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For once, I had found time, in the busy schedule of managing to keep the other four members of our little group of adventurers out of trouble, prison, fights, and each other’s comfort zones, to put my feet up and read a good book. It had been difficult enough when it had been just me and Tam, what with Tam’s propensity for left-field mischief making, bed hopping, and his curiously chivalrous streak that had often left to me stepping in to finish fights he’d started, but with Matias coming to the rescue of anyone who looked even vaguely downtrodden, Nura’s…whatever Nura wanted to do, after the events of this year, and Lyall, who was here and there but who always seemed to find us when we had more expensive lodgings, and would appear at breakfast wearing Tam’s clothes…it had become almost unmanageable.
My peace and quiet was thus, a rarity, and peace and quiet in a place well equipped enough to have good bookshops rarer still. Ah, there was of course, Sir Quackington, not that he was anything but a hard-working, trouble-free gentleman. Gentle…duck. Gentleduck.
Sir Quackington, as his name suggested, was, and indeed remains, a large ducgomire.
Large was, at this point, putting it mildly. Whilst he had hatched from an egg that only just filled my open palms, he had rapidly grown from ankle to waist height in half a year, and from waist to shoulder in another. Now, a summer and a winter and another summer since his hatching, he was approaching Nura’s height, powerfully built. He sat, fluffed up, at the base of my chair, asleep, occasionally letting little sleep-quacks out.
I turned back to my book.
As for the northern marches of the Empire, none had explored them before the Lindemann Expedition, since the days of the First Emperor. To do so was to begin to enter a strange, cold land, over which savage nomads followed reindeer for half a yea…
A crash from somewhere, and a large ginger tomcat, belonging to the owner, suddenly ran through the parlour, chased by a barefoot Lyall, messy straw hair scarecrow stuck-up. I sighed, marked my place, closed the book, got up, and went to investigate.
The cat, it seemed, had got stuck in the rafters, Lyall, light on his feet, had offered to help the innkeeper get the old, far less steady cat down, had managed to complete most of his task, but the cat had jumped down and so Lyall had shimmied back, and gone to make sure that the cat had not come to any harm. I sighed, crouched to give the cat in question a pet, and went back to my book. Back on the chair, feet up on the stool, opened my book, and had managed to read
As for the northern marches of the Empire, none had explored them
Before Matias yelled something that sounded remarkably like Tam’s name, followed by more dissonant yelling from both of them.
Five minutes later, Tam and Matias nursed clipped ears, and hangdog expressions, I had given Nura a reproachful look, as if to suggest “Don’t try anything”, and I was now finally left, in the warmth of a autumn afternoon, to read more on the Lindemann Expedition.
Peace at last.