then being asked by the king why he had taken so many arrows out of his quiver, when he was to make but one trial with the bow, "That I might avenge on thee," said he, "the error of the first by the points of the others, lest my innocence might hap to be afflicted and thy injustice to go unpunished!" Palnatoki later kills the king. Þiðrekssaga In the 13th-century Þiðrekssaga, chapter 128, Egill, brother of Völund, is commanded by King Nidung to shoot an apple off his three-year-old son's head:Now the king wished to try whether Egill shot so well as was said or not, so he let Egill's son, a boy of three years old, be taken, and made them put an apple on his head, and bade Egill shoot so that the shaft struck neither above the head nor to the left nor the right. Like Palnatoki, he keeps two more arrows to kill the king in case he fails, but the king does not punish him for saying so, but rather praises him: "The king took that well from him, and all thought it was boldly spoken." William Tell The best-known version of the story is in the legend of William Tell, supposedly happening to start off the Swiss revolution, written first in the 15th-century White Book of Sarnen, then in Aegidius Tschudi's 16th-century Chronicon Helveticum, and later the basis for Friedrich Schiller's 1804 play. Tell is arrested for failing to bow in respect to the hat that the newly appointed Austrian Vogt, Albrecht Gessler, has placed on a pole, and Gessler commands him to shoot an apple off his son's head with a single bolt from his crossbow. After splitting the apple with the single shot (supposedly on November 18, 1307), Tell is asked why he took more than one bolt out; at first he responds that it was out of habit, but when assured he will not be killed for answering honestly, says the second bolt was meant for Gessler's heart should he fail. In Schiller's play, the demand to shoot the apple off the boy's head motivates Gessler's murder. Malleus Maleficarum In Heinrich Kramer's 1486 Malleus Maleficarum (Book 2, chapter 16), a related story occurs: Punker of Rohrbach (also spelled Puncker or Puncher) in the Upper Rhineland is said to have been ordered by "a very eminent person" in about 1430 to prove