by Kate Gragg
“Well we can’t carry them like this all the way back,” I said, juggling three, one of which had an alarming gash right where the poor fellow’s forehead would have been. “Not with the way the ground here likes to jump right up and grab you.”
“If you’d look where you’re putting your feet, you’d trip a lot less,” Lydia said, coolly steering her horse around a tangle of roots that was positively salivating for my poor defenseless ankles.
“It’s not so bad,” said Barry, hopping down from a tree stump. “It’s funny to see the woods from this high up though. Lots of good hiding places I can’t fit into now. Did I ever tell you about my rabbit neighbors when they led a revolt against the local fox?”
“That sounds like a fascinating story, mate, but I’ll have a lot more attention to pay once we’re back indoors like nature intended.”
“Then we should go faster,” Lydia prodded. Easy thing to say from the back of a horse.
“Here, make yourself useful,” I said to Barry, handing him a helmet.
“It’s not in a frog’s nature to be useful,” Barry said, pondering the helmet. “We are but a placid eternal note struck in the thrum of the forest’s great symphony, like the multitude of honeybees and the constancy of ducks.”
“You were a poet!” Lydia said, snapping her fingers in triumph.
“What?” Barry and I both said.
“Well I’ve been trying to figure out what on earth Barry was doing out here. He obviously wasn’t a knight,” Lydia said.
I looked at Barry, who was trying to wedge the helmet I’d given him onto his head backwards.
“That seems like a safe bet,” I said.
“You get a lot of youngest sons sneaking onto the island thinking they can make their fortune here,” Lydia said. “It’s all nonsense. You can’t loot anything here without the island punishing you for it, but people believe anything they read in a book.”
“They certainly do,” I nodded sagely, having neither read nor wanted to read a book in my life.
“But those guys are cunning, and they come heavily armed. You don’t find them sitting around in ponds as enchanted animals. They like to pick a fight with the biggest animal they can find, get a limb bitten off, and then show up on my parents’ doorstep howling about lawsuits. It’s the creative types looking for muses who just wander off never to be seen again, until one day you’re hiking and you see half a sonnet carved into a tree and a lot of bones wrapped up in a pretentious scarf.”
“Does that check out, Barry? Any poetical thoughts rattling around in there?” I said, rapping Barry on the helmet.
“Huh?” Barry said, muffled. I yanked his helmet around the right way.
“Oh no I’m pretty sure I was always a frog,” he said. “None of this stuff feels right. I mean look at these things.”
He waggled his fingers and tried to catch a passing fly, missing entirely.
“See? Useless.”
“Maybe you didn’t poof back into the right body,” I offered.
“You know, I’ve been wondering about that myself,” Barry said. “I’d really like to turn back into a frog now. You guys can just leave me at the next stream we come by.”
The handkerchief popped out of my pocket holding the pearl.
“Absolutely not,” I said, stuffing it back down. “Once you’re an animal it’s too hard to remember how to turn back into a person. And anyway, rescuing you is my good deed.”
“I thought killing the snake princess was your good deed?” said Lydia. “The judges love monster slayings, and as huge as she was, she must have been around for a while.”
I shrugged. “I dunno. I’ve never killed anybody before. It didn’t feel like a good deed.”
“It did to someone last year,” Lydia scowled. “It had to have been someone who was on the island during the games. Granted, it was a lot more people last year, but somebody who knew the forest well enough to not only get that deep into the woods, no mean feat, but finding people in there on purpose is basically impossible. And it had to have been on purpose, right? To wipe out the entire class of finalists.”
“How do you know they were finalists?” I asked.
“The armor,” Lydia said, pointing to the helmets.
She saw my blank look. They all looked completely different to me – different metals, different styles. Knights of many different realms, not one.
“See how it doesn’t have any welding seams? It’s magical armor. That’s the final prize. Whoever comes back with a full suit of that armor is someone the island decided was worthy of being a knight. And that’s what makes it so strange that the killer waited until after they got it.”
“Well this one definitely doesn’t fit,” Barry said, trying another helmet from my pile. It was one of those northerner ones with the long metal nose guard, and Barry’s current nose was mashed uncomfortably underneath it.
“Can I try a different face?” he said, reaching for the pearl.
“No,” I said, swatting my handkerchief away as it tried to hand the pearl to Barry again, the little traitor. “If you can’t make it fit just carry it.”
“But my hands are tired,” Barry whined. “They don’t stick to anything.”
As we rode up to the house, a thought occurred to me.
“Who are we actually going to report this to?” I said.
“To the authorities? What do you mean?”
“Whoever killed those men was involved in the competition, you said. We don’t have any idea who it could me.”
Lydia laughed. “I hardly think my father was sabotaging the competition he’s been running for thirty years.”
“But somebody did,” I said, “and whoever it was, it’s somebody who’s close. I just want you to be prepared for that.”
Lydia looked like she had a response, but before she could speak her mother stormed out of the house followed by a retinue of nervous maids.
“Lydia where on earth have you been? We have guests. This is most unbecoming of a lady.”
