“Hi-ho, lad,” I called to Drool. “How fare thee?”
“Had a wee beating at first,” said the ninny. “But they gived me a drink of water what was lovely.”
“The beast yanked two watchmen’s shoulders out of socket when we untied him,” growled one of my bearers. “Took six of us to get him in the cell.”
“Just out of socket? Well, the lad hasn’t had a proper meal in a week. Off his game, I reckon. Normally he’d pluck the arms from spearmen like petals from a daisy.”
The spearman shuddered and signaled his mate to lower me to the ground.
“Leave him bound,” said Burke. “In the cell like that.”
They slid the pole out from between my limbs and dragged me into a small cell across from Drool’s, this one with an open barred door. One of the spearmen threw my coxcomb in after me, then bolted the door. The two watchmen carrying Puck’s body dropped him on the floor in the antechamber.
Blacktooth, who had watched the transfer from a heavy chair by the antechamber entrance, was picking his teeth with one of my daggers. “Burke, tell the chamberlain to tell the minister to tell the duke that we have retrieved the jester, Robin Goodfellow as previously festooned, and have further disinterred ourselves to our duties by also ingratiating his murderer.”
“Should I report that the Puck is dead?”
“It is implied in the subtaint.”
“Subtext,” corrected Burke.
“Aye, go.”
“Aye, sir,” said Burke, and off he went.
“I didn’t kill him,” I shouted.
Blacktooth climbed out of his chair, returned my knife to the sheath with its two brothers, which he threw to the floor next to the chair, then came to the door of my cell.
“Here is the case as it permits itself,” said the captain, counting on his fingers. “First, motive: thou art a known blackguard, having dirked Burke in the leg by magic.”
“That wasn’t magic, I threw the bloody knife.”
“Guilty, as confessed,” said Blacktooth. “Third, opportunity, you knew the diseased, and his name was said before you escaped.”
“I’d never seen him.”
“Sixth and finally,” said Blacktooth, “method, as you were going about with arms, which is forbidden to all citizens except soldiers, men of the watch, and criminals.”
“I had knives. He was killed with a bloody crossbow.”
“And second,” said Blacktooth, who had mysteriously run out of fingers to count on, despite having left several unused, and so was making his point by counting one of the bars on my cell door, “you were found au gratin with the victim when he was first defenestrated by the stream, as witnessed by various members of the watch. Non. Compos. Mentis.” He dusted off his hands as if he’d made a point.
Idiot.
* * *
A moment before lightning strikes, a charge fills the air, the hairs on your arms stand up, a general unsettledness comes over you, and holding a thought is like grasping at smoke, as if power and heat and blinding fucking light are about to reduce you to a cinder of memory, and so was the air in the gendarmerie when she entered. Even curled in the corner of my cell, hands and feet still bound, I could feel it. Watchmen who had been talking, laughing, or playing dice a moment before fell silent, as if the rude ribs of the castle had collapsed, dropping the mountain upon them.
I slid myself up the wall and hopped to the door of my cell. (Yes, I could have easily untied my hands and feet now that I was no longer slung under a pole, but as I was able to move and eat and even have a wee in the bucket in the corner while thusly trussed, I felt no need to put my captors on alert to my ability to free myself.) Blacktooth stood at attention by perhaps a dozen watchmen as Burke led her through the arch in the antechamber opposite from the one through which I’d been carried.
She was a woman in full, perhaps thirty years old, a head taller than Burke, although not so tall as Blacktooth. Her dark hair was woven into plaits with golden cord and tied back so that it fell to the middle of her back. She wore a long white gown with a plunging neck and back, the first garment I’d seen that looked like something a proper Greek would wear when modeling for pottery, except under it she wore a chemise of fine chain mail that looked to be fashioned from gold. Her arms were burnished by the sun, slim, strong, and lined with a net of fine white scars, bare but for a single silver armlet on her right arm with the head of a snake-haired Gorgon cast upon it. On her left arm was a patch of pale skin where she had worn another armlet, but the hair-fine scars stopped at the edges, as if the armlet had shielded her for many battles. This was not the look of a royal in any court I had attended.
“Ma’am!” said Blackfoot, coming to attention. The watchmen all came to some version of what they thought to be attention, although there was no uniformity to their motion.
She nodded to Blackfoot but looked at me. “Is this prisoner the one you found by the body of Robin Goodfellow?”
“Aye, Your Magnificence. We first encountered the knave yesterday, perspiring with a group of crude mechanicals, and he did fling a dagger into the bullocks of my consort Leftenant Burke, causing gracious injury, before disappearing by use of majiks.”
Burke stepped up and presented the bandage around his thigh with a flourish, then bowed and backed away a few shuffling steps.
“Begging your pardon, Your Municipal,” continued Blacktooth, “but we—not the royal ‘we’ as in your we, but the ‘we’ as in ‘us,’ meaning Burke and I and the men, being the ‘we’ collective, but not the ‘we’ as in the wee that me and the men have been known to take—”
“Oh for fuck’s sake!” said I. “Spit it out, you addlepated ninny.”
“Ahoy!” called Drool through the little portal in his cell door at the mention of a ninny.
“Yes, do go on, captain,” she said.
“Aye, Your Radiance. The following day, that being today, while searching for the Puck at the behest of the duke, may the gods smile upon your union and the fruit of your looms, we came upon this scoundrel dragging the fresh corpse of the previously apportioned Robin Goodfellow, who was freshly expired by an arrow to the antiquated chest.”
“Anterior chest,” corrected Burke.
She looked to me. I smiled, removed my coxcomb, and bowed. “Your Grace,” said I.
She did not return the smile. “I would see the body,” she said.
Blacktooth led her to the next cell, where they had carried the Puck’s body. The watchmen shuffled in their ranks, none with the slightest idea what he should be doing. I had the distinct impression they were not accustomed to a royal presence in their cellar. In two ticks she stormed out of the cellar, a bloody crossbow bolt in hand.
“So this scrawny rascal is the killer?” She pointed to me with the bolt.
I stood as tall as my form permitted and thrust my codpiece forward so it arched through the bars and she might see my hidden potential. Scrawny, indeed?
“We heard the Puck scream, ma’am,” said Blacktooth. “And not three shakes of a lamb’s pail later, we came out of the wood to find him over the body. This fiend is most certainly the percolator.”
“Perpetrator,” corrected Burke.