by Peter David
Granite bowed, nodded, and left immediately.
I, opportunistic little creep that I was, saw my chance to have yet another toss with the Lady Rosalie. I waited until I saw Granite ride away on that great charger of his, and then went straight to the chambers that he shared with his lady.
Rosalie, bless her heart, read my mind. She was lying there, naked and waiting. And she was holding her crystal ball.
Now, Rosalie had no knack for fortune-telling, but she fancied that she did. She obtained the large crystal from a woman purporting to be an oracle, and she would stare into the crystal ball for hours on end, trying to discern her future. Every so often she would make thoughtful pronouncements in a voice that I think she thought was great and profound. In point of fact, it just sounded like Rosalie talking oddly. I never paid any mind to it. It seemed a harmless enough diversion.
“Did you see me coming in that?” I asked teasingly.
She smiled in that odd way that she had, that made the edges of her eyes all crinkly. “In a manner of speaking,” she said, and laid the crystal ball on the floor.
My tunic was off and my leggings were just descending below my knees when the door burst open. There was Granite, looking considerably larger than he had when he’d been riding off into the distance minutes before.
I caught only the briefest of glimpses, though, because the moment the door opened, I had already rolled off the bed, landing on the far side, out of view. I may not have had a good deal going for me, but my reactions had always been formidably quick. Long practice, I suppose in keeping one eye behind me at all times. I lay paralyzed on the floor. The door slamming back against the wall had covered the noise of my thudding to the ground, but I was concerned that any further movement on my part might attract his attention. Granite was a formidable warrior with a sense of hearing only marginally less sharp than his blade. I held my breath so that he didn’t hear it rasping against my chest, but I was positive that he could nonetheless detect my heart slamming in my rib cage. In any event, I certainly didn’t want to risk making scrabbling noises against the floor. That would tip him for sure.
Rosalie was not the brightest of things, but barely controlled panic gave wings to her moderately capable brain. Upon the door slamming open, she had automatically clutched the sheet under her chin, covering herself. “Milord!” she burst out. She certainly did not need to feign her surprise. “I … I …”
I practically heard the scowl in his voice. “What are you about?” he demanded.
“I … I …”
“Well?!”
She suddenly tossed the sheet aside, wisely letting it tumble atop me to further hide me, although—truth be told—I’m not entirely certain how effective a disguise it would have been, since piles of laundry do not generally tend to quiver in fear. “I was … waiting for you, milord!” she said, throwing her arms wide and no doubt looking rather enticing in her utter nudity. “Take me!”
I still held my breath, which, actually, was no great trick, because my chest was so constricted I couldn’t exhale if I’d wanted to. My heart had also stopped beating, and I was fairly sure my brain was in the process of shutting down. I was hoping, praying that Granite would go for the bait. If he did, and she distracted him sufficiently, I could creep out on hands and knees while they were going at it.
“Take you where?” demanded Granite, never one to pick up on a cue.
“Here! Now!”
He had to go for it. How could he resist? Certainly I couldn’t have. Then again, I wasn’t a knight, at least not yet. Knights were apparently made of sterner stuff. Either that or Granite was just too block-stupid to be distracted from something confusing to him. Apparently he’d gotten a thought into his head, and the damned thing wouldn’t be easily dislodged, probably because it was fairly quiet in his brain otherwise and the thought enjoyed the solitude.
“How could you have been expecting me when I didn’t know I was coming back?” demanded Granite.
“I …” I heard her lick her lips, which were probably bone dry by that point. “I … anticipated … or hoped, at least … that you would return to service me once more before you left.”
“I didn’t. I came back to get my lucky dagger. I forgot it.”
“Oh.”
If Rosalie had just let that harmless little “Oh” sit there, we might well have avoided discovery. He was, after all, perfectly willing to accept that she was a nitwit. Unfortunately, because a silence ensued, Rosalie felt the need to fill it with words. “Yes. I … saw it over there on the wall and knew you’d be back.”