I tried to slip off the horse in as unnoticeable a way as possible, but the grand lady of the house couldn’t not notice Barry, who was wearing my shirt and not much else.
“Lydia who are these naked men, what will people think?”
“Mother that’s not important. We found something terrible in the woods and I need to speak to daddy right away.”
“You went into the woods?” Lydia’s mother cried, glaring at me like I made her do it.
“You know Joe, of course,” Lydia said, ignoring her mother’s outburst, “and this is Barry, we rescued him.”
“Another stray,” Lydia’s mother cried, flapping her fan. “Where am I to put all of them?”
“Really mother, I have to talk to father. This is life and death.”
“You’ll be the death of me if anyone sees you in this state,” Lydia’s mother said, dragging her off.
Lydia just had time to slip the length of ribbon into my hand, leaving me on my own to figure out where to stow Barry and how to get a private audience with a princess. Great.
I snuck Barry up to my room and gave him some of my clothes.
“Don’t you have anything less tacky?” he sniffed, holding a brocade vest at arm’s length and looking at it like it just spat on his shoe.
“Hey, I didn’t pick any of this stuff, okay? I don’t know if you’ve read the room, but I’m just faking my way through this stuff. I’m not a knight.”
Barry’s eyebrows shot up in surprise.
“But you’re an adventurer. You just killed the snake princess. She’s one of the most fearsome beasts ever to dwell on this island.”
“Yeah…” Killing still sat uneasy with me, but I didn’t know how to talk about it. I mean, she was an evil giant snake and she was trying to eat me.
I got Barry kitted up in something presentable, despite his objections, and ushered him down to the banquet hall, where the gamblers were briefly excited to learn that another lost hero had be
en rescued. When I explained that Barry was unaffiliated, they were slightly disappointed, but immediately got to work placing side bets about whether Barry was a man-turned-frog or a frog-turned-man.
Getting ahold of Althea turned out to be as easy as asking one of the flower girls if she would see me. The whisper network got to work, embellishing a lot of stuff about how I was planning to declare my love for her, but before I finished my beer someone had slipped me a note, in flowing, girlish script, summoning me to an audience upstairs.
Two silent footmen opened the towering paneled doors and let me into a room entirely unlike the rest of the house. The hunting lodge decor was gone, not just the taxidermied animal bits everywhere, but the dark wood paneling, the heavy beams. This room was light and airy, the walls painted with forest scenes on a pale green background, and the ceiling a perfect replica of the sky, with cottony white clouds adrift on an expanse of blue, with a sunburst lamp at the center, sending rays of glittering gold in every direction.
This was Lydia’s room, I realized. It was unmistakable, with books piled up on every desk, riding boots leaning in an untidy heap in one corner, and ephemera crowding niches that had been set into the branches of the painted trees. Leaves and flowers pressed under glass, a little brass model of the planets, a small telescope, and what I recognized as a leather sap, handy for packing a little more punch into her punches. I wonder if she got that in Cheapside.
Althea stood at the window, looking out on a balcony that soared over a stunning view of the island. From this height its treacherous woods just faded into pleasant background greenery, like a park. Hard to believe there were murdered men lying there under that leafy cover.
She turned to me.
“I feel as if I can be honest with you, Joe,” she said.
“Sure.”
“You’re doing very well in this competition, and it would be foolish of me not to consider the fact that you might win my hand. Is that a responsibility you’re prepared to accept?”
I couldn’t help it. I laughed.
“What’s so funny?” she said.
“Nothing, nothing. It’s just, I’ve never had responsibility for anything in my life.”
“Me either, actually,” Althea said, sharing my laughter.
“Which is why, actually, I should give you this before I forget, or lose it. Lydia said you’d recognize it.”
I handed Althea the ribbon. Her face fell.
“Where did you find this?”
“On one of the… it was with one of last year’s competitors. In the woods.”
“I heard rumors that you brought someone back again today,” she said, the tinge of hope in her voice heartbreaking.
“I did, but he’s not one of ours. Lydia thinks he might be a lost poet, or he might still be a frog.”
Althea leaned over the railing of the balcony, her shoulders hunched.
“Then my true love is dead,” she said, letting the ribbon slip through her fingers. “And I’m the one who killed him.”
“How?”
Althea blinked back tears and forced a smile.
“I was in love with a man from a country my father is always trying to start wars with. I knew he’d never approve, but I thought maybe, if he competed in the trials and won his knighthood, father would have to allow me to marry him. Tullio was never a fighter, but he agreed to do it for me. He trained for months. But when the competition finally got here, I was so afraid for him, I did something terrible.”
I put my hand on hers. Probably illegal or something, but she relaxed a little bit and continued.
“You aren’t supposed to interfere in the competition, but my godmother knows a lot about the ways of this island, and she helped me do a spell – a princess doing a spell! – to ask the island to protect Tullio.”
“Did it work?”
“Obviously not,” Althea said, rolling her eyes and smiling at me. “Things started to go wrong that night. Something on the island turned evil and started killing men. I’m sure it got Tullio too, if no one’s found him after all this time. Lydia was looking all year, even before you got here.”
