The Disposable

by Katherine Vick

Fodder met her playful gaze with a mock frown. “Now that’s just silly.”

  “I must say, that was an absolutely fascinating discussion.”

  Fodder jumped in spite of himself as Prince Dullard, his nose red and sore, wandered back into the circle of firelight grasping the princess’s cleaned plate.

  “I hope you don’t think I was rude for eavesdropping,” he added hurriedly at the surprised looks on their faces. “But I could hear you, and it was such an interesting idea you’ve both come up with…” He beamed at Fodder. “I have to say, the idea of trying to deconstruct the ways and means of The Narrative is one that intrigues me. But since I’ve never participated in it as anything other than a character, I don’t feel yet as though I’m ready to join in your debate. But when I have had that experience, perhaps I could discuss these ideas with you?” He beamed hopefully. “I so rarely get the chance for a good, academic conversation, especially on such a fundamental subject.…”

  “Ummm…” Fodder didn’t consider himself to be up to much in the way of academic discussion, but to say no to that face would have been like stealing sweetmeats from a starving child. “Well, yeah. If you want,” he managed.

  “Thank you!” Dullard glanced around, suddenly curious. “Where’s Shoulders?”

  Flirt gestured towards the river. “Doing the washing up.”

  Dullard glanced guiltily at the plate in his hand. “I’d better go and give him a hand then. Back soon!”

  Fodder watched Dullard lope off. He allowed himself a moment to rummage through his mind once more, to see if he could grasp the trailing edges of the elusive idea, but it had slunk away into the shadows.

  But he knew that the thought had been important. And if it mattered, he could only hope he’d have better luck in trapping it.

  * * *

  Delicious the stew might have been, but it was clinging to the edges of the plates like innards up an oak tree. With a mighty huff, Shoulders threw a smidgen more frustrated force into the task, glaring down at the dark waters swirling sluggishly before him. The muddy bank beneath his feet shifted slightly as he adjusted his crouch. Swearing fluently, he fumbled the plates for a moment before regaining his balance with the aid of some sharp river reed. His hand stung at the contact, he could feel damp mud coating his backside, and it’d be the perfect end to a perfect few days if he went headfirst into the river. And would he get an ounce of sympathy from those so-called friends of his?

  Would he bollocks.

  Typical, wasn’t it? Always the way. If there was a situation to come out worst from, a matter of luck to win or lose, it would home in on him like a bee to nectar! Stuck between a probably mad mate and a dungeon cell for a lifetime and why? Because he’d been standing in the wrong place at the wrong time! Because Fodder, bloody Fodder, had grabbed his arm and hauled him off into his grand cause without so much as asking! He’d lost a life he’d had no real objection to, aside from Clank’s headhunting, and exchanged it for one in which he’d been chased, kicked by an obnoxious brat of a princess, thrown into rivers, dragged through sewers, and now, now he had to do the sodding washing up!

  The scrubbing intensified as Shoulders’s brows knotted fiercely. He hadn’t asked for this! He hadn’t had a say! He’d been tarred with Fodder’s brush, and now he had no choice but to stagger along in the wake of his daft, pointless scheme because it was the only chance he had to come out of this mess with a future! What had he done to deserve this? Why did the weird knotty flowery bits always seem to land down for him?

  Oh and as for Flirt… Bloody hell! Gone was the cheery Barmaid who’d provided many an understanding pint and the woman who’d taken her place was a terror! Like back at the fire, for goodness’ sake! What had she been playing at back there? Handed a mystical object of great import, most people would have secreted it away in some safe place and clung to it fiercely and with the cautious respect it deserved. But oh no, not Flirt! No, she decided to use it to toss for the washing up! Toss for it! Oh it was fine for her to sit there all breezy and confident, but had she known it wouldn’t blow them all to kingdom come? No! Had she gone ahead and thrown it anyway without the slightest consideration for any of them? Of course she had! There had been a glint in her eye ever since they’d snuck out of the Archetypal Inn that night, and it was a glint that Shoulders was not loath to admit he didn’t like one bloody bit.

