Pence Page 4

  Chapter III

  The gardener swung his knife down on the dumbfounded boy’s head, cutting insatiably, as a passionate cook dices vegetables with artistic flair, stray bits and flecks flying every which way.

  Catching his breath, he stared at what his hand had wrought by instinct, the spontaneous antithesis of what had taken all his last ageless morning to create. He squinted, keenly aware of the cold dusk air on his listless eyeballs, and tilted his head to one side so as to properly evaluate the pattern of the cuts he had made: Pence had thus been capped with a criss-crossing crop of stumpy spikes, the hairstyle of a boy who has never been properly introduced to soap and hot water.

  “We’ll wait on a beard until you’ve proven you can handle one,” the old man said as he placed the knife on the ground next to the discarded purple jewel. “Brace yourself, Pence. This next one is really going to rock your mind.” He plucked from a concealed pocket in his tunic a pair of pellucid green gemstones, iridescent circles of a similar size to the metronomic heartseed.

  “To be your eyes, for they capture light without dissolution. These were once her earrings,” the gardener told Pence, not knowing whether he truly heard or not, “that princess of mine.”