A Fate Worse Than Dragons Read online

  Bored, he rubbed his ears to warm them up while he looked around the woodlot. It had the usual wood-chopping hardware—an ax, a sledgehammer, and a couple of iron wedges. Driven by male instinct, he picked up the ax and hammer in turn and hefted each one. Putting them back down, he found half a dozen long-handled objects leaning against the fence. He examined one of them. It was made of black iron, with a wooden handle and a long stem. It looked rather like a fork for toasting sausages around a campfire, except that against the fork was a flat wire grill. Curious, he took it by the handle and waved it around his head, wondering if it was some kind of weapon, or a flyswatter for really tough bugs.

  He jumped a little when the back door opened. The cook came out, smiled at him, and took off her hat. She was pretty enough with it on, but when her long hair fell around her shoulders she looked especially lovely. “Hello,” she said. “Can I help you with something?”

  “Just getting a bit of air,” said Terry.

  “I see you’ve found the toasting forks.”

  Terry held up the implement of destruction. “This?”

  “Yep. They’re my own invention. I used them for toasting sliced bread.” She went to the fence, where bundles of garlic and dried peppers were strung between the posts, and plucked some off. “I know it seems silly, but the customers like it.”

  “Toasted bread?” Terry examined the fork again. “Why? Why would you want to toast bread?”

  “Well, we like to serve sliced bread here. It’s convenient and makes for easier portion control. A lot of the customers still didn’t trust it, though. But we managed to convince them that searing sliced bread with fire makes it safe to eat. You know, sort of like the belief that boiling water makes it safe to drink? Everybody became happy with toasted bread. Now most of our customers won’t even eat sliced bread unless it is toasted.”

  “Don’t you boil your drinking water here?”

  “Oh, we have to, because the customers want it, but I think it’s kind of silly myself. There’s no evidence that boiling water makes it safe to drink. It’s just another one of those superstitions.” The girl finished gathering peppers. “I hope you enjoy your meal. If you’re going to stay out much longer, feel free to keep warm by chopping firewood.”

  Terry watched her go back inside. Smiling, he chopped some kindling, then searched the woodpile for a hickory log, always a difficult wood to split. He found one of medium size, put it on the chopping block, and cracked it with the ax. He set the wedge into the crack, picked up the sledgehammer, and swung it over his shoulder. A glance at the moon told him it was time to go back inside. Almost absently, he brought the hammer down with one hand. The log cleaved neatly in two. He returned all the tools to their storage places and went back inside to find Roland.

  His companion was finishing dessert. “The cook did a good job with the pie crust on that pheasant. So I wanted to see what she could do with a custard.”

  “How was it?”

  “Excellent. And the coffee is first-rate.”

  “Good. We’ve found the Princess.”

  Roland sat up. “Yes? Where?”

  “Keep your voice down.”

  Roland looked around the room. One of the waitresses smiled at him. The other diners had finished eating and were now clustered over at the bar. He hunched his chair closer to the table. “Where is she?”

  “She is stashed at a local manor. Our kidnappers are in the pay of a certain Baron Wayless. Apparently he’s deeply in debt and desperate for money.”

  “The fiend. What’s our plan, Terry? Do we get her now? Steal in under cover of night?”

  Terry shook his head. “Not now. We don’t have enough information. I’ve sent my man back to scout out the manor. He says he knows a servant who may let him inside.”

  “That will be fortunate for us.”

  “Very fortunate. I’ll ride out with him tonight and survey the grounds.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “I afraid you can’t. He doesn’t want to reveal himself to you. The best thing you can do, Roland, is to have a few drinks at the bar here.” Terry nodded in the direction of the bar. “Keep your ears open and listen for any of the locals discussing Baron Wayless. Listen for news of any strangers in town. Besides us, of course. See if these girls will talk to you. A lot of good information is picked up that way.”

  “Right,” said Roland. “I’ll be good at that.”

