Tales of the Dragon's Bard, Volume 1: Eventide (6 page)

The centaur’s great laugh shook the frosted ground.

“I’ll have you know that there is no higher form of love’s expression than that of the great quest,” the Dragon’s Bard sniffed. “If Jarod is to win his fair Caprice, then a quest is the surest path by which he may secure her affections. All the best books tell us so.”

“Caprice.” Farmer Bennis stopped, looking up into the darkening sky for a moment. “You mean Caprice Morgan—Meryl’s daughter of the wishing well? Is that what all this is about?”

Jarod flushed, his voice daring the centaur to contradict him. “I’d do anything for her.”

Farmer Bennis glanced at the young man who was barely tall enough to meet his flanks. He tied off the rolled canvas tent and laid it across his own back. “I dare say you would, son . . . and don’t mistake me; she’s a worthy woman to pursue.”

“Then I guess I need to fulfill a quest,” Jarod said with more certainty than he felt. “What kinds of quests are there? I mean . . . can I choose a quest?”

The centaur spoke as much to himself as to anyone else. “You don’t choose quests, boy—they choose you.”

The Dragon’s Bard thought for a moment before he answered. “There are so many tales of legendary deeds, each so difficult to quantify in its respective genre . . . give me a moment’s leave to recall . . . ah! There was the quest for the Godly Prize—the greatest gift ever given to the king.”

Bennis chuckled. “Ah, give her an impressive present.”

The Dragon’s Bard continued, “There was the quest for the Shield of Glory given by the gods to a hero who distinguished himself by his—”

The farmer laughed. “He means you should impress her with your charm!”

“What about the Quest of the Heart?” the Dragon’s Bard countered. “The Quest of Riches . . . the Quest of Power . . . the Quest of Valiance . . .”

“All fine enough,” Bennis chuckled, “so long as you peel back the fancy talk and get down to the roots. Buy her with money, impress her with the strength of your arm or fancy words: it’s all the same story for the lords and the peasants alike.”

“Well, they all sound like fine quests,” Jarod said, “and . . . well, it’s grand to be talking about slaying dragons and griffons and demons . . . but I’m an apprentice in my father’s countinghouse and I’ve got chores at home and . . . this whole quest business sounds pretty far away.”

Farmer Bennis stopped packing and turned to the young man. He leaned down closer to Jarod and laid both his massive hands as gently as he could on the youth’s shoulders. “Master Klum, you don’t have to go to the ends of the world to fulfill your quest. The best quests are those here, close to your heart. The quests in all those distant lands of story seem more important somehow because they are far away—but the quests that make a difference are the smaller ones in the places of power, glory, wealth, and magic that lie just around the corner from your own home.”

“Not from
my
home,” Jarod said with a glum expression.

“Yes,” Bennis insisted. “Your home . . . I’ll show you.”

Bennis turned Jarod so that he was looking back down the Meade road toward Eventide. The evening rays cast a pink color across the landscape and the buildings around the center of the town.

“There’s your quest, boy,” Farmer Bennis said in a rough whisper. “A place of treasure, adventure, honor, and glory.”

“It’s just the village,” Jarod said, puzzled.

“Look through better eyes, boy,” Bennis insisted. “It won’t be the same town we’ll be going back to, Master Jarod. It will be a different land altogether by the time we’re done. I’ll help you, boy, to win your woman and to do it proper, too.”

“
You?
” the Dragon’s Bard scoffed. “What know you of romance and the wooing of a gentle lady?”

“I’ll thank you not to ask that question again,” Bennis growled. “Take my help or not, boy . . . but you’ll need all the help offered, I’m thinking.”

“And I shall aid you as well, chronicling your every adventure,” Edvard said, trying to regain his audience. “I came in search of these very quests of which our friend Farmer Bennis speaks. Neighborhood heroes . . . princesses down the lane. Perhaps you don’t need to slay some distant dragon; all you need is to slay a more manageable one right here.”

“Slay a dragon?” Jarod’s voice broke with panic.

