The Tale of Sir Percival

[HLGStrider]

I am thinking about attempting to get published again. I have written two novels in the last two years which I think are of decent quality, both on similar veins, young adult fiction and lengthy fairy tales. The first is "The Tale of Sir Percival the Overly Ordinary Knight" and the second its semi-sequel "The Invisible Princess" (happens in the same world but the stories are not really dependent on each other). I wanted to put up the first chapter of the Percy story. If you want more send me a private message with your email address. I'd be happy to share and I am looking for opinion.

Chapter One​

Once upon a time in the kingdom of Ithelwaite there was an insignificant knight named Sir Percival. Sir Percival was born to be unimportant. In a kingdom where fairies ran rampant, he had somehow managed to get through his christening without being either blessed or cursed. His father had invited all the fairies in the realm to the christening, of course. In Ithelwaite it was common practice, and forgetting one often had regrettable results. However, though all nine-hundred-ninety-nine fairies of the realm were invited, not one showed and only two bothered responding with an “I’m sorry, but I have a previous engagement.”
So Percival was christened and grew up devoid of fairy magic. His father was a lesser knight but he had great ambitions for his only son and sent him to train with the sons of higher knights. Young Percy worked hard, followed instructions, and passed all knight exams with flying colors, yet he lacked the one thing a knight truly needed to succeed within Ithelwaite: luck.
Like all in his line, there was nothing especially remarkable about Percival. He was intelligent, but not a genius. He had black hair and brown eyes and was tall but thin and not particularly handsome. He could not lift boulders nor see through walls. Nothing about him evoked comment.
Other knights in his class, all of whom had managed at least one fairy at their christening, seemed to have fortune either so on their side that nothing could go ill for them or so dead set against them that nothing could turn out right. Sir Edward went on errant leave and was married to a princess by August, simply on the good fortune of coming across the right dragon to slay. Sir Chester, on the other hand, was found two days after his knighting, transformed into a slimy, green tree frog. Percival went upon errant leave and found the whole process incredibly boring. He met with no monsters or princesses and no one seemed to desire him dead or enchanted. It was as if the fellow did not exist where the forces of magic were concerned.
“Well, Sir Percival,” his instructor said when the youth returned no better and no worse from his errant leave, “not all of us have what it takes to succeed in a Fairy Kingdom. I will recommend you for guard duty at King Harold’s palace. It is uneventful work and should suit one of your fates.”
Sir Percival said nothing, but deep inside he felt that, fate or no fate, he deserved a more exciting life than that of palace guard. His father, however, simply sighed when he heard the news.
“I suppose not everyone can be a hero or even a villain,” he said. “Some folk in life must be innocent bystanders. It has been so with our family for generations, son. I was foolish to think you could break the mold. To be great in this land takes fairy work, and the fairies will not bother with us.”
“At least guard work is useful,” Percy said, trying to make the best of a disappointing appointment. “After all, even if I am not fairy blessed, the royal family is well known for their run ins with the pixie-blighters. Guarding them should be the second best thing.”
Now in theory this was quite sound. The royal family of Ithelwaite was more than well known. They were downright infamous for their ill-luck with the winged-inhabitants. The current king had once been a stable hand to the family, but he had been fairy-blessed and had saved the princess, who like most of her predecessors was fairy cursed, from a life as a wardrobe. The story of how the princess, by caring too much about fine clothes, had managed to get herself turned into a wardrobe was quite embarrassing, and the royal family had been grateful to the stable hand for his disenchanting kiss. He had been given the princess in marriage and upon the king’s death had gained the throne.
The palace was full of opportunity for a hard-working knight, and full of hope, Percy reported to the head guard the next day.
The head guard looked him up and down, snorted once, and rolled his eyes.
“Just like the knight instructor,” he said, “sending me his rejects to deal with. I have enough of you knights. You take the best food, flirt with the prettiest maids, and take up space. I have 73 knights under my care in a castle with only 35 doors. Where am I supposed to put you? I have guards guarding the treasury, the throne room, the ball room, and kitchen. Guards for the stables and the gardens and the duck pond. What’s next? Guards to guard guards?”
Percy opened his mouth to protest that the guard appointment hadn’t been his idea, but the head guard cut him off.
“Report to Sir Ivan at the royal kennels,” he said. “You take your post there.”
Percy’s face went red, but orders were orders, and there was little he could do.

