KING IMBERT, a widower, didn’t have a son. The succession when he died was uncertain.
He repeated, “The king’s son.” Real happiness overlaid the pleasure I’d zEEned him into feeling. “He’s at court, but he’s coming here to visit. He must already be on the road. I expect him the day after tomorrow.”
“I see.” But I didn’t.
The master added, “Jerrold doesn’t know the truth about his birth, and neither does the king. Those are my secrets, which I swore to tell no one.” Horror blew the zEEn air away. “What have I done?”
I could zEEn him back to calmness, but not forever. What could I say? “Er . . .” I began in my ordinary ogre rasp. “Er . . . Did you promise not to tell an ogre?”
That surprised him. After a moment, he laughed. “Aveece would despise me for betraying her, but I feel better for it.”
Queen Aveece had been his daughter?
“How did she die, if I may ask?” She had left the court three years after the wedding. There had been a state funeral, which I knew about, but I hadn’t been born yet.
“You don’t know? It was printed in the gazettes.” His sadness returned. “She fell off her horse. The injury was so severe that she died.”
Oh! “I’m sorry.”
Mistress Dosia came in for our plates. I grabbed mine, because three meat sticks remained. Happily for me, the master waved her away.
“I’ve begun. I might as well go on.” He stood and went to the fireplace. Facing me, with his back to the heat, he recounted the tale.
With an effort, I ignored my food to listen.
The master said his family was ancient and noble. His daughter had been a respectable match for a king.
“However, I worried they were too much alike—both headstrong, stubborn, energetic, lively. Aveece would have done better with a more serene character, but they loved each other and were happy and merry for three years.”
Their bliss, the master said, had frayed as the queen noticed that she was never consulted in affairs of state. She wanted a say, which hardened into wanting a seat on his royal council.
I imagined marrying an important healer who somehow managed to keep me from healing, too. I wouldn’t stay in love with him for long.
“Imbert is king and has the right to rule as he pleases,” the master said, “but Aveece was clever. Her opinion was worth hearing. I sympathized with her—and with him. He may have wanted her to be the one person he could be with and not think about the kingdom.”
The royal feud had sizzled for a month, and then the queen had returned to her father’s manor.
The master’s voice rose in exasperation, as if these events had occurred last week. “Why couldn’t they both bend a little?”
The separation had happened two years before I was born. To me, it was Kyrrian history.
“We lived between Bast and Frell at the time.” Messengers had galloped from the master’s home to the castle and back, continuing the quarrel. “She kept telling me, ‘If he wanted a stupid queen, he should have married someone else.’” He smiled wryly. “I always had a headache.”
He sobered again as he continued. When Queen Aveece realized she was pregnant, she refused to inform the king. “She said, ‘Now, more than ever, he won’t let me on the council.’”
I felt uncomfortable, hearing the secrets of my king and late queen.
“Before Jerro was born, she extracted a promise from me not to notify the king if she didn’t survive childbirth and never to tell him about her baby if it lived and she didn’t. She said she wanted the child to grow up away from its father’s influence.”
But both had lived, and then, a year later, she’d died. The master hadn’t promised anything about revealing her death other than from childbirth.
“I wrote to Imbert. If he’d come to the funeral, he would have seen his son and I would have been released from my absurd promise, but . . .”
I felt a surge in the master’s sense of ill use.
“The king merely sent his royal regrets, two ministers, and three jugs of mead to serve after the ceremony. I like to think his death would have melted her anger, but I’m not sure. I didn’t let the ministers discover Jerrold.”
A month later, the master had moved here, as far from court as could be. “I wrote to my acquaintances that Jerro had sickened and died without his mother”—he smiled—“but the boy never had a sick day in his life. Would you like to see him?”
Now?
The master started for the door.
I stood, torn. Then I tucked the three remaining meat sticks in my shirt and followed him out, gnawing on one while his back was to me.
The dining room opened into the parlor I’d peered into the night before. He marched to a portrait that hung next to the window I’d stood outside.
“The likeness is excellent. It was painted a year ago, shortly before he left me.”
Prince Jerrold was as deliciously handsome as Master Peter, though they were as different as cat and dog. Master Peter had been sleek and sinuous, while Prince Jerrold seemed sturdy and vigorous. I swallowed. “A fine-looking young man.” I wished he were already here, so I could eat—meat—meet!—him.
Ignoring both my stomach and my heart, I considered the rest of the painting. According to custom, females in portraits were painted sidesaddle on horseback, though they actually posed in a chair, with the horse painted in later. Males generally posed standing, with one leg on a footstool, which, like the chair, would be changed to something heroic. In this painting, the imagined corpse of an ogre replaced the footstool. If there had been as many slaughtered ogres as paintings of them, Kyrria would have been a safer kingdom.
