Carlos Fuentes (edit name/settings)

“Canceled? How can he cancel, we paid him ages ago. This really is completely unacceptable,” said Lady Libeth Symphata, putting in her earrings. “Unprofessional, even. I suppose the Great Giacomo feels he doesn’t need our patronage. Well, I shall see to it that he doesn’t perform for any of our friends, and let him stew on that for a while.”
On the other side of the parlor, Lord Symphata waved the unfortunate bard’s letter vaguely at his wife. “Doesn’t sound like he’ll be performing at all. Says here, he lost his voice. Playing at cards with a couple of witches... I’ve no sympathy for gamblers, but that still seems rough luck for a bard.”
“It’s bad luck for us! And worse for poor Eliott, he’s been expecting this fool to perform for his birthday for months!”
Lord Symphata frowned, which he did frequently when he was forced to think about his son. When Eliott had been younger, it had been a puzzled frown, usually given to family-minded well-wishers at court, as Lord Symphata tried to remember the boy; but lately, since Eliott had become a teenager, the frown had become one of bewilderment and general low-grade disapproval, mostly brought on by the subject of bards, sagas, and Eliott’s obsession with the adventures of a sword-swinging barbarian. “We did tell him, did we?”
“Yes, yes, that everything was arranged. He’ll be sullen for a week if we don’t find a replacement.”
This was given due consideration. “We’ll be attending court all next week...”
His wife fixed him with a cold stare that took most of the options off the table. All of them, in fact, except doing what she wanted. “Go out and hire another bard, and have him here tonight. Before the guests start showing up, we’ve only got them for six hours.”
“Yes, dear.” Lord Symphata rang for his coat. “Do I need to ask specially for anything? Or does every bard know these Jordan the Rogue stories?”
“The Red.”
“Hmm?”
“Not the Rogue. Jordan the Red. And I imagine so, I remember him being very popular, oh, twenty years ago or so.” Lady Libeth touched her hair, making sure that every sculpted curl was in place. “You might try finding an older bard, just in case.”
“I don’t know what the boy gets out of these things. Overblown nonsense, fireballs exploding, heads getting lopped off... he tried telling me that this Jordan fellow fought a dozen ogres at once. It’d do him good to go out and meet a real ogre, and hopefully get these ideas out of his head. I should invite one to his party.”
For the first time in years, Lady Libeth looked at him with interest. “You know an ogre?”
Lord Symphata nodded. “Xavius Gorm. Head of security for the Mercantile Bank of Palace Hills. We’ve had lunch a few times.” He put on his coat and straightened his cravat. “Right, then.” He sighed. “I’ll be down at the theaters. Eliott can consider this a part of his present.”
“Oh -- I don’t suppose you’d want to take him with you? He’s been down overseeing the party setup all day.”
They exchanged a look.
“...no.”
“No.”
When he had gone, Lady Libeth went to the window and pulled back the lace curtain. The garden below was an ant’s nest of activity, servants swarming to arrange the long trestle tables beneath the yellow and silver silk canopies, barrels rolling up to fill the fountain with wine, a team of artisans festooning every tree and shrub with paper flowers. Every member of the household was out there, working hard to make the evening’s party look absolutely perfect. Their guests -- at least, those not hired to be there as friends for Eliott -- would be dazzled by the extravagance. It would create such a good impression, which the boy needed to do so badly. Everything was coming together, just as she had spent the last year planning that it would. And down there in the middle of it all, learning to organize and arrange like the fine host he would be, was her son.
Except that he wasn’t.
Two minutes later, Lady Libeth was striding across the lawn, her gown swishing furiously over the grass. “Where is he?” she demanded.
The head coachman, who had come down from the stables to help move beer kegs, dropped into a protective bow. “He, he went off, ma’am. Down to the pond. With the elf girl.”
“Elf? What elf?”
“Miss Kess, ma’am. She said she’d look after him.”
Recognition crept into Lady Libeth’s manicured brain. “His baby-sitter? What does she think we need her for, he’s turning fifteen -- much too old for that now.”
There was a chorus of hastily abandoned snickering. The coachman, who felt he knew Eliott fairly well from all the time the boy spent in the stables, dared to look Lady Libeth in the eye. “No, ma’am, I think they’re just friends, now. She said there was something she wanted to do with him to get him ready for the party.”
Lady Libeth frowned. “What could she possibly be doing with him now?”

***

Eliott, lying flat on his back, could see nothing but bleached blue sky and dragonflies. He was attempting an impossible feat of endurance and resolution: keeping his body completely still. It wasn’t easy. He could feel Kess’s fingertips brushing his neck, tracing the ends of lines that had begun above his temples and trickled down the sides of his face. If she had cracked an egg on his forehead, it would have felt just like this.
“Kess? Is it done yet?”
“Don’t talk. I’ll mess up your throat.” Kess leaned over and gave him a pixie smile. “Almost done.”
“Okay,” he murmured, trying not to move anything but his lips.
“It’s looking good. Really barbarian. You’ll look just like one of the eagle berserkers of Skyld.” She dragged a delicate nail up behind his ear. “I’m seeing you with a big, two-headed axe. I know it says they used swords, but axes seem more barbarian to me.”
She sighed. “I knew a barbarian. A mercenary. Rulph. He loved big weapons, anything that took two hands to hold. I don’t think he did anything with just one hand.”
Eliott’s toes twitched. He couldn’t have stopped them for money.
After a ticklish minute or two, he realized she wasn’t going to tell him anything more this time. Sometimes, she would, and Eliott would imagine that he was there with her as she met fur-clad barbarians, or cavalier young swordsmen, or went dancing all night with satyrs and dryads in moon-hazed forests. Elves went where they pleased and did what they wanted, which sounded like the perfect life to Eliott. The big elvish families lived in caravans and traded enchanted silks and fairy-woven clothes in market towns all over the world. Occasionally, Kess had explained, an elf would take a job with humans for the novelty of it, and stay for as long as she liked the household. That was how she had come to be Eliott’s baby-sitter, until he had grown too old to be sat on.
Eliott had grown up with Kess’s stories. She told him about her life -- in more detail, now that he was a teenager -- and she told him all the old fairy tales. Best of all, she had told him his very first Jordan the Red story.
Jordan the Red, they both agreed, was the best hero ever. He had the best weapons, the best lines, and could send an evil vizier hurtling down a five hundred foot tower to be neatly impaled on the fangs of the giant serpent Jordan had killed on his way up the tower. Kess and Eliott had sat through the telling of every Jordan the Red saga ever written.
A dragonfly landed on Eliott’s nose. He heard elvish laughter and realized that Kess had stopped touching him.
“Is it done?” he asked, scrambling to his knees. The dragonfly took off petulantly. “Can I see? What color is it?”
Kess stretched out on the grass with a finger on her lips and gave the side of his head thoughtful consideration. She grinned. “Pink.”
Eliott slapped his own cheek. “Pink? Kess! You can’t give me a pink tattoo! There’s nothing barbarian about pink!”
“Tell that to Drog Steelshanks. I think his woad had glitter on it, too...”
“I still say that bard got it wrong about him,” said Eliott, rubbing his now-sore cheek. “Meant to be ‘ink-painted were his features and his rippling chest’, or something. Kess, how am I supposed to go to this stupid party with pink tattoos? All my friends will be there.”
“I thought all the guests were, what’d you call them, cardboard morons your parents had hired to be there.”
“Yeah...” Eliott snapped up a dandelion and started to idly tear it apart.
“So, who cares what they think of your... very cute... tattoo.”
“Kess!”
She laughed again, a sound that was nothing at all like the tinkling of bells and more like a rabbit snorting. Her long ears twitched. “Relax. It’s elf magic.”
Before he could stop her, even if there had been a conceivable universe in which he would have wanted to, Kess pulled herself up beside him and pressed her hand across his forehead at the point where she had begun the tattoo. He had one perfect moment’s look up her sleeve at the pale, soft skin from her biceps to her armpit; then felt a coldness wash down his face and neck everywhere she had touched him.
“There.” Kess drew her hand away and adjusted her sleeves. “Now it’s blue. Sort of a sapphire blue. Like someone embedded gems in your skin.”
“It looks cool?”
She nodded. “It looks cool.”
“I’ve got to see. Race you to the pond!”
“Winner gets thrown in!”
“No!”
Kess let him win anyway. She always did. The only time Eliott had seen her really run, he had been twelve; a basilisk had gotten into the garden, and fallen asleep sunning itself on a rock. Somehow, between when he had shouted for Kess to come see what he had found, and when he went to poke it with a stick, she had covered the fifty yards between them and knocked him away. It had happened in seconds. The basilisk had yawned, looked around, turned a squirrel to stone, and gone back to sleep. When she wanted to, Kess could outrun the wind.
When she reached the pond, at a casual jog, Eliott was on his knees looking at his reflection. The tattoo was everything Kess had promised: glinting blue whorls and jags from the peak of his peach-blonde hair all the way down to his collar bone. It looked like something off the skin of a northern warrior, like the barbarian tribesmen Jordan had befriended on his way to defeat the demon at the crown of the world. It did, in fact, look cool. It even hid the rogue spots of acne that had been showing up lately like marauding sub-dermal trolls. Eliott touched the tattoo lovingly, and wished for a moment that the rest of his face looked heroic enough to match it. Especially his ears.
“Hey, Kess? Wanna change the color of my hair, too?”
A pebble splashed into the middle of his reflection, turning his face into rippling rings. “Not today. But I’ve got something else for you... a birthday present.”
Something in the way she said it made his heart race. He looked up, and she was smiling, not with her usual playfulness, but in a mysterious way he had never seen before. His imagination raced ahead; he barely managed to reel it back before it got too far into dangerous fantasies. Another possibility floated into his mind, equally exciting and easier to put into words. “You got me a sword?” he asked hopefully.
“Nope.”
“Eliott! Eliott, this isn’t where you’re supposed to be! Get up here right now, young man!”
All his private fantasies died like evil viziers thrown off towers. He rolled his eyes. “Mom,” he muttered, summing up his frustrations, his boredom, and how much he would rather be staying down at the pond with Kess in one syllable.
Kess ruffled his hair. “I’ll be back for your party. I’ll give you your present then.”
She stood up and bowed gracefully, the way a man might bow, just as Lady Symphata came around the rhododendron bushes to their patch of the pond. “Your ladyship. Starlight shine on you. Your son is here; I’ve kept him out of trouble.”
Eliott chucked a stone out across the pond. He didn’t dare look around at Kess, or she would wink at him, and he would laugh, and then his mother would know what a joke Kess was making with her formal manners.
“I’m so glad,” said Lady Symphata. “You always could manage the impossible, couldn’t you. Eliott, the steward needs you to choose which piece the musicians will be playing when the guests start to arrive. You’ll want the pavane.”
“Good choice, Eliott,” said Kess, and Eliott couldn’t resist turning around to make a face at her before she slipped away.
His mother’s mouth fell open. He had forgotten about the tattoo.
“Eliott Miles Symphata -- what have you done to your face?! Go and wash that off right now before anyone sees!”
Her shouts chased him all the way back to the manor.

