by
Barbara Hambly
“I suppose it really started at her naming-feast,” said the King softly, looking down at the face of his sleeping daughter. “When we didn’t invite the Night Queen.”
“She a friend of the family?” Sun Wolf folded his arms, glanced sidelong at His Majesty, King Rainulf II of Mallincore, Ilfagen, and Darf Brael, Duke of Gnissmaul and Hereditary Godshadow of the Three Rivers, though owing to the wars that had intermittently torn the Gwarl Peninsula for the past twenty-five years since the death of Tarwyn the Strong, Rainulf currently held authority only in the city of Gnissmaul and its outlying countryside. Still, it wasn’t a bad gig. Situated where the Khivas River joined the Gniss, it was the central receiving-point for wool coming out of the cold Kanwed foot-hills – the very finest in the Middle Kingdoms – and ideally situated to take a cut of trade coming in from across the Inner Sea.
The ducal palace didn’t look more than a score of years old, the hangings around the princess’s bed wrought of figured silk. Obviously, the place was prospering. The King’s doublet was embroidered with a startlingly realistic garden of lilies, peach-blossom and primroses, sharply at odds with Sun Wolf’s shabby jerkin and battered boots.
“My grandfather – er – owed his throne to her.” The tips of His Majesty’s rather prominent ears flushed slightly pink. As anyone’s would, reflected Sun Wolf, who had to admit relationship to old Rainulf Raw-Heart – so called because, legend said, when he had killed his predecessor on the throne of Mallincore he had carved out that gentleman’s heart and not only eaten it before the assembled nobles of the kingdom, but had forced the king’s newly-widowed wife to share the morsel.
The Wolf wondered if Rainulf had kept up the ancient custom of bedding the Night Queen in order to keep demons from the land. The current Rainulf didn’t look like her type.
Still, by everything he’d heard about the lady, she wouldn’t take kindly to being cut out of anybody’s party-list.
“Does she really exist?” Starhawk of Wrynde – who had been Sun Wolf’s second-in-command back when he’d led the highest-paid troop of mercenaries in the Middle Kingdoms, and was the only member of that troop who’d remained with him after he’d discovered in himself the seeds of wizardry – spoke for the first time. She stood almost hidden by the bed-curtains, a tall slim woman in her later twenties, her straight baby-blonde hair cut short like a gladiator’s. “I’d always heard she’s a legend.”
“Oh, she’s real, all right,” said the Wolf. “They used to be worshipped as goddesses, so it’s no surprise the priests don’t want to talk about them—”
“All of them?” Her straight, dark brows pinched in over her nose, delicate still except for the bump of an old break in the middle. “The Lady of the Woods and the Lady of the Waters and the others?”
“Some of ‘em, anyway.” The Wolf turned back toward the bed, and the young man who’d been seated beside it on a velvet footstool rose, yielding him his place. “They used to say the Wizard King could imprison spirits in bottles: wights or ghosts or elementals. I’m guessing the Ladies themselves put that story around, about them bein’ just legends, to keep him off their backs. Isn’t that so?” His single eye, cold amber like that of his namesake, slid sidelong back to King Rainulf again. His Majesty nodded, and Sun Wolf settled on the stool, and took the Princess’s hand.
The young man, who had retreated only a step or two, whispered, “She’s been like this since yesterday evening.” He was sturdy and handsome in his short velvet doublet and parti-colored hose, the necklace over his shoulders discreetly screaming of wealth beyond what the average King could wear for every-day. Tears streaked his face. “It used to be I could wake her – I’m Kellen, by the way, Kellen Balkus.”
Sun Wolf recognized the name. The King had told him on the way up. Scion of one of the greatest merchant houses in Kwest Mralwe, his father – the House Balkus representative here on the Peninsula – was a good deal more powerful than the King. The husband of the dark-haired girl who lay so peacefully asleep.
“Lord Sun Wolf—” The King began an introduction, and the Wolf lifted one gold-furred hand.
“I’m not a lord. And it’d be a lie to introduce me as a wizard. I have some power. How much, I don’t know. What I don’t have is training.”
He turned back, pressed the cold, slender hand between his own sword-callused palms, closed his eyes. Walked his mind through the meditations that his own untrained teachers had told him were necessary to the raising of a power that up until the Wizard-King’s death eighteen months before none had dared to use or admit. He drew three deep breaths, whispered, “Tinómiel,” and sank his consciousness into the glowing twilight of the Invisible Circle.
The hunt for her wasn’t long. Her dreams were sweet, a child’s dreams still. The Wolf recalled what the King had told him, that his daughter Tinómiel was eighteen and a half, but had been sheltered from every ill wind since infancy. Dreams of embroidering, of conversations with talking cats and dogs. When he whispered her name again she came to him, obedient as a child. But when he tried to lead her back to the world of waking, she slipped away, shaking her head.
I can’t, she said. I can’t…
Darkness fell between them like a curtain. Suffocating darkness, that smelled of sweetness and poison.
“Pox fester it…” He opened his eyes. On the pillow before him, Tinómiel’s sleeping face was filled with peace. “It’s a curse, all right. There’s something there, keeping me from bringing her back.” Something strong, he didn’t add.
Stronger than he was, anyway. He could feel that in the marrow of his bones.
By the angle of the light from the tall windows beyond the bed, no more than a few minutes had passed. The girl’s mother, who had slipped into the room while the Wolf had been in trance, buried her face in her husband’s shoulder and sobbed. Rainulf stroked his Queen’s golden hair and whispered, “Hush, Daruanna… hush…” though in point of fact, Sun Wolf reflected, hushing so as not to wake the sleeper was the last thing anyone in the room wanted.
“It was my fault,” said Kellen brokenly. “My doing…”
Though it was obvious to Sun Wolf that the five of them could have danced in a ring around the bed singing ‘Three Old Whores from Mallincore’ at the top of their lungs without disturbing the sleeping princess, Rainulf herded them gently from the chamber. Only Kellen remained behind, resuming his seat on the stool beside the bed and laying his curly head down beside the dark velvet ocean of the sleeping girl’s hair.
A servant had brought a tray of cakes to the anteroom, and cider in the most spectacularly beautiful pitcher the Wolf had ever seen, an enormous nautilus-shell set in gold. Autumn sunlight warmed the tiled floor, carpeted now against the coming of winter; tapestries had been put up already on the frescoed walls. Tinómiel’s suite overlooked the palace park, which sloped down to the Brightwater stream. Across it, visible through some of the biggest expanses of window-glass the Wolf had ever seen, the forest of Bethen wore its smiling aspect of red, purple, and gold. The new palace stood a mile or two upstream of Gnissmaul itself, and on the other side of the river. Obviously Rainulf’s father had valued a pretty location over the safety of the city’s grimy walls. Sun Wolf calculated he and Starhawk could have besieged and captured the place in a week with minimal assistance – a troop of traveling acrobats would probably have sufficed. He priced the loot just in the anteroom and the bedroom at two hundred silver crowns (Kwest Mralwe money), not counting whatever the King, his wife, his daughter and Kellen Balkus would bring on the open market as slaves.
