Well, wasn't that such good luck that Jakob finally got out of that old witch's trap? What? Oh yes, yes it was very sad that he had to see Katherine in the glass coffin, but don't worry. Now that he is free, you'll soon see what he's willing to do to save her. What about Wilhelm you ask? Alright then, I will tell you what happened to him and it's really not as terrible as you think. At least not yet. You see, he is going to try to escape once again and this time he thinks he will succeed. Sadly he isn't as clever as he thinks he is. He may be a very good conman, but he is not as clever at stealing away as...

A Master Thief

The birds were chirping loudly and a cool breeze was blowing through the window of the tower when Wilhelm awoke. He felt stiff and his bruises were coming along nicely. It was quiet in the castle so he assumed he had slept through the night and it was sometime in the early morning of the following day. He arose and washed his face at the washstand in an effort to try and drag himself into another day in that wretched tower!

Even though it was apparently morning, Will grabbed the wine bottle from the table and putting it to his lips, tipped it up. 'Might as well.' he thought, 'There's nothing else to do.' The bottle was bone dry. With disgust and disappointment Will flung the empty bottle right out the open door of the tower and listened as it rolled down the stairs with pinging sound until it reached the bottom. There was a tiny crash at the end, but he couldn't care less at this point.

He began pacing back and forth in his room, his boredom giving way to despair, but was interrupted by the church bells chime. Listening carefully he counted the chimes. "Ten o'clock! Yes!" he shouted. A renewed vigor came over him. It wasn't too late to try again! This time he would plan more carefully and since the direct approach hadn't worked very well the last time, he felt perhaps a more stealthy approach would be in order. If he remembered correctly, in most castles there were enough convenient hiding places along the way between the tower and the drawbridge; that he should be able to pass through the castle in less than an hour's time unnoticed. He hoped. At this point, if his escape attempt cost him his life, then so be it! Anything was preferable to this! Will paced back and forth in the room as he carefully thought out each step in his escape. He was beginning to think the next hour would never pass, but soon the church bells began to ring.

Standing at the door and peering around the corner he found the hallway empty. He moved quickly and quietly to the top of the stairs and with his back pressed against the wall he listened for anything that told him that someone was on the stairs beyond. Hearing nothing, he leaned forward and looked for the guards, but saw no one, so he moved down the stairs cautiously pausing at the bottom again to listen for footsteps in the hall beyond.

'So far, so good', he thought as he made his way around the corner into the hallway that led to the throne room. This stretch would be particularly precarious due to the lack of hiding places. It seemed that the King was a man of simple tastes and wasn't one for having too many ornamental items cluttering up the castle.

"Why couldn't he be one of the greedy sorts", he whispered to himself, frowning.

Will slid down the hall with his back to the wall and scouted ahead for a place to hide if the need arose, but it was desperately barren. Just then, Will heard footsteps coming towards him and voices in conversation that were growing louder with each passing moment. Slightly panicked, he had to make a hasty decision on a hiding place or face the dungeon. Not a prospect he was looking forward to on any level.

His eyes fell on two large tapestries that were hanging on the opposite wall. Without hesitation, he slid between them and slipped behind one of them just as the voices told him their owners had rounded the corner into the hall. Two courtiers strolled down the hallway toward him in tired conversation having just awakened from their forced slumber somewhere in the rooms beyond. Will held his breath and despite the chill in the air, had begun to sweat. The tapestry was a heavily woven wool piece, heavy with dust and it was damnably hot and nearly suffocating being behind it.

'Oh no!' he thought. It had suddenly occurred to him that his feet were sticking out from under the wall hanging. 'Could you possibly be any more oblivious, Wilhelm?' he chided himself. Slowly he spread his feet apart, heels together, toes in opposite directions, his knees bent awkwardly out to the sides and all the while praying he didn't lose his balance. The two courtiers moved past him and down the hall, taking the passage to their left. Thankfully they hadn't noticed him nor had they taken the stairs to the tower to check on him. Will let his breath out in a relieved puff and straightened out his now cramping legs as he slipped out from behind the tapestry. Quickly he slipped down the hall and planted himself up against the wall to the left of the doorway that led to the throne room.

The next step would be the tricky part, getting across the throne room unnoticed. Will had a pretty good idea how to go about it, but he would have to be very careful. 'Time for a bit of reconnoitering', he thought as he squatted down, turned to face the wall and slowly peered around the corner into the throne room to get a good sense of its layout and not just depend on his memory of the room. After all, he had been just a bit distracted by his own mortality both times he'd been there.

