Chapter Six #2
Bait was a lightning rod, and so unwittingly spared the other servants by taking punishments that would have fallen on them.
But she had no use for their pity. The cloying words and kindness of the other servants seemed feigned – if they were really on her side, why would they not join in her war on Offa?
“Offa’s cruel to all of you, too. And everyone knows a pack of hagworms can take down a troll.”
They looked back at her blankly as if that wasn’t a self-evident truth.
“You just need to be good, Eel,” ventured Ysilde. “Don’t make trouble. Didn’t your mother teach you to behave?”
“No.”
The one moment of joy – as bright as a shaft of sunlight through a high window on the upper levels – was when Neb visited.
Neb’s father Gyul was now the village reeve and tax collector.
It was not a position that agreed with him.
Gyul was of a shy and nervous disposition, and the prospect of going to his neighbours and demanding they hand over their share of the taxes was torment to him.
Even worse was the nerve-wracking collection round visiting the outlying farms – a slow cart through the forest, every bump in the dirt track making the cart lurch, the coin bags jingle and Gyul’s bowels quiver.
By the end of the first day, Gyul was reduced to moaning in the back of the cart amid sacks of grain and wheels of cheese, and young Neb was breveted to cart-driver and chief guard, the reins bunched in his little hands and the reeve’s cudgel balanced precariously across his knees.
When they passed through the barbican of the keep and Neb was relieved of both duties and cudgel, he went in search of his friend.
Neb was struck by how poorly Bait’s costume suited her.
When he had first met her in the wood, she’d been dressed in rags and stolen adventuring gear and goblin motley, and that strangeness of garb had rhymed with the strangeness of her manner.
Now she was dressed in a servant’s tunic, her face soot-stained from the cooking fire and hands scrubbed raw from the laundry tub, just like all the other scullions, but he knew her instantly by the way she prowled rather than walked.
They withdrew to Bait’s lair in the pantry. Their conversation was stilted at first.
“It must be nice to live in the kitchen,” said Neb, staring at the sausages and strings of onions hanging from the ceiling.
“I thought they were stalactites. Or spikers.”
“Spiders?”
“Spikers.”
“What’s a spiker?”
He might as well have asked what a raindrop was. “You know. Grey bugs. Sharp shells. They climb up the walls and hang from the ceilings, and if anything walks underneath ’em they drop and squick.”
Neb shuddered.
“You get an iron pot, and you wear it as a helmet and you trick ’em into dropping on you.
Then you fill the pot with water, and boil ’em, and eat the insides.
” She pulled a saucepan from a shelf and waved it under the sausages.
None of them plummeted with homicidal intent, which disappointed her.
“I was going to lure Offa in here, if they were spikers. Your father’s cudgel – can I borrow it? ”
“Why?”
“To kill Offa.”
“You can’t kill Offa!” objected Neb.
“I can! He doesn’t regenerate like a troll, and he’s not armoured or magic or—”
“You shouldn’t kill Offa.”
“Why not? He was mean to me.”
“Because . . .” Neb tried to articulate the rules of the world, how children were subordinate to their elders, peasants to reeves, reeves to knights and barons, barons to .
. . after that it got hazy, but there was a king involved somewhere.
But he was quite certain that murder was forbidden.
“Because murderers get hanged if they’re caught. ”
“Not if you murder someone in a corridor,” said Bait with confidence. “Corridors are fair game. If you go wandering, you deserve what you get.” Offa’s assaults on her in the corridor were, in her mind, perfectly acceptable. But not here in the pantry.
“But this isn’t a dungeon.”
The surface world’s rules were confusing and unspoken. She sighed heavily. “What if I was a princess? If I was a princess, I could have Offa executed, right? By the Rules.”
“Are you a princess?” I don’t know if Neb was humouring Bait, or if she was so outside his frame of reference that he was prepared to consider anything as possible, and if she had declared she was a shapeshifting dragon he would have been equally accepting of the prospect.
“I am. Forgot to tell you, but I’m the daughter of King Arus and he misses me terribly.
He’s spending all his days weeping and is completely disconsolatable.
” Privately, Bait thought that years weeping sounded more soggy than anything else, but Sir Peledon said it important that she take her rightful place at her father’s side.
“Sir Rudyard didn’t believe me, but Sir Peledon told me it was true, and that I should seek out his squire Atten, only Offa won’t let me.
And Sir Peledon’s a greater knight that Rudyard. Or was. He’s a minotaur now.”
“So are you going to the palace?”
