A Bad Night In Bridgetown

Sir Cobb, The Prince, The Witch and The Moon Guardian

Frederick awoke to find that he was not dreaming. This concept had never presented him with an issue before. You dreamed while you were asleep, you woke up, you stopped dreaming.

It wasn't even as if he'd woken up anywhere different to the place that he'd fallen asleep. This was still a coaching inn, still solid wood beam roof, still a little cold because the heating was a little bit primitive. There, at last, was the core of Frederick's doubt and fear. Everything around him was a little bit primitive. He was taking a trip through a little bit primitive. A little bit primitive wasn't just a description of a state of being it was also a location that Frederick was visiting.

No sooner had he opened his eyes and heaved a sigh of resignation to this elongated twist in his journey than there came a knock at the door.

"Frederick, first light in an hour, time for food," Avan Weatherstrong's voice was barely muted by the wood of the door.

Avan Weatherstrong. It was a name, it was a sentence. It was a twelve volume epic that Frederick could neither have afforded to buy nor hoped to conceal from his parents. He had read tales of Avan Weatherstrong, of course. No boy nourishing dreams of heroism passed through life ignorant of the first Mage-Warrior-Prince. He was a man who spat in death's eye and cheated the devil himself (adventures related in volumes V and VII respectively).

Now, confronted with the man himself, the experience of Avan Weatherstrong was no less awesome. If anything, it was better. Avan Weatherstrong was no heroic caricature, he was not aloof, he was not proud, he was just an awesome guy.

Frederick did not come from a part of either world, man or folk, that knew what a bromance was. For this reason he was unaware that he was wrapped up in the middle of one. Not that he would have denied the fact even if he had known. Frederick was not such a fool as to deny an obvious truth.

"Frederick?" Avan's voice again. Frederick shook his head to clear it of the hero worship.

"There in a moment, go down without me," he shouted back.

The sound of a hero's assured tread padded away from the door towards the inn's staircase. It was followed by the creak of the steps as Avan went to enjoy his breakfast; a hero's breakfast.

This was the one problem Frederick was finding. Whenever Avan did anything it was always a hero's action. Whenever he said anything they were the words of a hero. Whenever he owned something it was always a hero's whatever-it-was. Frederick had always been wary at the prospect of meeting his heroes. He hated disappointment. In this case it had led to unimaginative adjectivisation.

Was adjectivisation even a word? Frederick suspected that it was not.

Frederick shoved his hero-worship issues to one side, rolled out of bed and put on his clothes. One thing he definitely missed on the road was laundry. You just couldn't get laundry done, even if you visited a city. The major problem was that, as a knight-errant, you owned the clothes you stood up in. He had yet to find a place which offered as much as a spare bathrobe on a rental basis. Such a garment was a must while the, usually smelly and disgusting, knightly garb was being freshened.

It was even worse in this age of legends place (although technically it was time travel time in Faerie is an elastic concept). There were no laundries and everything came with a frosting of dirt, or so it appeared to Frederick. His original knightly garb, which had just been his cooper's apprentice clothes, were gone. A leather jerkin and a couple of small bits of tatty armour, hadn't stood a chance after ten minutes at Avan Weatherstrong's side.

The worst part was that he had lost the comfortable breeches that his parents had gifted him when he turned fifteen. They had received a small tear on the left thigh whilst Avan had been training Frederick in rapier swordplay. Shortly afterwards the tear had snagged in the thorns of an evil living tree. As the tree tried to do to Frederick what Frederick usually did to cherry tomatoes the breeches had given up. By the time of their escape there wasn't enough of them left to make a handkerchief.