***

Dragonflies gave way to fireflies, and the pleasant, early autumn afternoon in which Eliott had been a tattooed barbarian with a beautiful elvish companion gave way to a perfume-scented evening in which he was the child son of a nobleman, being put on display for his parents’ friends and a few dozen rented guests. His parents had gone so far as to lay out an outfit for him: a pale green tunic with a frilled shoulder cape, tight white hose, and soft shoes that curled up to points at the tips. The cuffs had lace on them. It was his parents’ way of saying, he figured, that they wanted him to go on to a proud career as a court jester.
He rubbed at his neck where his tattoo had been. To his mother’s great relief, it had faded away just before sundown. He had asked if he could get a real one, but Lady Symphata had only laughed, as if he had asked for permission to grow a third eye.
The only good part of the evening, so far, had been the gifts. The table in front of him was heaped with the rewards of becoming another year older, and remarkably, his parents had successfully given their guests an idea of what interested Eliott: woodcuts and tapestries of Jordan the Red’s most famous battles; bronze miniatures of Jordan the Red’s preferred weapons and armor; and one wooden triumph of craftsmanship, a fully articulated Jordan the Red action figure that could be posed in dozens of monster-slaying positions.
Eliott fiddled with its arms. Everyone else was dancing or drinking or pillaging the buffet, paying no attention to him at all. If he had had anywhere else to go, he would have snuck away already. No one would notice. His parents, confident that his spirit had been broken by the outfit and their instructions that he was personally responsible for everyone else having a good time, had retreated to the manor. If he was lucky, he wouldn’t see them again before they left for court in the morning.
He sighed. Beyond the perimeter of torches and streamers, the grounds rolled out, dark and wooded, and completely devoid of monsters, brigands or witches. Wandering around out there alone would be even more boring than staying at the party, where at least he could drink wine. There was the saga to look forward to, too; when he called for it, the curtain would pull back from the little stage at the other end of the lawn, and the bard would bring Jordan the Red in to smash the tedium with a spiky club.
“Anyone sitting here?”
Without waiting for an answer, Kess swung herself onto the bench beside him. “Great party. People are really pretending they’re having fun. Is it somebody’s birthday?”
She smiled, and the party got better.
“Yeah, and somebody got this great tapestry of Jordan killing a dragon,” said Eliott. “Check it out!”
“Speared under the thigh. Nice,” said Kess. She waved down two glasses of wine. “When’s the saga?”
“Whenever we want it. I was waiting for you.”
“Thanks. I was getting your present ready. Here.”
She handed him a brown paper sack. It felt practically weightless. Nervously, eagerly, he opened it.
“...you got me popcorn.”
“That’s for the saga.” She grinned, ears twitching. “I’ll give you your present afterward. Come on, start the show.”
Eliott gave word to one of the waiters, who took it to the steward, who took it to the master of the entertainment, who found where the bard had snuck off to for a smoke. The curtain went up. Eliott leaned forward, his imagination already dancing ahead to the best parts.
The bard stamped his boot on the planks, struck a hollow chord on his six-stringed harp, and stretched out his hand to the crowd.
“Listen,” he began, in a hoarse, wheezing voice. “Hear the story of Jordan the Red / How he fought bravely / Fiercely / Against the Ice Demons of Brot.”
Eliott frowned. “Brok,” he muttered.
“Now word came,” the bard declared, with another pluck of the strings, “of the Demon’s doings / To the warriors of Hyjenac / To the brothers of Hyrame / Who sheltered Jordan then / And he was the mightiest among them.”
Eliott glanced at Kess. “Did he just...?”
“Yeah. I know.”
“He’s skipped the prologue!” Eliott felt the wine in his stomach turn sour. “He isn’t explaining about the ice house at all! ‘In the early days of the ice-shield kings...’”
“Maybe he’s rearranged it.”
“Maybe...”
The bard droned on, unaware that he was being given the benefit of the doubt. Stanzas passed, and with every absent line, every mispronounced name along the route of Jordan’s journey north, Eliott squirmed. Against all possibility, the bard was managing to take the meat of the adventure, flay it of any excitement, and then stretch it out over his voice to dry into flavorless jerky. The first battle sounded like a math lesson.
Eliott slumped onto his elbows amidst his presents. His parents had screwed this up, too. They had managed to find the one bard in all the world who could tell a Jordan the Red saga badly. Worst of all, nobody else seemed to notice. They all acted like they were perfectly entertained, laughing or applauding or gasping where appropriate. Just like they’d been paid to do.
Jordan the Red would have roundhouse kicked the bard right off the stage, thought Eliott.
Kess nudged him in the ribs. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Yeah...”
No one tried to stop them leaving, or even seemed to care, which struck Eliott as one more disappointment. When the guest of honor wanted to escape from his own birthday party, it ought to require more flash, more trickery. At least some cheap pyrotechnics. One of the coachmen, pulling duty as a waiter, even winked as they slipped away into the dark.
They ended up at the stables. Every stall was filled. The warm chestnut reek of hay and horses felt like a blanket of protection against both the chill of the early autumn evening and the glare of the party. Kess wandered among the animals, absently stroking noses.
“Did you want to go riding?” she asked.
Eliott felt his ears go red. “Nah,” he managed. “I left a pair of boots in here.”
He held up his hated shoes, the pointy toes tied together. The boots he was wearing now were real adventurer’s boots, scuffed leather and cracked soles and all. They were boots you could step on trolls with.
“Bet you I can get ‘em hooked on the weathervane.”
“The east wind says you can’t,” said Kess, as the metal arrow on the stable roof creaked around.
“Bet you a new tattoo.”
“Bet you your birthday present.”
“Hey!”
Now Kess was smiling at him mischievously, holding her closed fist out towards him. There might have been nothing in it at all. She leaned back against the wall, waiting for his answer.
“C’mon, Kess. I get my present anyway, don’t I? Don’t be a cow.”
She shook her head, sending ripples through her long, brown hair. Eliott’s libido jumped up and down, demanding to know why he hadn’t asked Kess to put more than a stupid tattoo at stake. “Now you really better make this throw,” said Kess.
Feeling her watching him, Eliott swallowed. He spun his shoes from hand to hand, imagining that he was a blind Devroshi spear-hurler about to ambush a caravan in the Mountains of Fire. He closed his eyes.
Then, because he wasn’t actually a blind Devroshi, he opened them again, took careful aim, and hurled his shoes at the roof.
There was a wobbly metal clang. Eliott’s shoes swung gently in the breeze, which they had decided should be blowing south. Someone with a ladder would be cursing tomorrow.
“Great shot,” said Kess.
Eliott grinned, doing a little victory dance. “One in a million, huh? So...”
“Come here and hold out your hands. And close your eyes.”
He did. There was the slightest brush of her fingers over his sweaty palms, and then he was holding... something. Something small. Almost weightless, with a slightly feathery end. He wondered for a moment if she had given him a wooly caterpillar, which immediately made him wonder why. It was definitely not a sword. “Can I look?”
“Okay.”
He peered curiously at the thing resting in his hands. It was four inches of thread, braided in three colors: gold, white, and silver. The threads were thick and soft, not like any sort of wool or linen he had ever touched before. The metallic threads sparkled like real silver and real gold, while the white thread looked as if it had never heard the word dirt. Eliott turned it over in his palm. Other than looking beautiful, it didn’t seem to do anything. It might have been the world’s most expensive, and simplest, friendship bracelet.
“Um... thank you! What is it?”
“It’s a Braid.”
“Yeah, I can see. Three threads. Like you made me do with your hair that time--”
Kess laughed. “Braid with a capital B. It’s magical. Really strong magic, too.”
She knelt down, scratching in the dirt, and Eliott squatted down beside her. “It’s traditional. At fifteen, an elf child is grown up. You’re a man, now,” she told him, with almost no teasing in her voice. “And when that happens, you get a Braid. Each thread... gives you a wish.”
She drew three lines.
“Gold. Silver. And the white thread. That’s the strongest of them all, because it sets everything right. You make your wish, and then you snap a thread. It’s sort of a test, to see what you’d do with Ultimate Cosmic Power.”
“Wow...” Eliott held the Braid up to make it catch the light of the rising moon. “I get three wishes!”
“Two. The white thread--”
“Oh, yeah. So how does that work? It undoes everything the other two did? Will I remember my wishes coming true?”
“Definitely. And so will everyone else involved.” Kess gave him a look that suggested she could read his thoughts, even the ones he hadn’t had yet. “It puts the world back as close as it can to where things would have been if you hadn’t made any wishes. Like, say you wished you had all the money in Palace Hills. You’d get it, but there’d suddenly be a lot of poor people there who’d be mad at you. The white thread would give them all their money back, and if they’d tracked you down and beat you up, it’d send them home. They’d be confused for a bit, and then get on with their lives.”
“Cool!”
“And if you die,” Kess added, “the white thread breaks itself.”
Eliott stopped playing with the threads. “Kess! You’re killing the fun of this. I know how wish stories go wrong.”
She squeezed his arm. “Sorry. Traditional. You think I’m bad, you should have heard my grandmother. She was like an instruction manual. ‘Step one, concentrate with all your heart and mind on the wish. Grasp the thread between thumb and forefinger.’ She went on forever before she let me make a wish.”
“I’ve got one.”
“Oh!” Kess got to her feet, looking genuinely excited. “Let’s do it, then. If I get to hear it. You don’t have to tell me what your wish is.”
Eliott scrunched up his face with quick thoughts, working over the exact words to use. The wish had come to him suddenly, out of the blue, but it was right. It was perfect. And it would be perfect for both of them. He smiled at Kess.
“Of course I’m going to tell you! You’re coming along.” He pinched the gold thread. “I wish that you and I could go to wherever Jordan the Red is -- the real Jordan the Red -- right now, and have an adventure with him!”
He snapped the thread.

Several kingdoms away, where the sun had not yet decided to go down, Jordan the Red squinted against the dying afternoon light and considered the downfall of kings. He was in a bad spot. There were too many arrayed against him; his own fault, but nothing to do about past mistakes now. Still, he wasn’t beaten yet. He could move. He couldn’t move anywhere that would let him escape defeat, but he had the option.
No surrender.
He flexed his stiff fingers. He moved.
“Ten to six, Sam. All up to you.”
On the other side of the checkerboard, Sam laughed softly and bounced one of his kings lightly over two of Jordan’s pieces. “You ready to call it a game yet?”
“Nope.”
They had been skirmishing all afternoon over their little battlefield, beside the high stone wall that separated the road out of the village from acres and acres of corn and pumpkins. From time to time, a farmer passing by would stop to inspect their game, nod approvingly, and carry on about his business. This was what passed for riveting entertainment in the neighborhood of that village, which was called Cheese.
“You’re not going to win by waiting for me to get tired of chasing your last piece,” Sam pointed out.
“Who says I’m trying to? This little piece of mine is setting up an ambush. Six to one. Crown him. Your king’s going to chase my man right into this ravine, and get himself slaughtered by the bloodthirsty horde of pirates lying in wait.”
“You’ve got pirates, now?”
Jordan tipped his beer stein towards his opponent before taking a long, satisfied drink. “And your king’ll never see them coming.”
“Of course not. He’s my king.” Behind his milky cataracts, Sam’s eyes twinkled. “You want to call this a draw and we can start a new game? One where you don’t make such an awful first couple moves, maybe?”
“Nope.”
“It’s your funeral.”
Jordan tapped the board impatiently. “Yeah, but hell if it won’t be a pyre.”
“Hah!” Sam snorted with laughter, spooking the crows in the field beyond the wall into flight. “You’re playing to your legend today, old man. Sure your piece wants a crown, not a broadsword?”
“No idea what you mean.” Jordan smirked with the tiniest corner of his mouth and pushed back the wiry gray shock of hair falling across his eyes, giving himself for a moment the look of a freshly unhelmed soldier returning from the battlefield. “No legends here. Just plain folk. Right?”
“I know, I know. And those tourists won’t hear any from me, either.”
“Good. Now hurry up and move your king into my cunning trap.”
He took another pull from his stein and settled back to play out his valiant, but inevitably doomed, last stand. At this rate, Sam would only have time to beat him another three or four times before it got too dark to play. That was the one advantage of the days growing shorter. It almost made up for the occasional blast of cold wind coming down off the mountain -- Jordan shivered a little and rubbed at his rolled-up shirt sleeves as a sudden gust struck him. On the other side of the wall, the crows who had been brave enough to return to the field took off again, protesting loudly.
“Feels like we’re in for a howler tonight,” said Sam.
Jordan shrugged. “Feels like. Hey, you seen them yet?”
“Funny man. Who’d you mean?”
“Our tourists. I’m trying to figure out what they’re doing here. Who comes to Cheese?”
“You did.”
“Yeah, but only because nobody else does. Feels suspicious to me. Might be another of Glister’s search parties. Cheese hasn’t got anything to draw real tourists, and you know it.”
“Nothing except a retired warrior hero? Jordan... no one’s been looking for you in years. Maybe they’re just...” Sam waved a hand up the road towards the village, grasping for possibilities. “...historical dairy enthusiasts. You don’t need to get paranoid about every stranger coming to town.”
Something on the other side of the wall made a scrabbling sound. Both men turned towards it. There was a thump. Jordan reached for his sword, which he hadn’t worn on his hip for twenty years, and was in fact currently packed away in the bottom of a trunk back in the village. He swore under his breath and settled for giving the wall a pointed glare instead, which seemed to stop it making any more noises.
“Paranoia. Right.”
“No one’s looking for you,” Sam repeated. “And even if they were, they’d never recognize you. You look like an old man.”
Jordan cracked a smile. “How would you know?”
A face appeared at the top of the wall. It was a long, thin face, with big eyes, big ears, and a lot of wavy blond hair -- very much a boy’s face, and at the moment a very red face, too, as it seemed to be trying to lift itself over the wall by its chin. It made a noise somewhere between a grunt and a squeal and uncannily like the sound of a primordial swamp beast beaching itself.
Jordan stared at it. “What the...”
The face pulled the rest of a body up behind it, proving that it was at least nominally human, in the awkward way of boys whose bodies have yet to figure out the right length for all their limbs. The boy perched on the wall, mouth gasping and gulping, like a primordial swamp beast starting to figure out how to form words, before finally blurting out, “Kess! Kess, you gotta get up here!”
Jordan kept staring. “You want something, kid?”
The boy nodded wildly. “You’re... you’re Jordan the Red! I want to be just like you!”
And he fell backwards off the wall.

