“So,” I tried, trying to sound casual, “can I come in and do some, you know, reading?”
“I’m afraid not,” she said, not bothering to soften the blow much. “The library is closed, as you know, and, since the fire, we have been obliged to tighten our security and speed up our work.”
“What work?” I demanded, a trifle testily.
“Cataloging,” she said. Her smile had evaporated like a ground mist under a morning sun. The door, if anything, had closed an inch or two. “Now I really must get back to work,” she said.
“Right, right,” I beamed, falsely. “While I remember,” I added before I walked away, “I was wondering if you might mention to Sorrail what I did during the goblin siege.”
“The goblin siege?” she said, suddenly hesitant.
“Yes. You know, when we were up on the walls and the goblins were attacking. You had your crossbow. I was on the other side of that big breach in the walls over there as the goblins were coming through. Well, no one seems to remember me doing anything and, when I mention it, people don’t seem to believe me. I wasn’t expecting them to put a life-size bronze of me in the town square, but a little less contempt would be nice, you know? After all, I did earn it. Pretty heroic, I thought: gigantic monster poised to ravish the city and. . Well, I’m not especially popular right now, so I thought you might mention it to Sorrail or the king or something. I mean, fair’s fair.”
She gave me a long, blank stare, as if I was speaking a foreign language. She showed no animation at the memory of the battle, no astonishment that I hadn’t got some kind of official award, and, in fact, no sign that she could recall the event at all. When I finished she merely nodded distantly, as if her mind was on something else, and said, “Yes. Now I really have to go.”
I made understanding noises and the door shut heavily in my face. A key turned and then a series of heavy bolts thudded home. I wouldn’t be going in that way.
“The lover returns,” said Renthrette. “Been breaking hearts, Will?”
“Jealous, Renthrette?”
“Desperately,” she said with a look that would have curdled milk.
“How did you know where I’ve been, anyway?”
“Gossip, Will, gossip. I thought you would have figured that out. What do you think courtiers do all day? It’s not all banqueting with the king, you know. A lot of talking goes on here. I expect you’d like it. That’s your strength, isn’t it, talking?” She smiled, wide as a grave and twice as nasty.
“We can’t all be semiliterate baboons like you and your brother,” I responded.
“I can read, so can Garnet.”
“I said semiliterate, not illiterate. Yes, you can read in that ‘see the dog run’ fashion you think is adequate, but it unsettles your stomach, doesn’t it, all that brain juice flowing? And killing things is so much more fun.”
“It’s not about fun-” she began.
“I know,” I interjected, “it’s about principle. It’s about honor and chivalry and sunshine and the forces of light. I heard the litany, Renthrette, so spare me.”
“I’m just verbalizing,” she said. “I thought that was what you liked: words.”
“Thank you,” I muttered bitterly. “You’re a chipper little thing when you’ve got an evening with Sorrail to look forward to, aren’t you?”
“Not just Sorrail,” she said. “The whole court. It will be tremendous. So tremendous that even your presence won’t spoil it for me.”
“Mine?”
“You’re going, too.”
She reached out, brandishing a cream-colored envelope sealed with red wax and edged with gold. My name was etched in a curly script marked by so many flourishes that the letters were almost unreadable.
“Your invitation,” she said, staring at me significantly. She didn’t actually say don’t screw this up for us, but it was there in her face. I reached for the envelope and she pulled it fractionally away until I met her eyes and gave a shrug of acknowledgment. Then she gave it to me.
And so were my evening’s plans made. It might even be fun. And, besides, I was still floating slightly on the knowledge that Lisha had trusted me while Garnet and Renthrette didn’t even know she was around. When Renthrette taunted me, it was all I could do not to whistle I know something you don’t know. But I said nothing. It was more fun that way.
In truth, I was faintly relieved. Being at the banquet meant I would be safe and could put off any attempts to break into the library until some less rational hour. Tonight, I thought, I would do my best to enjoy the pleasures of the court by blending in, something that would have been close to impossible were it not for assistance that came from a rather surprising quarter. An hour or so before we were due to go, Garnet appeared at my door with one of those earnest looks in his emerald eyes.
