Rivyé

Nobody should ever grow up in a tavern, but Rivyé did, and she would forever be a boisterous and rowdy storyteller because of it. She also turned out to be a wonderful flute player and not half bad on the guitar, so the salty sailors of The Queen’s Trenchcoat decided that Rivyé was alright after all and just tried not to tell them anything they didn’t want the whole tavern to know. The prevailing gossip claimed that Rivyé had been found washed ashore on the long lost door of the Queen’s Trencoat, which had been ripped off its hinges and tossed into the sea by Bones Longarm in the Forty Ales Brawl. Others pointed out that The Trenchcoat still didn’t have any door to speak of, so this was an unlikely possibility. Whatever the case truly was, whenever Rivyé asked the old pirates where she’d really come from, she always got a different answer, and this is how she learned to lie. 

Quite naturally, Rivyé fell into the habit of spinning tall tales whenever a new face at the tavern asked how a six year old had come to be bartending, and soon sailors would pack the tavern, jostling to listen in to her ever-shifting accounts. By the age of twelve she could begin a story in the dying light of an afternoon and finish it just as the first rays of morning prodded curiously at The Trenchcoat’s grimy windows, holding the rapt focus of every pirate in a ten mile radius. It was said that Blackbeard himself could have stormed into the tavern while Rivyé was telling a story, and no one would’ve even turned around to offer him a seat. 

Though Rivyé had never ventured beyond the short porch of The Trenchcoat, she spoke in a booming voice about the spectral monsters that haunted the deep trenches, and the Great Caves that connected the realms of past and future. Slowly but surely, her stories began to creep out of The Trenchcoat and into Odd itself, until Rivyé seemed to be conjuring up islands and pirates out of thin air. It became a common occurrence for Rivyé to recant the bone-shivering tale of a daring adventurer, only for that very same adventurer to stride into the tavern not an hour later, outfitted in the same mollusk-hide boots that Rivyé had described in odorific detail. Nobody was quite sure what strange magic she had conjured up in her stories, but everyone agreed that Rivyé had gotten a hold of the future, and was telling it for the listening pleasure of The Trenchcoat’s scraggly clientele. 

Word passed quickly to the far reaches of Odd of the tavern kid who could bring stories into the world, and it wasn’t long before a very unsavory pair of ears pricked up at the mention of Rivyé and The Queen’s Trenchcoat. Soon, a horrid ship cut blithely across the horizon. 

Even in as various and far-flung a place as Odd, there were not many people quite like the Admiral, and this is precisely because he was not from Odd at all. He wore a cloak of a deep dark gray over a clean white uniform, and his elegant mustache curved in disgust as he stood at the entryway to The Trenchcoat. His boots squelched ominously as he strode across the filthy floor of the tavern, turning what had once been pristine white hide into a motley mosaic of old food and various kinds of seaweed. The Admiral was doubly angry on that day, first because he was always angry and second because there was no door to break down in a fit of rage. He contented himself to punch the nearest drunkard with a gray-gloved hand, who let out a bemused “whumph” noise not unlike an elephant seal deflating. Just as he entered, Rivyé had been telling the story of the most putrid man to ever plague the peaceful quays of the Sleeping Sea, but her usually robust arsenal of adjectives had fallen short. All she could repeat, again and again, was that he was very clean.

The Admiral was clean, but he was also a bastard, and he scooped Rivyé up in a small barrel and carried her out of The Trenchcoat before the sluggish old pirates could lift their bushy eyebrows in surprise. It was not long before he was once again poised at the helm of this magnificent boat, slicing through the waves with that strange little barrel by his feet. After a time spent contemplating what really was a very beautiful sunset, he glanced down at the barrel, and asked imperiously, “Well?”

“Well what??” Retorted the barrel, “You kidnapped me so I should think you’d be the one explaining what the hell is going on?!” This reasonable observation was followed by a string of curses so explicit that they slightly singed the edge of the Admiral’s mustache, but he took no notice.  

“I want you to tell me a story.” He said as easily as if this was the most obvious request in the world, though of course they both knew that people are rarely kidnapped just to tell a story. “But” And here he interrupted what might otherwise have been a very short and very gruesome tale of his own demise, “I’d like it to go like this”. From the inside of his flowing cloak, the Admiral produced a piece of parchment longer than a swordfish’s snout. In bright red lettering at the very top of the sheet it said, “How the Admiral became King”. He tossed the paper into the barrel, waited a reasonable second, then unholstered the small pistol kept close to his heart and pointed it down at Rivyé. “Like Fish.” He said, in a voice so small she could hear the words scraping off his teeth. 

She shuddered, glanced at his horrid little list, and started to cough out the beginnings of a story. The problem was, Rivyé had never really seen the future. She knew it existed, in the way that she knew the tavern would smell just as bad tomorrow as it had today and the sailors would cry just as loudly to hear the story of the Soggy Fishcatcher, but she’d never actually bothered to try to change it. When pirates started showing up at The Trenchcoat with stories of Blackbird’s Cove or Skunk’s Peak just exactly as she had described them she reveled in the cheers of her listeners and marveled in the coincidence of it all, but never for a moment did Rivyé believe that she was anything more than a very very good bullshitter. And the truth was that she wasn’t. But just then, stuck in the bottom of a barrel with a list of non-so constructive feedback and a pistol staring soullessly into her temple, Rivyé wished what she said could be true, just this once. Here is what she said. 

Once, on a dreary ocean under a placid cloud, a great Admiral was headed home. He had gone on a great many adventures, and his hold was full of a great many wonders unlike anything the world had seen before or has seen since, but these are a story for another day. There was one treasure that the Admiral prized above all the rest, and he kept it close to him at all times for he knew that it was the key to becoming King. It was a small barrel, not so unlike this one, and it contained a wine so old that it had spoken personally with the dinosaurs and shared gossip with the meteors that passed by in the time before memory. Nobody was quite sure where it had come from, or why nobody had drunk it yet, but Everyone knew that the Admiral had it, and they all wanted it. If only he could return the wine home and take a sip of it to adopt the eloquence of its speech, the Admiral was certain that everyone would understand why he really ought to be King. He was almost salivating at the idea of the airtight argument he would espouse and the nods of quiet and reasonable agreement that he would receive from the Council of Sleep, when a terribly loud noise punctured a terribly big hole in his plans.

***

Of course, just as the second “terribly” fell from Rivyé’s quaking lips, it happened. The Admiral had been so enjoying her story that he had nearly forgotten where he was, and he landed unceremoniously on his bottom, cape splayed in all directions and uniform torn in at least three places. Rivyé’s barrel went rolling like a mad armadillo, and she could hardly poke her head out to watch as a wave of all the pirates who have ever listened to her stories at The Trenchcoat come roaring over the sides of the ship in a torrent of cutlasses and bared teeth. Moving with a spryness the old seafarers hadn’t had in thirty years, they made quick work of the Admiral’s crew, barely bothering with the man himself, and sent up a howl as they scoured the deck for the barrel. Finally, someone fished the barrel out from where it had come to rest under a cannon, and everyone gathered round silently to peer inside at its contents.

Rivyé emerged from the barrel bashfully, painfully aware that she was only a girl and not actually the oldest and wisest wine to ever exist. She expected to be met with jeers and threats, for after all in her time at the Trenchcoat she had learned that there was nothing so dear to an old pirate as their drink. Instead, Rivyé left the barrel to a thicket of hugs and cries of joy from all present. After all, it was not the barrel that the pirates wanted, but the stories it contained that had roused their broken grey hearts.