Granite, unfortunately for us, was able to track the conversation. “You just said that you were hoping I’d return to service you. Now you say you knew I’d be back for the dagger.”
“Yes, I … that is to say … I … that …”
There was another dead silence, and I could only imagine the blood draining from her face as her poor brain twisted itself about in confusion. I heard the door bang suddenly and prayed that he had simply exited with no further words … but that hope was short-lived as I heard the bolt slam into place.
Granite was no idiot. I had to give him that much. “What,” I heard him rumble, “is going on?”
I thought furiously at her, as if I could project words into her brain in hopes that they would spill out of her mouth. I am … tongue-tied by your presence, milord … I would say anything just in hopes of saying something you want to hear, milord … I hoped that, in your returning for your dagger, you would savage me like a wild animal, milord …
Something. Anything.
“Don’t …” There was a choked sob. “Don’t hurt him, milord … .”
Anything but that.
I heard a roar then. I think the word “What?!” was in there somewhere, but it was like trying to sort out one particular scream from the howling of a hurricane. There was a quick sound of steps coming around the bed, and suddenly the sheet was yanked off me. My bare ass was still hanging out as I squinted up at Granite.
He wasn’t moving. He trembled in place, seized with such fury that he could not yet budge.
I rolled to my feet, yanking my breeches up as I went. The bed was a huge four-poster affair, and I leaned against one of the thick oak bedposts, trying to compensate for my fairly useless right leg. I must have been quite the sight at that moment. At that age, I was thin and gawky. My arms were well muscled from years of hauling myself around while compensating for the lameness of my leg. My ears stuck out too much, and I didn’t have normal hair so much as a thick, wild mane of red that proved annoyingly difficult to brush or style. My nose was crooked from the times in the past that it’d been broken. My best feature remained my eyes, which were a superb shade of gray, providing me with a grim and thoughtful look whenever I put my mind to it. However, I suspect at that point that he wasn’t exactly concerned with admiring my orbs.
We stood there, frozen in time for half an ice age it seemed. I don’t even think he quite focused on me at first, as if his brain was so overheated that he needed time to fully process the information. “I … know you!” he said at last. “You’re Umbrage’s squire! You clean out stables! You’re Appletoe!”
“Apropos,” I corrected him, and then mentally kicked myself. As if I wasn’t in enough of a fix, I had to go and remind him of my name. Why didn’t I just stick my neck out and offer to hack it through for him?
Then I realized he wasn’t waiting for an invitation, as I heard the sword being drawn before I actually saw it. I took a step back, making sure to play up my limp so that I could seem as pathetic as possible.
His eyes were fixed on me, but he was clearly addressing his nude wife. “A squire? You cuckold me … for a squire? For a shoveler of horse manure? For this you shame me?!”
Rosalie was not going to be of any help. Her mouth was moving, but no sounds were coming out.
There was no point denying the actual cuckolding. I can be a dazzling liar given the right circumstances, but thes
e were certainly not they. So I felt my only hope was to try and address the other side of the equation. “Now … now t … t … technically, mi … milord,” I stammered out, “there’s been no, uh, actual shaming, as it were. No one knows. You, Rosalie, me … that is all. And if we can agree to, uh … keep this among ourselves, then perhaps we can just, well … forget this all happened, sweep it under the carpet until … until …”
I was going to say, “Until we’re all dead and gone.” Unfortunately, at that moment Rosalie found her voice.
“Until you leave again,” she suggested.
He swung his sword around and bellowed like a wounded boar. I tried to back up. Not only did my limp impede me, but also my feet became tangled in the sheets and I tumbled to the floor. Rosalie let out a shriek.
I considered telling him at that point that he might or might not be my father, but that statement—albeit true enough—seemed to smack so much of a desperation move that I figured it would be perceived as a ploy. So I chose to appeal to the one thing which might serve as his weak spot.
