Weasel's Luck

by Michael Williams

  With all my enemies on the loose, it might have been foolish to travel abroad that night, but travel I did. It was no problem skirting the keep of the castle, asking a servant the whereabouts of a private place to sit and ponder.

  Of course, when the Scorpion leaped through the window and vanished, none of us thought we were out of the woods, especially after Bayard and I recounted our history of encounters with the Scorpion—how each time he had vanished mysteriously, only to return in a new and equally deadly form.

  When I told Sir Robert of the Scorpion’s threats to the life of the Lady Enid, the old man flooded the courtyard of Castle di Caela with armed guards.

  You couldn’t walk, sit, or stand in the moonlight without being accosted by overly concerned protectors—by a “who goes there?” followed with a barrage of questions that dissected your business at the castle and your further business walking around at night, questions that traced your family tree back five generations with the genuine possibility that any ancestor remotely unSolamnic might get you a night in the guardhouse.

  Which is why the orchard was a pleasant change. I had set up camp there, amidst the peach and pear trees beneath the Lady Enid’s window.

  Guards surrounded the orchard from a distance, and now and again I heard one of them call to another. But the Lady Enid’s orchard was her own private preserve, evidently, and after a thorough search in the early evening, the guards had left it alone. Only an hour after nightfall, it was filled with nightingales and owls, singing their old quarrel from the trees.

  Not only were there singing birds, but birds wrought of evergreen, too. The floor of the orchard was a topiary garden, filled with carefully tended shrubbery sculpted into the forms of various small animals and birds. Owls there were, and nightingales, and squirrels and rabbits and short-eared lutra, all cut from juniper, aeterna, and other greenery.

  For a while I stood there, staring up at the dim and flickering light in Enid’s window and breathing in the strong, fresh smells of the fruit and the shrubbery. It was a romantic’s dream, this landscape, spoiled only by the occasional distant calling of a guard.

  I backed against a juniper owl, pausing to relish the smells, the sound of birdsong, the soft light.

  Suddenly there were hands about my throat and a coarse, familiar voice hissing in my ear.

  “I have a lot of paying back to do, little brother. And it starts here.”

  It seems Alfric had followed me out of the entrance and around the keep, staying hidden under the branches of the trees and in the shadows of the walls. My face was half-buried in the back of the topiary owl.

  “Please let me up,” I muttered, my mouth pressed against needles and hard wood.

  “Like you let me up back in the swamp? Oh … I have a mind to throttle you, Weasel, to make you burrow face down in the greenery. How do the needles taste, little brother? Where is the wisdom hiding now?”

  Nonetheless, his grip loosened and I gained room to speak.

  Letting me speak had always been Alfric’s mistake.

  “I said, better let me up, Alfric. If you mash or otherwise alter this familiar face, Sir Bayard won’t have you as a squire. Nor will any of these other gentlemen gathered here, if anything deflects the splendor of my nose.”

  “Which don’t seem bad to me, Galen, seeing as I plan to be suiting for the hand of the Lady Enid,” Alfric announced proudly, pressing me even farther into the evergreen.

  “It’s ‘suing,’ and I’m afraid you’re out of luck. Tournament’s over, remember?”

  After one more shove into the thick needles of the bush, Alfric let me up.

  “My luck may be out, but there’s something about that weasel’s luck of yours that keeps you landing upright.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning you’re here to press my suit. That’s your story,” Alfric growled. He put his hand over my mouth, muffling my cries for help. Then he grabbed my right arm, twisting it behind me until my elbow touched the base of my spine, my thumb the back of my neck. I tried for a witty response, but could think of none through the pain that tore into my shoulder and blotted out wit, blotted out everything but the sense of that pain. I was having trouble breathing.

  “What is my motivation, dear brother?” I gasped, and prepared to black out.

  “The swamp,” said Alfric. “Remember the swamp?”

  “Oh.”

