The Hero of Varay

by Rick Shelley

  “I didn’t do anything,” he said before I got halfway to him.

  “What happened?” I asked, slowing down only a little. I could hear Joy hurrying to catch up with me. We went around to the head table. Two places were set for us.

  “Just what happened before, it looks like,” Parthet said. “This time, he appeared right here in the great hall.”

  “Where were you when you went poof this time, Aaron?” I asked.

  “Right there where you left me,” he said. His voice sounded shaky. He had apparently been crying. He looked around, then looked up at me again. “Right after you left, Uncle Jake told me that Gramma was dead. I said no, she couldn’t be. Then my head felt real funny and I was here again.”

  “How many people were there with you?” I asked.

  “Uncle Jake and Aunt Sue. The policeman and two ladies from the hospital.” He held up his hand and extended a finger for each of them. “Five people.” That many shocks in twenty-four hours, I’d probably have to count on my fingers too. It was more than any child should ever have to suffer.

  “Do you need any more proof that he belongs here?” Parthet asked softly. Family—they’re the people who never show any hesitation at saying, “I told you so.”

  “I won’t argue the point right this minute,” I said. “But that also doesn’t mean that I’ve changed my mind. I’ve got to think on it first.”

  Servants had already started to bring in breakfast, so the discussion was easily postponed. Parthet is hard to distract at mealtime, even when it’s something that’s really got him hopped up. Joy and I took our seats and Timon did his best to keep our plates and mugs full. He really didn’t have much trouble. Joy started slowly, though before long she was shoveling the food in almost as rapidly as anyone else in the hall.

  Not even deep thought can slow me down much during a Castle Basil meal. I can think and eat at the same time without any difficulty at all. And I had a lot to think about. Besides the panic in my world over the Coral Lady, there was the way that Aaron Wesley Carpenter kept popping up in Varay and the talking elf head that Parthet still had. And King Pregel was still sick.

  Of course, Pregel seemed to be sick as often as not. His health was precarious. He would get over one thing and be fine for a week or a month—even for three or four months running—and then he would get sick again. When my great-grandfather got sick, seriously ill, Mother would tear off to our world and bring Doc McCreary back for a long-distance castle call. Doc McCreary would do what he could without any of the equipment available in a modern hospital, and leave the day-to-day nursing to Mother and a few local women Mother had been training. The king would recover and the level of tension in Castle Basil would decline.

  By the time breakfast started to wind down, I had some ideas on precautions to take after Parthet’s warning that there had to be trouble ahead for Varay and the rest of the buffer zone, but I still didn’t have real answers. I asked Parthet if there had been any weird manifestations other than Aaron’s two sudden appearances.

  “None that I’ve heard of,” he said. “But there are bound to be more. The disruptions are just too great for there not to be more.” Then he pulled a small leather bag out of some recess in his clothing. “Here, I got these done last night. I couldn’t sleep.” I opened the bag and found a set of rings like the two I wear. I gave the new rings to Joy.

  “The eagle always goes on your left hand, the signet on the right,” I told her. She slipped them on and they fit perfectly. That’s not the kind of thing that Uncle Parthet was likely to make a mistake about.

  “These are the rings that open those doorways?” Joy whispered.

  “Yes, and they identify you as part of the royal family as well.”

  “But I’m not, really.”

  “You are in every way that matters. We can take care of the formalities any time you’re ready. I’ll have to ask the chamberlain. I don’t even know how marriages are done here.”

  “Was that a proposal?” We were both whispering by then.

  I smiled. “I guess it was. What do you say?”

  She blinked, but that was the extent of her hesitation. “I say that I think we’ve come too far to back out now.”

  I grinned at her before I turned back to Parthet. There was still business to talk about.

  “I think I need to make a fast tour of the border castles to see if anything’s happened, and to warn them to be careful,” I told Parthet. “Find out if there’s any unusual trouble with Xayber or warlords out of Dorthin.” Parthet nodded around a mouthful of ham. I snorted. “Find out if there are any other kids like Aaron popping up around Varay.” That caught Parthet’s attention. He stopped chewing to stare at me, but Joy was at me from the other side.

