Peter & Max - Bill Willingham [85]
“By the same token, I can’t let you rob him. An adept of my society who stooped to rob his victim would be considered nothing more than a cheap thug. I’d be slain by my own masters if I let that happen, and rightly so.”
“Then it looks like we’ve reached an impasse. I don’t know how to resolve it.”
“You’ll just have to think of something, Peter. You always did consider yourself most clever.”
“Peter?”
“Yes, you’re Peter.”
“You know who I am?”
“I recognized you the first moment you spoke, and it’s breaking my heart that you haven’t recognized me.”
“But I — I don’t —”
“It’s me, Peter. It’s Bo Peep.”
PETER AND BO TALKED in the Bishop’s bedroom, sitting on the edge of his huge bed, while he slumbered away, snoring quietly, somewhere in its vast middle. In the ten years since he’d last seen her, Bo had grown into a beautiful woman. Like a vision in a dream, her features slowly revealed themselves out of the shadows, as Peter’s eyes adjusted to the dark. He held her hand tightly as they talked, afraid that she might fade away into the insubstantial vapor of dreamstuff that he still worried she might be.
“What happened to you,” Peter said, “after that night with the wolf?”
“I got hopelessly lost,” she said. “I wandered for three or four days, and then a terrible man found me. He kept talking about all of the things he might do to me, if I wasn’t good enough to pass muster with the Rowan House.”
“What’s that?”
“One of the names by which we’re known to outsiders. He sold me to them, which was a blessing, considering some of the alternatives he’d described, and they raised me to be what I am now.”
“A killer.”
“Yes, just like everything else in this terrible world, except that I finally resigned myself to becoming good at it, perhaps so that I’d have a decent chance not to be the victim of the next monstrous thing that found me.”
“So what do we do now, Bo?”
“About the Bishop?”
“No — well, yes, about him too, but also about the rest of our lives. We can’t just resolve our business here and then go on our separate ways again. I’ve found you at last — or maybe you found me, but I’m not about to let you go again, after all these years.”
“I’m afraid you’ll have to,” she said, her voice breaking with insistent emotion that refused to be entirely suppressed. “I’ve sworn binding oaths. I can’t leave the Rowan House, and you can’t come back there with me. Outsiders simply aren’t allowed to learn our secrets and live.”
“I’ve had to swear a binding oath or two myself.”
“Then it seems we’re both stuck.”
“No, I can’t accept that. There has to be a way. Let’s start with the determination that somehow, some way, we’re both going to stay together from now on, and work our way backwards from there.”
They sat silent for a long time, before Bo said, “It seems that the only fair and honorable way out of a binding oath is if we’d each sworn to an earlier one that conflicts with the others.”
That’s when Peter became truly excited, grabbing Bo by each arm. “Bo, you’re a genius! I could kiss you!” And then he did.
HUGO THE CHARITABLE, Bishop of Hamelin, the Weser River Valley and Lower Saxony, woke with a pounding ache in his head and a foul taste on his lips.
“That’s the taste of the antidote,” Bo said, in reply to the sour faces the Bishop made. “It’s not pleasant, but it does overcome the sleeping mist, and we needed you awake sooner than you’d have done so naturally.”
“What’s the meaning of this outrage?” Hugo sputtered, trying to sit up in his bed. It was hard to be sure in the room’s darkness, but he thought he could see two strange figures looming over him, a man and a woman, both dressed in dark clothes, such as what low villains and night skulkers might wear.
“We need you to marry us,” Peter said, with a broad grin splitting his face.
“And be