“I speak metaphorically, of course,” Edvard said dismissively. “Perhaps the Treasure Quest may be just the thing for you. You must find some gift of inestimable worth and with it capture your true love’s heart. Come! The evening is deepening quickly. Let us to Farmer Bennis’s homestead, where we shall set in motion the tale of Jarod’s Quest for the Greatest Prize of All!”

Jarod started walking back toward Eventide between the laden Farmer Bennis and the continually chattering Dragon’s Bard, his mind struggling to imagine a treasure of inestimable worth that might be had for the wages of an apprentice bookkeeper and found within the confines of the village he had known since birth. Were there places he had missed where a manageable quest might be undertaken? How would he present such a rare prize to Caprice if he could not say two words together to her?

So filled was Jarod’s head with puzzled thoughts that he did not notice the Bard’s scribe standing at the edge of the cold campfire in the deepening twilight, staring off into the line of trees where the tracks of the book’s thief led.

Feet of Prowess

Feet of Prowess

Wherein Jarod tries to find
a gift for Caprice in the town
but discovers the heart of a poet
in the most unlikely of places.

• Chapter 4 •

The Milliner and the Pixies

Merinda Oakman sat leaning against her ornately carved workbench, staring with weary eyes at the hat on the wooden form in front of her. The wind howled fiercely against the windows that nearly spanned the end of her workroom, sending whirling flashes of white snow in great whirlpools across the panes, illuminated for a moment in the glow of her lamplight before they vanished into the darkness of the alley beyond. She sat perched atop a tall chair, its back carefully and lovingly formed to fit the curve of her own back though at the moment she found no comfort in it.

“A quest hat,” she muttered to herself. “What a notion!”

Merinda gazed up at the storage shelves that rose from floor to ceiling on either side of her workbench. She looked to the ranks of carefully organized ribbons, thread spools, patches, buttons, stays, feathers, dried flowers, bundles of rye straw, leathers, pelts, wools, felt, and bolts of cloth. She searched among them for inspiration in the textures and colors. It was hidden there, she thought, among the bits and pieces of her trade: that special form of this hat that was yet to be discovered. From among the chosen bits and pieces the hat would emerge under her careful and talented hands; all she had to do was pluck them out and put them together. The pieces of her puzzle did not leap into her hands and make themselves evident, no matter how hard she willed it.

It was certainly not a question of
having
hats, she mused, turning back to the conical felt shape she had placed on the hat form and twisted this way and that without satisfaction. Indeed, the workroom had an overabundance of hats from her more recent labors. What else was she to do while Harv was away?

Her husband, Harvest Oakman, had gone to Butterfield not yet a week ago with his wagon filled with his magnificently crafted tables, chairs, and sideboards. He had a great inventory of pieces he had crafted in the autumn stored under the large shed bordering the yard behind the store. During the winter months he would make the rounds of the local towns, each at its prescribed time, with his large wagon piled with goods and come back with his wagon empty and his purse filled with what he considered a fair price for his craft.

Merinda wrinkled her nose at the thought. She was a short, comfortably round, sparkling woman with large, wide-set eyes and a button nose that everyone mistook as a predisposition to joviality. But the longer she stared at the hat on the form, the deeper her bowed lips settled into a frown.

Harv was better than the price he asked for his carpentry. He was truly a gifted craftsman, in Merinda’s opinion, but he never seemed to value his own work highly enough when it came to the coin of the realm. He thought of himself as a poor country carpenter, and, in the words Merinda found herself swallowing daily, that was why everyone else thought of him that way too. She knew he was better than that, but the prices he settled on for his work would keep them—keep her—in this little shop in the country forever without the recognition that her husband so rightly deserved.

Harv loved her as dearly as she loved him. He had built the shop for her so that she could contribute to their income through her own considerable skills as a milliner. So it was that each winter he would make his trips to the neighboring towns and she would spend her lonely hours in the shop making hat after hat after hat in an ever-increasing inventory of haberdashery that anticipated the Spring Revels and her own high selling season.

