A Fool's Bucket - Ch. 3.2

A/N: I have no idea why it took me this long to name the queen, but there it is.

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Buck sprinted along the wide main corridor of Pires's private wing, down a narrow spiral stairwell that led to the various large halls of the palace. Skirting around the edge of the meeting hall, he burst through the double doors onto the landing at the top of the stairs that Victane and Hilene had been guarding. He bounded down the stairs three steps at a time, carefully balanced on tiptoes and never even remotely in danger of falling. He twirled around as he leapt for the floor and landed facing them. Victane scratched his eyebrow and wordlessly handed him his bucket.

"Oh, right," Buck said, relaxing from his landing pose and stepping forward to take it. Didn't realise I'd left this."

"You set it down when you did your cartwheel thing-a-ma-jig," Victane said, gesturing vaguely towards the strip of carpet leading up from the entrance. "You seemed a bit, er, out of it, if you catch my drift."

Buck put his hand through the bucket's two handles, holding it around the crook of his elbow. He grinned and started gesturing all over the place. "Ah! Maybe so, my friend, but today has begun anew. Everything is back the way it should be and I am never leaving my bucket's side!"

He whirled the bucket around his wrist, throwing it onto his other arm. Oops, forgot the brace for that.

Victane chuckled - and Hilene at least looked round.

"Well, well," Victane said, "You and the Duchess cooking up something fun?"

"Oh, absolutely. Our biggest plan yet." Buck nodded vigorously.

"You say that every time," Hilene mumbled, pausing from his play with the puzzle box.

Buck pressed his shoulder into his cheek and faced him. "And have I ever let you down?"

Hilene fidgeted with the box for a moment, eyes narrowed. Then he rolled his eyes and grinned, ever so slightly. "No, you haven't."

Buck took the periodicals from a pocket inside his coat - a bulky purple doublet - and carefully placed them in his bucket. "Well then, you'll just have to trust me." He looked up from the bucket. "And play your part when the time comes, eh?"

Victane put his hands on his hips and thrust his belly outwards. "Oh, of course. We're here for whatever you need." He nudged Hilene. "Aren't we?"

"I'm not wearing the hat again," Hilene muttered. "But yes."

"Fantastic," Buck said. He held the bucket at his side and straightened his doublet. "Now, I have to go disappear into the walls, but assuming your schedules haven't changed I'll check in with you later in the week to let you know what I need."

"You got it," Victane said. Hilene nodded.

Buck smiled, then headed back up the stairs - two at a time instead of three on the way up. For some reason he always had more difficulty on the way up, which didn't bode enormously well for where he was heading. He pressed the double doors slowly open and slipped through. The doors opened onto the side of a corridor that stretched out far away on the right, less far on the left. Straight in front of him was another set of smaller double doors, which technically led to the room he was heading for, but instead he turned left and padded along the soft red carpet.

He turned right onto a narrower corridor. It was much darker, with only a single torch at each end lighting the way. There were a few narrow doors on either side on the way down, which servants often passed through carrying food and cleaning supplies and scrolls for the meetings. For the room that he was skirting around was the palace meeting room, where Pires, Erson and Queen Merhen would soon be meeting.

Soon he had reached the torch at the other end. To most occupants of the palace, this was a dead end. But to Buck, the most conniving fool in Resador, it was simply a well disguised stone door with no handle. He held up the bucket so that the bottom faced forwards, one hand over the opening so the periodicals didn't fall out. Carefully, he pressed it against the middle of where he knew the door was, about head height, and grinned as he heard the click.

He quickly leaned against the door, opening it far enough to slip through into the darkness. There were no lights in here, but it didn't matter. He knew exactly where the steps were carved into the stone on his left, knew which ones sloped up at the sides or in the middle. Much of this information came from trial and error and bloody noses.

At the top of the stairs, about fifteen feet off the ground, he stepped onto some wooden slats and was immediately assaulted by the light of the meeting hall. If someone were to walk into the hall by the double doors he'd turned left at, and looked very closely at the furthest away on the right of the stone arches supporting the vaulted ceiling, they might have seen a small gap towards the base of the arch. Buck emerged from this gap, and nestled in the join of the arch and the wall. He rested with his legs up, braced against the arch, and one of the periodicals balanced in his lap, a quill poised to take down notes in any blank gaps he could find.