She nodded.
Neb frowned. “We came from Crowhaven, and that took months. And Crowhaven’s less than half as far away as the palace.
” In this, he was correct, although more by luck than any grasp of geography.
The king’s palace was just as mythical and impossible to him as any dungeon.
As for Bait, she knew every inch of one small corner of the world, and next to nothing about anything beyond the Dungeon Door.
“I’ll find a way,” said Bait, although she was daunted by the thought of the journey. Underground, a journey of a half-mile implied a vast and winding labyrinth. Travelling hundreds of miles was beyond her conception.
Neb opened his mouth – to offer objection or sage counsel we shall never know – but he was interrupted by the croak of Clove.
“Where’s that damnable sneak skiving off now? Ealdufrida!? Ealdufrida!?”
The door to the pantry burst open. “She’s in here, with the new boy,” reported Offa.
“Not supposed,” muttered Bait under her breath, “to enter a lair without permission.”
“Skiving off again, Eel?” snarled Offa. “You know what that means.”
He raised his fist to strike her.
Her fingers curled around the handle of the iron saucepan.
Neb hastily stepped between the two of them, sparing Offa a staved-in skull and Bait the hangman’s noose.
“I was talking to her,” he said, “about getting food for me and my father the reeve.” Neb picked up a sausage. “Now that’s done.”
Offa snorted, bristling at this objection from a stranger, then stepped aside. It was not like he’d be short of other excuses to punish Bait in the weeks ahead.
“My father says we’ll be back again in a few weeks. Will you be here?”
“Oh, Eel’s not going anywhere. No one wants her,” snarled Offa. “She’ll be here.”
Neb looked up at the older boy.
“You might not be.”
Bait made it to Atten in the end, but it was less fruitful than she hoped.
Offa fell down the kitchen stairs, of which I shall tell more anon, and in the confusion Bait slipped away.
Out of the door, up the stairs and off down the road.
It was winter by then, and though it was only a few hours’ walk to Lastease, the wind cut through her rags like a host of wraiths.
She arrived shivering and miserable. No one she spoke to had ever heard of Sir Peledon, or Squire Atten Ever-Faithful, and it was hard to say “Atten Ever-Faithful” through chattering teeth.
A charcoal burner on the edge of town directed her to a little cottage.
She watched the house for a little while, circling around it, wary of traps.
There was no horse in the shed at the back, but there was a fine old saddle, and a lance, and a leather bag of tools and oils, and old whetstones that might once have been used to sharpen axes.
She knocked. After a long time – and it took all of Bait’s determination to stay waiting – the door was answered by an old man, his eyes white with cataracts.
“Who’s there?” He stretched out his hand, and Bait let his fingers trace her features.
“I’m . . . I’m looking for Sir Peledon’s squire.”
“Your nose is an icicle, child. Come warm yourself.”
There was no light in the little cottage except the glowing embers of the fire, which made it all the more welcome to Bait.
“Ah, it’s been an age and an age since anyone came to hear my stories,” said Atten. “A coin’ll buy you a tale.”
Bait had only one coin. She weighed it in her hand. “All I have is silver.”
Atten frowned.
“What is your name, child?”
After a pause, she answered: “Ealdufrida.”
“Have you nothing smaller, Ealdufrida?”
“I only have the one coin.”
“And you wish to spend it on this?”
“I want to know about Sir Peledon.”
“A silver’ll buy you all I know of him.”
It took the squire the rest of the afternoon and a goodly portion of the evening to tell the story of Sir Peledon in his fashion.
His fashion was initially enthusiastic – his eagerness to demonstrate some of Sir Peledon’s more impressive sword fights was unimpeded by his blindness – and largely concerned with jousting tournament rankings from thirty years ago.
I shall summarise thusly:
Sir Peledon’s tale? Glorious.
Reputation? Spotless.
Courage? Unassailable.
Notable deeds: Too many to mention even in summary.
He and Prince Arus won the Battle of the Pines and brought peace to the north, he rescued Aldebeth from the Knight Gules, he slew the Rat Bishop in the sewers under Crowhaven.
Most of the tales Atten told were from the early days of Sir Peledon’s long career, and it was clear he’d told them many times before.
They were new to Bait, even if they confused her.
They were upside down from her perspective: why praise Sir Peledon smashing his way into the lair of some poor Rat Bishop and murdering him without cause?
Why did the story describe the Labyrinth of Endless Night as a bad place? It sounded quite nice.
But she held her tongue.