The "Divine" Bovine In Line

"Coalsprit... Coalsprit..."

Coalsprit stirred at the sound of his name being whispered on the wind. He opened his eyes. It was not yet dawn. He closed them again. Whatever spirit or beast wanted his attention'd have to try harder than that at this hour.

What followed was the unmistakeable — wump! — of a boot being hurled against his window, and a hoarse cry of,

"COALSPRIT!"

He groaned, reluctantly leaving the nest of capes, blankets and scrolls he'd dosed off in the night before, hobbled to the window and gasped.

"Princess?! Is that you?"

"Call me that again and I'm aiming for your face with the other boot!" Princess Danaë scowled up at him, hurriedly retrieving her (filthy) boot from his herb garden.

"Fine, fine..." Coalsprit rubbed his eyes and yawned, retrieving his spectacles from the windowsill. "What do you want, Danaë?"

"I need you to come on a quest with me." The princess scratched the back of her head guiltily. "Right now."

Coalsprit blinked at her, cold and tired and pissed off about the muddy footprint on his window. "What possible use could I be on a quest?"

"You're the town apothecary: don't sell yourself short! The immense magic and knowledge in that head of yours... who better for a quest?"

Coalsprit raised an eyebrow. "The King's sorcerers have all those things and more, so what's the truth?"

"You're the most magical person I know who wouldn't grass me out to my grandfather..." Danaë grimaced. "If he finds out what I've done this time I'm done for. C'mon, Coalsprit, be a pal, please?"

The goblin sighed wearily. "Alright, don't fret, I'll be right down. What's the terrain?"

"Cobbles and boggy fields."

Coalsprit scowled. "I'll bring my crutches then. Hold on a minute."

"Thank you!" Danaë beamed as she plonked herself down in her friend's garden to wait.

Their friendship may have seemed unusual at first glance, but she and Coalsprit went way back. Friends since childhood; they were practically the same age, well, as far as anyone could guess Coalsprit's age. Coalsprit had been found down the mineshaft of a corrupt feudal lord by some heroic types when raiding the lord's lands. When first rescued, covered in soot, rag-worn, shivering, and with a problem in their leg-bones which never fully healed, these heroic types had thought Coalsprit to be some kind of adorable human waif girl and immediately took them in as a sort of page. Upon being cleaned up and fed Coalsprit turned out to be a foul-mouthed goblin child who stole things and hissed when touched. Suddenly the heroes were a lot less fond of their page, dumped Coalsprit in a halfway house where girls were trained to be healers and high-tailed off to their next adventure. Coalsprit lasted long enough there to teach himself letters, before deciding he was a boy, which the healers decided was unacceptable, so they palmed him off on an apprenticeship to the local apothecary. Fortunately, the apothecary, Mr Thistletwist, was a kindly orc who treated the young goblin as his own child, giving him all the love and patience he needed as he trained his successor. This was when Danaë had met him. As youngsters they'd bonded over their love of swearing and chasing Mr Thistletwist's familiar around the garden.

Unfortunately, Mr Thistletwist had waited until he was 105 years old before taking on an apprentice, and he died of old age halfway through the ten-year apprenticeship program; so Coalsprit Thistletwist was the kingdom's first mostly self-taught apothecary. Weirdly, that didn't seem to slow him down; if anything he was more dedicated than the high-faluting elves who studied the craft in academies.

"Oi! Get your armoured rump off my lemongrass!" Coalsprit yelled, causing Danaë to jump up apologetically with a loud clank.

"Sorry mate; I thought it was just regular grass."

Coalsprit muttered something about her being 'chronically unobservant' as he crutched out of his front door and locked it, but not before letting his familiar — a mummified cat — leap onto his shoulders.

Danaë grimaced. "Do you have to bring her?"

The mummy hissed as she curled around her charge's neck. "Nobody 'brings' me anywhere, child; I come and go as I please. I am accompanying you because I thought I might be of assistance, but if I'm not wanted I'm sure there are some rats that need catching. Well?"

Danaë sighed as the trio made their way down the street. "I'm not a 'child' Pachisi, I'm one-and-twenty... but I'm sorry I was rude to you. Necromancy just... spooks me a little."

Pachisi scoffed. "If it startles a pup like you how do you think I feel? I slumbered in Duat for centuries, only to be rudely awoken one day by an orc who named me after a boardgame, and now I spend my time babysitting this fool goblin and his rude human friend."

"I am sorry about all those times we chased you as kids," Coalsprit mumbled. "We didn't realise you were, y'know, people-smart."

"Or that you could talk." Danaë added.

"I am smarter than most people, thank you very much, and I don't waste my time talking to fools who chase demi-gods for entertainment." she yawned and stretched, closing her eyes. "To that end, wake me when we've arrived, Coalsprit."

"Yes Madame Pachisi." Coalsprit waited until his familiar was snoring gently before turning to Danaë and muttering. "She may have let you off the hook, but I fully intend to complain all the way there."

Danaë smirked. "I wouldn't have it any other way."

*

After Danaë had had her ear thoroughly talked off about the time, the weather, the unevenness of the cobbles, the bogginess of the fields, the sleeping weight of Pachisi, the footprint on the windowpane and the lemongrass her steel-encased buttocks had destroyed, they finally arrived at their destination.

"Here we are." she said, gesturing broadly with her arm.