That was supposing anyone would pay for a girl, no matter how beautiful she was, who slept sixteen hours a day.
“It has been a secret within the House of Gniss—” Rainulf helped his wife to a chair, “—that the so-called priestesses of the forest shrines are in fact the Ladies themselves. Father and Grandfather were on good terms with them all, even to having the Night Queen’s shrine cleaned and repaired. But when Tinómiel was born, neither my wife nor I would have the Night Queen in our house to celebrate the birth. She is a woman of anger, of savage wants and cruel imaginings. We would not dream of letting her near our daughter.”
The Queen – a fragile woman, from whom her daughter had inherited a complexion like finest porcelain – took her husband’s hand as she looked up into Sun Wolf’s face. “We invited the Lady of the Woods, and the Lady of the Waters, and the Lady of the Flowers, to our daughter’s naming-feast. They laid their blessings on her as she lay in her cradle: that she should truly be the fairest in the land. Her outer beauty is matched by inner loveliness, Lord Wizard. They gifted her with patience, modesty, good cheer and all the other virtues of a maiden. No couple in the land have been more blessed by a daughter than my lord and myself. When she wakes—” She stopped herself, her hand over her lips, and a shudder went through her.
“In the midst of the feast there was a spectacle of fireworks,” the King went on. “The Three Ladies went out into the garden, to help it with their magic, for the pleasure of the people. But as everyone rushed to the windows to see, the chamber behind us was left in darkness and shadow. It was only for an instant, Lord Wizard, I swear it! But Lord Balkus said later, that he saw an old woman slipping out the palace gates, and the Three Ladies feared that it might have been the Night Queen. For this reason we kept watch, for eighteen years, to keep our daughter safe from her. For this reason we live a little retired, here in my father’s country villa that he built originally for the summers only—”
He gestured to the acres of tiny-paned windows, the view of the woods and the stream. Long used to living in the bitter northlands, Sun Wolf could only guess at the quantities of wood needed to heat the place every winter.
“For this reason – knowing that the Night Queen holds dominion over mechanical objects, clocks and furnaces and spinning-wheels – we gave orders that all such devices be banished from Gnissmaul, and hidden away in the countryside. We screened all our daughter’s tutors and music-masters, hiring them from lands far away, so that they could not be influenced by the Night Queen’s powers. When it came time for her to wed—” Here the King turned back, as if through the closed doors of carven oak to gesture toward the young man sitting so faithfully at Tinómiel’s bedside, “—we allowed her to choose which of her suitors best pleased her. Believe me, the Kings of Gwenth and Ambersith put up a howl you could have heard in the Eastern Wastes, when we passed by their sons in favor of a merchant’s son – whose education and training, I need scarcely add, has made of him as great a gentleman as any in the land.”
He rubbed his hand over his face. By the bruised flesh around his eyes, all the sleep his daughter had been getting seemed to have been taken out of his ration of that commodity. He didn’t look like he’d had a night’s rest in months.
“So when did this start?” Sun Wolf leaned back in his chair, folded his massive arms.
“It was our daughter’s eighteenth birthday,” said the Queen. “But the sleeps have been getting longer and longer, and with each one, she grows harder to wake—”
“Her birthday was two months before her betrothal to Kellen Balkus was announced,” explained the King. “Though of course she had known him for six months. His love for her was unmistakable—”
“I would die for her.” Behind him, Kellen opened the bedchamber door. Leaning on his arm, the Princess pushed back the silky tendrils of her hair from her face, her eyes filled with concern and guilt.
“Papa, I’m so sorry—”
“It is nothing, my darling!” Rainulf strode to her side, took her in his arms. “Lord Sun Wolf—”
“I dreamed about you.” Tinómiel regarded Sun Wolf in surprise, as she held out her hand from the protection of her father’s arms. The trace of hesitation, Sun Wolf sensed, stemmed not from his admittedly daunting appearance – with his eye-patch, broken nose, and the general appearance that mercenary captains get after decades of breaking other peoples’ heads for a living, he was not a comforting sight – but from the shyness that well-bred girls in the Middle Kingdoms were taught to feel around men of any stripe. Still her sapphire gaze was frank and unafraid. “You knew me. You came to bring me back to Kellen and my parents.”
“And you said, I can’t.” His voice was as intimidating as the rest of him, he was well aware, croaking scratchily from vocal-cords torn and scarred. “Why did you say that?”
“Did I say that?” Tinómiel shook her head. “I don’t remember. Will you take some wine?” She made a move toward that gorgeous pitcher. “Or – Are wizards allowed to drink?”
“That I haven’t the faintest idea.” He gave her his most reassuring smile. “The Wizard-King killed off every other mage who showed his face for the past hundred and fifty years, so if they ever had any rules about what we’re supposed to do or not supposed to do, nobody remembers what they were. What I’d most like is for you to tell me about the first time you started falling asleep like you do.”
“But that’s just what I don’t know.” Tinómiel’s lovely eyes filled with tears, as her husband guided her to a seat at the table.
“I blame myself,” repeated Kellen wretchedly. “We’d ridden out to my family’s depots below the town, so that she could choose wools for her wedding-things—”
“I insisted,” Tinómiel defended him. “Papa’s always had cloth for my gowns brought here by the merchants, but since I was going to be a merchant’s wife—” Smiling, she reached behind her to take Kellen’s hand, “—I thought I should at least see the depots, and my father-in-law’s ship.”
“Some of my father’s contractors were there,” went on the Prince, “with spinning-wheels to send out to the women who do that kind of work. There’s a work-barracks of them, south of the river in Prakmarsh, and another east of here in the forest. Bandits had attacked the place a few weeks before and burned some of the buildings. The women needed new wheels. I was in the depot talking to the contractor. When I came out, Tinómiel was sitting on a bench beside the door, asleep.”
His blue eyes seemed suddenly to age at the recollection. “She woke up when I kissed her. But she was quiet, all the way back here, as if not really hearing what I said. She was nodding by the time we returned here, and slept twice the clock around.” His hand tightened on hers. “We feared that we would never be able to wake her.”
“And even when we did,” the Queen whispered, “it was not the end. The spells of sleep returned…”
“I don’t remember anything about it.” Tinómiel turned back to Sun Wolf. “I remember going to the depot, and watching the men unload the spinning-wheels. I was curious, because I’d never seen such things before. Curious about how they worked, I mean. The cloth is so beautiful—”
She gathered the long dagged ruffle of her outer sleeve, rose-colored wool as light as silk, stroked it with sensitive fingers.
“—and yet I haven’t any idea how the fleeces get turned into something like this…”
“She must have touched one of the spinning-wheels,” said Rainulf softly. “The Night Queen’s influence is wide, and as I said, she holds power over mechanical things. Only a fortnight ago, my daughter slept for three days, like one dead. One day we fear she will not wake, but rather will starve in her sleep.”
“You must help us.” Queen Daruanna came around the table, laid her soft hand on Sun Wolf’s tattered leather sleeve. “She is our only child, our dearest treasure—”
“Name what you will.” The King tightened his hold around his daughter’s shoulders. “If it is in my power to give, it is yours.”
“In return for going after the Night Queen?”
