The Well-Favored Man

by Elizabeth Willey

It was a great shame, I thought, that she was not like Mother. We could have used another sharp mind in the family; instead we had, it seemed—if she were ours and Prospero inclined to think she was—someone like Aunt Viola, who is not renowned for her intelligence. Viola has her own breezy charm, but Ulrike lacked even that.

  Self-conscious and shy, she was nothing like Belphoebe or Marfisa, and I imagined they, when they met her in person, would find her amusing. Though averse to arms and graceful in form, she was not quick to learn dance steps and tended to be clumsy. I had seen her trip on her own gowns so often I’d feared she’d fall on the Spiral and had suggested kindly to her that she have them taken up a few fingers’-breadth. When I took her to the Spring, I thought, she would probably be so overcome or nervous that she would either faint or stumble and fall in.

  Small loss, thought I, and then bit my lip. It would be murder, though someone would survive—Mother would, but Ulrike would not, her form animated by Freia’s substance. It would be a public service of sorts, true, yet Gaston would hardly thank me for restoring his lady in such a way, even though he himself must be aware at how lustreless Ulrike was. The comparison was inevitable, as was the conclusion.

  I pushed the idea away. To execute a criminal impostor thus was one matter, but to assassinate a sister, even if she was an idiot, was another.

  Thin golden sun came across the Spiral, nearly horizontal, as I descended one morning a few days after signing the treaty in Ollol. I had gone up to the top of the Citadel and watched the winter day begin, standing in the cold still air while darkness changed to light and seeing the stains of color creep onto the world—bloody crimsons and brazen oranges, presaging more snow. There had been nothing particular on my mind when I went up, though I find the heights a congenial thinking place; I had wanted to see the sunrise and the night’s flight. When the sun was a hand’s-breadth over the horizon, far away in the mild North, I went in and went down to find breakfast.

  From overhead, a cold draft accompanied a black shadow which whistled in the air as it fell toward me where I stood on the stairs. I turned toward it and lifted my right arm, a gesture so practiced as to be ingrained. The bird, one of my black-and-gold-barred hawks, spread her wings and landed, staggering me.

  It was one of the trio I had sent searching. Success, so soon? The cylinder on her leg had a blob of white wax over my black, which was broken. I stepped off the Spiral to a side corridor and into the first open room, which happened to be a formal reception room. The bird left my arm reluctantly and stood on the back of a chair. She did not appear to have had a hard journey. I murmured praises to her while I cracked open her capsule.

  A tiny strip of white paper, torn from the bottom of my note, was enclosed. On it was written: Yes, she is. W all affection, Gaston. He had made his usual flourish in the signature, in miniature.

  I sat down slowly, staring at it. Gaston’s handwriting. The paper shone gold in the sun. I wished he’d Summoned me, or come here. Or written more. Yet, this was a great deal already: and Ulrike was indeed my sister. Had Gaston said otherwise, it would have been difficult to accept; all the evidence was for her. It was a great wonder, after so many years of death, that my mother should have a new daughter. Perhaps she would improve with time and effort.

  My great pleasure and relief surprised me. I couldn’t keep from smiling broadly, and I wanted to jump up and down and whoop. Instead I made myself sit very still, wiped the glee from my face, and then went down to eat when I was sure I was under control. First, though, I took the hawk out and hand-fed her at the mews, and I hummed to her as I did.

  At the table, before Ulrike joined us, I remarked to Prospero that I had had confirmation of Ulrike’s story.

  “How?”

  “A wee bird told me,” I replied in a jesting tone.

  He looked at me sidelong and lifted an eyebrow. “Ah-hah. ’Tis a relief anyway.”

  The snow outside my window was falling in thick, fluffy, clumped flakes. The fire leapt soundlessly behind the mica window in the stove door. Virgil, perched on the curtain-rod over the window, was looking down at the room below through wise half-closed eyes. Brahms, his dark head drawn down into his shoulders, golden eyes closed, slept on the bookshelves over the fireplace, a featureless feather lump. It was a quiet winter afternoon, perfectly suited for curling up and reading.

  That was exactly what I was not doing.

  “Will it hurt?” whispered Ulrike.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Oh.”

  “It hurts as much as cutting yourself usually does,” I added, to explain myself.

  “Oh,” she said, and didn’t say anything more, hugging herself.

  On my worktable, fires burned with low, restrained roars in three pans arranged in a triangle. In a fourth pan in the center was a bar of gold. I took out my Master Key and set it ready on the bench beside a curved silver scalpel.

  “Just do as I tell you when I tell you to do it, and don’t do otherwise,” I warned her, moistening my mouth with a sip of wine.

  Ulrike, pale in a dark-blue dress, her left arm bare, long snug sleeve unbuttoned and rolled up above her elbow, nodded on the stool, wide-eyed.

  “I may not actually speak,” I said, “but you’ll know.”

  I began the spell. After the standard cleansings and invocations, I tapped the serious power and shaped it to the form I wanted. Now the Master Key hung suspended in the form of the spell over the gold bar; the spell itself was visible to me as multicolored-gold basketwork around the Key and the bar and the fires, which were now hand-sized balls of flame like miniature suns. The sweat from my forehead stung my eyes—I’d forgotten to put on a headband—and I blinked and itched and struggled to keep my concentration on the forces I controlled. The fires were roaring. A distraction now would make my tower room, truncated, look like the business end of a reversed rocket.

