Peter & Max - Bill Willingham [16]
“And there’s one more thing you need to know, and this is part of the good magic that’s left in the flute, even after so many ages. Because Jorg battled Bryn three times in that long-ago day, then three times — and only three times in your entire life — you can call on Frost’s powers. You can use it to play a tune that will make any danger, great or small, pass you by.”
“Really?”
“Really,” Johannes said. “Three times only though. Remember that part. Then that particular bit of magic won’t work again, until you pass it on to your son.”
“And you did it, Father? You made danger pass you by?”
“Yes, and I don’t mind telling you that it saved me from a nasty turn or two. But that was all in my brash youth, when I was full of pepper and aching for adventure. I don’t want to scare you with the details of the first two occasions, but the third and final time I had need of Frost’s powers was when I was courting your mother. I wasn’t the only young bravo who’d caught her eye back then. My rival was the grown son of a landed baron, who liked nothing so much as taking offense at every imagined slight, shooting at folks with his arrows, stabbing folks with his spears and chopping with his sword into pretty-near any unwary skull that had the bad fortune to cross his path. And when he wasn’t doing that, he was out riding on his chargers, at the head of armored columns, making war on his many unhappy neighbors.”
“So what did you do?” Peter said.
“What could I do?” Johannes answered. “I was determined to wed your mother and that made the baron’s son awfully prickly. So I played him a sweet tune and he went away to pick other fights. If I can offer you any advice on how to make use of your three gifts, now that you own Frost, I’d caution you to choose wisely how you decide to spend them. Sometimes a situation turns out in retrospect to be not nearly so dire as it may have seemed at first, and only three turns at anything can go by surprisingly fast.”
Without any further words, Johannes handed Frost over to Peter, who took it in both hands and couldn’t tear his eyes off it. He’d held it many times before, but it never felt quite as heavy as it did now. For a long time no one spoke a word, until Johannes finally said, “It’s grown late and we need to make an early start of it in the morning. Time to go to bed, son.”
Peter had many dreams that night and all of them involved wonderful and dangerous adventures, where he had to fight valiantly against impossible odds. And Bo was in every one of them, always nearby, always waiting for him to win her from horrible barons’ sons and other deadly monsters.
In which Bo captures
Peter and then releases
him again.
AFTER A BREAKFAST SPENT MOSTLY IN strained silence, Peter rode with Rose Red back to the main village area, where he dropped her off before taking over the Range Rover and turning it northeast again, then east, navigating around the Farm’s Great Wood, giving it a wide berth. This was the deep forest where tiny but doughty mounted knights of the constabulary rode valorous mice on patrol. Under these dark canopies Kaa lurked in the treetops, proud Bagheera prowled in the night, and the vast and barbarous Bandarlog host cavorted and pestered and performed their secret rituals, away from the sight of man.
True to his father’s instruction, on that fateful evening so many ages past, Peter had the flute named Frost with him. It sat in its small carrying case on the truck