Ignoring their shouts of laughter and the inevitable bruisings of hilt-first daggers bouncing off his slender shoulders—insulting reminders that as a Black Buckler himself, he must be ready to do battle with his fingers and dagger, should his spells prove too pitiful—the apprentice pounded down the slippery steps that led to the kitchens… and his current punishment.
Brandor was forever collecting punishments. Since the arrival of the Bucklers on seawind-swept Mintarn, his daily acquisitions of reprimands and duty tasks had reached a truly impressive rate, even for the youngest weakling ever to wear the Black Buckler badge.
It did not help that he was the sole apprentice of the accomplished but aging Druskin, supreme sorcerer of the Black Buckler Band. That made the other two Band mages see “the little grinning fool Brandor” as a future rival, to be ridiculed and discredited at every opportunity. Most of the strapping Buckler warriors, he knew, saw him as a pitiful excuse for a man, to be made sport of until he fled into the sea and rid them of his face and his pranks.
Ah, yes; his pranks. His only source of fun, and his only weapons. Long ago he’d fallen into the habit of responding to bullying with his quick wits and nimble fingers. Those who pestered Brandor the Fool paid the price, be they ever so mighty—and their colleagues roared with laughter.
Mintarn was small and mostly bleak, its folk suspicious of armed outsiders and guarded in their deeds, slow to welcome curious wanderers, and slower still to welcome one who wore both the Black Buckler badge and the robes of a wizard. Boredom had led Brandor to dub the island “The Place Where Guards Snore At Their Posts,” and that arch observation had earned him no love among the Tyrant of Mintarn’s own warriors.
It had done so just as Brandor’s boredom was chased away forever by the sight of dark-eyed, darker-browed Shalara, her hair the hue of the sun as it kissed her slender shoulders and vanished down her beautiful back. He began to hurry down the steps at the thought of her. She often stopped to talk with Halger; she might be down there right now.
The Tyrant’s daughter slipped around Mintarn’s ramparts and windswept stairs like a shy shadow, free to wander at will. Folk said she was the image of her dead mother, who’d never had any use for brawn and bluster, but had admired a keen mind. Hence her voyage from far Suldolphor to the meager splendors of this lonely isle, despite the coughing chills that had finally claimed her.
The Tyrant was said to dote on Shalara, but Brandor was utterly smitten with her. He would wait on bone-chilling ramparts for hours just to catch a glimpse of her, and Halger had finally forbidden him the kitchens—save when he was working therein for punishment—after he’d lurked and loitered for the better part of a tenday, staring intently at Shalara whenever she poked her head in.
She’d obviously been reluctant to enter and speak freely with him swallowing and staring at her, and Halger had said he’d have done anything, —anything, even endured a public beating from the fists of the hairiest, most sneering of the brutish Buckler warriors, or foresworn his paltry magic—to have earned her smile and friendship.
Instead, he’d fallen back on the only way he had to get noticed. Pranks.
Brandor the Fool had staged a series of increasingly spectacular pranks to impress Shalara Embuirhan. He’d begun with stealthily hook-spiking guards’ boots to the flagstones as they dozed at their posts, just to prove the fitness of the catch-phrase he’d coined, then he switched around all the garrison stores orders.
That had been followed by the switching of officers’ undergarments, then the swapping of those same smallclothes with those of the haughtiest ladies of the Tyrant’s castle. Then all of the shields hung on the castle walls had mysteriously begun changing places, and the castle chamberlain’s usual feast welcoming speech had been hilariously rewritten, just on the night when the chamberlain had taken ill and the understeward had been called upon to read out the speech in his place, with the stern admonition to “change not a word.”
Not a night later, the moaning ghost of Mintarn had been heard again, just outside the windows of the shuttered house near the docks where the Buckler warriors were wont to take their coins and their restlessness to the doors where plump and smiling lasses beckoned. Then someone had let out a paddock-full of mules to clotter and kick around the docks, and— the inevitable results had come down upon Brandor’s head. He’d seen kitchen duty and more kitchen duty, washing mountains of dishes, pickling jars upon jars of fish, and staggering down the long, spray-slippery path out of the castle to dump slimy basket after slimy basket of kitchen-scraps into the breeding pools where the tiny silverfin boiled up like fists reaching out of the water, their miniature jaws agape, to greet his every visit.
All of these panting, sweaty tasks had been done under the watchful eye of the old cook of Castle Mintarn, and Halger was not a man to miss noticing or tolerate a single moment of prank-preparation or malingering. A fat-bellfed, greasy ex-pirate whose left arm ended in a stump (which he usually fitted with a blackened, battered cooking pot), Halger stumped and huffed around the lofty, smoke-filled hall that was his domain. Somehow he contrived to keep no less than three cooking hearths alight and a steady stream of food going forth on dome-covered platters to feed the folk of the Castle, the Tyrant’s guards, the Bucklers, and whomever was in port and at the Tyrant’s guest table.
Down the years, Halger had also found the time to be Shalara’s confidante, trusted confessor, and wise old guide to the wider world. He knew her secret thoughts and yearnings and her judgments of the world around her and the people in it—and the amused look in his eyes when they fell upon a mutely staring Brandor made the apprentice squirm and sometimes want to shriek in sheer frustration.
As he ducked through the dogleg of archways designed to keep gusting storm winds from blowing out the kitchen hearths, Druskin’s apprentice let out a sigh of relief. Someone had piled too much wood on the blaze in the corner hearth. The smoke and sparks were roaring up the tallest chimney, the one that soared up through the thick walls of the beacon tower for a long bowshot, into the skies. Halger was shouting and red-faced men were running hither and yon with fire-tongs and soot-blackened aprons, while the women bent grimly over their pots and waited for the tumult to blow over. The lofty, many-balconied kitchen was ruled by swirling smoke and chaos.
There among it all was his waiting pile of potatoes, blessedly bereft of the old pirate cook standing with arms folded across his mighty chest and a soft but razor-edged query as to the tardiness of a certain apprentice. Thankfully Brandor snatched up the peeling knife Halger had left waiting on the stool, eyed the waiting bucket of similar knives that he was supposed to turn to whenever the knife he was using grew dull—and realized he was doomed.
The corner hearth had held leek-and-potato soup, almost certainly scorched down the insides of its cauldrons and ruined. Halger was going to be striding over here all too soon, in his flopping sea boots, expecting to find thrice his own weight in fresh-peeled potatoes waiting. If a certain diligent apprentice worked in frantic, finger-cutting haste, he might—might—have six potatoes ready by then.
Brandor swallowed, sat down on the stool, and closed his eyes. If he changed the incantation of the dancing dagger spell just so, it should serve to cause the blade to cut in a curve. Add four… no, six would be better… such phrases to the casting chant, and the cuts should come around the surface of a single roughly spheroid object. Treble the crushed mosquitoes and the iron filings, and add the trebling phrase to the summation, and he should have four knives whirling in their own dance, peeling his potatoes for him. All he need do is stand back—with stool and bucket—out of harm’s way, and watch for idiots blundering into the field of flight. A simple snap of his fingers would still cause the knives to fall to the floor in an instant… by Azuth, it couldn’t fail!