“Where’s the honor in this?!” I shouted.
He was standing directly over me, his sword drawn back and over his head, ready to bring it slamming down like a butcher slaughtering a bull. This was no ordinary sword, it should be noted. The damned thing had teeth: jagged edges running down either side, particularly useful for ripping and tearing. It was also formidable for a good old-fashioned slicing. If the blow had landed, it would have cleaved me from crotch to sternum. But he froze, his mustache bristling as if acquiring a life all its own. I thought for a moment that it was going to rip itself off his lip and come at me. “Honor?” he growled. “You have my wife … and speak to me of your honor?”
“Your honor, milord, not mine … I … I am nothing.” I spoke as quickly as I could. “I am nothing, no one … but that, you see … that’s the point …”
“What is?” The sword, which had a far more formidable point than any points in my repertoire, hadn’t moved from its rather threatening position above me.
“Well, milord, obviously … when my corpse turns up, and you, as a man of honor, why, you’ll have to own up to your slaying of me … and explain why …”
“I have no intention of hiding it,” he snarled. “Not a man in the court will deny my right as a husband!”
“No question.” I felt the longer I kept it going, the more chance I had of talking him out of what was clearly his intended course. “But look at the slaughter situation.”
“The … what?” The snarl had slightly vanished; he seemed a bit bemused.
“Look at you … full in your leathers, your sword in hand, rippling with power … and here I am, half-naked, on my back, unarmed … well, honestly!” I continued, as if scolding a recalcitrant child. I couldn’t believe the tone of voice I was adopting. One would have thought that, in some fashion, I possessed the upper hand. “And a lowly, untitled squire with no land or privilege at that. Where is the challenge in skewering me? Where is the redemption of honor? A stain on your status as husband and man requires something more than mere butchery.”
I would have felt just a bit better if the sword had wavered by so much as a centimeter. It did not. But neither did it come slamming down. “What,” he asked, “did you have in mind?”
“A duel,” I said quickly, not believing that I had managed to get it that far. “Tomorrow … you and me, facing off against one another in the proper manner. Oh, the outcome is foregone, I assure you. I’m but a squire, and lame of leg at that. You’re … well … you’re you …”
“That is very true,” he said thoughtfully.
“Certainly you’ll massacre me. But if we do it in the manner that I suggest, no one can look at you askance and say, ‘So … you carved a helpless knave. Where is the challenge in that?’ ” I paused and then added boldly, “I’m right, milord. You know I am. A husband’s honor restored. A philanderer put to rights in a way that no one can question. It is the thing to do.”
I had him then. I knew that I did. I glanced at Rosalie, praying that she would keep her mouth shut and say nothing to spoil the moment. Thank the gods, her lips were tightly sealed.
In point of fact, I had no intention of battling Granite on the field of honor. The man could break a griffin in half. I wouldn’t have had a chance against him; he would have driven my head so far down into my body that I would have been able to lace my boots with my teeth. Fighting him man to man would be suicide.
I intended to use the night between now and tomorrow to bundle together everything that I owned in the world—which was, admittedly, not much. Then, under cover of darkness, I would slip away. There was a wide world out there beyond the kingdom of Isteria, and I couldn’t help but feel that there had to be sufficient room in it for Apropos. Granted, my flight would be an irretrievable besmirching of my honor. To hell with that. Honor did not pay bills, nor keep one warm at night. Apropos would disappear; I would take up a new identity. It wasn’t as if the one that I had was all that wonderful anyway. Start a new life, learn a trade, perhaps become a knight eventually somewhere else. Who knew? Perhaps, at some point in the future, Granite and I would meet on the battlefield. We would face each other, glowering … and then, with any luck, I’d shoot him with an arrow from a safe distance.
All this occurred to me in a moment’s time.
And then Granite said, “I don’t care.”
That was all the warning I had before the sword swung down toward me.
Fortunately it was warning enough as I rolled out of the way. The sword came down with such force that it clanged into the floor and bit right into the paving with that jagged edge.
