“What’s the difference?” I began, talking to myself, perhaps a little loudly. “I would like to know what’s the difference, thank you, since my new employer is downstairs with Father and Brithelm, sitting at a farewell breakfast in the great hall while I am upstairs with the polish and the rags?
“For the life of me,” I whined, setting my cloth to the intricate visor of the helmet, “I can’t see much difference between this and cleaning Alfric’s chambers. Who is this Bayard Brightblade, after all, but another taskmaster? Only this one is set to cart me off to southern Solamnia where he bashes the heads of other Knights and wins the heart of the damsel while I get to polish armor and tend to the horses and run little errands. I’m already tired of being some damn southern hotshot’s factotum!”
I liked that last phrase, closed my eyes, repeated it.
I then surveyed my squirely work and realized that I had no idea how to put the armor back together. Greaves lay by the fireplace, the breastplate on the mattress where I had set it aside out of boredom, the gloves on the plain rug in front of the fire, and the helmet half-polished in my hands. Cords of leather lay strewn everywhere. There was elaborate lacing to this machinery, but I wasn’t a party to its workings.
“The pieces never fit together,” I whimpered. “None of the pieces fit, in Bayard’s armor or in Bayard himself. What am I supposed to tell the Scorpion when I don’t know what I’m spying for, can’t figure out the man I’m spying on?”
I walked to the fireplace and held my hands to the warmth of the little blaze.
“First of all, he doesn’t believe me when I identify his prisoner as the Scorpion. Of course, he wasn’t the Scorpion, but Sir Bayard couldn’t know that. Anyway, he doesn’t say anything, but I figure he can’t believe me because of the questions he asks. Now where was that wax?”
I reached into my pockets, took out the high-pitched dog whistle I had used to disrupt the great hall time and again, turning Father’s formal reception room into a churning frenzy of hounds, terriers, and mastiffs. I tossed it onto Brithelm’s mattress by the breastplate.
Then my even more prized possessions. First, the red Calantina dice, twelve-sided wooden curiosities from Estwilde. There were one hundred and forty-four numbers you could roll with them, and tradition had assigned to each number a symbolic animal and three lines of verses that were supposed to be prophetic, but usually turned out to be too obscure to be helpful. Only later, when you looked back on the reading, could you usually say, “Oh, that’s what the reading meant.”
It wasn’t ever much help, but it made you think there were ways to see things coming, and the thought was strangely reassuring.
After the dice, my gloves. I had purchased them from a merchant who swore they had adorned the hands of a Solamnic captain at the Battle of Chaktamir. I paid for them with the servants’ money when they had heard that Sir Bayard was coming. He had quite a reputation for heroism, and before his arrival the younger servants had begged me in the scullery, in the broom closet, in the downstairs corridors, offering me their pennies for just one peek at the fabled armor.
Those pennies were gone now, spent on the pair of thick leather gloves I tossed on the bed by the dice. I had not dreamed of wearing them around the moat house, since their stitching was intricate and costly, down to the phases of the red moon dyed and stamped upon the knuckles. Sporting such attire in front of Father would raise uncomfortable questions.
But the servant children raised no such questions, being the innocent and trusting souls they were. The night before the theft I had gotten around to telling them that viewing the armor would be impossible and that it had cost me all of their pennies even to ask for such a viewing. They bought my explanation, too, thinking perhaps that such was the way one transacted business with a Solamnic Knight.
With the whistle, the dice, and the gloves on the bed, I continued to ferret through my pockets.
“There must be wax in here somewhere . . .”
I gave up on the one pocket and moved to the other, all the while pondering my change in circumstances. Pondering Bayard Brightblade, who was a mystery.
“First he strips Alfric of squirehood for nodding off and losing the armor, then he takes me on for the same job when he seems to suspect I did far worse. And it isn’t soft-heartedness on his part, some bygones-be-bygones kind of gibberish. He slapped the poor man in black in the heart of the dungeon and is talking execution. Beheading! I didn’t know the Knights of Solamnia let you do that kind of thing, much less that Bayard would take it on himself to do it! The joke on him is that the poor fellow is hardly the Scorpion, for the Scorpion, as I and only I well know, is cavorting in the body of a raven presently. Ha! Ha!” I glanced over my shoulder nervously, just in case someone was eavesdropping. No one.
Exploring the new pocket, my fingers brushed against something leather. I drew out the little purse and looked in it for wax, but it was empty except for the six opals that came in it that fateful night of the Scorpion’s first visit. I remembered the scorpion standing in my hand and shuddered.
They looked like eggs, those stones, and I wished the raven had settled for them. I started to hide them in Brithelm’s room, thought better of it, and set them lightly on the bed by my other possessions. The wax was growing more necessary. For it seemed like a good plan: to melt bits of it over the pieces of armor, using it as a sort of makeshift glue or mortar. It wouldn’t hold them together long, but it might work long enough so that I could ask an unwitting kitchen servant to move the suit to Bayard’s quarters, blaming the poor boy loudly when the suit fell apart.
Such was my strategy, but you probably know what they say about the plans of mice and men. That goes for weasels, too, evidently.
When I heard the rattle of a key in the lock, I thought of Alfric, who was even less fond of me now that I had become Bayard’s squire in his stead. He was still condemned to fester in the moat house, while Father pondered his inadequacies, and though his hand was usually stayed by the presence of others, I did not doubt that he plotted outrage.
So it was deep into the closet for me, closing the door behind me and slipping under the hanging robes as though they were a curtain. I checked to see if they were a curtain indeed, testing the back wall for secret doors, for passageways, but with no results. I was backed into here, brought to ground. Outside I heard the movement of metal on stone, the muffled ring of metal on metal. Someone was doing something to the armor.
Sometimes curiosity outweighs prudence, and this was one of those times. I parted the curtain of robes and opened the closet door ever so slightly, admitting the light from the fireplace and from the one lamp in the room. Needless to say, I thought first of illusion when I looked through the crack of the closet door and saw Bayard’s breastplate floating above the bed, nothing supporting it but the dark air below it. Done by mirrors, no doubt. I mean, isn’t that the first thing you think when the magical intrudes in your otherwise unmagical life? I did what almost all of us would do: I looked for trapdoors and fictions.
Which there were none of in view at the moment. Only Brithelm, standing motionless in the center of the room. He watched calmly, even playfully, as the armor glowed red, then yellow, then white. Slowly it collected itself. The greaves got up and walked from the fireplace to the pallet, as though strapped to the body of an ancient phantom. There, as an unearthly music began to tumble out of the walls of the room, the greaves joined the assembling suit.