“Next thing I knowed,” Alfric continued serenely, “I was being dragged out of the closet by yourself, regaining my wits at the tail end of that little weasel’s alibis.”
I began to blubber and whine.
“Father, this is absolutely unfair.”
That was good. I choked, looked to the floor, then walked quickly toward one of the corners where a gutted torch smoked in a sconce.
“. . . and you, Sir Bayard, whose trust I fear my brother’s unkind words have taken and twisted and broken like so many snap beans . . .”
A bad comparison, but homespun, and sure to get the sympathy of the servants and the peasants, which I could use at the moment. I stared wide-eyed at the sputtering torch, allowing the smoke to pass over my face, make my eyes burn and water.
Nearest thing to weeping one can get. I turned back to my audience, tears streaming. The prisoner smiled faintly, reached into the folds of his cloak. Bayard noticed the movement and stepped quietly away from the fireplace, on his guard, staring intently at the disheveled man in black.
“Oh, you fine gentleman, my negligence has left me a disgrace to my Father and his glorious past . . .”
I bowed my head. Brithelm stepped forward and took my arm gently.
“. . . a disgrace to the family Pathwarden five generations back. Five generations hence.”
“Galen. Galen.” My brother Brithelm rose to his consoling best. “Surely nothing you have done . . .” I tore my arm from his comforting grasp, buried my face in my hands, and continued.
“Would that it were so! But my negligence is shameful. I shirked and nodded as well as my older brother...”
“Did more than nod, Galen Pathwarden,” the prisoner brayed triumphantly. “More than nod, for you embraced the business with greed.”
To my astonishment, from his cloak the bony prisoner drew my naming ring, the token that he—or someone who had stolen the armor that fateful night—had taken from me, taken to assure my silence. A torch in the far corner of the hall went out, but the servants were too enthralled by the drama to move and the light went untended. I stammered, fumbled for a story.
And came up empty. All I could manage were stammers and squeals, a feeble, “How did he get my naming ring? It can’t be mine! It must be a forgery! Oh, to compound burglary with counterfeit goods . . .”
Father was on his feet, the huge chair rocking as he leaped from it. Dogs scattered, whimpering.
“Silence, Galen!” the old man thundered. “How did he know your name? How could he copy your naming ring, when only one exists in the world for the copying?”
“I don’t know, sir. Perhaps he . . . wrested it from my unconscious hand the night he stole the armor?”
Father wasn’t buying.
“Show me your hand!” Father commanded in a tone that brooked no quibbling.
I had no choice but to comply. My bare, quivering hand caused a ripple of murmurs and I told you sos among the attentive servants. Father’s face turned a dark shade.
“But . . . but—”
“And why,” asked Father in an ominously hushed voice, “have we not heard about the disappearance of your naming ring until this very moment?”
I was hard put to come up with a quick lie for that one. The silence was deadly.
“Galen, I am sorely wounded,” Father said after an interminable lull, his voice low and dispirited. “When I consider this armor thief, when I consider you and your brother and what all of you have done, collectively and separately, I’m sore tempted to execute the thief and thrash the both of you until you long for execution. But I suppose that’s against Solamnic code, no matter how it conforms with good sense. I’ll leave all judgments, all sentencing to Sir Bayard Brightblade.”
With that I was escorted from the room, as roughly as my brother but fortunately not back to the same cell. Alfric was allowed the run of the house, still under punishment for his oversight but I was temporarily confined to Gileandos’s library. We saved the real cell, for we only had one, for the man in black. There among lecterns and desks, books and scrolls, bones and specimens and alchemical alembics and tubings, I cast the Calantina once more, receiving the nine and eleven, tunnel on stone, the Sign of the Rat. I consulted the books, the commentary, and again was baffled by my fate.
I waited for hours, the only sounds the tolling of the bell in the tower tolling three, four, then five. Some time in the late afternoon the faint shrill of a jay outside the library window, and twice the unmistakable sniffing and heavy breathing of my brother poking about outside in the corridor.
Once he tested the door. To his disappointment and my relief, it was locked, and after the events of a fortnight past, he was no longer keeper of the keys. Nonetheless, I hid the bag of opals deep in the pocket of my tunic, then passed time until evening.
I read a book on dwarf lore and another on explosives. I tried on several of Gileandos’s robes, hung fastidiously in the alcove of the library, and played awhile with the elixirs and powders he kept by the alchemical machinery. Finally, I climbed upon a table and slept amid papers and manuscripts, until I awoke to a darkness outside and the disturbing feeling you have when you wake in a room and know you are not alone.
“Wh—who’s there?”
No answer, but eventually the sound resolved itself into a brief, erratic fluttering noise over by the window. Evidently something else was trapped in here besides a youngest son.
I lit a candle, held my breath, moved toward the sound.
It was only a bird perched on the sill—a huge, ungainly raven who battered the dark panes of the window with its darker wings. I reached over the bird and opened the window, whispering, “How did you get in here, little bird?”
The creature stood on the sill, regarding me listlessly. For a moment it seemed like a stuffed bird sitting there, and I wondered had I dreamed the movement, the noise.
Then it cocked its head slowly, almost mechanically, and spoke in a dry voice out of nowhere.
“In much the same fashion as you, little boy. I meddled with those more powerful than I.”
“What?” The candle slipped from my hand. I snatched at it by reflex, fumbling it and burning my hand on the hot tallow as the wick went out.
We were in darkness again, but a darkness broken by moonlight through the now-open window. The raven backed along the sill, bathed in the red light of Lunitari. He cocked his head again and leaped sluggishly into the air, landing atop the lectern with scarcely a flap of his wings.
“Did you think I would abandon those who . . . obeyed me? That I would throw you to the Solamnic wolves?”
The voice was flat and without music in the throat of the raven, but instantly I recognized its rhythm, its soothing phrases covering iron and poison. The air in the library grew colder.
“I. . . trusted you would come back, sir,” I lied, shivering.
“You’re lying.” The bird hopped once nervously. “But nonetheless I am back.
“I have further need of you,” the voice of the Scorpion said.
“It is an absolute delight to be of service to you, sir, and let me add that . . .”
“Silence!” The voice seemed too large for the bird, too large for the room itself. I backed into a chair, which tumbled over into an array of tubing and retorts and glassware containing the gods .knew what elixirs.
“You still have much to do for me, Galen Pathwarden. Much to do to save that skin of yours.”
All of this struck me as slightly less ominous coming from a bird.
“What now? Haven’t I tangled myself in enough webbing for your satisfaction?” I scrambled to my feet, knocking over still another beaker in the process.
“Hardly.” The raven regarded me with a brief, dull-eyed stare. “You see, I make friends for life, and, after all, you didn’t expect a half dozen opals for what little you’ve done, did you?