C. Dale Brittain Read online

  When Roric said nothing, she added after a moment, “I was much sadder back when I heard my younger brother had died, only a few months after I arrived. He and I had been playmates . . . But you wouldn’t remember that!” she finished brusquely.

  “I didn’t really know you then,” he said, looking at her with his head cocked. “You were just the pretty little girl that I understood had come to live with us. You were an outsider— I did not then realize that you and I were both outsiders here. I do remember you crying, and I wondered why.”

  “You still don’t understand,” she said through her teeth. “Now that pretty little girl has become an heiress.”

  He considered her in silence for a moment. “So will you still love me when you’re queen?” he asked with a grin.

  She gave him another push. “Don’t joke, Roric! You, of all people, should realize what this means.”

  His attempts to take the anguish from her eyes a failure, he said soberly, “Then you’ll be important to a lot of people as well as to me.”

  “Not just important. Valuable. I’ve been valuable all these years as a pledge for my father’s good behavior toward King Hadros. Now I’m the heiress to my father’s kingdom. That makes me doubly valuable. A marriage would unite the kingdoms, ensure that war would never break out again between them.”

  “And as a future queen you couldn’t refuse,” said Roric grimly. “You’d marry Valmar, of course, because he’s the oldest son.”

  “I could do worse than Valmar,” she said, her eyes distant.

  “Now don’t you joke!” he cried, pinning her arms.

  She focused on him again and shook her head. “I only meant that I would prefer to marry Valmar than to marry his father.”

  “But you can’t marry Hadros!” Roric cried. “He’s old enough to be your father! He almost is your father!”

  “Older men marry young heiresses every day.”

  He clenched his teeth in silence for a moment, then thrust a fist into the straw. “I wish he was in Hel! Why is he doing this? Hadros is my sworn lord, and I used to love him like a father myself.”

  “Until last week,” said Karin.

  “You knew we quarreled?” he asked, turning around.

  “Everyone in the castle knows it. Both of you have good voices for calling the hounds in the hunt—or for hurling insults.”

  For a second he thought he saw a smile on her face. Encouraged, he took both her hands. “Then let’s run away, Karin, you and me. Neither Hadros or I will have to break our sworn word by killing each other, and you won’t have to marry anyone but me.”

  She pulled her hands free and stared icily over his head. “Sometimes you’re as dense as Valmar. If I go, King Hadros will invade my father’s kingdom, while the whole court is in mourning and no one expects it. I’m going to be a sovereign queen some day. I cannot run away.”

  Roric turned away abruptly and thrust his fist into the straw again. When he turned back toward her she had risen to her feet. “As a queen,” she said, “I also cannot compromise my good name by being found in the men’s loft.” But then she looked at his expression and bent to kiss him swiftly before scrambling down the ladder.

  As the sky went red and shadows stretched long across the castle courtyard, Roric slipped out the gate on foot. He stayed away from the road but cut through the oak forest, across the sandy hills, toward the base of the cliff.

  The sun had set by the time he reached it. He stood for several minutes at the cave entrance, waiting. Above him, the first bats darted across the sky, squeaking on the fringes of audibility.

  He lowered his eyes from the cliff to find a short personage standing before him. “Greetings, Roric, No-man’s son,” said a voice that could have been either a high-pitched man’s or a deep-pitched woman’s. No one had ever been able to say for sure if Weavers were men or women, or if the distinction had any meaning for them. This one, or one just alike, was said to have lived here since before the castle was built.

  Roric reached for his belt. “I’ve brought you my best knife,” he told the Weaver.

  The pommel was set with rock crystal and the blade was polished steel. The Weaver took it and examined it, turning it over as a squirrel turns over an acorn, before finally whisking it out of sight beneath dark robes. Roric followed as the Weaver stumped back into the cave where a tiny fire was burning.

  “And what would you ask of voima and of fate?” asked the Weaver, arms and legs huddled together until the robes looked like a pile of empty clothes, though yellow eyes glinted in the firelight. Roric too sat down.

  “I met someone last night,” he said after a moment. “Weaver, Mirror-seer—or Wanderer. I want to know who he was.”

  “And why do you ask another’s name when you have no true name of your own?”

  “He said he might have use of me,” said Roric, trying with an effort to keep the edge out of his voice. It was no use becoming angry with a Weaver.

  “And that use might be—?” When Roric said nothing more, the Weaver’s hand disappeared again into the shapeless robes and emerged this time with a piece of string. Fingers moved quickly as the string took shape, first a series of loops, then triangles and diamonds, finally a web so dense it looked as though it must contain much more string than when the Weaver had begun.

  “Tangled,” came the voice at last, neither man’s nor woman’s. The Weaver always said that. “Lives are tangled here. The change, the upheaval, may be closer than anyone thought, and some beneath the sun may be sought to withhold it, or even to hurry it.”

  “I gave you my best knife for a clear answer,” said Roric testily. “I’m not burning an offering to influence the future—not that I’m sure that often works. I’m asking you something that has already happened.”

