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Автор Майкл Уильямс
Weasel’s Luck
Part I
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Part II
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Part III
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Epilogue
Weasel’s Luck
by
Michael Williams
Part I
From the Moat House to Warden Swamp
The Sign of the Weasel is tunnel on tunnel,
enchantment on enchantment.
He digs beneath himself, and in digging
discovers all roads into nothing.
Burrow the dark until darkness unravels,
in dark the philosophers dance.
Chapter One
It started on the night of the banquet I did not attend.
While the others were celebrating, I was cleaning my eldest brother Alfric’s chambers, sweeping away the daily confusion of soiled clothes, of bones, of melon rinds. It was like a midden in there, like an ogre’s den. Surely the missing servants were only hiding from Alfric somewhere in the moat house, and would turn up shortly.
Don’t misunderstand me. It would be wrong, then or now, to compare my brother to an ogre. An ogre is larger, more lethal. Probably brighter.
Yet Alfric was bright enough to have me sweeping his quarters, soaping his windows, while he and the rest of the family sat down to supper with an honorable guest. For eight years running he had blackmailed me for the smallest of misdeeds, so that while the sons of other Solamnic Knights had spent their teens in horsemanship and falconry, I had spent mine in sweeping and dread, for reasons . . . well, the reasons come later.
Let it just be said that at seventeen I was feeling too old to be my brother’s keeper. While I stirred the dust in his quarters, Alfric sat in the great hall, at the table where Father entertained Sir Bayard Brightblade of Vingaard, a Solamnic Knight who had ridden up to our backwater estate in the glittering armor that was already the subject of song and a legend or two. To top it off, Sir Bayard was supposedly the best swordsman in northern Solamnia.Not that I cared.
What was especially galling about our visitor was his redemption of Alfric. For it seems that Bayard Brightblade was on his way to vie for the hand of some southern nobleman’s daughter in some glorified tournament, and had stopped in our rice paddy of a county as a favor to our once famous father. Bayard was taking my brother on as a squire at the advanced age of twenty-one, where half a dozen Knights had balked and refused. He would take Alfric with him, whip him into shape, and return him to Father as a man with knightly prospects.
Hearing of these prospects, Alfric had decided to celebrate: another horse had been found dead of exhaustion in the stables this morning, and once again, our tutor Gilean-dos had been set on fire. Arson was a hobby both Alfric and I pursued, but as usual, I had been blamed, dismissed from the hall without ceremony and supper, while a celebrity dined in our midst.
Laughter and the clatter of crockery arose from downstairs as I dusted my brother’s nightstand, passing the cloth over the freshly carved “Alfric was here” on its surface. No doubt they Were talking about me over wine and venison downstairs, hoping I would soon grow out of whatever I was supposed to grow out of. Brithelm, my middle and spiritual brother, had been excused from supper once again that evening for the gods knew what ancient and honorable fast, and Alfric was no doubt seated at the right hand of my father, nodding in agreement with the old man who had done his best by all of us, while Sir Bayard looked on in solemn and knightly approval.
