The Well-Favored Man

by Elizabeth Willey

  “Your bedroom has no hall door and I had no wish to wake the house pounding and yelling,” I said, sitting down. Had I done so, Ulrike would have heard me. “Guess where Gaston’s been.”

  He stared at me, his glowering look lightening. “Gaston’s back?”

  “No.”

  “Gwydion, I’m in no temper to play your foggy guessing-games. If there’s urgent news, speak it; else leave me to my rest and my curse on you for breaking it.” He sat down heavily.

  I noticed a lot of broken glass in the fireplace: dark-brown wine bottles. Oh. He had observed the end of the Old Year too, probably feeling much as I had about it. “Your pardon, sir; I meant no offense,” I said, looking away. “I have another sister, and she arrived but an hour ago by a Way through the Keystone.”

  Prospero’s jaw dropped, but he recovered quickly. “Your mother’s daughter?”

  I nodded.

  “Gaston! Ah, that skulking sire of yours,” he said, and hit the arm of his chair with his fist. “Years ago, ere your mother fell, while we were battling with Tython’s accursed minions in the Jags, I half-suspected she’d something ’neath her apron, but the minx kept close-mouthed. Meseemed wiser not to ask her, confidence of mine eye failing me. You remember—she was ever gadding off, never saying whence or whither. She had glib excuses for her absences, yet ’twas all out of nature that she’d leave Argylle in such a pickle for any common reason … All out of nature, and wholly natural …” He shook his head. “She showed herself alone, this girl, without her father to construe his own unnatural silence? How is she called?”

  “Her name is Ulrike. She said Gaston took her to Landuc and initiated her clandestinely at the Well. He opened a Way that sent her here afterward. She said he had said he was sending her home. I suspect he may have been vague; home is a big word …” All at once I wasn’t sure. Deliberate or not? I ought to tinker with passage spells and see if it could happen accidentally.

  “The world’s a wide place; anything’s possible,” Prospero muttered. “Well, well, well.” He scratched and smoothed his beard, staring at me.

  “For the nonce, she is around the corner from me on the east side,” I said. “Seems a bit … I don’t know, shy or frightened. I wonder what Gaston has told her.”

  “We may hope, the fundamentals.”

  “I hope so.”

  He leaned back. “If he has sent her here mistakenly, then he’s sure to find his slip as soon as he fails to find his child. Indeed, must have done already: he’ll be in a panic, if she’s here by way of error, for he’ll have no way to know where she’d be.”

  I related, word-for-word, her description of Gaston’s actions.

  “He gave her no Key? And he sent her from the Well’s fire to the Way’s?”

  “No and yes.”

  Prospero frowned. “Then ’tis clear to me she’s here by his intent. It could be that she heard amiss, were she still bedazzled by the Well.” His fingers tapped on the arm of the chair.

  I could not decide, and I was becoming a bit dazed with the late hour myself. And I had never gotten any supper. “It does look that way. If that’s so, he probably did not return to this place Fenshuyan, knowing she would seek him there at once.”

  He shook his head. “There’s naught of Gaston in this; ’tis timed too pat, too near the heart aimed, to be true. Could it be she lies?”

  “About what? I believe she’s telling the whole truth. She was scared.” I had lost him.

  “The whole tale! What fear, what guilt, could so vitiate Gaston’s nature as to turn him from his children and then his child, could sway him to slink like a thief into Landuc? Why there, indeed? He could have brought her here. He could have brought her here, nursling though she be, twenty-three years past, when her mother half-orphaned her and your siblings. Why, by all the winds of the south, her mother could have …” His hand tightened into a fist and pounded the chair arm once. Then he opened the fist slowly and began tapping his fingers again, as some new thought apparently balmed the offense. “Although … Your parents have ever affirmed the safety of their brood before all else.”

  I watched him, unsure whether to respond.

  Prospero gazed into the fire, narrow-eyed, thinking aloud. “Certes, there’s method here, though it seems lunacy. Whenas we’d floundered through that fight with Tython, that ended in her murder, ’twould be out of keeping with his character for Gaston to fetch the child hither. He’d not expose her to that danger—for we knew not that Tython was no more, and indeed we cannot be secure of him even now.