  “What has happened,” said the Weaver enigmatically, “depends so much on your perspective. Who has appeared, and what he seeks, depends on whether he seeks a man without a name or a man with a mighty father.”

  “And which one do you think you’re talking to?” asked Roric fiercely.

  “It might also depend on which the Wanderers could use most readily . . .” The light and shadow from the fire accentuated all the Weaver’s deep facial lines.

  “So it was a Wanderer!” The Weaver did not reply, which Roric took as assent. He stared unseeing for a moment into the fire. “Such a thing has never happened to my certain knowledge to any I know,” he said at last, very quietly, “only to those of the old tales.”

  “And are there not Weavers as well in the old tales?”

  Roric did not answer but cocked his head as though listening to the high voices of the bats outside. “He never did tell me what he wanted,” he said after a minute, “but if he wants me it’s because I was nearly an outcast when he spoke to me. Does that mean— Does that mean the Wanderers have reasons of their own for hiding from me who I am?”

  “You are Roric No-man’s son,” said the Weaver loudly.

  “Yes, and that’s who they said they might need. But why would the lords of voima want a mortal to help them?”

  The Weaver examined the web of string again, picking at a few threads until the knots were even more tangled. The silence stretched so long that Roric had decided he would have no answer to his question when the other suddenly spoke. “Even the Wanderers may not have full control over their own fate.”

  “Listen. I haven’t tried this since I was twelve.” Roric tugged in sudden resolution at his ring, the one Hadros had given him when he became a man and received his sword, when they had first sworn their oaths to each other. “If I give you this, will you give me a straight answer? Will you tell me my father’s true name?”

  The Weaver made little rasping noises that could have been a cough, could even have been a laugh. “That is not an answer I give for a ring—or for the silver-decorated halter you tried to give me years ago. This is an answer that gives a man his identity and takes it away in the same instant. The price of your question i
s knowledge that will destroy you.”

  “I must say I don’t understand you any better than I did when I was twelve.” Roric rose abruptly. “I’ve wasted a good knife,” he said with a shrug. “The Wanderer—if he was a Wanderer, and if he appears again—can tell me himself what he wants. In the meantime, I know who I am, and I have no intention of waiting for my fate to reach me. I am King Hadros’s sworn man and bitter enemy, and I am the man Karin loves.”

  As he left the cave, there came a metallic clatter almost at his foot. He paused and glanced down. It was his knife.

  He stood motionless for a second, then picked it up and returned it slowly to his sheath, looking back toward the cliff. A fitting conclusion to the last day’s events, he thought with a mirthless smile. Even in the oldest tales, no Weaver had ever refused payment. It was now full night, and there was not even a glint of firelight from the cave.

  2

  Karin had never told anyone, not even Roric, about the faeys.

  She slipped out of the hall very early in the morning, an hour before the maids would rise to stir up the fires for morning porridge. The room was still completely dark. Hadros and his sons snored peacefully in the other cupboard beds as she went on slow silent footsteps across the hall, finding her way by feel to the great door. She always kept the bolts oiled, and they slid back effortlessly. The hinges gave the faintest creak as she swung the door open, but the note of the snores did not change.

  Roric, she knew, would also be asleep, up in the men’s loft with the king’s warriors and housecarls. She hesitated for a moment as she pushed the door soundlessly shut behind her, with a disquieting image of him quietly knifed. But even Gizor would not dare an attack among so many men.

  She pulled her cloak around her against the pre-dawn cold and hurried across the courtyard to the apple tree that spread its trellised limbs against the outer wall. They would assume she was in one of the other buildings in the castle when they woke to find her gone from the hall. She had been climbing this apple tree since she was small, and it would still—just—hold her.

  She scrambled upward quickly, pausing at the top of the tree to free her cloak from a twig on which it caught. The last ten feet she went by toes and fingers, but the sandstone was soft enough that she had been able to chip away holes over the years. Then she went lightly along the top of the wall toward the back of the castle, where an oak branch stretched near. Since Hadros had won the war with her father, he had neglected such things. She seized it, scrambled, and worked her way down the tree until she was low enough to jump.

  The faeys would want to know she was going to become queen.

  The long grass brushed dew against the skirt she had hitched up while she climbed, and roots caught at her feet. She never liked to come out while it was still fully night, for fear of meeting the troll, but if she waited for sunrise the faeys would be gone. She hurried in the opposite direction from the cliff, darting between trees whose shapes became clearer and clearer as the sky lightened above her.

  But she was in time. As she came over the last rise, she could see their lights still burning with a cold green glow. Many of the faeys had already gone into the hill, but others lingered in the dell. She paused above them, pushing back the hair she had not taken time to braid, and whistled three times.

  They ran around in panic for a few seconds as they always did, as though they never could remember they had taught her that whistle themselves. But then they spotted her and poured up the hillside to meet her.

  They came up to her knees. They leaped and frolicked like puppies, crying, “Karin! Karin!” in shrill voices, snatching at her skirts and all trying to get closer to her than the others.

  Even miserable she had to laugh. “Yes, yes, I’m coming to visit you! I have news you’ll like to hear. Yes, I’ll tell you when we’re all inside.”

