Weasel's Luck

by Michael Williams

  For this was the seat of a great family, one who fought side by side with Vinas Solamnus. Who could trace their ancestry back a millennium. And the man who walked in front of me, holding a candle, was the heir to all this—not only the wealth, mind you, but the history and the heroism and the nobility. It was enough to impress the hardest head in Solamnia.

  Sir Robert guided me past several paintings—ancient oils of his di Caela ancestors. I looked out of the corner of my eye for a portrait that might be Benedict’s. The eyes of one portrait—that of a handsome old man with a livid scar on his left cheek—seemed to follow me as I moved down the hall. I thought of the childhood stories of haunted galleries, of things behind the walls who watched passers-by through holes in the portraits.

  With my eyes on the painting, my thoughts on the likelihood of spooks in the woodwork, I didn’t notice that Sir Robert had stopped until I walked into him.

  “A Pathwarden, you say?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Son of Sir Andrew Pathwarden?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But I had been told …”

  “Sir?”

  “… that Sir Andrew has but two sons,” Sir Robert mused, tilting his head and, taking me by the shoulder, moving me beneath a sconce on the wall—no doubt so he could get a better look.

  “I am often forgotten when sons are tallied at our moat house,” I replied quickly, desperately, staring wide-eyed at the sconce above me, filling my eyes with the tear-jerking heat and smoke of the torch.

  For some reason, my throat burned without aid of torch or smoke. And easily I burst into false sobs after the fire had stirred up the tears.

  “My brothers keep me in the mews, Sir Robert. With the hunting birds!” I sniffed.

  His grip on my shoulder softened.

  “If that’s so, they’ll answer for it soon, lad,” he declared—a puzzling statement, to be sure.

  I looked at him curiously. He turned away, addressed me awkwardly.

  “Now compose yourself, Galen. You’re too big for tears.”

  As we passed beneath an arch into another room and approached a wide staircase, my eyes followed up the steps to a landing surrounded by a marble railing and statues of hawks and of unicorns. Intricate metal cuckoos perched upon swings that hung from the ceiling of the keep, their moorings lost in darkness and in height.

  Suddenly a cuckoo whistled behind us. I turned to the source of the sound.

  And saw a vision there on the landing, winding a metal bird.

  Actually, it was a girl about my age, dressed in a simple white gown that a girl of almost any station—from princess to servant—might wear in comfort. It was obvious, however, that this one was unaccustomed to following orders of any kind. She walked the landing as if she owned it.

  She had blond hair and fair skin, but even from where I stood I could tell that her eyes were dark, her cheekbones high like those of a Plainswoman. It made me wonder about her ancestry from the first, and I instantly believed she had gotten the best from both sides of her family.

  The girl paid little attention to us, intent on fixing one of the cuckoos whose cuckoo had, evidently, ceased to function. With some tiny, glittering instrument, she inspected the head of the toy and made adjustments too small for me to see at the distance from which I stood.

  “Tell the servants to set another place at the dinner table, my dear,” Sir Robert called up to the girl on the landing. “We have a guest.”

  “You tell them,” the girl called down, attention still fixed on her business. “You’re heading in that direction.”

  Sir Robert reddened for a moment, clenching his fists. Then he laughed, shook his head, and continued walking. I doubled my steps, walked alongside him.

  “Your wife, sire?”

  “My obedient daughter, Enid di Caela,” Sir Robert chuckled, as we walked up a small flight of stairs toward another mahogany doorway.

  Enid? The pastry-baking, hefty Enid of my imaginings? Bayard had good reason to be downcast!

  “Enid di Caela,” Sir Robert repeated, this time more quietly, less merrily. “Soon to be Enid Androctus.

  “Ah, and here is one of your brothers!”

  It took a moment for Sir Robert’s last statement to sink in. I was still wrestling with the idea that the Enid of fact far surpassed the Enid of my imaginings, still entangled in the blond hair, drowned in the dark eyes, as the poets might say. But when Alfric appeared from an archway ahead of us, it was all I could do to keep from turning and taking flight through the paneled and cuckooing hallways.