  Because he was starting to wonder if she hadn’t gone and bloody done it on purpose. She liked her fights! She liked it when things got dangerous! Was that what this was for her? Some big thrill-seeking, danger-teasing adventure? It wasn’t as though she couldn’t have found some other, less risky, more respectful way to pick a washing-up-doer, was it? But no, she’d dived straight in with the mystical Ring of Anthiphon and in spite of what she’d said, she hadn’t known really what was going to happen, and he’d bet that was exactly why she’d done it. Maybe I’ll blow up, she’d be thinking, and maybe I’ll take my friends with me, how exciting will that be? No finding some other way to choose, oh no, let’s find the most unpredictable, unconventional thing we have and chuck it! It was probably a game to her, an addiction to unnecessary risk. And for Shoulders, who was addicted to necessary safety, it was an appalling prospect.

  What a week he was having! What a turn for his life to take! His oldest friend had gone doolally and decided to take him down for the ride. The cheery Barmaid at his local had turned into a thrill-seeking nutter. He’d been saddled with dragging around the most horrific, banshee-like creature ever to don blonde curls and velvet. And as for that relentlessly, overbearingly cheerful excuse for a prince they’d got lumbered with…

  “Goodness me! If you scrub that plate much harder, you’ll wear right through it!”

  At the sudden voice, Shoulders started violently, his tentative, muddy footing skidding as he jerked with shock. It was only the hurried, securing grab of a hand against his arm that prevented the anticipated undignified tumble into the dark waters below.

  “Bloody hell!” Furiously, Shoulders jerked his head around to find Prince Dullard watching him with the pursed-lipped, oddly nervous stare that the Disposable personally found so infuriating. It was like staring at a weirdly deformed rabbit.

  “What are you doing sneaking up on a man like that?” he snapped angrily, shaking his arm free of Dullard’s rescuing grasp. “I almost went in the river!”

  “Oh gosh, I am sorry.” There it was; even in the shadows of the dark riverbank, Shoulders knew that rabbit expression was glowing away. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I thought you would have heard me coming.”

  “Well, I didn’t.” Shoulders gave a lusty sigh. “What are you doing here anyway? I thought you’d still be feeding Princess Chomp pieces of your nose.”

  Dullard’s prominent features underwent several contortions, but apparently he chose not to rise to the matter. “I’ve finished feeding her, as it happens. I was just bringing her plate down to—”

  “Oh, fine!” Shoulders interrupted harshly as he chucked the mostly clean wooden plates back up to a grassier part of the bank. They landed with a noisy clatter. “Brought me more work, have you? Slaving after Royalty, so much for Fodder’s grand revolution! All right, hand the bloody thing over and piss off, will you?”

  There was a moment of silence. Dullard’s lanky outline was a still silhouette in the pale moonlight.

  “Actually,” he ventured quietly, “I was just going to do it myself. If you don’t mind.”

  Shoulders could feel the wind sucking out of his sails. He gritted his teeth. Oh, that was just lovely, wasn’t it? Now the Royal pillock was making him feel bad!

  And hang on…

  “If I don’t mind?” he repeated acerbically. “Why would I mind you doing your own dirty work? What, you think we common folk worship the chance to bow and scrape and do your work for you?”

  “No.” There it was again, bloody rabbit face! And there was that soft, tentative rabbit tone that went with it! And this man called himself
Royalty? “I just didn’t want to get in your way.”

  “Well, you’re not.” Shoulders swept his arm towards the river in an expansive gesture. “All yours.”

  But Dullard hadn’t moved. His expression hadn’t changed. In fact, his eyes seemed to be searching the shadow-riddled contours of Shoulders’s face.

  “Are you quite all right?” he ventured gently. “I don’t mean to impose, especially on such a short acquaintance, but…you do seem to be awfully out of sorts. Most of the time, as it happens, and…well, I thought perhaps if there was something wrong…”

  Shoulders could feel his eyes narrowing. Pity. He could smell it on the breeze. There was going to be pity.

  “My sorts are all in and accounted for, thank you,” he retorted sharply. “If they were out and about, you’d know about it.”

  “I rather feel like I do.” Dullard winced under the weight of Shoulders’s glare but, annoyingly, he didn’t back down. “I just thought there must be something in particular on your mind. After all, here we are in the midst of this great endeavour and—”

  “Great endeavour?” The two coldly thrust-out words killed the rest of Dullard’s sentence dead. “Great endeavour?”

