by Ed Greenwood
With that, Paramore touched the handle of his mighty sword, Kneuma, to dispel whatever enchantment Dorsoom might have cast on the king. Then he snapped his fingers, and the tiny percussion of his nails struck sparks in the air. The king’s retinue and the king himself, as though awakening from a dream, turned toward the shadow-garbed mage. Dorsoom sullenly answered the summons and moved into the light.
“Milord, do not be tricked by the puny magicks of this — “
“Hush, mage,” replied King Caen evenly, regarding Dorsoom through changed eyes. He turned, then, to address the thin nobleman. “Lord Ferris, I know the hand of my daughter has been pledged to you since before you could understand what that pledge meant. But time has passed, as it does, and has borne out a nobler man than thee to take the princess’s hand. Indeed, he has taken her heart as well, and mine too, with many great deeds that not a one of them is equalled by the full measure of your life’s labors.”
“But-”
The king held up a staying hand, and his expression was stern. “I am now convicted in this matter. You cannot sway me, only spur me to anger, so keep silence.” His iron-hard visage softened as he looked upon Sir Paramore. “By royal decree, let the word be spread that on the morrow, you shall wed my darling child.”
A cheer went up from all of those gathered there save, of course, Lord Ferris and the mage, Dorsoom. The joyous voices rung the very foundations of the palace and filled the stony vault above.
It was only the plaintive and piercing cry of one woman that brought the hall back to silence. “My Jeremy!” cried the noblewoman, wringing a light blue scarf in tender, small hands as she came through the doors. “Oh, Sir Paramore! I’ve looked and looked through all this crowd and even checked with the doorguards, and he is not here. Where is my Jeremy?”
Sir Paramore stepped down from his rightful place before the king and, tears now running down his face, said, “Even I could not save your son, with what these butchers had already done to him…”
“And her cries were piteous to hear,” the cloaked man muttered low, and the crowd in the pub soaked in the sibilant sound of his voice, “so that even evil Dorsoom shut his ears — “
“That’s it, then. No more ale for any of you. I don’t care how strong the gale’s ablowin’ out there; there’s a stronger one in here, and it’s ablowin’ out this stranger’s arse!”
It was Horace, fat Horace who’d tended this bar in this tiny crevice of the Snowdonia Mountains and fed eggs and haggis to the grandfathers and fathers and sons of those gathered here. In all that time, the good folk of Capel Curig had learned to trust Horace’s instincts about weather and planting and politics and people. Even so, on this singular night, regarding this singular man, Horace didn’t strike the others as their familiar and friendly confidant.
“Shut up, Horace,” cried Annatha, a fishwife. “You’ve not even been listening, back there banging your pots so loud we’ve got to strain our ears to hear.”
“Yeah,” agreed others in chorus.
“I hear well enough from the kitchen, well enough to know this monstrous man’s passin’ garbage off as truth! He makes out King Caen to be a dotterin’ and distracted coot when we all know he is strong and just and in full possession of himself. And what of Dorsoom, cast as some malicious mage when in truth he’s wise and good? And Lord Ferris, too?”
Fineas, itinerant priest of Torm, said, “I’m all for truth — as you all know — but bards have their way with truth, and barkeeps their way with brandy. So let him keep the story coming, Horace, and you keep the brandy coming, and between the two, we’ll all stay warm on this fierce night.”
Now the stranger himself extended that trembling left hand that did the work for two and said with a rasping tongue, “It is your establishment, friend. Will you listen to your patrons’ desires, or turn me out?”
Horace grimaced. “I’d not throw a rabid dog out on a night like this. But I’d just as soon you shut up, friend. Aside from lyin’, you’re puttin’ a dreamy, unnatural look in these folk’s eyes, and I don’t like payin’ customers to go to sleep on me.”
This comment met with more protests, which Horace tried unsuccessfully to wave down.
“All right. I’ll let him speak. But, mark me: he’s got your souls now. He’s worked some kind of mesmerizin’ magic on you with the words he weaves. I, for one, ain’t listenin’.”
