Michael Williams - Weasel's Luck

Moreover, the ransacked guest was Sir Bayard Brightblade, one of the most promising Knights in northern Ansalon, whose swordsmanship and bravery (and good sense, evidently) had been rumor even as far to the north as here in our godforsaken, backwater estate in the middle of Coastlund (which was northwest of the Vingaard Mountains and southeast of nowhere). Bayard was quietly, politely stewing, no doubt vexed at the delay that kept him at our estate when he would much rather be on his way to Solamnia, where he could batter the heads of younger men in a contest for a girl he had yet to meet, if what I was hearing was true. That was probably why I was being punished, too.

For on that night that now seemed ages ago, the black-booted intruder out the door, Alfric face down in the closet, and Father and Bayard approaching rapidly up the stairs, I was forced to think quickly. I would draw too many questions if I stood unharmed at the scene of the struggle. Far better to blend into the scenery.

I lowered my head and ran into the oaken door of Alfric’s chambers.

As a result, mine was the first body the Knights found lying in the room, the first they revived. And of course I knew nothing, and only moaned pathetically while Father rushed to my eldest brother, pulled him by the ankles into the center of the room, and slapped him awake.

It was my first real look at Sir Bayard Brightblade. And he passed muster.

Here was a man a full head taller than my father, and a good deal thinner; darker; moustached; thirty at the youngest but not forty yet; long hair, shoulder-length, in the Solamnic style of that time; a calm upon his countenance—his face like a handsome but expressionless mask, as though it were carved on a monument in an old landscape where there was nothing but rock and sun.

Bayard regarded me only briefly, then looked meaningfully at my father, who scolded me bluntly, groggily.

“Never mind the fanfare, Galen. Tell us what happened.”

Alfric was still stirring below us. He groaned, and Father glanced anxiously his way. I began the story rapidly.

The two Knights heard the same story as had my hapless brother—of the flitting, shadowy shape outside the window, of my concern for our guest. That in my concern for Sir Bayard’s belongings I had tried the door of the guest chambers, finding it locked, and enlisted my brother’s help as he passed by.

“So it was all with the best of intentions, Sir Bayard, that my brother and I came into this room. In our concern, perhaps we did not notice the felon in question as he sneaked up behind us from a dark notch in the hallway, or . . .” and I paused meaningfully, hoping to cast a fly into Alfric’s soup, “. . .or perhaps he was already hiding in your room, allowed in there by a previous oversight.”

I paused, let that settle, and continued. “Whatever way, I’m not sure. But I turned for a moment at a noise in the hallway, then back to see a black-hooded form looming over my fallen brother. Whoever it was moved quickly. He was on me before I could gather myself, before I could see anything clearly.

“The next thing I know is that you’re waking me and I’m lying here by the doorway and Alfric face first in the wardrobe and . . . I’m feeling a little faint now. Father.”

I lay back in mock exhaustion. Alfric grunted on the floor beside me.

“I do hope,” I sighed, “that my dear Brother is intact.”

Intact enough to wait another decade for his squire’s spurs.

Within the next several days, things changed around the moat house—things that I noticed from the first but the others dismissed as bad climate brought about by a sudden switch in the weather. From the moment the birds hushed their singing on the night of the banquet, there remained a certain absence in the air: where you might expect the song of the nightingale, the quarrel of jays, the flapping and gurgling of pigeons, there was now only silence, and eventually it occurred to me that even though it was still high summer the birds had gone, perhaps to a warmer climate to await the passing of winter.

Because of the time of year, we expected summer—light and heat, and the smothering damp rising from the notorious swamps scarcely a mile from our walls—but the weather was acting otherwise. In the morning we would wake to the stiffness of frost on the grounds and the trees shedding leaves prematurely. We had trouble keeping the fires lit, much less the candles, as though all light and heat were being siphoned away. Gileandos had studied with gnomes. He almost always ignored the obvious, preferring to notice something subtle, hidden in a situation, from which he almost always drew the wrong conclusion. When he noticed the departure of birds, the sudden drop in temperature around the moat house, he blamed events on “the precipitous action of sunspots upon marsh vapors.”

I recall him now, staring absentmindedly through his telescope directly into the face of the sun, so that when he turned from his stargazing he no doubt saw sunspots that were never there in the first place. He was at least sixty years old, but had no doubt been stooped and graying for years, all jewelry and combed beard and slick pomades and colognes—a dandy gone nightmarishly wrong in his declining years. But to this appearance he was adding a peculiarly haunted look of late, as the gallons of gin caught up to him. He taught us poetry and history. Mathematics, too, until the day Alfric fainted from exhaustion in class. He also taught heraldry and rhetoric and Solamnic lore—a jack of all trades he was, lukewarm in all disciplines and running scared of sources of heat and light.

Which is why, as usual, I paid his explanation no mind, preoccupied as he was with conjecture and rumor and superstition. Instead, I cast the Calantina, the red dice from Estwilde, and received four times running the five and the ten, steam on earth, the Sign of the Viper. I consulted the books in Gileandos’s library, read all the commentaries on the augury, but afterwards I knew no more of the mystery than I had before. In the meantime everyone was worked up about the events of the banquet night. Bayard, armed only with borrowed leather jerkin, shield, and sword, was ready to set out in pursuit of the thief, if only he could locate him. He was upset at the delays to his tournament plans, but being by nature a lenient sort, he still intended to take his squire with him, even though Alfric had been caught nodding while the armor changed hands. Father, on the other hand, brooded over Alfric’s part in the theft.

Father was not a lenient sort.

“Bayard, is the penalty for armorial neglect still death by hanging, or has the Order grown soft in the years since my retirement?”

I remember this word for word, set to memory as I stifled a cough from the ash and old smoke. You see, there were secret passages in the moat house, passages Father had either forgotten or never knew about in the first place, that Brithelm was too spiritual and Alfric too stupid to discover. They were there, nonetheless, perfect for a boy accustomed to escapes, to dodging responsibility and punishment. I was especially fond of the entrance to the great hall concealed handily in the back of the fireplace, from where I listened to Father and Bayard.

“Not soft, Sir Andrew, as much as understanding that squires or would-be squires can make mistakes.” I could see him lean forward in his chair, hear the leather jerkin creak and crackle as he paused for emphasis. The armor was too short for him and would have made him look comical were it not for those gray eyes and impassive face that silenced all comedy. “No,” he continued, “nowadays the Order tends toward leniency, nor am I all so sure that is wrong.”

So it was not to be hanging. Very well. There were always accidents upon the road—bandits, hostile centaurs, even the peasants themselves, who for generations had not been altogether fond of the Order—something to do with the Cataclysm, Gileandos said, though the Cataclysm happened almost two hundred years ago.