‘Crones can’t be royal,’ Lex said dismissively. If Schmidt had known anything about royalty he would have known that only humans could be kings and queens.
‘Well, at any rate I doubt she’s going to hand something like that over to you just because you ask her to.’
‘Whoever said anything about asking?’ Lex said with a nasty smile. ‘Trust me, she’ll hand it over.’
‘I should warn you,’ the fairy godmother began hesitantly. ‘Matilida is… not like other crones-’
‘Madam, she could be Queen Japunzel herself for all I care,’ Lex said firmly. He was going to get that crown if he had to wrestle the old crow for it himself. ‘Are you coming?’ he asked, looking at Schmidt.
The lawyer hesitated and then shook his head. ‘No,’ he said stiffly. ‘I’ll wait here. But be civil to her, Lex.’
‘I’m always civil,’ Lex replied. He wrapped the grotesque skull necklace around his wrist, walked up to the house, found the front door and went straight in without bothering to knock. After taking no more than a couple of steps inside he’d already managed to tread on about three disgruntled cats who shot out of the hut, hissing. The remaining cats regarded him moodily from their various perches.
Lex stopped in astonishment once he was inside. He had never seen a house quite like it. Crones liked small spaces, they liked strings of skulls and creepy, grinning masks and more cats than windows. And this one was no different but she had clearly tried to make the hut seem like a fairy cottage and the clash of the two decors was more than a little disturbing.
What light there was came from the large hole in the pointed roof and one small window set high up in the wall. There were the usual skull-strings but these had been painted with sap from the cherry-drop tree to make them pink and sparkly. A thick, matted spider web served as a substitute for a lace doily in the middle of the table upon which stood a vase with a couple of dead roses in it. There was a bed the crone had managed to get from somewhere, presumably a fairy godmother chuck-out for it was clearly old and worn and very, very lacy. The crone’s basket was perched on top of the bed, though, for crones did not like sleeping on mattresses — they would have to lie down straight then and their bent backs seemed to be more comfortable if they curled up in a basket. There were net curtains over the window but, like the bed, they were now so filthy as to be almost black. There was a mushroom ring in the middle of the room and in the centre of this sat Matilda herself. The fairy godmother had been right. Matilda was clearly not like other crones.
Physically she was much the same as all the others — an old lady with matted grey hair, a bent back and more than a few warts. But, at an angle on her grey head, was an old bonnet that she had clearly taken from one of the godmothers’ trashcans and a grotty old apron was tied around her waist. There seemed to be a cat sleeping in the front pocket. The rest of her clothes looked as if she had simply smeared cherry-drop sap all over them in an effort to make her outfit more colourful. The result was a sickly sweet smell that mixed with the other odours of cat, old mud and decaying flowers in the tiny hut.
‘Matilda doesn’t do princesses and coaches any more, dearie,’ Matilda rasped when she saw Lex silhouetted in the doorway. ‘Matilda is retired. You must take your pumpkin elsewhere.’
‘I don’t have a pumpkin, you blind old woman!’ Lex said irritably, unimpressed with being mistaken for a princess by anyone. ‘I just want that crown you pinched from the forest. Where is it?’
‘Matilda doesn’t steal,’ the old crow sniffed huffily.
Lex walked over to the bed and tipped the grubby blankets in the crone’s basket out onto the floor, ignoring her squeal of protest. He looked through them with his boot and then kicked them away into a corner once he was satisfied the crown wasn’t there. Then he turned the bed over and did the same with that as more cats shot out of the hut in alarm. He tried not to touch anything more than he had to, for it was clear that no cleaning ever went on here. The crown wasn’t in the bed but where else could it be hidden? There wasn’t anywhere to hide such a thing in a tiny, empty hut like this. Lex tried to control his frustration. He tried to prevent a snarl from curling his lips. But he could feel his anger mounting. He had had just about enough of old women for one day. And if this one hadn’t interfered, he would have won the round long ago.
‘I know. It’s in the walls, isn’t it?’ Lex said with sudden maliciousness.
