Eaglethorpe Buxton and the Elven Princess (2 page)

I turned and leveled a kick at the side wall
through which crack I had but a moment before been peering. One of
the boards flew off, landing in the snow six or seven feet away and
leaving an opening almost big enough for the boy to pass through. I
kicked a second board off the side of the structure and I was
outside in a jiffy. Turning around, I reached through to aid my
companion’s escape.

“Come along orphan,” said I.

I pulled the boy out through the hole that I
had created and into the deep snow that had formed in a drift
beside the shack. He almost disappeared, as he couldn’t have been
more than four foot ten.

“Grab the back of my belt,” said I. “I will
guide you. The first thing we must do is find my noble steed.”

“The stable is on the other side of the Inn,
just beyond the cart path.”

“Very good. Come along. I am sure that the
noise of our escape was heard and any moment I may have to fight
off a dozen or so angry villagers with pitchforks and such.”

“Do you have a weapon?” asked the boy.

“I have a knife in my boot, but I would be
loath to stick it into a person over such a thing as this.”

“They deserve it,” said the boy, now
trailing along behind me as I negotiated my way around the
buildings in the gloomy night. “If my father was here, he’d lay
waste to this town.”

“Quite the fierce cobbler was he?”

“Um… yes. Before he died...leaving me an
orphan.”

I trudged through the snow around the large
building that I now knew was the inn and crossed the cart path,
distinguishable from the rest of the landscape by two parallel ruts
in which the snow was not quite as deep as everywhere else. I
perceived no danger from any direction and indeed could still hear
the voices of men and women singing in the inn. The stable, which I
would have recognized even without the orphan’s help, was dark and
silent. The pleasant aroma of horse dung enveloped me as the slight
breeze turned in my direction. I crept up to the large double door
and pulled one side open slightly.

“Hysteria,” I called in a whisper and was
answered by a gentle knicker, which is to say the sound that horses
make when they are neither angry nor excited nor otherwise
engaged.

Inside the stable was pitch black, and I
cast around for a lantern, but the lad needed no such artifice.

“I see your horse in the last stall,” said
he.

“You have very good night vision, orphan,”
said I.

The little ragamuffin guided me by the hand
to the far stall and by the time we arrived there I could make out
the more prominent shapes including that of Hysteria, which is to
say my horse, who tossed her head in greeting.

“Poor girl,” said I, running my hands over
her. “They didn’t even bother to unsaddle you or remove your bit
and bridle.”

“All the better for us and our escape,” said
the boy.

I led Hysteria out of the stall, through the
dark of the stable, and into the lesser dark of the night. It was
in fact, quite a good night for traveling, at least as far as light
was concerned. The moon was reflected off the white snow, and
though the ghostly illumination created monsters of the many gaunt
and gnarled trees, they were easily negotiated through. This put me
in mind of a number of similar nights, when the moon was shining
upon the snow. It seems somehow unfair that I more than most find
myself sneaking in or out of town on cold, dark nights. I am not
one to complain about my lot in life though. Then at that moment,
as if to remind me that the lot of others was worse than my own,
the boy tugged at my sleeve.

“What are you doing?” said he.

“I am pondering life,” I replied.

“Can you ponder life once we’ve made our
escape from this wretched town?”

“Quite so,” said I, placing my foot in the
stirrup. Once I was in the saddle, I reached down for my charge.
“Come along orphan.”

“In some circles it might be considered rude
to keep calling me an orphan,” he opined.

“Your parents are dead and so you are an
orphan,” said I, lifting him up to sit behind me. “If I call you
something else, your parents will still be dead.”

“Even so,” he agreed. “Let us get out of
here.”

“Not until we make this town pay for its
injustice and our indignities,” said I.

I spurred Hysteria forward, though truth be
told I did not spur her precisely because I do not wear spurs.
Spurs seem unnecessarily mean and pointed and Hysteria is possessed
of something of a fragile ego. If one speaks harshly too her, she
is likely to go into a mope for weeks on end and jabbing her
haunches or belly with pointy metal objects could send her into a
serious downward spiral of depression. It would be a sad thing to
see. So I encouraged her forward. I urged her forward. I coaxed her
forward. I asked her to go forward and she went forward, which now
that I think about it, is the direction that she is usually most
likely to go.