  “How long will you be gone?” Joy asked.

  “Well, let’s see,” I said as I turned again. “There are five border castles in the north and east, four more in the west. That makes nine castellans to talk to in Varay, and Duke Dieth over in Dorthin. I don’t think I could possibly finish in less than three or four hours.”

  Joy seemed to miss a beat on that. Then she swatted my shoulder. “I thought you were going to say three or four weeks.”

  I smiled. “There’s no reason why you can’t come along,” I said. Before she could respond to that, I said, “Let’s go find Baron Kardeen.”

  I had already looked around to see that nobody was still shoveling the food in so fast that he would be devastated to have breakfast end. That was another tradition that I had tried without success to end—the tradition that the meal was over as soon as the ranking member of the royal family or court left the table.

  Kardeen was in his office, hard at work already, a large platter of food holding down one edge of the scroll he was writing on.

  “Two problems for your expert attention,” I told Kardeen after we got past the hellos and so forth. I told him about my personnel situation. He said that he would send Timon to the Master of Pages with instructions and he would make the necessary entry in the records of the two “promotions.” Any ceremony was up to me, whatever I wanted to make of it.

  “What’s next?” Kardeen asked then.

  “What’s the procedure for getting married around here?”

  He waved a finger back and forth between Joy and me and raised an eyebrow. I nodded.

  “We’re really not big on formalities here,” Kardeen said, directing that mostly at Joy. “There are the rings, of course.” He looked back and forth between us, and Joy held up her hands to show him the rings.

  “Mostly, it’s just a matter of entering the marriage agreement in the court records and having it announced by the magistrates around the kingdom,” Kardeen continued. He hesitated then and looked at me. “There is one bit of ceremony you might want to consider. It’s hardly old tradition.” He shrugged. “Your parents did it when they got married.”

  “What kind of ceremony?” I asked.

  “They met in front of the king and me, faced each other, and linked their fingers together so the rings were touching.” He demonstrated. With two people doing it, it would look like finger-wrestling, a painful little sport I hadn’t tried since I was a freshman in high school.

  “How is the king?” I asked. He hadn’t met Joy yet. That was something we had to correct before there was any ceremony anyway.

  “Pretty much confined to bed yet,” Kardeen said. He made a helpless gesture with his arms. “It’s hard to tell. You know that. He’s been worse before, I suppose. Your mother is upstairs with him now, probably feeding him breakfast. You can go up and see.” This latest downturn had happened after he heard that I had been wounded by the elf warrior in the Bald Rock.

  The baron led the way upstairs, walking quickly as he always did. My great-grandfather was sitting up in bed, propped up by a dozen thick pillows. He wasn’t reading now though, the way he had been the last time I had seen him. Mother was sitting on the edge of the bed, holding a tray of food on her lap and feeding t
he king.

  “Hello, lad,” Pregel said. Both his voice and his smile were weak.

  “Grandfather, this is Joy Bennett. We’d like to get married.” The king didn’t like to have anyone talking about his health in front of him, no “How do you feel” or anything like that, especially when he wasn’t feeling well.

  His smile got a little broader. “Come over here then, children,” he said. He scooted himself up a little higher. Mother set the breakfast tray on a small nightstand, then stood up and moved out of the way.

  “I’ve heard about you, young lady,” Pregel said, reaching out to take her hand. His hand was shaking rather badly. Joy clasped it in both of hers. “And yes, you are lovely.”

  “Thank you,” Joy said, stuttering a little before she added, “Your Majesty.”

  “Don’t worry so much about the formalities, dear,” the king said. “I quit worrying about them decades ago. Now, how are you bearing up?”

  Joy shot me a quick look. “He knows that you had never been here before yesterday,” I told her.

  “I still wonder if I’m going crazy, sir,” she said, obviously uncomfortable.