Nodding his shadowed and dripping head, the stranger watched Horace disappear into the kitchen, then seemed to study him hawkishly through the very wall as he continued his tale. “Though Lord Ferris’s forked tongue had been stilled that morning before the king and nobles and children, his hands would not be stilled that night when he stalked through the dim castle toward Sir Paramore’s room.
“But one other child of the night-the ghost of poor dead Jeremy-was not allied to the sinister plans of Ferris. Indeed, the ghost of Jeremy had sensed evil afoot and so hovered in spectral watch on the stair to Paramore’s room. When he spotted Lord Ferris, advancing dark at the foot of the stair, Jeremy flew with warning to the bed foot of his former bosom friend, Petra…”
Petra was a brown-haired girl-child and the leader of the pack of noble children. Jeremy found her abed in a castle suite, for the children and the parents had all been welcomed by King Caen to spend the night. Poor Jeremy now gazed with sad ghostly eyes on the resting form of Petra, sad ghostly eyes that had once gazed down on his own still body, lifeless and headless.
“Wake up, Petra. Wake up. I have terrible news regarding our savior, Sir Paramore,” the child-ghost rasped. His phantom voice sounded high and strained, like the voice of a large man pretending to be a child.
And Petra did wake. When she glimpsed her departed friend, her brave girl-heart gave a start: unlike greater ghosts decked in diaphanous gossamers, poor Jeremy had no body upon which to hang such raiments. He was but a disembodied head that floated beyond the foot of her bed, and even now his neck slowly dripped the red life that had once gushed in buckets. So grotesque and horrible was this effect that Petra, who truly was a brave child, could not muster a word of greeting for her dead companion.
“It’s Lord Ferris,” the ghost-child said urgently. “He plots to slay our Sir Paramore where he sleeps tonight.”
Petra managed then a stammer and a wide stare.
“You must stop him,” came the ghost’s voice.
She was getting up from the feather mattress now, arraying the bedclothes around her knees. With the sad eyes of mall boys-who see small girls as mothers and sisters and lovers and enemies all at once-poor Jeremy watched Petra’s delicate hands as she gathered herself.
At last she whispered, “I’ll tell Mother-”
“No!” Jeremy’s voice was urgent, strident. “Grown-ups won’t believe. Besides, Sir Paramore saved your life this morning. You can save his life now, this evening!”
“I cannot stop Ferris alone.”
‘Then get the others,” Jeremy rasped. “Awaken Bannin and Liesle and Ranwen and Parri and Mab and Karn and the others, too. Tell them to bring their fathers’ knives. Together you can save our savior as he saved us.”
Already, Petra was tying the sash of her bedclothes in a cross over her heart and breathlessly slipping sandals on her feet.
“Hurry,” commanded Jeremy. “Even now, Lord Ferris is climbing the stair toward Sir Paramore’s room!”
Upon this urgent revelation, Petra gasped, and Jeremy was gone.
Alerted and assembled in the next moments, the children followed Petra to the stair. It was a long and curving stairway that led to the high tower where Sir Paramore had chosen to bed. The steps were dark, lit mainly by a faint glow of starlight through occasional arrow loops in the wall. But when Petra and her child warriors began to climb, they saw ahead of them the vague, flickering illumination of a candle.
“Quiet now,” whispered she.
Bannin, a brown-haired boy half her age, nodded seriously and slipped his small hand into hers. The twins
Liesle and Ranwen smiled at each other with nervous excitement. Meanwhile, Parri and Mab and Karn and the others clustered at the rear of the pack and set hands on their knives.
“That’s got to be the candle of Lord Ferris,” Petra mouthed, indicating the light. “We’ve got to be quiet, or he’ll know we’re coming.”
The children nodded, for they adored Petra as much as Jeremy had when he lived. And they followed her, doing their very best to be silent and stealthy, though children have a different sense of that than do adults. They proceeded on tiptoes, fingertips dragging dully across the curved inner wall, childish lips whispering loud speculations. As they climbed, the light grew brighter, and their fear welled higher, and their voices became froggy from the tension of it all.
