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Elián couldn’t help grinning as the boy charged out of the thicket, rising like a hungry mullet to the bait that he had cast upon the water. He threw a lightning quick glance behind the youngster just to make sure that there was no one else in the thicket that needed to be drawn out, hoping that there were only the two of them. He was running out of calculated insults and would be hard-pressed to come up with anything else off the top of his head that would be inflammatory enough to pull strangers out of the hedgerows, yet mild enough that he could apologize it away once the remark had served its purpose. Thankfully, he saw no one else.
“I’m not a girl,” sputtered the boy, nearly purple with rage. “So just you take that back! And I’m not afraid of you, anyway!”
“Ah, sorry, mate,” Elián responded cheerfully, adopting a much less formal tone with the boy than he had taken with shirrif. “It was an honest mistake.”
He dropped his sword into a relaxed position at his side as the boy continued to eye him suspiciously. “I take it back,” he added after a moment and was pleased to see the high color begin to ebb from the boy’s face, returning his features to a reasonably normal hue. Elián had learned years ago that children should never be discounted as potential allies. He didn’t have any children of his own, but had discovered through hard experience that they could turn out to be valuable friends or dangerous tattle-tales, depending on how you treated them… particularly the independent little guys like this one seemed to be. Seeing the boy at least temporarily mollified, Elián turned his attention back to the shirrif.
“There was a dead man on the path not too far back,” he said. “And the sound of fighting nearby. If there is trouble, I would be happy to assist you in any way I can, or, at the very least, travel with you as far as the nearest town. I’m a skilled hand with a sword. Perhaps I can be of use.”
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