  CHAPTER 13

  My brother was disturbingly untroubled, almost serene, when he met me in the long corridor of Castle di Caela, though I expect it puzzled Sir Robert that two long-lost brothers did not rush into a warm, fraternal embrace.

  While Sir Robert escorted us back to our assigned quarters, I began to entertain the hope that something on the road had transformed my brother, had left him a wiser and more forgiving man than when I had left him waist-deep in ’Warden Swamp. As Alfric kept conversation polite, even friendly, I decided there could be worse things than sharing his rooms for the evening.

  When he sprang upon me as the door closed, fully intent on throttling me, it was all I could do to utter feeble protest.

  “Please, Brother! P-please! You’re killing me!”

  This loud enough, I hoped devoutly, to call Sir Robert back. But no footsteps returned to the door. And all the while Alfric’s death grip tightened.

  “This is it, little brother. This time all the bluster and promises and crying wolf is over on account of I am going to kill you. Going to strangle you dead for leaving me back there mired in ’Warden Swamp.”

  “But what will Sir Robert s—” My voice was pinched into hisses and whistles.

  Alfric’s grip slackened.

  “You’re right, Weasel. If I was to do you in it could cause great harm to my prospects here.

  “Even though you are not the favorite folks around here at the moment—you and your high and mighty Sir Bayard Brightblade, that is—it would not do me to fall into something as unSolamnic as killing a brother, now would it? Specially since you are no more a danger to me, and you no longer have got what I want.”

  He told me what he had learned about the tournament—of the lists and the sorrows and the cold power of Sir Gabriel Androctus, and Sir Robert di Caela’s rising impatience as the days wore on and no Bayard Brightblade showed. He straddled me and reveled in our delays.

  “I would expect that it’s only Solamnic courtesy what keeps him from tarring and feathering the both of you and rolling you back to the Vingaard Mountains in a barrel.”

  “H-how did you ever manage to …”

  “Beat you to the castle? Seems like everyone beat you and Bayard to the castle, don’t it?”

  He placed his hands on his hips and laughed. Laughed until he was red-faced and the veins stood out in his neck, and I began to wonder if my brother did not have a few cats in his bell tower, as they say. I used the opportunity to slip out from under him and crawl under a table in the far corner of the room.

  “Brithelm,” he declared, his laughter subsiding and his breath recovered. “Brithelm it was what pulled me out of the mire. And I explained to him that I needed to get to Castle di Caela. Told him about the tournament, I did, and that we’d have to rush to get there.

  “So he’s off in a flash back to the moat house, and he returns in a few hours with two of Father’s best horses and a week’s provisions and we’re off for Castle di Caela. I didn’t think I’d have much of a chance in that tournament, but I thought I might get a chance to skin you in the bargain, or at least take your place as Bayard’s squire, seeing as nobody wants a squire who bogs down his own brother.

  “Anyway, Brithelm not only knows to get the horses and provisions, but he knows this pass through the Vingaard Mountains way south of the Westgate. A pass he says is going to cut three days off our trip at least.

&nb
sp; “You can imagine our surprise, Galen, when we seen you and Bayard and that horse-man …”

  “Agion.”

  “Whoever … run up against that ogre in the high reach of the pass. I watched it from a distance. Brithelm couldn’t see that far—part of his bumping into things is just bad eyesight, did you know? So I tell him Bayard was winning, and he believes me. Otherwise he’d of wanted to hike down and pitch in.

  “So when I seen you folks had settled for the night, Brithelm and I passed by and made our way over the mountains.”

  “Then it was your voice I heard that night at the campsite!”

  “Seems to me it’s better to leave your brother on a mountain pass with two able companions than waist-deep and alone in the mire,” Alfric philosophized. “Think about that if you get too pious.”

