Tales of the Dragon's Bard, Volume 1: Eventide (15 page)

“Thank you, Winifred,” Livinia said through a tight smile. All the townspeople present knew that Livinia was wondering why Winifred Taylor’s son, Percival, had not asked her daughter to the Couples’ Dance later in the evening. Awarding her second prize was testing her limited diplomacy. Xander gratefully delivered the dress back to Winifred, handed her the elaborate red ribbon award, and hurried back into the storeroom.

“Now, for our first prize and the unanimous decision of our judges, I am thrilled to announce that the blue ribbon and the grand prize winner of this year’s Crafts Contest goes to . . . number thirteen!”

Xander came at once out of the workroom holding a tapestry.

The crowd gasped. The tapestry was set on an easel that supported it for its full twelve-foot height so that it could be seen throughout the hall, but everyone present, including the centaurs watching from the back of the hall, was drawn toward it at once. The pixies pushed against the glass of their lamp prisons in wonderment.

It was the most exquisite tapestry anyone there had ever seen. The tiny stitches were impossibly close together, their silk shining in the pixie lights. It was a mountain scene with a waterfall of silvery threads that seemed to cascade as the light shifted against it. The clouds, too, seemed to move beyond the mountain peaks. There were a lake and pine trees with a spindly white tower emerging above the tree line. In the foreground were two figures facing each other—undeniably Queen Nance and King Reinard—in their coronation dress and mantles, each rendered in exquisite detail.

Someone started clapping amid the appreciative murmurs, joined quickly by others until the entire Hall was filled with applause and shouts of congratulations.

“Number thirteen!” Livinia called out to the crowd, standing on the tips of her pointed shoes trying to see who might acknowledge creation of this amazing work. “Please! Number thirteen step forward!”

From the back of the crowd she could see people begin to part, though for some reason she could not see who was approaching. In a few moments the people moved aside and she gazed down in shock.

Standing before her at the front of the stage stood Beulandreus Dudgeon. His hands were scrubbed nearly raw in his attempt to get the smithy stains of years of work out of them. His face behind his neatly combed beard was equally pink, as was his shiny, bald head. He wore a leather coat over his threadbare shirt, and his nicked and cut hobnail boots had a dull polish to them.

In his right hand he held a square of parchment—signed by Xander Lamplighter—with the number thirteen.

Livinia gaped at him for a while. The applause died down in anticipation but was only filled with Livinia’s silence. At last she spoke with the only explanation that made sense to her.

“Master Dwarf,” Livinia said as though speaking to a naughty child, “you’re from a different land and I’m sure you just didn’t understand the rules of our contest. You were to submit only work that you did yourself—not something made by someone else.”

“Made it myself,” the dwarf nodded, thrusting the square parchment slip up toward the woman. “Number thirteen . . . that be mine.”

“The dwarf made
that?
” someone called out from the crowd.

“Yeah,” called someone else, “with his hammer, he did!”

A tittering sound rolled through the crowd. They had come to have fun and now their celebrations were taking a strange turn. They wanted to get back to having a good time.

“It must have been a very
small
hammer!” someone called back.

An explosion of laugher broke in the Hall.

Livinia’s face went flush. “You’re a smith! A dwarf! You
can’t
have made this—”

“It are mine and I made it,” Beulandreus said, his cheeks flushing to a brick red as the laughter grew behind him in the Hall.

Livinia’s shrill voice cut through the Hall. “Thief! Liar! Xander! Arrest this dwarf!”

“Theft and fraud?” Jarod repeated. “Father, that can’t be true.”

“I know,” Ward Klum answered, shaking his head. “But where did that tapestry come from? He insists he made it, but I’ve been to court in Mordale, Son, and there’s nothing remotely that beautiful even in the halls of the king’s palace there. If he were capable of creating art that’s more beautiful than the craftsmen to the king can produce, why would he be in Eventide? That tapestry alone is worth more than our entire town. And if he didn’t make it, where could a dwarven smith get the wherewithal to buy such a treasure?”

“It doesn’t make sense, Father,” Jarod said, shaking his head. “I know the smith—better than most, I think—and he just couldn’t do that. Where is he now?”