  Dullard bit his lip. “Well, isn’t it?”

  Shoulders shook his head in disbelief. Of all the witless, naïve…

  “Let me see,” he exclaimed in mock thoughtfulness. “I’ve been dragged away from my home by my mad mate and a psychotic Barmaid. I’ve been chased, drowned, chucked in several rivers, thrown off castles, walked through a sewer, and climbed up a toilet. I’ve had to escort the brat from hell, and there’s a better-than-reasonable chance I’m going to end up spending the rest of my life in a dungeon! You call it a great endeavour, mate! I call it a bloody disaster!”

  Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit… “But the possibilities! The improvement we could make, to our lives and everyone’s…” Dullard broke off as a manic chuckle escaped Shoulders’s lips.

  “I do not get you,” Shoulders exclaimed flatly. “I really don’t. You had such a cushy number going up at that Palace. You had good food, good clothes, a good bed, regular character work In Narrative—and you’ve chucked it away for root stew and being bitten on the nose. And you’re so bloody cheerful about it!”

  The prince gave a slight smile. “Well, I do like to look on the bright side.”

  Shoulders snorted. “What bright side? We’re being pursued by the all-powerful master of our land! We’ve lost everything we had for an unlikely shot at a future that probably won’t be much better anyway! How can anyone find a bright side when there’s so much to be down about?”

  For a moment, Dullard’s slender silhouette made no movement. And then slowly, gently, he turned and crouched down by the dark water, swilling the plate he had brought in the cold water. Shoulders was irritated to note just how much more easily the stew residue seemed to come away from it for him.

  “We have the chance to make a difference.” When it came, the prince’s voice was soft. “A chance to use our own brains and skills for our own benefit and that of others. A chance to ask questions that no one has ever asked before. We have the chance to do what no one has ever done before.” He glanced up at Shoulders, his face half-hidden in shadow, half-washed by pale moonlight. His smile gleamed. “How can anyone find a downside when there’s so much to be bright about?”

  Shoulders stared at Dullard. Something uncomfortable prickled at the back of his mind, that irritating little corner that whispered sometimes that maybe he was protesting a bit too much and might be happier if he just went along with Fodder’s madness. No more ditches, no more head-chopping, no more Clank…

  Or more likely, no more freedom.

  It was a stupid corner. He didn’t like it and wasn’t having it. Firmly, he told it to sod off.

  He just wished he could be sure it was listening.

  “I don’t get your attitude,” he repeated, though the lack of conviction in his own voice was annoying. “I don’t get anyone who enjoys being stupid.”

  Dullard rose, shaking his plate dry carefully as he moved with an oddly effortless lope back up the muddy bank. “I don’t get yours either,” he replied with a shrug. “I’m afraid we shall just have to agree to disagree.” He nodded respectfully in Shoulders’s direction. And then, he turned and headed back towards the nearby glow of the camp.

  Shoulders stared after him for a moment.

  What a bloody pillock.

  He turned to collect his plates and his boot came down firmly on a patch of mud. Skidding and with arms flailing, his inevitable splash followed moments later.

  * * *

  Fodder had to admit, if there was one thing he admired about his new friend Dullard, it was his perseverance. He’d never seen anything quite like it.

  There he sat in the bow of their liberated boat, his clothes still bearing the faint stains of his numerous, fractious attempts to feed the princess, the bite marks on his hand and nose fading but visible—and yet he was still smiling, still calm, still reasonable to the point of infuriation as he patiently continued to try and win Pleasance around. As far as Fodder was concerned, it was a cause so lost as to be laughable, but Dullard seemed absolutely determined that before they reached the coastal town of Salty Port and attempted to hire a seaworthy ship for the purposes of sailing off of the Taskmaster’s map, he would persuade the most self-obsessed, irritating, stuck-up brat Fodder had ever met that everyone in the world deserved an equal chance. Against the protests of the others, he’d even removed her gag so that she could argue back. If Dullard actually succeeded in doing anything but making her bellow high-handed insults, the flocks of flying pigs would probably be circling for days.

  “How do you even have the gall to talk this way? You are a Royal by blood, and you should know how absurd this is! You can’t have some common, ache-riddled peasant leading a story! It would be an absurdity!”

