Fifty

Lange had also received some rough treatment from the Cannibals. They had pretty thoroughly worked him over with some blunt instruments, but he was in relatively good spirits despite that. Bird released him of his bonds and gave him a once over.
“Lange, are you alright?” She asked, switching fluidly back to her G accent.
“Liberty! Holy shit man, I thought I was a goner,” he answered with surprise, “Yeah, I’m alright. I’ve had worse, but I definitely thought they were going to kill me.”
“Good, can you walk?” she asked.
“Yeah, I should be good. Can we go home now?”
“Yeah, man,” Bird said as tears welled up in her eyes. They had changed back to normal, and showed no evidence of being black soulless voids.
Lang got up and stretched a bit, as being hogtied was physically draining and unbelievably uncomfortable. He spent a couple of minutes searching around the encampment for something.
“What are you looking for?’ Bird finally asked.
“Huh? Oh, right. Roxy wanted me to bring her some horn back from the Shepherds. I think she is going to make stiffer boots for this winter,” after a couple of more minutes of poking around, he found the horn he was looking for, ”Hell, yeah,” he said excitedly when he found it.
They made their way out of the encampment and started the long journey home. Lange had always been pretty chatty, but ever since his head injury, he had trouble reading social cues. He ended up talking Bird’s ear off the entire walk home.
“So, I was sent down to the Shepherds to negotiate a better deal on wool and mutton and the like. They have been kind of leaning on us pretty hard lately, and Solomon thought that we might be starting to get screwed. It all went pretty well, and I got us a better deal, but they have been getting a real hard time from the Cannibals this season. I was on my way back home, and they snatched me right up,” he had started bringing Bird up to speed about things. She was tired, but extremely happy to see him alive, so she let him ramble on for a while.
“Anyway, so there I was fixin’ to be dinner, and you’ll never guess what happened?” He continued.
“They beat the shit out of you?” Bird quipped.
“Well, yeah. but they started asking me a bunch of stuff about the village,” he said conspiratorially.
“That’s no huge surprise,” she observed.
“Well, the weird thing is that they started asking me about you. Or at least some lady with a sword,” he stated.
“Me? What? How would they know that?” She asked.
“I don’t know if you know this, but you’re kind of a big deal around here. They said they heard a rumor about something going down in Kingston. Some dude came walking into town and cut another guy clean in half like he wasn’t there. Then I think you got spotted somewhere in the woods carrying a nice shiny sword and they put two and two together,” he went on.
“That’s not good news,” she said darkly.
“Don’t worry though. I didn’t tell them shit about you. I played dumb. It’s pretty easy, because, well, you know,” he said in resignation.
“I appreciate that, Lange,” she said.
“I’m not that dumb though. Stuff just takes me longer, and I get distracted,” he continued, “Anyway, how’d you kill all of those Cannibals? There were like forty or fifty of them.”
“The sword,” she lied, “it’s very sharp.”
“That’s still pretty impressive, those guys were brutal. What happened to the bodies? There was nobody there?” Lange pointed out inconveniently.
“The survivors took them when they ran away. Probably to eat them,” it was a plausible lie, and Lange eventually accepted it as fact.
Lange talked her ear off the whole way back to the village. She was brought up to speed on his thoughts about ski shape, the current state of waterproof fabric, what Roxy was going to do with the horn she requested, and other various unconnected topics. Bird was relieved that he was alright, but she had tuned out after a couple of hours. By the time they made it back to the village, it was well into mid morning.