The Green Dragon Inn #11 - The Last Chapter

[piosenniel]

Cook joins the battle

‘Ladies!’ Cook’s voice cut through the shrieks and laughter. Ginger and Buttercup hastily turned to face her, their towels quickly hidden behind their backs.

‘Yes, m’am?’ asked Buttercup, one hand coming up to push some errant curls behind her ear. ‘The barley-mushroom soup is simmering and we were just getting the bread cut up for the baskets. Is there anything else you’d like us to be doing?’ Ginger coughed, ducking her chin down to hide the giggles she was trying hard to stifle.

Cook set down the two bottles of brandied wine on the table (there was to be a peach cobbler from last summer’s canned peaches topped with a brandied custard sauce). She picked up a dishtowel from the pile near the sink and began talking about how in her day young ladies knew the proper conduct of things. The two young women watched her as she wet the towel and began to wring it out. There was a fair amount of crumbs from the bread they had sliced and they were thinking she meant to wipe them all up. The two were a bit chagrined also at being caught in their horseplay.

‘Now, this is how we did it in my day,’ she instructed them wringing out the thoroughly wet towel. In a trice she had wound the damp towel in a twirling motion and snapped it expertly at the back of a chair. With a wicked smile she advanced toward Ginger and Buttercup, who for a moment only stood staring at her with open mouths . . .

[Fairleaf]

Miz Bella, the dragon-slayer . . .

Reggie nudged his sister with his elbow trying desperately to get her attention. He leaned toward her and hurriedly mumbled something in a low voice.

‘What are you going on about?’ hissed Daisy as quietly as she could. ‘You know ma said we were to be good and do what Miz Bella told us.’ She gave a little snort of disgust and tried to move out of range of her brother’s insistent elbow. ‘Sit still and be quiet,’ she instructed him. She folded her hands on the table in front of her, trying to set a proper example for him.

‘But Daisy,’ he whispered again, scooting right up next to her. ‘I just heard the fellas talking. It’s about Miz Bella.’ He gave her a pleading look, squirming on the bench in anticipation of sharing the news he’d just learned.

‘Hush!’ she said to him, speaking a little louder than before.

‘But Daisy,’ he returned again, speaking now in a loud voice to her, his hand on her forearm. ‘Did you know she fought a dragon once? Killed it, too . . .’

Daisy’s mouth dropped open at her brother’s words and she turned beet red as the heads of others in the room swiveled round to look at them.

[Primrose Bolger]

The fray continues . . .

The battle of the kitchen was engaged! Both she and Buttercup had managed to wet their towels. It was two to one, but Cook, for all the years she had on them, seemed quite adept at keeping out of reach of their snapping towels. Ginger’s legs were stinging where Miz Bunce’s towel had connected, and she was sure there would be welts should she have the chance to look.

All three of them were laughing and shrieking as the skirmish progressed. Butterup had just fallen into a chair she hadn’t seen as she backed up, while Ginger tried to drive off the advancing Miz Bunce.

Then, the back door opened, casting a tunnel of light into the kitchen. And into the light stepped a backlit figure throwing a long shadow across the kitchen’s floor . . .

[Child of the 7th Age]

"That will be enough! There's too much chatterwalling going on here. We have a lot to do today." Miz Bella spoke calmly but sternly as her eyes swept over the faces in the classroom.

"Put the chalk down, Willie," she commanded. "You're not to start your work until I say so. And, as to the other," she added. "You have incorrect information. 'Twas not a dragon. I have never seen a dragon in my life, other than those in the pages of a book. But 'twas a very large and ferocious black bear back in the New Lands."

"A bear? Miz Bella, you saw a bear?" one of the voices piped up from the back of the classroom.

"'Saw' a bear? I did more than see it. I stood some twenty feet away and killed him with my bow. Or," she added modestly, "at least I brought him down with an arrow, and the others rushed in for the final attack. He was up on his hind legs about to maul my friend. So, of course, I had to do something. You see, this bear had been bothering the families in camp for some time so they sent out a party to track him down. I was a sturdy tweener at the time. Of couse, I wasn't supposed to go along but I followed them in secret. They discovered me after a day's march, when they were too far out to send me home."

"Funny, isn't it," Miz Bella mused. "The worst part of that day wasn't killing the bear. It was slogging on to find him. There were hugh expanses of open bog with no cover surrounded by large tracks of impenetrable tuck. That meant we had to push through endless miles of bog hoping to find the animal in the open. At one point the bog was six feet deep, way over my head. But we kept going and finally chanced on him where he had stopped to pull fish out of a muddy pond."

An anonymous voice was heard from the back of the room, "You're too little. You couldn't have killed a bear."

"Believe it or not, but that is a true story." Miz Bella opened the drawer of her desk and took out a wooden box. She removed the box lid and unwrapped the object, which was tucked inside a cloth, and then held it up for the class to see. It was a carving of a ferocious black bear, fashioned out of sandstone. "My friend gave me this to thank me. And he taught me to make carvings like these because I love to work with my hands. But enough of that. It's time for letters."

Miz Bella walked over to a large slate and wrote the following letters in chalk:

b e a r

And then she wrote this:

bear

She drew a picture of a large bear on the wall slate and sounded out each of the letters separately. She even showed how certain letters could be put in different comninations to make another word like "bare" or "bar".

"Alright now. Copy these letters onto your slate. I want everyone to do this ten times. When you have finished, you may come to my desk and bring your slate for checking. Camille and Marigold, I still need you to explain about those books. The rest of you get busy."