  “Then go to bed early. I’ll wake you when I return. We’ll work out a plan of attack.”

  Roland nodded. The young waitress brought over their bill, leaning close to Roland as she presented it to him. Roland reached for his money again. “Dinner’s on me.”

  “No,” said Terry firmly. “We’ll split it.”

  “You’re an independent cuss, aren’t you, Terry?”

  “I’m afraid so.” Terry counted out some coins from his vanishing supply. He gave them to the girl with a bright smile. Inwardly, he sighed.

  Alison entered the manor house through the garden door, wearing a housecoat over her kitchen dress and apron. She had a basket of rolls from the restaurant hanging from one arm, and from the other, a string bag heavy with parsnips, carrots, and onions. In one pocket of her coat she had a bottle of wine, and in the other, a soup bone wrapped in butcher paper. She took the food to the kitchen and flexed her arms to get the cramps out of her muscles. It was a long walk from the inn. Normally she stayed in the village, sleeping in the kitchen with the other girls, but she made a point to go home at least twice a week and check on her father. She also knew that once the snows came this would be more difficult. She thought again about trying to get him to move into town. But where would he stay? They had no money to spare. His pride would not let him take a cheap room at a mere pub. On the rare occasions he visited Sulcus, he had stayed at a gentlemen’s club.

  She was able to locate him easily by the sound of his coughing. He was sitting at the dining table, hunched over. He did most of his work in the dining room these days, taking advantage of the warmth from the kitchen. He had a very nice office upstairs, with large windows that afforded an excellent view of the land they no longer owned. He had even kept the furniture. But he couldn’t afford to keep another fire going. He didn’t straighten up when she kissed the back of his neck. “I’ll make you some tea and honey, Papa. It will soothe your throat.”

  “Thank you, dear. But no thank you. The coughing is not from the throat, it’s from the lungs.”

  “And I’m making soup.”

  “Thank you, but I’m not hungry.”

  “You must eat anyway, to keep up your strength.”

  “Fortunately I won’t have to keep it up for much longer.” The Baron turned around in his chair. “Alison, dear, please remember that I have asked you not to wear your restaurant clothes to the house. I may not have money, but I still have my pride.”

  Alison took her chef’s toque out of her pocket and put it on his head. He smiled ruefully. “There is nothing wrong with working, Papa. Many fine people work.”

  “Not the best people. It is bad enough when a man must work to support himself. It is even worse when his daughter must work.”

  “I don’t mind it.”

  “I wouldn’t mind it either if you didn’t need to do it. That’s the embarrassing part.”

  “That’s why they call it work. If you don’t need to do it, it isn’t work. It’s a hobby.”

  “I can’t believe you really like being a kitchen drudge.”

  “I didn’t say I liked it. I said I didn’t mind it. And I am certainly not a kitchen drudge. I’m the cook. I have two kitchen drudges reporting to me. And there’s nothing undignified about working. The nobility should try it, Papa. Most people do work, you know.”

  “Most people still respect the nobility, my dear.”

  Alison wrinkled her nose. “Ha! Which people? The tools of the ruling class. If the proletariat would throw off the shackles of materialism and rebel against their enslav
ement by the so-called nobility, they would . . .”

  “My dear, please remember that you are talking to a member of the so-called nobility. A position you will inherit in the not-too-distant future.”

  “Um, right. Right. Sorry. You spend all day working with drudges and it kind of gets to you after a while. Anyway, you just sit here and rest, while I cook up some soup. Soup is good for you. It’s easy to digest. And the hot liquid will help unclog your lungs.” She went through the swinging door into the kitchen. The Baron was seated at the end of the table, near the door, so he could still hear her while she talked and chopped things.

  “The coach came in,” she said through the door. “I brought the mail and the news from the city.”

  “Thank you. Anything good?”

  “No, not really. Just a lot of court gossip. And two strangers came to town. They’re staying at the inn. I think they might be working for Bussard.”

