Eselda wiped her fingers absently on her denim dungarees, too used to dog saliva to care. Like most children her age, she wasn’t particularly concerned with tidiness: the dungarees had grass stains on the knees where she’d knelt down earlier, one of her shoelaces was coming untied and, in spite of or perhaps because of the recent, hasty adjustment, the ribbon was loose in her hair. A few coppery brown curls had already escaped and were framing her pretty, heart-shaped face. Eselda looked more like her grandmother than any other member of her family: same bone structure, same eyes, same lips and nose. Her hair and skin tone were significantly darker, though, and she was already set to be taller (not that that was a great achievement, in itself).
The two dogs bounded around, patting each other and running away again in what Eselda could only presume was a game of some kind of doggy tag. Penguin seemed happy, so she could focus all her attention on the ‘sort of’ knight and his pony. She wasn’t entirely sure how someone could be a ‘sort of’ knight now and a full one when they were older, but she didn’t know him well enough to ask for clarification. He had a nice smile, anyway – just like all of the knights in Eselda’s picture books. She smiled back, dimpling.
“Do you fight dragons?” – the job of a ‘sort of’ knight was still unclear – “There’s a dragon near my house.” The immobile rock-dragon, while merely thrilling to behold in the day, became a regular source of terror at night. To the little girl, it had become the equivalent of the monster under the bed. She allowed herself to be led around to the pony’s head and was relieved to see that he was a full pony, not just a ‘sort of’ one. “Hi Hal,” she said shyly to him. “I’m Eselda, and this is Hannah – ” she holds the doll up for Hal to see “ – and that’s Pingu.”
She patted him on the shoulder as the boy had done, standing on tiptoe to reach as high as she could. The ‘sort of’ knight vanished for a moment (Eselda didn’t mind, she was with a pony) and came back with a wooden crate for her to stand on. Tucking Hannah firmly under her arm, she took the boy’s hand, placed her other hand on the side of the crate and clambered up. The crate was fairly sturdy, luckily, and the seven year-old’s face lit up as she stroked the pony’s velvety grey nose. While she petted him, a man in a funny suit came over and started talking to the ‘sort of’ knight about the king, and he called him ‘highness’. At first Eselda was confused, because the man was taller than the boy, but then she remembered that the princes in her stories were often called ‘Your Highness’. Did that mean that this boy was the prince? If so, that would explain why he was only a ‘sort of’ knight, since he had to be a prince too, so he couldn’t be a full-time knight. Eselda shot him a questioning look.
“Are you Prince Tristan?” She queried neutrally. Upon receiving confirmation, she added in an informative tone, “you’re friends with my Uncle Thoth.”
At the prince’s words, she jumped down from the crate and ran into the stable to look for the pony nuts. It took a little longer than it should, not because the nuts were hard to find, but because Eselda was immediately distracted by the presence of the other horses. After skipping up and down the hall to say hello to all of them and introduce them to Hannah, she remembered that poor Hal was probably hungry and dashed back to the sack to dig out a handful of nuts. Holding them with both hands, Hannah wedged firmly to her side with her elbow, she carefully walked back out to where Tristan and Hal were waiting. Getting back onto the crate with both hands full quickly turned out to be impossible, so Eselda just placed them carefully on the top of the crate and watched Hal bend down to crunch them up. His head now at a reasonable height, she scratched behind his ears affectionately, displaying a sense of familiarity with equines.
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