With all this muttering, it was no wonder that they came round one of the cold stone curves of the stair to find the narrow, black, long-legged Lord Ferris poised above them, his wiry body stretched weblike across the tight passage.
“What are you children doing here?” he asked in an ebon voice that sent a cold draft down the stairs and past the children.
The brave-hearted crew started at this rude welcome, but did not dart. Petra, who alone hadn’t flinched, said stonily, “What are you doing?”
The man’s eyes flashed at that, and his gloved hand fell to the pitch-handled dagger at his side. “Go.”
The group wavered, some in the rear involuntarily drawing back a step. But Petra did something incredible. With the catlike speed and litheness of young girls, she slipped past the black-cloaked man and his knife. She stood now, barring the stairs above him.
“We stay. You go,” she stated simply.
Lord Ferris’s lip curled in a snarl. His hand gripped her shoulder and brusquely propelled her back down the stairs. Her footing failed on the damp stone, one leg twisting unnaturally beneath her. Then came a crack like the splintering of green wood, and a small cry. She crumpled to the stone-edged steps and tumbled limply down to the children, fetching up at their feet and hardly breathing.
They paused in shock. Young Bannin bent, already weeping, beside her. The others took one look at her misshapen leg and rushed in a fierce pack toward the lord. Their young voices produced a pure shriek that adults cannot create, and they swarmed the black-cloaked nobleman, who fumbled now to escape them.
They drove their fathers’ knives into the man’s thighs. He toppled forward onto them and made but a weak attack in return, punching red-headed Mab between her pigtails and, with a flailing knee, striking the neck of Karn, too. The first two casualties of battle fell lifeless beneath the crush, and the steps under them all were suddenly slick with blood.
As though their previous earnestness had been feigned, the children now fought with berserker rage. They furiously pummeled and stabbed the man who lay atop them, the once-bold Ferris now bellowing and pleading piteously. At one point in the brawl, Parri dropped down to take the crimson dagger from Mab’s cold hand, then sunk it repeatedly into the back of the nobleman.
Yet Lord Ferris clung tenaciously to life. His elbow swept back and cracked Liesel’s head against the stone wall, and she fell in a heap. Next to go was her twin, Ranwen, who seemed to feel Liesel’s death in kindred flesh and stood stock-still as the man’s fallen candle set her ablaze. Ranwen, too, was unmade by a clumsy kick.
Aside from the bodies that now clogged the path and made it treacherous with blood, Lord Ferris had only poor Parri and two others to battle now. His weight alone proved his greatest weapon, for these next children went down beneath him, not to rise again. That left only bawling Bannin and broken Petra below, neither able to fight.
The man in black found footing amidst the twisted limbs of the fallen, then descended slowly toward Bannin and Petra. “Put the knives away,” said he, sputters coming from his punctured lungs.
The boy-child-young, eyes clouded with blood, ears ringing with screams-drew fearfully back a few paces. Petra could not retreat.
“I told you to go, you little fiends!” growled Lord Ferris. Red tears streaked his battered face. “Look what you’ve done!”
Bannin withdrew farther, his whimpering giving way to full-scale sobs. But Petra, with a monumental effort, rose then. The desperate cracking of her leg did not deter her lunge. Through bloodied teeth, she hissed, “Death to evil,” and drove Parri’s blade into the nobleman’s gut.
Only now did Sir Paramore come rushing down the stairs, just in time to see wicked Lord Ferris tumble stiff past a triumphant Petra. She smiled at him from within a sea of scarlet child’s-blood, then collapsed dead to the floor.
The death of the child in the story coincided oddly with the death of the fire on the hearth; the stormy night had reached its darkest corner. But the rapt crowd of listeners, who sat mesmerized in the storyteller’s deepening shadow, did not even notice the cold and dim around them. Horace, in the now-frigid kitchen, did.
It was Horace, then, who had to trudge out in the snow for more wood. He wondered briefly why none of the patrons had complained of the chill and dim in the taproom, as they had tirelessly done in days and years past. As soon as the question formed in his mind, the answer struck him: The stranger’s story had kindled a hotter, brighter fire this evening, and by it the people were warming themselves.
