Weasel's Luck

Начало книги

It started on the night of the banquet I did not attend.

While the others were celebrating, I was cleaning my eldest brother Alfric’s chambers, sweeping away the daily confusion of soiled clothes, of bones, of melon rinds. It was like a midden in there, like an ogre’s den. Surely the missing servants were only hiding from Alfric somewhere in the moat house, and would turn up shortly.

Don’t misunderstand me. It would be wrong, then or now, to compare my brother to an ogre. An ogre is larger, more lethal. Probably brighter.

Yet Alfric was bright enough to have me sweeping his quarters, soaping his windows, while he and the rest of the family sat down to supper with an honorable guest. For eight years running he had blackmailed me for the smallest of misdeeds, so that while the sons of other Solamnic Knights had spent their teens in horsemanship and falconry, I had spent mine in sweeping and dread, for reasons . . . well, the reasons come later. Let it just be said that at seventeen I was feeling too old to be my brother’s keeper. While I stirred the dust in his quarters, Alfric sat in the great hall, at the table where Father entertained Sir Bayard Brightblade of Vingaard, a Solamnic Knight who had ridden up to our backwater estate in the glittering armor that was already the subject of song and a legend or two. To top it off, Sir Bayard was supposedly the best swordsman in northern Solamnia.

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