Coalsprit squinted as he tickled Pachisi's chin to wake her up. "It's a field with a cow in it."

"That's a bull, you idiot." Pachisi muttered.

"How is this different from all the other fields with cows in we passed to get here?" asked Coalsprit.

"Well for one thing that's still a bull..." added Pachisi.

Danaë pointed. "Look at what's in its mouth."

As the group watched, the bull, whose mouth was moving in that slow, circular bovine chewing motion, belched. As he did, a gold tassel poked out of the corner of his mouth. He kept chewing.

Coalsprit peered at it. "That looks an awful lot like the end of the Golden Girdle of Royal Inheritance..." he turned to Danaë with a look of dawning horror, "The priceless one that's bestowed upon the next in line to the throne, and has been for generations."

Danaë was now scarlet. "Mm-hmm."

"Danaë, how...?"

"I took it off because it kept clanging around in my armour when I was doing cartwheels." the princess said quickly without making eye-contact.

"You were doing cartwheels."

"Yes."

"At night."

"Yes."

"In most of a suit of armour."

"Yes, I was training."

"For what?! And in a random field somewhere?"

"Look, the noise of my stealth agility training wakes Grandpa up if I do it in the castle grounds, alright? Lay off!" Danaë yelled, more hotly than she meant.

"Alright, alright... sorry I asked." Coalsprit patted her shoulder-plating gently, making it jangle comfortingly.

He sighed to himself. It wasn't Danaë's fault she was next in line to the throne. She had been a distant relative to the ruling family via several bastard heirs. Her immediate family were mostly assassins and mercenaries by trade. Her mother, Hemlock Grace, had been a famous assassin and iconoclast. Defying tradition, she'd killed her husband during childbirth (he'd made some crass joke about her not pushing hard enough. She'd thrown a poisoned knife into his throat before he even finished laughing. The midwife, a mother of five, swore up and down that he tripped and fell onto the knife so Hemlock got off scot-free.) Danaë had all the subtlety of a brick that liked running around with maces as soon as it could walk, so she had been training to be a mercenary. She even had a motivating quest; to avenge and/or find her mother. On Danaë's tenth birthday, Hemlock either been murdered or had staged her murder. Danaë assumed the latter; there was no body, but there was a mysterious vellum map and a diary Danaë was sure her mother never kept at the scene of her dramatic "death."

Danaë trained for the rest of her childhood to become a bloodthirsty mercenary who'd stop at nothing to find her answers, but she never achieved her goal as she'd been cursed with an ambitious great uncle. Hellebore Grace connived, backstabbed, and frontstabbed his way from an obscure illegitimate relative to King Hellebore I. His reign lasted two months before he was swallowed by the Infernal Realm after four separate demons realised he'd pledged their soul to them, and so the crown passed to Hellebore's mild-mannered brother, Hesitancy Grace, Danaë's grandfather. She had to abandon her dreams of macing people in the face for money to rule a kingdom, and now a bull was munching on her precious royal heirloom. Life just wasn't fair sometimes.

"But what do you want me to do about this?" said Coalsprit after a while. "I'm not a farmhand."

"Y'know," Danaë gestured vaguely with her hands. "Magic the girdle out of the cow."

"Bull."

"Whatever, Pachisi."

"(Insolent whelp...)"

"Why do we need to use magic for that?" Coalsprit frowned. "That girdle's going to come out of that cow eventually."

"Ew! I'm not going to wear something that's been encased in something else's bodily fluids!"

"Don't you polish your armour in the blood of your enemies?"

"That's different; blood is a classy bodily fluid, plus it hues the steel a nice maroon. I don't want to wear a piece of golden string that's been in literal bullshit!"

Coalsprit sighed. "Fine, fine, but I can't just 'magic the girdle out of the cow', as you so eloquently put it. It's been partially digested, if I remove it with a spell the king is still definitely going to know that something ate it."

Danaë kicked a clump of dirt. "Shit!"

"Well that was my first suggestion but you poo-pooed it."

"That's not even funny." Danaë snort-laughed, before grasping at her hair anxiously. "What are we going to do, though?"

Pachisi yawned as the dawn broke behind them. "In my time in Egypt, bulls with unique markings were worshipped as heralds of the god Ptah, you know."

"What a tale, I'll be sure to let my grandfather know as he disinherits me." Danaë scowled, dodging Pachisi's claws.

"Wait... no, Pachisi saved you, Danaë!" shouted Coalsprit, mildly startling the bull. (It snuffed loudly in response, considered things, then went back to chewing.) "What if we make it look like the bull is some kind of magic bull, that it ate the girdle because it IS next in line to the throne? I can perform a simple aesthetic transformation spell no problem."

"Are you daft?!" Danaë scoffed. "If you do that I'll never be queen... oh gods, if you do that I'll never be queen! Coalsprit, Pachisi, you're geniuses!"

Coalsprit smirked and rubbed his hands together. "Alright, Danaë, hold my crutches – thanks - now, Pachisi, what were the special markings the bulls had to have?"

And that was the story of how – thanks to a goblin apothecary, a soon-to-be mercenary, and an extremely dead cat – Apis I; a black bull with a white triangle on his forehead, a scarab shape under his tongue, a white vulture's wing outline on his back, a white crescent moon on his right flank, and a golden, almost girdle-like, band of fur around his belly, ascended to the throne.