The Pitchfork of Destiny (6 page)

Nevertheless, it seemed inevitable that he would ride forth to battle the beast, so Charming's thoughts naturally turned to the far more important question of what he would wear. Unfortunately, there his confidence was not what it once was. He was not at all certain what condition his questing clothing was in, and as he made his way back to the cottage, he came to the sudden, horrible realization that even if they had been properly pressed before being packed away, they would definitely be so
last year
.

When he finally joined the siblings, it was over a melancholy meal, during which Will mumbled incoherently about what had transpired at Castle White, and Charming worried over how he was going to brave being seen on an actual quest in out-­of-­date clothes. Besides being distracted over the age-­old question of cape or hood, trying to focus on Will's story was not helped by the fact that, to Charming's mind, Will was a terrible storyteller. His descriptions were lacking and his word choices abysmal. But, as they pieced the tale together, Charming's mood began to rise.

The behavior Volthraxus exhibited, and particularly the note he had left behind, seemed to confirm the stories about him, that he was a creature that understood the proper forms. The dragon would, of course, take every opportunity to kill anyone coming to slay him, but he would probably treat Elle quite well and would certainly not raise a claw against her until he could face Will or Will's appointed hero. Charming tried to explain this as they ate, leaving out the fact that the King's champion would almost certainly die, but Will was in no mood to hear reason. After a time, Charming sunk into his own brooding silence as he thought about what he would need to pack.

The hat will have to be discarded, but my old jacket was definitely fashion forward,
he reminded himself.
A few alterations to the cuffs and collars, and I might be able to get away with it.

By the end of dinner, Will was asleep in his chair. Charming, on the other hand had mentally addressed every issue that he was liable to face except for the insoluble ones like how to prevent a full-­grown dragon from boiling one before you have time to parley for the release of its prisoner and the fact that he lacked a valet and would have to buff his own boots for the entire length of the quest. Liz interrupted these troubling thoughts as Will began to snore beside him.

“Edward, help me with him,” whispered Liz.

Charming carried Will to the guest bedroom. Liz began unlacing the sleeping King's breeches and vest while Charming held him upright.

“What are you doing? That is the King!” whispered Charming.

“Yes, he is.” She sighed. “But, he is also my little brother, and he has exhausted himself with grief, Charming. Don't forget that. He has never had to face what he is facing now, and we have no idea how he is likely to react or what he is likely to attempt.”

After they had tucked him in, Liz gently smoothed her brother's hair and sang him a lullaby.

“Poor, Elle,” Liz said with a sad shake of her head. “She must be so afraid. In the morning, when we are all fresh, we can come up with a plan. Tonight, we need to get some sleep. Hopefully, Will's guard and his wits will catch up with him tomorrow. Even if they don't, we have to find a way to convince him that rushing after Elle isn't going to save her. I remember the last dragon, Charming. If this new dragon is anything like that one, then no man can face it.”

He did not argue, and they rose and left the King to sleep in peace.

They went to bed, and although Liz fell asleep, Charming lay awake thinking about her last words as the moonlight traced strange patterns on the ceiling. She was wrong, of course. Any man could face a dragon. In fact, it was trivially easy. The trick he reflected was in not worrying overmuch about the outcome. He used to be a master at not worrying. He wondered if he still could. He fell asleep with the question still echoing in his mind.

H
e woke a few hours later to find a large, callused, and meaty hand clamped over his mouth. Charming was slightly alarmed to see a shadowy Will leaning over him.

“Shhh,” whispered Will, slowly removing his hand. “Come with me.”

Still half-­asleep, Charming did as he was instructed, shutting the door quietly behind him so as not to wake Liz.

Will was dressed and had his sword belted to his side. A few candles had been lit in the kitchen, and they threw a wavering light about the room. “Get dressed,” said Will, indicating a pile of Charming's work clothing sitting on a chair.

Though the cobwebs were still thick in his mind, Charming knew that whatever was happening was a bad idea, particularly if Will had any intention of sending him out in those clothes. “Wait,” he said. “What are we doing?”