Queen Nance herself had ordained the Spring Revels throughout the kingdom as a celebration of the end of winter and the return of the growing season in the country. It was, perhaps, the one time of year when all the highborn folks of the larger cities like Mordale suddenly found the country in vogue. Mordale would become desolate as the wealthy, the powerful, and the fashionable would flee the city walls and inundate the countryside, making great pretense of “getting back to the old and simpler ways.” Playing at farming became the order of the day, and, Merinda reminded herself with every drop of glue and needle stitch, the purchasing and wearing of country hats was a practice led by the Princess Aerthia herself.

It was with this object in mind that Merinda, as late in the fall as she dared, made her annual journey to Mordale. There she would stay at an inn whose reputation was tolerable and whose rates were within her careful budget. She then would spend her preciously counted days not in seeing the great castle there, or the cathedrals, or the tournament lists, but in visiting every hat and clothing shop possible in the city. She would come away with precious few purchases but a wealth of information regarding fashion trends and which designs would be most desired in the spring to come. Then she would make her way back to Eventide, draw up her order for materials from Charon’s Goods, and settle in for a winter filled with furious hat making—dreaming all the while that someday she would be presented at the great castle, be invited to the cathedrals, and be a popular figure in whose company others wished to be seen in the tournament lists.

Her local trade was dedicated but few in numbers and consisted primarily of the ladies of Cobblestone Street, who came by with more of an object to talk and less to purchase hats. The men of the town found Merinda’s shop such a warren of femininity that they would cross its threshold only under the direst of circumstances—usually at the insistence of a young woman on their arm. Men of the town purchased their hats from the more sensible establishment of Charon’s Goods next door, even though when they ordered their hats from Mordechai Charon they fully knew that he would simply have his wife, Alicia, order them in turn to be made next door by Merinda Oakman.

So it was a mystery that morning, as Merinda was working on a hat in her storefront, that she had spied three odd men and a centaur passing back and forth in front of her shop.

They would pause for a time facing each other in front of the leaded glass panes of the display window and wildly gesture in animated conversation as the snow fell in a great blanket of large flakes about them. The youngest of the men—Jarod Klum, by the looks of him—would stare straight at Merinda through the window and then bolt off in one direction or another, followed closely by the two other men, who were strangers to her, and an enormous creature that could only be Farmer Bennis.

This curious scene was reenacted with slight variation several times before Jarod Klum took a determined stance, set his jaw, and marched determinedly through Merinda’s shop door, his companions at his heels.

Merinda’s storefront was a wonder to behold, for her husband had lovingly carved every pillar, arch, and beam to his wife’s delight. The columns featured reliefs of intertwining ivy runners weaving their way up an otherwise smooth and polished surface. Pixies and fairies could be found carved among the leaves. These columns rose to a wooden lattice carved from a single piece of wood detailed with intricate reproductions of branches and leaves filled with doves, pheasants, and small dragonettes playing with one another. The lattice curved to form the top of a heart shape over the ornate counter. The bases of each corner of the counter were carved into unhappy trolls—each an individual with a different comical expression—holding up a frieze depicting Eventide from the Blackshore road in breathtaking detail.

Jarod passed it all by with a fixed stare as he marched directly toward Merinda at the counter.

“I would like to order a hat!” Jarod announced in a voice that was entirely too loud and too high-pitched.

Merinda smiled slightly at the unexpected sound and looked from face to face at the four beings suddenly filling her storefront. She succeeded in speaking on her second attempt. “Well, all right then, Master Klum. I’ll be happy to help you with that. What kind of a hat would you like?”

Jarod blinked uncertainly.

“A quest hat!” said the angular man with the pointy beard who was leaning on the counter next to Jarod.

“A . . . what kind of hat?”

“Jarod here is on a quest,” Farmer Bennis said in a warm, soft voice. The centaur was holding his great leather hat by its brim respectfully in front of him with both hands. “He needs a special hat for a special woman.”

“Oh! A lady’s hat, then . . . well, you’ve come to the right place, Master Klum.” Merinda pulled out a small slip of parchment and one of the pencils Harv was always making for her.

“But it can’t be just any hat,” the centaur concluded.