  “Healthy sign, they tell me.” Pregel laughed softly and reclaimed his hand. “So, when do you two want to do this?”

  “We haven’t really talked about timing,” I said. “Is there anything wrong with right now?” I aimed that question more to Joy than to the king.

  Joy smiled. “I don’t see anything at all wrong with now,” she said.

  “Nothing like the rush of young love,” Pregel said, and he laughed again. “I don’t see anything wrong with now either.” He looked at Mother, then at Kardeen. Neither of them contradicted him.

  There really wasn’t much to the ceremony. Joy and I stood facing each other, right there next to the bed. Grandfather, Mother, and Baron Kardeen were the only witnesses. Too late, I thought to warn Joy what might happen when we completed a circuit with the rings. There just wasn’t time to say anything. When we linked our fingers, I could feel the familiar electricity—and I saw Joy’s eyes get wide. The exchange of vows was impromptu—obviously. I don’t remember exactly what either of us said, though Joy probably does. I said something about promising her my undying love and she said pretty much the same thing. We broke the circuit of the rings, accepted congratulations, and left the room.

  “What the blazes was the shock?” Joy asked when we were in the hallway alone.

  “I didn’t think about it until it was too late. It’s some sort of side effect of the magic of the rings.”

  “It felt like my hair all stood on end.”

  “It didn’t,” I assured her.

  “I don’t mean on my head,” Joy whispered, looking around to make sure that we were really alone.

  I started laughing, very loudly, and Joy’s face got red. She started pounding on my nearest shoulder, until she missed and hit the guard on one of my elf swords.

  “Do you have to wear those things all the time?”

  “The Hero of Varay must be armed,” I said. “I think I’m even breaking tradition by taking them off to bathe and sleep.”

  We started right out on my tour of the border castles. I let Joy operate the doors each time we made a hop. It’s not that the doors take practice, but I thought that it might make her feel a little more confident of using them if I didn’t happen to be around. The full tour ended up taking a lot more than three or four hours. We spent the entire day making the circuit, and it could easily have taken even longer. I introduced Joy around. We sat and chatted with the various castellans, gave them the warning, asked for news, and looked around a little at each place.

  Baron Resler was still in charge at Arrowroot. He was civil but not overly warm. But then, that was his normal style. Baron Hambert ran things at Coriander. He was a lot warmer, and he made a point of telling Joy that he owed his barony to me. I cut him off when I thought he was about to start telling her about the Battle of Thyme. I didn’t want to lay that story on Joy yet.

  Although proximity had nothing to do with the speed of using the magic doorways, we went from Coriander over to Carsol, the capital of Dorthin, to talk with Dieth. He was as ebullient as ever, carrying on about the work of holding that kingdom together. It was an adventure rather than a pain in the butt to him. I got Joy out of Carsol before Dieth could get too deep in details as well.

  Castle Thyme was being renovated, as were the other two small castles to the south of it. I had insisted on that. Even though Dorthin was no longer a threat, I knew we couldn’t count on that always being the case. One of the first things I had insisted on after the Battle of Thyme was that we had to have doorways into all of the border castles, ways to avoid the sort of ambush that had cost my father his life.

  Then we hopped over to the western border. Varay hadn’t had trouble over there for ages. Castle Curry, the major fortress on our border with Belorz, was as peaceful as ever. Baron Veter was still a minor, only a couple of years older than Aaron. The castellan was his guardian, Sir Compil, an elderly knight who liked to tell me stories about the grandparents I had never known. They had died back in what would be the early 1940s in the other world. When World War Two had our world in an uproar, Fairy and the buffer zone were in similar chaos. Varay had lost four Heroes in as many years.