“Isn't it obvious? I've saddled both horses. We are leaving,” said Will.

“No, Will, we should wait until daylight. If you insist on going, I'll wake Liz. Besides, I would never wear that shirt with those tights.”

He half turned to go back to the bedroom.

“No, you won't,” ordered Will, placing a hand on the hilt of his sword.

Charming was now awake, and the edge of anger pawed at him. “Will, brother or not, please don't threaten me in my own home. I place a high value on hospitality.”

“I'm not
threatening
you, Charming. I'm
telling
you not to wake her,” Will said, his voice assuming a measure of command that Charming was unaccustomed to. “This I do not as your brother or friend, but as your King. You will journey with me, and
you
will teach
me
how to kill the dragon.”

In that instant, Charming was no longer Edward Charming the man, but Edward Charming the boy, and he faced his father, King Rupert. Years of memories and training flooded through him and warred in his breast against what he knew was right. In the end, his duty to his King and kingdom won. This was not his brother-­in-­law. It was King William, giving him a Royal Command.

It was only later when Charming was dressing himself in a set of appropriate clothes—­he had been unyielding on this point at least—­that something else King William had said struck him. He had said that Charming would teach
Will
how to kill the dragon. Suddenly, Charming felt sick as he realized what it was Will was really asking.

As Charming slipped on his last boot, he asked as casually as he could, “Your Majesty, what do you intend my role to be in this quest?”

“You are going to be my squire,” Will said brightly.

It was like a slap in the face, and Charming physically recoiled as though Will had struck him. Fortunately, Will did not seem to notice his reaction, and turning about, began picking up his pack. As Charming went through the motions of finishing his preparations, he recalled his own former squire, Tomas. He lapsed into a silence as he reevaluated both his relationship to Will and also his past treatment of Tomas and the many others who had served him.

“Are you ready?” asked Will.

Charming bit his lip and nodded. He was at the door taking one last look at the little cottage when he realized he could not leave Liz without a word. He turned back and grabbed a scrap of paper and a quill from a small writing table near the fireplace.

“What are you doing?” Will asked irritably from the door.

“I am leaving a note for Liz.”

“No,” Will said, and, crossing the room, seized the quill from him. “I don't want her following us.”

“I understand,” Charming said, and grabbed at his arm to keep him from taking the quill. “But if I don't leave her a note, I assure you, she will follow us. And when she finds us, she'll be furious. More than that, Will, we are going to face a dragon, and I do not want to leave anything unsaid between us.”

Will's expression turned down. Perhaps it was the thought of his angry older sister that made him hesitate, or perhaps it was the memory of all the things he wished that he could have said to Elle before she was taken, but whatever the reason, Will sighed, “Okay, go ahead.”

Charming quickly scrawled a note to Liz.

My dearest Liz, your brother, the King, means to face the dragon and has ordered me away with him. I swear to you that I will do everything in my power to return him home to you. I will always love you. Edward.

He placed it on the mantel behind one of the figurines Liz kept there. Will was in the open door shifting impatiently from foot to foot. “We must go,” he said.

“My King, where do we start?”

“North. The beast is the Great Dragon of the North, so that's where we are going. North.”

Charming opened his mouth to ask another question, but Will cut him off with a gesture. He stared at Charming, and said sternly, “On this quest, I must insist that you follow my lead, Charming. We must rescue Elle. I will not argue the point.”

Charming nodded, but his insides were empty. Charming was not on a quest with Will. Charming was on a quest with King William, who had lost his bride-­to-­be almost on the eve of their wedding. With a heart full of dread, Charming left the cottage with King William. Using a lantern to light their way, the two men slowly rode away to the north, past the newly churned earth of Charming's field, leaving Elizabeth dreaming on her pillow.

