Hulking like an ogre, smelling of pork and port, Brother Alfric paused, reeling, on the second floor landing. Shading his eyes with one meaty hand, he squinted down the hall in my direction.
“You again, Weasel? I just saw you on the stairway.”
By the way, he calls me Weasel, if you haven’t guessed. “Galen” means “Weasel” in Old Solamnic, and Alfric has other reasons—unfair reasons—of his own.
“The old gallon distemper,” I explained, referring to his wine-slanted vision. “How is your guest enjoying his stay?” I continued, my voice full of sweetness and brotherly affection—as best I could imitate, at least. But it had dawned on Alfric that I was hovering about the guest chambers door in a way that I should not be hovering. Lumbering up the hall he came, his fists clenched, promising mayhem.
“What was you trying to do to that lock, little brother?”
“I’m not here, Alfric. You just saw me on the stairway, remember? What you see before you is a resinous vision, the dregs of the wine.”
I never claimed to have planned this all too well. But he stopped at that and puzzled it out for a moment. Meanwhile I scrambled to my feet, backed away from him, and kept talking.
“Brother dear, even as I speak there are mysteries milling about this moat house, endangering all of us.”
It sounded good.
“Endangering you above all others. For you are to be the squire of a certain reputable Knight whose . . . belongings may be at jeopardy this very evening.”
Alfric paused in his unsteady charge, hiccupped, and stared at me in stupid puzzlement. If he came after me, he would have the stones—and probably the whole story—in an instant. Would probably drub me senseless in exchange.
My visitor would return, would find the the armor still locked away behind a door thrice bolted. Would ask for his stones back, which I would not have.
Would dance in my skin.
I kept talking, quickly, desperately, dancing through memory, through invention, through downright lies.
“Brother, only now when I was at the finishing touches to your quarters . . . there flitted a dark shape in and out of the shadows in the courtyard.”
“A servant?” Alfric had stopped, panting and leaning against the wall of the corridor. His ragged red hair clung sweatily to his forehead: when Sir Bayard had sworn to whip him into shape, the noble Solamnic had admitted it was “a monstrous undertaking.”
“Servants don’t flit in and out of shadows, Alfric. Burglars do.”
“Burglars?”
“And what is there around this backwater moat house worth the burgling?”
Alfric stared at me questioningly.
“Sir Bayard’s armor, damn it!” I shouted, then lowered my voice, afraid that the noise would carry downstairs. “Coming down to get you would have raised a stir, perhaps for nothing. But I had to know that the armor was safe, especially since it had been entrusted to my dear brother’s safekeeping, and if he lost it. . . well, his squirehood—your squirehood, Alfric—would be delayed even longer than . . . ill fortune . . .”
“And politics . . . ,” Alfric interrupted, sliding down the corridor wall to a sitting position.
“And politics . . . have delayed it already.”
I could not resist reminding him that a twenty-one-year-old squire was a bit grotesque, like our ancient tutor Gilean-dos sending flowers, sonnets, and scandalous proposals to Elspeth, our twenty-year-old milkmaid.
“You expect me to believe that? Expect me to believe that even if there is a burglar, he could get in past them locks and all our servants and the dogs?”
“Look at our servants, Alfric. Look at our dogs. This castle is wide open to any secondstory man who crawls out of our own private swamp down the road. The servants themselves are always complaining of missing pennies, missing baubles and beads.”
“Some of that’s you, Galen.”
“And some you. But we both know our petty thievery doesn’t add up around here. There’s more that slips through the cracks than slips through the cracks, if you catch my meaning.”
I’m not sure he did, but his dimwitted face fell.
“About this burglar?”
“Outside before the bell struck ten.”
“A dark shape?”
“Flitting in and out of the shadows, Alfric. A burglar if I ever saw one.”
My eldest brother curled up on the floor of the hall, jamming his head between his knees.
“Oh, little brother! What shall I do?”
This was better. I looked at Alfric, then down to the window at the opposite end of the hall. Outside I could hear the call of a cuckoo as it settled somewhere for the night—probably in another bird’s nest, where it would lay its egg and fly on under cover of darkness, as the old legends said, leaving its young to the kindness of a robin, a nightingale, one of the pretty singers who would raise the croaking infant as its own.
“All isn’t lost, Alfric. After all, the armor may still be in the room.”
He looked up at me hopefully, his big gap-toothed grin awash in the torchlight. I thanked the gods that the brains that ran in the family had never run after him.
“So first of all, we should check to see that the armor is there.”
I looked back to the door, and in a sudden rush Alfric was on me. I was slammed against the wall and hung there, feet dangling helplessly in the corridor. A strong hand gripped my throat, another tangled less than lovingly in my hair.
“You better not be up to nothing, Weasel.”
I began to weep, flatter, lie.
“Please, please, Brother, don’t throttle the baby of the family! I know you’re a good man, you’re going to be a fine squire and an even finer Knight! Remember, Father had younger brothers, all of whom survived well into adulthood! He’s come to consider that a family tradition.”
Alfric took the hint. His grip slackened, and I took courage.
“Of course I’m not up to anything. No need to borrow trouble, Brother. The worry and the confusion and the running around headless will come soon enough if there’s no armor in this room.”
Alfric let me drop and was on his knees by the door in a moment, knife in hand and gouging where I had left off gouging.
“Alfric?”
“Shut up, Weasel.” The irritating and frantic sound of metal on metal as the knife slid through the lock. I looked down the hall. Nobody there.
“Alfric, the reason you’re so essential in this is that you have the keys to the room on your belt.”
After fumbling with keys and locks for a while, we gained entry to the guest chambers which tonight were to house the most ingenious of Solamnic swordsman. It was the most richly appointed room in the moat house, Father being a zealot about hospitality: each wall was hung with tapestries, the enormous bed was covered with goose down blankets, and the fire blazed cheerily.
It was not a room for misdeed.
Alfric charged in ahead of me, lurching in a drunken panic toward the standing closet; I hovered behind him, thinking frantically of explanations I could summon if Sir Bayard Brightblade were to walk in the door and find us burrowing in his belongings.
Thinking frantically of how I might proceed from here.
Alfric stumbled once, grabbed the doors of the closet, and pulled. Of course they were locked. Of course the key was on the ring at his belt, and of course he had forgotten it, too, in the anxiety and wine. Inside the closet, the armor rattled like a ghost in an old story.
You can see a miracle coming for miles if you only pay attention. It all added up—the recklessness, the jostling, the heavy armor in the closet. After my brother had fumbled with the keys a long and distressing moment, one fit into the lock. With his considerable brute strength, Alfric yanked at the door, which flew open readily.