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Somebody’s Favorite Knightby Jon EtterOriginally published in the all-ages anthology Tales of the Once and Future KingDo you have a brother or sister that everybody just adores? You know how annoying that is, right? Multiply that by a thousand and you know how it feels to be me. You see, I’m Sir Kay, King Arthur’s brother. Well, foster brother, but same difference.Don’t get me wrong—I love my brother. He’s just as nice and fair and kind as you’d want a brother to be (which is also a little aggravating because I always feel like kind of a jerk when I get envious of his power and popularity and everything). And he’s a great king. The best Britain’s ever had according to most people, and they’re probably right. Top ten at least, in my opinion. It was just kind of hard to go instantly from him serving me as my squire (and he wasn’t that good at it, by the way) to me serving him when he proved himself to be “Rightwise born King of all Britain,” or whatever the heck that stupid sword said he was. But I served him and served him well. I did everything I could as his knight to help defeat his opposition and unite Britain under his rule, and I was pretty good at it. At the time, I thought that, while he may be king, maybe I could be the greatest knight in the realm. Let him have the throne—I’d be the champion of the tournaments and hero of the battlefield! But no such luck—that jerk Lancelot du Blech! had to come along, show us all up, and become the “greatest” knight in the land and Arthur’s best friend.So where does that leave me? King Arthur’s seneschal. If you don’t know what that means (and honestly most don’t), that means I run Camelot. Sounds cool and important, right? It’s not. What I do is read reports from around the kingdom, supervise the castle servants, manage the accounts, order the groceries, and all the other boring day-to-day stuff of castle life. So while all the other knights are off defending innocents and slaying dragons, I’m stuck here haggling with the green grocer over the price of turnips and making sure the pastry chef is sober enough to make tarts for the royal tea.I was feeling especially bitter about my lot in life one night during the nightly feast at the Round Table. See, Arthur had the table made round to show that all knights who served him were equal, which is a nice idea in theory, but in practice it’s a load of horse dung. Tell me that the knight stuck at the far end of the circle next to the servant’s entrance is really the equal of Gawain, who sits to Arthur’s right, and Lancelot, who sits on the other side of Queen Guinevere (he had the chance to sit to Arthur’s right but chose to sit next to the queen so he could more easily flirt with her, the creep!). Also, I know for a fact that Lancelot has extra cushions put on the seat of his chair so that he’s a little higher than the rest of us.Anyway, all the knights were taking turns bragging (and lying) about all the adventures they had had that day, and I was getting good and fed up with it all when Sir Bragsalot, as always, had to top everybody. “So I began my day by riding out to Bath to vanquish the dreaded giant that has been waylaying travelers along the king’s roads.”“Giant?” I said. “I read through a couple criminal complaints about an aggressive panhandler with an extremely ample belly, but—”“It was a giant,” Lancelot asserted. “And the battle was fierce, but in the end, he fell before my sword. That done, I immediately rode to Bristol—”“Pity. You should have actually bathed in Bath. I can smell you all the way from—”“—where a pack of brigands have terrorized the good people there. I tackled them single-handedly—”“Tied the other one behind your back again, did you?” I asked.“All thirty of them.”“Thirty? By yourself? Really?”“Yes. Thirty.”“Well,” I sighed, “you never have been that good at math. Anything beyond ten, and you can’t count them on your fingers. Plus you had one hand behind your back, so it was really, what, six? Seven?”“As I was saying,” Lancelot continued, clearly annoyed, “I handily—”“Single-handily.”“—defeated the lot of blackguards and delivered them to the bailiff there before riding south to Exeter and—”“Okay! Hold up!” I cried. “You seriously want us to believe that in one single day you rode from Camelot to Bath to Bristol to Exeter and still made it back to Camelot in time for dinner?”