 

CHAPTER 3

A TEMPEST AND A TEAPOT

I
n fairy stories, most heroines are demure and proper. They sigh when appropriate, swoon when necessary, and never, ever, are given to complaint—­unless, of course, they are forced to sleep on anything but the finest pea-­less eiderdown, then all bets are off.

When she woke the morning after Will's arrival, Liz felt nothing like those fairy-­tale ladies. She was angry with Will, furious at Charming, her stomach was tied in knots, and as for being demure, that was right out. For at least an hour after waking, she stomped around the house, retching into a bucket and swearing like a sailor. But it would not be fair to judge Liz too harshly for her unfairy-­tale-­ladylike behavior. She had her fair share of reasons.

Reason one became apparent to her almost as soon as she opened her eyes. She rolled over to find an empty spot in the bed where Charming usually lay. This was not alarming in itself, but when she turned the other way and found her bedside table also bereft of her customary morning breakfast, she knew that something was wrong. Charming had, from the first morning of their marriage, always made sure that she had a little pot of tea, freshly cut flowers (usually lavender), some bread, and a pot of sweet jam to eat. This morning there was nothing. In an instant, she felt her heart empty with fear and her stomach churn violently. Charming was gone.

There was a part of her that wanted to go back to sleep, and not just because the room seemed to be spinning in a peculiarly sickening way, but because she simply did not want to face the cold loneliness of her empty house. However, she was Elizabeth Charming, and avoiding difficult, maddening, infuriating truths was simply not what she did. So, she rose and did the only thing that she could do. She made herself a pot of tea.

It was over her second cup of chamomile, after she had settled her stomach and confirmed that indeed two horses were missing from the barn, that a second reason for being angry suddenly occurred to her. Charming had lied. He had looked her in the eyes and agreed to help her stop Will from leaving. This realization led to a storm of profanity that turned an entire flock of bluebirds red from blushing and also led to her dashing the entire tea set against the fireplace, one satisfying piece at a time.

It was while waiting for a new pot of tea, literally a new pot as the old one had been smashed to bits, to steep properly that the third and final reason for her anger was revealed. She had been sweeping up the fragments of her tantrum from the hearth when she found Charming's note, standing on the mantelpiece and tucked discreetly behind a little ornament of a cheeky dwarf, or as the dwarves had called them when they gave her a set of these figures, “merchandising.” She read Charming's brief letter and gave a cry of frustration and anger. From the tone of his writing, it appeared that Charming knew full well that Will was out of his senses, that his desire to hunt down the dragon was both ill considered and ill conceived, and yet he had still been fool enough to follow her mad little brother. This was the last straw. What was left of her self-­control broke.

It was during the resulting invective-­laced tirade against her absent sibling and husband that Charming's old squire, Tomas, arrived. She had just snatched up a particularly smug figurine of her dwarf friend/tormentor Grady and was going to hurl it against the wall when she saw the man, scruffy and misshapen as ever, staring at her through the open door of the cottage, with the biggest grin she had ever seen him wear stretched across his face.

“Don't mind me,” he said in his characteristic rasp. “I was just taking notes for the next time I need to talk to my local clergy.” He chuckled, a deep and throaty laugh, at his own joke.

Liz had never been happier to be laughed at in her life. She put the statuette of Grady down, rushed across the room, and, throwing her arms around Tomas's neck, began sobbing violently.

“There, there, Lady Charming, no need for all that,” he said while thumping her back solidly like he was trying to burp her.

“But . . . but . . .” she said gasping for air, “but Edward has left me.”

“I don't believe it,” Tomas said in a gentle growl. “He was never that smart, but he couldn't be that much of a fool. I mean look at you . . .” He pulled her away from him and cast his eyes up and down. “You may have put on a ­couple of pounds, but your figure is still fine. I ask you, what more could a man need?”

The cheekiness of this comment was shocking enough that it gave Liz a chance to gain the upper hand on her emotions. Clucking her tongue in indignation, she pulled a handkerchief from her pocket and wiped the tears from her eyes.