***

Eliott opened his eyes. The sun was setting. Again. This time it had found some jagged, snowcapped mountains to sink behind, mountains unlike any Eliott had ever seen on the horizon back home. The wish had taken them a long way, then. To wherever this was. Wherever Jordan was. And they had heard him, Jordan, on the other side of a wall...
Shakily, Eliott sat up. His head hurt. He rubbed the back of his skull and felt a fresh lump. Someone had propped him up against a pumpkin, possibly the same someone he could hear talking behind him.
“...doesn’t mean anything by it, nothing personal. He just likes his privacy. You understand.”
“Of course,” said Kess, and Eliott sat up straighter. “And I’m sorry. We didn’t mean to drop in on him like this.”
“No. Well, you’ll have to be telling me how you managed that. He’s been off the map for twenty years.”
Kess sighed. “Magic.”
“Ah. That does explain it. He’s not going to be happy about that, either, you know.”
Eliott scrambled to his feet. Everything was coming back to him. “Where’s Jordan? Is he still here? I knew he wasn’t dead -- Jordan the Red could kick the ass of a crocodile god any day. Where’re we going? Did you tell him about the wish?”
Kess put her arm around his shoulders, which Eliott had figured out long ago was her way of signaling him to talk slower, or maybe even not talk at all for a bit. What she hadn’t seemed to figure out yet was how, lately, it was mostly effective because it started his pulse racing too quickly for him to think about words. “Hey, Eliott. This is Sam. He’s a friend of Jordan’s.”
She nudged him, and he stuck out his hand. “Oh. Hi. I guess, any friend of Jordan’s... I’ve never heard of you. Are you in any of the sagas? Because that’s pretty cool, I didn’t know Jordan had any friends. Living friends, I mean. I’m Eliott. That’s with one L, two Ts.”
Sam found his hand and shook it. “A pleasure to meet you. And, no, I’m not in any of the stories. Jordan and me, all we ever did together was go fishing.”
Eliott tried to make a space for this in his mind. The notion of Jordan the Red fishing, unless it involved massive harpoons and giant squid on stormy seas, didn’t fit. It was like trying to imagine Jordan going to the toilet, or brushing his teeth. Of course, even a hero would do these things, but until now, Eliott had never considered it.
“Well, I’m going to go adventuring with him,” said Eliott.
Sam laughed, not unkindly. “That’ll be a thing to see.”
“I am! The next time he has an adventure, he’s taking me along. I made a wish.”
“That may be,” said Sam, “but you shouldn’t hold your breath. Jordan, he doesn’t go off on adventures these days. I’m sorry, son. He’s retired.”
Again, Eliott’s head tried to make room for the impossible. “No, I mean Jordan the Red, right? The famous hero. He kills seven-headed monsters when he gets bored. That’s his life! He’s got to...”
He looked at Kess, who shrugged.
“Hey, can I go meet him now?”
“I should think he’s still close by,” said Sam. “He’ll be trying to decide what to make of you. You’re the first fan he’s had come to visit in a long, long time.”
Eliott nodded and hurried off, leaving Sam and Kess talking. This wasn’t how he had pictured meeting Jordan -- fewer decapitated goblins, for one thing -- but he was here, and it was happening. Nothing was going to spoil this for him. He’d made a wish, and he was going to get his adventure. He pushed through the rows of corn as if they were an army arrayed against him. Jordan was somewhere close by...
“Hey, Jordan! Jordan?”
At the end of the path, a scarecrow loomed against the nearly extinguished sunset. It was an old, shabby construction, mostly ignored by the local flocks of birds, but Eliott approached it cautiously. Adventure could strike at any moment. Scarecrows coming to life was a fine old tradition of the sagas. The question was whether this one would spring knives from its empty sleeves and attack, or just do a funny dance at him. Either way, there was a good chance it would go after his brain...
Eliott picked up a stone and took careful aim at the straw head.
“That’s one of Farmer Wormick’s old shirts,” said a voice behind him. “His wife stitched the head herself. I watched ‘em put the straw in myself. It ain’t coming alive.”
The stone tumbled out of Eliott’s hand. Jordan the Red eased through the corn beside him, moving stiffly towards the scarecrow.
“He’d give you a smack just for thinking of knocking it down,” Jordan added, patting the tattered shirt affectionately. “Good thing you shouted, kid. Unless you wanted to spend the night out in the middle of a field. I was waiting for you back by the gate.”
The sky continued to burn itself out. Crickets started to work on their harmonies. Eliott opened his mouth a few times, but nothing came out. In his head, spinning around and around, was the single thought that Jordan the Red was actually talking to him; anything they did right now could be in a saga!
“Yeah, this is going to go great,” said Jordan. He put a guiding hand on Eliott’s shoulder, and they turned back the way they had come. “Look, kid -- quit gawking. I heard you talking to Sam. But I’m out of the hero business. You still remember me. You know all the sagas. That’s great. But I don’t want it. I don’t need it. And I don’t need anyone turning up to bring all that back to me. So you and your girl can head back home and forget you found me here. All right? Good.”
Eliott stammered. He couldn’t even manage real words. He had an idea that he should drop to one knee, or salute, or recite the Skarbolg Saga. Something. Anything! He was walking with a living legend, and the moment was slipping away. He could feel the humiliation setting fire to his face.
And then, he stopped. The heat, the paralysis, the feeling that he had literally been struck by a falling star, all went away. He could move and talk on his own again. He rubbed the two remaining threads of the Braid, safe in his pocket, like a talisman of courage.
“Um... No.”
Jordan blinked. “What?”
“I’m not going,” said Eliott. “I’m not going home yet. I’m walking with Jordan the Red! This is the coolest thing that’s ever happened to me -- because you’re the best. You’re amazing. You’re, you’re my hero, man! And, yeah, I do know all your sagas. I want to go on an adventure with you.”
His face ached from grinning.
Jordan halted, staring off at a silhouetted ear of corn so intently that Eliott wondered if was some sort of shape-shifted monster waiting for them. When Jordan spoke, his voice was thin and forced. “Ain’t happening, kid.”
“I won’t get in the way! I promise, you can tie me up and put me in a sack if I’m crowding your style. Just let me be there to watch. Watch and learn. I’d be like your apprentice!”
“Think I need an apprentice, huh?”
“I don’t think you need anything. You’ve taken on armies by yourself. You killed twelve ogres in the Ashgrit Frontier saga.”
Jordan rubbed his left arm. “Yeah, and I still feel it when the weather gets damp. Twelve? I’d forgotten it was twelve.”
“I could do those verses for you. Right now. Can I?”
“Last thing I need is to hear any of that trash again. No thank you.” Jordan sighed. “Kid, if you were my apprentice, the only thing I’d teach you is how to get old and die. Find yourself another hero if you want to go on an adventure. Because I’m not one any more. I’m retired, and I don’t have adventures.”
“But...”
“Trust me. Nothing exciting happens here. And that’s how I like it.”
Jordan pushed open the gate to the road and went through, but he left it open for Eliott to follow. Ahead, the village of Cheese was lighting up with a soft, domestic glow. Candles shone through decoratively carved shutters. Chimneys rising from thatched roofs puffed out wooly smoke. If this was a one-horse town, the horse would have to be a shaggy-haired, miniature pony. It was the kind of town that would be obliterated by rampaging hordes, if an evil warlord wanted to prove just how evil and heartless he truly was.
Eliott had to jog to catch up with Jordan, who was striding along at a good pace. “I don’t believe it.”
“What? Believe it or don’t. I’m retired.”
“Yeah, that’s what your friend said. And I get that. That’s why there haven’t been any sagas for a while--”
“Twenty years.” The corner of Jordan’s mouth twitched up. It took Eliott a moment to realize that this was a smile.
“Twenty years, okay, and you’ve given up the bards and the glamour and the golden banquet halls--”
This got a laugh, or possibly a brief, violent throat-clearing. Since Jordan didn’t follow it up by spitting out a small lump of gravel, Eliott assumed it was a laugh.
“--but I don’t believe you’ve stopped having adventures,” he carried on. “You just don’t want people to know about them. But when the next one happens, I’m going to be here.”
“Kid, this is Cheese. People don’t have a lot of problems here. And y’know what? They don’t need a hero to deal with any that do come up. So unless you want to help me chase a stray sheep out of someone’s garden patch, you’re going to get pretty damn bored.”
Eliott considered this.
“A zombie sheep?”
“A -- what? No, nobody here raises zombie sheep. Where the hell did you get that from?”
“Skulp Saga. The entire village got turned into zombies, including the--”
“Right, I get it. No. There are no zombies here. There will never be any zombies here. It’s a zombie-free zone.”
“Because it’s got a hero to defend it.”
Jordan spun around. “No! It doesn’t. I’m nobody’s hero here. I’m just an old man living in a little town where the name Jordan the Red means nothing. Got that?”
Reluctantly, Eliott nodded, scuffing the toe of his boot into the dirt. He’d been yelled at before, on rare occasions, but this was the first time he’d felt that someone was actually getting angry at him. It was a strange, trembly sort of feeling. It had to be a warrior hero thing; Jordan could probably demoralize a legion of bloodthirsty marauders with his voice.
“I won’t tell anyone your secret identity,” Eliott said meekly.
Jordan stared at him. “My secret... kid, I’m not doing my heroics in a mask after dark either.”
They walked along the road together in silence. A plump housewife came out with a bowl of table scraps for an equally plump cat. She gave Jordan a friendly, disinterested wave and a smile, the kind she might have given to anybody. When she went back inside, Jordan nodded with satisfaction.
“See? Nothing special. I can walk down this street, any time of day, and nobody looks twice. Nobody stares, nobody asks me for an autograph.”
Eliott perked up. “Hey, do you think I could--”
“No.”
“I’ve got a pen and a card here somewhere...”
“You know what else’s been nice about retirement? It’s been twenty years since I’ve had any young twerps wanting to prove themselves against me in a duel. Smacking them down got old, real fast.” Jordan’s eyes narrowed to a strata line. “In your case, I might make an exception.”
“Wow, really!” Eliott stopped searching his pockets. “You’d duel me?”
“No. But I’d give you a smack upside the head for free. Right. We’re here.”
Here turned out to be a slightly run-down cottage set back from the road by a short path through a weedy garden. One wall supported, or was supported by, a large stack of firewood. In front of it was a badly fractured chopping block, well on its way to joining the stack. The thatched roof was sagging, but free of moss, and in several places, there were neat, fresh patches of repair. A sign over the door simply said ‘Dun’.
“This is... where you live?” Eliott ventured. There were no massive iron ramparts, no trophy weapons displaying the heads of Jordan’s enemies. The yard was completely devoid of casks of ale the size of swimming pools.
“Yep. And it’s where I say good-bye. Inn’s just up the street. Trout and Truncheon, you can’t miss it. Stick around until you get bored. Or don’t. I don’t care.” Jordan swung the gate closed between them. “As long as you leave my past alone.”
Eliott watched Jordan walk up the path, into the gloom of the gathering night, up to the door of the cottage, without accepting anything he had said. Of course Jordan the Red was still having adventures. Even if he had, as Eliott was forced to admit, gotten old, it was impossible to imagine that he could be living a boring life. Any moment now, goblins would leap at him, or a farmboy would bring him news of a princess in mortal danger. The world would behave as Eliott knew it from the bards’ stories. If not, if someone could choose a measly country cottage over a life full of adventure and romance and battle, then nothing made sense.
In the doorway, Jordan turned around and looked back at him. “You waiting for something?”
Eliott shrugged. “Goblin assassins?”
Jordan shook his head and shut the door behind him.
A less devout believer might have been discouraged, but Eliott had absolute faith. He swung himself up onto the fence and hooked his feet through the rails. His wish would come true. All he needed to do was wait.
Ten minutes later, when Eliott’s patience was already straining, a half-dozen men and a lanky gray dog with a face like a basket of wet laundry came trudging up the road. The men carried lanterns and looked, to Eliott’s mind, exactly the way peasant villagers in need of a hero should look. Eliott jumped down and ran to meet them.
“It’s all right! He’s still inside -- want me to go get him?”
The men stopped. One turned his lantern towards the cottage, then poked it into Eliott’s face with a baffled squint. It was not yet so dark that the lantern was needed, so Eliott could only assume that intentionally blinding people was a customary country greeting here.
“Evenin’ there, stranger,” said the man, with a tip of his hat. He lowered the lantern beam from Eliott's eyes reluctantly. “What’re you on about?”
“He just went in. He’s probably polishing his sword. But have no fear, good citizens,” Eliott added, with what he felt was an appropriately bardic flourish. Being Jordan’s herald was almost as good as being his apprentice. “He is ever vigilant!”
The men looked at one another dubiously. “Fear of what? Who’s got a sword?”
“Is it a monster?”
“What?”
“Jordan. What’s he facing?” Out of respect for the villagers’ plight, Eliott did his best to hide his exasperation, but he really wished the man could keep up.
“Facing?”
There was a long silence, which would hopefully never make it into the sagas.
“Hey, can we start again?” Eliott asked desperately. “So... hi. Are you guys going somewhere? Is there trouble? Trouble you might, you know, need help dealing with?”
The man nodded and answered slowly, having decided he was dealing with a boy who was either dimwitted or foreign, or both. “Aye, Skinner’s girl Dulice never came back from berry-pickin’ down by the Wild Forest this evenin’. Are you offerin’ to help look for her?”
“Not me! I mean, I would, sure, but -- don’t you want Jordan?”
“Hah, no need to get him out of bed on a damp night like this. In fact, I think we’ve enough to make a fair search party already. Skinner’s brought his gnomehound and all.”
The men started to move on, clearly failing to grasp the situation. Eliott caught up with them. “Yeah, but... the Wild Forest? What’re you going to do about the witches and bandits and horrible monsters?”
“The what? Where’re all those?”
“In the forest! But don’t worry, I’ll get Jordan, and he’ll take care of them--”
Someone laughed awkwardly. Someone else muttered something about moonshine. The gnomehound bounced and barked impatiently on its leash until was hushed. The leader of the search party gave Eliott a stern look. “We don’t take well to tale-tellers here. Now, we’ve a girl to find before it gets much darker, so I’ll ask you kindly to let us be about it.”
Deflated, Eliott stepped aside and let the men trudge on up the road, around the curve and out of sight, on their way to inevitable doom and unsung defeat. He wondered if they were counting on Jordan coming to rescue, or possibly avenge, them.
The thought drew his eyes back to the cottage, where a candle still glowed behind heavy curtains. He might have imagined it, but for a moment, as he turned away, he thought he saw the curtains twitch back into place.

***

“And that was it. He never even came out to see if he could help them. He just let them go off into the forest to, I don’t know, get eaten by rabid wolves or something.”
Eliott flopped backwards onto the bed, despairing at his hero’s inaction. It was the best bed in the Trout and Truncheon. Great seas of gaudy rag-quilts swelled up around him, infuriatingly soft and comfortable when he wanted them to be prickly and unyielding, so he had a reason to feel as irritated as he did. The pillows were equally unsatisfying, giving him no cause to pummel them. He settled for a deep, frustrated sigh.
“He’d help if they got in trouble,” said Kess, who was sitting on the edge of the bed, unlacing her boots. “He’s still Jordan.”
“He’s gotten old.”
“Yeah. People do that.”
“Well, they shouldn’t. They shouldn’t get old and they shouldn’t retire and they shouldn’t have stupid birthdays.”
“You still got to meet him,” said Kess. “I didn’t get to say anything to him. You’d better get me his autograph, or I’m going to paint your nails while you’re asleep.”
Normally, he would have let her cheer him up with her teasing, laughed off his sullenness, perhaps thrown a pillow at her, but tonight, he felt perversely attached to his bad mood. He wanted to tell the universe what a bad job it was doing, and how it should straighten itself out right now. It was a childish thought, one that he knew he ought to have grown out of by turning fifteen, but knowing this only made his mood worse.
He rolled over onto his stomach. “Kess? I’m going to get my adventure, right?”
“You wished for it. Of course you are.”
“Okay. Because that’s what I want to do. I don’t want to go to the court, I don’t want to get old in some dull village and be in bed by dark. I want to be one of the people who does things. Real things. Stuff worth hearing about.”
Kess smiled, and for a moment, he thought she was going to come over and hug him. Instead, she went to the window and put her heel up on the varnished oak sill, stretching like a dancer. “Then that’s what you’ll get. We’ll stay here until you do. It’ll be a vacation.”
“Yeah, not like anyone back home will miss me,” Eliott muttered into the quilts. He kicked himself off the bed. “You really think he’s retired? Like, not just from doing sagas, but from all of it?”
“Maybe he thinks so. I know he’d still kill a giant fire-breathing scorpion if it came here.”
“Yeah. Yeah! He’s just... keeping himself in reserve right now. Resting up.”
“Saving his strength.”
“Like a coiled spring, compressing his awesome power.”
“He still looks like he’s in great shape.”
“Training.”
“For when the scorpions attack.”
In Eliott’s mind, the streets of Cheese swarmed with enormous, deadly insects, held back only by Jordan the Red. How quickly, he realized, the Jordan in his head had changed shape, becoming an old man, but still a warrior. This Jordan was a weathered veteran, a grizzly survivor of not only a thousand battles, but also of decades skirmishing against age. Eliott rolled the image around, looking at it from all angles, and decided he liked it. He added more bugs, and put himself into the scene, and Kess, too; the three of them standing back-to-back against the swarm.
“Think we’ll be attacked soon?” asked Eliott. “Because this is gonna be great.”
“It’ll happen. But you might have to be patient.” Kess looked out the window. “That looks like your search party coming back.”
“Bet they realized how much danger they were in, and they’re on their way to get Jordan.”
“I don’t think so...”
Eliott leaned around her to see.
In the street below, the men passed by with their lanterns and their dog, and from what Eliott could see, not one of them had been disemboweled or turned to stone. At the back of the group, one carried on his shoulders a very small girl in a dirty blue dress, who looked likewise unharmed -- though this, at least, was no surprise to Eliott. In all the sagas he knew, children were always spared from specifically directed violence. At worst, Dulice Skinner was going home to a spanking and a cold supper.
“I guess they didn’t need him after all,” said Eliott.
Kess ruffled his hair. “No. But somebody will. We’ll get our adventure with him. Have faith.”
“Yeah,” said Eliott. “I know. I do.”
But when Kess had gone to her own room, Eliott lay awake for a long time, counting the knots in the ceiling. He wanted a massive ball of fire to rip the roof off the inn right now. A beautiful spy in black silk to come through the window with a cryptic warning. An army of zombies to kick in the door. Something, anything, big enough that Jordan the Red would have to stop pretending and leap into action. He wanted the story to hurry up and begin.
Having faith was easy. Having patience was the real challenge.

