“I’m sorry, my prince!” Ben cried. His face had gone pale, and he may have been visualizing the dungeons (and I know his mother and father, watching anxiously from the sidelines, were; if it weren’t for bad luck, Andy Staad was fond of growling, the Staads would have no luck at all); more likely he was just sorry for the hurt he fancied he had caused, or was amazed to see that the blood of the future King was as red as his own.

“Don’t be a fool,” Peter said impatiently. “It was my fault, not yours. I was clumsy. Hurry and get up. They’re catching us.

The two boys, made into a single clumsy three-legged beast by the sack into which Peter’s right leg and Ben’s left one had been tightly tied, managed to get up and lurch on. Both had been badly winded by the fall, however, and their long lead had been cut to almost nothing. Approaching the finish line, where crowds of farmers (not to mention Roland, standing among them without the slightest feeling of awkwardness, or of being some-where he shouldn’t) were cheering deliriously, two huge, sweat-ing farm boys began to close in. That they would overtake Peter and Ben in the last ten yards of the race seemed almost inevitable.

“Faster, Peter!” Roland bellowed, swinging a huge mug of mead with such enthusiasm that he poured most of it onto his own head. In his excitement he never noticed. “Jackrabbit, son! Be a jackrabbit! Those clod-busters are almost up your butt and over your back!”

Ben’s mother began to moan, cursing the fate that had caused her son to be paired up with the prince.

“If they lose, he’ll have our Ben thrown into the deepest dun-geon in the castle,” she moaned.

“Hush, woman,” Andy said. “He’d not. He’s a good King.” He believed it, but he was still afraid. Staad luck was, after all, Staad luck.