“Yes.” The King looked a little surprised that he’d have to ask. “Of course.”
*
Taking on an elemental spirit widely held to be a goddess and robbing it of its prey was not behavior calculated to make old bones. Sun Wolf – who occasionally felt that his own skeleton had aged decades in the eighteen months since the agonizing birth of the powers of wizardry within him – had set forth from his hermitage in the cold hills beyond Wrynde hoping to find some clue, in the puzzle of the Sleeping Princess, that would lead him to another wizard.
“Funny,” he said, as they passed the head of the track that led down to one of the outlying barrack-villages of spinners that Rainulf had established to keep his daughter safe from all contact with machines. “I’ve heard for years how the Gnissmaul cloth-workers labored outside the city in barracks. It’s why they haven’t had the trouble with riots that they’ve had in Ambersith and Ciselfarge, and why the merchants here can charge about fifteen percent under the going rate for velvet. I thought it was damn clever of ‘em, to get the people to agree to it. Keeps the workers out of the city and away from each other, where they can’t team up to fight for better wages… I never figured it got started to protect the King’s daughter from a curse.”
“Yeah.” Starhawk drew rein, and studied the rutted trace where stripped trees showed that the firewood shipped in by the town’s merchants to their workers wasn’t sufficient to keep those workers warm in the winter. Far down the track Sun Wolf could see the wooden palisade that surrounded the long huts, where the women lived twenty-six days out of thirty, apart from their families back in the city. In other compounds across the river men and women slept and ate in the lofts above their looms. “But what do you want to bet me, that if we do get the Night Queen to remove that curse, the merchants in Gnissmaul are going to find some other good reason to keep them there?”
“Not a goddam thing.”
A shrine to the Lady of the Woods stood near the head of the track, a sort of open belvedere in the style of the Empire of Gwenth at its height. Her statue was new, its marble head adorned with a wig of bronze wire woven with gold, its robes of porphyry and malachite carved with intricate inlaid borders, though the altar clearly dated back to most ancient times. While Sun Wolf and the Hawk sat their horses there, three women came up the track; they knelt in the shrine, pressed their faces, then their hands, to the stained and mossy square of rock.
“Wonder what the local priests have to say about that?” Starhawk nudged her horse onto the trail that led into the forest of Brethen, and toward the foothills beyond.
“Not a lot, if the Ladies make these parts their home. They’re not people I’d want to bad-mouth where they can hear me.”
Sun Wolf had spent most of the previous day and on into the night attempting to decipher two ancient spell-books he’d unearthed from King Rainulf’s locked library-vaults. Each contained pages concerning Great Elementals, spells and information unknown to him from the few volumes of magic he’d managed to collect over a year and a half of searching. The late and unlamented Wizard-King Altiokis had destroyed most books of magic as a means of preventing the rise of any rival – had not even kept them himself, as far as Sun Wolf had ever been able to ascertain. Beyond that, the Wolf’s personal experience with elementals had been limited, though the bog-land a few miles from his hermitage crept with them. But they were small, and in all the nights he’d sat out freezing his ass off in a protective circle watching and listening to them, he’d never seen them manifest either intelligence or anything close to human form.
The Ladies would be different.
“At least the shopping-list of what I need to summon them was plain Megantic,” he grumbled. “Now I know why none of my ancestors was ever a mage – not one of them could read his own name. What language the rest of the books were in is beyond me. I could make out the Summoning spells, but if they’ll work is anybody’s guess.” He shook his head. “It’s not like we’re dealin’ with another wizard, for all these skirts are supposed to look like us. For them, it isn’t even really magic. It’s like you and me breathing. It’s just what they do.”
“You and me breathing,” pointed out Starhawk in her soft alto voice, “doesn’t put some innocent kid in danger of her life, Chief. If she is innocent…”
“She’s innocent. I saw nuthin’ in her dreams but embroidery and talking animals. I’d like to get a look at her daddy’s – or Prince Charming’s – because I’m guessing whatever pissed off the Night Queen wasn’t about missing hors d’oeuvres at the palace.” His hand went to the sword at his side, which he had taken care to ensorcell last night with whatever counterspells he could figure out. He’d likewise obtained a couple of iron daggers, and had gone through the messy and complicated rituals that supposedly imbued them with spells inimical to the Night Queen. Unless the rat-bastard who wrote that book was lying…
“If nuthin’ else I’ll learn something about elementals out of all this.”
“That’s why you answered the King’s letter in the first place?”
She lifted her eyebrows, her voice deadpan, and Sun Wolf glanced sharply at her to see if she was accusing him of being a softie. In his mercenary days he’d dragged innocents half Tinómiel’s age screaming away from their slaughtered parents and sold them to slave-dealers without turning a hair – behavior that he was loathe to admit gave him sleepless nights these days. “I answered the King’s letter so I can loot his frakkin’ library,” he growled. “Those two spell-books are older than God – and the gods know what else is in there, if I look. And I’m gonna make him give me a troop to go in and search the Wizard-King’s old fortress ruins. There’s got to be books in there someplace. He couldn’t have burned ‘em all.”
“Makes sense,” agreed Starhawk affably. I wouldn’t DREAM of saying you’ve gone soft, Chief…
Yeah, well, see you goddam don’t.
*
The shrine that marked the boundary of the Night Queen’s lands was, as Rainulf had said, clean and new. Its ancient altar showed signs of recent sacrifice, scattered ashes, blood flung upon the blackened stone. The image, wrought of cinder-dark basalt and whitest marble, depicted a woman no less beautiful than the Lady of the Woods. Yet the whole air of the place was one of desolation. The clearing in the trees, before a great cleft that ran back into the rock shoulder of the mountain itself, was silent, as if the birds and rodents of the woods kept clear of the place, at least as the afternoon lengthened. Leaves drifted deep on the ground, tawny and buff, and Sun Wolf had to clear them away before he could ritually cleanse the area and mark out the circles of protection, the circles of warding, on the earth.
She hears me, he thought, as he lit the four fires, passed his hands across the water-bowls, scratched the sigils of power into the earth with the iron knife. The thought of that made the hairs on his nape prickle. She feels the iron as if it scratched her own flesh. She knows I’m here.
She knows my name.
He remembered the strength of the darkness that had passed over him in the Invisible Circle, the smoky stink of poison and death-flowers.
The horses, tied at some distance from the shrine, tossed their heads uneasily. Even the Wolf's mount, Widowmaker, was almost too cowed to kick at him as he walked by within range. The Wolf didn’t blame them. He’d been raised in the wilds of the far north. He when he was in the hunting-ground of wolves.
“You stay inside the main circle, Hawk,” he cautioned softly, as he marked off the boundaries beyond which – he hoped – even a Great Elemental couldn’t summon lupine assistance. “Keep an eye on these nags and keep them from bolting out of the circle. Once the lines get broken, the whole spell’ll collapse.”
“This is getting better and better.” Starhawk, her attention taken with soothing the nervous horses, glanced over at him as he joined the intricate sigils (How well did Yirth know the spells she taught me? How well did HER master know them to teach to HER…?) that would allegedly not only keep enemies out, but would keep the Night Queen in. “Any suggestions about what I can do if you get into trouble?”