  All in all, it was a pretty good tour. No one had any hard evidence of really weird happenings, although you can always get a few strange tales in a place like Varay. There were no indications of invasion from any of our neighbors. There were rumors, but there are always rumors. At both Arrowroot and Coriander, the word was that the Elflord of Xayber was on the verge of a successful end to his civil war, perhaps within weeks or even days of overthrowing the Elfking and taking his place … or at least obtaining a favorable truce that would leave him free to pursue “other interests,” like getting even with me. At Carsol, Duke Dieth mentioned a rumor that the blind wizard of the late Etevar of Dorthin was now working in Mauroc, the kingdom east of Dorthin, the farthest east of the seven kingdoms. The rumor was that the wizard had somehow regained at least partial use of his eyes. Something was plainly going on in Mauroc. There were refugees fleeing west, crossing Dorthin to settle in Varay or to go even farther west.

  If the Elflord of Xayber was about to finish his war inside Fairy, he would certainly look south at Varay, particularly since his son was there. And trouble in Mauroc could easily spill westward, particularly if Parthet’s apprehensions were justified. I would have to discuss both sets of rumors with Kardeen and Parthet, but I decided that it could wait until the next morning. This was my wedding day, after all. Joy and I stopped back at Castle Basil just long enough to collect Timon and our two new pages, boys named Jaffa and Rodi.

  I wasn’t too interested in new pages at the moment, or in the supper we rushed through when we got back to Cayenne. As soon as we could, Joy and I left everyone in the great hall and retired upstairs to our bedroom.

  It was a beautiful night, all either of us could have asked for. It didn’t matter that we were off in something like Never-Never Land for real. That night was our own fairy tale.

  But we were wakened at dawn by Uncle Parthet pounding on the bedroom door. And by his screaming. I pulled on a robe and went to the door, ready to commit mayhem. I opened the door and Parthet almost fell into the bedroom.

  “The kitchen at Basil is full of dragon eggs!” he shouted.

  6

  The Sot

  If Parthet hadn’t been in such an obvious panic, I would have sniffed his breath, then asked him to walk a straight line. But running around like a chicken with its head cut off took too much energy for Parthet to be simply drunk. He carried on for a couple of minutes and I waited for him to run out of a little steam.

  “Calm down,” I said then, a brilliant choice of words, naturally. “You’re not making any sense.”

  He stopped his frenetic pacing and jabbering and stared right up at me. “The kitchen at Basil is full of dragon eggs,” he said, ver
y calmly. “You do remember dragons, don’t you?”

  “I remember.” As perhaps the only mortal in Varayan history to ever kill one, let alone two, dragons and survive, I wasn’t likely to ever forget dragons.

  “Where did the dragon eggs come from?” I asked.

  “From the chicken coop.”

  Before I could jump on that statement, Joy came up behind me and asked, “What’s the matter?”

  “Uncle Parthet says that the kitchen at Basil is full of dragon eggs.”

  Then, very softly, Joy whispered, “Is he sober?” right close to my ear. But there was nothing wrong with Parthet’s ears, even if he was virtually blind without his thick glasses.

  “I’m sober, young lady,” he said. “Dragon eggs just make me a trifle nervous.”

  Joy swung the door open wider. She had slipped into a bathrobe. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It just sounds so … so bizarre.”

  “It is bizarre,” Parthet said. “That’s why I’m upset.”

  “Okay, there are dragon eggs in the kitchen at Basil,” I said. “What do you want me to do, dice them all up nicely with Dragon’s Death?”

  Parthet did everything but make steam come out of his ears—and that wouldn’t have surprised me. His face got so red that I thought he was going to blow a gasket.

  “Calm down, Uncle,” I said. “Let’s go see your dragons. Give me a minute to get dressed.”

  Joy was already getting clothes out for me.

  “You want to come along?” I asked her.

  “I think I’ll pass this time.”

  “They’ll have breakfast ready downstairs any minute, I imagine,” I said. “You go ahead and start eating. I’ll try to get right back, but if I’m not here soon, I’ll get something to eat over at Basil. If there’s anything but dragon omelet.” I whispered the last as quietly as I could. The door to the hallway was shut and Parthet was on the other side, but I didn’t want to take any chance at all of him overhearing and getting angrier than he already was. Dragon eggs in the kitchen? Even if Parthet was right, I didn’t see what the big deal was.