And so Percy became the guard dogs’ guard, a boring, smelly position. Sir Ivan, the chief kennel guard, was likewise considered an underachiever, and Percy was the first man he had ever had to command. The idea of someone under him thrilled the fellow, and he set out to be the harshest of commanders. Percy was given all the work and none of the benefits. The dogs ate better, had better sleeping quarters, and received kinder treatment from Sir Ivan. At first Percy harbored a frail hope that if he simply did what he was supposed to do to the best of his ability, Ivan would learn to respect and better his treatment of his young inferior. The harder he worked, however, the more Ivan seemed to resent him.
Percy wrote vague letters home describing life as a guard “routine,” ashamed to admit to his still hopeful father that his son had been put in charge of a motley pack of hounds rather than the royal family as he had hoped.
The other guards, who were likewise underachievers, but most by fault of their own laziness rather than poor fortune, looked down upon the new arrival for being foolish enough to be hardworking. They would rather spend their guard duty whistling at the palace maids or leaning against the wall bragging to each other about their physical prowess. Percy, who preferred neither of these activities, was looked upon as abnormal, and so the youth chose to spend his limited free time alone with a book rather than with the other guards.
The royal library was opened to the entire palace but seldom used. The librarians sat behind their desk and looked at you sourly if you actually wanted to borrow a book.
“It is just like you readers,” one said grumpily. “The moment we get the books put away and in alphabetical order, you come along and want to start thumbing through them and taking them out and putting them back in the wrong place, as if we had nothing better to do than sort books all day.”
From the way they just sat there, whispering to each other, it certainly appeared to Percy that they didn’t have anything better to do, but he kept his mouth shut, took his book to a dusty corner of the library, and sat down to read. He spent many a pleasant hour in this way, for in his books he found release from the boredom about him. If he could not have a knightly adventure of his own, he could read about those that came before him.
Two months passed and he worked his way through the first shelf in his dusty corner, reading every spare moment and smuggling books out under his cloak to finish by candlelight when he should’ve been sleeping. The other guards mocked him as Sir Percival Dog Keeper and snickered when he walked by, nose in a book. Most of them felt they could take him in a fight. Percy, who had done well in his hand-to-hand combat training, felt he could probably take three of them at once but was happy to ignore them.

 

[HLGStrider]

Percy turned 20 in his third month as Dog Keeper and celebrated by playing sick for the first time in his life. As soon as Ivan had sulked off to do Percy’s work, he snuck out of his quarters and into the library where he picked up a book he had been saving just for the occasion. The title, Exploits of the Great Warriors of Ithelwaite, sounded promising, and he planned to read it all in one sitting. He sat on the floor with his back against a shelf, a couple apples he’d purloined from the kitchen at his side, happy to have a day to himself. Even if he got caught, it would be worth it. How could one demote a Dog Keeper? Make him Goldfish Keeper? He laughed as he opened the book. At least goldfish were cleaner than dogs. Let Ivan find him.
“Ahhh . . . ahh . . . ”
Percy shut his book and looked around. He had thought he might be caught, but he didn’t want it to be this soon!
“Ahhh . . . ahh . . . ” The voice came from the shelf before him. Dust rose in the air, floating over toward Percy and tickling his nose. “Ahh . . . ahchoo!”
The sneeze exploded, followed close on by another, and another, and another. The fellow on the other side of the shelf was caught in the grip of a sneeze attack. Percy smiled; it was impossible to think of the sneezer as a threat. He stood up lazily and glanced over the shelf.
“Bless you,” he said, suppressing a smile.
“Th. . . . ah . . . ah . . . thank . . . ah . . . ah . . . choo!”
The sneezer was an older man, perhaps sixty, only a bit over five feet tall, and covered head to toe with a thick, brown layer of dust. He had clear, impish blue eyes. He smiled back, breathed deeply, and stepped around the shelf to face Percy.
“I can’t abide dust!” he said. “But one has to deal with it when one is dusting, does one not? Dust seems to be my lot in life. You simply can’t escape fate, even if it is a dusty one.”
“I suppose you can’t,” Percy mumbled.
“Well, fate is often in a name. Mine just happens to be Dustin, Dusty if you would like. And you, my young fellow?”
“Percival. Sir Percival, I suppose, but I prefer Percy.”
“I prefer it as well. A fine, friendly name is that. Yes, indeed, one can trust a nice, honest name like Percy. How old are you, Percy?”
“Nineteen . . . I mean twenty.”
“Is it hard for you to remember your age?”Dusty laughed.
“Well, I was nineteen yesterday and today I am twenty,” Percy explained.
“Then today is your birthday!” Dusty exclaimed. “Happy birthday. Twenty is an illustrious age, an age of action, an age for celebration! No one should spend their twentieth day sitting in a dusty corner. Come with me, young man! We shall celebrate in a manner befitting this great day.”
Percy shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. He cleared his throat and began stuttering an excuse. He really couldn’t because . . . because . . . He simply couldn’t bring himself to admit to the honest Dusty that he was there under false pretenses. After a moment Dusty smiled and patted the youth on the shoulder.
“I was young once, Sir Percy,” he said. “We shall go where Sir Ivan shall not spy us. I have a feeling your fine boss has fallen asleep on guard duty and will not awaken until the next shift comes to relieve him. Men like Ivan do not work when they work.”
Percy, who had not mentioned that he worked under Ivan, blinked uneasily, but drawn by the thought of companionship, he set down his book and followed Dusty from the library out into the courtyard.
Percy’s exploration of the palace grounds had been limited to the stables, kennels, and library. Dusty led him down a side hall away from the servants’ quarters. They came out into an open green space surrounded by tall, ivy-covered walls. There were trees, a small pond spanned by a stone foot bridge, and dozens upon dozens of rose bushes.
“Now isn’t this more pleasant than the kennels?” Dusty asked.
Percy had to admit that it was. He followed Dusty over the bridge and glanced down into the water. Colorful fish darted about after bugs. They came to the far wall. There, nestled among rose trees and vines, was a tall tower with no door and but one window. Percy and Dusty circled it once, Percy searching in vain for an entrance or purpose to this tower.
“What is the use of a tower you cannot access?” he finally asked. Dusty looked up from laying out a picnic lunch he had left waiting.
“You don’t know about the Doorless Tower? You think someone would have told you the tale by now. I thought the whole kingdom knew of it.” Dusty and Percy sat on the grass by the pond, gazing at the high window and snacking on chicken and bisquits. “In that tower dwells the Princess of Ithelwaite, daughter of our king and the princess who was a wardrobe.”
Now of course Percy knew that there was a princess–the kings of Ithelwaite seemed to be able to produce nothing but princesses, there having been very few princes born to the royal house–but it puzzled him that a princess would be kept so cloistered. How did food get in, for one thing? He supposed it had something to do with Ithelwaite’s fairy problem, and he voiced this opinion.
“Aye, of course. There is little in this kingdom the fairies don’t meddle in, and princesses get the worst of it. It was a vindictive fairy that turned our queen into a wardrobe, changed the queen’s mother into a duck, and caused the queen’s grandmother to speak backwards for a year. Our royal family fears the creatures like the plague.