Aside from lying slurs on King Caen, Dorsoom, and Lord Ferris-dead now? Horace wondered, fearing that much of the story might be true-no crime had yet been committed by the stranger, not even a stolen bit of bread or blood soup. And his story kept the patrons there when Horace would have thought folks would flee to their lofted beds. But something was not right about the stranger. The hairs on the back of Horace’s neck, perhaps imbued by the natural magic of apron yokes and years of honest sweat and aches, had stood on end the moment the man had entered with his swirling halo of snow. Now, as the darkness deepened, as Horace heard snatches of the wicked tale that held the others in thrall, his uneasy feeling had grown to wary conviction. This man was not merely a slick deceiver. He was evil.
Despite this certainty, despite the outcry of every sinew of his being, Horace knew he didn’t dare throw the man out now or he would have a wall-busting brawl on his hands.
Even so, as he bundled wood into the chafed and accustomed flesh of his inner arm, he lifted the icy axe that leaned against the woodpile and bore it indoors with him.
In the taproom beyond, the stranger was bringing his tale to its inevitable end…
There was much that followed the cruel slaying of the innocent children: Sir Paramore’s shock at the assassination attempt, the shrieks of parents whose children were gone for good, the trembling praise of the king for the deeds of the fallen, the empty pallets hauled precariously up the curving stair, the filled pallets borne down on parents’ backs, the brigade of buckets cleansing the tower, the stationing of guards to protect the princess’s betrothed…
And after it all, Sir Paramore prayed long to the mischievous and chaotic heavens, to Beshaba and Cyric and Lovi-atar, seeking some plan behind the horrific affair. When his shaken mind grew too weary to sustain its devotion and his knees trembled too greatly beneath him to remain upright, Sir Paramore hung the spell-slaying Kneuma on his bedpost and crawled into his sheets to vainly seek sleep.
Without alarm or movement, and as soon as the knight was disarmed and disarmored, the mage Dorsoom suddenly stood inside the closed and bolted door. Sir Paramore started, and an approbation rose to his lips as he sat up in bed.
But the mage spoke first, in a sly hiss: “I know what you have done, monstrous man.”
Sir Paramore stood up now, gawking for a moment in rage and amazement before reaching for his spell-slaying sword. His hand never touched the hilt, though, for in that instant the mage cast an enchantment on him that froze his body like ice.
Seeing Paramore rendered defenseless, Dorsoom spoke with a cat’s purr. “Most folk in this land think you a valiant knight, but I know you are not. You are a vicious and cruel and machinating monster.”
Though he could not move feet or legs or arms, Sir Paramore found his tongue. “Out of here! Just as my young knights slew your assassin, I will slay you!”
“Do not toy with me,” said the black-bearded mage. “Your sword dispels magic only when in your grip; without it, you can do nothing against me. Besides, neither Ferris nor I am the true assassin. You are.”
“Guards! Save me!” cried Paramore toward the yet-bolted door.
“I know how you arranged the kidnappings. I know how you hired those five men to abduct the noblemen’s children,” said the mage.
“What?” roared the knight, struggling to possess his own body but bringing only impotent tremors to his legs.
The guards outside were pounding now and calling for assurances.
“I know how you met with your five kidnappers to pay them for their duties,” continued the mage. “But they received only your axe as their payment.”
“Guards! Break down the door!”
“I know how you took the clothes of one of the kidnappers you had slain, dressed in them, masqueraded in front of the children as him, and in cold blood slew Jeremy for all their eyes to see. I know how later, in guise of the noble knight you never were, you rushed in to feign saving the rest of the children,” said the mage, heat entering his tone for the first time.
The guards battered the bolted door, which had begun to splinter.
Paramore shouted in anguish, “In the name of all that is holy-!”
“You did it all for the hand of the princess; you have killed even children to have her hand. You orchestrated the kidnapping, played both villain and hero, that you might extort a pledge of marriage in exchange for rescuing them.”
The tremors in Sir Paramore legs had grown violent; by the mere contact of his toe against the bedpost, his whole pallet shook, as did the scabbarded sword slung on the bed knob.