Disenchanted (16 page)

“Really?” asked Boric. “Then whose feet are those?”

Clovis turned to see two black boots sticking out from under the dragon’s carcass.

“Maybe…somebody else…” Clovis started uncertainly.

“And how do you explain
that
?” As he spoke, Bubbles the wyndbahr landed with a gust of wind next to them. Viriana slipped off his back. “Ready?” she asked.

Clovis looked to Boric and then Viriana and back again. Then he examined his ghostly hands. “So I’m really…”

“As a doornail,” said Viriana. “The good news is, you’re number twenty-seven. Congrats, Clovis the Dragon-Slayer. You could sit next to Hollick the Goblin-Slayer if you wanted to, although I don’t recommend it if you ever want to get your hands on any mead.”

“Whoa, how is he Clovis the
Dragon-Slayer
?” asked Boric. “The dragon
fell
on him.”

“He killed it with his sword.”

“Are you
kidding
me?” Boric exclaimed. “That was sheer luck!”

“I don’t feel very lucky,” said Clovis, regarding his ghostly form dismally.

“
I
killed the dragon,” Boric insisted. “Did you see what I did? I jumped onto a dragon’s back and rode it all over the canyon. That has to be in the top five bravest things anyone has ever done!”

Viriana shook her head. “First of all, that wouldn’t even make it in the top fifty. Second, that’s technically an assist, not a slaying. Third…”

“An
assist
! You’re going to pull that again? First with the Ogre of Chathain and now the Dragon of Kalvan? What do I have to do to get credit for killing something?”

“Actually killing it would be a good start,” sniffed Viriana, patting Bubbles on his head.

“I don’t mean to interrupt,” said Clovis, “but what do I…”

“These rules are ridiculous,” growled Boric. “I’m getting shafted out of two legitimate monster kills on a stupid technicality. An assist, my ass.”

Viriana shrugged. “I don’t make the rules. And by the way, calling it the Ogre of Chathain isn’t helping your case any. It just sounds pretentious.”

Clovis was looking around uncertainly. “Seriously, guys, do I just get on the…”

“
Pretentious
?” Boric growled. “You know what’s pretentious? Calling someone a Dragon-Slayer when the dragon
fell
on him.”

“Oh, and third,” said Viriana, “you don’t get credit for the assist because you’re already dead.”

“What? I risked my life to — ”

“You didn’t risk anything, you big whiner. You’re already dead. Get that through your maggot-infested skull, Boric. You’re dead. Dead, dead, dead.”

Clovis shuffled toward Bubbles. “I’m going to just climb on up the, uh, bear-thing…”

“And how is it, while we’re on the subject,” Boric continued, “that Hollick the Goblin-Slayer gets such high acclaim? They’re
goblins
, for Grovlik’s sake.”

“He single-handedly killed every goblin in Avaress,” said Viriana.

“There aren’t any goblins in Avaress!”

“Exactly. What in Varnoth’s name do you think you’re doing?” This last was directed at Clovis, who was awkwardly trying to climb onto the wyndbahr’s back. Bubbles seemed to think he was playing and began to nuzzle the Clovis apparition affectionately. “Back, fell beast!” cried Clovis, falling to the ground and raising his hands in fear.

“Take it easy, Dragon-Slayer,” Boric said dryly. He glared at Viriana, who stuck out her tongue at him. She hopped onto Bubbles’s back. “Crouch, boy,” she said, and Bubbles flattened himself against the ground. Boric climbed onto his back and Clovis followed. “Up!” cried Viriana, and Bubbles launched himself into the sky.

Less than twenty minutes later, Bubbles the wyndbahr landed on the roof of the Library of Avaress. Boric climbed down and waved good-bye to Viriana and Clovis the Dragon-Slayer.

“Good-bye, Boric of Ytrisk!” said Viriana. “I shall return in one week! Pray that you have broken the curse by then!”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Boric. “Enough with the theatrics.”

“Good-bye, Boric!” called Clovis as the wyndbahr took off. “Thanks for the assist!”

“Poser,” muttered Boric, waving absently at Clovis.