[Firefoot]

Willy frowned at Miz Bella's back. He definitely didn't like her. At all. He had been a little intrigued despite himself at the bear story, but not enough to overcome his irritation for being here at all in the first place, having to put away the marbles, and finally having been reprimanded for drawing on his slate. She had never said that he couldn't, after all.

And now he had no room to write the letters. He started to erase the slate with his fingers, then stopped. Why should he have to erase the drawings? He even had a perfect excuse: he would get chalk dust on his hands. A surreptitious glance around showed that there had actually been little cloths with which to erase the board, but he could say he hadn't noticed them before. Which he hadn't. Smiling to himself, he started to write the letters in the little space which he had erased.

b. b. b b b. Now wasn't this easy? Just a little line with a bubble at the bottom. Granted, his letters were hardly as neat as the ones Miz Bella had printed on the board... but they were legible, anyway. And it was boring, writing the same letter so many times over again. How many different ways could he write the letter b? In one stroke. Starting with the little circle. Drawing the line from the bottom up instead of vice versa. This made the letter sloppier, but it was more fun that way.

e. Now this was a little harder. Sometimes the little loop was far to big, sometimes the tail too long. Plus, after about six e's he ran out of space in the previously empty corner. So he started placing the e's creatively all over the slate. One on the dragon's belly. Another on the man's shirt. So there were six e's in a neat little line and four e's all over the slate. Yes, maybe this could be fun.

a. None of his a's were in a straight little line. All of them were scattered, but at least they were easier and neater than the e's (but still not very neat). He looked at them curiously. They sort of looked like b's, except the bubble was on the other side and the stem was shorter. Or not so much shorter, in some cases.

Then the r's. By this time there wasn't a whole lot of space left on the slate, so it was a good thing that r's were such a skinny little letter. They were much harder than they looked, though, especially since his hand was starting to hurt from gripping the chalk. The little curvy line just did not look right. Sometimes it was too short, other times too long. Finally, he produced a reasonable looking r on his last try though. Done, he leaned back for scrutiny of his work. He decided he rather liked it: it was chaotic, almost. Much more interesting than the neat letters Miz Bella had printed on the board. And certainly, his letters were not nearly so neat as those. Willy decided to ignore that particular fact, though; it wasn't like he really cared anyway.

Satisfied, he got up from his seat and walked over to Miz Bella's desk. He noted the boringly plain slates of the other students working around him. Just rows of letters. His was much more interesting. Proudly, he displayed his work to Miz Bella. "I'm done."

[Envinyatar]

Ambushed & wounded by Halflings

‘Ouch!’ A cry of pain issued from the shadowy figure as it stepped through the back door and into the kitchen. The tips of both Buttercup’s and Ginger’s towels snapped soundly against the man’s lower breeches causing him to yelp in pain.

Derufin hobbled across the floor to a chair and sat down rubbing his knees, both of which he could feel stinging and welting up through his breeches. ‘By the One!’ he growled at the trio of armed women. ‘What are you trying to do? Bring me down like some hunted beast!’

The two younger Hobbits were mortified, their faces white as they looked on at the injured man. But leaning against the counter, holding herself up by its edge was Cook. And she was laughing! At him!

He heard the door creak open behind him and he turned about to warn Anyopâ to be wary of attack. Derufin began to chuckle then as he saw the man’s hand extend round the edge of the door, waving a white handkerchief.

[Arry]

‘Well, a bear is pretty close to a dragon,’ whispered Woody, keeping a straight face on. 'And did you hear? they were living rough . . . in a camp!'

He paused to look at his lines of ‘b’s and ‘e’s. Not too bad, he decided. Though glancing up at Miz Bella’s letters on the board he could tell his ‘e’s were far too tall – they were the same height in fact as the ‘b’s. Now how to fix that . . . he extended the leg of each ‘b’ upward until he was satisfied. He cocked his head and looked at the next letter. Hmmm . . . about the same size as the ‘e’, but round with a short stem.

Hanson looked over as his brother began the row of ‘a’s. He sighed at the ease with which Woody’s chalk flew along the slate. He knew Woody would have an easy time of it . . . he was forever drawing clever little pictures on the hearth with a stick charred in the fireplace, or scrawling little scenes in the dirt with his fingers. Hanson gave a critical look at his own slate. The ‘b’s looked tired, he thought, they were leaning every which way. The ‘e’s were odd, seeming like big-headed snakes that sometimes danced on their tails and sometimes ate them altogether. Now the ‘a’s were not too bad, though he found it difficult to make all the little circles round – some of them were rather eggy looking and some of them he hadn’t quite gotten the little leg close enough to the circle. He decided he had better stick to ‘r’s. They looked like his Gammer’s little cane she used for hobbling about in her garden – a straight line with a little bent piece on top.

Woody was still working on his neat row of ‘r’s when Hanson hopped off the bench, slate in hand. Hanson figured he had practiced enough and was now trundling up to the desk to show his efforts to Miz Bella. The little boy grinned widely as he laid the slate in front of the teacher. ‘Well, I did each one ten times; same’s my fingers like Woody told me.’ He leaned in against her desk as she picked up his slate and began to look at it. His curious fingers found their way to the carving of the black bear, and he traced the lines of it. Hanson looked closely at the grey curled lady who sat perusing his letters. ‘Say, Miz Bella . . . ‘zactly how tall was this old bear that you shot?’