He tossed her the second of the crude iron daggers he’d worked over, imbued with spells and soaked overnight (as the crumbling grimoire had instructed) in dog’s blood. It was still sticky. “Use that if she comes after you. Iron’s supposed to drain her powers. Whatever you do, if I get into trouble, don’t you tackle this bitch yourself. I mean it, Hawk. You won’t win.”
She said nothing, which Sun Wolf feared meant that she was going to disregard his instructions if it looked like his life was in danger. Which it probably would be…
Thing had been a lot easier when second-in-command of the troop was all she was.
Damn uppity skirt. Man falls in love with ‘em, and they think that means they can do whatever they please…
He wrought a smaller circle, in which he put the prescribed bowl of new-fired clay, with the leaves of nightshade, the fragments of bone… From the saddlebag he took the small box containing two live bats, which had cost him considerable difficulty finding in the market of Gnissmaul (And I hope to all my ancestors the little bastard who sold ‘em was telling the truth, that they’d been caught in the dark of the moon, the lying weasel…)
He hoped that any of this would work in the daytime. That was part of the spell he hadn’t been able to make out. Still, he had the feeling that summoning the Night Queen after sundown would be a genuinely stupid idea.
He made the fire in the old way, with flint and steel, though starting it with a Word was a hell of a lot easier. A lot of spells wouldn’t work, if you used a Word to start your flames.
Slit the bats’ throats, to quench the flame in blood.
Three deep breaths. Sink into the Invisible Circle, where power began.
He felt her fight him. Felt the rage, the bitter pride, Who the hell do you think you are, to summon ME…?
And with the pride, outrage. Because the spells of Summoning had her.
Crushing weariness, the deep drowsiness like drowning in black oceans…
And then, when he dug the point of the iron knife into his hand to pull himself awake, pain that went through the whole of his body like lightless fire.
Oh, no you don’t, honey… You came to the wrong man if you think I’m scared of pain.
She came, springing at him even as she materialized above the stinking blood-smoke: swollen, spider-like, lashing at him with tentacles and claws. He grabbed the chitenous scorpion-tail that whipped at his face, drove the iron knife through its armor with all his strength, cursed as black ichor spurted forth and scalded his hand but didn’t let go. At the same instant he heard both horses scream in terror, heard Starhawk swear and the wild hammering of hooves, but didn’t look around. In one of his books it had said that old wizards used to send their students through mazes, tearing at them with spells and flogging them, to teach them to concentrate on their spells whatever the circumstances – his instinct told him that to take his mind from this one, even for an instant, would be his death, and Starhawk’s too.
The thing he grappled, the thing that ripped at him, was his own bulk and his own weight, its limb searing-hot where he clung to it but the claws that ripped into his back ice-cold. Over its hissing he shouted, “God damn it, woman, I want to talk to you!”
Shadow blinded him, and the thing he saw through it, he knew wasn’t how she really looked. Cloudy masses of ash-white hair like spider-web; eyes cold and pale and filled with rage.
He knew he was wounded – bleeding – and hoped his strength would outlast hers. Around them was darkness, as if night had fallen in the instant that she struck.
“I only want to talk!”
He heard Starhawk yell a warning and glimpsed a dark shape lunging from the darkness behind him. Widowmaker, he thought, the instant before the heavy-muscled buckskin knocked him to the ground. The black scorpion-tail slipped from his hand, wrenched the iron knife free of his grip.
Raking pain.
*
He came to feeling like he’d been run over by a harrow. Shivering – naked to the waist, and the night was bitter-cold. Then the bee-sting of pain as something hot and astringent was pressed over a wound in his back. He jerked, swore, and a cold firm hand shoved him back face-down against the earth: “Good. Hold still while I sew this up.”
He set his teeth, his whole body an anvil under the iron hammer of pain. He smelled blood soaking into the earth. Way too much for those two bats. A fire burned near-by, illuminating the dark trees, the black cleft in the rock-face at the end of the little clearing. “Where’s Widowmaker?”
“Got away.” She pinched up the flesh, poked the needle through.
“Crap.”
She was neat-handed with wounds but couldn’t mend her own shirt to save her life. Wolves howled, a mile, maybe a mile and a half away. It’s autumn, there’s plenty out there for them to eat…
They weren’t close enough to smell his blood.
Yet.
Starhawk helped him sit up, handed him what was left of his shirt and doublet. It was well and truly night – I must have been out for hours – and even the effort of sitting up made him grit his teeth against the woozy wash of light-headedness. She held a water-skins steady for him while he drank. When he set it down she remarked,
“Well, that went well.”
“What the hell was I supposed to do, bring her candy?”
In the firelight he saw that her face was bruised and cut, and when she took the skin and drank from it herself, she moved as if her whole back and right arm were stiffening. As they would, he reflected, if she’d tried to hang onto Widowmaker when the Night Queen threw a spook-spell onto him. She was lucky the stallion hadn’t killed her.
A chorus of howls answered the first: closer. Coal, Starhawk’s gelding, jerked at his tether with a scared whiney. “You stay still,” said the Hawk and got to her feet, took a small ax from behind Coal’s saddle and went to chop branches. Sun Wolf tried to get up to help her – I must have been bleeding like a pig for her not to have made another fire before this – but staggered and sank again to his knees. Dizzy, he drew deep breaths, trying to steady himself enough to work a healing-spell, no easy matter considering the blood he’d lost. Wonder how the old-time wizards taught their students THAT one…
Starhawk brought wood back, working fast. The howls had ceased, but Sun Wolf guessed the pack would be on them before long. He felt like he should have been more frightened but light-headedness and the cold calm of shock seemed to intervene between reality and himself. He remembered what Rainulf’s book had said about the Night Queen: She commands the children of the night: the wolf, the bat, the moth, the rat, the cat, the owl, the raven, the serpent, bids them come and go against those she hates. Darkness and fog are her servants; she calls forth the storm, the wind, the lightning…
She commands the nightmare, but is queen also of prophecy, of dreams, of rage and lust…
Her strength will drain away, if so be she be struck with cold iron, and he who would subdue her hath the will and strength enough to hold the weapon in her…
Sun Wolf looked at his palm, torn where the iron knife had been jerked from his grip. Damn book could have mentioned SOMETHING about giant spiders…
Hope she puts on a better face for the King of Mallincore when he beds her.
Or maybe that’s the test...
Starhawk carried flame from her first small fire to the other two, then led the hobbled Coal into the triangle made by the blazes. “You okay, Chief?”
“I been better.”
All around them in the darkness, gold eyes caught the firelight. There must have been three or four different packs, brought together at the Night Queen’s command. Starhawk took a brand from the fire, drew her sword. Sun Wolf tried to prop himself up on one hand enough to draw his dagger, and it was like trying to sit up in a hammock. Damn it, I can do this…
He tried to collect power, tried to bring together a spell of fire. They’ll flee from fire…
The gold eyes disappeared. In the terrible silence, he could feel magic pass through the clearing, like the prickly whisper of a thousand shards of breaking glass.
Coal whinnied again, tried to rear against the rope that bound his forefeet.