  “I have heard tales of your confession, Weasel, but omitted by chance—by oversight, I’m sure—is the part where you stranded your older brother in deadly muck and mire. A most convenient oversight, no doubt, for we all know that violence against one’s blood relatives is the worst transgression of Solamnic code. I do not think Sir Bayard and Sir Robert could overlook such a, shall we say, naughty piece of business? What do you think, dear brother?”

  An excruciating pause. “At—your—service,” I stammered, gasping for breath.

  Alfric loosened his grip. Air and sense rushed back into me as my brother leaned above me and whispered.

  “Good. I brung the lute. Now what’re we going to do, Galen? You’re good at these things.”

  He spun me about, pulled me up to his face, and drew his dagger, and I remembered the smell of my brother that was the smell of wine and of old food and of something that tunneled to the edge of insanity always beneath those other smells.

  Alfric pressed the point of the knife against my chin, inflicting slight but menacing pain. Then he lowered me and took cover, drawing me roughly after him into the breast of the shrubbery owl.

  “Everything is close to perfect,” Alfric crowed. “I was late to the tournament, so I did not have to join the lists against anyone who would of mangled me in the first place. Then it turns out that the Knight who wins and I’m planning to be the squire for is a crook and did not win at all, and for a while I’m even madder at you because you kept me from being a squire again. But then I think it’s even better on account of now the tournament don’t matter and the Lady Enid and her inheritance are fair game.”

  “Fair game? What a … romantic way to put it, Alfric”

  “That’s up to you,” my brother hissed. “You’re better at putting things than I am. You tell me what to say underneath the Lady Enid’s window. You play the lute and sing like you was me.

  “If you don’t,” Alfric said, flatly and casually, “I am going to kill you.”

  As we had grown up in the tunnels and chambers of the moat house, each of us had dreamed of killing the other, I am sure. I can speak with authority that I often went woolgathering over Alfric’s untimely death. I would fancy it at night as I lay in my chambers, or in the daytime in my secret place behind the hearth of the great hall.

  It usually involved large, hungry animals with fangs.

  But we were too old for the old threats, the bluster of “I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you” that underscored our militant childhoods. This time, Alfric might mean it.

  “You better do good, Weasel,” Alfric whispered.

  He loosened his grip and pushed me completely into the belly of the owl. He dusted himself off, then licked his fingers and ran them through his hair like a grotesque, makeshift comb. He stepped into a clearing in the topiary, lit dimly by the stars and the firelight from Enid’s window and other windows on this side of the keep.

  I was allowed to woo, but from the wings only.

  “Hello, Lady Enid,” Alfric called up to the window. He looked back to me at once for advice or approval.

  “Wonderful!” I whispered from the belly of the owl.

  Alfric smiled stupidly and turned back to his courtship.

  A small sound rose from the window—a muffled sound that I took as laughter, but Alfric, buoyed by what he thought was his own silver tongue, no doubt took as a sigh of adoration.

  But he had no idea what to say next. He stepped away from the window, looked at me, panic-stricken.

  I scrambled out from under the owl’s wing, hoping to put shadows between me and my broth
er—shadows through which I could escape and return to my quarters. That way I could be at peace, and Alfric—well, Alfric could pursue the courtship of his lifetime with what talents he had. Left to his own charm and resources, my brother might make a four-hundred-year-old curse seem attractive.

  Overhead, slate gray clouds scudded over the moons and shaded and shifted the light around us.

  Alfric followed me, losing me only a moment behind the light blue needles of an enormous aeterna jay. He found me again soon enough, catching sight of me as I turned to run and finally cornering me against a larick nest of sparrows, who rustled and dropped their berries when Alfric grabbed me by the shoulders and began to shake me pleadingly.

  “You don’t know how hard it is to be the eldest, Weasel, to have so many responsibilities fall into your lap simply because you’re the first one out. You have to put up with everything from your younger brothers—mysticism, theft, bad opinions—and you have to do so with a smile because you are the oldest and it has fallen into your lap to put up with those things.”

