by Rick Shelley
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 the 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 s
trange 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, very 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.
Parthet didn't have anything to say as we stepped through to Basil and hurried on to the huge kitchen area behind and below the great hall. The cooks weren't around. The kitchen was deserted but for two men-at-arms who held their halberds aimed more or less at a huge cast-iron kettle near one of the fireplaces.
Eggs at Castle Basil are generally served scrambled, cooked by the gross in kettles that are large enough for boiled missionary, stirred constantly with spoons the size of canoe paddles. I saw two large egg crates, the kettle in the center, and a small collection of eggshells on the floor to one side.
"The cooks had started preparing breakfast," Parthet said. He pointed at the kettle and gestured for me to precede him. I nodded and went up to the kettle and looked down.
There were some normal eggs in the bottom, yolks and so forth, but there were also a couple of tiny dragon forms-fetuses, I guess I would have to call them. They appeared perfectly formed, so I assumed that they were close to being big enough to hatch. I reached over to the nearest egg crate, took an egg out, cracked it on the edge of the kettle, and dumped in a regular egg. The second one was normal too, but the third I tried had another of the little dragons.
Altogether, I cracked a dozen eggs and got four dragons.
"Are these regular dragons or those small scavengers that run around the woods?" I asked.
"I haven't the faintest idea," Parthet said. "At this point, dragons are dragons, as far as I'm concerned."
"Is that what their eggs normally look like?" It didn't seem right. I thought reptile eggs were usually leathery.
"No. These are chicken eggs. They came out from under chickens-yesterday it would have been."
"You're the wizard. What does it mean?"
"I wish I knew," Parthet said. There was no trace of his earlier anger in his voice or face now. "It may just be part of the increased weirdness I warned you about, but I'm afraid that there may be a lot more to it. It seems that it must be some kind of omen."
"Not a good one, I take it."
"No. Kardeen and his clerk are already searching old manuscripts, trying to find references. I need to get busy doing the same thing. The answer must be around here somewhere. I hope."
"What do you want me to do?"
"Right now, it may be enough just to lend your presence. This has a lot of the working folks scared. We'll get men to load all these eggs up on a cart, take them out to the forest, dump them, crush them. But nobody will handle the eggs without a Hero around to bail them out in case a mama dragon comes around or something."
"What about tomorrow's eggs, and the next day's?" I asked. "I can't see doing this kind of thing every day."
Parthet shrugged. "Until we know what's going on, we can do little more." He scowled down at the eggs. Then he shook his head. "I'm sure that news of this has already started to spread. We'll have all kinds of bizarre reactions. Some farmers will likely kill all their chickens. Maybe more will just bury the eggs. I don't know. We'll have to keep watch. But I'll bet that scrambled eggs are going to be hard to come by for a while."
"Is this happening at any of the other castles, or is it just here?"
"I haven't checked yet," Parthet said. "That's something else on the list."
So I rode shotgun for the garbage detail. It wasn't the most glamorous of assignments, but I wish that all Hero jobs were that simple. None of the fetuses made a move, or even a sound. No full-grown dragons came to dispute what we were doing. By the tim
e I left the keep for my detail, Kardeen and Parthet were getting a grip on the rest of the morning's needs. The cooks were shooed back into the kitchen. Breakfast being late at Castle Basil was scandalous. Parthet was getting ready to hop around the kingdom to check on the eggs elsewhere, and to send riders to outlying areas that didn't have family doorways handy. Baron Kardeen was arranging to send riders to the villages around Basil.
Meanwhile, I shepherded more than a hundred dozen eggs to a pit outside the town and watched while two of King Pregel's stalwarts smashed eggs with paving stones, poured lamp oil over the mess, and set fire to all of the eggs, good and bad. We stood around and watched while the super omelet cooked and burned, and when the fire died out, the soldiers shoveled in dirt and more rocks to bury the mess. Then we rode back to the castle.
When I walked back into the great hall of Basil, nearly two hours after I left, I spotted Joy and Aaron up at the head table. Breakfast, the late breakfast, was just starting to wind down. There was less table talk than usual, and what I could hear was all about the mysterious eggs. "Who's attacking our food?" one soldier asked me as I passed. All I could do was shake my head. In the buffer zone, an attack on the food supply could be catastrophic.
I kissed Joy as I sat next to her. "I didn't think you were coming over," I said to her before I turned to Aaron. "Hello, Aaron. How you doing?" I asked while a platter of breakfast was filled in front of me.
"Pretty good," Aaron said, grinning. "You guys eat like this all the time?"
"All the time." I smiled back at him, then turned to get a start on my own belated breakfast. Smelling that dragon omelet cook had given me a real appetite.
"I think maybe there's a problem," Joy said after I had a few minutes to take the edge off. "A farmer came to the castle gate, back at Cayenne, and said that there's a dragon on his farm. Lesh talked to him. He said that the farmer was scared out of his wits. Were there really dragon eggs here?"
"Tiny dragons in chicken eggs," I said. "We've burned and buried them." And now a full-sized dragon, I thought. Just what I needed.