  “No. He’d lair somewhere and keep his nose in the wind, biding till he adjudged she’d take no harm here. Nay, and Freia’d not have wanted the child at our Citadel, with all out of sorts and overturned, war lurking and monstrous moil in the wood. She’d do as with the others—excepting present company—slink away to bear the brat, out on the Road in some unheard-of pastoral Eddy, naught saying in words or looks to betray herself. Sly. She was always sly … I cannot believe none marked her …” he growled, and punctuated this with more thumps of his fist. His jaw moved, grinding his teeth.

  I opened my mouth, but had nothing to say. It did not seem the moment to point out that Mother’s reasons for sneaking away for her first four children were directly connected with her and Gaston’s concealment of their illicit marriage, which had finally become known when Walter was a boy. The Bad Old Days, Dewar called the following years of feuding. Not until after I was born were ruffled feathers shamefacedly smoothed and stiffly courteous diplomatic and familial relations gradually resumed. To bring this old sourness up now would only curdle the conversation.

  “Even so …” Prospero stood and paced. “I cannot envisage Gaston turning the girl out thus. It lacks the ring of truth. Or perhaps ’tis my knowledge of Gaston lacking.” Prospero folded his arms, twisted his mouth, and glared into the coals. They burned a bit brighter.

  “I thought perhaps he found her too like Freia. Perhaps the likeness pained him.”

  He shook his head again. “Bah. You look like your mother, but your face does not put me out of countenance.” After drumming his fingers for a moment, Prospero got up and left the room. “Come,” I heard him say. I followed him into his study where he was preparing for a Lesser Summoning.

  The mirror clouded and began to clear …

  A sense of imminent completion, the beginnings of an image …

  Fiery brightness shot through the mirror and the spell shut off. We gazed on ourselves. Gaston had invoked the power of the Well, drawing it around himself, concealing himself in its flow.

  That convinced me. “I wouldn’t wish to speak to anyone, either, had I just sent a young daughter into a passage spell all alone,” I said.

  “In all likelihood you’ve the right of it there.” Prospero grabbed his Ephemeris from a shelf and began flipping through the index, stopped, and indicated a place on the page. No Fenshuyan in the index: Fens (many subheadings) and Fenslach (var. Phinslech). “ ’Tis his wont: Gaston ever goes to earth in stagnant dead-end places. Can you locate this Fenshuyan? Belike they’ve word of him there; he may return, if he’s made himself a leader in the place.”

  “I can certainly try. All right.”

  He snapped the Ephemeris shut. “As for the girl—let her be subtly put to probation, but tell her not so; take her not so deep into confidence nor so near to your bosom that, if she be hostile, we’re made vulnerable. Let her be welcome, be at home among us. Yet I want Gaston to avouch her blood-kinship ere she go near the Spring.”

  I considered a moment. He was not being unreasonable. A wary attitude to her seemed wise, for the Spring is only for our kin, and it was not inconceivable that someone, seeking to play on our heartstrings, had invented Ulrike and her tale. I had no hard evidence of anything, really. “You are right. If we can get outside confirmation, fine; otherwise, we ought not to trust her.”

  “Just so. Let your welcome be nice, not overcool nor warm. When you’ve found Fenshuyan—
”

  “It were simpler by far to find Gaston.”

  He blinked at me.

  “I can send him a note requesting the favor of a reply. I think I shall. I resent this, and I would like him to explain it.” I stood. “Good night, then.”

  Prospero nodded. “Good night, Gwydion.”

  Back in my workroom, I Summoned three of my strongest-flying birds and sent them away after Binding each of them to Gaston via his Key. I had insufficient information about Fenshuyan to locate it thus, but Gaston’s Key was part of him.

  My hawks, like Virgil and Cosmo, are not entirely ordinary creatures, but they are more natural than my familiar or horse. Natural is an odd word to use—it seems to me that the closer something is to the Spring, the more natural it must be, but the common parlance has it just the opposite. At any rate, they are magical creatures too, and I can use them in ways that the austringers who handle lesser birds will never know.

