Tales of the Dragon's Bard, Volume 1: Eventide (7 page)

Merinda looked up from her parchment. “Oh?”

Jarod had found a piece of string in his pocket and was winding and unwinding it repeatedly around his finger as he bit at his lower lip.

“Forgive me, my dear Missus Oakman,” the thin man said, removing his own enormous hat with a flourish that almost avoided hitting his writing companion squarely in the face. “I am Edvard—the Dragon’s Bard—the author of this noble—”

Merinda set down her pencil and folded her arms across her chest. “Ah, yes. I have heard of you.”

Edvard beamed. “No doubt you are an avid follower of my tales!”

“No,” Merinda said, her eyes narrowing slightly. “The Widow Merryweather was in here not two days ago with Miss Ariela telling me about you and your dangerous writing companion.” In truth, the Widow Merryweather had given a chilling account of what might have happened to her at the hands of this charming, mystical, and dangerous stranger had he not been apprehended by the Constable Pro Tempore before any mischief could be done. By the time Miss Ariela had added her own embellishments, it was clear that the Widow had narrowly escaped the very worst and most interesting of fates. “And I suppose that fellow scribbling behind you goes by the name of Abel?”

The scribe glanced up in surprise at hearing his name mentioned, which caused him to make an unsightly mark on his page.

“Yes, he does, but that’s not important right now,” Edvard continued, his smile forced into an even brighter countenance.

“That’s all right, Missus Oakman,” Jarod said nervously. “Sorry to have troubled you . . . I think maybe we should just go.”

Both the Dragon’s Bard and the centaur farmer put restraining hands on the youth’s shoulders.

“Courage, lad!” Edvard said to Jarod. “We’ve crossed the threshold into uncharted realms where lesser mortal men fear to tread! That is the very nature of a quest!”

“Perhaps,” Merinda asked, “if you could describe this hat that you wish to order?”

“Well,” Jarod said, obviously gathering up every ounce of courage he hoped to possess, “it’s . . . it has to look like a quest hat.”

“A quest hat,” Merinda coaxed, picking up her pencil once more. “And just what does a quest hat look like?”

“It has to look like the greatest prize in the world!”

“Greatest prize in the world,” Merinda repeated as she scribbled on the parchment scrap. “What shape would the greatest prize have? Loaf? Conical? Pie?”

“Well . . . it needs to be perfect.”

Merinda was feeling her frustration mount. The one time men came into her shop and her husband had just left town. Who could possibly translate for her now? She decided to try herself. “Wide? Narrow? Short? Tall? Feathered? Wrap? Train? Brim?”

“Those all sound fine . . .”

“Pelt? Felt? Straw? Wool? Cloth?” Merinda continued, hoping that something she said would make sense to the boy. “Knit? Bonnet? Cap?”

“Anything . . . so long as it’s perfect.”

Jarod had answered her with such an expression of earnest desire that a single laugh escaped Merinda Oakman’s tightly drawn lips before she could stifle it. “Of course, Master Klum,” Merinda nodded. “A perfect hat.”

“A perfect
quest
hat,” Edvard added.

Merinda paused, drew a line through her last note, and added, “One perfect
quest
hat.”

Merinda hopped down off her chair in frustration. She had negotiated a price for the quest hat that was nearly double her usual rate—“no one wants a cheap quest hat”—which should have pleased her. Now, however, in the night, with the wind howling outside her window, and faced with the prospect of having to create the perfect quest hat for a woman whose identity Jarod refused to divulge, she was beginning to feel she may have gotten the worst part of the deal.

She gazed again out the window at the raging storm without. Harv was supposed to have come home sometime in these last two days, and now she was worried. She hated to be away from her dear husband for any period of time; it was not like him to be late. No doubt the storm was delaying his return to her. She offered a short, heartfelt prayer to Plania, the god of travelers, that Harv would have the good sense to wait out the storm and not try to foolishly push through its dangerous fury.

Something beyond the glass, in the swirling eddies of blowing snow, caught her eye. She was not sure she had seen it at first, but—there it was again, a streak of bright light falling outside her window. She considered for a moment that it might be a trick of her flaring lamp reflected in the glass, so she turned and, with a quick puff, extinguished the flame.