  “Really?” Baron Wayless turned in his chair. “What makes you say that?”

  “Just a hunch. I saw one of them standing outside the back door, like he was waiting for someone. A big, tough-looking sort of guy. I don’t know. He just looked like he was here to cause trouble.”

  The Baron made a mental note to ask Gloria what her rescuer was supposed to look like. “Two strangers, you said.”

  “The girls told me there were two. I didn’t get a chance to go up front and see. It was a busy night. You know how it is at the inn. It’s always busy these first few days after the coach comes in, when everyone comes to the village to pick up their mail.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “I’ll bring you the newspaper as soon as I get these onions off my hands. It says a princess was kidnapped.”

  This time Wayless turned so quickly his neck joint made a cracking noise. The motion triggered another coughing fit. When he finally got his lungs under control, and was able to listen again, he realized that Alison had kept on talking. “. . . anytime there’s anything strange going on around here, you can bet Count Bussard has his hand in it somehow.” The sound of chopping became audibly more vicious. “And I’m sure he’s in cahoots with the Middle-Aged Man of the Mountains, although of course everyone is too frightened to talk about him. The commoners suffer the most. If the workers would just unite, they would have the power to stand up to their oppressors.” Alison came through the swinging door and looked at her father with her hands on her hips. “Papa, I don’t know why you don’t write to the king. I’m sure he’d set things to right if he knew.”

  “For the same reason that no one else complains, my dear. Fear of retaliation. There’s no way to send a message without Bussard learning who sent it.”

  “Don’t you think the king would protect you?”

  “Bussard collects the taxes and sends the king his proper share. He’s the man the king will listen to.” In his mind, Wayless gave a wry chuckle. He wanted to do it out loud, but was afraid it would trigger more coughing. “But fear not, my dear. There are other ways to attract the king’s attention, even to our little village of Bornewald.”

  Alison shot him a speculative look, but apparently decided to talk about it another time. She vanished back into the kitchen. There was the sound of pots and pans being moved about, and water being drawn from the cistern. A few minutes later she came out again with a basket of rolls in her hands and a broadsheet under her arm. She ran straight into Gloria.

  “Um,” Alison said, but it was a word that spoke volumes. She was not mentally prepared for this. Had it been daylight—teatime perhaps, her brain might have adjusted to sight of a girl with curly blond hair, fashionably clothed in a new wine-colored dress with black lace sleeves, standing by her father’s chair. She might have assumed the girl dropped by for a social visit. But it was well after dark, and the only reasons she could imagine for a beautiful girl at her father’s side were too ridiculous to even consider. So she simply stopped and stared.

  “Oh, is that the Sulcus newspaper?” said Gloria, slipping it away from her. “May I see this? Thank you.”

  “Um,” said Alison.

  It was a moment that Baron Wayless knew would come, but one he had been hoping, right up until the last minute, that he could avoid. Now he rose, a bit stiffly, bowed to Gloria, and said formally, “Princess Gloria, allow me to present my daughter Alison. Alison, this is the Princess Gloria.”

  “Delighted,” said Gloria.

  “Um,” said Alison. Acting on autopilot, her hands lifted her skirt and she began a formal curtsey. But she stopped halfway down and straightened up again. “Right,” she said. “Yeah, right. Princess Gloria. Papa, who is this?”

  The Baron coughed. This time it was not a real cough, but one of those discreet I-need-time-to-think coughs. “This really is the Princess Gloria, my dear. She will be staying with us for a few days. As you see, she has not exactly been kidnapped.”

  “Not exactly been kidnapped? How, Papa, do you not exactly kidnap a princess? She’s either kidnapped or she isn’t.”

  “I kidnapped myself,” explained Gloria. “Although your father certainly helped,” she added, wanting to give credit where it was due.