There were a couple of dozen people milling about the room slowly and few of them still sat at the tables trying to wake up. Squires moved about the room tiredly trying to clear away some of the mess from the night before, but weren't being too successful at it. Will noted the long banquet table to his left which was covered with a cloth that draped to the floor, an unholy mess stretched out across the top of it. Sliding down the wall to his knees and making sure no one saw him; Will crawled the short distance across the doorway, past an overturned chair and lifting the cloth, slipped under the table.

One look at the underside of the table made Will scrunch up his face in disgust. " Aw, gah!" he said quietly as he squeezed his eyes shut and turned his head away. The floor underneath was littered with plates, cups, old food and some unrecognizable, lumpy, sticky looking things the used to be "something", but Will didn't want to think about what they once could have been. Now having come this far and having no other choice really, he began to slowly pick his way through the horrid mess without getting into anything too nasty, towards the other end of the table.

Reaching the other end, Will thought it best to take a quick peek before taking the next leg of his escape. What he saw next made him blanch. Upon lifting the cloth, he was confronted with two very large and very hairy knees. One of the courtiers, a hugely rotund fellow with a dark beard sat at the end of the table, still snoring away. 'Oh great!' thought Will. Getting around him to the next hiding place was going to take a bit of doing. However, before he could rethink his plan, the large man had begun to wake up and began shifting around in his chair. He froze where he knelt afraid to move. He was right between the man's knees, so he dared not move and give himself away. This turned out to be not the best of plans. The large man stretched and yawned, then proceeded to pass the longest, loudest fart that Will had ever heard!

From his position under the table, the effect was immediate. Will felt his stomach heave in protest between the mess he had just crawled through on the floor and the horrid aroma that had just engulfed him. He almost lost it right there under the table; not that it would have made much difference considering. Thankfully the large man got up and moved away. After a few moments of kneeling there with his hand on his stomach and the other over his mouth in an effort to keep his breakfast where it belonged, he tried lifting the cloth again to plot his next move.

The next attempt was far more successful than the last. There were two suits of armor standing on pedestals against the wall between Will and the doorway to the great hall leading to the drawbridge. Carefully making sure no one was looking that way, he crawled out from under the table and behind the first suit, standing up quickly so that it blocked the view of anyone who might look in that direction. So far this was looking quite promising. The top of Will's head slowly appeared over the shoulder of the armor and his eyes scanned the room to see if anyone noticed. As it was apparent they had not, he took two steps sideways to the left behind the second suit, his toe slightly bumping the pedestal on which it sat.

It hadn't made any noise, so he thought he had gotten away with it, however as Will looked down he saw not all was well with Sir Knight. This particular suit was holding a sword by the hilt in its right gauntlet with the tip resting on the pedestal. Wilhelm's brown eyes grew large and the blood all but drained from his face as he watched the hilt leave the gauntlet and as if in slow motion, begin to tip, falling forward away from Sir Knight towards the floor. Will quickly poked his arm out under the arm of the armor and caught the sword just before it was out of reach and holding his breath, carefully replaced the sword back into the gauntlet of Sir Knight. Peering around the shoulder he could see that no one had noticed, but realized he was still holding his breath. He let the air out of his lungs in a relieved rush and his shoulders slumped. That had been far too close for his liking.

'Just a bit farther and freedom awaits', he thought happily as he looked around the corner into the great hall, but his happiness was short lived. The hall had the two guards at the drawbridge as expected and a few courtiers wandered about taking in the fresh air from the open door, but it also lacked something that made Wilhelm very disappointed. No hiding places! Now what was he going to do? He had nowhere to go at this point and he was beginning to lose all hope of getting out of the castle.

Something caught his attention out of the corner of his eye. Hanging on the wall just around the corner was a large shield bearing the King's crest and crossed behind it was a sword and a spear. It was what was hanging off the tip of the spear that made Will smile broadly. Someone had thoughtlessly hung a long cloak with a hood from the spear as if it were dumped there during the revelry. Wilhelm was ecstatic as he pulled the cloak down off the spear and pulled it around the corner behind the armor where he was hiding and quickly put it on. Nothing left now but to head for the open drawbridge, freedom and if he were still alive, his brother Jakob!

Not to seem too anxious to leave, Will slipped out from behind the armor and casually drifted around the corner into the great hall. He began wandering around among the few courtiers that were in the hall and slowly meandered his way towards the open drawbridge as if he were just waking up and getting his bearings. Now just a few feet from the door he slyly looked around to see if anyone has noticed him and to his relief it seemed that no one had. Will took one step forward towards the door and freedom.

"I see that my cloak has grown feet and its leaving without me", boomed a great voice from behind him, "and they're tiny ones at that!"