  I shrank back behind the table.

  “You may have a chance for that squirehood now, Alfric. Because of some things that happened in the swamp and in the mountains, Bayard has no further use of me. Odds are he’ll be looking for a squire at once. You can find him at his encampment tonight.”

  “It comes around, does it not, brother?” Alfric gloated, seating himself on the bed. “For I am no longer studying Bayard Brightblade. He was late. He is no longer the champion.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Gabriel Androctus is,” Alfric pronounced exultantly. “He won this tournament and the hand of the Lady Enid. He is about to become the most important Knight in this part of Solamnia.

  “He that may be needing a new squire, and if he is, I plan to be that squire.”

  Outside the door of my chambers, the halls of Castle di Caela trilled with mechanical cuckoos.

  I awoke from my nap. Alfric was still gone, no doubt preparing for the Feast of the Wedding Eve, the big dinner that precedes the nuptial ceremonies.

  No doubt he was overdressing. No doubt trying for an audience with Gabriel Androctus—a chance to grovel and bootlick his way into squirehood.

  Brithelm was somewhere in Castle di Caela, too, though no one was quite sure where. He had arrived shortly after the fateful meeting of Gabriel Androctus and Sir Prosper of Zeriak, and almost immediately wandered off—no doubt looking for some quiet spot in the castle where he could meditate.

  Which was all very well. I needed some time to regroup.

  A good healthy sleep was unlikely in these chambers, what with the chirping and song and questioning calls of the little metal birds outside my door. Had it been only one bird and a less wealthy house, I could have marked the time until dinner by its calls, for cuckoos were just becoming fashionable then as a sort of mechanical timepiece.

  Fashionable, but not reliable. As most of the birds were of gnomish make, most did not call out at the regular intervals the craftsmen promised. Instead, they would not call at all, call once and continuously until they wore out, or call at irregular times with the sound of metal scraping across metal so that the listener wished either time would stand still or he had never purchased the damn thing in the first place.

  The di Caelas, of course, were too old and wealthy a family to bother with keeping track of time. They lived in a mansion where past stood beside present, and nobody ever stated a preference for one or the other. What was more, they were so rich that if they had to be at any particular place at any particular time, the main event was held up until they got there. The birds were for decoration only, and for the pleasing sounds some di Caela thought they made, evidently.

  Such sounds were not pleasing to this guest, however. The songs of the cuckoos disrupted my thoughts, which were disrupted to begin with by the questions I knew would sooner or later arise.

  Why had I abandoned Sir Bayard Brightblade, who less than a fortnight back had generously consented to take me on as his squire, despite profound misgivings on my father’s part?

  Why was Sir Bayard late to the tournament in the first place, and what had I to do with any delays he might have encountered?

  The longer I considered my situation, the more a return to Bayard seemed in order. I drew out the dice, cast the Calantina.

  Sign of the Hart. Which had nothing to do with anything, as far as I could tell.

  Well, I was losing faith in the Calantina, anyway. I tried it again, hoping for a sign more to my understanding, more to my liking.

  Sign of the Rat. Again. I remembered the last time I cast that, which was at the moat house.

  Well, so be it. I was leaving once more. Once again the Weasel was a Rat.

  I stood, picked up my cloak from the bed, and walked to the entrance of the chamber. I set my ear to the door and listened. Outside, the hallway was fairly quiet, the cuckoos on this floor having apparently wound down or broken or made their noises for a while, gears grinding toward a time anywhere from ten minutes to three days from now, when like clockwork in a clock gone completely mad, they would sing once more.

  I opened the door slowly and stepped into the hallway. On tiptoe I passed the still sentinels of metal birds and headed down the hall toward the stairway, still clutching my cloak in my hands.

  The bird-lined hallway ended in an arch, which opened into a landing above the large room where Sir Robert had first mentioned his daughter’s impending marriage. I stood at the arch, looking down the stairway.

