The Storyteller Read Free Page A

stuff I normally wouldn’t watch. Like the news. You know what the big story this morning was? Besides all the tales of pardoned turkeys and all the people going wild back in the USSR?
    The Littlest Knight.
    He’s a boy they found in a lake somewhere in the Middle East. Jordan? Syria? I forget. One of those. He was dead, and his body floated up on shore a few days ago. No one knows who he was, but he was wearing a miniature suit of armor called scale mail. Apparently it’s a type of armor from hundreds of years ago. It’s one of those weird random stories that people love talking and wondering about, but I couldn’t bear to watch much more than a few minutes of the coverage.
    I switched over to the parade instead. The New York City one, obviously. It’s funny; our parades in Thessaly are nothing but Little League twerps and beer-gutty bagpipers. In the big city they get the big floats, the humongous balloons. I started to zone out as I watched it and I imagined that there were balloons of Fiona and Charlie in the mix. Monstrous cartoon versions of them, floating between the skyscrapers.
    Mom sat down next to me and broke me out of the daze. She put her hand on my knee and said, “Maybe next year we can drive down there, get a hotel, and see this thing in person.”
    â€œThat’d be fun,” I said.
    It would be fun. To be a year in the future. To ditch this place and time for a bit. To eat Thanksgiving dinner in a restaurant where no one knows who the hell we are, to eat lobster instead of turkey, to gaze out a window and see people you’ll never see again in your whole stupid life.

 
    THE FINE ART OF FORGETTING
    Many years ago there was a princess named Sigrid, and she lived in a tower made of onyx, which is a type of stone that’s as black as black can be. Sigrid was an only child, destined to inherit a kingdom that stretched from one sea to the next. Every day, she sat on a swing that hung over her balcony at the top of the tower and she watched her subjects work in the market and the fields. Her heart was always bursting with empathy, and whenever she saw someone in turmoil, she called to her trusted advisor, Po, and made a request.
    Make sure that man gets his broken leg fixed.
    Make sure that mother has enough food for herself as well as her children.
    Make sure that family has a warm home in which to live.
    Po would always nod and respond, “Yes, my lady,” but he knew that all requests had to filter through her parents, and her parents, the king and the queen, kept the purse strings mighty tight.
    â€œShe is given to whimsy,” the king said at first. “Indulge her for now, but we cannot afford to do this all the time.”
    All the time is what Sigrid wanted, however. She was a humanitarian, and a humanitarian’s work never ends. She kept passing her requests through Po, and her parents kept growing more and more annoyed.
    â€œI fear we must turn to the Dorgon,” the queen finally said, a shocking but inevitable decision.
    The Dorgon was neither man nor woman. It was a vile beast made of mud that lived in a bog not far from the tower. It possessed one talent, the construction of potions, and while the potions always worked, they came at a steep price. Payment was always in blood.
    â€œI agree with the queen,” the king told Po. “Give the Dorgon our kingdom’s lowliest citizen in exchange for a potion that will cure young Sigrid of her constant do-goodery.”
    â€œAnd what sort of potion might that be?” Po asked.
    â€œWe do not want to silence her kind heart,” the queen said. “We simply want to make the kindness temporary. A potion of forgetting should do the trick.”
    Po was a loyal subject and did not ask any other questions. That night, he went to a tavern, where he sat down next to a man named Tom Rondrigal. Rondrigal was a known liar and cheat, a thief and a scoundrel who would cut the throats of