surface, that surely the five toe days heralded worse fortune, since that version of Bill would go on to lose two more toes. Four-toed Bill, by contrast, only lost one, and Three-toed Bill gained one. His logic of sticking with three over four was sound, but accepting five over four was confusing. Joan stubbed her own toe on a fallen brick due to lack of attention, and snapped out of it.
                “Lady Scarletta?”
                “Yes, Isabella?”
                “How high can you make the water go?”
                Joan turned to face her.
                “As high as I please.”
                “So, past the top of the well then?” Isabella asked, a smile beginning to appear at the edges of her mouth. Had it begun to appear on the back of her head, it would have been troubling.
                “If you want the ground to get wet then yes, I suppose so.”
                “We have no need for a wet town square.” The Alderman told them all. “It was bad enough when that badger kept swimming in the river and then picking here to wring itself out.” A collective groan of recollection from the crowd gave credence to the Alderman’s words. “We’d all prefer it to remain dry. The top of the well is perfect.”
                “Very well.”
                “No, wait.” Isabella interjected. “I wasn’t finished. I have a thought.”
                “That’s two fewer than the number of toes on my feet, and three fewer than the number of toes I have!” Bill said happily, clutching the bone to his chest with both hands.
                “If the water is higher than the well then it will try to flow outwards, right?”
                “Yes. Onto the ground, as we have discussed at length.” The Alderman replied impatiently.
                “But what if we made gullies instead? Ones that allowed the water to run elsewhere into the town instead of falling to the square?”
                “You want to make aqueducts?” Asked Caleb. “Aqueducts at the lowest point of a valley… because we don’t need a mountain when we have water that rises of its own volition…” He realised out loud. “It’s genius.”
                “Exactly! Why come to the well when the water can come to us?”
                “Coulton isn’t that big, Isabella. It’s hardly a long walk to get here for anyone.” The Adlerman defied.
                “So what? It could still be easier if we have water flowing along to every home.”
                “To every home!? The town would be nothing but aqueducts! They’d blot out the sky.”
                “We’d find a way to make it work.”
                “It’s a good idea, but you’d need a lot of stone. I doubt you have enough here right now to do it.” Joan observed.
                There was no arguing with that statement.
                “We could use timber. We have plenty of carpenters without work, and the loriners could make locking mechanisms that start or stop the flow of water!” Continued the excited Isabella, her imagination reaching an unstoppable level of momentum.
                “The wood will rot, Isabella.”
                “Then we’ll line it with stone. We’d need far less of it to make just a stone gulley that’s supported by a timber frame. The farmers need never pray for rain again!”
                “That would be quite an undertaking.” Caleb observed quietly. “We can’t wait around here for those works to be finished, but it’s exactly the kind of grand work we should be enabling, Joan.”
                “We don’t need you to wait here. We just need you to make the water sit high enough. Our craftspeople can do the rest.”
                “And flood Coulton for the intervening years?” Snapped the Alderman.
                “Why don’t we make the well taller?” Offered the Alderman’s Assistant. “It can hold the water until we’ve finished the aqueducts, and then we connect it when we’re ready.”
                The Alderman roared, and kicked out at a fallen brick. Once he was done hopping around, and once Three-toed Bill had been shooed away from trying to feel for whether the toe had been severed by the kick, he spoke through gritted teeth in the near silence of the town square, leaning against the totem for support.
                “If only there was a way of holding the water until the aqueducts were finished. Then we might build the aqueducts first and connect it to the water supply when we’re done.” The fury emanated from The Alderman in waves. “Oh, I know. We’ll make the well taller. Funny how these ideas pop into my head from an OTHERWISE SILENT TOWN SQUARE.”
                Isabella rolled her eyes and thanked the Alderman’s Assistant.
                “Why are you talking to yourself, Isabella?” He shouted in an ever-growing rage.
                “Because the law of ignoring your assistant is stupid!”
                Silence really did fall on the town square that time. Joan and Caleb watched with ever-deepening confusion as the old man and the young woman stared daggers at one another. It reminded Joan of a time when she’d cursed someone to literally be able to stare daggers, such that they could prune high branches without using a ladder. They were simpler times.
                “It is an ancient tradition that has kept Coulton safe for time immemorial.” Growled the Alderman.
                “It’s something you invented and then pretended to be ancient.” Isabella shot back. “Isn’t that right, Bill?”
                “The last time an assistant was acknowledged must have been… hoo boy… when I had seven toes. How naïve I was back then…”
                “How dare you question my laws!”
                “They’re just as moronic as your decision not to let anyone repair their fences because ‘the heroes will be here soon’. You’ve lost the plot, Woodman, and this thing is a symptom of your failure.” Accused Isabella, pointing angrily at the totem.
                “Well it seems like, maybe, this has been boiling up for a while,” Caleb said, stepping forward with his hands held up, “and we should take a moment to breathe.”