EIGHTEEN

Boric did everything he could to locate Milah after the wedding, but she had disappeared without a trace. The widow hadn’t seen her since the morning of the wedding, and Milo the messenger hadn’t checked in at any of the Messenger Corps outposts within two hundred miles. The servants Boric had sent into the local taverns and brothels turned up many a pretty young redhead, but none of them were Milah. He issued standing orders to notify him if Milo checked in at any messenger haunts or if anyone caught wind of someone peddling magic mirrors in Ytrisk, but these orders resulted in not a single lead. She was simply gone.

Boric eventually settled into married life at Brobdingdon. He was relieved to find that Urgulana had as much interest in him as he had in her. Initially this was a bit of a blow to his ego; he had expected to have to continually rebuff her advances and explain to her that he had no intention of consummating their sham union. But it didn’t take him long to realize that he fell well outside of Urgulana’s preferences through no fault of his own. Urgulana’s orientation was as definite as her appearance was ambiguous.

Somewhat unexpectedly, though, this fact gave rise to a wholly different sort of tension in the castle. His servants continued to turn up remarkable specimens of femininity whose tresses ranged from auburn to near-crimson, and Boric couldn’t bear to let some of them go back to the inns and houses of ill repute in which they had been found. Being the crown prince, he had a fair amount of control over the hiring and firing of servants, and after several months the staff of Kra’al Brobdingdon began to take on a decidedly ginger hue.

The quality and coloration of the female servants at the castle was fodder for speculation and rumors but the only person who really seemed to mind was Urgulana. Her own tastes, it seemed, ran toward petite blonds with lean, almost boyish figures. Once Boric figured this out, he was able to negotiate a compromise with Urgulana that dictated that she was to have final say over the hiring of seamstresses and kitchen staff. It wasn’t long before one could ascertain someone’s function within the castle solely from a one’s hair color, and it was not uncommon to hear within the walls of Kra’al Brobdingdon such odd utterances as “The new gingers are hopeless with cobwebs” or “My soup is cold; fetch me a blond.”

Boric kept very busy over the next several years. When he wasn’t evaluating the staff or officiating over some ceremony or meeting, he was mincing trolls or dodging assassination attempts by his brothers. His brothers’ preferred method was poison; Boric’s food-tasters had such a short life expectancy that they had to be hired from consecutively more distant lands where they were unfamiliar with the notorious nature of the position. Sometimes, however, one or both of his brothers would fall on him in some dark corner of the castle, attempting to cut his throat. Having grown up with the two murderous scoundrels, Boric managed to stay one step ahead of them, but after having lost count of the number of attempts they had made on his life, he finally went to his father to complain. King Toric, unfortunately, seemed to view assassination attempts as a rite of passage for future kings. “Why, one time my brothers locked me in a beet cellar for a fortnight,” he exclaimed. “I survived on nothing but beets and my own urine. I was orange for three weeks.”

King Toric died of a heart attack on Boric’s seventh wedding anniversary. The next day, Boric ascended to the throne and assigned both of his brothers to oversee the pumice mines of Bjill. This engendered a fair amount of goodwill among his subjects, who for the most part considered Yoric and Goric to be haughty, capricious, cowardly, and cruel. Their exile was also welcomed by the rulers of the other Six Kingdoms, who found dealing with the two brothers exasperating. During trade negotiations the brothers would often make ridiculous demands to amuse themselves, such as the time they demanded ten tons of cat hair in exchange for an equivalent weight of pumice. Bjill being the only source of high-quality pumice in Dis, the other kings found themselves in a bidding war, each endeavoring to determine how many tons of cat hair he could come up with on short notice, as well as trying desperately to find a secondary buyer for several million shorn cats. When not one of them could promise more than a few hundred pounds of cat hair, Yoric and Goric stormed out of the negotiations in mock disgust and spent the rest of the night getting drunk and laughing uproariously at their cleverness. In the meantime, thousands of Ytriskians went hungry for the lack of potatoes, which is what they had actually been sent to acquire.

So there was little grieving when Yoric and Goric were exiled to Bjill, and even less when it was reported three years later that Goric had been accidentally abraded to death in a pumice avalanche. To no one’s delight, Yoric lasted much longer, succumbing to the Bjills only a few months before Boric himself died.