***

On the other side of the village, Jordan was having trouble sleeping, too. A mug of warm milk with a little brandy in it before bed had done nothing. Neither had a rather larger mug of warm brandy with a drop of milk in it. He blamed the boy. Whenever the old memories got dredged up, his chance of a restful night went straight to hell. Some of his memories came straight from hell... the demon bats of Phorbis. That gate in the Boneyard of D’loom.
He twisted involuntarily under the wool blankets. It all came back so easily...
But only memories. In the morning, the boy would be gone, and the memories could sink back into the muck at the bottom of his brain like so many weapons dropped into a turbid river. Tonight, he would just have to face them, one more time, break their lines and fight through into dreamless sleep. No surrender.
Jordan’s eyes shut like portcullises as he steeled himself to make it through the night.

“So how do you think it’s going to happen?”
A perfect, golden, autumn apple arced across the cloudless sky like a second sun. Eliott swung. There was satisfying, juicy crunch, as only three feet of maple meeting an apple can make. The apple bounced into the bushes on the other side of the stream, just barely missing the holly tree that was worth twenty points. A crow, who was worth fifty points, hopped down and pecked at it.
“Some way neither of you will expect,” said Kess, foraging for another apple. “Magic likes to be tricky.”
“But it’s got to happen soon, right?”
Kess sighed. “You never said how soon you wanted the adventure. So the wish’ll come true as long as you and he go for an adventure some time before one of you dies.” She picked up a half-rotten, wasp-ravaged apple and blew softly on it until it became a perfect piece of throwing fruit. “And that could be ages. God, I think he’s made of the same stuff they pickle mountains with.”
“I can’t wait ages! Do you think I should use another wish?”
“Up to you.”
Eliott rubbed pensively at the two remaining threads of the Braid, which right now were pinned to his shirt like a prize ribbon. He kept putting it someplace different, on his shirt, in his pocket, tied around his wrist, his forearm, as if finding the perfect spot for it would also mean figuring out what to do with it. One wish left, and then only the white thread to take everything back to normal.
“...no,” he said at last, “I think I’ll save it for something really special. Something good. But I bet we can make it happen -- y’know, give it a nudge.”
He frowned.
“That’s okay, right?” he asked, beating the weeds with his bat. “Giving my wish a nudge?”
“You can nudge. What’ve you got in mind?”
“...I haven’t thought of it yet. But y’know how you said if a monster showed up, Jordan would have to fight it? We need to find a monster.”
They both looked around at a landscape of such bucolic blandness it might have been created by an artist under heavy sedation to make the nightmares go away. The most monstrous thing anyone was likely to come across was a temperamental bull. Dragons would have taken one look and written it off on their maps as ‘Here There Be Tedium’.
“Or something,” Eliott said weakly. “I don’t know. Buried treasure! A secret coven of witches. Some old dead god sleeping under one of those hills. This place has to have something we can stir up.”
“We might be able to find a wasp nest,” said Kess. “Nothing feels occult here. I tried talking to some of the farmers this morning -- tried! I’ve had easier conversations with trees--” She patted the trunk of the apple tree convivially. “Anyway, there’s never even been a war around Cheese. People settled here thousands of years ago, and they joined the empire peacefully.”
She lobbed the apple to Eliott, who caught it.
“If they’ve been here for thousands of years, they must have had priests or druids or something, right? And gods were pretty bloodthirsty back then... maybe there’s an old temple buried here.” Eliott kicked the apple back and forth between his boots as the idea bounced around his head. The village didn’t have much, but he was sure it had a shovel.
“Maybe. Probably all they had was a mother goddess.” Kess shaped a fat, female body in the air with her hands, then shrugged it away dismissively. “Dairy farming tribes don’t seem to need much from the Elder Gods of Eternal Horror and Mystery. But it can’t hurt to look,” she added.
“Yeah, but where you’ve got cows, you’ve got bulls, right?”
“If you want to have more cows,” Kess agreed.
“And if you’ve got bulls, you know what you’ll end up with.”
“...men in very small jackets and big red capes taunting them?”
“Minotaurs. Wouldn’t this be the perfect place for a temple built around a minotaur -- there could be an underground labyrinth here, and nobody would suspect it.”
“Okay. So, a long time ago--”
“Centuries.”
“--centuries ago, all the cows attract a really bullheaded man. The villagers start worshipping him?”
“Of course.”
Kess smiled encouragingly, as she always did when Eliott’s imagination started to run wild. She turned her face towards his fantasies as if they were a pleasant scent on a summer breeze. “So why would they hide his temple behind a maze and then bury it?”
Eliott thought about it. “The cows.”
“Bovine revolution?”
“They started giving birth to freaky monster calves. Because, y’know, the minotaur liked to--”
“--go cow tipping. Okay.”
“That’s where your mother goddess comes in!” Eliott bounced the apple triumphantly off his knee. “She got her followers to trap the minotaur in his own temple, seal it all up, and then made them swear never to speak of it again! Bam -- sleepy little farming village with a dark secret underneath. Now all we have to do is find it!”
“Sounds like fun,” said Kess. “Got a plan?”
“Yeah. We’ve got to get underground. We should start in the sewers.”
“Gross. No.”
“Come on. You know Jordan always found the entrance to secret lairs and ancient ruins by going through the sewers. Plus, I want to kill a giant rat.”
Eliott stretched out his arms, holding his hands a giant rat’s breadth apart. Kess pushed them three feet closer together.
“That size,” she said firmly. “Any bigger, there’d be no farms left around here. Basic ecology.”
Eliott rolled his eyes. “Kess. We’re on vacation. Don’t start giving me lessons.”
He grabbed the imaginary rat by the tail and flung it over the holly tree. The watching crow flew after it.
“Anyway, we’re wasting time when I could be having adventures. What we need to be doing is figuring out how to get down to that ruined temple. You know what we need to do?”
“Find the village historian?”
“No! We need to bring Jordan the Red along. I bet if he came into the sewers with us, I’d lean on a hidden latch -- totally by accident -- and fall through into a secret tunnel. Or we’d say there was no way we were going to find the entrance, and the ground would just happen to give way under us.”
They both looked down at their feet. The autumn-dried earth remained uncooperatively solid.
“Okay,” said Kess, “but Jordan won’t come with us unless we find something he has to face.”
“But we won’t find anything unless--”
“That’s the problem. It’s the chicken and the egg.”
Eliott nodded, thinking this over. “Yeah. Let’s go get lunch.”

***

Lunchtime in Cheese meant going back to the Trout and Truncheon, which in addition to being the only lodging house in the village was also the only pub. Once, hundreds of years ago, there had been a mildly significant road not far away, and the ancestral incarnation of the Trout and Truncheon had done a good business sheltering foreigners and travellers on their way to better, more interesting places. Now, it survived by serving large meals and cold cider to the local farmers, keeping the upstairs rooms aired only out of respect for tradition, or for those rare occasions when a marital dispute would lock a husband out of his usual bed.
But where the guest rooms suffered from lack of use, the kitchens thrived. When Kess and Eliott got there, the midday meal had just been spread out, and the common room was packed. Broad-backed ploughmen and herdsmen crowded the benches, their dogs weaving underfoot and snapping at anything that fell from the tables.
“I guess we just... sit anywhere?” said Eliott.
“Anywhere you can find,” said Kess. “I think we came late.”
Eventually, they found stools at the back of the room, by the bucket where the serving girls dumped anything the dogs missed. Eliott sat back and waited for someone to bring him a menu.
“You could have charmed someone into giving us a place at a table,” he said, after a hungry while.
Kess shrugged. “Do you see anybody I’d enjoy charming? Not worth it.” She stretched out her legs, crossing her ankles. “Nice people here, but dull. And sweaty. Hempen homespuns, my grandmother would have called them,” she added in an undertone. “And then she would have given them donkeys’ heads.”
“Harsh. Like, what, severed?”
“Like transformed. Their heads, into donkeys.”
“Oh. That’s not so bad.” Eliott rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. “I bet you could do some nasty damage, if you rammed somebody with a donkey’s head.”
“There’s always an upside for you, isn’t there?”
“Well, yeah. Why not?” He could feel Kess smiling at him, making his ears warm. “It could be cool.”
“My grandmother would have done it out of mischief. Because it’s funny. She thought it was, anyway. She could be a witch like that.”
Eliott glanced sideways. Kess had taken on a bored expression, watching something in the rafters that was only visible to elvish eyes.
“Have you ever...” he began.
“Not recently.”
Sometimes, Eliott had noticed, Kess would go like this. It was an elvish thing, or a feminine thing -- in his experience, it was hard to know the difference -- but her attention would wander to some distant place beyond his perception, a place where things were certainly more interesting than wherever she was when it happened. When it did, Eliott’s job was to lure her back with stories or wild flights of imagination.
“Hey, you know all those animal-headed Egyptian gods,” he ventured, thinking back to a picture book from his childhood. Since it had showed goddesses in a much hotter climate, it had been extremely educational, until his parents took it away from him. “Think they could have been people under elf spells? A guy with a donkey head would have fit in perfectly. The god of stubbornness. Or bad music.”
Kess drifted back from wherever she had gone. “Could be. I wouldn’t go to his temple, though.”
Then, suddenly, all thoughts of gods and monsters were knocked out of Eliott’s head. Anything he could invent or speculate was only a poor, second-rate distraction; Jordan the Red had walked into the common room.
“Kess! Kess -- he’s here!”
The warrior hero stood in the doorway like an aged titan surveying his created world, like a general overseeing a battlefield. His shirt sleeves were rolled up, and he rested his fists on his hips in such a way that Eliott wondered for a moment if he was planning on throwing the room into a brawl. His lips moved, mouthing a curse that could have cracked the mast of a galleon.
“You know he’s not going to have any problem getting a seat,” said Eliott, in a muttered tone of awe and envy. “He’ll probably chuck somebody out the window, if nobody gives him one.”
But nobody did, and nobody got thrown anywhere. Jordan stopped one of the serving girls as politely as any old man might, took a glass of cider off her tray, and gestured at the crowded tables. The girl shrugged and pointed, and Eliott forgot how to breath; she was pointing to the stools where he and Kess were sitting.
Jordan looked in their direction, and sighed.
“He’s coming over... Kess, he’s coming over!”
“I can see. You’re calm, right. We’re calm. Cool.”
“Right! At ease. Totally at ease. We’re here for lunch, he’s here for lunch, it’s not like we’re going to end up in a saga just because we had lunch in the same place at the same time as Jordan the Red -- Kess, we’re having lunch at the same time in the same place as Jordan the Red oh my god--”
“Eliott!”
“--calm! Right! What?”
The stool beside him groaned like an old man sitting down heavily. Eliott dared a slow glance over his shoulder.
“So. You two’re still around,” said Jordan. He chewed the idea around a bit. “Not bored yet?”
“We’re finding stuff to do,” said Eliott.
“Here? Really? Well, as long as it keeps you to yourselves.”
Eliott drummed his fingers against his knees. Everything he could think of to say sounded pushy or stupid or completely un-calm... and he realized, as he wobbled forward, that his stool had one leg shorter than the others.
“You know, some of it’s pretty interesting stuff,” he muttered at the floor. “If you, anybody, wanted to see it.”
“No thanks, kid,” he heard Jordan say, from a million miles away. “No fantasies, no heroics. All I want right now is some food.”
“That’s what we came here for, too,” said Kess. “But we haven’t figured out how to get any yet. Is there a trick to it?”
“Yeah. Don’t be strangers.” Jordan raised a beckoning hand vaguely in the direction of one of the kitchen boys.
“No, really. I’ve never been to an inn that didn’t like guests before.”
Jordan smirked. “One of the reasons I like this village. It’s nothing personal; they had a bad experience with a bard, thirty or forty years back.”
“But they’ve accepted you,” said Kess.
“Yup. Took a while for them to get used to me. Helps that I keep to myself and don’t go nosing around, asking questions. Here we are.”
The kitchen boy, plump and prematurely balding as if it was part of the uniform, had finally given in and waddled over.
“Hullo, Jor’,” he said, through a smile as greasy and put-on as his apron. “What’ll it be?”
“The usual, Dermot. With another of these.” Jordan handed back his empty glass. The kitchen boy took it and turned to go, with the sparsest of nods to Jordan and no glimmer of acknowledgment at all to Eliott or Kess.
Eliott slid forward off his stool. “Hey! Um, excuse me,” he began, but when the kitchen boy glanced back blankly at him, whatever brilliant, indignant protest he might have come up with faltered somewhere in another kingdom a thousand miles away. “Can I... y’know... could we get...?”
“They’ll have the usual, too,” said Jordan.
When the kitchen boy had gone away, glumly resigned to having taken an order, Eliott got back onto his stool and turned to Jordan. “Um, thanks,” he said. And then, “What do we get when we get the usual? We’ve never eaten here before.”
“Same thing everyone gets,” said Jordan. “Other option’s the unusual, but nobody ever orders that.”
“And don’t think I’m paying for yours,” he added.
“Oh, don’t worry about that! I’ve got lots--”
Kess nudged his ankle with her foot. “I’ve got enough to take care of things,” she said smoothly.
Jordan eyed her skeptically. “Yeah? Didn’t think you elf and fairy types went in for money.”
“Some of us do.” She smiled, rubbing her fingers together like a conjurer vanishing a penny. “And when you’re practically immortal, investment banking comes easily.”
The usual, when it arrived, came in a bowl for each of them and appeared to be lumps of uncased sausage mixed together with mashed vegetables and a pinch of turnip greens. There was cider, too, but after one sip, Kess carefully took Eliott’s glass away from him. They ate in awkward silence; Eliott felt so nervous, watching Jordan the Red eat at such close distance, that he could barely get the food past his grin.
“Look, it’s nothing personal,” said Jordan, eventually. “I mean, as long as you don’t go... bringing up the past, I’ve got no problem with you two being in town. Hell, I might even ask you to tell me something about the outside world sometime. Maybe. But Cheese, well, Cheese doesn’t like strangers.”
He finished his cider. He glanced across the room, sizing up his odds of winning another skirmish with the kitchen boy for a refill. He shook his head.
“Especially not nosey strangers. And you two, on top of the two we’ve already got...”
Kess arched an eyebrow. “Others? Here? Where are they staying?”
She glanced at Eliott, and a mutual thought arced between them like a golden thread.
“I don’t know,” said Jordan. “Nobody knows. And that’s half of what’s so suspicious about them and no, kid, I am not going out looking for them so wipe that hope off your face right now.”
Eliott frowned. “I was just going to say, maybe someone should. Not you, it didn’t have to be you, just... someone.”
“They’re a couple of tourists. Nothing to write songs about. They’ll go away on their own soon enough, if we keep our heads down.”
“You sound like you’re trying to convince someone,” said Kess. “Us, or you? How long have these tourists been around?”
“Last couple of weeks, they’ve been coming around every few days, from who knows where. They buy some food, ask some questions, get enough cold shoulder to freeze an ogre... but they keep coming back.”
“What sort of questions?”
Jordan scowled. “The innocent sort. About cows. And very definitely, specifically, not about me.”
“I see why you’d be suspicious.”
“You think they’re looking for you!” said Eliott, catching on. “They could be bounty hunters, or assassins, or--”
“Fans, like us,” said Kess.
Jordan snorted. “Not like you. You two’re upfront and honest about looking for me, annoying and unwanted as that is. But these strangers... yeah, I don’t trust ‘em.”
Eliott’s eyes widened as the words echoed in his head, rebounding with the implication that Jordan the Red did, in fact, trust him! They had eaten a meal together, discussed an enemy, and now, Jordan trusted him.
“I bet we could track them down,” said Eliott. “I mean, Kess and me. Not you -- you can stay undercover, and we’ll do your scouting for you and spy on the spies.”
There was a long moment as Jordan weighed the offer. Eliott brushed his fingers over the Braid for luck.
“What the hell. Sure, kid, if it’ll keep you out of trouble, go find out what these clowns are here for.”
“What do they look like?” asked Kess.
“Foreign. A tall, hairy man and a short one. You’ll know ‘em when you see them. But remember...” Jordan leaned in. “You don’t say anything to them, or to anyone else in town, about what I did in a previous life. Right? Good.”
He turned and walked away, leaving only an empty glass and a dirty bowl to mark his passing. Kess and Eliott stared at each other, both grinning and trying not to grin so broad and foolishly as the other.
“Wow,” said Kess. “Wow. We’re working for Jordan the Red.”
“I know! This is so--”
Jordan came back.
“In fact,” he growled, “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t say anything to me about what I did in my past life, either.”
He stalked away again.