“That is why, when his wife bore him a daughter, our king took every precaution with the little Princess Matilda. He sent special invitations to all the fairies, taking care not to forget one. He showered them with every possible consideration at the christening. He greeted each of the nine-hundred-ninety-nine fairies by name, and when the christening was over, the little princess had somehow escaped a cursing.
“Now the king was so relieved and pleased with his own ingenuity that he burst out laughing. One of the fairies, who had come back to retrieve her purse, overheard this and decided that the fairies were the brunt of some cruel joke. She returned to the fairy council, and convinced all but one of their number that they had been greatly deceived by the king’s seeming kindness and that the only way to save face was to strike this new child harder than any of her predecessors
“Most of the fairies were eager to do this, but each of them had a different idea of how the smiting should take place. Some felt she should be cast into an eternal slumber, others said deprived of her beauty, others wanted to change her into a lizard or a newt or some such animal. While they were arguing over the best method, one kindhearted fairy slunk away to warn the royal family.
“Under the guidance of this fairy, the panicked king built the tower you see before you. There is a way into it but it is known only to a trusted few, and only the princess’s parents and hand maiden are allowed to enter. Once a week, under the guidance of the kind fairy, the little princess is allowed to look out the one window onto the world. That is all she has seen of outside that tower in sixteen years. Meanwhile the king is searching far and wide for a true hearted prince who will be willing to stand by his princess and disenchant her when the fairies finally find a way past the tower’s defenses.”
“And I thought my life was dull,” Percy murmured.
They sat in silence for a little longer; then Percy saw something stir in the window above him. He stiffened. A head appeared in the opening. It was a pretty young girl with golden locks and soft features. She glanced about the garden and her eyes met with his. She gasped and stepped back away from the window.
Suddenly realizing that this was the princess and that he could possibly be in a lot of trouble, Percy leapt behind a nearby bush. The princess looked out again but finding him gone, turned away and did not return.
“That was close,” Percy said to Dusty. “Why didn’t you warn me . . . ” He stopped for the old man was no where to be seen. Percy swallowed. The whole thing was strange. If it hadn’t been for his family’s record, he would have suspected fairy work.