“I’ve brought you something,” he said, kind of sheepishly.
“Come in,” I said, trying to see what he was holding behind him. “What is it?”
Garnet lowered his eyes, hesitated, and, with a sharply intaken breath that suggested both embarrassment and resolve, he whisked a suit of black silk and brocade out from the bag he was clutching. It was adorned with a white lace collar and cuffs-not too flouncy, but enough for elegance-and buttoned with silver. I gave a long, tuneless whistle. “Where did you get this?”
Garnet muttered something and walked over to the window with a nonchalance that was totally unconvincing.
“What?” I said.
“I found it in the town,” said Garnet, fidgeting and looking pointedly out of the window.
“You what?” I said.
“I found it,” said Garnet, looking at me suddenly with something like defiance, “you know, in the town.”
“What, lying around?” I demanded.
“Of course not lying around,” he snapped, irritation clouding his brow.
“You bought it?” I exclaimed.
There was silence for a moment.
“Kind of,” said Garnet, dropping his eyes again and gesturing vaguely so that he knocked a small flower vase off the window ledge. It broke and he instantly stooped to pick up the pieces.
“Kind of?” I repeated. “What does that mean? Did you buy it or not?”
“Yes,” he hissed, not looking up.
“You bought this for me?” I persisted. “Garnet, I didn’t know you cared!”
He looked up, and his usually chalky face was flushed with pink. “Don’t make a big deal of this, Will,” he spluttered. “I got it because you’ll need it for tonight. That’s all. I don’t want you embarrassing yourself. Or us.”
“That’s really very sweet of you.”
He rose quickly and his fingers flexed as if he were looking for the axe he normally wore in his belt. “Listen, Will, don’t start. . ”
“I’m grateful, Garnet. I really am,” I said, honestly. “I’m just surprised that you would think to do this for me. Was it expensive?”
“I got a good deal on it,” he said, a little sulkily.
That I didn’t doubt. He and Renthrette would argue for hours to save the kind of change you find under bar stools. The suit was unlike anything I’d ever worn before, excepting some of the cast-off fashions with which the nobility had supplied the Cresdon theaters. I felt the fabric. It was flawlessly smooth, and the brocade felt like the pelt of a meticulously groomed mink. I grinned at Garnet and he shuffled.
“Thanks, Garnet.”
“Don’t mention it,” he said, and meant it in all possible ways.
I changed quickly. The suit was a perfect fit. Garnet had completed the outfit with suitable hose, boots, jewelry, and a tastefully discreet codpiece. I felt like an impostor at first, but I walked up and down a few times and practiced holding one arm crooked while the other hand rested on the pommel of my sword, and the role started to feel more natural. I began to walk slower and straighter, with my head back and my lips curled in a self-satisfied sneer. Soon I was bowing fractionally, practicing delicate li
ttle smiles and applauding with two fingers of my right hand against the palm of my left. Garnet rolled his eyes.
“It’s just a suit,” he said. “You’re not supposed to change your entire identity.”
“Rubbish,” I said, admiring myself in a pocket mirror. “I am what I look like. Enter Viscount William, courtier, poet, sophisticate, and lover. This is going to be fun.”
And indeed it was. For a while.
SCENE XVI A Fly in the Ointment
It was, as you might imagine, a glittering affair. The entire court, serving maids, footmen, and nobles, counselors, and the king himself, were all turned out as if panache, elegance, and looking like they had been rolled in something very sticky and then pelted with jewelry would save them from the goblin hordes. As they filed formally into the banquet hall, each one seemed more dazzling than the last, each vying to outsparkle the polished crystal of the great chandeliers with their gold and diamonds. Each wore a paper-thin veil of humility over self-satisfaction verging on smugness, and each dropped their witty words like a king on a balcony casting rubies into the outstretched hands of the peasants below. In seconds the hall was buzzing like some insane beehive, all poetry and studied laughter, clever songs and felt-lined applause. And in the middle of it all, dressed to kill and brandishing his rapier wit and disarming charm, was Sir William Hawthorne.