“No, I also swung by Northampton and Oxford to—”“Oh, come on! There’s no way—”“Well, if you tire of my tales of keeping the peace in the kingdom,” Sir Lancelot-a-Boils said, all smug, “perhaps you can regale us with some tales of your day’s adventures. Did you save us all from the terror of unmade beds? Draw the magical shovel from the stone proving yourself rightwise born lord of the royal stables before scooping all the poop? Perhaps you threw together a truly heroic stew?”The rest of the table erupted with laughter. “Good Sir Kitchen Knight, grab your sword!” that pig Gawain cried, spitting little bits of apple into his bushy red beard as he did so. “The kingdom is in peril! This mutton is slightly overcooked!”“Yes, to the kitchen, Sir Potpan, posthaste!” Bors shouted. “There’s a soufflé that might fall! Save us!”Then everyone else got in on the act. I tried to laugh it all off, but it really ticked me off. Right after dinner, I went to my room and sat down to go over the daily reports from across the kingdom, but I couldn’t concentrate. The other knights are right, I thought. They’re out there defending the kingdom and what am I doing? Pushing papers and bullying servants! I shoved the papers off my desk and threw my quill to the ground in disgust.A knock on my door made me start. Arthur stood there in the doorway. “Bad time to chat, big brother?”I sighed. “No, it’s fine. What do you need? Are we out of port? I knew we were running low, but that crooked wine merchant has been just—”“No, as always, we all have everything we need, thanks to you,” Arthur said, putting his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t let what the other knights said get to you. What you do is important. I couldn’t rule effectively if you didn’t go through the reports from the kingdom and tell me what needed my attention, and I wouldn’t be able to focus on anything if things didn’t run smoothly around Camelot. I can only do my job because you do yours so well.”It was nice of him to say and I thanked him for it, but the thought that I wasn’t a real knight, just a “kitchen knight,” nagged at me. After a mostly sleepless night, I knew I had to do something, so I wrote up instructions for the castle staff. The next morning, I put on my chainmail armor, grabbed my sword, handed the instructions to the head butler, and set out on horseback to seek an adventure worthy of a knight of the Round Table.Now, at this point in my life, I had been seneschal for about five years and had forgotten how hard it is to actually find adventure. Unless someone comes to you and says, “Hey, there’s a troll under that bridge over there trying to eat people,” adventuring can be a pretty tedious business. After riding a few hours, I came across a balding farmer fixing the hitch on his hay wagon. His face was bruised and his clothes torn as if he had recently been in a scuffle.“You look as though you have been attacked,” I called. “Tell me, good peasant, which way the varlet went and I, Sir Kay, a knight of Camelot, will bring him to justice.”“No worries,” the man said. “‘E already took care of ‘im!”“What? Who?” I asked.“Lansinglot, it were. Jumped roight in and give ‘im what fer! Lord, never ‘ave oi seen sich a devil in a foight! Strong ‘e were! And tall! Oi mean, oi ‘eard ‘e were tall but—”“He wears lifts in his boots, you know,” I said.“What? Really?” the farmer asked.“Oh, yeah. Out of his boots and armor, he’s about six inches shorter. Has to sit on a stack of bibles at the breakfast table to eat his eggs in the morning.”“Is that roight? Wahl, ‘e sure look big! And when ‘e jumped in and—”“I’m sorry,” I interrupted. “I really must be off to protect the king’s subjects.”“A’roight then. But when ye see Lansinglot be sure an—”I didn’t catch the rest of what he said as I rode off. In time I came upon a rundown, dingy wayside inn. It looked exactly like the sort of place that criminals might congregate and conspire. I hopped down from my horse and approached the door when suddenly it swung open and a middle-aged barmaid stepped out. “Lock ‘em up and throw away the key!” she cried as what I assumed to be the local sheriff and his bailiffs led out a group of ten men who would have looked extremely dangerous if it weren’t for the fact that they were battered, bloodied, and tied up. “Oh, is you from Camelot, then?” she asked, looking me up and down.