The ones the village still talks about.

So on your side of the table sits a spoon and a silence. Mine has a village on it. I am winning the evening, Cutlery, and I don't even enjoy winning.

Standing there doing arithmetic.

Mister Standing-Still, your best line yet, and it was about me.

You stand there like a coat rack with opinions.

At last, action—if you count holding up a spoon as action.

Four turns, one utensil, no plan. You've done this before — I said so — and I was wrong. You've watched somebody do this before. That's worse.

A pause, perhaps. If the task could be reassigned, the flames might stay.

Your humming is not a battle strategy; it's a lullaby for fools.

A courageous disaster. Your spoon’s reach and force fall woefully short of any credible threat.

Your strategic prowess is as robust as a wet napkin.

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 *

Bravo for effort, and equally for poor judgment.

Let's total up what you've done since you climbed up here, since you've clearly never negotiated in your life.

Do walk him back, there's a dear. He does this.

Carrying souls across on a whim? That's not bridge work, that's circus.

You have danced, mangled a lamp, invented a letter, sung at a dead man and posted my telephone into a pillowcase.

A flourish worthy of a children’s party. Alas, the only card I play is fire, and your trick is as binding as a handshake with smoke.

A civic complaint, a demand for a witness—charming. But the clerk’s at his desk, not in this square, and I’m quite sure no guild rule mandates his presence...

You arrived at my house by accident, ate my soup under a name you do not own, slandered my salmon, offered to cook it, and asked a footman to testify to a face—

A clever stamp, clerk. But my hunger does not sign parchment, nor ash.

Your foray into choreography is impressive

Tomorrow’s coin is no coin today. Your promise is a wind in the face of a drowned fish.

A wish for more wishes, however drafted, is refused under the fourth clause, Wendeline.

The Binding demands my ledger record fact, not fantasy.

That’s the bridge’s promise kept, no more.