“My luck may be out, but there’s something about that weasel’s luck of yours that keeps you landing upright.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning you’re here to press my suit. That’s your story,” Alfric growled. He put his hand over my mouth, muffling my cries for help. Then he grabbed my right arm, twisting it behind me until my elbow touched the base of my spine, my thumb the back of my neck. I tried for a witty response, but could think of none through the pain that tore into my shoulder and blotted out wit, blotted out everything but the sense of that pain. I was having trouble breathing.
“What is my motivation, dear brother?” I gasped, and prepared to black out.
“The swamp,” said Alfric. “Remember the swamp?”
“Oh.”
“I have heard tales of your confession, Weasel, but omitted by chance—by oversight, I’m sure—is the part where you stranded your older brother in deadly muck and mire. A most convenient oversight, no doubt, for we all know that violence against one’s blood relatives is the worst transgression of Solamnic code. I do not think Sir Bayard and Sir Robert could overlook such a, shall we say, naughty piece of business? What do you think, dear brother?”
An excruciating pause. “At—your—service,” I stammered, gasping for breath.
Alfric loosened his grip. Air and sense rushed back into me as my brother leaned above me and whispered.
“Good. I brung the lute. Now what’re we going to do, Galen? You’re good at these things.”
He spun me about, pulled me up to his face, and drew his dagger, and I remembered the smell of my brother that was the smell of wine and of old food and of something that tunneled to the edge of insanity always beneath those other smells.
Alfric pressed the point of the knife against my chin, inflicting slight but menacing pain. Then he lowered me and took cover, drawing me roughly after him into the breast of the shrubbery owl.
“Everything is close to perfect,” Alfric crowed. “I was late to the tournament, so I did not have to join the lists against anyone who would of mangled me in the first place. Then it turns out that the Knight who wins and I’m planning to be the squire for is a crook and did not win at all, and for a while I’m even madder at you because you kept me from being a squire again. But then I think it’s even better on account of now the tournament don’t matter and the Lady Enid and her inheritance are fair game.”
“Fair game! What a . . . romantic way to put it, Alfric.”
“That’s up to you,” my brother hissed. “You’re better at putting things than I am. You tell me what to say underneath the Lady Enid’s window. You play the lute and sing like you was me.
“If you don’t,” Alfric said, flatly and casually, “I am going to kill you.”
As we had grown up in the tunnels and chambers of the moat house, each of us had dreamed of killing the other, I am sure. I can speak with authority that I often went woolgathering over Alfric’s untimely death. I would fancy it at night as I lay in my chambers, or in the daytime in my secret place behind the hearth of the great hall. It usually involved large, hungry animals with fangs.
But we were too old for the old threats, the bluster of “I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you” that underscored our militant childhoods. This time, Alfric might mean it.
“You better do good, Weasel,” Alfric whispered.
He loosened his grip and pushed me completely into the belly of the owl. He dusted himself off, then licked his fingers and ran them through his hair like a grotesque, makeshift comb. He stepped into a clearing in the topiary, lit dimly by the stars and the firelight from Enid’s window and other windows on this side of the keep. I was allowed to woo, but from the wings only.
“Hello, Lady Enid,” Alfric called up to the window. He looked back to me at once for advice or approval.
“Wonderful!” I whispered from the belly of the owl.
Alfric smiled stupidly and turned back to his courtship.
A small sound rose from the window—a muffled sound that I took as laughter, but Alfric, buoyed by what he thought was his own silver tongue, no doubt took as a sigh of adoration.
But he had no idea what to say next. He stepped away from the window, looked at me, panic-stricken. I scrambled out from under the owl’s wing, hoping to put shadows between me and my brother—shadows through which I could escape and return to my quarters. That way I could be at peace, and Alfric—well, Alfric could pursue the courtship of his lifetime with what talents he had. Left to his own charm and resources, my brother might make a four-hundred-year-old curse seem attractive.
Overhead, slate gray clouds scudded over the moons and shaded and shifted the light around us. Alfric followed me, losing me only a moment behind the light blue needles of an enormous aeterna jay. He found me again soon enough, catching sight of me as I turned to run and finally cornering me against a larick nest of sparrows, who rustled and dropped their berries when Alfric grabbed me by the shoulders and began to shake me pleadingly.
“You don’t know how hard it is to be the eldest, Weasel, to have so many responsibilities fall into your lap simply because you’re the first one out. You have to put up with everything from your younger brothers—mysticism, theft, bad opinions—and you have to do so with a smile because you are the oldest and it has fallen into your lap to put up with those things.”
“Stop shaking me, Alfric.”
“Shut up. I listened to you long and often. But did anyone ever look out for Alfric? Did anyone ever ask what would please Alfric?”
“Well, I . . .”
“Shut up.” His voice was a little too loud. He paused, looked around. “I’m tired of always seeing to the needs of others, of being the concerned big brother. What I would rather do is to win some attention on my own, for once to do something for myself and only for myself.”
A look of pain and fear passed over his face. The scene would have been pathetic had I not known that Alfric’s every waking moment since childhood had been devoted to doing things for himself and only for himself.
“And you are going to help me, little brother. You and your words and mischief and petty larceny,” Alfric gloated, breaking a branch from the larick and waving it irritatingly under my nose. The sharp, minty smell of the red needles almost made me sneeze.
“You see,” Alfric continued, “I am going to step back into that clearing, back by the wall of the keep, where I will be in full view of the Lady Enid. From there I can pay court to her. Make me up a poem to say to her, Weasel.”
Suddenly he dragged me by my collar back beneath Enid’s window, where he held me at arm’s length, dangling in the midst of a juniper nightingale, a rather woolly overgrown thing crouched beneath one of the taller pear trees.
I took refuge while Alfric stood in the clearing, in partial view, romanced by moonlight and shadows. He stood there—and I dangled there—for a good minute of silence, until I realized he was waiting for Enid to come to the window.
“She’s not going to show, Alfric, unless you let her know that you’re out here.”
I choked and coughed as my collar tightened. Still he suspended me among the evergreens.
“Return to the window, my lady,” I whispered.
“What?”
“‘Return to the window, my lady.’ That’s your first line.” I grabbed a branch in the midst of the shrub and, settling part of my weight upon it, took some of the pressure off my neck.
“I don’t understand,” Alfric muttered. One hand held me even more tightly among the needles and the branches while the other scratched his head.
“You wanted a poem, Alfric. I am obliging you with the first line.”
“I forgot what it was.”
“‘Return to the window, my lady,’ damn it!”
“‘Return to the window, my lady, damn it!’” he called aloud beneath Enid’s window. There was silence. A faint light shook deep in the chambers, glancing off the uppermost branches of the tree. Alfric looked toward me, awaiting the next line. I dangled and composed rapidly.