Peter & Max - Bill Willingham [22]
So they ate and they played at small talk, as if a silent pact had been struck to speak only of inconsequential things from now on, until he left and came back and they could take up their lives again as before.
Just before leaving, he went back into their bedroom and unlocked the one closet that was always locked and took out the small wooden traveling trunk that they’d brought with them from their old lives in the Hesse. Under her watchful eye, Peter carefully unsealed the special seals and unlocked the locks — first the obvious ones that anyone could see, and then the hidden ones. There inside were all of the deadly things they no longer had to use. Most of the knives were missing of course. Bo still practiced with them too often to go through the bother of constantly taking them out and putting them back into the multilocked trunk. Peter had already packed away her small knives for throwing and her other knives for stabbing, wishing all the while that he’d been as steadfast keeping up his practice with them as she had. So the knives were already taken, but here were all of the other small implements of murder: the vials full of poisons, those that went into food or drink and those for coating a blade or a dart. And here were other little bottles of deadly liquids to be splashed on a victim, or thicker gels to be touched onto someone’s exposed skin in passing — “Only the merest drop brushed onto the outside of his wrist just so, and then hurry along quickly, so that you aren’t too near when the body drops.”
“How many of these will still be potent?” Peter asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I doubt my instructors ever anticipated someone keeping these things for so long. The prudent thing to do would be to test them.”
“No time,” he said. “I’ll just take a selection and play the odds — trust that they haven’t all lost their bite.”
Peter took out a small metal tube — a blowgun that could fit in the palm of his hand, and whose minuscule darts, smaller than a bee’s stinger, could hardly be felt. He tucked them away into one of the many hidden pockets which Bo still sewed into all of his clothes. Many of the things he ignored — innocent everyday items that anyone might carry, but which had deadly secondary uses. The problem was that everyday items of an age ago would look decidedly out of place today. But here and there he found a few things that still looked appropriate to any age: the plain gold ring with the cleverly hidden spring mechanism; the delicate ivory toothpick; the intricately woven copper wire bracelet. Soon enough he was done.
“I’ve got so many of your little nasties secreted about me, I feel like I’m going to clank and rattle when I walk,” Peter said. “Every metal detector in the airport’s liable to scream its head off.”
“You’ll do fine,” Bo said. “All together that stuff hardly adds a single pound to your weight.”
“Until I unpack your knives and other assorted hardware at the other end and add them to my ensemble.”
“It won’t matter. If I did my job right altering your clothing, nothing will be able to clank and scrape against anything else.”
He gave her a kiss goodbye and she returned it with an unusual hunger.
In which Little Bo Peep
loses her sheep and
Peter Piper picks
a pickled pepper.
MAX PIPER WASN’T AT ALL PLEASED WHEN he went to bed that night, in Squire Peep’s grand mansion. They’d played well after dinner, as well as they ever had, but once again precious little Peter got all the accolades. Peter didn’t deserve the praise, Max thought, and it wasn’t just jealousy, or an older brother’s resentment that a younger one came along and