One for the Morning Glory by John Barnes Read Free Book Online

next, you would hear the clash of wooden escrees and he would be at it with the Twisted Man, whacking away with great ferocity in his early years, and later with increasing skill.
    The minute you thought he had settled into that, you'd hear the clatter of his right foot on the roof tiles, and the shriek of Psyche as she swung out the window and climbed after him. On one occasion when he was twelve, he deliberately climbed a steep roof face that she could not manage in a long skirt. Boniface, watching from his own tower window, almost chuckled, until halfway up Amatus began to slip, and seemed to be headed for the stones of the courtyard below.
    At that moment—hadn't the Twisted Man been right next to Boniface a moment ago?—the humped and distorted giant was rushing up the roof, catching the sliding Amatus by the triolet, and bearing him safely back inside by the collar.
    That night, at dinner, Amatus was uncharacteristically quiet. Cedric asked him if fright had "settled him a little."
    "You could say that," Amatus said. "I wasn't afraid of falling—perhaps I should have been—but the Twisted Man said that if I ever gave everyone such a bad scare again, he would ask Father to let him punish me."
    "What is that around your neck and hanging under your triolet?"
    "The Twisted Man gave it to me." The boy pulled it out; it was a tiny silver whistle. "He said since I'm not making it easy, he would appreciate it if I would blow on this any time I am about to do something stupid—and that he expects it will more commonly be blown when I have already done something stupid."
    But though Psyche and the Twisted Man were the favored Companions of his youngest and most physically active years, Amatus also spent much time up in the laboratory or down in the library, following Golias and Mortis around and generally being in the way. Alone among people in the castle, he never seemed to fear Mortis, despite her appearance. She seemed to pay him little attention, but things he needed—spells of protection and of power, spells for learning and discernment— were usually there for him when he needed them, even the powerful Trigonometric Spell, developed by Trigonometras himself; it was said that if you could survive that, nothing would ever seem difficult to learn again.
    On the other hand, for those things he merely wanted, rather than needed, there always seemed to be something flawed about the spell; she gave him a spell so that he could know all his lessons the next day without studying, but he arose from his bed exhausted and feeling unwashed as if he had stayed up all night to learn them. He was invulnerable for about a week until he discovered that he could not taste his food, feel Psyche's hand on his cheek after she tucked him in, or feel the pressure of the wooden escree against his hand and know where the Twisted Man would strike next. Worse yet, he lost all pleasure in Golias's songs, and that was intolerable, so he finally went to Mortis and begged her to lift the spell—only to learn that he would have to sweep out her chambers for a week, and clean the bat droppings from her rafters, and get all the gurry out of every reticle in the cracks of the wheat-stone, before she would undo the spell.
    Boniface watched, and saw how Amatus, or at least his remaining half, seemed to thrive in the care of the Companions, and like the wise King he was (for he had been shrewd for more than a decade before becoming jolly) he neither softened nor contradicted their tutelage of his son. Not when the Twisted Man gave the boy a great, heavy festoon for his thirteenth birthday and took him all the way to the Ironic Gap to stalk gazebo. Not when Psyche caught him tormenting a baby hydra and forced him to raise it as a pet and take care of it—and since he had gotten the poor thing up to more than thirty heads before she caught him, and each head demanded a separate bowl, the job became onerous indeed. Yet when the hydra died at the end of the