  For ten years, the faeys had been the only ones with whom she could be not a princess, not a hostage, not even a woman, but only herself, Karin.

  They poured back down the slope into the dell and gathered up the lights. She went on her knees to crawl into the hillside behind them. The stone swung shut, closing them in.

  In all the years she had been coming here, she had never liked this disorienting moment when natural light was abruptly gone, leaving them all illuminated only by the faint green light that put weird shadows across their features. She took a deep breath and shut her eyes, then carefully opened them again.

  It always became better in a few minutes. The faeys brought out wild strawberries and honeydew from the bees and ate happily, apparently not noticing that she was not eating hers.

  “Yes,” said Karin. “I told you I have something to tell you. I’m going to become a queen.”

  “A queen! A queen!” the faeys cried in delight. “And will that pleasant young man you told us about become your king?”

  “I don’t see how he can. But I love him, and I don’t want to marry anyone else.”

  The faeys gave her more strawberries as though that would solve her problems and finally noticed she was not eating. She ate a few to make them happy.

  “And that’s not all,” she continued. “I shall have to leave here, go back to the kingdom where I lived when I was little.”

  This caused consternation. “But how could you go away? That would mean you’d leave us! Don’t leave us, Karin! Maybe we could come with you!”

  She looked at them between exasperation and affection. She had stumbled across the faeys when wandering at twilight the first summer she had come to Hadros’s kingdom, within a week of when her younger brother had died. She had not then been much taller than they were, and the faeys had since told her she was the first mortal they had successfully tamed.

  “If you came with me,” she said, “you’d have to leave your dell. The trip is too long for a single night, and much of it is by ship.”

  They had not thought of this. They conferred urgently among themselves for a moment, then announced, “Then you’ll have to give up being queen! That way you can stay here and still marry that nice young man.”

  They gave her arm and hair reassuring pats, happy to have solved her problem so easily. Karin shook her head. She had come hoping the faeys might have some ancient wisdom to offer, but years of visiting them should have made her know better.

  “The king here would like me to stay, I think,” she said.

  “There! What did we tell you? You know you wouldn’t want to move away from us!”

  “But he will want me to marry his son, rather than Roric, the man I love.”

  For a reason she could not understand, there was immediately further consternation among the faeys. They jumped up, knocking over their bowls, and several darted off down the tunnels while others started making little piles of pebbles in the dim green light.

  “What’s happening?” she asked in a minute when no one seemed about to tell her.

  One looked up from a pile of pebbles that kept falling over every time he tried to balance another on top. “Is your Roric— Is he sometimes known as Roric No-man’s son?”

  “That’s right,” she said with a frown. “He was found at the castle gates when he was a baby, no more than three months old. The queen had pity on him, especially since she had no children of her own yet—or so I’ve always heard. He was brought up as King Hadros’s foster-son and became one of his warriors, but he is a man without family.”

  “Should we tell her? You tell her. Don’t you think she’ll be upset if we tell her? We don’t want to upset Karin. But queens have to deal with upsetting things every day.”

  “What’s going to upset me?” she almost shouted.

  “Oh, nothing!” the faeys cried together. “Nothing at all! Just something we heard, but it must have been another Roric altogether. Nothing to do with you!”

  She rose to her knees, as high as she could go in the cramped space. “If you do not tell me at once,” she said resolutely, “I shall leave here and never visit you again.”<
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  There was a horrified silence, then several spoke up, although hesitantly. “Well, it’s probably nothing serious. But maybe it’s better if— We may have been mistaken, of course . . .”

  “Tell me plainly,” she said grimly, “and tell me at once.”

  Only one dared speak now. “We’ve heard— That is, someone said— We’ve heard the Wanderers want him.”

  This was so unexpected she sat down abruptly on her heels. “But why would the Wanderers want Roric?” she asked in wonder.

  “Well, you know,” said the faeys unhappily, “even you mortals must realize— Even for the lords of voima, fate does not always go well. Or for faeys!”

  “Yes, I know the faeys have their problems,” she said absently. “But— But could it mean they need him because of who he is?” Her face lit up in the green glow of the lights. “Could he really be a son of a Wanderer all this time?”

  “What?! Why would you even think that? Don’t think that! It’s not right for mortals to have such notions!”

  It had been a nice idea for about two seconds.

  “They want him because he is a mortal, but one who has no ties with other mortals!”

  Then they don’t know about me, she thought. This was disconcerting; it was almost as bad to think that the Wanderers could have important gaps in their knowledge as it would have been to think that they were watching all the time.

  “What use would they have for a mortal?”

  “Maybe he can help them,” said one of the faeys slowly. “We sense the time of upheaval is coming, the time even creatures of voima fear . . . Soon we may have to seal our burrows against the outside world; sometimes we have to seal them for hundreds of years. Would you like to stay inside with us when we do, Karin?”

  She deliberately ignored this, not sure what upheaval the faeys could be talking about and certainly not wanting to be sealed up anywhere for the rest of her life. “But how did you find out about Roric? Do you speak yourselves to the Wanderers?”