***

The afternoon slipped away, and the evening, and the next morning, and the next day with no sign of the tourists. By the afternoon two days later, Eliott was getting bored and frustrated with his self-appointed quest and the taciturn villagers who offered him nothing helpful at all. He had tried posing as a straggling relative of the elusive tourists, suggested obliquely that he was in pursuit of them for moral reasons, and even offered to trade chores for information at some of the outlying farms, all with no success. The difficulty made no sense; back at home, he could cajole any information he wanted out of the servants and the local peasants.
“It’s like everybody’s in one big conspiracy to keep me from finding these guys,” he complained, hooking his feet around a fence rail and testing how far back he could lean without falling over.
“Maybe they heard you were after them,” said Kess.
Eliott considered this. “They have a spy in the village. Someone they’ve bribed to help them out and let them know if they’re in danger. I bet it’s that bald boy at the inn, he totally looks like a weasel. Or, y’know, some fat, bald animal that’s like a weasel.”
“So why don’t they get all the information they need from him?”
“Oh, like a fat, bald weasel really knows anything. No, they need to snoop around for themselves, and they can’t even trust their own snitches...”
Inspiration struck, launching Eliott off the fence in a flurry of limbs and ideas.
“Kess! That’s it -- brilliant! We’re not going to track these guys down by actually tracking them down!”
“We’re not?”
“No! We’re going to find them by getting inside their heads. Think like them, and figure out where they’re going to be.”
Kess helped Eliott to his feet, and he once again had the incredible, phosphoric feeling that she was going along with his idea, wild as it was. He straightened his tunic, spat on his hands, and rubbed them together in a ritual of mental focus. He closed his eyes.
“Okay... okay, I’m a bad guy. Black cloak, bad teeth... nosey...”
“Which one are you, the short one or the tall, hairy one?”
Eliott opened one eye. “The short one. He’s always the brains of the pair. Remember Rinzini and Mister Thud, from the Last of the Merovians? Or Nickel and Dime from the Rotwood Saga?”
“Right, of course.”
Kess leaned back against the fence, lounging in the autumn breeze in a manner that completely drove out of Eliott’s mind any notion of asking her to be the tall, hairy one. He pulled himself back into his state of deductive concentration.
“I’m coming to Cheese... I’m not staying in the village, because I’ve got a lot of stuff I don’t want to be seen with. Or one really big thing... I’m camping somewhere, but nobody sees my fire smoking... the forest? No, underground! I’m underground, with something big that needs to be hidden. And I’m asking questions, because I want to find out... about cows? No. That’s my cunning subterfuge. About Jordan... no, I’m going to be totally caught off guard when he jumps in and thwarts my evil schemes -- it’s going to be awesome, Kess, I’m totally not going to see it coming, I can’t wait to watch.”
“You’re blurring character. Come on, what’s your scheme?”
“I... I dunno. But these guys definitely aren’t here for the scenery. Wait -- they’re not trying to find out if Jordan’s here, they’re trying to find out if anyone is! Anyone who could stop them! I know what they’re up to -- Kess, I’ve got to go warn Jordan!”
Fueled by raw excitement and inspiration, he bolted down the road, picking up details of his scenario along the way. Kess sighed happily and watched him go.

***

Jordan was sitting on his front steps when Eliott vaulted his gate and flailed to a dusty halt in front of him. He was carving a turnip. He didn’t seem to be carving it into anything, other than a small heap of vegetable chips, but Eliott assumed he had a good reason. It was probably an evil turnip.
“Something to report?” asked Jordan, without looking up.
“Huh? Oh -- right! So, I’ve been tracking them for the last two days.” Better not to say unsuccessfully, thought Eliott, or go into too much detail about how he figured things out. He took a breath. “And I’ve got it -- they’re secretly hiding in the old sewers under the village, with the half-giant warlord they’re working for!”
Jordan stared at him from under a skeptical eyebrows. “In the sewers.”
“Yeah.”
“With a half-giant.”
Eliott nodded. “Yep. A whole-giant would go on a rampage without bothering to send scouts first, but this one does. He’s got size issues. But he’s bent on terrorizing the countryside as soon as he’s sure there’s no one here capable of defending it.” This got no reaction, so he pushed a little more. “You know... no guards. No militia. No hero.”
Jordan sank his carving knife into the dirt and looked at Eliott wearily.
“Two things wrong with that, kid. First, there’s no way even a really small half-giant could fit into the sewers -- and second, there are no sewers under Cheese.”
“There aren’t?”
“No.”
Eliott tried to mentally readjust for this. “Are you sure? Because every place you went in the sagas, there was a sewer.”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure I know where all the shit ends up around here. There are no sewers.”
“Oh.” Eliott shifted awkwardly. “They might be in the catacombs, then.”
“Gods, kid, you have a one-track mind. There are no catacombs. There are no sewers. There are no dungeons, barrows, or ruins of any kind, not under the village, not outside the village, not anywhere near here! Closest thing Cheese has is an abandoned mine--”
“That’s it! The abandoned mine. They’ll be hiding in--”
“--and the mine was abandoned after ten feet.” Jordan pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose. “You’re making this up, aren’t you. You couldn’t find them.”
Eliott squirmed. He couldn’t tell a lie to Jordan the Red, not a real lie. The half-giant warlord didn’t count; there would be one lurking nearby if the world was behaving itself properly, so that wasn’t a lie. It was what should have been true.
“I couldn’t find them. But I’m not exactly... not making it up. Well, sorta. I mean... yes,” said Eliott. “But we should still go check out that mine. You know, just in case.”
“Just in case a half-giant has gotten stuck trying to squeeze inside?”
“Exactly!”
Jordan shook his head wearily and stood up. Eliott thought for sure he was going to go back into his cottage and shut the door, but instead he opened the gate and waved Eliott after him.
“All right. Fine,” he said. “Let’s go down to the mine. Get it over with.”
“Really? You mean it? I’ll go get Kess -- wait here!”

***

Kess looked down. “Well. It’s a pit.”
“Yeah. The deepest of a dozen,” said Jordan. “Dug all over the place. People thought they’d find gold in it.”
“Did they?” asked Eliott, leaning carefully over the edge for a better look in case he had missed something that could keep his enthusiasm burning. There were bones at the bottom, obviously from a deer, and an old, muddy hat, but no sign of monsters or treasure. He listlessly dropped a clump of grass onto the hat.
“Of course not. There’s no gold around here. It was a stupid bard’s story, told by a mule-brain of a scam artist who came into the village promising to sing about buried treasure if he got paid enough. This,” said Jordan, “is what you get from listening to that sort of junk.”
“What if he’d been telling the truth?” said Kess.
Jordan backed away from the pit. “What if. Who cares? There’d be a whole other, hah, hole of trouble come from it some other way, then. I’m just showing you what’s here.”
“Maybe nobody dug deep enough,” said Eliott. “Could I get a shovel anywhere around here?”
“Leave this one alone, Eliott,” said Kess. “If Jordan says there’s no gold, then there isn’t.”
Jordan eyed her suspiciously. “Yeah. Smart plan.”
“Besides, we still need to find where the strangers are really hiding,” she continued smoothly. “If they’re not underground, where did you say? Somewhere in the forest?”
“What? Oh, forget that!” Jordan threw up his hands. “Forget about them -- you two are going to get yourselves lost or eaten by bears or into some sort of trouble, and I’ll be damned if it’s any fault of mine.”
He trudged away, heading back over the fields to the village. Crickets and cicadas leapt out of his way. Eliott and Kess hurried after him.
“Hey! Hey, Jordan, wait up -- I’m sorry.” Eliott fell into pace at his hero’s side. “I’m not looking for trouble. I’d like to have an adventure, like you used to. I mean, I’d really like to go on one of your adventures, but I know, you’re retired...”
Jordan shot him a basilisk glare. “Adventure, trouble. Same thing. Same bardic impshit. If I were you, I’d spend more time trying to grow up. Grow up, grow old, and hope nothing interesting happens to you, or you know what you’ll end up with? A great big empty hole.”
For an old man, Jordan’s stride was impressive. He put several yards between them before Eliott, sprinting, caught up.
“Well, okay,” said Eliott, “but it’s too late. I’ve already had something interesting happen -- I’ve met you! My life can be dull from now on.”
Jordan sighed and stopped.
That must have sounded so dumb to him, thought Eliott. Why did I say it like that, like he gives my life meaning or something.
“Look, kid, how long am I going to have to put up with you?”
Until I get my adventure, Eliott thought peevishly. He folded his arms tightly and touched the silver thread pinned to his shirt, tempted once more to make something happen.
Kess put her hand on Eliott’s shoulder. “Until the end of the week,” she said. “Then we’ll leave and leave you alone.”
Eliott opened his mouth to protest, but Kess caught his eye before he could speak. Trust me, she was saying silently, so as always, he did.
“That’s four days...” Jordan pushed his fingers through his hair and squinted out towards the horizon. “Fine. I’ll make you a deal, both of you. Stay out of trouble until you go, swear that you won’t tell anyone where you found me, and you can come to my home and read my journals. They’re not bardic and they’re not pretty, but there’s stuff in there even you two’ll never have heard before. You’ll learn something.”
He held out his hand.
“We got a deal?”
“Oh, wow. Deal!”
They shook on it, and then Jordan left before he could, as he put it, come to his senses. Kess and Eliott stood in the field for a long time after he was out of sight, massaging their crushed hands and giggling like fools.

***

In a hidden hollow at the edge of the Wild Forest, where the setting sun scarcely managed to penetrate the canopy of leaves, a tall, hairy man and a short man approached a goat-hide tent. Their boots crunched over a carpet of gnawed bones. When they were close to the tent, they stopped and bowed low to the occupant.
“Master,” said the short one, “we’ve returned. We brought them for you. Everything you asked for.”
A massive hand reached out expectantly. The tall man placed a neatly-wrapped bundle into the dirty palm and stepped back, sweating nervously as his offering was examined.
“A dozen picture postcards,” the short man carried on. “Got a really nice look at the Mitchling Farm Creamery, and you were right -- they’ve got one of the best redbodied herds we’ve seen. That third card there, that’s one of their cows standing by the yard gate, and you can sort of see there’s a relief carving of the same breed on the gatepost.”
“Lovely,” growled a voice from inside the tent. “Then everything is as the guide book said it would be... you’ve done well. Tomorrow, we leave for the coast to proceed with the next part of the plan.”
“What are we going to see next, Master?”
“An ancient Roman dairy. Check the map for yourself, it’s on there with an X.”
“Got you a sample of the local cheese, too,” said the tall man, as his companion hastily rummaged for their map. “They call it ‘cheese’. Thought maybe we could have it on toast, master, if that would please you.”
“Yes... yes,” said their master’s voice. “We shall have toast...”
The voice broke off into a sinister cackle. The tourists, out of self-preservation, joined in, and the chorus of their laughter echoed out into the forest until the trees and the gathering dusk swallowed it.