The workroom fell into instant darkness, and it took Merinda a moment for her eyes to get accustomed to it. The alley beyond slowly emerged in the window, lit with a faint blue light that she could not recall seeing before. She leaned closer to the window, trying to see the source of the strange, dim light.

A third brilliant streak fell almost against the glass. Merinda leaped backward with a yelp, pushing over her chair. As her breath came quickly, three more streaks of light plunged downward beyond the glass in the alley, and then a cascade of light falling like a sudden, driving rain filled the glass for a moment. She heard the soft impacts in the snow piled up in the alley, dull thuds that came at her through the shop wall.

Just as suddenly, the falling lights stopped and a deep winter silence filled the workroom.

Merinda reached for her lamp, consciously steadying her hand as she took it from the workbench. She held still for a moment, holding the unlit lamp, and listened.

No sound at all.

She drew in a deep breath.

BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!

The milliner blinked, uncertain as to what to do.

BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!

It was the door—the back door to her kitchen off the alley.

Someone was banging at her door.

Merinda turned from the workbench, wishing fervently that she had not quenched the lamp. The glow from the alley window had brightened and she could make out the stairs at the far end of her workspace, one set leading up to the rooms where she and Harv lived above the shop and the other set leading down to the storeroom in the cellar space beneath. The right-hand door led to the storefront, but the door to the left would take her into the kitchen and closer to the banging on the door.

She could make out the bright, cheerful outline of the door that led into the kitchen, illuminated by the hearth fire still burning there. Merinda knew that she needed to light the lamp and that the hearth was now the most ready means of doing so.

“It’s your kitchen, Merinda,” she muttered to herself; then she took another deep breath and pushed through the door.

BAM! BAM! BAM!

“I’m coming!” Merinda shouted as she pushed a stalk of dried goldenrod into the fire and relit her lamp. The kitchen hearth was burning low in the evening. Merinda had intended to bank it before going to bed but was now glad she had not. The flame sprang to life on the lamp’s wick, illuminating the cheerful kitchen and making it feel comfortably familiar. The long, beautiful table in the center of the room and the carefully built, oversized hearth dominated the space. The three windows set in the wall across from the hearth normally afforded a view of Harv’s work yard and sheds—now completely obscured by the night and its storm. Her china cabinet stood next to the alley door with all of her best plates—such few as she had managed to collect—carefully cleaned and stacked. Her kitchen was her joy, the place where she and Harv filled most of their evenings together.

BAM! BAM! BAM!

“Just a moment!” Merinda glanced around the room, wondering what kind of company she would be entertaining on a night like this. She frowned at the far corner of the room. With her husband away, Merinda liked to keep busy, and she had spent part of the day cleaning out a few pieces of trash from the cellar. She had not gotten as far as taking it all to the yard, however, and it remained an unsightly stack in the corner. She decided that there was no help for it now—whoever was in need at her door would have to put up with her house as it stood.

Merinda gripped the lamp, wished again that her husband were home, and opened the door.

The gale nearly doused her lamp, but the dim glow of the hearth fire gave enough light to see.

On the stoop before her, standing up to its neck in a drift of snow, was a pixie, its wings stiff and coated with ice. It stood shivering uncontrollably, its arms folded across its chest. Its normally brilliant shine was replaced now by a blue glow that illuminated the surrounding snow.

Merinda slammed shut the door.

Merinda had no love for pixies and no patience with their antics. They were a notorious public nuisance in Eventide and the perpetual bane of Xander Lamplighter, the Constable Pro Tempore, whose knack for capturing these small, flying hoodlums was a serious relief to the townsfolk and ensured him of his job. It was Xander’s suggestion, in fact, that pixies caught in their nefarious acts be incarcerated in the streetlamps lining Trader’s Square and Charter Square during summer evenings, allowing the public areas to be well lit by their glow while punishing them at the same time. Ariela Soliandrus, the Gossip Fairy, had let everyone in town know just how terrible pixies were and that they were never to be trusted in civilized communities. The fact that fairies and pixies were distantly related only seemed to lend credence to Ariela’s assertions. Pixies wore next to nothing, being naturally warm beings to begin with and not caring for the weight that clothing added when they flew on their diaphanous wings. They had a humor all their own and a penchant for theft. Everyone knew that to invite a pixie into your house was to open your door wide to trouble.

BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!

Merinda knew that she should just walk away from the door.

But . . .

The image of the little creature, blue from the cold and shivering on her porch step, kept returning to her thoughts. Little crystals had formed in its hair, and its pointed ears had quivered as it stood before her. She could not shake off the image of its large, violet eyes staring up at her.

Merinda considered herself a good woman. She visited the Pantheon Church weekly and had promised the Lady of the Sky that she would help those in need.

She wondered if that included pixies.

“Merinda,” she said to herself, “what a notion!”

She turned back to the alley door and opened it.

“You promise to behave yourselves,” Merinda said, shaking her finger at the pixie named Glix.

“Whenever have we not?” answered Glix with a sly grin.

“Promise me!” Merinda warned.

“That we do, ma’am! We promise to behave yourselves,” Glix nodded in the affirmative as he turned to his fellow pixies. “Don’t we, boys?”

Merinda had plucked more than a dozen pixies out of the banks of snow in the alleyway. They had not been particularly difficult to find, since they glowed in the snow, but all of them were literally frozen stiff into little pixie statues, which she had brought into her kitchen and, not knowing what else to do, lined up on her mantel above the hearth. She had then enlivened the fire with a pair of well-placed logs and, within a very short time, the pixies had all begun to come around.

The other pixies on the mantel, who had now lost their blue chill to a more healthy red-brown color and were looking far too animated for Merinda’s liking, all answered Glix in the affirmative.

“Behaving yourselves we will,” said Dix.

“We’ve never behaved like yourself before,” piped in Plix, “but we’ll be doin’ it fer you!”

“Just how long would you be liking us to behave like yourself?” Snix wanted to know.

“I don’t think you understand,” Merinda said nervously. “You’re all feeling better, I see, so perhaps if I just saw you back out the door . . .”

“Back into that ice?” Glix whined. “We fell out of the sky on account of that! You wouldn’t be doin’ that to us now, would you? Us being poor little creatures on a night such as this and all!”

“No, I suppose not,” Merinda answered wearily.

“Don’t you worry, love,” Glix said with another wide grin. “It’s be a party you’ll not soon forget!”

In the first hour of the night, Merinda tried to organize a dinner for the pixies. Finding it not to their peculiar tastes, the pixies threw the food in the general direction of the cleaning basins and set out to make dinner for their hostess instead as Merinda worked furiously to clean up the meal she had just made.

By the second hour, the pixies had spilled cornmeal onto Merinda’s floor as they were in the process of mixing up their cakes. This led to the almost immediate discovery that the combination of cornmeal and pixie feet allowed for a tremendous ability to slide across Merinda’s floor. Pixies being what they were, they immediately established rules and contests for one another regarding sliding across the floor on cornmeal, a distraction that kept them from getting their cakes baked for quite some time. Merinda grabbed her broom almost at once and began sweeping up both cornmeal and pixies in an effort to once more establish the cleanliness of her kitchen. Unfortunately, the pixies considered this a considerable challenge to their game and added new rules incorporating the broom into their play.

By the third hour, Merinda had managed to put her kitchen back in order just as Plix discovered Merinda’s workroom. All of the pixies were astonished at the idea of how hats were made, and Merinda, grateful for something to distract the pixies from the kitchen, began telling them about the millinery craft. The pixies saw an immediate possibility for improvement in the craft and began reorganizing Merinda’s workspace as an expression of their appreciation for her help. This reorganization was entirely along the thinking lines of pixies—which generally categorized all of Merinda’s notions, cloths, pelts, felts, and supplies according to the third letter of the object’s name and in order of time required to manufacture it. By the fourth hour, every scrap of material owned by Merinda once more had a place, but everything was out of place and impossible for Merinda to find.

By the fifth hour, Merinda had gratefully discovered that singing to the pixies seemed to quiet them and prevent either further damage by them or their discovery of other as-yet undamaged areas of her shop and home. Merinda was rapidly running out of songs to sing—and it was still not yet dawn.