Knight Name Generator

The story

Sir Merrit had put the collection token in the pocket normally reserved for important messages. This seemed a reasonable precaution. The token promised one copy of The Widow of Three Moons, Volume Four, paid in full. It also showed a lady on a roof holding an improbable number of roses. He folded that side inward. His squire, Pell, asked whether the message required a reply. Merrit said it required an errand. The bookshop had a little side window where a person could collect a parcel without explaining why he had been awake until two in the morning worrying about a fictional duchess.

The errand would have been easier without Dain. Merrit found him beyond the willow ditch, standing over a dropped sword while two furious carters came down the road behind him. A week earlier Dain had taken a purse and a pair of good blankets from their wagon. The carters recognized him, and he recognized Merrit's raised visor. He put both hands where the knight could see them and said he surrendered. Then he said it again, more loudly, as one of the carters lifted a wagon peg. Merrit stepped between them. Dain would go to the town watch. Nobody was going to strike him on the way.

Pell took the sword. The carters could make their account at the watch house, Merrit told them, and their missing property would remain missing until it was found. Dain's surrender did not return a blanket. Nor did a promise to protect him prevent the watch from holding him. This satisfied none of them particularly well. Merrit had once imagined that settling dangerous encounters would produce more grateful silence. Dain asked if they might walk slowly. The sole of his left boot had split across the front, and every second step folded it underneath his toes. He showed it rather than inventing an injury.

They set off at the pace the boot allowed. Pell went beside Dain, with Merrit on the roadward side and the carters following at a distance that required occasional correction. The bookshop would still be open when they reached town. Merrit repeated that fact to himself twice. It was not the closing hour he feared so much as the morning crowd. At the side window he usually encountered a clerk, a parcel and an admirable absence of questions. He had even prepared a remark about collecting something for an aunt, although no one had ever asked.

A gust turned the token in his fingers while he checked it. Dain saw the lady on the roof. He asked whether the fourth volume had finally arrived. Merrit put the token away so abruptly that Pell looked around for a threat. Dain said he hoped the author had disposed of Lord Vessant, who had been surviving entirely on misunderstandings for three books. Merrit said Vessant had an unresolved obligation to his sister. He had meant to say nothing. The correction escaped before he had considered the difficulty of explaining his sisterly concern for a man he was supposedly collecting on an aunt's behalf.

Dain preferred the other suitor. Merrit said the other suitor had abandoned a horse in a storm. Dain said the horse had been found by the end of the chapter. Merrit said that was hardly the point. They argued for the next stretch of road while Dain's damaged sole flapped like a small unconvincing applause. Once Pell began to go ahead, then looked back and fell into their slower rhythm again. The distance between the three of them closed. Merrit could have reached the first town houses earlier alone; he did not arrive earlier by pretending Dain's boot had improved.

At the fruit stalls Dain quoted the scene in which the duchess mistakes a moonlit roof for a balcony. His imitation was terrible. A carter heard him address the air as my magnificent commander of hearts and decided this was an insult to the knight. He came forward angrily. A fruit seller turned, another man put down his basket, and suddenly the words had an audience. Merrit kept himself between Dain and the approaching carter. He could have stopped there. He could have ordered everyone to be quiet and retained a little of the severe expression he had spent years practicing.

Unfortunately, the carter repeated the line incorrectly. The commander of hearts was not being addressed. It was the duchess speaking to her own reflection in a very silly hat. Merrit explained this before his dignity caught up with him. Then, because Dain looked intolerably pleased, he supplied the next sentence as well. It was longer, worse and absolutely correct. Pell shut his eyes. The fruit seller said she had never understood how the hat stayed on. Merrit told her the ribbon had been tied beneath the duchess's chin. There was a short silence in which everyone discovered how much Sir Merrit knew about that ribbon.

The carter lowered the peg he had continued carrying. Someone laughed. Dain tried to join in and caught Merrit's look. They were still going to the watch house. Literary agreement had not returned the stolen purse, and literary disagreement would not make Merrit hand him over to a roadside beating. The knight told the carters to bring their account inside when they arrived. Then they resumed the same slow walk. Behind them the fruit seller called that she hoped the fourth book would explain the second moon. Merrit said it had better, which was not the answer of somebody hoping to recover anonymity.

At the watch house, Pell handed over the sword and the carters described the wagon encounter. Merrit gave his account of the actual surrender. Dain was taken into the ordinary holding room while the watch dealt with the reports. Before the door shut, he asked whether Merrit would tell him if Vessant got his deserved ending. Merrit said he was making no promise. Dain said this was wise; the author had not kept several of hers. The watch keeper shut the door before Merrit could explain that a delayed revelation was different from a broken undertaking. He went back to his errand with Pell, carrying neither a prisoner nor a convincing secret.

The shop's side window was full of potted cuttings. Merrit had passed it twice in the previous month without needing a parcel. A clerk saw him staring and pointed toward the reading table outside. Collections had been moving there every market morning for weeks because the clerk could manage parcels and the lending stack together. Regular customers had followed the change. No notice had been sent to the occasional knight arriving with an old routine carefully rehearsed. Merrit could ask for a discreet handover, or come another day. He found that, after the discussion of the duchess's chin, neither precaution seemed particularly useful.

He gave the token to the clerk. She brought his actual paid copy, its pages still smelling of paste. She did not make him read aloud or prove that it was for himself. She merely asked whether he wanted wrapping. He said no. Pell offered to wait nearby while he began. Merrit sat at the end of the table and opened the book exactly where he had intended to open it, though with considerably less mystery. Two people asked him about the hat. He pointed them toward the third volume and kept reading.

By the final chapter he was furious. Lord Vessant had become a gardener without speaking to his sister, the abandoned horse had acquired three sentences of apology, and the duchess had chosen a fourth man introduced only that morning. Merrit read the last page again to make certain. Then he borrowed a sheet of paper from the clerk and began a letter to the author. He started with Madam, I have followed this matter with some patience. Pell brought him an ordinary pencil when the first one broke. Beyond the table the market went on, entirely unimpressed that a knight had protected a surrendered opponent and still been defeated by the ending of a book.