Rosalie shrieked. So did I. Even as I did so, however, I lurched to my feet, pushing up with my good leg. I was still clutching the sheet in my hand, and I threw it over his head to obscure his vision. At that moment Granite struggled with his sword, trying to extricate it from its state of being temporarily immobilized, and he sent up a caterwauling that was a fearsome thing to hear. So infuriated was he that he had practically lost capacity for speech, instead generating a sort of inarticulate grunting.
Picking a general area of the sheet that seemed to represent his head, I drew back a fist and struck as hard as I could. My upper-arm strength, as noted, is somewhat formidable. I hit him on what felt like the side of his head, probably causing a profound ringing in his ears. But by that time he had a firmer grip on his sword, and he ripped it from the floor and swung it about so that it shredded the sheet, which fell to ribbons around him.
Rosalie was shrieking his name, trying to get his attention. That probably wasn’t the wisest course. He seemed ready to decapitate her as soon as look at her, but at the moment he appeared more interested in getting to me. He swung again, cleaving straight down once more. Apparently he didn’t have an abundance of moves, but the few he did have were devastating if they happened to connect. I lunged onto the bed, barely avoiding the sweep. Rosalie adroitly vaulted over me as I rolled toward the other side, landing on my feet but not smoothly, and stumbling back.
He came after me, his eyes wild, his face turning as red as my hair. He didn’t seem in the mood to reason.
I heard a pounding at the door. The sounds of commotion had started to attract attention. The door, however, was bolted. People were calling Granite’s name, asking if anything was wrong. Granite didn’t bother to respond. I made a motion toward the doorway, and he leaped to intercept. He moved with the speed of a damned unicorn, cutting off my possible escape route. A sneer of contempt was curling his upper lip.
I backpedaled, headed back toward the bed. Symbolic that it should begin and end there. Rosalie had wisely vacated the bed by that point, grabbing a dressing gown from her wardrobe and tossing it over her nakedness. “Milord, stop! Stop!” she said over and over. He seemed disinclined to attend to her wishes, however.
He swung at me and I ducked again, and he hacked right through one of the bedposts. It fell into my hand, a len
gth of wood about three feet. It was better than nothing, although not much. I gripped it firmly, waited for his next pass. It wasn’t long in coming. I couldn’t let it come into direct contact, because he’d just chop right through the wood as he had done a second ago. I stepped back, angling the wood, and managed to deflect the flat of his blade, preserving my makeshift cudgel for perhaps another second or so.
Granite repositioned himself, the better to get some swinging room so that he could properly bisect me. The hammering at the door became louder. Apparently others in the castle were being drawn by the sounds of … of whatever it was they thought they were hearing. Granite still hadn’t said anything particularly useful, seized as he was in voiceless paroxysms of fury.
He took a step back, and for a moment I thought my salvation was upon me, for he stepped on the crystal ball that Rosalie had placed so delicately upon the floor. The large crystal rolled under his foot, causing Granite to stumble. I tensed, waiting. If he went down, I might have a chance to run madly for the door. I don’t know how likely escape would have been in that situation; there were apparently knights crowding in on the other side, and the moment that Granite managed to find his voice, they might very well seize me bodily and hold me still so that Granite could finish the job. But I was dealing with one crisis at a time.
He went to one knee, but it was the most fleeting of pauses. Then he was on his feet once more, holding the crystal ball and glowering at it as if the thing had been sentient and tried to trip him out of spite. I made a desperate bolt for the door, but only got a short distance when he froze me with a glance. I stood paralyzed some feet away, my body sideways to him with my lame right leg facing him.
The perpetually screaming Rosalie made a grab for him from the back. He shoved her away without even looking at her, cocked his arm, and let fly with the crystal ball. It hurtled toward me at roughly chest-high level. From the size of the thing and the speed with which it was moving, it would easily have broken any bone with which it came into contact.