“Lydia knew all this?”
“Of course. She and I tell each other everything.”
Not everything, I thought, if you don’t know about me.
“I obviously angered the island by trying to interfere. So, it punished me by taking my true love away from me.”
I wanted to apologize, or vow revenge, or something. It’s so useless, standing in the wake of another person’s grief. But she collected herself first.
“Well then! As I said, we must prepare for the possibility that you will win. To be honest I would prefer it over some of the other options.”
“Clifton,” I nodded.
“Really any of them,” Althea admitted. “The little boy seems all right, but I can’t wait any longer to get married than I already have. I’ll accept your favor.”
I blinked at her. She held out her hand. I blinked again.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Your favor,” she prodded. “A memento of yours, for me to pin on my breast to let others know you fight in my name.”
I was drawing a blank.
“Your handkerchief, Joe, give me your handkerchief.”
I felt my pal flapping around in my pocket, making his objections heard. I ran a fingernail down his hem in a way that I hoped was reassuring to sentient textiles and thought hard. I hated to lose the little guy before I learned what his deal was, and if he attacked the princess I’d probably be beheaded for witchcraft. He might be able to make his way back to me on his own, strong breeze permitting, but I’d feel a lot better with some insurance.
The coin. If it really did come back to its bearer, and it sure seemed like it did, that might do the trick. I folded the coin into the handkerchief, annoying the poor guy even more than he already was, and tied a knot.
“This is the traditional way in my country,” I said, handing the princess the little bundle. “For luck.”
“And what country is that?” Althea said.
“I can’t wait for you to see it,” I smiled.
The footmen came in then, sparing me from any follow-up questions. The competitors were all back, and the hour of judgment was nigh.
Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who’d struggled with the vague parameters of “right a wrong.” Hughie and Dickie had gone around doing wrong and righting each other’s, knocking over wine flagons and mopping them up, kicking over carts and righting those up, generally being a menace to the local populace. The judges seemed to think it all ended in a wash, so they were on the bottom.
Wart, the keen-eyed citizen that he is, had decided to right the wrong of the household’s exploitation of the help. Tired of being overworked throwing parties and catering to the whims of rich drunken revelers, they had formed a union. Negotiations would begin after the competition was finished, and until then the drunks could pour their own wine.
After some uncomfortable muttering amongst the judges, Lydia’s father coughed and admitted that Wart’s heart was in the right place, although his methods “left something to be desired.”
Clifton, that drama queen, refused to go anything but last, so I was up next. I knelt before the dais and held up the magic pearl.
“I have defeated the snake princess and retrieved her treasure,” I said.
The crowd gasped. Love to inspire a good gasp. I was developing a craving for applause. Should I go into acting when I got back? I was getting a lot of practice lying.
The judges were delighted to have “something conventional” and asked me a lot of questions about my heroic stabbing-a-snake-lady-in-the-head, which they chose to imagine as a “battle.” I’d apologize for embellishing the details, but they did that all themselves. I saw the gamblers work themselves into a lather placing and cashing in on bets. My stock just jumped quite a few points in their eyes.
And then, Clifton. Languorous, ominous Clifton slunk to the
front of the room, still wearing his morning clothes. He took a dramatic pause for a sip of wine, and then stared right through me.
“I have not righted a wrong yet today,” Clifton said.
The crowd gasped, but not as much as they’d gasped for me, I have to say.
“But the hour is not struck,” he continued, “and not every victory requires a battle. This, in fact, I hope will resolve itself peacefully. You see, this competition is for the elite, for the people who matter in this society. The right sort. And this year, well, I kept it quiet as long as I could because, being of common stock myself, I empathize. But this wrong has persisted. It has escalated. It has wormed its way into the very heart of our sacred traditions.”
He glanced at Althea, who had not yet noticed the way the handkerchief squirmed where it was pinned to her bodice.
“You see a rat in the gutter, pay it no mind. Rats have to live somewhere. But a rat in the parlor, well, that must be dealt with. So, the wrong I am righting tonight is nothing more than catching a rat. A liar, a fraud, a would-be gentleman who is really nothing more than a thief. And a thief of the worst kind, aren’t you, Joe?”
The crowd turned to me, but I remained calm. Clifton was clever, but I was better.
“If I were a thief, I’d be the very best kind, I promise,” I said.
“Is that what you tell yourself when you’re stealing ladies’ dowries? Stealing a bride’s hope, stealing a couple’s future?”
Althea’s eyes flashed to me in dawning recognition. She stifled a laugh.
He blew a kiss at Althea (who ignored it) and jumped down off the stage and stalked toward me.
“I’ll admit, Joe, you clean up pretty well. You make a very convincing imitation of a gentleman in those clothes. I assume they’re stolen, too? I almost didn’t recognize you from the parlor. The Duke’s parlor, his most private sanctum, nestled in the bosom of his family, that’s where you crept, clad in the filth you were born to. Chimneysweep.”