Contents
29. Hasp-a-Rasp
Overview
Kinch spends months apprenticed to Hasp, refining comic routines for the Erydon court and glimpsing a hopeful future Hasp imagines for them. Hasp’s frailty and past enslavement surface, binding him and Kinch to Princess Renata. The princess shows Kinch Erydon’s printing press and vast public library, which he longs to explore but never does.
Summary
Months blur as Hasp tutors Kinch in foolery, advancing Kinch from simple juggling to five-ball patterns and passing routines. Together they perform bawdy, violent-tinged jokes for the Erydon court, adapting their patter to win laughs from King Agraias and Princess Renata. Their success relies on cruelty-as-humor, which Kinch notes with distaste.
In private, Hasp once kisses Kinch after mead, but Kinch refuses, and Hasp accepts the boundary. Hasp shares a dream of returning to Galtia with a traveling act, promising coin, mirth, and camaraderie. Hasp also tries to teach Kinch musical flatulence, a low trick Kinch fails and disdains, highlighting their differing limits.
Hasp’s backstory emerges: once a traveling performer, he was drunkenly pressed into the Holtish navy, wrecked west of the Thralls, enslaved, and purchased by King Agraias in their youth. Now ill and aging, Hasp has been passed into Princess Renata’s service, the same hand that holds Kinch’s leash, tightening their dependency.
Princess Renata takes Kinch to the city stampery, where metal type and presses ceaselessly print books and leaflets, even for religious authorities like the Praxeter. She then brings him to a remarkable public library open to all classes, whose shelves teem with troubling and alluring titles. Kinch longs to return and read but is dragged away for sweets and never manages to go back.
Who Appears
- KinchNarrator; trains in foolery, performs for court, rebuffs Hasp’s kiss, longs to explore Erydon’s library.
- HaspAiling jester and mentor; teaches Kinch routines, shares a hopeful plan, reveals past enslavement and service.
- Princess RenataRoyal who holds Hasp’s and Kinch’s leashes; escorts Kinch to the press and library, then to a bakery.
- King AgraiasErydon’s king; enjoys crude performances, once bought Hasp in youth.
- XanderKitchen-boy who visits Hasp privately, sharing quiet conversations and laughter.
- The PraxeterReligious authority with rights to the printing press; presence noted overseeing printed materials.