Dignity somewhat restored, she said, “No, you old fool, he and my idiot brother have gone off to track down this dragon.”

Tomas glowered at this news. “I was afraid of that. I told Alain as soon as the King gave us the slip that we should've come straight here, but he wanted to follow ‘procedure.' Bah!”

“So you didn't meet him . . .” she started to ask, but then stopped and exclaimed with wide-­eyed disbelief, “Wait, Alain has a ‘procedure' for this? How often do you lose kings anyway?”

Tomas went red in the face and muttered something about “affairs of state” and “complicated,” but quickly lapsed into silence under Liz's glare.

They stood a moment without speaking, both frowning, lost in whatever dark thoughts their minds had constructed. Liz recovered first. A sly gleam crept into her eyes. “Well, how rude of me. I can't leave you standing in the door. Come in, come in.”

She took his arm and led him to the table in the kitchen, where she had set out her second-­best tea set. She moved her thankfully unused vomit bucket aside and grabbed a second cup. “Have a seat. I was just planning how I was going to track down Charming and Will when you arrived.”

Tomas looked at her sideways with suspicion. “Oh, is that what you were doing? Well, if the speech I heard is any part of this plan, then I feel sorry for those fellows.”

Liz ignored this barb and took a demure sip of tea. “Yes, well, now that you are here, we can decide on our next steps together.”

“ ‘We' and ‘our' and ‘together,' ” he repeated, emphasizing each word. “I am honored to be made part of your war council, Liz, but . . .”

“No buts, Tomas,” she interrupted sharply. “I am sick and tired of ‘buts.' Besides, there's nothing you can do to stop me from going after them unless you want to stay here in the cottage and sit on me, which, I would remind you, would require you to abandon your own search permanently, because as soon as you leave, I'll follow, even if I have to do it alone and on foot.”

“Why . . . why . . . why . . . you're blackmailing me,” Tomas spluttered. “This is extortion, plain and simple. You know I couldn't let you go traipsing off into the wilderness all by yourself. Why the whole idea is . . . is . . .”

Tomas seemed unable to come up with words strong enough to express what he thought the idea was, so he worked his mouth noiselessly and glowered at her. Liz took another, slightly less demure but infinitely smugger sip of tea and did her best to ignore his glares.

Something about the set of her face or the way she held her teacup must have convinced Tomas that there was no use arguing the point because he eventually relented. After swearing that all women were mad as snakes and as aggravating as mules, and adding that Liz was the worst of the lot, he asked, “Fine. What's the plan? Not that Charming ever had a plan to kill the first dragon. He would always just say something like, ‘My good man, we will away to her dark tower there to claim that measure of glory that is my due.' Or some equally meaningless rubbish!”

Liz was silent for a moment, her teacup frozen midway between saucer and lips. The fact was had Tomas asked his question without comment, she would have had no answer, but this last grouse by the man about his days squiring Charming had given her an idea, a most definite idea. She ran to the sitting room, pulled a large, leather-­bound volume down from a shelf, and, sweeping the tea to one side in a great clatter of china and silver, plopped it on the table between them. It was an atlas of Royaume, and she flipped to a well-­thumbed page near the back that showed a detailed map of the southern portion of the kingdom.

She stabbed a finger down at a point in the mountains south of a small valley where a town labeled “Prosper” lay, and said, “We go there.”

Tomas squinted hard at the map, and his face grew white and serious. “What, you mean to the old Dragon Tower? But that dragon is dead.”

“Exactly,” she replied, then stood and began bustling about the kitchen, filling cloth bags with odds of this and ends of that.

Tomas stared at the map for a minute and then, scratching at the scruffy stubble on his neck, said, “I don't understand.”

Not slowing in her feverish packing, Liz asked, “What do we know for certain about this dragon?”

He picked up a tart from among the spilled contents of the tea and said between bites, “Well, that it really hates Will.”