A moment later, the double doors swung open and Pires walked in, with Erson and Queen Merhen in tow. They were chattering quietly as they led a crowd of diplomats and administrators to a large wooden table in the centre of the room. Buck raised one eyebrow as they resolved into boring grey garb on one side, vibrant blues and yellows on the other. Although, with that many Resadorian officials in a row, even Buck had to squint to make out the actual shapes of people rather than just blue and yellow squares. He started to doodle a diagram of the table beside the date on one of the newspapers as Pires lead their royal guests up a wide dais at the far end of the room.

There were three chairs on the dais, over which Buck and Pires had spent hours of the previous week debating. They'd eventually settled on Pires in the centre, to maintain her authority and Queen Merhen on her right hand side. This had meant Erson being relegated to the left, but even before the row between the two of them, any diplomat worth their salt knew not to prioritise the Queen's ego above any other.

The meeting started amicably enough. Buck zoned out after a while because most of the discussion seemed to be about the raising of sheep. Buck's mother raised sheep - she had done before she and his father moved south, and she did now that she had returned north. He'd visited the community a few times, even minded a flock once. It was peaceful, in between the chaos of running around after the sheep and realising he was nowhere near as fit as he thought he was. Theoretically there were breaks in the day to compose songs and come up with new acts, lounging around in the sun on the soft green grass. But in reality it just rained, and rained, and so far away from Pires's court he was stumped for inspiration.

"Well, yes, shepherds are the cornerstone of our society," said one of the Resadorian representatives, a tall skinny man with spiky hair.

"Quite, quite," agreed a middle aged woman with a pointy chin.

"Yes, indeed," Pires said. There was a slight edge in her voice, which Buck knew meant she was so bored she was angry. "I think we can all agree on that."

Buck chuckled. They could all agree on that, which was probably why everyone had stayed on the topic of supporting shepherds - without any actual policy proposed - for so long. But apparently not everyone was in the mood to hide from a fight. Queen Merhen cleared her throat.

She was shorter than Buck thought she'd have been. Her long grey hair he also found suprising, imagining it would have been held back in a tight bun or cut short or something. His mother's was always either short or held out of her face, and he didn't know many other women from the northern duchy of Eliador. But her voice was loud and sharp and so close to how he'd imagined it that he thought he must have encountered her before, maybe as a small child before his parents moved south.

"Yes, well, perhaps if we all paid more attention to our shepherds, we would not be importing so many of these new fish, new pulses." Merhen gestured with one hand, then the other, as if she was orating in front of a crowded Great Hall, rather than a chilly meeting hall on a Tuesday morning.

Buck quickly scribbled down her quote in short-hand then glanced at Pires. Ships had been setting off from Resador port for a long time, sometimes even in the direction of the island that Buck's father had travelled to. New foods and materials had been flooding in from various islands that actually were uninhabited, and in some cases where there were people around trade relationships had been established. These days, Resador was a culinary paradise.

Or not, according to the Queen.

"Well, I'll cross gorentbeans off the menu for tonight."

Buck was confused for a moment. Pires's lips hadn't moved at all and in fact that voice was an awful lot lower than hers usually was. Buck gasped, glad he was so high up and far away from the others. It was Erson who had spoken. Buck focused on scribbling ferociously down the margins of the pages.

"I am simply saying that there is nothing wrong with some hearty lamb for a feast," Merhen said, addressing Pires rather than Erson.

"Well maybe there'd be more lamb around if you hadn't sent the shepherds to war," Erson muttered. "Your army is living on gorentbeans - brought up from here!"

"Actually, no matter the situation in the war, gorentbeans for the north may be a valuable development for the long term. There's lots of interesting new products to be gained from the south," Pires said, glancing from Erson to Merhan and back.

Gut-wrenchingly, the big white and black clock behind Pires's chair had just struck ten to three, which meant Buck had to go. He always left ten minutes before the end of a meeting, to ensure nobody asked questions about his absence afterwards. He was almost certain Pires was about to broach the subject of further relationships in the south, namely with the people who had taken his father.