Well, let’s face it, if there’s one thing I can do, it’s fake pretty much anything. More to the point, what passed for wit and wisdom here was pretty obviously the usual recycled courtly twaddle about beauty, truth, taste, etcetera, and if I couldn’t fake that by now I wasn’t the duplicitous cad I prided myself on being. I had heard it all before and I was sure I could match the best of them. Pretty sure, anyway.
Now, there may be a handful of people out there who live for bad love poetry and dressing up as lovelorn and unfeasibly wealthy shepherdesses, but I’m banking that they’re few and far between, so I’m not going to go into a lot of detail about the wonderful costumes and the wonderful speeches and the wonderful songs and the wonderful smiles that were smiled so wonderfully at the wonderful poems. To those few of you who thrive on this kind of saccharine and overpolished pigs’ offal, my apologies. Here, then, are the salient facts, unadorned by satin and pearls.
First: Will Hawthorne, looking like someone’s terribly debonair great aunt, makes his entrance into the king’s banquet hall to a general raising of the collective eyebrow. “How handsome!” they remark. “How stylish!” “Could this be,” they wonder among themselves, “the same degenerate hog’s turd of an Outsider who sullied our court only days ago?”
Second: Will sparkles. Not satisfied with merely looking impressive, he opens his store of golden words and charms his hearers dumb. Rarely have such wit and poise, such timing and ease, been so impeccably combined. This man could break wind loudly and his audience would swear they had never heard anything more wryly apposite all season. Such a man cannot fail to win the hearts and admiration of the entire court.
Third: Will spectacularly fails to win the hearts and minds of the entire court, and is forcibly ejected as if he is some slimy form of pond life which was accidentally tracked in on the sole of someone’s boot.
In retrospect, it started out far too well. With my history, I should have anticipated calamity looming overhead like a thirty-pound hammer, but foresight, hindsight, and any other kind of sight which doesn’t originate in the very second in which I exist is something of a mystery to me. The thirty-pound hammer (augmented by murderous-looking spikes) hovered just long enough for me to start feeling comfortable, and then pounded me through the floor.
But enough of these ominous metaphors. I woke at about five o’clock the following morning. The banquet and its subsequent revelries had been over for about three hours, though I had been absent from them rather longer. I had been curled up in the drafty corner of one of the palace’s anterooms, sleeping fitfully, when the toe of Garnet’s boot prodded me imperiously. As I gazed wretchedly up at him and his iron-faced sister, the whole miserable affair gradually came swimming back to me.
“Get up,” said Garnet, more exhausted than angry. “We’ve been looking for you for ages. Get up and we’ll get you to bed.”
I stirred vaguely, but my legs were not interested. I paused to consider the drool and vomit that had stained the front of my new suit while they looked at each other and sighed. At first, Renthrette refused to help, but eventually Garnet persuaded her to brace me up, and between them they dragged me half-senseless to my room. There they maneuvered me onto my bed, where I lay on my side, wheezing and hacking the thin, foul-smelling remnants of whatever had been in my stomach into a tin basin. Once, I tried to sit up, but the room tossed and spun as if I was bound to the sail-less mast of some storm-wracked ship. I retched something that looked liked orange oatmeal onto the pillow and my gut contracted as if my entire midriff had been clamped into a vice. My eyes watered with pain and my open mouth strained, voiding nothing but air in a long, agonizing gasp. Pleasant, eh? When the nausea subsided I collapsed back onto the bed, my eyes shut against the lamplight and the humiliation. And in this blissful condition, I passed the rest of the night.