Someone was out there in the trees.
The pale blur of a face. The dark movement of robes.
“Have no fear.” She stepped forward into the firelight, slender and ageless, hair like bronze smoke touched with gold. A simple gown of antique cut stirred around her, in a perfume of sweetgrass and summer.
“Lady.” Starhawk bowed her head. The Wolf noticed she didn’t let go of either sword or torch.
“Come,” said the Lady of the Woods. “Can you ride, Lord Wizard? The wolves will be back soon; maybe the Night Queen with them.”
“If that’s the case,” said Sun Wolf, “I’ll walk if I have to.” He took Starhawk’s hand, tried to rise, and blackness swallowed him as if a door to the Cold Hells had opened under his feet.
*
If the Night Queen commanded the realm of nightmare and dreams, she gave no evidence of ill-will. Sun Wolf dreamed of stabbing, not the clawed and tentacled spider-thing in the forest, but a pale-eyed woman with ash-white hair, a woman who scratched at him and cursed, but cried out in pain at the twist of the iron knife. In his dream he saw her, from a great distance, walking along the terraces of King Rainulf’s palace while fireworks played gorgeously in the night sky, her dark robes billowing around her. Saw her watch the faces of the King’s guests – local nobles, visiting dignitaries, the richly-dressed coterie of the town’s merchants – and among them, the Ladies who, like the Night Queen, had been worshipped as goddesses, beautiful as sunlight and flowers.
Invited to celebrate the naming of the child who would be the fairest in the land.
The Night Queen’s face was calm, but there was bitter derision in her colorless eyes.
*
Sun Wolf woke to morning light and bird-song. The shutters of the low-roofed stone room where he lay were open, and the air sharp, mitigated a little by the fire in the beehive hearth near the bed. Starhawk slept, fully clothed, on top of the several quilts that lay over him. Last night’s cuts on her face were already half-healed. The Lady must have touched them with a spell. Touched him, too, while he slept: he felt far better than he knew he should, and was hungry.
Moving gently so as not to disturb the Hawk, he rose and found his clothes. There was a spare shirt for him, and the sort of quilted jacket poor weavers wore. By this – and by the smell of smoke and privies wafting distantly on the morning air – he guessed that the little dry-stone house was in fact attached to the shrine of the Lady beside which he and Starhawk had halted yesterday morning, where the road ran on down to the barrack-village. When he stepped outside he found this indeed to be the case, and followed a little path to the shrine itself. There he found the Lady sitting at peace in the sunlight on a stool beside her own altar, mending his shirt.
“You were fortunate.” She set her work aside, shaded her eyes to look up at him as he approached. “Or wise, to deal with the Night Queen while the sun was yet in the sky. Did you learn the Summoning from the Book of Sharmedion, that was in King Rainulf’s library? Fortunate again, for those who come to petition, she does not answer. Only waits until darkness falls, when they are at the mercy of her creatures.”
Lovely as a swan, she turned her head, rose from her stool as a pair of women – a mother and daughter, it looked like – approached the shrine. They had the beaten-down look the cloth-workers got in the Middle Kingdoms, from never enough pay, never quite enough food or rest. The old woman’s hands were visibly crippled with arthritis, from labor at spinning-wheel or loom from first light til it grew too dark to see. Men could riot, Sun Wolf reflected, or become thieves or mercenaries in the endless wars between the small states of the Middle Kingdoms – usually ineffective ones, who got killed in the first battle. A woman with children would take whatever merchants like the House of Balkus or the House of Stratus cared to offer.
He wondered if the younger girl had children back in Gnissmaul, children to whom she was sending the few coppers she made here. The girl had been weeping; she knelt before the Lady, pressed her forehead to the Lady’s thigh like a weary child, her whole body trembling. The Lady of the Woods gently stroked her hair, said something to her in a voice too soft for Sun Wolf to hear, even as close as he stood to her. The girl looked up, and the Lady drew a little sign on her forehead with her thumb. “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s all right.”
Sun Wolf’s mouth tightened under his raggedy mustache at this patent untruth, but he said nothing. The girl closed her eyes, and sighed, as deeply as if the whole of her skeleton within her flesh were racked apart with it, bone from bone. For an instant she relaxed, and the Wolf had the impression that, for that instant, she slept.
Then her eyes opened, calm and at peace. The Lady raised her up, and kissed her. Made the same sign on the forehead of the gray-haired mother, and kissed her weakened hands.
“I feel so bad for them,” the Lady murmured, as the two women walked away back toward their work in the barracks. “They have so much to bear.” She turned her head, as if at a sound from the little stone house: “Come. Your friend wakes – you must be hungry.” She gathered up her sewing. “Later we will speak about the Night Queen, and how best to approach her without being killed yourselves.”
“Would you know if my horse made it back here?” Sun Wolf asked as they walked back to the stone house. Widowmaker was as malicious a piece of original sin as the ancestor of horses ever put together, but the thought of the old bastard being torn to pieces by wolves wasn’t one he cared for.
“Of course.” She gave him her radiant smile. “I found him last night, after I brought you here. He’s in the stable.”
Starhawk was in the stable already, perched worriedly on the rails of the stall – something she never could have done, Sun Wolf reflected, had the big stallion been in health. He quickened his stride as he approached the shabby little building, but found Widowmaker eating peacefully from the manger. The stallion turned his head at Sun Wolf’s approach, gave a sleepy nicker of welcome…
“What’s the matter with him?” Sun Wolf entered the stall – taking his usual wary care of the big horse’s heels – and went around to Widowmaker’s head. By the scrapes and bites on his flanks he’d clearly run into a wolf or two in the woods – but nothing he hadn’t gotten before, and gotten over. It was almost shocking to see him this placid. If it hadn’t been for the scars on him, the Wolf would almost have doubted it was the same animal.
“I don’t know.” Starhawk, too, sounded deeply troubled. “Those bites are nothing. I’ve been over him—”
Touching the horse’s forehead, Sun Wolf felt it. A spell-mark – an Eye, they were sometimes called – of the kind a wizard would draw, to leave a lasting Word on a place or a thing. In it, he felt the power of the Lady of the Woods.
The Lady came up, smiling, like an aunt who’s given her nieces and nephews a holiday treat. “Ah, you feel it,” she said. “He’ll be happier now – and you, too, I daresay!”
Sun Wolf said the first thing that went through his thoughts: “But he won’t be himself.”
Her eyebrows shot up. The look on her face was almost comical, but he could have bitten out his own tongue: That isn’t a woman you’re talking to, you block-head, it’s a goddam high-level Elemental—
And the look in her face was offended chagrin.
She made a recovery like a woman, however, with a soft chuckle and a smile. “If you mean, he won’t be a wicked handful of brute anger for you to contend with on the road, no, I can promise you he won’t.” She came into the stall, ran a loving hand over Widowmaker’s flank. It would have got her kicked clear to the other side of the room the previous day. Widowmaker only continued to munch sleepily on his hay.
“Can you remove it?” asked Sun Wolf, speaking very carefully now.