  “Stop shaking me, Alfric.”

  “Shut up. I listened to you long and often. But did anyone ever look out for Alfric? Did anyone ever ask what would please Alfric?”

  “Well, I …”

  “Shut up.” His voice was a little too loud. He paused, looked around. “I’m tired of always seeing to the needs of others, of being the concerned big brother. What I would rather do is to win some attention on my own, for once to do something for myself and only for myself.”

  A look of pain and fear passed over his face. The scene would have been pathetic had I not known that Alfric’s every waking moment since childhood had been devoted to doing things for himself and only for himself.

  “And you are going to help me, little brother. You and your words and mischief and petty larceny,” Alfric gloated, breaking a branch from the larick and waving it irritatingly under my nose. The sharp, minty smell of the red needles almost made me sneeze.

  “You see,” Alfric continued, “I am going to step back into that clearing, back by the wall of the keep, where I will be in full view of the Lady Enid. From there I can pay court to her. Make me up a poem to say to her, Weasel.”

  Suddenly he dragged me by my collar back beneath Enid’s window, where he held me at arm’s length, dangling in the midst of a juniper nightingale, a rather woolly overgrown thing crouched beneath one of the taller pear trees.

  I took refuge while Alfric stood in the clearing, in partial view, romanced by moonlight and shadows. He stood there—and I dangled there—for a good minute of silence, until I realized he was waiting for Enid to come to the window.

  “She’s not going to show, Alfric, unless you let her know that you’re out here.”

  I choked and coughed as my collar tightened. Still he suspended me among the evergreens.

  “Return to the window, my lady,” I whispered.

  “What?”

  “ ‘Return to the window, my lady.’ That’s your first line.” I grabbed a branch in the midst of the shrub and, settling part of my weight upon it, took some of the pressure off my neck.

  “I don’t understand,” Alfric muttered. One hand held me even more tightly among the needles and the branches while the other scratched his head.

  “You wanted a poem, Alfric. I am obliging you with the first line.”

  “I forgot what it was.”

  “ ‘Return to the window, my lady,’ damn it!”

  “ ‘Return to the window, my lady, damn it!’ ” he called aloud beneath Enid’s window. There was silence. A faint light shook deep in the chambers, glancing off the uppermost branches of the tree. Alfric looked toward me, awaiting the next line. I dangled and composed rapidly.

  “While the garden dances with light.”

  “What?”

  “Your second line,” I explained. “ ‘While the garden dances with light.’ ”

  “You sure she will want to hear about a garden?” Alfric whispered. “Don’t girls want to hear about themselves?”

  “In a minute, brother,” I replied, sliding away from his hand, crawling into the branches of the nightingale. “Meanwhile, you want to set the mood. It’s what the poets call ‘creating atmosphere.’ ”

  Alfric stared into the shrubbery bird, looking long and mistrustfully for me. Finally he gave up, turned back to the window, spoke aloud.

  “ ‘While the garden dances with light.’ ”

  A stifled sound descended from the chamber window.

  Laughter? Who could tell?

  I composed for a moment in silence, then prompted my brother.

  “While the moon glides low in the evening sky, borne aloft in the hands of the night.”

  “What?”

  “For Huma’s sake, Alfric, open your ears and listen to what you’re saying! It’s not Quivalen Sath, but it does for topiary romance!”

  He turned, faced the window, and spoke loudly.

  “While the moon gets low in the evening, and something happens at night.”

  I didn’t think the line was that bad, but it turned poisonous in Alfric’s translation.

  “Great, Alfric,” I spat. “That’s just magnificent. You couldn’t win Lexine the cook’s daughter with a display of oratory like that!”

  All of a sudden, from the recesses of Enid’s room above us came a scream, loud and frightful and filled with desperation. After the scream died, the keep and the orchard about it were terribly silent.