Boric spent thirteen years doing the mostly dull and thankless work of ruling Ytrisk. His days were occupied by boring, pointless ceremonies and even more boring and pointless meetings. The cachet of the king was such that people seemed to think progress was being made on whatever issue was bothering them if they could simply get Boric to hear their grievances even if there was absolutely nothing he could do about them. He met with the pumice miners about the horrendous conditions of the mines; he met with the bakers about the price of flour; he met with shepherds about the number of sheep that were falling into crevices (this was before the epidemic of suicide among Ytriskian sheep was widely known); he met with farmers about the lack of rain. The aggrieved contingent would go away feeling better that the matter was in good hands, slowly become more disgruntled over the next several months about the lack of progress being made, and eventually demand another meeting.

The only part of the job he enjoyed was declaring war on Skaal. He did it whenever he could. Sometimes the Skaal would antagonize him by raiding one of the border towns or confiscating a shipment of pumice traveling through their territory, but most of the time he was just bored. Declaring war on Skaal increased patriotism among the people, made them forget about all their other problems, killed off some of the excess population, often resulted in the acquisition of some valuable booty, and — most importantly — relieved Boric’s crushing boredom. It was too bad about the killing, of course, but most of the peasants were probably going to die of plague or starvation anyway. There was a lot of that going around and not much Boric could do about it. And at least he had the balls to lead his troops into battle, not like some kings who kept on attending boring meetings throughout the course of a war.

Boric was popular among the other kings (except for King Corbet, who ascended to the Skaal throne shortly after Boric became King of Ytrisk). Part of this was goodwill engendered by Boric’s father. Toric had been an honorable man and generally well liked, although his wife, Gulbayna, was considered uncouth and was nearly as difficult to look at as Boric’s own wife, Urgulana. Fortunately, Boric seemed to take after his father both in looks and bearing. To Boric’s dismay, though, his mother decided to take on the role of a sort of goodwill ambassador to the other kingdoms after his father’s death; she did so much damage to Ytrisk’s reputation abroad that Boric had to form a special diplomatic corps to follow behind her on her travels and apologize. Her death, five years after Toric’s, created an international incident that nearly caused King Jeddac of Blinsk to break off all trade with Ytrisk: having gorged herself on the poisonous crayfish of Lake Blinsk, she fell into a well and rotted there for three days, sickening several hundred Blinskians. Only the finesse of Boric’s diplomatic corps kept Jeddac from refusing to send any more salt or copper (the chief exports of Blinsk) to Ytrisk.

 The resolution of the Gulbayna Incident — as it was called — was good news for Boric, because Ytrisk was still embroiled in an on-again, off-again war with Skaal and couldn’t afford to deal with a trade war with Blinsk at the same time. Relations between Skaal and Ytrisk improved a bit after King Corbet died in one of the many Skaal invasions of the southern part of Ytrisk, about a year after the death of Boric’s mother. Corbet had never completely gotten over his humiliation at the hand of Boric, and he always seemed to inject personal sentiment into the age-old conflict between the two countries. King Celiac and King Toric had always been at each other’s throats too, but it was never personal. Declaring war on each other, burning each other’s crops, and stealing each other’s cattle was just what kings did. There was no call for bringing emotions into it the way Corbet did. It was unprofessional.

So it was a relief to Boric when Corbet was killed by a chance hit by an Ytriskian arrow in what was called by Ytriskian historians The Fourteenth Battle of Plik. The battle had no conclusive result (in keeping with the spirit of the thirteen previous battles of Plik), but the death of Prince Corbet at first threatened to escalate the hostilities between the two kingdoms even further: although Corbet had clearly been seen to fall from a parapet with an arrow lodged in his throat, his body was never found. The Skaal accused the Ytriskians of stealing the corpse, but the Ytriskians pointed out that this was obviously impossible: they’d have had to send men a hundred yards behind enemy lines and surreptitiously drag the corpse across an active battlefield. If they had men capable of such a feat, surely the Fourteenth Battle of Plik would have ended more decisively. The mystery of the missing corpse was never solved.

This was not the last strange occurrence revolving around the death of one of the kings of the Six Kingdoms. King Loren of Avaress, moments after being severely mauled by a wild boar in the southern reaches of the Thick Forest, got to his feet and staggered off into the woods, never to be seen again. Similar rumors surrounded the deaths of some of the other kings over the next several years. Boric dismissed it all as old wives’ tales. He didn’t know what had happened to Corbet’s body, but then he didn’t know where the sun went when it set over the Sea of Dis, what lay beyond the Wastes of Preel, or why potatoes were so damned expensive. It wasn’t his job to figure everything out. It was hard enough just sitting through the meetings.