“Xander and Aren took him over to the lockup,” Ward replied, taking off his hat and pushing an uncharacteristically out-of-place lock of hair back where it belonged. “I think Aren mostly went to show Beulandreus support and to stay with him. Livinia’s convinced most of the town—thanks to the unfortunately rapid assistance of the Gossip Fairy—that Beulandreus must be dealing in stolen goods. But if that were the case, then why expose himself by trying to pass off a tapestry as his own in front of the entire community?”

“How’s Beulandreus?” Jarod asked. “What does he say?”

His father drew in a considered breath. “He never says much anyway, Son. The more we talk to him, the quieter he seems to get. He did ask me to find you and have you get a few things for him from his house.”

Jarod looked down. His father held the dwarf’s great iron key.

“You’re coming with me,” Jarod said, taking the key. “Right now.”

Jarod turned the key in the lock and pushed the door slowly open.

It was extraordinarily dark inside. No lamps were lit, and there were no windows in the subterranean apartments of Beulandreus Dudgeon. Jarod’s father stood behind him with the lantern, but Jarod was blocking the light into the room. He took a step inside as his father pushed the lantern to the side.

The rooms were more spacious than Jarod had imagined—and filled with artistic treasures that took his breath away. Among the chairs, tables, and couches that furnished the room were paintings, sculptures, and tapestries ornamenting every wall, each exquisite in its own way. Some lay casually propped against the wall. There was jewelry as well, and gems and wooden cases filled with expensive silks and threads.

Ward shook his head. “This won’t help his case, Son. This is a king’s treasure he has hidden in his home. It looks as though he
is
a thief or at best is assisting a thief.”

Jarod walked over to a workbench at one side of the room. He stopped and gazed down at the pieces of wood partially assembled on the table. They looked familiar to him, reminding him of . . .

Jarod reached into his pocket and drew out the Treasure Box.

The pieces were the same. Beulandreus had not just given him a Treasure Box—the dwarf had
made
the Treasure Box.

Jarod cast his eyes quickly about the room, his eye settling on a shadowy form around a corner at the back of the main room.

“Come on, Father,” Jarod said, moving quickly around the corner. “I know what the dwarf needs.”

The dwarf shivered, huddled on a stool in the dungeon cell behind the iron-barred door that he had installed just three weeks before. The cots had not yet been replaced, and a stool from the countinghouse above was the only readily available seating that Xander could find for his prisoner.

Outside the cell, Ward Klum stood with Jarod and the Constable Pro Tempore.

“You think Aren will be much longer?” Xander asked.

“I think your answer has arrived,” Ward replied.

“We’re all very busy women,” came the unmistakable voice of Livinia Walters echoing down the dungeon corridor. “Everyone is waiting for the Couples’ Dance!”

“They’ll wait,” said Aren Bennis without the slightest tincture of sympathy in his voice.

“Really, Farmer Bennis!” said Daphne Melthalion. “I thought we had all this settled already!”

“There’ll be a complaint to the town fathers about this!” added the Widow Merryweather.

The three women appeared at the base of the stairs, urged onward by the uncomfortably bent form of an aging centaur filling the stairway behind them.

“I’m just following orders, ma’am,” Aren Bennis said, giving them a polite shove down the dungeon corridor.

Livinia saw Ward, Jarod, and the constable at once and stepped quickly toward them. “What is the meaning of this, Ward Klum? You’ve apprehended the criminal and . . . oh, what kind of sad joke is this?”

Livinia had turned toward the dungeon cell and discovered what for her was the incomprehensible sight of a dwarf sitting on a wooden stool in front of a tapestry loom frame. A box of silk threads sat next to the dwarf, but Beulandreus himself sat with his back toward the cell door, slumped over and making no move toward either the loom or the spools of thread.

“You’ve really gone lunatic this time, Ward Klum!”

“It wasn’t my idea,” Ward replied calmly. “It was my son’s.”

“You’re going to blame your son for this?” Livinia shrieked. “Sitting that fool dwarf in front of a tapestry loom like some kind of bizarre River Fairy tableau? You might as well try to convince me that my dog can play cards!”

“Livinia, you don’t have to get so—”

“I do
too
have to get so, Daphne Melthalion!” Livinia snapped. “That dwarf tried to make a fool of all of us by passing off his stolen property as his own, thumbing his nose at the lot of us while he uses our town—our town!—for his criminal deeds!”