I guided her through the snow, across the
cart path, and around the corner of the inn to the spot where upon
I had first been laid hold of. I fully expected that the pie I had
originally seen would by now be gone. As cold as the weather was,
the pie would have gone from hot to warm to cool to quite cold in
the time that I had spent escaping from the shack and rescuing my
valiant steed, which is to say Hysteria. I was not wrong. The pie
was gone. But Ho! There were now two new pies sitting on the very
same window ledge.

Sitting astride Hysteria as I was, the pies
were now at a level between my shoulder and my waist, and I could
easily look inside the window. A fat woman with red cheeks and red
hair and wearing a white apron was rolling out dough with a rolling
pin. She was too busy to notice me. That was not the case with the
stout fellow that at that moment entered from the common room
beyond. He caught sight of me and let out a yell that could have,
and in fact did, summon everyone in the place. The sounds of
singing stopped as others rushed to see the source of his
consternation.

“Let this be a lesson to you not to waylay
innocent travelers!” I shouted, scooping up the pies, one in each
hand. I urged Hysteria onward, but no doubt feeling the warm air
exiting the window, she was loath to move. The orphan fixed that by
slapping her on the backside, her fragile ego notwithstanding. She
jumped and shot around to the front of the inn just as the gang of
toughs from inside came out the front door. They were just in time
to watch us race off into the darkness with two warm and steamy
pies.

When we were not two hundred yards down the
road, I let Hysteria drop to a trot, for in truth I did not expect
anyone to follow us into the night, daring wild animals, bandits,
or hobgoblins regardless of how fine a pie smith Mistress Gaston
was reported to be. A few hundred yards beyond that, my horse
dropped of her own accord to a walk and I expect she was beginning
to feel a bit mopey because of the slap the orphan had dealt her.
At that moment I was less interested in her mental condition than
my own physical one though, because I was holding a cast pie pan in
each hand and they were both heavy and still quite warm.

“Here.” I turned in the saddle and handed
one pie to the orphan. “We can eat while we ride. If we wait until
we find a campsite, the pies will be cold.”

“Do you have a fork?” the boy asked.

I mused that this seemed an unlikely request
from any boy, most of whom I have found uninterested in tableware
on the best occasion, and especially from an orphan whom one might
have supposed to have been forced by necessity to dig into all
manner of food scraps with his hands. However it was not a question
to which I needed reply in the negative, for I always carry a fork
in the inner left breast pocket of my coat, which I call my fork
pocket. I gave the orphan my fork and pulled my knife from my boot
to use on the remaining pie.

“This is a very nice fork,” said the
orphan.

“Of course it is,” said I. “That fork came
from the table of the Queen of Aerithraine herself.”

“You stole this fork from a Queen?”

“Impudent whelp!” cried I. “That fine fork
was a gift from the queen, with whom I once had the pleasure of
spending a fortnight.”

“What kind of queen gives a man a fork?”

“A kind and gracious one.”

That apparently satisfied the boy’s
curiosity for the moment and for the next few minutes we
concentrated upon the pies. I am not one to mourn a lost pie and
that is well, for the pie that was lost to me on that night, as I
have previously mentioned, was a pie for the ages. A fine pie. A
beautiful pie. A wonderful pie. This new pie was almost as good
though. It was a crabapple pie, which was a common pie to come upon
in winter in those parts, which is to say Brest, as cooks used the
crabapples they had put up the previous fall. This pie was an
uncommonly good pie, with nutmeg and cinnamon and cloves and
butter. I had more than a few bites by the time the boy spoke
again.

“What kind of pie is that?”

“Crabapple,” I replied. “What pie do you
have?”

“It is a meat pie.”

