Read Online The Hero of Varay by Rick Shelley - Free Book Online Page B

into metal brackets to lock the door. Other wooden bars could be propped against the door to give extra support, and outside there was a slight ramp leading down to grade, making it that much more difficult for attackers to batter down the door. A lockable wrought-iron gate across the bottom of the ramp was the final touch. There was no way to tell if the defenses were really adequate. They had never been fully tested.
    Joy and I didn’t go all the way down to the ground floor, though. We stopped in the great hall. It was suppertime. I don’t have a large staff, but Lesh had obviously passed the word that I had returned.
    “I’m starving,” Joy said when we smelled the food and saw the first trays being hauled up from the kitchen. I thought an appetite was a good sign.
    “Oh, yes,” I said, and then I laughed. “That’s something else about this place. You eat and eat and can’t possibly get fat. It’s a literal impossibility.”
    Joy giggled, and it sounded healthy rather than hysterical. I tried to hold back a sigh of relief.
    “Now, that’s what I call a proper fairy-tale world,” she said.
    We sat at the table and Timon rushed about to serve both of us. Joy was as upset at that kind of attention as I was when I first came to Varay, but I told her she would get used to it. … even though I had never really gotten comfortable with it myself and I usually told Timon to knock it off when we were “at home.” I didn’t permit any of the nonsense—two tables, servants eat “below the salt” or wait until afterward—at Cayenne that held most places in the buffer zone either. The cooks came out, and the two lads who helped Timon with the serving, Harkane, Lesh, and the six men-at-arms under Lesh’s command all sat at the table and we ate together. I introduced Joy to everyone.
    And everyone dug right into the food. I ate with my customary abandon, but I kept watching Joy put away food at the same time. She never ate much. She was short and thin and she always told me that she intended to stay thin. But she didn’t show any diet control at all during her first meal in Varay. She put away food, wine, and coffee—especially a lot of food. It is probably an exaggeration to say that she ate as much in that one meal as she had in the year and odd months that I had known her, but it is a tempting exaggeration.
    Timon loaded up our plates at the start of the meal, and whenever he happened to notice one of us getting low on anything, he tried to get around to replace it, but I kept waving him back to his seat. Even after three years, he couldn’t get it into his head that I really didn’t appreciate that kind of service at home. It might be socially required at Basil or elsewhere, but I didn’t want it in my own little place with no visiting big shots.
    Cayenne is a compact little community. My two cooks and most of the others who work in the castle live in the small village that sits alongside the creek a few hundred yards downstream from the castle. The guards are the only locals who come close to living in the castle, and three of them have families in the village. Cayenne village was founded to supply the castle and it was still doing that after more than a thousand years.
    The current population of Cayenne village was seventy-three.
    I was just getting to the point where I was almost full when Parthet came barging in—clomping down the stairs from the passage to Castle Basil. I started to invite him to sit down and eat, but he didn’t give me a chance.
    “Something extraordinary has happened,” he said, short of breath. “You’d better come along to Basil right now.”
    “Slow down, have a beer,” I said. It was unlike Parthet to pass up any opportunity to eat, no matter what the crisis.
    “No time. Come on, lad. This is urgent.” He appeared to notice Joy then. He smiled and winked at her. “Glad to see you finally made it here, my dear,” he said. Then he turned to me again. “What are you