Fool's Proof: 1 (The Heart of Stone Adventures)

A jobless jester and a misguided magpie wander into a land where technology is booming... but trouble is brewing!Dame Elsebet de Whellen has ruled her mildly magical high-tech country for 50 prosperous years. Now its facing a crisis three generations in the making and the bold steps shes taken to save it have gone disastrously off the rails.Naturally shes going to pray for the help of a brave and selfless hero. Of course it will go wrong. Obviously instead of a hero shell get an exiled jester and his bantering bird.That jester would be Malfred Murd: poet acrobat wielder of wit. Hes cynical- twenty years of playing the Fool for an unappreciative wet blanket of a King will do that to a fellow-as well as broke blacklisted and reduced to eating lizards caught by his self-appointed guardian a sassy magpie with a longing for adventure.All Fred might have wanted was a few coins to keep him off the dirt streets. But he gets more far more. Like it or not he and Dame Elsebet are about to get hopelessly entangled in a desperate mission that could cost a Fool his life and a people their future.