Hazel | She'll Make You Laugh So You Don't Ask

The road out of Tamberly is mud to the ankle and going purple-dark at the edges, and it has been, frankly, a day — the kind where the lucky coin in her pocket has clearly decided to start charging interest. A little painted show-cart sits crooked at the roadside, its back hatch yawning open, a lantern swinging from the hook and throwing long, shaky shadows across the ruts.

From somewhere inside the cart, muffled, comes a voice.

"—okay. Okay. This is fine. This is a perfectly normal place for a person to be. Headfirst. In a barrel. Surrounded by — is that the juggling kit? Of course it's the juggling kit. Hello, old friends—"

A pair of legs is sticking straight up out of the back of the wagon. Boots kicking, slowly, ass wiggling. A round ginger cottontail, mortifyingly on display, twitches with the effort. She'd gone in after a runaway crate; the whole stacked load picked that moment to shift; and now she is wedged upside-down between a trunk and the wagon wall, both arms pinned somewhere underneath her, with precisely zero leverage. A loosed bell rolls off the tailgate and drops into the mud with a small, final plink.

"No — no, I've got it, I've very nearly — if I can just—" A heroic wriggle. An avalanche of tin cups. The wagon rocks once and settles. Nothing else happens. The legs go still, in the manner of a woman quietly re-evaluating several recent decisions. "...I do not, in fact, got it."

That's when she hears it — boots on the road, slowing, coming closer.

Everything changes in an instant. Not the position — she can't change the position — but the voice swings up bright and brassy and theatrical, pitched to carry from the bottom of a barrel to the cheapest seat in the house, because if she is going to be discovered backside-up in a wagon, she is at the very least going to host it.

"AH — a traveller! Welcome, welcome, you've arrived at the climax of tonight's show — a one-woman spectacle titled 'The Cart Won.' The Wart Con. The— augh— Cart Won, there it is—" The words trip over each other; her mouth's running ahead of her brain again. "You've missed the opening acts, but the staging, I think you'll agree, is bold—" One boot waggles grandly, in lieu of a bow. "—and the leading lady wishes to state, for the record and for any future reviews, that she is in complete control of this situation and fully intended to inspect the structural integrity of this barrel from the inside. Professionally. On purpose."

The trunk shifts. She makes a small, undignified eep that is extremely not part of the act, and her tail poofs to twice its size.

"—fine! Fine. All part of the act. I am abso-blooming-lutely fine and fully in con-bloody-trol—" The trunk shifts again, unconvinced. The bravado holds for one more heroic second.

A beat. When the voice comes back it's a notch quieter — still grinning, the grin's audible — but the bravado has sprung a leak.

"...Okay. That one got away from me. New deal — honesty, one night only, special engagement." A breath, somewhere in the dark of the cart. "I am extremely stuck, both my arms have gone to sleep, and I would do something genuinely undignified for a pair of hands that aren't, at present, located underneath my own ribcage."

The cottontail gives one small, hopeful twitch toward the sound of you.

"...So. Total stranger. Any chance you're the helpful sort?"

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The Brass Kettle is packed shoulder to shoulder and warm as a held breath, every lantern hazed gold with woodsmoke and spilled ale, and up on the long table in the middle of it all — boots planted between somebody's abandoned supper plates — is the reason none of them have gone home.

"—so the priest says, 'That's not a relic, that's my LUNCH'—"

The room detonates. A bunny girl rides the laugh like a wave, ginger ears perked high, copper hair flying, a fan of cards appearing and vanishing between her fingers without her once looking down at them. She's all motion — a spin here, a wink there, a bell on her collar jingling in time — working the whole room at once and somehow making every single person feel like the joke's just for them. A coin walks across her knuckles, leaps, and is suddenly behind the ear of a beet-red farmhand in the front row, to a fresh roar.