 

[HLGStrider]

Percy returned to his bed and pretended to be asleep when Ivan returned.
A week passed, and Percy began to spend his free time searching for Dusty among the servants, but while all of the servants acknowledged that there was a Dusty at work in the palace, but none seemed certain what he did or where he stayed. The knights thought he must be a stable hand, but when Percy inquired among the stable hands they denied he was in their number and pointed to the janitorial staff. The janitorial staff acknowledged that, yes, they had often seen him cleaning, but actually, he was a member of the kitchen staff. He had to be, for whenever a maid was feeling abused he would appear with jam tarts to share. The kitchen staff also shook their heads, claiming that Dusty was simply a scrounging gardener who hung about the kitchen after leftovers. There were, however, only three gardeners under King Harold’s pay, and Dusty was not one of them. Confused, Percy gave up his search and continued to work.
Once he tried to revisit the garden, but this time he found the door barred and under guard by two knights who actually seemed to care about their work. Even more puzzled, Percy sunk into his books and did his work mechanically. He spoke with no one but Ivan, and avoided speaking to Ivan when he could.
One night, two months after his birthday, he lay in bed, trying to sleep. The hounds were restless that night and he could hear them scuffling and whining through his thin walls. He pulled his pillow over his head, but the cloth smelled of dog . . . or perhaps he did. He could use a bath. He closed his eyes, but the sound of the dogs only grew louder. He moaned.
“Hello again, young Percy.”
Percy quickly sat up, throwing the pillow from his face. He stared at Dusty who stood in the doorway holding a candle.
“Where have you been?” Percy frowned. Dusty shrugged.
“My work takes me to many corners of this realm,” he said. “I am sorry that I have been neglecting you, but the first thing I thought to do upon my return was check on you. I am surprised that you have yet to receive a promotion. A good, intelligent knight like you shouldn’t guard dogs forever.”
“Well, when one has a commander like Ivan and walks around smelling of wet dogs, promotions seem to look the other way.” Percy frowned.
“There are ways to work around bosses, and a simple bath could rid you of the scent,” Dusty admonished. “Let me help you.”

Now Percy was grateful for any help he could get, being by now quite sick of the whole guard dog’s guard position. However, when Dusty began to explain his plan, his face fell.
“The first step is to get you presentable, which means a bath and a fresh change of clothes. Unfortunately, the nearest body of water cleaner than you is the royal fish pond, but I think we can work around that. Tomorrow I will sneak you into the garden . . . ”
“Are you insane?” Percy burst out. “Last time we went to the garden, I was nearly caught by the princess. There is no way I am going to go swimming there!”
“Calm down.” Dusty held up his hand. “Tomorrow is not the princess’s day to look out, and I can see to it that the guards aren’t there to pester you.” Percy hesitated. “Do you want to be a dog keeper forever?” Dusty prodded.
The next morning, just as Dusty had promised, there were no guards at the garden gate. Dusty handed him a bar of soap and a bundle wrapped in paper.
“These clothes should be your size,” he said. “I’ll keep watch at the gate.”
Percy slipped in and quickly disrobed. He then dove into the water at the deep end of the pool which was only a bit above his head. He came up gasping from the cold, but the way the grime was dissolving was delicious. He rubbed himself vigorously with the soap. Despite Dusty’s assurances of safety he wanted to be out of there before something happened.
After about five minutes he swam to the edge of the pond and started to climb out. It was then that he heard a shrill giggling. Leaping back into the water, he whirled around and stared up at the tower. The face in the window was not that of the beautiful princess but of a middle-aged woman with graying brown hair and a face like a bulldog. His face went hot, and she laughed even more harshly at his blush. Percy wanted to sink under the water and drown.
“Edwina? Edwina? What is it? Why are you laughing?” he heard a voice call from deeper in the tower. “Oh Edwina, please tell me what is going on!”
The woman turned and gave a response Percy couldn’t hear. The second voice began to plead.
“Oh, Edwina, dear, please let me look! I know it is not my day, but I wish to see the funny man! Please . . . ”
Percy clambered onto the bank, hoping to be dressed and gone before the princess got her way, but he couldn’t find the bundle of clothes anywhere. He quickly jumped back into the water, sinking down so he was only visible from the nose up.

The princess gazed, wide-eyed, out the window.
“Sir!” she called. “What is your name?” Percy didn’t answer but gave out a desperate cry of “Dusty, get me out of here!”
Dusty ran forward and tossed Percy a blanket. Wrapping the now soaked piece of cloth about his body, Percy ran from the garden with Dusty close on his hills. When they reached an empty hall, Dusty presented the young knight with his clothes.
“That is the last time I ever listen to you!” Percy growled as he quickly dressed.
“Well, you are a good deal cleaner.” Dusty smiled. “Trust me, young one. You shall be meeting with nobility before the week is out.”