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He reached the junction, peered around the corner, and saw a sleepy young Guard o’ the Watch passing farther up the way. De
De
But because he dared not be seen-not by anyone-De
He thought he had never been so hungry in his life.
Never mind your cussed belly now, De
He was standing far back in a shadowy doorway. Faintly, he heard the Crier call four o’clock. He was about to move forward when slow, echoing footfalls came down the hallway… a clank of steel-and-scabbard-a creak of leather leggings.
De
A Guard o’ the Watch paused just in front of the thinly shadowed doorway where De
Please, De
He could smell the guard, could smell the old wine and burned meat on his breath, and the sour sweat coming out of his skin.
The guard started to move on… De
“I have a girrul name of Marchy-Marchy-Melda,” the guard began to sing in a low-pitched, droning voice, rooting in his nose all the while. He produced a large green something, ex-amined it thoughtfully, and flicked it onto the wall. Splat. “She’s got a sister named Es-a-merelda… I would sail the seven seas… Just to kiss her dimply knees! Tootie-sing-tay, sing-tiy, and pass me a bucket-da wine.”
Something exceedingly horrible was now happening to Den-nis. His nose had begun to itch and tickle in a way which was unmistakable. Very soon he would sneeze.
Go! he screamed in his mind. Oh, why don’t you go, you stupid fool?
But the guard seemed to have no intentions of going. He had apparently struck a rich lode up in the left nostril, and he meant to mine it.
“I have a girrul name of Darchy-Darchy-Darla… She’s got a sister named Red Headed Carla… I would take a thousand sips… From her pretty pretty lips… Tootie-sing-tay, sing-tiy, and pass me a bucket-da wine.”
I’ll hit you over the HEAD with a bucket of wine, you fool! De
The guard frowned, bent over, blew his nose between his knuckles again, and finally moved on, still singing his droning song. He was barely out of sight before De
De
For a few minutes there I didn’t think of my belly at all! he thought, and then had to slam both hands over his mouth to stifle a giggle.
He peeked out of his hiding place, saw no one about, and moved to a doorway down the corridor and on his right. He knew this doorway very well, although the empty rocker and needlework case outside it were new to him. The door led to the room where all of those napkins had been stored since the time of Kyla the Good. It had never been locked before, and was not now. Old napkins were apparently not considered worth locking up. He peered inside, hoping that his answer to Peyna’s key question still held true.
Standing there in the road on that bright morning five days ago, Peyna had asked him this: Do you know when they take fresh stores of napkins to the Needle, De
This seemed like a simple question indeed to De
He told Peyna about the big storeroom (Peyna was flabbergasted to hear of it) and how each Saturday night around seven o’clock, a maid took twenty-one napkins, shook them, ironed them, folded them, and set them in a stack on a small wheeled cart. This cart stood just inside the room’s doorway. Early on Sunday morning-at six o’ the clock, less than two hours from right now-a servant boy would pull the cart to the Plaza of the Needle. He would rap at the bolted door at the base of the ugly stone tower, and one of the Lesser Warders would pull the cart inside and place the napkins on a table, where they would be doled out, meal by meal, through the week.
Peyna had been satisfied.
De
He lifted the Sunday breakfast napkin. Sunday lunch. For a moment he almost passed over Sunday supper as well, and if he had done that, my tale would have had a very different ending, better or worse I ca
“Let it find you, Peter,” he murmured in the ghostly silence of that storeroom, piled high with napkins made in another age. “Let it find you, my King.”
De