  “But why? In most Quests, the Hero and even occasionally the Heroine are of humble origin.”

  “Oh, origin! Origin is nothing! It’s blood, and blood will out! They may start as peasants but they end as Kings for they have the blood of Kings, however well-diluted! That isn’t something some Ordinary layabout can conjure! Whoever heard of a genuine peasant being anything but background noise?”

  “But that’s the point, you see. We haven’t heard of it because it’s never been tried. And if it’s never been tried, how can we possibly know if it would work out or not?”

  “Of course it wouldn’t work! They don’t have the breeding! And anyway, who would want to hear about a Quest about some commonplace Ordinary people? A Quest is about aspiration, about losing yourself in the lives of people that everyone would secretly like to be! Who could ever want to live in some smelly village shovelling dung? Who would want to be plain-faced and homely? Who would want to be anything but me?”

  “I wouldn’t.” Shoulders intervened firmly from his position on the left-hand oar. “Too much ruddy screaming.”

  “You haven’t got the figure for it either,” Flirt offered with a grin from the oar on the right. “But I wouldn’t want to any more than you. The dress isn’t my colour, is it? Not to mention if I can’t swing a sword, I’m not playing.”

  “Precisely.” Pleasance’s voice swung shut like a steel trap. “Aspiration. Everyone wants to be us.”

  Dullard’s smile was gentle. “Then why not let them?”

  Pleasance’s expression was one of affronted confusion. “I beg your pardon?”

  The prince shrugged slightly. “I’m not saying that Heroes shouldn’t be noble and save the world. But why are they always from the same families? In terms of Quest plots, The Narrative can continue much as it chooses, if it comes to it. All we want is for everyone to have an equal chance to shine.”

  “But why should they?” Pleasance snapped back. “They have their place. They were born to it, bred for it, raised to it, just as we were bred to ours! They should be happy to be what they are! Why
should they want anything else?”

  Dullard pursed his lips, his expression pleasantly reasonable. “Aspiration. Everyone wants to be you.”

  Pleasance’s eyes could have flayed a man alive. But Dullard didn’t even flinch. His sincere smile never wavered. He was a gentle, friendly soul, but Fodder was learning quickly that that didn’t mean he couldn’t use his niceness like a ballistic trebuchet loaded with red-hot boulders when the situation called for it.

  In spite of the fiery gaze he was subject to, Dullard ploughed bravely on. “It’s a matter of opportunity, really. It’s knowing that there’s a choice. People will be much happier to be hacked to pieces or totter around in the background if they know that they’ll have the chance to do the hacking in the foreground next time around. It’s spreading the opportunities more widely. It’s giving everyone the chance to be a Principal.”

  Pleasance growled. “But they’re Ordinary. They don’t have the looks! The talents! The glamour!”

  “They may have the talents. Who knows? Why, as you must have seen last night, Flirt here is a fine, natural swordswoman; but because she was born into an Ordinary family, the talent she has is wasted on serving drinks in a country inn.” Flirt glanced up and grinned at the compliment. After his bout with Pleasance over supper the night before, Dullard had taken the time to show Flirt a few of the fencing rules he’d picked up from old Gallant. As a result, Flirt’s natural proficiency had already developed an alarmingly dangerous edge.

  Fodder, however, had also noted the look of outright shock on Princess Pleasance’s face as Dullard had demonstrated a particularly complicated parry. It seemed his gift for swordsmanship had come as much of a surprise to her as it had done to Shoulders back at the Palace, and she had spent most of the rest of that evening watching him with bewildered incredulity. In that respect at least, Dullard had certainly opened her eyes.

  At this particular moment, however, Pleasance’s eyes were narrowed as her lips twisted into an unladylike sneer. “Perhaps by freak chance, she’s picked up some basic ability,” the princess drawled, her nose so far in the air that Fodder was privately surprised that no one had pulled out a pickaxe and attempted to scale its north face. “But what you seem to be forgetting is the matter of breeding. Royalty is bred to be Royal. We have the looks and the talent for it, and we mix very carefully to insure that talent is not diluted.” The superior look that she cast at Dullard implied that she considered his unusual origins to be a considerable watering down. The mild look that Dullard returned with was a very quiet and reasonable assertion that he didn’t care.