  In astonishment Alfric pulled me from the nightingale. He and I stared at one another—that stupid, childhood stare that comes when you have broken something, when you stand there in the aftermath, trying to figure each other: “Is he trustworthy enough that we can conspire in silence?” or “Is he stupid enough that I can blame him entirely for this?”

  As we stared, a long silence settled in the shrubbery and shadows around us. The orchard birds that had not grown quiet at Alfric’s poetry grew quiet now at the sound of screaming above them.

  For above us came the sounds of movement, commotion, and through it all continual screams.

  I started for the keep wall, somehow intending to scale it, to vault in Enid’s window …

  But Alfric’s hand restrained me. My brother crashed back into the shrubbery nightingale, drawing me with him.

  It was this bird that swallowed us—my brother and me—just as Enid’s window filled with shadows. Concealed beneath the shrubbery’s overgrown wings, we watched as if paralyzed as a core of darkness rose out of the large keep window, and as that darkness moved rapidly down the wall.

  Across the courtyard it moved, quick in the light of the moons. But neither the red nor the white light could enter its thickness, its opaqueness. Its surface was pocked and dappled like molten wax doused with cold water.

  From within it I thought I heard screams.

  I struggled with the green, fragrant branches around me. Once again I tried to break free of my brother, to storm the keep and rescue the damsel in distress as any good Knight in any old story would be bound to do. But Alfric only clutched me tighter, drawing his knife again and pressing it uncomfortably against my ribs. It was refreshing not to be the most cowardly Pathwarden.

  In the shifting light of the moons I saw the shadow rush rapidly toward the gate, and two shouting guardsmen move almost as quickly in a desperate effort to cut it off.

  The shadow gathered speed, as though something within it were guiding it, propelling it with an increasing sense of will and of urgency. It struck them with a sharp wet sound, and they fell over.

  Their screams were unspeakable.

  It was then I heard the screams once more, cascading from the window above me. They were no longer stifled, but muffled somehow, as if whoever was screaming was a great distance away and the sound was reaching me from afar and far too late.

  Gradually the shadow grew smaller and smaller as it passed through the gate in the outer walls of the castle and from there moved toward the plains,
in what direction I had no idea.

  “Alfric!” I called aloud. There was no sound behind me but that of branches breaking, of sobbing, of something large and clumsy crashing away into the darkness.

  “Damn it!” I muttered, and turned to follow my brother. I was stopped by the screams from above me.

  When I remember it, it seems the most foolish thing I had done, at least until then. Why, helping the Scorpion steal the armor seemed like an act of genius next to this.

  I grabbed the trellised vines against the wall of the tower and climbed up to the Lady Enid’s window, where I heaved myself over the sill and toppled inside.

  Dannelle di Caela lay screaming, bound on the bed, a vacancy beyond terror on her face. It was clear to me now that the Lady Enid was being carried from Castle di Caela in shadows, toward what murky destination and for what reason only the gods knew.

  But I knew that somewhere in the days ahead the Scorpion would make good his most deadly threat.

  It was all I could do to get to the base of the southeast tower, more than I could do to climb the stairs that encircled it from the outside. Nonetheless, I climbed the stairs, stopping to gain my breath twice, three times, wondering how Mariel di Caela ever got all those cats to this altitude, and filled with a rising sense of despair that despite climbing a topless tower, I would not see what I hoped so devoutly to see.

  I was nearly to the top of the southeast tower when the spiraling stairwell gave me a view of the plains to the east of the castle. I stood on tiptoe, squinted, and cast my gaze to the limits of the horizon.

  Where the red light of Lunitari shone on a dark shadow moving quickly toward the Throtyl Gap. And beyond to the gods knew where.

  PART III

  To the Scorpion’s Nest

  Nine after two the Sign of the Owl,

  the old watcher, facing all ways,

  Sailor in the perplexing night,

  where countries burn and vanish, never were,

  Seeing ahead of him, seeing behind him

  where the possible ranges in firelight.

  —The Calantina II:IX

  CHAPTER 16