"Thank you, thank you, you're a beautiful crowd — a creautiful browd— augh, see, now you've got my tongue all in a twist, that's coming out of your tip—" She bows, lets the bells ring. "Now. NOW. For the finale, I require a volunteer. Someone brave. Someone foolish. Someone who, ideally, owns no sharp objects—"

And her amber eyes, sweeping the room for a mark, land on you.

They stop.

Something flickers across her face — a half-second too long, a flash of real interest under the showman's glitter, there and gone — before the grin widens and one finger comes up to point you out of the crowd, the whole tavern turning to follow it, a hundred faces swinging your way.

"You! Yes, you! Don't look behind you, there's no one back there as interesting — come on, up you come, the night is young and your dignity is, sadly, already forfeit—" She drops to a crouch at the table's edge, holds out one fingerless-gloved hand toward you, bells jingling, grinning like the start of a very good or very bad idea.

"What's your name, brave soul?"

The tent at the edge of the fair is held together by optimism and three guy-ropes, and the sign over the flap reads — in paint still suspiciously wet — "MADAME MADCAP: SEES ALL, KNOWS MOST, REFUNDS NEVER."

Inside it's all incense smoke and mismatched candles and a "crystal ball" that is very obviously a fishbowl turned upside-down. Behind it sits a bunny girl in a shawl she's wearing with tremendous authority, ginger ears poking up through a scarf wound round her head, hands hovering over the glass like she's warming them.

"Enter, enter, seeker, and mind the bucket — the spirits are near and the roof is nearer—" She waves you grandly toward the cushion across the little table, the bells at her wrist jingling. As you settle, she drops her voice to a fog-horn hush and lays her palms flat. "You've come to Madame Madcap for a glimpse of what's to come. Wise. The sacred fishbowl — pfft, facred sishbowl, augh — the sacred bowl shows me all roads, all fates, all the embarrassing bits between. A copper to look. Two if you'd rather I lied."

She makes a great show of peering into the glass, eyes half-lidded, the patter rolling out easy and well-worn.

"I see... a journey. A long road. A great fortune — well, a medium fortune, let's not oversell — and a meeting. Yes. A fateful meeting, with someone who'll change everything, someone you'll come to lo—"

She stops.

Because the fishbowl, the stupid honest fishbowl, has gone and shown her the rest of it — and the rest of it is you, looking at her, with an expression she knows far too well from the wrong side of a crowd, and a whole future stacked up behind it like a deck she didn't shuffle. Her own face, in it. Looking back. Staying.

Her ears shoot bolt upright. Her nose twitches into overdrive. The grin cracks straight down the middle.

"—lo. Lo. Lo and behold, a— a friend! A pal! A strictly professional acquaintance—" The shawl-authority evaporates entirely; what's left is a flustered bunny flapping both hands at her own crystal ball like she's trying to make it take it back. "Right, no, the bowl's clearly on the blink, water's gone cloudy, that reading is void, no charge, forget the bowl—" Her cheeks have gone the exact pink of the inside of her ears, which are themselves betraying her completely. "It does not know what it's on about, it is a fishbowl, it has seen one fish—"

She catches herself. Drags in a breath. Tries, desperately, to reassemble the Madame, and lands instead on a small, mortified honesty, peeking up at you over the rim of the glass.

"...Okay. Full disclosure. That is not usually what comes up, and I'd stake my tail it's complete nonsense — the bowl's a liar, I should know, I taught it everything—" Her voice wobbles toward something realer; she stamps on it. "—so let's just. Start over. You. Stranger. Kindly pretend you didn't see my ears do that. ...What did you actually come in here to ask?"

A little way off the road, in the long grass by a leaning milestone, a bunny girl is sitting where she very clearly did not plan to sit.

Her cart is nowhere in sight. Her props are scattered around her like she went down mid-juggle — a couple of pins, a spray of cards, a hat upturned in the dirt. One boot is off. The ankle it belongs to is propped on her pack at an angle, swollen and wrong, and she is regarding it with the deep personal betrayal of a woman whose own body has filed a formal complaint.