Jordan’s gate was open when Kess and Eliott arrived to take him up on his end of the deal early the next day.
“We should have brought him something,” said Eliott. “Like a ham. To say thank you.”
Kess knocked on the door. There was a shuffling and a general low-grade muttering from within that suggested either that warrior heroes were not morning people, or that a particularly unenthusiastic zombie had gotten loose inside. The door opened.
“Oh,” said Kess. “Hello, Sam. Is Jordan in?”
Sam smiled and held the door open for them. “The beautiful Miss Elf,” he said, “and Eliott, too? No, Jordan’s out back in the shed putting together our fishing poles. He said you were to come in and make yourselves comfortable, though. His books are on the little table under the window, and on the bed. You can go through them as you like.”
“Jordan’s going fishing?” said Eliott.
Sam nodded, and the feathers and beaded flashers hooked to his fishing hat danced cheerfully. “Oh, yes. He said you’d probably rather not have him lurking around, hovering and getting self-conscious while you read through all his things.”
“Did he really say that?” asked Kess.
“No. But I took his meaning from what he did say.”
“What was that?”
“That I wasn’t going to stick around and be ogled,” said Jordan. He reached past Kess and pressed a cane fishing pole into Sam’s hands. “You two knock yourselves out with those books. But not literally,” he added, with a skeptical glance at Eliott. “I’ll be back before it gets dark. Make yourselves at home until then.”
“Hey! Thank you,” Eliott called out, as Jordan vanished down the lane. “Catch some good fish! Or, you know, evil ones!”
Kess patted his arm. “Books,” she said, with an inspired gleam in her eye.
They went inside.
The house had a sullen air to it, as though it resented having unfamiliar visitors. There was only one room, comprising kitchen, bedroom, sitting room and pantry in what seemed to Eliott to be a phenomenal compression of space. Permeating the house was a faint, musty smell that should have belonged to a room left locked and unoccupied for a long stretch of years, a smell Eliott knew from the highest attics of his parents’ manor, where furniture that had yet to go from old to antique was kept under dusty canvas sheets. The only signs that any sort of living went on here were the stack of unscrubbed dishes by the fireplace and the man-shaped hollow in the bed.
Eliott took in every detail, a pilgrim at a holy shrine. The dirty dishes, the wool blankets, the crudely carved wooden ornaments were all sacred relics of his hero’s daily life. Of Jordan’s past, there were no tokens or trophies on display at all, but Eliott was coming to accept that Jordan was keeping those to himself. The Sword of Empire, the ring of Princess Amariah, the Teeth of the Chimera, those would be hidden away somewhere safe, in case they fell into the wrong hands.
A sudden urge to check for hidden compartments under the floorboards crept over Eliott. There was nothing wrong with his hands, after all...
“These must be them,” said Kess.
Eliott looked up guiltily. Kess, who approached holy shrines as if they were places to dance and sing and sprawl on the grass with vine leaves in her hair, had made herself comfortable at the table, with her legs tucked up under her and a stack of leather-bound books in front of her. There were at least a dozen, most no thicker than Eliott’s thumb, but a few at the bottom were fat and bulging with promise.
Kess took one off the top. “So. You want me to read to you?”
Eliott lifted it from her hands. “I want to see his handwriting for myself. Do you think he wrote any of these in blood?”
“Let’s find out.”
Holding Jordan’s journal reverentially, Eliott settled himself on the floor at the foot of Jordan’s bed. He could feel the blanket, Jordan’s blanket, on the other side of his shirt sending wooly prickles up his spine.
He turned to the first page.

***

“He’s got a good spirit, that boy,” said Sam. “Too much imagination, I’ll grant you. Maybe more than any world could live up to. Or any man. But a good spirit.”
Jordan said nothing, ostensibly because the fish might hear and dive for deeper cover. It was a near-perfect day to be out at the pond. Perch were basking in easy reach of Jordan’s line under the shade of an overhanging willow, a light breeze was blowing down from the mountains, and Sam’s home-brewed moonshine was giving everything a peach-colored bearability.
“So what happened to hiding your legend under a rock?” asked Sam.
“A change of tactics,” said Jordan grudgingly. “Won’t do any harm for him to read about me, and it’ll keep him busy for a couple of days. You know me, Sam. Long as there’s an end in sight, I can get there.”
“You won’t want to hear this, but I think you’ve done a nice thing.”
“We’ll see.”
“You sure you can trust them not to tell anyone about finding you when they’ve gone?”
Jordan frowned. “I think so. Definitely the boy. Nothing’s better than having a secret at his age. The elf... I’m taking a chance. You know elves.”
“I hope you’re right,” said Sam. “If it comes to it, I’d prefer if you didn’t have to leave again, old friend.”
The breeze died for a moment. Jordan glanced sideways at his friend. Once upon a time, when stories still began that way, he and Sam had been boys together, playing with wooden swords and working the boats out of Whale Harbor, and in their free time, hunting fantastic beasts that never existed. Then Jordan had met a talent agent and gone on to fame, and Sam had cashed in his winnings and gone to live with a distant aunt in Cheese, and for thirty years, they had had no contact with each other. It took a very special kind of friendship to pick up again after all that.
“We come here to talk or fish?” asked Jordan, casting his line emphatically out into the pond.
Sam chuckled. “I came for the waters.” He patted the case of moonshine beside him, which came with his personal guarantee of safety: he’d been drinking it for years without going blinder.
Half a bottle later, they had caught three fat fish too stupid to realize that crickets rarely went swimming with barbed metal piercings, not even rebellious teenage crickets. That satisfied the fishing side of things.
“Sam... if you were a tourist, and didn’t want to stay in the village for some reason,” Jordan ventured, “where’d you make camp?”
Sam thought about it. “Down by Mitchling’s south pasture, by the creek, maybe? Or out in the forest somewhere.”
Jordan squinted across the pond to the dark line of the Wild Forest. He had avoided it ever since he’d come to Cheese, for no particular reason. “Hmm. Haven’t gone calling on the Mitchlings for a while. Think I might drop in on them this week.”
“Hah!”
“...so much for the fish.”
“Sorry, Jordan.” Sam wiped the laughter from his face. “He’s gotten to you, hasn’t he? Eliott. You’re going to go looking for our tourists after all.”
“Thought I might...”
“In case they actually are spies for a half-giant? Jordan, you’re stirring up for another adventure -- I did not think I’d live to see the day.”
It was another testament to their friendship that Jordan let this pass. “No. No adventures. I’m just thinking, maybe I should take a closer look at our tourists. Make sure everything’s on the level.” He reached for the bottle. “Which it will be. Of course it will be.”
“But you’d like to see it for yourself.”
“Right.”
“And what if they are a couple of Glister’s scouts?”
Jordan drew in his line. The mountain breeze was starting to give him a chill, and the fish had gone deep. “Then I’ll deal with them,” he said grimly. “He never hires people who can’t be bought, and if their price is too high... well, I’ve dealt with that before, too.”
Sam nodded approvingly. “You can still sound ominous better than anyone else I know.”
“Old habits.” Jordan rolled down his sleeves. “Come on. Let’s get back to my place and make these fish fry.” He rubbed his hands together and sneered wickedly at the unfortunate perch.
“...when you’re not being an overacting ham,” said Sam.
“You want to eat or not?”
“Lead on, old man. But won’t your fan club still be there?”
“Damn. Right. We’ll go to the Trout and Truncheon, and you can sweet-talk the cooks.”
They packed up. Jordan looked back towards his house with a thin smirk stretched across his lips.
“I wonder how they’re liking the undecorated truth.”

***

“‘Day 102. Still snowing. Somewhere in Brok, no signposts. No villages. Occasional demon. Must talk to G. on return about getting better furs, not going to freeze like this again and he wants more north stories. Must have enough saved by now. Ponies have eaten bad oats and are farting half the night, will tie them downwind tomorrow or by Shango’s tent if he doesn’t stop whistling that stupid ballad...’ Whistling. Whistling and farting, that’s what he was writing about while he was hunting the Ice Demon of Brok.” Kess slumped forward onto her arms, her ears drooping. She stared at the page as if changing her distance might bring a more dramatic version of the journal entry into focus.
“I guess that’s what he was thinking about,” said Eliott, who was having a similar experience with Jordan’s version of Timebreaker, in which Jordan had scribbled three pages of attempts to understand the Tinkers’ Guild’s explanation of how a clock worked.
“I can’t read any more,” said Kess, sounding equally disappointed and surprised with herself. “I can’t.”
They had been poring over Jordan’s journals for hours. From the first entry, it had been clear that these were not the original manuscripts of the heart-stopping, spine-chilling sagas Eliott and Kess knew, but there had been glimmers, or so Eliott had insisted. For him, the holy pilgrimage had become an archeological expedition, sifting through the paper ruins of an ancient age, Jordan’s youth, to find the buried relics of the glories Eliott knew had been there. If he could decipher the words, he was sure he would find the gold of a lost adventure, or at least the silver of a good fight scene.
“You want me to read to you?”
This did nothing to perk Kess up. “Not if you want me to stay awake.”
“Kess! Don’t even joke about -- we’re getting to read real history here!”
“And you always fall asleep in history,” said Kess. “I hear it from all your tutors. Besides, this is worse than kings and dates and battles. He skims over the battles.”
“But it’s still his own words. Jordan the Red, in his own words!”
A knot twisted somewhere under Eliott’s ribs. He had argued with Kess before, even once or twice seriously, but never over anything relating to Jordan. Their one absolute, unshakable common ground had always been their hero, his adventures, and their shared belief that if Jordan was not in fact a god, could at least give a solid kicking to any god he came across.
“Yes, he’s Jordan the Red,” said Kess wearily. “Warrior Hero. Amazing with weapons, heroic escapes, stopping demons. Really dull as a writer! Eliott, listen to this: ‘Some thing in water. Killed it. Tentacles taste like sardines.’ No wonder he had a bard with him.” Kess let the journal fall back on top of the others.
“Okay, so it’s kinda dry...”
“This whole house is dry. Dry and dusty and stale. How can he breath? There’s no life in here!”
“We haven’t looked through them all yet. I bet they get better.” Eliott shuffled through the journals, looking for some hope.
“I need air. My skin’s crawling.”
“Let’s skip ahead to the good parts. This one looks like a scrapbook -- that’s got to be better, right? Maybe there’s pictures. Hey, yeah, it’s got a poster in it with a woodcut of Jordan. ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’. Right next to this one where he’s getting proclaimed a Defender of the Crown. Says--”
“You keep reading. I’m going for a run.”
Eliott opened his mouth to speak, but Kess was already through the door, shaking out her hair and picking up speed.
“Yeah, okay. Sure. I’ll stay here. If I find anything cool, I’ll let you know,” he called after her. “Maybe.”
Eliott sighed and picked up the scrapbook by one cover, letting its pages splay open carelessly. Glimpses of clumsy sketches and old bloodstains flipped past.
Something fell out and hit the floor with a glassy clink.
Eliott picked it up. It was an oblong of black glass, the size and shape of a tarot card, with silver writing etched into the surface. On one side, it had the image of a man prying open the jaws of a lion, under the caption, ‘THE STAR’.
Eliott, who had played with Kess’s tarot deck, frowned at it. The picture was wrong for the Star; it was the picture of Strength. He turned the card over.
The other side had a name and address: Glister Starmacher, Cherub Street, Palace Hills. Beside the name was a bulge, like an air bubble trapped between the front and the back of the card. Eliott pushed at it with his thumb, to see if the bubble would move or dent, but it refused to yield.
There was a soft chiming sound, almost musical. It didn’t seem to come from the card, or in fact from anywhere; it got into Eliott’s head without using his ears, through a secret passage in the back of his skull. He glanced around, at once excited and nervous, as if he was in danger of being caught doing something wrong, despite having Jordan’s permission to go through the scrapbook. When no ethereal agents of law and light swept in to chastise him, he felt vaguely cheated.
Then he looked back at the card.
The bubble in the glass was swelling up, inflating like an overnight pimple, black-headed and greasy. It grew until became a perfect sphere, two inches across, perched weightlessly on the flat of the card. Then, still swelling, it pulled itself free and floated upwards, a soap bubble’s evil twin.
When it was the size of a large melon, it stopped expanding. It reached Eliott’s eye-level, which also seemed to be as far as it was going to rise. Its surface had become opaque, like the card, so all he could see on it was his own distorted reflection staring back. It hovered in front of him, waiting.
Eliott’s curiosity could have killed the three-headed cat-beast of Mount Oblivion, if Jordan hadn’t already done so. He poked the sphere.
It gave a gentle, contented sigh, and swallowed his head.

