Pence Read online

  Chapter XXI

  The white bird whistled a tone Pence did not natively understand–one he had only heard before through the Queen’s bedchamber door–and the nut wren flew at Pence without warning. Pence tried to duck but found that against the buffeting winds he was barely managing to stay on his own two feet. The wren closed her talons around his torso and pulled him off the whale’s back.

  “You sneaky–urmph!” Pence grunted. “If I had my sword I’d spit you like a hog in the belly!”

  “Yeah, well, when pigs fly, mate,” the wren whistled.

  “Ha!” Pence snorted despite himself, “you’re funny!”

  The hole directly behind where Pence had been standing puckered, then blasted out a visible gust of hot air.

  “Hot springs!” Pence marveled. “You saved my life! I might have been blown away like a beanbag!”

  The nut wren deposited Pence in the shadow of the white bird, whose talons dug into the whale’s back like a perfectly tilled row of scaly roots. Her eyes and beak and wings were purely white, as unblemished as a young girl’s cheek.

  The whale moaned like a foghorn. The white bird whistled to the nut wren, who translated the foreign notes for Pence: “Someone has been feeding this whale old grog.”

  Pence looked away and tried to twiddle his thumbs, forgetting he had none.

  The whale sounded again, which the white bird translated to the nut wren, who translated for Pence: “He wants to say thank you.”

  Pence looked up in surprise.

  “Not much grog to be had up here, I reckon,” the wren elaborated.

  “Well, I try my best,” Pence conceded with protracted humility.

  “He says it’s the finest he’s ever tasted.”

  Pence made a sour face.

  The whale moaned; the white bird whistled slyly, as if she could already see how everything would unwind; the nut wren translated: “He wonders if there’s anything he can do for you in return.”

  “That depends,” said Pence, putting a stump under his chin, posing with as much charm as he could muster, “how far will those slugs of grog get me?”