This story is an unfin­ished work-in-progress. It will be updated here as it is written.

The prob­lem with amne­sia, I reflected as I gazed across the lake, was that it was so cheesy, so stereo­typ­i­cal. An assas­sin with no mem­ory of his for­mer life, as if that hadn’t been done a hun­dred times before. Still, here I was. Here we all were — the Duke, Bub­ble, Squeak and me. The Plas­tic Flow­ers, assas­sins to the dis­cern­ing and cash-strapped courts of Fairyland.

They called me “Kiddo” back then, Duke and the twins, since not even I knew what name was right­fully mine. Not that any of us would have used our real names — who­ever the Duke once was that title was surely never his, and there could be no-one alive sadis­tic enough to call their daugh­ters Bub­ble and Squeak. Probably.

I stood, and paced, and thought, and skimmed peb­bles until the shad­ows length­ened and the world darkened.

Bub­ble crept up behind me, as always mak­ing much more noise than she thought, and pat­ted me on my greasy-haired head.

“C’mon, kiddo,” she said, “time to go back to the palace.”

It had been a long day of pre­tence for all of us.

House Hyacinth had, of course, to show off their vast new palace to every­one, and thus they had thrown a party open to every noble in the land. So it was some­what for­tu­nate for us that a cer­tain minor House had come down with “food poi­son­ing” whilst we were around to take their place. In what was by now a famil­iar pat­tern for the other three, they had trans­formed them­selves into the some­what gruff Duke Whitethorn and the charm­ing socialites Lady Wil­helmina and Lady Hen­ri­etta. I, of course, a kid so scruffy that no clothes or makeup could ever make pre­sentable at a noble court, had taken the vastly under­rated job of Kitchen Boy.

Thus at the end of the first day of the party, the Duke had won the respect of his tem­po­rary peers, Bub­ble and Squeak had caught up on gos­sip from the far cor­ners of Fairy­land, and I knew every­thing there was to know about roast­ing parsnips.

We also knew every­thing there was to know about Prince Archibald Hyacinth. Or so we thought.

We were paid by proxy, of course — it was usu­ally the way — but we had our sus­pi­cions as to whom our gen­er­ous donor was. Who would want to kill the Prince of a House? There was a war on, of course, so the Reds would hap­pily have removed any mem­ber of House Hyacinth. But why not its Duke? No, the only thing that made sense is that it was a White — more than likely, a mem­ber of his own family.

We’d found out plenty about the iden­tity of Prince Archibald, the Duke’s only son and thus his heir. His birth was not a legit­i­mate one, though, for the Duke had never mar­ried. Some poor woman from the town had come to the cas­tle one day bear­ing two chil­dren in her arms, a boy and a girl, and claim­ing that they were the Duke’s. This, we ascer­tained, was some­what of a sur­prise to the Court, who always fig­ured the Duke to be the type that enjoys the com­pany of young men rather than ladies.

Nev­er­the­less, the boy came to live in the cas­tle as a Prince. I sup­pose the Duke realised that, young as he was, he couldn’t live for­ever. The girl, though. The girl dis­ap­peared. Nobody speaks of her any­more, though Squeak man­aged to coax the infor­ma­tion out of some soci­ety lady anyway.

But the Prince, the Prince… Only fif­teen years of age, he was barely older than me. And yet some­one, for sake of argu­ment let’s say his own father, wants him dead. Why? Does he have designs on the throne already? From what we’ve heard, it wouldn’t sur­prise me if he would be a bet­ter Duke than his father any­way, but still. It’s not our place to decide these things. We took our pay­ment, half in advance and half after it’s done, and now we have to go ahead with it.

Kill Prince Archibald Hyacinth. But how?

This is when our spe­cial­i­ties come into play. As a kitchen boy, there’s nowhere I couldn’t go. With a lit­tle effort, I could get access to his food, too. So poi­son? I have to admit, it’s the method I like best. Dis­like least, I should say. We’re assas­sins, we kill, that’s the way it is. But I’ve got to admit, I wouldn’t like to do it while look­ing the tar­get in the eye. With poi­sons, there’s dis­tance involved. Cause and effect can be far enough apart that you can almost bring your­self around to not feel­ing bad about it. But the prob­lem remained, what if the Prince had food tasters? What if he only ate what oth­ers ate? What I’m really say­ing is, what if he knows someone’s out to get him?

The Duke — our Duke that is, not any of the real ones, though every­one for now thinks he’s Duke Whitethorn any­way, could like­wise pretty much go any­where and do any­thing, here. After all, who’d tell a Duke off for doing some­thing? But he could most eas­ily blow our cover. The most likely per­son to find him out of place — Duke Hyacinth. And if we assume that Hyacinth him­self is our cus­tomer, there’s a pretty big chance of us not get­ting paid the rest of our money if we’re dis­cov­ered. If we’re dis­cov­ered by Hyacinth and oth­ers are with him, well… I can’t see it going well for any of us.

Which leaves Bub­ble and Squeak. As the high soci­ety ladies they’re pre­tend­ing to be, there’s a lot of rules they have to fol­low. Appar­ently, any­way. So what can they do, if they can barely leave the great hall? Well, here the iden­tity of our tar­get helps us out a lot. Being a fif­teen year old boy, one can imag­ine the effect that twin seventeen-year-old girls could have on him. I’m cer­tainly not… unaware of it.