“I am.”“Well, ya’s too late. Sir Lancelot done ‘em all up for ya.” She got a dreamy look on her face and sighed. “‘He’s a handsome ‘un, he is…”“He wears make-up.”“He does not!”“Yep. About an inch thick to cover up all the pimps and warts and boils. Very unfortunate skin.”“I don’t believe ya,” she said, putting her hands on her hips.“Suit yourself,” I said, climbing back into the saddle. “I’ll give your regards to old spotty bottom when I see him.”Frustrated, I rode on, hoping against hope that some heroic deed would present itself, when suddenly I heard it: a lady’s cry for help and the roar of a bloodthirsty beast. Throwing all caution to the wind, I put my spurs to my horse and galloped at breakneck speed into the forest, ducking under branches and dodging past trees until I came to a clearing in which a beautiful maiden stood tied to a post. I leapt from my horse and rushed to her side.“You are safe now, fair one,” I said, cutting the rope that bound her hands to the post. “For, I, Sir Kay of Camelot, have—”“Well, that’s done!” a voice boomed behind me. I turned to see Lancelot strutting into the clearing with what looked like an ox-sized snakehead tucked under his arm. “I’ve slain both the beast and his master.”“My hero!” the lady declared, rushing to Lancelot and wrapping her arms around the jerk.For the love of Pete! I thought.“Oh, morning, Kay,” Lancelot said, as if he just noticed me there. “What brings you out this morning? Good deal on pork somewhere around here?”“Something like that,” I grumbed, heading back into the woods.“Can’t wait to try it at tonight’s feast!” he called after me.“I hope you choke on it, lousy show-off,” I muttered.At that point, I gave up. It was clear—I wasn’t cut out for adventure anymore. Maybe I had been a real knight once upon a time, but now I was nothing more than the head housekeeper in the biggest house in Britain and that’s all I’d ever be for the rest of my life.Not wanting to go back to the main road and risk meeting more fans of Sir Lancypants, I trudged through the woods, feeling sorry for myself. It was a nice, quiet walk, the only sounds being the tweets of birds from above and the chirping of insects all around.In the early afternoon, I came upon a small cottage by the side of a small path that looked like it saw very little traffic. My horse needing a rest and myself needing a drink, I stopped and knocked on the door. There was no answer, but a small girl with dark hair and dark eyes came around the side of the house. “Excuse, me, but may I have a drink from your well?” I asked. “I’m terribly parched.”“Okay,” she said quietly. “Are you a knight?”“Yes,” I said cranking up the bucket that hung over their well. “Sir Kay of Camelot.”She rushed over to me and grabbed my arm. Her face, I could now tell, was streaked with tears. “Thank goodness you’ve come! I need your help!”“You sure?” I asked, taking a sip from the dipper in the bucket. “If you wait a little while, Lancelot will probably show up and—”“No! That’s just it! I need you to find and save Lancelot!”How could this be? I wondered. There’s no way he could have gotten here and— Then I remembered his claims from the night before. Maybe he’s not as full of cow manure as I thought! I dropped the bucket and knelt down on one knee before her. “What do you mean? What’s befallen Lancelot?”“I was just playing with him behind the cottage—”“You were playing with Lancelot?”“Yes, and then he caught this little mouse and started batting it around—”“Lancelot was batting at a mouse?”“Yes, and then—”“Lancelot, the knight?”“Lancelot, my little black kitten,” she said.“Of course,” I sighed, rubbing my now aching forehead, “your kitten. Named Lancelot.”“After my favorite knight, Sir Lancelot,” she said, shredding the last vestiges of my dignity. “So he was playing with the mouse and then it got away and he chased it. I ran after him, but then he went down into the ravine. Papa says I’m never to go down there—it’s too steep and dangerous—but Papa’s gone to town and I have to save my poor little kitten! Oh, please, Sir Ray—”“Sir Kay.”