“The ogre is absurd.” My voice rose. “Am I that big? Do I have a wolf’s ears or a shiny black nose? We may not clip our nails, but we don’t have claws. People know what we look like.” Some survived an ogre encounter. “It’s heroic enough to kill an ordinary ogre. Why did the artist have to make us more monstrous?”
The master chuckled. “I had hoped your attention would stay with my grandson.”
I checked the master to trace a resemblance between him and Prince Jerrold, but beyond the square jaw, I saw none. The master’s lips were thin, the grandson’s fleshy; the grandfather’s nose was beaky, Prince Jerrold’s wide and straight; the master’s eyebrows arched, the grandson’s ran straight across. The master’s cheeks and nose were freckled, the prince’s clear.
“He takes after my wife, as Aveece did.”
Except for the cleft chin, I didn’t see much likeness to the king, either, whose face was stamped on our KIs, our coins.
A resemblance to the master was evident in other ways, however. Prince Jerrold had pulled his shoulders back for the portrait, and his hands hid behind him as the master’s did right now. The young man gazed out of the painting as frankly as his grandfather now regarded me.
I thought of Wormy, whose gaze was more confiding than pointed. “How does he come to be at court if his mother wanted him to live away from it?”
“Because he wished to go, and I wouldn’t stop him. Aveece hadn’t foreseen that. Mistress Evie, he was made to be king. His judgment has always been careful, unlike his parents’. He has all their virtues and none of their faults. He may be a bit overserious.”
An excellent trait in a monarch. And his face would look well on a coin.
My stomach rumbled. I wanted the meat sticks in my shirt. “He isn’t headstrong, like his parents?”
“He’s brave. There’s a difference.”
An enormous difference, so why did he bring up brave when I said headstrong? Was the master less willing to recognize his grandson’s faults than he had been to see his daughter’s and son-in-law’s?
“He’s athletic, sits a horse well . . .” The master recited all the virtues a paragon of a king would have. “He has shot birds that my old eyes couldn’t even see, but there they were, falling out of the sky.”
My neck ached from nodding. Perhaps Prince Jerrold could be the man to dethrone Master Peter in my heart.
But he’d be unlikely to see beyond the ogre, as my love had.
Maybe he would. His grandfather had.
Alas, the distance from not fearing someone to loving that person was long.
The master said, “Whether he’s ever acknowledged as royal, I’d like him to be happier in marriage than his parents were.”
I wasn’t stubborn, except about how to treat my patients. I’d be perfect!
“He’s hoping to win a knighthood, unaware he’s already a baronet through me.” The master explained that he’d left his history, his title (Lord), and his name (Niall) behind when he’d moved here. “This close to the Fens,” he said, “people welcome new neighbors and don’t ask questions.”
“What does Prince Jerrold believe about his parents?”
The master put a finger over his lips. “Squire Jerrold. No one here knows.” He went on. “I told him the truth about his mother’s death—that she fell off her horse—and said his father died in a hunting accident. He thinks they were both magistrates who judged disputes with Ayortha.” The master’s smile was mischievous. “Imbert does judge when the disputes are serious.”
I noticed he never said King Imbert.
“Come! Follow me.”
I thought the master the source of his daughter’s imperiousness. He led me back to the dining room and on to the kitchen, where I found out that the man whose gauntness had alarmed me was the master’s cook. In the two weeks since I’d seen him he had noticeably gained weight—and had become tempting.
He stirred a smelly porridge in a clay pot on a brick stove—a new invention that even Wormy’s family didn’t have. What a wonder it would be in an apothecary. He smiled at me and bobbed a bow. “Thank you, Master Ogre. They called me Twig until you came. Now I’m making them call me Trunk.”
I congratulated him. “Please call me Mistress Evie.”
“Ah. I’m sorry for not guessing. Mistress Evie it is, Mistress Ogre.”
The master had no guests but me at dinner. Mistress Dosia served me a quarter of a roast mutton and a slice for him, with a mucky mess of broad beans and onions. Though I could have eaten twice as much meat, my belly was comfortable when I finished. The master was comfortable, too, his melancholy barely there.
“How does Squire Jerrold fare at court?” I asked.
The master’s irritation reawakened. “He was doing well—made friends, won a tournament. He’s a squire because a young knight, Sir Stephan, took him on.”
“But he’s no longer doing well?”
“In his last letter he spoke of a new arrival at court, a hero who’d killed several ogres and had their heads to prove it, which are now displayed on pikes.”
“Do you know how they died and how many were killed?”
“Jerro didn’t mention how. He said half a dozen heads.”