The voice was that of the rather large man that had "perfumed" Will earlier in the throne room. For some unknown reason, he froze in his tracks instead of bolting out the door. He would certainly damn himself later for being such a girl and panicking the way he did. Everyone in the room stopped and looked at the cloaked figure as two guards appeared beside him as if out of nowhere, to pull back the hood and expose the thief.

Will's posture failed him as they grabbed him up and began to drag him back to the King who would certainly throw him in the dungeon this time. He had nothing else he could do but admit defeat. The guards however, didn't even bother to take him to the King; they simply began dragging him to the dungeon. Presumably the King had already left a standing order for them to do so, knowing full well he would never give in that easily and another escape attempt would be made.

However, Will had slightly miscalculated how long his stealthy little journey would take and as they entered the throne room, the church bells began to chime in the noon hour. As the guards escorted him towards the doorway from the throne room that led to the dungeon, Will knew he no longer had a chance. Even if he did get loose, there would be no time to get to the dungeon, the drawbridge or the tower room. The past few days had lead to nothing but failure.

They had just reached the top of the stairs leading down to the jail cells below the castle when the chimes stopped and the air was filled with fiddle music coming from the room beyond. Will knew that there was now little he could do and he would be lost to the spell. The saddest part was that he really did like parties, drinking and pretty women to dance with and would take any opportunity he could to enjoy them, but at this moment his mother's words came back to him from when he was a small child.

"Be very careful what you wish for Wilhelm, for you may find that the having in not nearly as satisfying as the wanting."

The urge to go to banquet was too much for the three of them to ignore and dutifully they headed back towards the music. When they reached the throne room, Will found that he was quite aware of what was going on around him, but it seemed as if the guards didn't really care anymore and they just joined right in as if it were a natural thing to do. 'Perhaps because they have been at this for so long, they've long since given up caring', thought Will.

As if being compelled by some unseen force, he could not help but join the banquet. As a servant walked by with a tray laden with cups of wine, Will grabbed one as it passed by and turned around in a complete circle in an effort not to spill his drink. By the time he had come to a stop, he had already drank nearly half the cup. The effect of the wine was fairly immediate and he began to feel quite giddy. Either that or it was the spell, he really couldn't tell which, not that he cared at the moment really.

A young man about Will's age came over to him and draped his arm around Will's neck. The young courtier had fluffy blond hair and deep blue eyes and was quite handsome. If was apparent that he had been hitting the wine quite heavily in a very short period of time and Will wrinkled up his nose and blinked rapidly as the smell of the alcohol on his breath invaded his face at close range.

"Welcome to banquet my friend!" the young man said drunkenly as he waved his cup about spilling bits of wine in the process. "I thought you never arrive!"

Apparently what happened while you were not under the spell wasn't remembered while you were under it, for the young man apparently didn't recall Will was supposed to be a prisoner and not a party guest and he wondered if the opposite were true as well. He supposed he would find out tomorrow.

"Eat, drink and have a good time my friend, for tomorrow we may die!" puffed the young man into Will's face, "And I predict that good time may be yours very soon, eh?"

He had nodded towards the back of the room and Wilhelm's gaze followed. There near the back wall stood a group of young girls who were giggling and whispering back and forth amongst themselves as they stared and smiled in his direction. The young man hugged him tightly with the arm he had draped around his neck and moved off in search of another glass of wine. A servant came by with a tray laden with food distracting Will from the group of ladies.

"Fruit sir?"

"Um…no… thank you."

When Will turned back around he was taken aback by the fact that he was now surrounded by the bevy of beauties. There were blonds, brunettes and even a redhead. Tall and short, buxom and lithe, all were as young and beautiful as any man could have wished for.

"Well, hello ladies", said Will, as a cautious smile spread across his face.

They all giggled at once and then moved in toward him vying for a position to take his arm, touch his shoulders or smooth his hair; all the while smiling at him and giggling. Will went round from face to face saying hello to each of them, one at a time. It appeared that the female courtiers were thrilled at having a new toy to play with in their midst.

The thought that this might not be so bad after all was beginning to form in his mind. Will did some quick math in his head and the answer he came up with made his quite pleased. 'There are nine of them and I have but nine days left', he thought to himself as he smiled broadly and surveyed the gift the spell had left him with. "Huh, one for each night", he said out loud feeling quite pleased.

As the banquet went on into the night, "King" Wilhelm held court with his newly found harem and any thought of escaping or his brother were soon forgotten. Even though he was now thoroughly under the spell he was still aware of the fact that he only had a short time left to enjoy himself, but at this point his only thought was that if he were going to die, at least he was going to die a happy and well satisfied man.

Thanks as always to my readers and reviewers. I love hearing what you have to say, so please keep letting me know what you think.