“Won’t you please help me!”I wanted to say “To heck with Lancelot!” (which would have been gratifying on several different levels), but then I looked into her teary, pleading eyes. It wasn’t a grand quest nor was it likely to impress anyone at the Round Table, but I was a knight and here was a girl who needed help and that’s what we knights are supposed to do: help people. “Of course, my lady,” I said. “Take me to the ravine, and I will save the poor, pathetic, helpless little Lancelot from certain doom.”(I must admit, it felt extremely satisfying to say that.)The little girl led me a short ways through the woods to the edge of a rocky ravine. I told her to wait back by the cottage and then slowly, carefully made my way down, whistling and calling, “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty! Here, little Lancelot!” as I went. The girl’s father had been right to warn her away from the ravine—it was a steep, perilous climb down, and I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to make my way back up.Reaching the bottom, I looked for some sign of a little black cat. To the east was a long, straight stretch. Seeing nothing but dirt, rocks, and withered grass, I headed to the west, where the gorge took a turn to north. As I rounded the corner, something crunched under my foot. It was a skull, a small one, probably a squirrel or rat. Near it were other skulls and bones ranging in size from mouse to deer, all of them picked clean and bleached white by the sun. I drew my sword and continued to follow the bend. The gorge grew wider to reveal the remnants of a campsite—two rotting wagons, a couple tattered tents, an immense stew pot sitting in the ash-filled center of a disused fire pit ringed with stones—with the mouth of a dark cave gaping behind it. Every inch of ground was strewn with bones, including, over by the cave, human ones.As I wondered what creature could possibly be responsible for all this death, a quiet little meow drew my attention to a pile of rocks near the cave entrance. There, clambering on top of it, was a fluffy black kitten. Little Lancelot! I was about to call his name when suddenly the rocks flew apart and a small man with saggy, leathery, scabby skin hanging from his long, bony arms and legs snatched up the kitten in his hideously long, talon-like fingers. “Eats!” the creature hissed through pointy, crooked teeth as it raised the kitten up to its mouth.My first instinct was to charge at the fiend and hack it to pieces, but then I recognized it from Merlin’s lessons on magical creatures: a spriggan. Insatiable appetite, stone-covered clothes to better ambush prey, inhumanly strong, almost impossible to beat when grappling, able to grow to gigantic proportions when threatened, and (because all of that wasn’t terrifying enough) impervious to all metal weapons. I looked at my sword then, realizing it was utterly useless, sheathed it in its scabbard.I’m not too ashamed to admit that I was terrified just then and my first instinct was to sneak off, hoping that the spriggan would be too preoccupied munching on the kitten to notice me. I turned to do just that then stopped. No, I thought. I’m a knight of Camelot, sworn to protect King Arthur’s subjects and, I suppose, their pets. I will not flee!But what was I to do? The spriggan was an unbeatable foe! Even a great knight like Gawain—heck, even the greatest knight, Lancelot (ugh!)—might not be able to defeat the creature. What chance could I possibly have against it? Me, Sir Kay, a kitchen knight? And then I realized that was the answer. Only a kitchen knight could stop this monster.“Excuse, me,” I said pleasantly, walking toward the spriggan. It turned, jagged jaws still gaping as it fixed its crimson eyes on me. “But are you about to eat that kitten?”“More eats!” the spriggan hissed. The creature started to swell, its saggy flesh growing taut, expanding and expanding until it towered over me—at least eight feet tall, it was—its skin barely holding together over knotted muscles and the cloak that before had covered its whole body hanging half-way down its chest like a rock-studded napkin. “A knight it is!”“What? Oh, the armor? No, I just came from a fancy dress party. I’m a chef.”The spriggan cocked its head. “What ‘chef’ is?”“I make food.”“Yus,” the spriggan grinned a hideous grin. “Kit-cat make food. You make food. Both I eat.”“No, you don’t understand. I make food taste better,” I explained, happy to see that the spriggan seemed as dumb or dumber than I had hoped.“No think so. Kit-cat more nommy than person.”“What I mean is that I can make the cat taste better. And be more food.”