“A meat pie,” I mused, as I thought back
upon how long it had been since I had eaten any other meat than
venison. I had eaten a sausage a week before, but it had been a
fortnight and half again since I had eaten mutton stew with
potatoes and black bread in Hammlintown. That had been a fine stew
and the serving wench who brought it to me had been nice and plump
with the top two buttons of her blouse undone and she had smiled
quite fetchingly when she had set down the tray. Stew is a
wonderful food and even when it is not served by a nice, plump
serving wench with the top two buttons of her blouse undone. It
always seems to give me the same feeling when I eat it that a nice,
plump serving wench with the top two buttons of her blouse undone
gives me when I see her.

“What are you doing now?” asked the
orphan.

“Pondering stew,” said I.

“Well stop it. Rather ponder this instead.
You eat half of your crabapple pie and I will eat half of my meat
pie. Then we can trade and eat the other halves of each others
pies.”

“Alright,” I agreed. “But this will mean
that I have to eat my dessert first and my supper after.”

“Just pretend that the meat pie is your
dessert and the crabapple pie is your supper.”

“A crabapple pie could be a fine supper. In
fact I have been to countries where the most common part of a
supper is crabapple pie.”

“Fine then.”

“But a meat pie is in no country a
dessert.”

“Then trade me now.”

“How much have you eaten?” I asked.

“About a fourth. How much have you
eaten?”

“About a fifth.”

“Then eat another twentieth,” said he. “Then
we will trade pies and each eat two thirds of what remains and then
trade them back. At that point, we will each eat what remains of
the pie we originally started with. That way you can think of the
first portion of the crabapple pie as an appetizer, the portion you
eat of the meat pie as your supper, and the final portion of the
crabapple pie as your dessert.”

“You are a fine mathematician for an
orphan,” said I. “But it suits me. Will it not bother you that your
appetizer and your dessert are of meat pie and your supper is of
crabapple pie?”

“I have decided that I will make this
sacrifice,” said he. “Since it was you that provided the meal.”

“You said that you do not live far from
here,” I mentioned, once we had finished the pies. One might say
the purloined pies, but I would not. I would instead insist that
they rightly belonged to us in recompense for our unjust
confinement.

“That is correct,” said he.

“The pies rightfully belong to us?”

“No. I live not far from here. Are you
carrying on some other conversation in your head about the
pies?”

“Of course not,” I replied. “You are an
orphan.”

“I am well aware of that fact. There is no
need to keep rubbing it in my face.”

“What I mean is you don’t have a proper home
any more now that you are an orphan.”

“Even an orphan may have extended family,”
he explained. “Perhaps I live with them.”

“Do you?”

“One might suppose that I do.”

“One might suppose a great many things,”
said I. “But would it not be better to base our future activities
less on supposition than on actual remembrances?”

“One might suppose we should,” said he.

“You have an odd way of talking,” I
commented. “You don’t quite sound orphanish at all.”

“Really? How many orphans have you
known?”

“Quite a few actually,” I revealed. “The
Queen of Aerithraine…”

“With whom you once had the pleasure of
spending a fortnight.”

“Indeed it is so. The Queen of Aerithraine,
with whom I once had… well, she has a soft spot for orphans. Some
years back she opened an orphanage called Elleena’s House.”

“Is that because her name is Elleena?”

“Why would her name cause her to have a soft
spot for orphans?” I wondered. “No, I believe it is because she was
an orphan herself.”
“No. Is it called Elleena’s House because her name is Elleena? And
how could a queen be an orphan? Doesn’t she have to be a princess?
Or did the King find her in an orphanage and come to sweep her off
her feet? That would be a lovely story.”

“Well, there is no king,” said I.

“Gah!” he exclaimed. “You are the worst
story-teller in the world. You are messing everything up and making
me confused.”

“Forsooth! I am the best story-teller in the
world. I do not expect you to know so, as you are an unfortunate
orphan without any knowledge of the world.” I looked over my
shoulder at his pinched little face. “In truth I was not trying to
tell you the story of the Queen of Aerithraine. If I had, you would
be filled with wonder and excitement. I have made half my fortune
from that story, and a better story, a truer story, a more profound
story; you are not likely to hear in all the days of your life. But
I was not trying to tell that story. I was trying to explain that
the Queen of Aerithraine has a soft spot for orphans. In fact, I
suppose that I do so myself, as I am almost an orphan.”