“Perhaps,” she said, pausing for a moment, a loaf of bread in one hand, a jar of pickled preserves in the other, and a wistful look on her face. “But we know for certain is that the dragon must have really loved the Wyrm of the South. Where better to act out its final revenge than in the nest of its fallen love?”

Tomas could say nothing to this, and so wisely sat eating a pastry and drinking his tea as Liz made their final preparations.

D
espite the urgency both felt to get going, it was not until midafternoon that Tomas and Liz found themselves slipping out of the cottage gate. It was fortunate that Tomas had brought several fresh horses along with him because Charming and Will had taken the best mounts from the barn, and after examining the one Will had ridden in on the previous day, Tomas declared the beast needed at least a week's rest before it would be fit for any journey, much less a journey of the length they were proposing. So they let the poor creature out into a fenced field of spring grass with Charming's ox, set the chickens and the geese free, and headed off.

On their way down the path, they passed Charming's field, and Liz gazed wistfully at the mad crisscross of furrows and wondered why they had aggravated her so much the previous day when now she would not change a single thing about them.

Tomas grunted. “What happened here? Did a twister hit, a flood, maybe a giant?”

She nodded and laughed. “Something like that, Tomas. Yes, you could say that a Goliath struck.”

By afternoon, they had reached a small road that would lead them in a few days' time to the village of Quaint. It was early spring, and thus far they had traveled little-­used ways dotted by the brilliant green of new growth, and the going was actually quite pleasant, or would have been pleasant had not Liz's nerves kept her, and her stomach, in a state of constant upset. But in Quaint, where the Southern Road to Prosper made its beginning, there seemed to be an unusual number of travelers, and the bustling streets combined with recent rains had turned the town into a quagmire of mud filled with ­people and carts all jostling this way and that, trying desperately to make their way somewhere else.

“Tomas!” Liz shouted over the sea of noise around them. “See if you can find us a room.”

He tipped his cap, dismounted, and maneuvered his way around a pair of families arguing over the contents of their upset handcarts and toward a two-­story building with a high, steep-­pitched roof that had a colorful sign over the door showing a cross-­eyed badger juggling beer bottles. Liz took the horses into a nearby opening between two buildings and watched the ­people pass by. After a few moments, she frowned. There was something frenzied about the way they were moving, and the carts she was seeing were not loaded with goods but with whole households: furniture, clothes, animals, children, and all. With a sudden chill, she realized that this was not just high traffic from a market day or a festival weekend; these ­people were on the run. They were fleeing the dragon.

Tomas returned a few minutes later, stalking his way through the crowds and across the mud-­filled streets with a sour expression on his face.

“I take it there are no rooms?” she asked, still studying the ­people with a frown.

“Oh, there are rooms” he said with a grimace. “If you don't mind selling your soul for one. I'm ashamed to tell you what the landlord of the Drunken Badger wants for a single room for you and a spot in the stalls for me. If his prices are any sign of what things cost around here, it's no wonder everyone is running.”

“It doesn't matter,” she said flipping him a purse of coins. “Go and get us
two
rooms.”

“But, Your Ladyship!” he said in protest.

“No arguing, Tomas,” she said sternly. “I'm tired and sick from camping out on the road, and you are no longer a squire. I will not have you sleep with the horses while I stay warm in a bed.”

Reluctantly, Tomas agreed, mostly because he was also not really keen on sleeping in a tent again if he could help it, but also because an inn promised ale, and in his mind, any promise of ale is a promise that should be kept.

They paid dearly for what appeared to be two closets that had been hastily converted into rooms for them. As for information, their fellow guests had plenty of rumors and gossip to share. According to the ­people they spoke with, who had ALL apparently witnessed at least one dragon attack personally, the beast had been seen raiding farms from Prosper in the south and the village of Modest in the west to the town of Quiet in the north. What was more, the creature seemed to have a bottomless appetite and a particular fondness for fair maidens. In fact, if all the stories she heard were true, Liz was not sure that a fair maiden existed anywhere in Royaume that remained unmolested by the dragon. She was beginning to feel a little left out.