Sir Pants and Sir Reddy stood around a lot. Part of the job of being a knight was to stand around guarding things. It took up a lot of their time.
People usually don't realize how boring it is to stand around guarding things until they have to do it themselves. When Sir Pants and Sir Reddy discovered how boring it was, they put their money together and bought a book that they could read out loud to each other to pass the time. It was called Frog and Toad Together. In it was a story about being brave. Frog and Toad looked in a mirror to see if they looked brave. Sir Reddy and Sir Pants thought it would be a good idea to look in a mirror to see if they looked brave. People were always telling them they looked brave, but they weren't even sure how they did it. If they could find a mirror to look in, maybe they could find out what looking brave was and how one went about doing it.
"What is a mirror anyway?" asked Sir Reddy. He asked because Sir Pants knew a lot about how things worked. Sir Reddy only knew a lot about how flags worked. To be precise, he knew a lot about how his flag worked. It had a heavy pole that Sir Reddy had to prop against his body to get just the right balance and it waved in the wind or whenever Sir Reddy had the energy to move the whole ensemble back and forth.
Sir Pants shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know. But look at the picture. There are two Frogs and two Toads. Maybe a mirror is something that makes one person into two, and two people into four."
"It doubles things," suggested Sir Reddy.
"Yes," said Sir Pants. "Maybe it doubles things. How did you know that word?"
"Well," said Sir Reddy, "when Princess Pieplate asked me if I wanted one big piece of pie or if I wanted her to double it by slicing it into two pieces, I told her right away I wanted it doubled. Two pieces of pie are better than one piece of pie."
"Well, actually..." said Sir Pants, but he let the words trail off when he saw the indignant look on Sir Reddy's face.
'How could anyone ever think that two pieces of pie are not better than one piece of pie?' Sir Reddy was thinking. 'I'm not sure I can even listen to this.' He opened his mouth to say something.
"Never mind that," said Sir Pants quickly. "We want to find a mirror, so who is the best person to ask for help?"
"Princess Pieplate?" said Sir Reddy.
"I suppose we could start there," said Sir Pants doubtfully. "I was thinking of the magician up at the top of Caraway Castle, but we will probably pass Princess Pieplate on the way."
As soon as two more knights came to take up the guard, Sir Reddy and Sir Pants started up the winding stairs to the top of Caraway Castle, which was the castle they had been guarding. They did pass Princess Pieplate on the way. Princess Pieplate was on the way to nearly everything. She loved to bake pies so that she could pass them out to everyone she met. As she passed pies to people, she stopped to talk to them to find out any news they might have. Then she passed that news on to the next person along with her pie. It was a hobby of hers, and really the only thing she did at all. After bringing the magician up at the top of the castle one pie a day for many months, she had gathered a lot of useful information. The magician had told her she wanted to be a journalist. When Princess Pieplate asked what was a journalist, the magician said, "Well, you'd have to be born in the twentieth century at least, and even then you could end up as a nosy parker instead." Princess Pieplate asked many, many more questions about all this but in the end all she really got out of it was the word. Journalist. What a beautiful word it was.
But this has almost nothing to do with Sir Pants and Sir Reddy, who were still climbing up stone steps that spiraled upward until you could get dizzy just by looking up.
To be continued...
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