  Like Virgil, they can seek and find things, though they are slower than he.

  The three would return when they had found their search-object. The hunt could be swift or slow: they would sweep through Argylle’s Dominion and the Border quickly enough, but once across the Border in Pheyarcet they would be hampered by the twisted Roads there. Each hawk bore a simple message: “I request confirmation that Ulrike is indeed my sister. Gwydion.” He could write, call or ignore it.

  “What do you think, Virgil?” I asked him as he settled onto the head of my bed.

  He ruffled his feathers and smoothed them again.

  “Is she genuinely ours?”

  He nodded once.

  “You think so, huh?”

  A nod.

  “You’ve been right before. But I still want a word with Gaston.”

  If she were my sister, why hadn’t he told us? Did he not trust us? What had we done?

  Prospero’s reasoning that Gaston and Mother had thought Argylle too dangerous for a baby stung sharply, implying as it did that we were incompetent, that we were untrustworthy, that we would not have delighted in another sibling.

  I liked it little, but I liked less the opposite: that Ulrike was lying, that she was not one of ours, and that she was here to attempt a theft of what could not be freely given.

  10

  ULRIKE OPENED THE DOOR TO MY knock.

  “Care for breakfast?” I smiled.

  She didn’t smile, but she nodded and said, “Oh, yes. Thank you.”

  “I hope you rested well.”

  Still no smile. She was uncommonly serious for a girl her age, and her manners were stiff—very unlike Mother. “Yes. Although the fireworks startled me.”

  “The festivities started at sunrise,” I said, leading her to a small dining room.

  Prospero was there already. Standing, he smiled, minutely scrutinizing her. “Gwydion has told me of your coming,” he said warmly. “It is a great happiness to meet you, Ulrike.” Prospero can be a surpassingly genial man when it pleases him.

  An uncertain smile from Ulrike. “Thank you. I am happy to meet you at last, too.” She took his outstretched hand and he bowed over hers, then straightened, looked down at her, and embraced her gently, still smiling.

  “Welcome.”

  “Grandfather,” she said softly.

  “Just Prospero,” he said curtly, and released her. Discomfited, Ulrike blushed and nodded in confusion.

  I should have warned her. Prospero hates, hates being called Grandfather. And this atom of incident clicked in my mind with another thing: Gaston very likely would not have thought to mention that. He probably didn’t even know it.

  Prospero was utterly charming during breakfast and managed to put her more at her ease. She seemed very young. I wondered if time in this Eddy Gaston had chosen was slower than our time, a backwater of the Well; the whorls of vitality can be swift or slow, or both at once. Why had he suddenly decided that that part of her life was at an end, though? Had he been unable to bear the sight of her? She did look like Freia.

  I had intended to go over to Walter’s house during the New Year’s festivities. We did little along those lines at home in the Citadel since Mother’s death. I suggested that they join me. Prospero nodded, eyes half-lidded, watching her.

  “Walter lives in the City most of the time,” I told her. “Phoebe is generally in the forest, and the others are in Landuc or perhaps Montgard.”

  “That is what Father told me,” she said. “I would like to go, yes, thank you.” She looked down at her frock, the same travel-stained one she’d worn last night. I understood.

  “I’ll have clothes sent to you,” I said.

  “Thank you,” she said again.

  Prospero decided to join us and said he would show Ulrike around the Citadel. We would all meet again at noon.

  When I had left them to their tour, I realized that finding suitable clothing for Ulrike was likely to be less simple than I had thought. I supposed I could go quickly to Walter’s now and ask his lover Shaoll, a weaver and noted fashion-setter, for help, but it was quite possible she would be out, having much to do around town for the day’s festivities. The shops were mostly shut or on short hours. There was no stock of spare women’s clothing around the Citadel for me to raid—

  Of course there was.

  I went to my mother’s rooms. None of us had faced up to the wrenching job of cleaning out her closets and chests. The staff, out of habit or homage, saw that her three-room, three-storey apartment was cleaned as ever, dusted and kept fresh, and the issue of destroying or giving away her effects had never come up since.