Now, this was not the first time I had been a little the worse for wear after an evening’s carousal, but it was, I think, the first time that I had passed into this miserable state without the slightest idea how it had happened. One minute I had been the life and soul of the party, sipping some flavorless fruit drink while bantering to the admiration of all; the next I had been launching the partially digested remains of my dinner over someone in lemon velvet. My lyrical depiction of the pangs of love went into a hideously rapid decline, and before I knew what was happening, I was trying to organize some kind of impromptu orgy using language that would have made the most experienced harlot blanch. But how this all came about, I could not say.
Garnet and Renthrette, naturally, just assumed that I had let the side down by drinking beyond my limit. Now, I know for a fact that I could drink either of those two under several tables and go on to perform every role in several full-length plays without dropping a line. Moreover, everyone had been drinking the same yellowish muck as I had, and I would go before the highest authority on earth and swear that I had had no more than two glasses of the treacherous filth. In fact, I knew that many of those about me, including the stoically sober Renthrette, had had a good deal more than me, so engrossed was I with my courtly patter. I suspected foul play and said so, but Garnet would have none of it.
“Someone doctored your drink?” he exclaimed, his anger now showing through his disbelief. “Why would anyone do that? These are not the kind of degenerates you used to spend your time with.”
“I’m not a degenerate,” I muttered unconvincingly.
“Really?” barked Garnet with nasty hilarity. “So you’re just a normal, civilized person, are you? And normal, civilized people always end the evening by announcing that Lord Gaspar, the chief justice of the land, couldn’t fill his own codpiece.”
“I didn’t do that,” I said, hopefully.
“Yes, you did,” Garnet exploded. “You said that you bet there was nothing in there but old stockings, and that if his wife went home with you instead she’d get to see, and I quote, ‘the one that got away.’ ”
“I did not say that,” I said bleakly, my voice muffled by the rancid pillow.
“Yes, you did,” said Renthrette, leaping into the fray. “In fact, you went on for a full five minutes about your bait and tackle, about eels and fishing poles, about how once she ‘nets this one’ she’ll never mess with minnows again, and every other stupid, degraded fishing image you could come up with, all the while rubbing yourself against her and leering until everyone in the room. .”
“Everyone!” agreed Garnet.
“. . was staring at you in horrified silence,” she concluded. “You only stopped when Lord Gaspar and Viscount Vallacin physically moved you away. And then you started drunkenly swinging at them
and calling them a ‘pack of poncey-assed nancy boys who dressed like girls.’ It was only their honor and decency that stopped them from skewering you on the tips of their rapiers like the pig you are.”
“It can’t have been that bad,” I replied, lamely.
“No,” said Garnet, “it was worse. You sneezed all over Baroness Drocine’s dinner plate and then told her that you could bet safely that your snot was more palatable than anything that had been served all night.”
“Well, you know, the food here. .” I inserted, semi-apologetically.
“And then you climbed onto the table and offered to urinate into any glasses that needed filling. Thank God Sorrail was on hand to get you down before you had a chance to lower your breeches.”
“I thought the worthy Sorrail would have been a witness to all this,” I said, the surge of resentment I always felt at his name rising as quick as the bile in my throat.
“Sorrail saved your neck,” Renthrette spat. “You could have been executed on the spot after what you said about the king being a bloated and flatulent old fornicator.”
“I never said that,” I tried again.
“You said he had a private room full of small animals with which he practiced immoral acts,” said Renthrette, her face prissily straight.
“I’ll bet I didn’t put it like that,” I said, managing a smile for the first time since this nightmare had begun.
“No,” she said flatly, “but I wouldn’t sully my lips with one-tenth of the things you said last night. You also called the king’s private secretary a ‘whoreson swamp-sucking varlet’ and the captain of the palace guard an ‘unctuous, civet-reeking, pus-dripping clodpole,’ whatever that is.”
“I can get rather colorful when the mood takes me,” I admitted.
“Most of the time no one had any idea what you were talking about,” Garnet said. “But they got the message, all right. How much did you have to drink?”
“Nothing!” I exclaimed. “Maybe two glasses, but no more! Somebody put something in my drink! You think I can’t hold my beer? I could outdrink everyone in that entire court combined.”
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