“Yus, more food you be. Kit-cat I eat then you I eat. More food you be than just kit-cat.”“No. Try to pay attention. How many meals would this cat be for you?”“One,” the spriggan grunted.“What if I told you I could turn it into six meals?”The spriggan’s eyes widened and it began to drool. “Six more kit-cats you have?”“Actually, I’d only need five more to make six, but let’s not worry about basic math right now. No, I don’t have more cats, but I could make a stew out of this cat, which would turn it into six meals and make the cat even more tender, juicy, and tasty.”The creature licked its lips with a long green-gray tongue. “Do! Stew you make!”“Now, if I do,” I asked, “will you spare my life?”It shook its head vigorously. “No. You I eat next.”“Well, would you at least wait a while longer before you eat me?”The spriggan nodded. “Yus. If full, you for later I save.”“You’re a shrewd negotiator. You have a deal.” The spriggan looked quite pleased with itself. I walked over to the campsite’s abandoned pot. It was a heavy iron cauldron big enough to hold two or three pigs and a full complement of vegetables. Its immense lid lay in the dirt near one of the ramshackle wagons. “First, I need you to fill this pot with water. Is there water nearby?”“Yus,” it said, hoisting up the immense pot as if it were an easter basket. It pointed one of its wicked talon-like finger-tips at me. I was pretty sure it could poke straight through my head without any effort at all, an assumption supported by several nearby skulls with holes in the front and back. “I fill. Try to run and catch you and eat you first I will.”“I wouldn’t dream of it.” I smiled and reached out for little Lancelot. “Here, I’ll just hold onto the little kit-cat while you—”But the spriggan just loped swiftly off, pot in one hand and tiny mewling kitten in the other. If I had had any intention of trying to escape with the cat while the spriggan was gone, that plan would have been shot. Fortunately, I hadn’t.By the time the spriggan came back with water sloshing this way and that out of the pot (which took much less time than I expected), I had a nice roaring fire going in the abandoned fire pit. “Put the pot right there in the fire,” I told the creature, which did as I asked. “Now we need to find some plants.”“Plants? Plants I no eat. Plants not made of meat like kit-cats and chefs.”“No, but some plants—we call them herbs—make meat extra tasty. And some plants—we call them vegetables—can be delicious when cooked. In fact, we can make them taste like the kit-cat by boiling them together and making a stew.”“Yus! More kit-cat tasting!” the spriggan cried. He held Lancelot, who hissed and clawed, over the pot. “Kit-cat we boil!”“Whoa! Wait!” I jumped between the pot and the spriggan. “No! We boil the kit-cat last. It will, uh, make everything taste the most like kit-cat.”“Yus! Most kit-cat taste!”“Okay. Come with me and we’ll find plants for the stew. But first, could you maybe get smaller again?”“Smaller?” the spriggan asked, suspicious.“Yeah. You’re awfully scary when you’re this big, so that’s likely to distract me when we look for the vegetables, plus your shadow might hide some especially good herbs we could use. I’m sure you’re just as strong when small.”“Yus. And much more fast!”“Even better for killing me if I try to run then. So if you could just—”“Yus,” it agreed, followed by a horrible prolonged farty noise, like twenty Sir Bagdemagduses after haggis nigh,t and a stench fouler than an uncleaned stable in August. As the noise grew louder and louder and the smell ranker and ranker, the spriggan shrank until it barely came up to my armpits.“All right,” I choked, trying to keep down my lunch, “this way.”With the spriggan following behind, I scoured the ravine for anything that could possibly smell delicious when boiled. There was little there of use—a couple wild carrots, a few leeks—but I was lucky enough to come across a small patch of mint and a good amount of basil. It wasn’t much, but I supplemented with various weeds and grasses—nothing really edible, but they’d make a good showing for someone who had never eaten stew before. All of this I would toss into the pot as I found it, with the exception of the mint, and then look for more, going as slowly as possible to give the pot as long as possible to come to a boil.When I brought my last additions to the pot—a few handfuls of ivy—the water was at a rollicking boil and the area was filled with the wonderful smell of the basil. The spriggan inhaled deeply and sighed. “Smells nommy-nom-nom! Again you do this when time to eat you?”