He stood back a little and kicked as hard as he could at the mud wall. It crumbled around the edges of where Lex’s foot had struck it, dust rising up in a cloud and bits of twig and stone falling to the floor in a heap. It was clear that a few good kicks from Lex would be enough to bring the entire wall down. The crone was on him at once, tugging at his shirt and screeching in his ear. ‘Do not wreck Matilda’s home!’ she wailed. ‘It took Matilda so long to build! No one else would help her!’
‘Then tell me where the crown is, you stupid old crone, and I’ll stop destroying your house!’
‘Horrible boy has no right,’ she sobbed. ‘No right! The crown belongs to Matilda!’
Lex aimed two more really hard kicks at the wall and this time he broke right through so that the wall partially crumbled in on itself and light shone into the hut. The crone screamed at him but still she wouldn’t tell him where the crown was. The prophet wouldn’t need anyone to tell him where it was for he’d be able to sense the magic in it. He’d be circling in on it even now whilst Lex wasted time messing about with this infuriating old woman. Jezra’s opinion of Lex as a player would be diminished. He’d wonder why he ever went to such trouble to try and procure him. Gods would no longer argue over him and his name would never be etched in stone. And he would have won ages ago if it hadn’t been for this vile, pathetic, thieving old crone.
‘What the hell are you doing?’
Lex turned to see Schmidt’s lanky frame in the doorway. The noise from the destruction of the wall had drawn the lawyer down to the hut. He had to bend almost double just to get inside. Lex ignored him. Time was precious and they had wasted more than enough as it was. So Schmidt didn’t like his methods. Fine. That was why Schmidt would never be a winner like Lex was.
‘Tell me where it is or I’ll pull your whole house down!’ Lex shouted, turning back to the crone.
‘I’ve had enough of this!’ Schmidt snapped, striding into the room and pulling Lex roughly away from the weeping old woman.
‘Oh, get off me! Do you remember what happened last time you tried to protect a crone? She attacked you with a pair of walking sticks! She’s a thief! She stole my crown! I thought you frowned on stealing, Schmidt?’
‘Whatever else she is, she’s an old lady and you will respect her for it!’
‘Respect her for it? Respect her for it? Why should I respect her just for being old?’
‘Because she knows things about life that you couldn’t possibly understand, you arrogant brat!’
‘Oh, spare me!’ Lex said angrily, throwing the lawyer off.
‘You’ll be an old man one day, Lex. It’ll come quicker than you think and you might regret all this then.’
‘I don’t intend to ever be old!’ Lex snapped. ‘I want to die young! I have it all planned out — I’m going to die suddenly, extraordinarily, doing some daring, villainous thing! I’m not content to just drift towards a slow, undignified death like you are!’
‘You know, if it wasn’t for your brother I would have thought that whoever brought you up did a very poor job of it indeed and clearly had no manners whatsoever themselves,’ Schmidt said spitefully.
‘My grandfather had impeccable manners!’ Lex shouted and then cursed himself for rising to such obvious bait.
‘Yes, well, I’m forced to believe you since Lucius must have got his manners from somewhere, although I suppose he might have just read about them in books.’
‘Lucius!’ Lex sneered. ‘If my grandfather was alive today, Lucius would be just as much of a disappointment to him now as he was when we were growing up, because my grandfather was an Adventurer and a storyteller and he liked excitement like I do! And I am quite sure that he would have detested you, Mr Schmidt, because you are quite the most boring, uninteresting man I have ever met in my life.’
‘Yes, perhaps you’re right,’ Schmidt said calmly. ‘But if you really were the favourite, as you claim, I find it odd that Lucius was the one who cared for your grandfather when he became ill.’
That was the nub of it, really. One might think that his parents dying at such a young age, and then his grandfather succumbing to a horrible illness just a few years later might have changed Lex. But the truth was that he had always been this way. He had always had a terrible thirst for adventure as well as a generous dose of selfishness that must, by very definition, accompany all the truly great Adventurers. You can’t be ‘ truly great ’ if you let family ties and responsibilities hold you back. Lex knew it, and his grandfather had known it. Alistair Trent might have come back to raise his grandsons but that was only because there was no one else. He had not been around whilst Lex’s father was growing up. Adventurers had to be selfish if they were to be any good, but no one ever