  I could have moved into her apartment. No one would have opposed me. It was the pick of the Citadel, with wide views over the City and landscape beyond, but I had not wanted to do that. Nothing had been discarded; her jewels lay in intricately-decorated cases in her bedroom, her books stood in ordered array on the shelves in her study below; and in her office, below the study, her appointment book and pens were still on her desk with an absentminded sketch on the blotter of a sailing ship or the moon surrounded by birds or stars.

  Candle in hand, I quietly opened her office door and went to the central spiral stair that connected the three high-ceilinged chambers and ascended its polished treads with one hand on the grapevine-carved banister. The draperies were drawn and no fires were lit here today, although to keep the rooms dry they were usually heated in the winter. The topmost round room was her bedchamber. I glanced instinctively to the left where a door led to a sitting-room between her and Gaston’s chambers, then lit a triple candelabra off my single light and carried it over to the wardrobe. A draught of herbs and staleness whiffed past me as I opened the double doors. Twenty-three years, and the fabrics had aged hardly at all—unfaded, clean, neatly folded or hanging waiting. Twenty-three years, and I could still remember occasions on which she had worn each garment. I hesitated.

  Don’t be a fool, I told myself; Mother would hardly have disapproved lending the girl a couple of her frocks. I touched a sleeve, green velvet with roses, then looked further away from the center, where less-frequently-worn things were likely to be. As I took out a blue-green gown with silver fish frolicking around its hem, I noticed a seamstress’s box with string still tied around it lying on the floor. Curious, I laid the gown aside and picked up the box, biting the string. Inside lay, folded as the maker’s hands had left it, a new ensemble never-worn: a rose-colored chemise and a moss-green woolen gown. Odds were, I thought, Mother had gotten it for New Year’s. A frisson went up my neck. I set the gown with the other and chose two more, quickly, hardly thinking about them, and closed the wardrobe.

  I carried the clothes to Ulrike’s rooms and laid them out near the fire to air for her. She had clearly not yet returned from her tour with Prospero. Then I dressed in more festive clothing myself and hunted down Argylle’s Seneschal, Utrachet, in the stables, to tell him what was going on.

  “Remarkable,” he said. “I heard part of it from Akrak this morning as he came off duty.
”

  Utrachet said he would take care of establishing her in the family wing of the buildings and suggested renovating some north-facing rooms near my late mother’s.

  I hesitated. “I don’t want her to be isolated,” I said, and we decided to leave her as she was for now. Utrachet would find a maid to help her settle in after the New Year’s bash had done. I asked him to pass the news to Anselm and the general staff. “They’ll have no trouble recognizing her,” I said.

  At noon I found her and Prospero in the Core near the front doors.

  “Thank you for the frocks,” she said.

  She was wearing her own cloak and the gown with busy fish embroidered at the bottom. It fit passably. “I thought you’d prefer the green-and-rose one,” I said.

  Ulrike bit her lip anxiously. “I do like it, but it is creased—should I change? Would it be better?”

  “No, no, no,” Prospero said, “ ’tis well enough, so let us be off.”

  We walked to Walter’s house through the City. The snow decorated everything. Firecrackers popped everywhere. Vendors were selling food and toys, gauds and trinkets, and anything you can think of in the streets, which were thronged with people. It was a perfect introduction to Argylle; they were all too busy or too drunk to really notice Ulrike, who shrank against Prospero nervously.

  We passed a brass band playing polkas for a dancing crowd at the entrance to Walter’s street, which has a strip of park in the middle where people were building snowpeople, snowbirds, snowdogs, a snowgryphon, and a snowdragon, painting them and having snowball fights. Walter was assisting in the construction of the snowdragon with its glittering icicle teeth. The double front doors to his house were wide open.

  He waved at me and a snowball whizzed by my left shoulder. I nailed him squarely in the chest with a return shot. We covered each other and a few innocent bystanders with snow. It ended when he got close enough to holler, “Who’s your date there? It’s about time you held something besides a pen! Or is she Prospero’s?” They had retreated from the field of combat and Prospero was apparently regaling her with a story because she was actually giggling, hands over her mouth.