  It was on this landing that the Lady Enid had stood, had adjusted the birds. I bade the lady a silent farewell, hoping that someday in the great hall of the moat house, when the news came to Alfric that his younger brother had met an untimely death in a far-flung land, that the di Caelas—both the lovely Enid and her elegant father—would shed a sympathetic tear, perhaps wish they could have known this youngest Pathwarden, the irrepressible Galen, the mischievous but good-hearted Weasel.

  I sniffled, having almost brought myself to tears with the pity of the scene I had imagined. I started down the stairs.

  It was then that the bird to my right began to screech—loudly, painfully, as though someone were tearing it apart. Surprised, I spun about and tossed my cloak over the wailing mechanical thing, which continued to dance beneath the gray folds, its cry muffled but certainly not silenced. I looked behind me down the corridor toward my quarters, then once again down the stairs in front of me.

  At the foot of which stood Enid, small hand on the banister, brown eyes regarding me with curiosity and amusement.

  “Don’t pick at the devices, boy,” she said calmly. “You’ll make them sound worse.

  “Though in the case of that one you just cloaked,” she continued, ascending the stairs, “it is very hard to imagine you doing anything that would damage the sound any more.”

  She smelled of lilacs and lost time.

  I found my voice, which had no doubt scurried halfway back up the hall. “That one does seem a little … harsh, Lady Enid. But the rest of them, if I might be so bold …”

  “Are hideous,” she laughed, her merriment as musical as the sound of the covered cuckoo was discordant. “I do believe that had Mother lived, we would be happily free of these little tin outrages, no matter how much a part of di Caela family tradition they are. You cannot trust a man’s taste in sound or in color—for in both, loudness pleases them far too well.”

  She passed by me on the steps and lifted my coat from the cuckoo in question, who continued with its grating, hysterical call. Reaching under the base of its perch, she tinkered with something, turned some toggle or switch, and the bird at last grew silent and still.

  “Of course, you know all about family traditions, being of Solamnic stock and all,” the Lady Enid said, linking her arm in mine and escorting me past the stairwell in a wave of lilac and light. “Don’t you ever find this obsession with bloodline and ceremony just a little … tedious?”

  I was speechless, this bright thing on my arm.

  “I mean, every little gesture is part of some somber Solamnic tradition, the punishment for breaking which is really nothing more definite than losing face, which can be a dreadful thing, but certainly not
as lethal as the Knights make it.”

  She laughed that laugh of music once again, and I felt my face go warm.

  “I beg your pardon, sir. Here I am forgetting that you’re in training for Knighthood, and probably all too concerned with such serious things.”

  “Knighthood?” I stopped on the steps.

  “Are you not Sir Bayard Brightblade’s squire?”

  “Of-of course. Forgive me, Lady Enid. I was distracted by the beauties of this castle.”

  And of the lady of the castle. So much so that I was forgetting myself, forgetting to ask where I was going, among other things. Where was she leading me?

  “Attractive man, this Brightblade. I saw him approach from the windows of my chamber. A good swordsman, I’d wager.”

  “One of the best,” I agreed. “If you fancy that kind of thing in a man.”

  “Makes me wish I still had decisions, choices to make,” Enid said desolately, then brightened suddenly and overwhelmingly, nodding at one of the portraits hanging on the wall.

  “Mariel di Caela. My great-great-aunt.”

  “Lovely,” I responded automatically.

  “It’s charming that the Order teaches boys politeness, Galen, but there is no need to parade it in these halls. Look at that face: an owl. A countenance only a troll could love.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “Dead when I was an infant. Six months before I was born she locked herself in the top of the southeast tower—the tallest one, windowless except for the rooms overlooking the curtain wall. Locked herself in with her pets—a dozen cats. Can you imagine the loose fur in the air? Grandfather was the di Caela then—the lord of this castle. He let her have her way. It’s a tradition that di Caela men make all decisions for their women—until they get old …”

  She said that with some bitterness. I became more attentive.