The delicate line of her mouth flattened out a little. “Well, I can, if you wish—”
“It isn’t that I’m not grateful, m’am,” said Sun Wolf. He could see she was definitely pissed. “I am. But the truth is, that his wickedness – his anger – is what keeps him alive in a tight place. It’s for damn sure what let him fight off the wolves in the woods last night.”
“After he’d run away from you—”
Well, last night that had been the Night Queen’s spell, but it hadn’t been the first time.
Diplomatically, Starhawk chipped in, “We believe – our people…” Though in fact her people were no relation to Sun Wolf’s, unless – he supposed – a gang of his ancestors had come through the Western Cliffs Country at some point in the past… “—that our ancestors make us as we are for a reason. We’re taught that it’s very bad luck to change their handiwork. That if we offend them, they’ll take revenge.”
“That’s ridiculous,” snapped the Lady. Then she seemed to recollect that she was the beloved comforter of the women at the village, and shrugged. “But have it as you will.”
Sun Wolf watched her hand, to see if there was some kind of gesture or spell she used, but she simply swiped it across Widowmaker’s forehead, as if smudging out a chalk-mark. The next instant Sun Wolf grabbed her and almost threw her over the railings of the stall as the stallion lunged at them. He got over himself too quickly for the horse to take a bite out of his ass, but he got his trousers ripped and a hell of a bruise for his trouble.
The Lady straightened her robes and stalked back to the shrine where a couple more of the spinning-women from the barracks waited humbly for her. Her back was stiff with indignation, as if Sun Wolf had made an attempt upon her virtue… or had turned down an attempt by her upon his.
His glance crossed Starhawk’s. Then they both, thoughtfully, watched for a time as the Lady of the Woods greeted her worshippers, and made the sign of peace on their foreheads, to still anger, resentment, bitterness from their hearts. To make them happier.
“You get the feeling we went calling on the wrong goddess, Chief?”
“I do.” He went and fetched his saddle from the rails of Coal’s stall where it had been set. “But I also get the feeling nobody’s going to thank us, for what’s going to happen when our Princess wakes up.” Widowmaker watched him suspiciously, and angled his heels toward the rear of the stall.
Starhawk collected bridles from the wall. “Should have waited to get that mark taken off him, ‘til after he was saddled,” she said.
*
To Sun Wolf’s question, when he and Starhawk returned to King Rainulf’s palace that night, the King replied at once, “Lord Balkus. As I said, he was at Tinómiel’s naming-feast – and he has one of the largest libraries in the Middle Kingdoms. With all his business dependent upon such things as looms and machines and spinning-wheels, he would surely know if the Night Queen has power over them.”
He regarded Sun Wolf with his daughter’s expressive blue eyes, clearly wondering why the Wolf had asked him such a question.
“And this was the same Lord Balkus who claims he saw the Night Queen leaving the palace after your daughter’s naming-feast?”
The King – and Queen Daruanna, and young Kellen Balkus, all sitting around the inlaid table in the so-called “solar chamber” which overlooked the gardens – all shook their heads, and Sun Wolf closed his jaw hard on the incredulous question, Are you REALLY that stupid?
It was pretty clear that Rainulf was, at least. Which might explain why he’d been run out of his rightful realm of Mallincore twenty years previously and hadn’t ever managed to get his throne back.
“The same Lord Balkus who suggested to you that to save your daughter from the curse, you split up all the weavers and spinners of the city and keep them out in barracks, under a guard set by the merchant princes, to do their work?”
“The people were wonderful about it.” Queen Daruanna clasped her slender hands. “When word went out into the city, that it was for the sake of our beautiful little princess…”
“It was all the merchants who agreed to build barracks,” offered Kellen, a little diffidently. “And to keep guards over them, to protect them from bandits…”
“Or from riots, or demands for higher pay? Had Balkus or the other merchants ever asked for this system before?”
Rainulf and Daruanna looked at each other uncertainly. Starhawk, seated at the far end of the table on Sun Wolf’s blind right side, remarked, “You’d only come here a year or two before that, hadn’t you? After Ambersith conquered Mallincore?”
“Father spoke of such a system to the other representatives of the Family in other cities, before your coming, sir.” Kellen looked respectfully toward his father-in-law. “I was about seven. But what does this have to do with the Night Queen’s curse on Tinómiel?”
Sun Wolf sighed. “Not a damn thing.”
*
Tinómiel dozed off three times during Sun Wolf’s explanation to her, of what had happened at her naming-feast. In between, she struggled visibly to remain awake, while Starhawk kept discreet guard on the garden paths that led to the little bower where Sun Wolf had found her.
“Then it was never the Night Queen?”
“I don’t think so, no. You are under a spell,” he added, and shook her gently, as her blue eyes began to slip closed. They’d asked Rainulf only that they be allowed to speak with the princess alone. When he thought about it, Sun Wolf wasn’t entirely sure the King could be trusted not to eavesdrop – for his daughter’s good, of course. “All those blessings the Ladies put upon you in your cradle – patience and cheerfulness and never getting angry about anything, EVER… All those were spells. Have you ever been angry about anything?”
She blinked at him in the dove-gray dusk, chilly among the dark laurels that surrounded that end of the garden. Struggling to remember. Then her head drooped and he shook her again, harder, and her eyes popped open: “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “I don’t seem to be able to—”
“Have you ever been angry?”
“Yes,” she said, and immediately fell asleep.
Patiently, Sun Wolf passed his hand over her alabaster forehead – she was marked there, all right – and carried her to the little fountain in the center of the lawn. He sat her on its low edge, stuck her hand in the chilly water, and she woke with a start. “Have you ever been angry?” he repeated, and Tinómiel, her eyes filled with shock and alarm, nodded.
“What’s wrong with me?” she asked. “Yes, I’ve been angry—” She shook her head, like a guard left too long on duty fighting sleep, and hurried to get the words out. “I remember now. When we went down to the warehouses on my birthday, Kellen and I. While he was inside I spoke to some of the spinning-women out on the docks. I asked them about their work. About the barracks, and what they have to do. I asked them, did my father know—”
Her head lolled. Sun Wolf stuck her hand into the water again and she gasped, shook her head. “Did my father know about this?” she demanded, really frightened now.
“About falling asleep whenever there’s something that troubles you?” He sat on the fountain-rim at her side. “It’s one way to keep a sunny spirit. The Lady of the Woods thinks it makes the women in the weaving-barracks happier.”
“Well, so would getting them drunk every night!” protested Tinómiel. “And my father would never tolerate that, ever!” And she collapsed against his shoulder.
“If she falls into one of those deep three-day sleeps—”Starhawk emerged from among the laurels, “—we’re going to have to get out of here fast.”
Sun Wolf cursed Rainulf’s ancestors and the Lady of the Woods for good measure, and, when Tinómiel wouldn’t respond to either shaking, gentle slapping, or having a hand dunked in cold water, picked the girl up bodily and dropped her into the fountain. For a horrible second he thought even that wouldn’t serve, but her eyes opened, first outraged at this lèse majesté, then, an instant later, terrified at the implications of her state.
Quickly – because he knew she was going to go off again – the Wolf asked, “Do you want me to make you different, if I can? To let you be angry? To let you feel what you feel?”