***

Glister Starmacher leaned back in his leather chair with his feet up on his desk. He had just discovered, to his amusement, that with a gentle nudge of his thumb, he could spin the crystal ball he had balanced on his fingertips. It didn’t seem to make a difference to the image. Inside the crystal, the worried face of the Duke de Quiche stayed where it was, looking into Glister’s sincere, focused smile.
“I know. I know. It’s a pain, but it’s for the good of the story, your Lordship. Trust me. In ten years’ time, everybody is going to have heard, and you know they’re going to remember.” Another nudge. He wondered how fast he could get it going. “Think of it as an investment in your future reputation!”
“But what am I supposed to do--” the Duke began, only to be drowned out by screaming gulls.
“You’ll be fine. Start writing your memoirs, keep a journal, it’ll be over in no time. You want to be famous, don’t you? Of course you do. It’ll be just the way we talked about. You like birds -- I’ve got it right here on your contract, you love birds.”
“Yes, but I didn’t expect to be imprisoned on an island with them for the next ten years!”
“Think of it as a holiday,” said Glister. “Now, listen, we’ve got a comically stupid jailer and an enigmatic old prisoner being transferred out there to keep you company. Take full advantage of them! And one of my very best bards will be out twice a month to get the latest account of what you’re going through. When it’s all over, you’ll be a literary classic!”
“Couldn’t we skip over this? I could--”
But what the Baron de Quiche could do was again muted, this time by a gentle chiming tune from the crystal ball itself. Glister’s perfectly barbered eyebrows went up.
“Sure, sure. Of course. Listen, your Lordship, hate to do this to you, but I’ve got to go. You’re going to be great -- you’re already great. We’ll talk!”
The crystal ball went dark. Glister put it down carefully on its stand, an expensive little gold statue of three naked women. One of his bards had declared they were Muses, which meant it was an actual piece of Art. As far as Glister was concerned, it was three naked women.
He peered into it curiously, looking for the face. Only a very select tier of the talent he represented had direct access to him this way, and even fewer could interrupt him when he was on another ley line.
“Hello...?” he ventured. “You’ve reached the star-maker. Who’s out there?”
One of the barbarians, Glister guessed. He kept having to explain to them how the crystal balls and crystal cards worked, but Ungk the Destroyer still kept using the cards to pick his teeth. That had been a bad call. Glister hadn’t been able to eat tongue for a month.
A face swam into focus, one Glister had never seen before. It had the biggest eyes he had ever seen on a human.
“Whoa,” it said. “Where am I?”
“No idea. Wherever you were before, you’re still there. But, hey, I’ve got a better question -- who are you, and what are you doing in my crystal ball?”
The eyes managed to get wider. “I’m in a crystal ball?”
“In a ball, in my office, in beautiful downtown Palace Hills.” Glister was beginning to get annoyed, and his words were sharper and more clipped for it. “Wherever you’re calling from, you’re there, too. Magic! How about that. Now, since you clearly don’t know anything about the cards and balls, how did you reach me? Whose card are you using?”
“Oh... I guess it’s Jordan’s...”
“Hey, hold on! Jordan? Jordan the Red?” Suddenly, the face in the ball had his full attention. “Where’d you get his card?”
“He, um, he gave it to me. Because I’m... his apprentice. Yeah, I’m Jordan the Red’s apprentice. Hi!”
“That old devil! Taking an apprentice without telling me. He’s told you who I am, right?”
“Not... exactly. You’re Glister Starmacher?”
“Right in one. Glister Starmacher, talent agent to the stars. You must like the Jordan stories -- of course you do, all boys do. You’re talking to the man who made them all happen.”
Glister grinned, flashing a gold tooth that had been responsible for the fall of empires, or at least for getting an audience for their fall.
“Cool!” said the face. “I’m Eliott. One L, two T’s.”
“Sure, great. So... where is the old devil these days? You two must be galavanting all over the world, him teaching you everything he knows... Been any place interesting lately?”
Eliott rolled his eyes. “Nah. We’re in this boring little nowhere called Cheese.”
Out of the crystal ball’s line of sight, Glister very calmly jotted this down. There would be time for a victory dance later. “Cheese... that’s out beyond the Squamata Plains, right? Up by the mountains? Who’d have ever thought to look for Jordan the Red there.”
“It’s boring,” Eliott repeated. “There’s nothing going on here. You couldn’t make a saga out of it.”
“Hey, don’t count me out so fast, boy! Let me shake a little of the old Starmacher magic on the story, I’ll get you an audience. People love ‘Where Are They Now?’ -- doesn’t matter if they’re nowhere.”
Glister scribbled out a few more notes to himself: Focus on apprentice. Jordan the Red Adventures, Next Generation?
“Besides,” he continued, “I bet Jordan’s been doing a great job, getting you ready to be a star of your own. How ‘bout it? You want to sign up for your own adventures?”
“Wow, really? I mean, sure! Jordan and I are ready to go adventuring any time!”
Glister’s pencil snapped.
“You... and Jordan? Jordan and... together?”
He could feel the back of his neck start to sweat. It was like the first time he’d fallen in love, the moment she’d asked him how much she could pay him.
“Well, yeah,” said Eliott. “Jordan’s not going anywhere without me. I’ve -- we’ve been waiting for something to happen.”
“I think,” said Glister, “that I can make something happen. It might be possible. Standard contract, of course. Eliott... Eliott, baby, you have made my day. A brand new Jordan the Red adventure. This is going to be big. This is going to be huge -- the hugest thing since the King Arthur sequel, Arthur II: Revenge of the King. It’s going to be a record-breaker!”
“Wow -- we’re in! We’re definitely, definitely in. Wait until I tell Jordan! This is going to be awesome!”
“Hey, hang on. Let’s not spoil the essential spontaneous quality of this. Realism! I mean, Jordan always loved having his adventures start unexpectedly -- he knew, that’s how you keep it real for the audience! And if that’s good enough for Jordan, well... you want to do this the right way, don’t you?”
“Yeah, of course--”
“Then don’t tell Jordan anything. Not yet. Let me get some wheels in motion, okay? Okay. I owe Jordan the full treatment, after all these years.” Glister smiled into the crystal ball, filling it with warm sincerity that had taken him years to learn how to fake.
“Sure. Okay, I won’t tell Jordan, if you’re sure that’s how he’d want it.”
“Definitely. Trust me.”
“But I’ve got to tell Kess!”
Glister frowned, searching for the name and any known associations with Jordan the Red in the index cards of his mind. “Now, hold your horses, my boy. I thought we’d agreed, we’re going to keep this between you and me while I get things together. Do you know how gossip starts? One person tells one person tells one person and -- bam -- spoilers everywhere and I can’t hire someone to bring Jordan a drink who doesn’t know he’s going to get attacked by a hydra at the end of act three. You see what I’m saying?”
“Sort of. But I know Kess would never say anything to anyone -- she keeps all my secrets.”
“Eliott, Eliott. Do you want to be a part of this opportunity or not?”
Eliott’s face in the crystal ball wobbled. Glister assumed the boy was nodding.
“Great. I knew you were a smart one -- Jordan would only train the best, am I right? Now, we’re going to enter into a sort of a verbal agreement right now, don’t think of it as a, hah, magically binding contract of some sort, just an arrangement between talent and management. You won’t say anything about what we’re planning, and I’ll put my best resources into giving you and Jordan the saga you deserve. Say yes?”
“Um... yes?”
“And I’ll look after all the production, distribution, finances and marketing, and you’ll get total creative freedom in your performance. Sound fair to you?”
“Yes, definitely!”
The gleam in Glister’s smile ranked up another ten karats.
“Eliott, I love you. You are absolutely the perfect apprentice for Jordan the Red. You just sit tight, keep practicing your moves, and keep this conversation between you and me. I’ll set everything up for Jordan’s big comeback -- and I’ll make you a star right up there with him!”
“I can’t wait! Thank you!”
“Don’t mention it, Eliott. It’s what I do.”
There was a pregnant pause as they stared at each other, mutually grinning. Glister waited. The pause went into labor.
“...Yes? If there was something else, don’t keep me guessing,” he prompted. “Fine print? Catering clause? If you’re wanting a stunt double, you’ll have to hire him for yourself.”
“No. No, I...” Eliott’s face pivoted within the crystal. “...um, how do I stop talking to you?”
Glister laughed. “Slap your ears.”
“What, like--”
There was a soft pop, and a very faint “ow”, and the crystal ball went dark.

Glister Starmacher threw a black handkerchief over the crystal ball in his office and sat back in his chair for a minute, fingers steepled in front of his lips. A new saga. A classic hero, one everybody loved hearing about. This had to be handled with care. Delicacy. And style -- most importantly with style. The last saga had seen Jordan tumbling off a waterfall with the Crocodile God Zebek in a death grip... could they say that he had become a king between then and now, ruling a lost jungle kingdom? Now, at last, his crown weighing heavy on his head, he has returned to stop the evil... which?
Witch. Warlock. Wizard!
Glister stuck his head out of his office and shouted at his secretary.
“Winnie! Send a monkey down to the wizards at Central Casting. I need someone who can chuck fireballs or turn people into sheep, someone who’s got a grudge against Jordan the Red! And I need him in here ten minutes ago, babe. We’ve got a legend to make!”
He grinned, flashing his gold tooth. Just saying the name had caused a stir in the waiting room, where half a dozen hopeful bards, minstrels and scribes were gathered. Everyone with their portfolios and their nervous, eager smiles, wanting to show off their talent and maybe get a shot at writing for one of Glister’s big names. Well, boys, today one of you gets your heart’s desire. Who’s it going to be?
Glister’s beady eyes went around the room like a roulette ball. No; too old. No; too opinionated, that piece in ‘The Duke of Yorker’, terrible. No; ye gods, what is that, a gorilla in motley? It’s chewing on its lute! No. No.
He zeroed in on a young man standing next to the water barrel with a paper cup. Every detail flashed past Glister’s mental adjudication committee. Old fashioned suit, not too flashy, except for the terrible feathered hat. Patched elbows. Good mustache. Looks a bit like a young Jeff Chaucer, who also had a thing for bad hats...
Glister turned his back to the room and leaned over his secretary’s desk. “Who’s thirsty boy, and what has he done?” he murmured.
His secretary checked her files discreetly. “Cyral Gideon,” she answered, without looking up. “‘Druid Today’ last March, temped as a herald to Sir Boise, performed The Murder of Monteverde for the Earl of Fernwood. One encore on that. Seven original songs officially registered.”
“Give me what you’ve got on him and I’ll see him in... two minutes.”

