“Oh, your Knights are in love with the sound of honor, the mouthings and motions of the old school, but with all of this posturing you seize what is rightfully mine.
“You have done me great injury, Robert di Caela!” he screamed, and I heard the sound of something else shattering.
“But nothing . . .”
His voice descended into quiet, into a cheerful, commonplace tone that was more frightening by far than the screaming of a moment before.
“Nothing compared to the injury I shall do you.”
Sir Robert cried out in rage. I heard the sound of furniture falling. I burrowed out toward the light and peeked through the blankets just in time to see the Scorpion wheel away from a charging Sir Robert and sprint for the door my brother Brithelm blocked. Halfway to the door he paused, wheeled once more in his tracks, and quickly, with a strange, awkward gait like a grounded raptor, leaped toward the broken window and out, his cloak catching and tearing on a jagged claw of glass near the base of the sill.
Bayard sprang to the window and looked out and down. He turned back to us and shrugged.
“Disappeared from the face of the earth,” he declared flatly.
Sir Robert drew his sword and split the back of the one chair standing upright in the room.
Brithelm sat on the edge of the bed and chattered as I stood by the fireplace and tuned the lute he had brought me.
“What a wonderful stroke of fortune, was it not, that the one most capable of taking care of you in your illness was your long-lost brother, with whom you you had reunited only an hour or so before you needed him direly?”
“Yes, Brithelm,” I responded tactfully, politely. “I’d have to say there was tremendous good fortune all around in this matter. Is this”—referring to the lute—”in tune?”
“I am sure it’s in tune with something, little brother. I do not believe it’s in tune with itself.”
I sighed and returned to tuning, following the old gnomish philosophy: “When in doubt about the pitch, tighten the string.”
“What’s keeping you here, anyway, Brithelm?” I asked. “I thought you were secluded for good, intent on becoming some kind of swamp saint.”
He shifted on the bed, stood, and walked toward the fireplace, where he stood by me, warming his hands at the red coals.
“Seclusion it was, little brother, but I had to return to the world in order to answer a brother in need.
“I am here as a character reference for Alfric in his suit for the hand of the Lady Enid di Caela,” Brithelm announced serenely, and a string broke as I tuned it far too tightly, whined and ricocheted and whipped against my hand. Brithelm started at the noise.
“Character reference? For Huma’s sake, Brithelm, it’s nearly impossible to find any character in our brother, much less to vouch for it. How in the world did he wrangle you into such a business?”
I stared hard at Brithelm.
“Well, I could tell that all his talk of heroics was only talk, but after all, Father had sent him. Alfric told me that the prospect of being wed to the Lady Enid dwelt with him night and day. He appealed to Father to perform the emergency Knighthood ceremony, which, of course, allowed him to enter the tournament—”
“Wait a moment, Brithelm. ‘The emergency Knighthood ceremony’?”
“You know more about it than I do, Galen. You studied the Solamnic codes while I turned to theology.
“But isn’t the ceremony a dispensation that the Order grants on the eve of a tournament in which the husband of a daughter of an Early Family is to be chosen? Young lads not yet squires but intending to be are allowed to forego squire-hood altogether, moving straight to the ceremony which Father performed in our absence at the moat house, making Alfric a Knight and thereby eligible to marry Enid di Caela.”
“Is that what Alfric told you about the ceremony, Brithelm?”
It was simply the worst lie I had ever heard—not the most cruel, the most base, the most foul, but surely the most stupid. There were a dozen places within this castle—as many as there were Knights—where Brithelm could turn and discover there was no such thing as an “emergency Knighthood ceremony.” Something was approaching shore in Alfric’s brain. Swimming in loneliness, that half-drowned idea had sight of land.
With all my enemies on the loose, it might have been foolish to travel abroad that night, but travel I did. It was no problem skirting the keep of the castle, asking a servant the whereabouts of a private place to sit and ponder.
Of course, when the Scorpion leaped through the window and vanished, none of us thought we were out of the woods, especially after Bayard and I recounted our history of encounters with the Scorpion—how each time he had vanished mysteriously, only to return in a new and equally deadly form. When I told Sir Robert of the Scorpion’s threats to the life of the Lady Enid, the old man flooded the courtyard of Castle di Caela with armed guards.
You couldn’t walk, sit, or stand in the moonlight without being accosted by overly concerned protectors—by a “who goes there?” followed with a barrage of questions that dissected your business at the castle and your further business walking around at night, questions that traced your family tree back five generations with the genuine possibility that any ancestor remotely un-Solamnic might get you a night in the guardhouse. Which is why the orchard was a pleasant change. I had set up camp there, amidst the peach and pear trees beneath the Lady Enid’s window.
Guards surrounded the orchard from a distance, and now and again I heard one of them call to another. But the Lady Enid’s orchard was her own private preserve, evidently, and after a thorough search in the early evening, the guards had left it alone. Only an hour after nightfall, it was filled with nightingales and owls, singing their old quarrel from the trees.
Not only were there singing birds, but birds wrought of evergreen, too. The floor of the orchard was a topiary garden, filled with carefully tended shrubbery sculpted into the forms of various small animals and birds. Owls there were, and nightingales, and squirrels and rabbits and short-eared lutra, all cut from juniper, aeterna, and other greenery.
For a while I stood there, staring up at the dim and flickering light in Enid’s window and breathing in the strong, fresh smells of the fruit and the shrubbery. It was a romantic’s dream, this landscape, spoiled only by the occasional distant calling of a guard.
I backed against a juniper owl, pausing to relish the smells, the sound of birdsong, the soft light. Suddenly there were hands about my throat and a coarse, familiar voice hissing in my ear.
“I have a lot of paying back to do, little brother. And it starts here.”
It seems Alfric had followed me out of the entrance and around the keep, staying hidden under the branches of the trees and in the shadows of the walls. My face was half-buried in the back of the topiary owl.
“Please let me up,” I muttered, my mouth pressed against needles and hard wood.
“Like you let me up back in the swamp? Oh . . . I have a mind to throttle you, Weasel, to make you burrow face down in the greenery. How do the needles taste, little brother? Where is the wisdom hiding now?”
Nonetheless, his grip loosened and I gained room to speak.
Letting me speak had always been Alfric’s mistake.
“I said, better let me up, Alfric. If you mash or otherwise alter this familiar face, Sir Bayard won’t have you as a squire. Nor will any of these other gentlemen gathered here, if anything deflects the splendor of my nose.”
“Which don’t seem bad to me, Galen, seeing as I plan to be suiting for the hand of the Lady Enid,” Alfric announced proudly, pressing me even farther into the evergreen.
“It’s ‘suing,’ and I’m afraid you’re out of luck. Tournament’s over, remember?”
After one more shove into the thick needles of the bush, Alfric let me up.