She staggered up from the fountain, streaming water from her ruined pink silks and sopping hair, her blue eyes filled with a new fear. “Will Papa hate me if I’m different?” She clung to his steadying hand. “Will Kellen hate me?”
“I don’t know. They might.”
“But nobody’s ever going to thank you,” said Starhawk, “for taking care of yourself. Whatever happens, it’s going to be hard. But it does get easier.”
Tears ran from her eyes – all the tears she had never cried, in eighteen years of being the fairest in the land and no trouble to anybody. She whispered, “I want it. Please help me.”
And collapsed.
That time they couldn’t wake her.
Sun Wolf said, “Shit.”
“They’re going to be looking for her pretty soon, Chief. Whatever you’re doing, you’d better work fast.”
“Gimme your coat.” He was already turning toward the satchel of implements he’d brought out to the garden with him – he’d guessed this might be his only chance to act. “Keep guard and don’t let anybody near us.” At least we don’t need to worry about wolves.
He draped Starhawk’s embroidered coat over Tinómiel where he’d laid the girl on the thin autumn grass beside the fountain, paced off the circle of ward, the circle of protection. The fire and water points. The Lady of the Waters wanted the blood of a toad – fortunately easy enough to trap on the way back into the city that morning; the Lady of the Flowers could be summoned with the blood of a wren (two coppers in the market). It had been another two coppers for the rabbit required for the summoning of the Lady of the Woods, and Sun Wolf suspected that he could have dispensed with the Elementals he privately thought of as Puddles and Posies. But he might be wrong, and he needed to speak to them all.
His heart was beating hard when the smoke curled from the three little terracotta bowls of congealing goo. The Night Queen had gone after him, he suspected, because he – a mortal – had had the temerity to use this spell to call her in the first place, and something about the Lady of the Woods’ reaction that afternoon told him that she wasn’t one whit less proud, no matter what she liked others to believe. Lamps were being lit behind the palace windows, dim and distorted by the jewel-like panes. The King would be sending guards out to look for his daughter soon, and wouldn’t appreciate finding her sunk in slumber beyond waking.
And if this turned out to be the time she didn’t wake up…
“You!” hissed the Lady of the Woods.
She seemed to materialize from the smoke. In the cobalt twilight of the garden she looked taller than she had in her woodland shrine that morning, and considerably less innocuous. Her green eyes reflected the lamplight like a cat’s, and this time Sun Wolf didn’t need to remind himself that this wasn’t a human being he faced. She had lived long enough, drawn sufficient strength from the life of the trees and the seasons, to form an intelligence, to take on the speech and personality of the mortals who came to her. But she was a spirit, nevertheless.
“What happened?” From the smoke to his right another woman stepped, ageless as the Lady of the Woods was ageless, her face delicate as porcelain amid ringlets of shining gold. Her robes – a thousand fresh colors, like the wildflowers on the Kedwyr hills in the first flush of their blooming – billowed about her as she crossed to the sleeping Tinómiel, knelt at the girl’s side.
“Who is it, who dares to summon me?” The Lady of the Waters – black hair that could have been blue, wet garments draped in dripping weeds – turned furious eyes on Sun Wolf, but the Lady of the Flowers called out to her, “It’s our darling Nómie…”
“What have you done to her, wizardling?” the Lady of the Woods demanded. But her eyes slid sidelong to the two other Ladies, now kneeling at Tinómiel’s side, then flickered back to Sun Wolf with dangerous enmity glinting in their depths.
“Only asked her what she would have.” Sun Wolf slipped the iron knife down his right sleeve, ready for his hand. Yeah, and with my luck, that part of the book I COULDN’T read said, ‘Do not under any circumstances attempt to carry on a conversation with these babes…’ “Whether she wanted to continue to live with half her heart buried under blessings, or whether she wanted to feel all that there is to feel: anger, disappointment, grief. The things that make a woman a woman and not a child. That make a person a person, and not a tree.”
“And what—” demanded the Lady of the Woods, “—is wrong with trees?”
“Nothing. There’s a lot of them. They’re beautiful. But they’re trees for a reason, and I don’t know what that reason is. Nor do I know why I was born to be a man, or why Tinómiel is a woman… or will be a woman, I hope. She told me she wanted her heart back.”
“Nonsense! Happiness was my gift to her—”
“And she’ll come to appreciate it in time.” The Lady of the Flowers stood up, her kindly face smiling and considerably less human than it had been. Her eyes were copper mirrors in the dark, golden with flame.
Oh, crap.
“Your lives are short.” The Lady of the Waters rose also, the rising moonlight turning her face pale as ice. “And nothing can be done about the injustices and follies of men. Why then grieve over them?”
“Why then stir her to grief,” said the Lady of the Woods, “about which she can ultimately do nothing? Only because, like all wizards, you think you must be busy about what doesn’t concern you—”
He backed as they closed in on him. If he ran for it, he knew they’d be on him like leopards. “It concerns me that she be free to choose her own path—”
“Like you? A rogue and a murderer—”
“He’s armed,” warned the Lady of the Woods. She stood within touching distance of his hand. Reached for him with a hand like a hawk’s talon. “He carries iron—”
Wind smote them like the blow of a monster wing, so strong that it nearly threw Sun Wolf to his knees. Darkness blotted the moon, the lamps, the glimmer of the stars; he caught at the laurel-trees that masked the garden wall, felt the twigs and leaves ripped from the plants tear at his face. For a moment he saw nothing, the cold draining him like a wound. Then his vision cleared and he saw the Night Queen, standing over Tinómiel’s body, gray-white hair unbound like smoke and lightning.
“Leave her alone!” The Lady of the Flowers ran a few steps back toward her but the wind threw her back, the air shuddered with the blue-white crack of lightning.
“Leave her alone?” The Night Queen raised her brows. “Of us all, I am the only one who did leave her alone. Who didn’t give her the patience that sits down in a rainstorm rather than building a shelter, or the puling sweetness that takes a beating rather than teaches the assailant a lesson he’ll never forget.”
“We owed thanks to the King.” The Lady of the Waters drew herself up, considerably wetter-looking now with the sudden splatter of icy rain. “His father gave us shelter from the Wizard-King—”
“So you took from him the experience of having a genuine daughter instead of a stuffed doll?”
“But if you take our blessings from her now,” protested the Lady of the Flowers, who seemed to be the most soft-hearted of the three, “she’ll be so unhappy!”
“And sleep is better than grief?” The Night Queen turned toward Starhawk, who had appeared at the end of the little garden bower, her sword in her hand. Ready, thought Sun Wolf, to take on four Elemental spirits in his defense… “You’re a woman, girl. I see by the scars on your cheek – and your heart – that you know the face of pain. Is sleep better than grief?”
“I don’t know,” said Starhawk. “I know I prefer to be awake and in pain, than asleep and in nothing. But that’s just me. Maybe I haven’t had bad enough pain yet.”
