Forgetting that she had planned to have lunch, Martha remounted Silver and guided him back towards the road. But she didn’t know which way to turn. Jasper was still alive. How was it possible? His bones had been on display in a glass case in the castle chapel for the last six years. They were decoratively arranged around a sentimental watercolour of the boy in his prime, which had been framed with the precious stones that gave Jasper his name. Then again, she supposed the bones could have been anybody’s. Jasper’s squire had arranged for the flesh to be boiled off them before sending them home, so none of them had ever seen the body. But if they weren’t Jasper’s bones, whose were they? There was no way of asking the squire, because he, too, had been killed, not long after Jasper’s death. Martha shook her head. Apparently there was no such thing as Jasper’s death. So where was he? What had happened to him? And why had he never come home?
Martha tried to feel joy and relief in the fact that her brother was still alive, and of course she did feel those things. But she also felt a deep, terrible sense of disturbance. Death was not the worst fate that could befall a person, far from it. Her father was better off dead than alive in the state he had been in. And she remembered a story she had heard as a child, which had given her nightmares, about Elaine of Corbenic, the mother of Galahad. Until Lancelot rescued her, she was trapped by a sorceress’s spell for years in a bath of boiling water, consumed in endless, hopeless agony. What if Jasper was in a similar predicament? Did she really have the ability to rescue him, even with a magic sword? She drew the sword again for a moment, looked at its beautiful, gleaming blade. She had no idea what to do with a sword, she had never even held one before. She had to hope that the sword knew what it was doing.
As for where to look for Jasper, she had no idea. He had been in the far north when he died – when he disappeared – or so she had been told. In reality he could have been anywhere. And that was six years ago. Who was to say that he hadn’t moved since then? Curse that damned bitch in the pond! Why couldn’t she have told her where to find him? Martha should have commanded her, as Queen –
Martha stopped. She wasn’t Queen. If Jasper was alive, he was the King. She was just a princess, same as she had always been. When she found Jasper, he would take his rightful throne and she would … Go back to a life of putting rosettes on marrows? And of being married to Edwin? No. Martha would find him, she would rescue him, she would send him home, but she was not going back to that.
Which didn’t solve the problem of where her brother was. Martha had nothing, no clues, no way to even begin tracking him down.
Except what had the pond woman said? That the purpose of the sword was to help Martha find her brother. Not just save him. Find him.
Martha dismounted from Silver and removed the sword from its scabbard. She placed it on a flat piece of ground, put her hand on the hilt, and then spun it as fast as it would turn. The direction in which the sword pointed when it stopped? That was the way she would go.