No one ever claimed Warren, the Court Jester’s son, was the smartest cookie in the batch. He wasn’t even half-smart… or even barely smart. To be quite blunt, at the age of nineteen he was considered by most of Tonapolis to be the dumbest human being in all the land. No one found him friendly or brave or well-spoken or clean-smelling. He couldn’t cook or ride horses or do chores or think for an extended amount of time without bursting a blood vessel in his head. And, as of recently, he was no longer allowed to be near plants, especially the inedible ones, or use forks for that matter, a result from mistaking his tongue for food that wouldn’t disappear.
So the fact that Warren was the only one to see Princess Nutmeg leave the castle was both a good and a bad thing. If one person was to see her escape, she’d have picked Warren. She would have assumed that he’d forget her departure as quickly as he took his next breath. But she’d have been wrong. It would have taken Warren three breaths and a sneeze to get the job done, which, in fact… it did.
He had followed her like a lost pup as she departed the children’s wing, down the servant steps, into the kitchen, past the basket of sweet rolls where he stuffed four in his mouth and nearly choked before trotting out the door, past several inept guards, into the market crowd. He then stepped on two chickens without notice and crossed the grounds to the old stable in the outer wall. That’s where he stopped following and let the Princess go on alone. Dark places frightened him.
Once the Princess was long gone, an irritating tickle in his nose threw him into a sneezing-spell. Needing a tissue, he grabbed the paper that Meg had hung on the sliding stable door and blew his nose. After he dropped the snotty, crumpled, note on the ground, he turned around and made his way back towards the castle to tell his father about the scary black hole (a.k.a. the darkness of the old stable). Unfortunately, Warren quickly forgot about the ‘hole’ too once he returned to the market, where the two injured chickens were waiting amongst a posse of fierce feathered friends with the lust for revenge on the tip of their sharp beaks.