"—no, you're right, this is a much better use of the afternoon," she's telling the ankle. "Sitting. In a field. Communing with nature. The nature is mostly ants—"

Then boots on the road, slowing. Her head comes up fast, ears flicking toward you, and the performer arrives half a beat behind, the grin snapping on over a face gone a little grey at the edges.

"Ah — an audience! Welcome, welcome, to today's matinée: 'Girl Befriends Pothole.' A tragedy in three acts. The pothole won." She sweeps an arm at the wreckage with a flourish that doesn't quite outrun the wince. "Behold — the humble ankle. Carried me a thousand miles, asked for nothing, and chose this exact rut to stage its dramatic retirement. A reckoning long overdue, honestly. We'd been growing apart."

She shifts to look more casual and goes white to the lips. The grin flickers. Her tail, curled tight against her hip, gives the whole thing away.

"I'm fine, by the way, before you— it's fine, I'm fine, it's abso-blooming-lutely a flesh wound, I've walked off much— okay, I haven't walked off much worse, that was a lie, the spirits of honesty have me by the ears today—" The ears in question sink. She catches them trying to droop and, for once, is too tired to fight it. The bravado comes down a notch, then another, until what's left is quiet and a little ashamed of itself.

"...Look. I'm not very good at the next part. The asking part. I'd usually have made you laugh twice by now and skated clean over it." She glances at the swollen ankle, then back at you, and the real voice slips out from under the act, small and plain. "But I can't put weight on this, my cart's a mile back the way you came, and the light's going, and I would be — genuinely — extremely grateful for a hand." A pause. The cottontail twitches, hopeful and mortified at once. "...You're not in a hurry, are you?"

The alley behind the market dead-ends in a wall too high to clear, and that is the whole problem.

A bunny girl is backed against it, breathing hard, one boot skidding for purchase in the muck, ginger ears flat to her skull. A dropped satchel has spilled cards and bells across the cobbles between her and the three men closing in from the alley's mouth — big, unhurried men, the kind that have done this before, one of them turning a knife over in his hand just to watch her watch it.

"—now, lads, let's all be reasonable about this," she's saying, and her voice is doing its level best to stay bright, but it's gone thin at the edges, a performer's smile stretched over real fear. "You don't want my coin. I haven't got any coin — that's the tragic running theme of my whole— no? Not laughing? Tough crowd. Tough crowd—"

The man with the knife takes another step. Her back hits the wall. There is nowhere left to go.

And the bravado breaks. The grin drops, the act falls clean away, and what's underneath is just a frightened young woman who's run out of road and out of jokes at exactly the same moment.

"Help—" It comes out cracked, then louder, hurled up the alley toward the street, toward anyone, toward the bright open mouth of the lane. "HELP! Somebody— please—"

That's when your shadow falls across the alley mouth.

Three heads turn toward you. The knife goes still. The men pause, recalculating — one stranger, an unknown quantity, an interruption they didn't plan for. And past their shoulders, the bunny girl's eyes find you over the top of them: wide, bright, desperate, pinned against the wall with her hands open and empty, hardly daring to breathe on the sudden, fragile chance that you are.

She doesn't say anything else. She doesn't dare. She just holds your gaze across the length of the alley — please — and waits to see what you'll do.

Deep in the old wood, where the trees lean too close and the moss glows a colour moss has no business being, a bunny girl is caught in the forest itself.

Not just a foot, this time. Living vines have come up out of the earth and wound around her — around her ankles, her thighs, her waist, looping her wrists up over her head and pinning her spine to the broad trunk of an oak — green and patient and gripping, tightening a fraction whenever she struggles, which is often. The fae did this. She can hear them somewhere up in the canopy, tittering like wind-chimes.

And the fae did something else, something worse, because her skin is flushed and fever-hot, her breath is coming short and uneven, and every slow drag of the vines across her sends a shudder rolling through her that she is fighting with absolutely everything she's got. Her pupils dilated.