                “He just wants to ignore his assistant because he thinks having an unseen, unheard helper makes him seem more powerful. Everyone else thought it made him seem like a jerk, so then he passed it into law that everyone has to ignore poor Charles. It’s not right. They used to be friends!”
                “The responsibilities of authority supersede friendship.”
                Florane’s Penitence slammed downwards onto the cobbles, shattering them clean out of existence with a thunderous crack. The arguing ceased.
                “Thank you.” Caleb said, lifting the hammer back onto his shoulder. “That might have been impulse of me, in hindsight, but something had to be done. We can nail some more cobbles into place in a bit.”
                “Bit of a digression there, Caleb.” Said Joan.
                “Yep. Back to the point.  Whatever else is going on, we need to know what we’re doing with this well. I can nail some bricks together to make it taller for now, and you can all work out what you want to do afterwards. Would someone please provide me with bricks enough to raise this well up by two storeys?”
                “Would you like to use loaves?” Shouted Jospeh Pitts, the baker. “I baked you a hundred loaves apiece this morning just in case.
                “They’ll do.” Accepted Caleb, to keep things moving along. “You can curse them to be waterproof, right Joan?”
                “Of course!”
                Despite protestations from nearly everyone else present, Jospeh smugly carted two hundred loaves of bread into the centre of the town square and Caleb wielded his mighty magical hammer to nail them all together. It took most of the day, between waiting for nails, repeatedly climbing up and down a ladder to add more loaves, and rejecting offers for more traditional bricks and mortar, both of which were readily available, but eventually the towering well was completed. It overshadowed even the mighty totem.
                “It smells amazing out here, to be fair.” Isabella said, trying to find a bright side to a tower of bread dominating Coulton’s town centre. She’d underestimated how peculiar a tall well would look in an otherwise open square, but it would surely be worth it to provide clean water to the whole town.
                “Your insistence on this has plunged Coulton into eternal night.” The Alderman melodramatically sniped.
                “You’ll see that I was right when we all have clean water to our homes, Woodman. But I’ve heard enough of your complaining. Until tomorrow, heroes.” Isabella said, before taking her leave from the well.
                Using some further twig effigies, this time made from oak and hornbeam because that’s what Coulton had in abundance, Joan cursed the bread to forever reject any moisture and the water to rise up to the apex of the baked goods. As the sun set behind their tower of wholemeal water encasement, Joan and Caleb put the small-town politics out of their minds, and congratulated themselves on another job well done.
 
                “Mr Holst, sir, would you like a heavier blanket tonight?” Asked the innkeeper as they sat eating their supper that evening.
                “Heavier? Why do you ask?” Said Caleb through a mouthful of celery. He was starting to get used to the taste.
                “It’s just that I noticed you nailed your blanket to the bed last night and, er, maybe instead of doing that again you could just have one that holds you down without being permanently affixed to the mattress.”
                “Oh. Oh no, sorry. That’s just how I make the bed normally; force of habit really when you’ve got Florane’s Penitence at the ready.” Caleb explained, patting the ram’s back. “I can refrain tonight if you’d prefer.”
                “I’d be right grateful for that, sir. I only have so many blankets and so many bedframes.”
                “I guess you’ve got something to be penitent for as well now, Caleb.” Smirked Joan.
                “If you’ll pardon my asking, heroes, why is it called Florane’s Penitence? She was a great vanquisher of evil, was she not?”
                Caleb smiled and held an open palm towards Joan.
                “It was a reminder for Florane herself to always plan ahead, especially when hiring wizards. The penitence was, in her mind, to continue using this divine tool with its… unusual abilities, rather than having one with the war-ending powers she’d envisaged.”
                “Imagine just leaping at the first magical solution that comes to mind.” Caleb said, looking out of the window at their tower of bread.
                “It’s doing us a good turn. Not a punishment at all.” The innkeeper decided. His cloth must also have been enchanted, otherwise it would surely have worn through by now.
                “Us too, to be honest.” Agreed Caleb. “Florane wanted something to bring an empire to its knees and protect her people, and she got this instead. But she made it work in the end. And although she didn’t exactly like what she’d had forged, and although she didn’t feel like the champion she wanted to be, she’s remembered as one anyway. Funny how history does that to people.”
                “You’ll be remembered as heroes too, mark my words.”
                “Yeah, maybe.” Caleb said. “Or perhaps we’ll just be two bozos who roamed around with a wagon full of celery for years on end, after wasting two hundred loaves of bread.”
                “We can be both.” Joan smirked, patting him on the back. “We can always be both.
                The innkeeper returned to his futile tankard wiping and the heroes returned to their celery-heavy supper. Only when they stood to leave did he return to them.
                “This letter was left for you two. From Isabella.”