“I wouldn’t want to go any other way. Now, please hand me the kit-cat and I’ll—”“No!” The spriggan hugged the cat to its chest, causing the cat to yowl and bite its leathery flesh. “In pot I throw!”“But you don’t know how to best prepare kit-cat. Give it to me, and I’ll rub it with this,” at which point I held the mint out under it’s nose, “and butcher it to make it as, uh, nommy-nom-nom as possible.”The spriggan sniffed and sniffed again and then began drooling even more than it had before. It thrust the kitten into my hands. “Yus! Make nommy-nommy-nommy-nom!”I took the cat gingerly and gently rubbed the mint on its head while it batted at the herbs. I nodded toward the pot. “Here, while I prep the cat, why don’t you give the pot a sniff and really work up an appetite?”The spriggan walked closer to the pot, breathed in and out deeply, then sighed happily.“Good, eh? But if you want to get a really good whiff, get nice and close.” The spriggan got right next to the pot and sniffed. “That’s good, but to truly take in all the aromas, get that nose right over the water.”“Yus! Yus!” it said, standing on its tiptoes and craning out its neck so that its face was sticking out over the lip of the cauldron. My chance had finally come. I dropped the cat, raced over, grabbed handfuls of the creature’s loose, dry flesh, and heaved it up and into the boiling water. The fiend shrieked in pain, and I clapped the lid on the pot and threw myself on top of it, holding it in place as the creature banged and thrashed in a desperate attempt to free itself. The lid grew hot and steam scalded my hands, but I held on until at long last the spriggan ceased to struggle. Spent, I climbed down and took off the lid. The spriggan’s dead eyes stared up at me, surrounded by chopped leaks, carrots, and ivy leaves.“Let’s see…Lancelot…make a stew…like that!” I panted, flopping down on the ground to rest.“Meow?”“Not you, Lancelot,” I groaned. “The other one. Gimme a second and we’ll get you home.”The climb back out of the ravine was just as difficult as I expected (and having a feisty kitten to handle on the way up didn’t make it any easier), but by mid-afternoon we reached the top and headed straight to the cottage. When the little girl saw us, she dashed over and grabbed little Lancelot and hugged and kissed him as he tried to squirm free.“Well, there you go, milady,” I said. “I’ve saved poor, defenseless, and somewhat dim Sir Lancelot for you. And—”“Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you, Sir Kay!” The little girl hugged me tightly. “You’re my new favorite knight!”I smiled and tousled her hair. Nobody had ever said that to me before. It felt pretty good.She looked up at me, puzzled. “Why does my kitten smell like mint?”I shrugged. “Who can say?”That night back at Camelot, the evening feast was one long list of complaints:“The soup is too watery.”“I think I chipped a tooth on this biscuit!”“Is this pork cooked all the way through?”“These apples are mealy,” Gawain grumbled, tossing an apple core across the room. “Good grief, Kay, how could you let the kitchen staff serve us this swill?”“Oh, he wasn’t here to supervise it,” Lancelot said.Arthur arched an eyebrow at me. “Really.”“Mm-hm,” Lancelot said, taking a bite of meat pie then making a face. “I ran into him this morning. He was out adventuring.”The other knights stopped eating.“Did he then?” Bors said, grinning.“He did,” Lancelot smirked. “So, what feats of bravery did you perform today, good Sir Kay?”I glanced round the table. All of the knights were looking at me, clearly amused. I smiled. “I saved a kitten.”The knights oohed and aahed and whistled. I shrugged and popped a grape in my mouth (it was a bit past its prime and should not have been part of the evening meal).“That what happened to your hands?” Gawain asked. “Was the little nipper too much for you?”“Oh, this?” I held up my bandaged hands. “Stew-related injury.”Laughter filled the room, and Bors banged the table in delight. “Got to be careful with those stews!” Lancelot guffawed. “They’ll get away from you!”