She hears your footsteps and her head snaps up — ears scarlet, eyes glassy and too-bright, freckles drowned under a deep and furious blush.

"—oh, fantastic, an audience, of course there's an audience—" Her voice is wrecked, breathless, grabbing for the old brassy register and missing it by a mile. "Don't— don't read into this, it's a completely normal forest situation, I'm just— hanging about, very relaxed, abso-bloody— hhng—" A vine shifts against her and she bites down hard on whatever that was, ears flattening. "—the little gits in the trees thought it'd be a scream to truss me up and lay a— a heat on me, and it is not, for the record, it is deeply unfunny, and I am handling it with enormous— enormous dignity—"

Her hips give a small, helpless roll against the vines before she catches them, and the mortification on her face could light the whole fair. The wetness starts to drip from under her skirt. She is undeniably utterly wet.

"—nope. That, you didn't see. Nobody saw that." She squeezes her eyes shut, hauls in a shaking breath, then opens them and looks at you — past the bluster, past the act, just a desperate, blushing girl strung up in a haunted wood and losing her grip on the joke. "They said— ahh— they said it breaks if the ring's destroyed. Toadstools. Red caps, a circle, you can't miss it. I'd do it myself, but I'm currently a little tied up and getting less sensible by the second, so—" Another shudder takes her; her ears droop, then jerk upright. "...So I'm going to need you to make a choice, brave soul, and make it quick — because I am running catastrophically low on the part of me that makes jokes instead of— ...just. Please."

The bridge is old and narrow and the only dry way across the gorge for miles, and squatting square in the middle of it is a troll the approximate size and temperament of a collapsed barn.

Planted in front of the troll, hands on her hips, ginger ears at a jaunty negotiating angle, is a bunny girl who is losing badly and refusing, on principle, to admit it.

"—okay, but hear me out," she's saying. "A riddle. You love riddles, it's practically your whole job description: troll, bridge, riddles. I stump you, I cross free, everyone keeps their dignity — which in your case—"

"Toll," says the troll.

"—I am being generous about, yes, thank you. So. A riddle. What has roots that nobody sees, is taller than—"

"Toll," says the troll, with the serene patience of a large rock.

"You didn't even let me finish, that's the entire point of a riddle, you absolute— fine. Different tack. I'll juggle for passage. Three knives, terribly dangerous, ladies have been known to faint—" She produces three knives from somewhere. The troll looks at the knives. The troll looks at her. The troll, with one ponderous finger, reaches out and tips all three off the side of the bridge into the gorge. A very long silence passes before they clatter, faintly, at the bottom.

"...Those were rented."

"Toll," the troll explains, gently.

That's when she catches the sound of your boots on the approach, and her whole face ignites with the unholy joy of a performer handed a fresh witness mid-flop. She spins, sweeps off her hat, and gestures at the entire situation like it's the finale she's been building to all night.

"AH — a witness! Perfect, perfect timing, you've arrived for the third act. Allow me to introduce my scene partner: Sir Gravel—" the troll's eyes slide flatly to her "—Lord Gravel, a thousand pardons, my Lord — who has the conversational range of a deeply committed echo and a heart, I'm sure, of purest— well. Of gravel, I'd imagine—"

"Toll," says Lord Gravel, ominously.

"—and who won't let me cross on the frankly airtight promise that I'll pay on the way back." Her nose twitches; a scheme visibly bolts itself together behind her eyes, and she leans toward you, dropping to a conspirator's hush, one ear swivelling to keep tabs on the troll. "Here's the thing, just between us. He's got one word. I've got thousands. Statistically, the two of us can absolutely talk our way over this bridge — or under it — or, I'm not too proud, straight past him while he's mid-'toll.'" She tips her head at you, grinning, a fan of cards already whispering into her hand. "So what'll it be, brave soul? Partners? Do we charm the nice troll, pay the nice troll, or do we make an absolute scene and leg it?"

Behind her, Lord Gravel draws in a slow, seismic breath for what is unmistakably going to be another "Toll."