                Joan and Caleb looked at one another with some confusion as the innkeeper held out an envelope to them. Isabella had been with them for most of the day and could easily have talked to them about anything while the well was being built. Then again, she summoned them in the first place with a letter so maybe she put more stock in that form of communication.
                “Thank you.” Caleb said, as Joan took it.
                “She asked that you read it in private, so I thought I’d better wait until you were done here. Wouldn’t want to spoil your dinner by making you anxious about letters now, would I?”
                “Heaven forbid.” Said Joan, flatly. “Thank you. Shall we, Caleb?”
                In the isolation of Joan’s lodging, with its cursed floorboards and nail-free bed, the two heroes lit a lantern on the wall and sat on a pair of hard wooden chairs. Joan opened up the envelope and pulled out a single sheet of paper. She read it silently, much to Caleb’s chagrin.
                “Is it about ignoring the Alderman’s assistant?” He speculated blindly. “Or about the aqueduct again?” Joan read on without responding to him, so he idly played with the window shutters until she was done.
                “Well, it’s neither of those things.” She finally replied, proving that she had indeed heard him. He frowned. “Isabella has a request to make of us.”
                “What is it?”
                “I think that you should read it for yourself.” She said, handing the letter over. Caleb rolled his eyes and then, realising that they would be better employed by looking at the writing, settled them down again.
                ‘Heroes’, the letter began ‘I am writing to you about a matter of much importance. You have seen the state of our town, and you have learned how it was allowed to get that way. Our Alderman, James Woodman, is dangerously underqualified to hold a position of such power. He has nearly starved us, sent us for water tainted by the mine, and legislated that we ignore a man for reasons that have never made sense. Unfortunately, the people of Coulton are, on the whole, hardly any brighter. Three-toed Bill is one of the better ones, but he’s so obsessed with toes that he does not make for an able co-conspirator, just an enthusiastic one. Please believe me when I say that I only want what is best for Coulton, and I seek to do no harm.’
                Caleb looked up at Joan, who was watching him with some interest.
                “This, er, gets off to an interesting start doesn’t it.”
                “Finish it.”
                ‘The time has come to take drastic action about the Alderman, but clearly I cannot lead a coup of two people with thirteen toes between them.’
                “Do you think she’s including the fourth toe that we gave back to Bill from the well?” He asked.
                “I doubt it. She seemed pretty well balanced. But keep going.”
                ‘I do not wish to have power myself, nor do I really want to depose Woodman. I just want him to listen to reason. To my reason. I would like for you to place a curse on him to be receptive to my opinions. So receptive that he would never question them. Naturally we will need a plausible reason for him to have experienced such a change in attitude towards me, and nursing him back to health from an injury would be just the ticket. I was stumped as to how to such an event might be orchestrated, but that’s where Bill came through for me, having witnessed Holst’s prowess earlier. Please find within this letter a sketch for Florane’s Penitence to strike. We will know if you have accepted our terms, naturally, and I would plead that you do so. It is for the good of Coulton.
                Yours in anticipation,
                Isabella.’
                “Where’s this sketch?” Caleb asked, looking up from the letter.
                Joan handed him another piece of paper. It was a surprisingly accurate drawing of a human foot, viewed from above such that all the toes were visible, with a labelled arrow directed towards them. It read ‘The Alderman’s Toes’.
                Holst and Scarletta sat in silence. Light from their lantern flickered and the flame danced inside to music of its own imagination.
                “Remember Vailon? The first town we ever went to as adventurers?” Caleb asked. “When they had that rockslide that blocked the road and I gave it one with Florane’s Penitence?”
                “It was great. I cursed the hillside to remain unchanged so that no more rocks would fall down. The shepherd was a bit annoyed that his sheep couldn’t eat the grass anymore, but it basically worked out.”
                “Or Boule’s Cross? You cursed the pigeons to eat only the weeds and fertilise the crops. I felled that dangerous craggy outcrop on the mountainside using just a picture of it.” He sighed. “It was simpler then. No-one knew who we were, no-one built totems to bring us to them, no-one plunged their town into disrepair waiting for us…”
                “No-one invited us to brainwash and overthrow their Alderman.” Joan added.
                “That, I’ll be honest, is one of the major advantages of our earlier exploits, in hindsight.” Assessed Holst.
                “Yeah. I think we both took the lack of that incredibly specific circumstance for granted.”
                The lantern flickered on in the silence. Caleb looked down at the drawing of the Alderman’s toes. The hammer in his room had gifted him and Joan the life of adventurers many years ago, and now it had burdened them with the responsibility of choice. Certainly it seemed like Isabella would be a more level headed leader for the town, but it was hard to put too much faith in someone who took power in the shadows using curses and the magical ability to crush toes from afar. Perhaps Coulton, this town of rotting wood and few toes, was Holst and Scarletta’s penitence.
                “So, Joan,” Caleb finally asked, picture in hand, “what do we do?”