The Princess Gardener by Michael Strelow

Author:Michael Strelow [Strelow, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78535-675-9
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2018-04-26T16:00:00+00:00

Arbuckle followed the courier. He borrowed a small donkey, dressed in country jerkin and shoes, and rode in secret. The first time out, the courier, riding one of the castle’s finest horses, quickly out distanced him and disappeared over a hill. But Arbuckle could almost taste the court’s attention, and so he got aboard the donkey and spurred the poor beast so hard that it collapsed at the top of a high hill. He rolled the exhausted creature into the ditch and trotted himself down the road until he saw the courier in the distance glancing this way and that until he was sure he wasn’t being followed. Then the courier set off across a field toward a farmhouse just visible in a grove of trees.

Arbuckle hid himself and waited. And waited. And finally the courier came back across the field, rejoined the road and made his way back toward the castle. Arbuckle, followed the trail the courier had left across the meadow and burrowed into a forsythia hedge near the house and waited to see who or what could possibly have been the goal of the courier’s message. While he waited, the yellow flowers slowly rained down on his head and shoulders every time he moved.

All this secretive business I know because Jake could see most of this action, and he couldn’t wait to tell me later. Jake is the key dragon here.

And that was how Jake found Arbuckle, sitting cross-legged in the bushes hidden from everyone except a small boy. Arbuckle’s head was by this time a garland of yellow petals and his lap a potpourri of flowers and twigs. A small white butterfly had alit on one of his knees: a coxcomb of nature was Arbuckle. An omen of things to come. I imagine it went something like this.

“What are you doing under our bushes?” Jake asked in the deepest voice he could muster. “What do you think you’re going to steal?”

Arbuckle spun around to see who was talking but saw no one. Jake had climbed a tree and was speaking from behind a large patch of leaves, hanging by one arm and one leg from a crotch in the branches like a small gorilla.

“You’re under arrest,” Jake said in his deepest voice. “Well, I’ll call the Bailiff. I’ll call the sheriff. I’ll call my father.” I think I might have been next on his list of authorities, but he probably didn’t get all the way to me. “I’ll have you in chains, you know. We have chains right there in the barn. We could easily clap you in chains.” Jake sometimes liked to find out what there was to say by saying things.

Arbuckle continued to look around from under the bushes, and not seeing the source of the voice, the idle threat (for Arbuckle was well connected in the legal world of the kingdom and feared no consequences for his actions, no matter how illegal), he crawled out from under the forsythia raining yellow flowers, and stood up.

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