The Night Queen’s lips curled. “I’m sure you will, child.” She knelt at Tinómiel’s side, looking down into the girl’s face. Sun Wolf, coming close (and giving the Lady of the Woods wide berth), saw that Tinómiel had begun to weep in her sleep, hot tears mingling with the cold droplets of the storm-rain. The Night Queen took the tear-drops on her claw-like thumb, and with them, gently wiped Tinómiel’s forehead, as if to wash away the mark of the blessing of the Lady of the Woods.
The storm had grown still, though darkness still lay on the palace. Beyond the garden nothing could be seen, as if it lay at the bottom of an abyss.
“They are men, and the children of men, Sisters,” said the Night Queen, rising. “Let them be as they are, and as they will be. In the end, they are beyond our understanding—” She turned, and extended a warning finger as she met Sun Wolf’s eye. “As we are beyond theirs.”
Like the flicker of dark fire, she was gone.
*
In departing, the Lady of the Woods took back her healing-spell, so Sun Wolf was laid up for another week with the after-effects of his initial tussle with the Night Queen – relegated, moreover, to an unheated attic while Starhawk got to have her meals with the stable-hands. As the Lady of the Flowers had guessed, the dissolution of Tinómiel’s saintly patience and unfailing good cheer was not welcomed in the slightest by either her parents or her husband, especially not after she began to champion the cause of the spinners and the weavers against the powerful merchants of the city. “How could Papa have been such a blockhead that he didn’t see what Lord Balkus was doing?” raged the girl, on one of the numerous occasions on which she came up to take refuge in Sun Wolf’s attic. Her talk was mostly with Starhawk, ten years her senior, who gave her what advice she could. On another occasion – when the girls thought Sun Wolf was asleep – Tinómiel confessed that the removal of the blessings of “modesty” and “shyness” from her heart and her flesh so totally disconcerted poor Kellen that she didn’t know what to do: “It’s as if I’m on fire when he touches me, and yet he acts like he’s never seen me before….”
Anger, Sun Wolf recalled, was not the only province of the Night Queen.
That problem, at least, was short-lived. A day or two later, from his attic window, which overlooked the garden, Sun Wolf heard them quarrelling, and looking down saw the princess slap her husband and shout, “You’re an idiot!”
Losing his temper, Kellen shouted back, “You’re an idiot yourself!” and stormed away along the brick path. Tinómiel stood for a moment, fuming, then raced after him with flying skirts, even as he turned back, and caught her in a crushing embrace.
Better grief than sleep, thought the Wolf. And better consuming fire than dry, cold wood.
Two evenings after that, Kellen came with Tinómiel to their attic, cloaked and panting from the run up the narrow stairs. “You have to leave,” said the young man, as Starhawk opened the door. “Now, tonight – at once—”
“That why His Majesty rode out this afternoon?” Sun Wolf set down the heavy wooden loom-beam that he’d been exercising with, gently easing his back and shoulders back into the habit of movement, and reached for his shirt. “So he could claim he wasn’t here when somebody came for us?”
A week ago he’d have hesitated to say the words around Tinómiel, but the princess had grown up considerably in that brief time.
King Rainulf had gone forth in state with a procession of his entire household, supposedly to attend the marriage of one of his cousins to the heir of Ambersith. Under Kellen’s cloak, the Wolf could glimpse the white-and-gold velvet costume the young man had worn: They must have turned back when the company halted for the night, and ridden hard.
When Tinómiel said, “Papa wouldn’t do that,” he believed her – or believed that she believed it, anyway.
And to tell the truth, he didn’t think the dethroned King of Mallincore had that kind of treachery in him.
“It’s my father,” Kellen said. “He was beside himself when Nómie—” His arm tightened around Tinómiel’s slender shoulders, “—went to His Majesty demanding redress for the weavers, and asked that their representatives be given a seat on the Town Parliament. Father blames you. And of course he’s still swearing that the Night Queen does, too, hold power over machines—”
“Where’s my smelling-salts?” inquired Starhawk, and perched one flank on the chamber’s rickety table. “I’m going to faint with surprise.”
“That’s not going to win him luck as long as she dwells in these mountains.” Sun Wolf slid – a little stiffly – into his shirt – a new one he’d bought, since he had qualms about putting anything the Lady of the Woods had stitched next to his flesh. He’d patched his leather doublet himself. “I take it he’s the one who talked His Majesty into going to that wedding?”
Kellen nodded unhappily. “He offered him the use of the Balkus palace in Ambersith. It’s bigger than this place, and more elegant.”
Sun Wolf was still adjusting to the idea that anything could be larger and more ostentatious than King Rainulf’s residence when the young man went on, “When we reached the stopping-place this evening I saw Father with half a dozen of his livery-men—”
Livery-men was the polite word in the Middle Kingdoms for household thugs, maintained by nobles and merchant princes alike to deal with enemy underlings or recalcitrant workers.
“—and I heard him speak your name. He said, He’s wounded, and the place half-empty.”
“Half a dozen?” Starhawk sniffed. “I think we’ve just been insulted, Chief. Let’s stick around and then send their ears to Lord Balkus baked in a pie.”
“I’m tempted.” Sun Wolf eased his aching left arm into his doublet-sleeve, jerked tight the buckles. “But something would screw up. It always does.”
Starhawk shrugged, and let the matter go. And in fact, he knew quite well that like himself, the Hawk tended to sidestep trouble where she could. There was plenty of that commodity in the world without taking on somebody’s headbreakers in a fit of pique.
“I ordered your horses saddled,” said Nómie, as they hastened down the stairs. “And had food packed for you. If there’s anything else I can do – we both can do…”
“There is.” Sun Wolf halted in the narrow doorway that led to the stable yard, took the girl’s hand. In the deepening autumn twilight she looked older, the childlike peace gone from her face, that she’d worn when first he saw her sleeping. But there was a brightness to her, like a knife-blade. A sharp, sweet delight.
He brought her hands to his lips. “You can rule wisely and well, when your time comes.”
She returned his smile. “We’ll both do that.”
“And you can go through your Daddy’s library and get me those two spell-books, and send them to me at the Pissing Dog Tavern in Wrynde. Bron – the owner – will see they get to me.”
Kellen grinned. “We’ll do that, too.”
Widowmaker tried to kick him as he swung up into the saddle.
Sun Wolf’s final glimpse of Princess Tinómiel was of her and Kellen standing hand-in-hand in the torchlight of the stable courtyard, as he and Starhawk rode through the gate. The main portcullis was drawn up, tall cressets burned on either side of the gateway – and as Sun Wolf and the Hawk rode out onto the causeway, a group of riders clattered onto it from the other end, cloaked in the livery of the House Balkus.
There were fully a dozen of them – They must have picked up some on the way here...
Sun Wolf reached for his sword.
But at that instant a blast of night-wind, like a bitter gale, swept from the woods, blowing out the torch-flames as if they’d been candles. The horses of the livery-men shied and reared wildly, and so pre-occupied were their riders in keeping the terrified animals from going over into the moat, that they didn’t see when their intended prey cantered past them, and on into the night.
Glancing back, Sun Wolf thought he saw a tall woman with long ash-white hair, standing at the land end of the causeway, black robes billowing around her like a thousand midnight curses. He even thought he saw her lift a hand to him in greeting.
But when he looked again she was gone.