***

Exactly two minutes and six frantic seconds later, Cyral Gideon was standing on the other side of Glister’s desk, trying to bow, flatter the decor, and fumblingly present his portfolio all at the same time. Glister cut him off mid-introduction.
“Yes, yes, great to meet you, loved your column in ‘Druid Today’, I never knew the migration of giant toads could be so interesting -- sit down, take your hat off; tell me, Cyral, have you ever trailed anybody?”
“Nice to-- Thank you, I-- trailed?”
“Rode with, shadowed, written up adventures as they were happening. Field work!”
“A, a bit, sir. I have a partial ode if you’d like to see it...”
Cyral started to untie his portfolio. Glister waved it away with a glinting smile that said it was entirely unnecessary to actually see or hear the piece to judge the quality of it; when that smile looked at you, it knew exactly how great you were, and boy, were you great. In fact, you were so great that you wouldn’t need to read over the contract the smile was about to hand you; it was that great, too. Faced with that smile, Cyral retreated into his chair and let Glister carry on.
“Cyral, I took one look at you, and I said to myself, there’s a boy with promise. A boy who’s willing to go out and get the job done. Not afraid to get his feet wet. Am I right? Of course I am. You are exactly what I need to bring back the first new Jordan the Red saga in two decades.” Glister laced his hands behind his head and let this sink in.
Various expressions of shock and awe wrestled for Cyral’s face, until an openmouthed, gulping stare staggered victorious out of the fray. “Me, sir? You want me to write for Jordan the Red? I mean, of course, Mr. Starmacher, I’d be honored! I know he’s a legend, but I’ve had some ideas for modernizing his story, just passing thoughts, you know...”
“Right, right -- just sign here -- you’ve thought about writing a Jordan saga before?”
“Who hasn’t, sir? You spend an evening down at the pub listening to a couple of the best ones, The Ice Demons of Brok or Doctor Novay’s Monster, and they bounce around in your head all night.”
“The greats. I always say, please let this saga be another Doctor Novay and not another Thundersphere. I’m counting on you not to let me down.”
“I’ll do my very best, sir! Will I be working with Jordan directly on this project?”
“Of course! You’ll be right there with him.”
“Only, I don’t know where that is, sir. Nobody’s seen Jordan in years.”
“We’ve had a lucky break there,” said Glister gleefully. “His apprentice tipped me off. Seems they’re ready for a comeback special.”
Cyral shuffled his hat around in his hands. “May I ask, who will Jordan be fighting this time? Is there a synopsis yet? A working title?”
“Cyral, kiddo, you’re not getting this. Jordan is the artist. He’ll be making it up as he goes along. You’re there to follow in his footsteps. Go along with whatever he tells you, and it’ll turn out golden. Trust me.”
“Yes, but still, if I could have something to work with, a rough idea of what to expect...”
Glister took on a pained look and threw up his hands as if Cyral had asked for a cash advance. “All right, twist my arm, lose some of the spontaneity. I’m seeing revenge. I’m seeing old grudges, giant battles, magic tricks. Call it... working title... Jordan the Red vs. Some Schmuck Wizard We Don’t Really Care About.”
There was a crack of thunder and a puff of smoke. Glister’s office, by its nature intended for intimate, one-to-one negotiations, was suddenly forced to make room for a wizard in billowing robes, who by nature took up the space of three people. Cyral dodged out of his chair and barely managed to catch an award statuette knocked off the desk by the wizard’s staff. The wizard, who had been gifted with a nose meant to be looked down, fixed him with a haughty stare and took his seat.
“From my contemplation of the universe and manipulation of the raw power of the cosmos, you have summoned me, Glister Starmacher,” said the wizard. “So this had better be good. What’s this about Jordan the Red.”
Glister recovered quickly.
“Oh, are you in for a treat. He’s back.”
“Back? Back from where? Isn’t he dead? Eaten by a crocodile or something, in that saga in the jungle. Fell over a waterfall. I had a little party when I heard.”
“Nah, that was just our way of keeping the stakes high. Trade secret,” said Glister, with a wink.
“Intentional ambiguity,” added Cyral, who felt that if he made a contribution, he might be entitled to un-wedge himself from the corner.
“Exactly. Worked like a charm, didn’t it? The old cliffhanger ending.”
“He hung onto the cliff? Damn,” said the wizard.
“Right. Exactly. Means we left his fate up in the air. Makes his fans more eager to hear what happens in the next saga. It just happened that this time, the next saga was a bit longer coming than we expected.” Glister coughed. “By about twenty years.”
The wizard scowled, stroking his long, white beard. It was such a perfect beard that Cyral couldn’t help wondering if it was a chin wig. The white was definitely powdered on. “Too bad about him still being alive. Although hanging from a cliff for twenty years serves him right. So what--”
“I take it you’re not a fan,” said Cyral.
This must have been the first time anyone had ever interrupted the wizard. Anger rose in his eyes, with no subtlety at all.
“You might very well say that. Indeed, even your miniscule, unenlightened mind might be capable of perceiving how greatly I dislike Jordan the Red,” he growled. “Who might you be?”
“Cyral Gideon, at your service.”
“Oh, yes? And are you anyone important?”
“Not... not really, sir.”
“Good.”
The wizard flicked his wrist dismissively. There was another small thunder crack. Cyral found himself suspended from the ceiling, unable to move.
“That’s much better. Now we have room,” said the wizard. “Go on, Starmacher. You have my attention.”
Glister stared up at the magically pinned bard. “Okay, I’m impressed. Full marks for show. Really, really great stuff, but can you bring him down? We’re going to need him for the saga.”
“What saga?”
“Yours, my friend! Your big break. I’ve invited you here because you’re going to star in the new Jordan the Red saga!”
“I am?” The wizard sounded skeptical. “What’s it called?”
“The Wizard’s Revenge: The Death of Jordan the Red. Catchy, hey? And you’re my man, right? A wizard out for revenge... it’s got glamour all over it.”
“I would get to kill Jordan?”
“Well, that’s the idea, isn’t it! Of course, he’ll try and stop you, but that’s where the excitement comes from. You’ve got a grudge against him, he knows it -- maybe he doesn’t know it yet. Maybe you’re coming out of his past like an assassin’s arrow. Yeah. Go with that.” Glister sat back, turning on the gilded smile. “What do you say?”
“Hmm...”
Looking down, Cyral imagined the thoughts going through the wizard’s head. Wizards’ brains were vast, expansive places, capable of taking in the whole of the universe. Possibly this was the reason it took so long for anything to get from their ears to someplace where it could be processed. But on the whole, and, more significantly, on the ceiling, Cyral had the impression that this particular wizard was simply dense as a stack of bricks.
“Now, wait a moment,” said the wizard. “Haven’t other people tried to kill him before?”
“Quitters,” said Glister dismissively. “No imagination. And, don’t forget, Jordan’s been out of practice.”
Yes, thought Cyral, he’s probably completely forgotten how to decapitate villains. Which end of this sword do I hold again? Where does the pointy bit go?
The wizard drummed his fingers against his staff. Glister’s smile was getting to him. At last, he nodded. “Very well. I shall take the leading role in this saga of yours, in return for the opportunity to put an end to Jordan the Red. He will fall victim to the most cunning and intricate traps sorcery can devise, each one equal in humiliation and pain. I promise you, your audiences will cringe in horror at the merest description of what he will suffer.”
He leaned over Glister’s desk as he signed the contract. “You’ve got a good bard to do this, right? I don’t want to be written as some poser with silly stars and moons all over his robe.”
Without losing the gleam in his smile, Glister pointed a single finger at the ceiling. The wizard followed it.
“...oh.”
Abruptly, Cyral could move freely again. He scarcely had time to savor his freedom before it brought him crashing to the floor. He dusted himself off without a word.
“I suppose he’ll do,” said the wizard. “You are most fortunate, bard, to have the privilege of recording this historic event. Try not to get in the way.”
“Don’t worry about that,” said Glister. “My boy Cyral here won’t be following you. He’ll be riding along with Jordan, so our audience can, er, feel the suspense building as Jordan walks into your trap.”
“But then how will they hear about my plans? When do they get a sense of my burning desire for revenge, my motivations?”
“We could do that right now, if it’s convenient,” said Cyral. “I can take all your information now, rewrite it in the present tense, and then later, add a different backdrop and some narrative to make it sound as if I was there with you when it happened.”
He dug into his portfolio for a spare piece of parchment. The wizard watched him with the bewilderment of one who had only ever been on the audience side of a saga before.
“‘As if you were there’? Surely you don’t mean... make things up,” said the wizard.
“No, of course not,” said Cyral. He reached towards Glister’s desk. “May I?”
“It’s all done through the wonders of technology,” Glister explained, handing his golden goose-feather pen to Cyral.
The wizard grunted disapprovingly. “Very well. What do you need from me?”
“Well, to start with, sir, I could use your name.”
There was a delicate silence, during which Cyral was afraid he was going to end up on the ceiling again. The wizard shifted uncomfortably in his chair, refusing to make eye contact.
“My name.”
“Er... yes, sir.”
“That’s absolutely necessary, is it? I couldn’t go by ‘the Dark One’ or some such?”
“I’d rather not,” said Cyral. “Jordan the Red has already fought eight Dark Ones, two Dark Lords, and one entity simply known as The Dark. Three of them were wizards. Why, is there some problem? It doesn’t steal a part of your soul to know your name, or anything like that, does it?”
“No, no... nothing like that.”
The wizard’s ears were turning red. Until that moment, they had been quite overshadowed by the sheer angular size of his nose, but his ears were equally large, and in his embarrassment, gave him the look of a tomato split in half with an axe. Cyral mentally made a note of that image to save for later.
“Hey, why are we wasting time on this?” asked Glister. “We’ve got your name right here on the contract-- oh.”
“Oh?”
Cyral leaned over, tilting his head for a better view.
“My name,” said the wizard, remaining magnificently calm, “is Sardo Hopley... Junior.”
“What, as in, ‘Sardo Hopley’s Famous Baked Goods’?”
“Yes.”
“‘Mister Puffy Muffin’ and the Sugar-Crumb Goblins? You’re that Hopley?”
Hopley sighed. “Yes. Forever haunted by the legacy of my family’s business. But I assure you, my grasp of cosmic powers is quite real! As will my vengeance be, when I have Jordan the Red in my clutches.”
“Yes, I’m sure you’ll rise to the occasion,” said Cyral, who felt confident the pun would go over Hopley’s pointy hat. It did.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Glister, hastily. “We’ll make it part of your angle. Secret identity, gimmick... something like that. Make a giant oven part of your master plan, we’ll sell it to the tradesmen.”
“I’m sure they’ll eat it up,” said Cyral. Hopley glowered at him.
“Mock not a wizard,” Hopley intoned. “Your temporary necessity may save you from the wrath of my magic -- but I can still give you a poke in the eye with my staff.”
“Right, right, he gets the message. Cyral, kid, show a little respect to the guest artist here.” Glister was on the other side of the desk so quickly he seemed to have teleported, putting a hand on the shoulder of each of the other men. “We’re all friends, right? All working towards a common goal?”
“The death of Jordan the Red,” said Hopley.
“Creating a saga for the ages,” said Cyral.
“Exactly,” said Glister. “So let’s be smart about this, and do it right. Sardo -- can I call you that? Great -- why don’t you give Cyral here your vital details, and then you can go get your evil plan underway... what am I saying, I don’t mean evil, I mean your rightful revenge! That’s the way.”
“What more do you need from me?” Hopley asked, folding his arms.
“We, er, could go over your grudge against Jordan the Red. A quick summary of it, perhaps?” Cyral raised his pen and offered what he hoped was a conciliatory smile.
“Yes. Yes, your audience should know the details. I should begin by telling you, how I grew tired of running the family business soon after it came into my hands... within minutes, in fact... and began exploring the arcane arts. Like many magically inclined young men, I was drawn to the darker side of wizardry...”
He went off on an account of sordid practices and illicit lessons with infernal tutors which, if told by someone else, might have evoked terror and fascination. Hopley mouthed his way through it as if he was pounding bread dough. Cyral listened patiently, taking notes and wondering if there would be anything worth saving from it all.
“...until, at last, I was inducted into the ranks of the A.T.C.B.S.O., where I was--”
“Hang on,” said Cyral, risking another trip to the ceiling. “Which is that? The A.T.B...?”
“A.T.C.B.S.O.!”
“Acronym That Cannot Be... something something,” provided Glister.
“Spelled Out?”
Hopley sank into his chair, glowering. Outside the windows, small, dark thunderclouds began to form, rattling the glass. “I am beginning to feel as if I am not being taken seriously.”
“Sorry,” said Cyral. “Carry on.”
“I was an up-and-coming Dark Wizard with the A.T.C.B.S.O., when I devised a scheme for turning children into swine. My superiors were immensely pleased with the notion. Everything was going along perfectly, until Jordan the Red ruined it all!”
Hopley raised his staff furiously, and the miniature thunderclouds crackled and spat tiny wintergreen sparks of lightning, which even Cyral had to admit were suitably dramatic.
“So he showed up and thwarted you,” Cyral prompted. “How did you escape?”
“I didn’t!” said Hopley. “Oh, no -- Mister Jordan the Couldn’t Be Bothered never showed up. He didn’t thwart me at all! So when the A.T.C.B.S.O. Grants Committee came by to see how my scheme was developing, I had to show them...”
There was an embarrassed silence. The thunderclouds slunk away behind the curtains. Glister closed his eyes and folded his hands in some sort of prayer over Hopley’s contract.
Cyral coughed. “And you, er, couldn’t actually...”
“Have you ever tried turning children into pigs? It’s harder than it sounds. All I had was a warehouse full of the little brats getting fat on Traditional Recipe Gingerbread Scones. Jordan the Red was in town -- I was counting on him to break the whole thing up before the committee arrived! I lost my funding because of him!” Hopley gestured madly with his staff, but the storm had gone out of it.
“Will that be enough for you?” he asked wretchedly.
“Yes, I think that tells me everything I need to start writing the prologue,” said Cyral. “And, er, your current plan?”
“It will be cunning and intricate. I shall inflict upon Jordan equal measures of pain and humiliation.”
“You did say. But... any details?”
Hopley’s eyes flicked towards Glister. “It... may involve a giant oven.”
A sudden manic enthusiasm suddenly took over Glister’s face. He clapped his hands together as if giving CPR to a dying fairy, then started scribbling on the back of one of his cards. “I can see you boys are going to have your work cut out for you. Hopley, here’s Jordan’s last known location -- village called Cheese, way over in the back of nowhere. He’s got an apprentice, some kid called Eliott. Sound like bait to you? Of course, that’s a brilliant idea -- use the apprentice for bait. Wish I’d thought of it. Oven, giant mixing bowl, whatever else you can think of, run with it. Something that somebody can dangle over. Cyral, you got that? I want to hear about dangling.”
Cyral nodded and made a note.
Hopley stared at the card with Jordan’s location on it.
“Cheese,” he murmured. “I seem to recall there being one of the old family mills near there...”
“That’s great. Perfect. I can see you’re already bursting with inspiration,” said Glister. “Why don’t you go gather yourself some henchmen and head over there. Take a couple days to get comfortable and set everything up. Don’t worry about travel expenses, you can magic yourself there. Right? Of course you can.”
“Um, I can’t, Mr. Starmacher,” Cyral pointed out.
“We’ll take care of that in a minute, Cyral. Can’t you see that our hero here is in a hurry to get on with his revenge?”
“I am? Oh. Indeed,” said Hopley.
“Right. Have a good laugh over how perfectly everything is coming together, and go get him, magus! Remember, this is all about you, so the sooner you start doing things, the better for your audience!”
Then Glister was shaking Hopley’s hand and pushing Cyral out of the way to give the wizard plenty of room to teleport. His smile was everywhere, reassuring Hopley, encouraging Cyral, checking itself in the mirror, tidying away the contracts now that they were signed and no longer anything anyone else needed to worry about. Cyral could see the smile at work, even rationally realize what it was doing, and yet he was still powerless to resist its charm. Hopley stood no chance at all.
A flash and a thunderclap later, the wizard was gone. As soon as Hopley’s pointy hat had spun out of sight, Glister collapsed back behind his desk, once again drawing Cyral into intimate conspiracy.
“He’s perfect, isn’t he? Nobody’s going to be crying bitter tears when he gets killed off. I know, I know, it’s not my place to tell you how to write but, Cyral, skewer him to the hilt. Go big -- way over the top. And his ego? It’ll have them rolling on the floor. The groundlings love laughing at someone who pretends to be, what’s the word, intellectual. Elite. If Jordan’s going to come back with a vengeance, there’s got to be some comedy, too.”
“I’m... not sure I could make him seem like much of a threat,” said Cyral. “Are you sure--”
“Of course! Central Casting provided him, they never let me down. Comedy. Run with it. Who knows, maybe Hopley’ll hire himself a henchman with some real dramatic juice. Right now, the important thing is, we need to get you onto the scene...”
“Another wizard?”
Glister smacked his palms against his desk. “Don’t be silly. Wizards charge money to teleport other people. You can’t afford that, and I’m not going to let one of my writers get themselves into unnecessary debt! Go get yourself packed, and be back here in fifteen minutes -- I’ll have all your travel arrangements made by then.”
“You will? Thank you, Mr. Starmacher!”
“You’re on the hero circuit now, my boy. Turning everyday lives into adventures. You get taken care of! Trust me.”

***

Still buzzing with the prospects of fame and fortune, or at least being paid enough to eat this week, Cyral raced back to his apartment, a room partitioned out of the cellar of an arrhythmic dance studio. To the stuttering drum beat coming through the ceiling, he packed his bags. This took him no time at all; everything he owned could fit inside a small closet, which was coincidentally the size of the only apartment in Palace Hills he could afford. The bottom shelf made a comfortable bed and kept him above the level of the gutter run-off, while the upper shelves provided enough room for his collection of scrolls, books, and crow-feather quill pens. He had one change of clothes, very plain, which he wore when he didn’t want to look like a bard; this didn’t happen often, because he was trying to be noticed.
And today, he had been!
Everybody knew Glister Starmacher kept the very best heroes in his stable, that he had launched the entire Jordan the Red series. Going to his office had been long shot, but it had paid off! Forget the pompous, brainless wizard; forget the nagging feeling that Glister might not be as sincere as he seemed. Writing for Jordan the Red was the literary opportunity of a lifetime.
Cyral shouldered his luggage and danced back through the crowded streets. Everything sounded like music, even the shouts for him to get out of the way and watch where he was going. When he checked in again with Glister’s secretary, he half expected her to start singing a pretty duet with him about how bright the future looked. She did not.
“He’s waiting for you on the roof,” was all she said.
Nevertheless, Cyral tipped his feathered hat to her. A lost opportunity, he thought. A waiting room full of bards would have made a perfect chorus, and been far more believable bursting into song than, say, a stagecoach full of traveling salesmen.
Four flights of stairs took most of the music out of Cyral’s step. He found Glister looking out from the edge of the rooftop balcony, with a hand on the head of each of a pair of gargoyles. Palace Hills spread out before him like an overloaded banquet table, gleaming glass and polished copper roofs reflecting a pink sugar sunset. Spires rose like candelabras, each one competing to be the only tower in the city able to boast a view over all the rest. And in the middle of it all sat the vast, circular bulk of the Central Casting building.
Cyral had never seen it from above before. He had never been able to see all of it at the same time, either. It was a dwarf compared to the height of the towers around it, but of such a diameter that if it had been hollowed out, the wizards could have had chariot races within its walls. Its flat roof supported a formal garden, full of statues of famous wizards, built around a central glass dome. Under that dome, Cyral knew, was the heart of Central Casting: the Wizards’ Conclave, Where the Magic Happened. It was in all their brochures. Nobody knew exactly what that meant, but it sounded tremendously impressive.
“You’re here -- that’s great! Some view, huh?” Glister had noticed him at last. “Know what all that is? That’s your audience out there, a half-million bums to put in seats. I bet you can hear the applause already.”
“I’ll try not to disappoint you, Mr. Starmacher,” said Cyral, who was far more aware of the sound of the wind.
“Me? Oh, you don’t have to worry about me -- I’ve got faith in you! It’s them, out there, waiting in the dark for the curtain to go up. They’re the ones you’ve got to think about. All those eager ears, waiting to hear the new adventures of Jordan the Red... waiting to hear the best damn saga of their lives... waiting for you. Come over here, take a good look down.”
Cyral swallowed, hard. He had been afraid of this since stepping onto the roof. “I can see fine from here, Mr. Starmacher. If it’s quite all right with you....”
“Nah, I insist. What, you’re not afraid of heights, are you?”
“Not heights, exactly,” said Cyral, edging towards the railing. “More distances. Things a long way down getting closer very quickly... I’m a bit afraid of that.”
“Then I really hope you packed a blindfold.” Glister lit a thin cigar, and the moment he took his hands off the gargoyles, one stretched its wings and scratched itself. A monkey face in a mane of granite-gray fur turned towards Cyral and yawned toothily.
Cyral backed away. “Oh, no. No. Mr. Starmacher, I can’t fly!”
“Of course you can! You want to get there fast, don’t you? Can’t be late to the scene.” Glister waved his hand, dismissing Cyral’s fears like so much smoke. “Now, just let the monkeys get a good grip on you--”
“What happens if they don’t?!”
“Relax! They’ve never dropped anyone,” said Glister, beaming with the confidence of a man not likely to be airborne any time soon. “Not without making sure there was a haystack below. You’ll be fine.”
“I could take a coach. I could pay for my own wizard.”
“No, you couldn’t.” Glister sighed. “I didn’t want to do it like this, but if you’re not there when the action starts, you make the whole team look bad. Get him, boys.”
There was a moment, right before four leathery hands seized him, when Cyral could have grabbed onto the railing, or bolted for the stairs, or in fact, done anything other than stand frozen in front of the leaping gargoyle monkeys. Not that anything he could have done would have saved him, but it made him feel slightly better, as they carried him over Palace Hills like a sack of potatoes, thinking that he had had the option.
But not so much better that he didn’t throw up twice before they dropped him onto an inn for the night.