Coat-Rack: The Legend of Coat-Rack and the Spoon

A

"Cat got your tongue and the reeve's nephew kept his," Ashfang says. "Remarkable." He shifts his weight, and a section of the fallen roof settles a finger's width, shedding grit onto the table's remains. "Since you're standing there being decorative: I owe my aunt a favor. Forty years old, promised in this hall, and tonight is the last night I can pay it — carry one stone of this floor up to her nest before dark. So whatever you've climbed up here to say, say it before I'm carrying masonry and a grudge at the same time."

B

Ashfang regards you a long moment. “You were the one who stood in the doorway like a coat-rack, so I'll call you Coat-Rack. Now.” He noses a cracked platter flat against the floor, tilts his head at it. Rain has pooled in the hollow. “Say what you came to say, or have the decency to be eaten quickly. I have a stone to move and an aunt who does not accept late.”

C

Ashfang settles his chin on the platter's edge and recites. "One: you arrived. Awarded nothing. Two: you said nothing, which I tally under arriving again. Awarded nothing. Three — that one's you, presently, so it's running." He lifts his head, dripping. "Coat-Rack, in forty years of feasts I have been served by cooks, cupbearers, a boy with a lute and no ear, and once, memorably, a goat. Every single one of them said something. The goat bleated. You are the first course that has arrived silently, twice, and expected the meal to begin." His tail finds a fallen tile and pushes it off the table's remnant, barely looking. "So. My aunt's stone. The southeast corner, under the nettles. It is not heavy. That is the entire fact."

D

Rain has pooled in the hollow of the platter, and Ashfang laps it, once, while you speak. "You count things," he says. "Congratulations. So do I. Forty feasts, and a coat-rack that has so far counted three of my turns out loud and offered me none of its own." He drags the platter with one claw, scraping it across the stone toward you. It stops a foot short. "There. Execute your idea. I am genuinely curious what the third-silentest creature in this valley plans to do with a platter."

E

Ashfang finally looks at the spoon. Not the platter — the spoon, small in your fist. "You brought it up the hill. That's the whole village's good cutlery, is it? Forty feasts and the heir to the table is a teaspoon of tin." He settles lower, so his jaw is nearer the floor than the table. "Here's the stone's problem. It sits under the nettles at the southeast corner, and my aunt will know if it's the wrong one — she was at the last feast, she'll remember the grain. I could move it, but I said carry, and a dragon who reneges on his aunt is a dragon with no aunt. So: who carries? Say something useful and I'll hear it."

F

"So the spoon is a plan," Ashfang says. "You are the sixth thing this village has sent, after a goat, a letter with four spelling errors, a nephew and two years of nobody at all, and you have brought less than the letter." He scrapes the platter an inch closer with one claw. "Here is your useful thing, since I am short a carrier and you are short a plan: carry my aunt's stone down the hill instead of up. She is at the ford. It is one stone, and I will watch you do it, and then we will discuss what a village owes."

G

Ashfang waits, then sighs, the sound echoing off the ruined walls. "You have had seven turns to offer a plan, a bargain, a joke, or even a complaint about the rain. You have brought a spoon and silence. The village will have to settle for a dragon’s memory and a courier’s blank look. I will carry my aunt’s stone myself—then I will carry fire to the village. You may watch, or you may run. Either way, you will remember this as the day you brought a spoon to a reckoning and left with nothing but a story to tell the ashes."