  “There’s a story behind it,” said the Baron. “It’s rather amusing, in a way.” He proceeded to describe the plan, with help from Gloria, to Alison, who started out unamused and grew less and less so with each sentence. Still, she managed to keep her temper until almost the end of the story, at which point she exploded.

  “You’ll be executed!”

  The Baron was one of those men who grew calmer when people around him got excited. “Yes, my dear. That is rather the idea. I’m dying already. We’ve both learned to accept that.”

  “You’ll be arrested! You’ll spend the rest of your life in prison!”

  “That won’t be very long. Hardly enough to make it worth packing a change of clothes.”

  “You don’t know that! You might live a long time yet! Some people with your condition have lived months longer. Years, even.”

  “Lingering on in pain and febrility. True, I was looking forward to that. But I think I can handle the disappointment.”

  “Pain? You’ll die in pain, Papa. Are you forgetting that? You’ll be tortured. It will be far worse than any natural death.”

  “Not at all, my dear. I won’t be tortured. I’ll confess to everything.”

  “A cure might be discovered. You don’t know! It could happen tomorrow.”

  “What a wonderful thought. My life will be spared so I can spend it in debtors’ prison.”

  Alison strove to lower her voice, to adopt a tone that was calm and reasonable. “Papa,” she said soothingly, “you are a fine man. You’ve led a good life. Is this the kind of legacy you want to leave behind? Do you want to be remembered as a criminal?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do. You’re still young, my dear, and you don’t understand how men think. We’d all much rather be remembered as scoundrels and rogues than as paupers and failures.”

  “What of your estate? It will be confiscated. Everything we have will be taken!”

  “Everything we have is mortgaged. At least this way it will go to the king and not Count Bussard.

  “It’s a stupid and futile plan. The land will be put up for sale. Bussard will get it anyway.”

  “Perhaps. But you, my dear, will at last be free of debt.”

  Alison gave him a withering stare. “Surely you’re not going to claim that you are doing this for me? You will not only lose your life and estate, you’ll lose your title, your reputation, and your good name. And so will I, incidentally.” She decided to elaborate on this. “Yes, Papa. If you won’t think of yourself, think of me, your daughter. When you’re gone, Papa, I’ll be all alone in the world. I’ll have nothing.”

  “No,” said Gloria. “I’ll take care of that. It’s part of deal. I have a lawyer arranging it now.”

  “It’s your chance to get free of all this, Alison. Make a fresh start in a new city.”
/>   “It’s disloyal to the king,” snapped Alison, trying a new tactic. “If he chose some rich guy for her husband, then that’s the man she should marry.” She pointed a finger at Gloria. “Women do not have the right to choose their own husbands. That’s for their parents to decide. It’s her duty to obey her father and it’s your duty to support the king.”

  “You rejected every suitor I ever chose for you,” said her father mildly.

  “That’s not the same!” Alison’s voice was shrill. “This is completely different!”

  Gloria realized it was time to retreat. She nodded to the Baron and quietly slipped outside the door. The Baron pulled another chair away from the table. “Alison, my dear, please sit down.”

  “I’m not . . .”

  “Sit down,” said the Baron, gently but firmly. “Let’s talk about this calmly.”

  Alison sat down sullenly, with her arms folded across her breasts. Wayless uncrossed them and held her hands in his. “Alison, if your mother were alive . . .”

  Alison snatched her hands away. “Don’t bring Mother into this! That is so unfair!”

  “I promised her I would take care of you,” the Baron pressed on. “She lived her whole life with me under this crushing burden of debt. I inherited it from my father and he from his father, and I should have known we would never get out from under it. I should not even have proposed to her. But we were young and foolish and we were in love and we thought anything was possible. Then we had you, and we saw the world differently.”

  “We were happy,” said Alison, although not with conviction.

  “Bussard’s shadow loomed over us,” said her father. “It still does. He will never leave us, and so you must leave him. Alison, all your mother wanted was for you to be free of this.”