Leopold chewed on the end of the quill. This wasn't entirely foreign to him. He and all his brothers had gotten tested and schooled in a room not unlike this one. And to tell the truth, what they had been tested on was a lot duller than this sheaf of riddles he was being asked to solve.
What is broken every time it's spoken?
Siegfried worked out the business with the chicken after a lot of playing about with possibilities and the utter ruination of several sheets of foolscap as he drew out river, boat, fox, grain and chicken. It finally occurred to him that you could always take something back over the river, and that was the key — you always kept the two things that might eat or be eaten apart by hauling one back. But this puzzle...
If I say, "Everything I tell you is a lie," am I telling you the truth or a lie?
Leopold snapped his fingers as the answer occurred to him, and he quickly wrote it down. Of course!
Speak the word silence and you broke the silence! Now the next —
Hmm.
Food can help me survive, but water will kill me. What am I?
Siegfried grinned. That one was easy. It appeared in the old sagas all the time. If only some of the things are lies, then the statement that everything I tell you is a lie will always be a lie. He wrote down "lie." Now the next...
The one who makes it sells it. The one who buys it doesn't use it. The one who's using it doesn't know he's using it. What is it?
Leopold snorted. A child could have figured that riddle out. It was fire of course, which needed "food" in the form of wood.
He had been worried at first. He wasn't worried now. If this was the worst they could do, he could get through this.
A coffin... thought Siegfried. That was...a rather too-morbid riddle. He did not like the way this was going.
At the end of the day, thirty-one men emerged from the room filled with tables, surprised at the amount of time that had passed. Some were elated. Some were in despair. All were happy to have the contest over and done with. They fell on the cold buffet laid out for them like starving wolves, and many were surprised at just how tired they were after a day of "only" thinking.
The astonishment came when they all started talking about the riddles and the answers, and compared what they could remember of the riddle test with each other. Because it appeared that no one recalled the same riddles.
No one.
"I don't believe it. Are you sure you don't remember that one?" Siegfried asked a particularly satisfied Prince Roderick, who was sure that he had done very, very well. The Prince shook his head.
"And you don't remember the wizard and the staircase?" the Prince countered. "I thought it was as morbid as your coffin one."
"I know I would have if I'd seen it, wretched murdering wizards..." Siegfried said, feeling more than a little confused now.
He wasn't the only one. No one was out in the garden tonight. The puzzle just grew and grew, as all thirty-one men conferred and cross-checked, and finally came up with the only possible solution there could be.
Each of them had answered an entirely different set of riddles. Impossible as it seemed, somehow thirty-one different tests had been assembled and presented to them.
As they separated, some to go straight to bed, some to drink, some to go straight up in despair and pack, Leopold and Siegfried elected to take the walk out to the King's Arms. They were such regulars there now that they had a preferred table, and the serving boy brought them their drinks before they even sat down. Everyone else that was a regular there knew they were Princes, and no one troubled them about it. Leopold said wistfully that it was just like that inhis favorite tavern, back before he'd left his home. Since in Drachenthal, there were no such things as inns and taverns, Siegfried had merely nodded.
"That must have taken an immense amount of doing, making up all those riddle lists," Siegfried said, and shook his head. "I don't know how they did it. I don't know how I managed to get through it. That was one of the hardest things I've ever done, and I think if I had known in advance what we were going to do, I'd have packed up and left before trying. My brain feels worse than when Norbert dented my helm."
"Well, if nothing else would have convinced me that the Queen is the Godmother, this did. The only way you could do something like that is by magic. There weren't enough clerks in the entire Palace to have found and written up that many lists of riddles and never repeat one." Leopold drained his beer and signaled for another, then reached for a handful of the salted, toasted grain in a bowl parked between them. "And although no one said this out loud, I think we all know that the only reason to do it that way is to make sure no one cheated."
Siegfried chuckled at the idea of any one of the Princes knowing the runic alphabet in which the language of Drachenthal was written, much less the language itself. "I haven't seen that much of my own script written out at one time, ever. I think that test was bigger than every book in all of Drachenthal."
Leopold smirked at that; the very few times he'd seen Siegfried write something down, he hadn't been able to make head nor tail of how you were supposed to hold the paper, and never mind what was written on it.
"I supposed that eventually there would be a riddle contest, but I thought it would be just one fiendishly difficult riddle." Siegfried sighed. "And I thought it was going to be recited to us. I never thought I would spend a whole day answering puzzle after puzzle after puzzle." He rubbed his head. "Well, that's over. We might not have proved we're scholars, but we proved we aren't fools, either."
"I wonder how many of us were knocked out." Leopold sighed. "I saw quite a few long faces, and I think there are going to be more empty guest rooms tomorrow. Too much to hope one of them is Desmond."
Siegfried shook his head. "Not unless someone stole his paper and substituted another. He's smarter than he has any right to be."
"He's certainly smarter than I am," Leopold grumbled. "I couldn't get him to play cards with me."
The next day, there were, indeed, a few new empty guest rooms in the Palace, and there was no announcement of the next contest. It was one of those hot summer days that threatened rain without actually producing it, making people restless and listless at the same time.
Leopold managed to find himself a card game at last, and proceeded to fleece some of the other Princes.
At loose ends, Siegfried decided that, although he and Leopold were helping each other as much as they could within the competitions, there was nothing binding them to do so outside of the competitions. If there was any way he could manage to bring himself to the Princess's attention, well — it might not help him in the contests, but it certainly wouldn't hurt.
And he decided that Desmond was entirely too good at getting and holding the Princess's attention during the evening. It was time to do something for himself, without Leopold.
He resolved to get her attention in a different way, and maybe a way Desmond wouldn't think of. As always, when he needed to think something out, he took a long, solitary walk. By this time, he knew the Palace as well as any of the servants did, and there were plenty of places where most people didn't go.