Deeds of Honor Read Online Free PDF

swore to perform any daring deed he named to ransom her father and her kingdom. And that wicked king laughed, but then bethought him that he could seem merciful at no risk to himself by setting her impossible tasks. This he did, twelve of them, and then demanded that they be all performed in so short a time that not even one could be accomplished. Torre agreed, and would have started at once, but the wicked king told his soldiers to lock her in her chamber.
    In the dark of night, and despite the wicked king's guards, Torre escaped out her window and down the vines that climbed the palace. She had with her little enough: the supper she had not eaten, her sturdiest clothes, a sack to bring home the proof of her deeds, and her determination. In the stable, where she expected to find her own mount, she found instead a tall horse as black as her own hair and eyes, and around its neck a string of twelve lumps of coal. Its eyes were bright as stars; its hooves shimmered, as if standing in a stream of running water and not on straw.
    It bore no saddle or bridle, and when Torre would have fetched her own saddle, the horse was before her, blocking her from the tackroom. So Torre, determined that death was better than giving up, dared to mount the strange horse bareback, and rode off into the night, and the wicked king's anger, in the morning, came hard upon those he blamed for her escape.
    The deeds demanded were every one difficult and dangerous, and though the black horse bore Torre from place to place more swiftly than any mortal horse, it was Torre herself who faced heat and cold, hunger and thirst, danger from man and beast and monster, storms of wind and storms of rain, to achieve them.
    Time passed, for her, and her skin bore the marks of sun and wind and age as well as the scars of injuries. Her hair, once night-black, whitened year by year until it was white as plum blossoms. And one by one, as she accomplished the tasks, the coals on the horse's necklace turned to jewels, blazing with the light of all stars together.
    When all was done, and the black horse wore a necklace of these jewels, she returned to her home, where only the days required by the wicked king had passed. The black horse bore her up to the palace, and the guards fell back, frightened and astonished by the gleaming black horse and its necklace of brilliant jewels: they did not recognize the white-haired rider in ragged clothes. Into the hall she rode, the black horse's hooves ringing on the stone like warning bells.
    In the hall where the wicked king stood gloating over her father, all eyes turned to the black horse and its jewels. Torre slid from its back, with the sack in which she had carried proof of her deeds. Still none recognized her, for they had in mind the princess she had been, and not the aged woman she had become.
    She walked forward, and held out the sack. "Here is the debt paid," she said, "with the treasures you swore would wipe it out."
    "Who are you, old woman, to talk to me of debts?" the wicked king asked.
    "I am Torre," she said, and her father all at once knew her for his daughter, but wept at what she had become. "Look, and see that the debt is paid in full," she said. And she opened the strings of the sack, and turned it upside down, so the treasures of the universe fell out and everyone there was astonished, for nothing so precious had been seen there before, and gold itself appeared dull beside them. Here was a leaf of the One Tree, and a dragon's scale, and the heart of a star, and all other things the evil king had demanded.
    The evil king, astonished with the rest, was yet angry that she had succeeded, and spurned the treasures with his booted foot, saying, "If the debt be paid, you are still turned old and ugly and I have indeed taken this king's daughter from her father. Only your ugly nose is the same, Torre Bignose, and you will die alone and childless." He looked at the horse. "But I will take those jewels as payment of the