Xander shook his head. “Now, there’s no real evidence—”

“No evidence? Are you blind?” Livinia’s face was nearly purple with rage. “He’s a
dwarf!
He’s a smith from under a
mountain!
They’re all the same: dirty, smelly creatures whose only worth is in beating things into shape with a hammer. They have no grace . . . no appreciation for the finer things in life . . . no understanding of art. I mean, honestly, all you have to do is look at him and . . . what does he think he is doing?”

The dwarf offered no reply. He put his hands to the loom and began to weave.

What emerged with incredible speed was a tapestry of the finest detail using impossibly narrow silken threads. The dwarf’s thick fingers moved with unmatched skill. Silence fell in the dungeon even over Livinia, who stood with her mouth stuck open in midlecture.

For some time they all watched as a perfectly beautiful face emerged in the tapestry.

It was the face of Livinia Walters.

Not the line-creased, careworn face of the screaming, scolding woman, but her face as she might have been in joy and peace. The lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth were still there, but there was the hint of bliss in their turn. Her eyes shone from the silken threads with an inner contentment. Her head was tilted slightly as though inviting conversation. It was a more beautiful Livinia—it was the woman she longed to be.

The dwarf dropped the shuttle and turned to look at the woman whose image he had just completed.

Livinia Walters fell to her knees on the dungeon floor, covered her eyes, and wept.

The crowd in the Cooper’s Hall was tiring of the Flag Four Troubadours. They had long since exhausted their repertoire several times over, but no one was willing to leave until the Couples’ Dance was accomplished.

Livinia Walters returned to the Hall to the accompaniment of relieved applause and cheering. A few noticed that her eyes were bloodshot and her face flushed, but mostly they were astonished that she was followed by the dwarf who had been arrested in front of them—and whose guilt so many had been convinced of—only an hour before.

Ariela Soliandrus, the Gossip Fairy, fluttered her wings madly to carry her fourteen-inch height over to Aren Bennis, who had motioned her toward him. It was the first time the centaur had ever deigned to speak to the fairy and, as he whispered in her tiny ear, her eyes widened perceptibly.

Livinia did not take her place on the stage but stood next to the dwarf. She could not find her voice even though the apprentice scribe was prepared to record her words precisely. Instead, overcome as she was, she allowed the Gossip Fairy to spread the word of events quietly throughout the Hall, which grew more silent by the moment.

Livinia took the blue ribbon from where she had left it on the stage and, with tears in her eyes, quietly knelt and handed it to the dwarf.

At the back of the hall, Jarod Klum stood next to Vestia Walters, who was looking on in open-mouthed astonishment at her mother. Jarod looked around the silent hall and caught sight of Caprice Morgan, standing alone next to the large double doors that opened out into Charter Square. He slipped away from Vestia and, filled with an idea that overcame his fear, he stepped up to Caprice and quietly spoke to her.

“You don’t have a partner for the Couples’ Dance?”

Caprice looked away with a wry smile. “I did . . . or thought I did.”

“May I make a suggestion?”

Jarod whispered to her, and her smile widened. “Yes, I’d like that.”

Caprice Morgan walked down the length of the Cooper’s Hall past the brightly colored costumes and hats of the silent crowd and stepped up to the dwarf, whose head was bowed down as he held the blue ribbon in both his large hands.

“Master Dudgeon,” she said across the silence of the Hall. “It’s good luck to dance with a dwarf. May I?”

Beulandreus turned his face up, gazing at Caprice in wonder.

She reached down and took his hand, leading him to the center of the floor.

“What shall we dance?” she asked him.

“I . . . I watched the Ladies’ Dance,” he mumbled quietly.

Caprice smiled. “Do you mind? It
is
the Ladies’ Dance . . .”

“No! I don’t mind!” the dwarf blinked.

Caprice looked around at the stunned occupants of the Hall. She spied a familiar face and called to her. “Evangeline! It’s a reel. We need someone else for the dance!”

Evangeline shook her head emphatically. Daphne Melthalion, watching next to her daughter Evangeline, turned to her and whispered insistently, then gave her daughter a shove. Evangeline stumbled onto the floor and took the dwarf’s other hand. “It’s . . . it’s good luck to dance with a dwarf?” she said uncertainly.