“You have no idea,” I said, raising my goblet in salute.Sure, I could have told them all about the spriggan and put them in their places, but I didn’t need to. I knew what I had done. I may just be a kitchen knight, but I’m the best darn kitchen knight in the kingdom. More importantly, I knew that I was somebody’s favorite knight, and that was more than enough for me.Study Guide & Project IdeasComprehend, Analyze, & InterpretHow is Sir Kay related to King Arthur? How does he feel about him?When Arthur became king, what goal did Sir Kay set for himself? How did it work out?What is a “seneschal”? How does Sir Kay feel about being one?At their knightly banquet, what all does Sir Lancelot claim to have done that day? How does Sir Kay feel about Sir Lancelot’s tales? How accurate do you think Lancelot’s accounts are? Why?How does Sir Kay seem to view/feel about Lancelot? Why do you think that is?What does King Arthur say to Sir Kay that night? What does this show us his character and/or his feelings about his brother?What does Sir Kay decide to do the next day and why?At the beginning of Sir Kay’s day seeking adventure, what does he discover every time he thinks he’s found a chance to do something heroic?What sorts of things does he claim about Lancelot as he talks to the various people Lancelot has helped? Do you believe his claims? Why or why not?What chance to help someone does Sir Kay finally get? Why does he consider not taking it? In the end, why does he choose to do so anyway? What does that tell us about his character?When he goes down into the ravine, what does he find?What is a spriggan? What makes it an especially dangerous creature to fight?Explain Sir Kay’s plan to kill the spriggan? How do his experiences as a seneschal (or “kitchen knight”) help him defeat the creature?Where does the title of the story come from?At that night’s feast, how do all the knights react to Sir Kay telling them he saved a kitten? Why doesn’t he tell them the full story? What does this suggest about how he feels about himself?EvaluateDo you think Sir Kay was right to go off on an adventure the next day to prove his abilities as a knight after being made fun of? What else do you think he could have done to handle the situation? What do you think would have been the best way to handle things?What do you think of Sir Kay’s plan to kill the spriggan? Was it a good one? How else might he have saved the kitten? What do you think is the best solution to the situation with the spriggan?Do you think Sir Kay should have told everyone at then end about the spriggan? Why or why not?Reflect and ConnectDo you have a sibling? If so, how do you feel about them? Do you every get jealous of them or do they ever get jealous of you? Why?The other knights at the nightly banquet make fun of Sir Kay for being a “kitchen” knight. Has anyone every made fun of you? What exactly did they make fun of you for? How did it make you feel? How did you handle the situation? If you could say something to that person right now about the situation, what would you say to them?In the end, Sir Kay clearly feels proud of what he has done. What’s something that you’ve done that you are proud of? What all did you have to do to accomplish it? What makes you especially proud of that particular accomplishment?Imagine and CreateCreate a comic book version of the story or draw pictures of Sir Kay, the spriggan, the kitten, and other characters from the story.Make finger or hand puppets and turn the story into a puppet show.Write a new adventure for Sir Kay or another one of the characters in the story.Imagine what the castle at Camelot looks like and then make a model of it using legos, blocks, or craft supplies.Read, Research, and ReportA spriggan is one variety of fairy/magical creature. Look up some other types, draw pictures of them, and write down all of the special features—magical powers, habitats, habits, etc.—about them to share with your class, family, and/or friends.Sir Kay and all the other knights mentioned in this story are from the classic tales of the knights of the round table (and Sir Gawain’s love of apples comes from them as well!). Read one of those stories that features a character or characters from “Somebody’s Favorite Knight,” summarize the plot, and compare and contrast how that story’s portrayal with this one. ................
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