The children piled in, pulling cushions from the couches and settling themselves comfortably down. One blonde-haired tot waddled over to the old man, "Fee," she wisped.
"So, I'm losing even more of my name, am I now?" asked Grandpa Feeg, before reaching down and lifting her up onto his lap. "There now," he whispered, while she squirmed in his arms. "Settle down and I'll tell you a story of when your Uncle Rath was a little older than you are now."
"Ruwalk noticed it first. In those days he had long black hair and drew admiring glances from all the girls."
"Not Unca Ru?" squealed a messy boy from the floor.
"Yes, that Unca Ru," replied Alfeegi. "He was completely vain and spent three hours brushing his hair every morning."
Several of the little girls laughed.
"He also spent four hours putting on make-up," the old man said, miming the application of lipstick to his face. "And six hours getting dressed. After all that it was time to go to bed, so Ruwalk took another four hours to do that properly. We didn't see much of him, but what we saw was breath-taking."
Ruwalk normally focused completely on his toilette, which means that you do yourself up in the morning, not that you need to pee, so it was unusual that he was the first to realise that anything was wrong. He burst out of his bedroom, eyeliner and mascara in one hand and tissue paper hanging from his shoe. I was walking down that way, the Dragonlord had sent me to rouse him and get some work from him. Lykouleon, the old Dragonlord, was a real harridan and worked us to the bone. We didn't get any time off, no holidays at all and if you were sick, or on a diplomatic trip, when you got back there would be rooms full of paper that you had to read and sign before you were allowed a bite to eat. It was terrible hard in those days.
I rarely left the castle. The one time I did, I had to empty the north tower and that's awful cold. I caught pneumonia after working seven days and night straight through and that's why I'm sickly today. I couldn't slack off, because if I even took a brief rest, Lykouleon would run in and throw another box of papers into the room, cackle and run off again. No-one liked him, but he was the Dragonlord and we had to do what he said.
Anyway, this day Ruwalk ran out of his room and banged into me. I fell heavily and rapped my head off the tiles, gaining a small concussion, but nothing that would give me time off work. He asked me where Rath was.
"Rath?" I said, climbing slowly to my feet and trying to remember my own name. "who's Rath?"
"Rath, the Dragonlord's son!" he cried, grabbing me by the lapels and shaking me hard. "Where is he?"
Well, as you can imagine that made me woozy and I slumped back down onto the floor. Ruwalk yelled at me to get up until Tetheus showed up and he started to yell at him instead.
In those days Tetheus was remote. Scribes followed him around to count and record the words he spoke and everything was written into a big black book that was handed to the Dragonlord at sunset each day. At that stage, the first two pages had been filled and there were still several hundred more to go. Tetheus was so cold and aloof that the corridor got colder and colder the closer he got and ice started to form on my jacket when he stood beside me.
Tetheus grunted instead of saying hello and asking what was going on. The scribes argued for a moment about whether that went into the book or not. Ruwalk started shaking, because Tetheus was the castle policeman. He didn't have any friends by order of the Dragonlord as his job was arresting people, locking them up in the dungeon and torturing them until he got bored.
"Someone called Rath appears to be missing," I mumbled from the floor. "And my head hurts."
Tetheus nodded and walked off. When he was out of sight, Ruwalk grabbed me, hauled me off the floor and dragged me away, babbling about this Rath the whole while. We soon gathered quite a trail of people, although none of them were looking for Rath. You see, quite a few girls in the castle found me very attractive. My hair was long and blue and I'd such a sad air, due to my terrible life. They pitied me and wanted to look after me. Now, a smaller number, but still a significant one also fancied Ruwalk and somehow they'd gotten it into their heads that something was going on between us. They held meetings once a week and lived for moments like these, where Ruwalk would march my barely-conscious body about the castle. They'd squeal if we kissed and so on.
Anyway, with a crowd like that around, it was hard for us to search for Rath, since they blocked all the areas that he might be hiding and screamed and screamed when we crawled into the bushes or went to any of the other dark and secret places where he liked to hide.
So night fell and there was no sign of the boy. Ruwalk was terrified to talk to the Dragonlord, as he feared that one of the vaults had been filled with paperwork just for him, so when we arrived at the Dragonlord's hall, he pushed me inside and closed the door after me. I thumped on it and pulled at the door, but he was holding it closed on the other side, so there was nothing I could do and eventually I turned to the Dragonlord and told him that his only son was missing.
He didn't really care, but thought that there should be some sort of official search party, so he told me to find Kai-Stern, who'd just come home and ask him to join in.
I agreed, shouted at the door for an hour, then climbed out the window and down the ivy, when Ruwalk refused to let me out. I think he stayed there until he fell asleep. The Dragonlord was at breakfast the next day, but not dinner, so there you go. Anyhow, since Kai-Stern was just home from a big trip - he was the Foreign Secretary at the time and was away a lot - I knew that he'd be in one of the paperwork rooms.
The first two rooms were empty, which was strange, as he's very bad at filling out paperwork and is given a little less than the rest of us, since the Dragonlord would never be able to send him away if he had to do the same amount as me or Ruwalk. I found him in the third room, curled up in a pile of parchment and snoring his head off. At his place, sitting up at the big desk was little Rath, doodling all over the Dragonlord's official forms and filing them away.
He gave me a picture of myself, done out in crayon on a F79J Requisition form and it's still up in my office, where I look at it every day.