  I continued chanting and created the forms for the Keys I was making in the spell. The gold melted, glowing red-hot. I invoked Ulrike and described her to the spell, creating a space for her in the sorcery too, combining her with the Keys I would make and identifying her with them. Now …

  I held out my left hand, reaching across the table above the red-hot metal, and commanded her to take it. A clammy, shaking hand was set in mine after almost too long; the force that abided in the spell surged and strained. I picked up the silver scalpel and nicked Ulrike’s wrist. Her arm jerked in my grip; she might have squeaked or shrieked. I held her there, though, and her blood fell onto the molten gold and into the spell and when it was enough I released her, speaking words of acceptance and inclusion and completion.

  The gold was white now, liquid and shining. I uttered the disposition of it and commanded it to go and at the same time, in the instant it went, I upended a silver ewer of water into the dish where the metal had been with more words.

  The power, released suddenly, passed through me and off along the vent lines I’d established—a lifting, sexual rush that made me shiver and thrill. The three fires whoomfed and went out. Steam rose from the dish now filled with water.

  I closed the spell, hands shaking in the gestures, and then took out my handkerchief and mopped the sweat off my face.

  “That was not so fearsome, was it?” I said.

  Ulrike made an odd, strained little sound. “But almost nothing … happened,” she said. She was snow-white in spite of her comment. In fact she looked faint.

  “There were things you could not see or feel happening,” I said. “It was all on another … level. There are your Keys.”

  She nodded, but didn’t look into the dish at which I gestured.

  “They will be cool enough to handle in a moment,” I assured her.

  Ulrike nodded again, holding her wrist. “M-may I go get a bandage …”

  “I’ve things here. Wait.” I caught my breath, shrugged uncomfortably in my damp clothing. I keep medical supplies in my workroom, for my own use and for mending my birds when they n
eed it from time to time.

  When I’d bound up my sister’s wrist, the Keys were cool enough to handle. I asked what she wanted to do with them.

  “What do you mean? I’ll give them to people, won’t I?”

  “Yes, but how? That’s the question.” I took one out and looked at it. It was a delicate, lacy thing, slender, the head shaped like a hornèd moon with a star between the points, closing it, and the wards like wavy rays. Rather nice. I had chosen the general shape, but the details came from Ulrike herself.

  “Oh. I see.” She frowned and rolled her sleeve down to button it. “I think,” she said shyly, “for now, I … can I just give them to you and Grandfather and Walter? For now?”

  “That’s up to you. Here …” I counted out seven. “One for you, one for everyone else … an extra for yourself …” I hung one on my own ring of Keys and took out a leather bag to keep the rest in.

  “Where do you put them …”

  “In with the rest of the …” I was going to use Dewar’s irreverent term, family jewels, and then supposed it would make her blush again, “… Keys, in storage. Come with me and I’ll put together a set for you.”

  Ulrike said nothing while we went along to the strongroom. I nodded to the guard on duty there and opened the door. Lights leapt up in the wall sconces as we entered.

  The extra Keys are kept in a cabinet in this repository for odd bits and pieces of stuff deemed, for sundry and sometimes whimsical reasons, too valuable to leave just lying around. The security of the place was debatable. Dewar had once laid complicated protective spells on it, but then Freia hadn’t been able to get around them and had scolded him and made him lift them. She felt that the best warding was provided in part by obscurity, and anyway she trusted people, so she did no more than lock the strongroom with impressive chunks of metalware. That was early in Argylle’s history, though, and I thought that perhaps I’d put down protective sorcery of my own. Now that I was supposed to use my judgement on things like that.

  I unlocked the cabinet with a mundane sort of key (the lock and key did have a spell on them, such that they only worked for one who had drunk of the Spring, but that was hardly exhaustive security). The doors swung back. Inside, the cabinet was pigeonholed with little crystal-knobbed drawers. Each one held Keys for a member of the family, stored in an idiosyncratic order Freia had settled on. I opened them in order, took out a Key from each, and put them all side-by-side in a row on top of the chest; and, in that they represented us, they brought to mind a row of bodies, our family, laid out for identification.

  My hand hovered in front of the last drawer, almost didn’t open it, and then I did open it and took out one more. I put Ulrike’s spare Keys in an empty drawer and locked up.

  “Here,” I said. “They’re all quite easy to keep sorted out, you see …”

  “I remember now. Father showed me his. This is his …”

  At least he had shown her something. “That’s Gaston’s, yes. This is for the Citadel and this for the City. Here is Prospero’s.” An intricate, elegant knot shaped like a Key, or a Key shaped like a knot. “Alexander’s. Marfisa’s. Phoebe’s. Walter’s. Mine …” A featherish design at the top, clawlike wards at the bottom, and engraving along the barrel. “Uncle Dewar’s, and Mother’s.”

  “Mother’s,” she repeated.

  I nodded, looking down at her face as she studied the Key. “Just so you have it.”

  Freia’s Key is strangely similar to Dewar’s in its labyrinthine wards, a negative image of her brother’s, and the top is a cross-quartered circle, unadorned, smooth and rounded.

  “I wish I had known my mother,” Ulrike said, nearly inaudibly. “I dream of her sometimes. I think it is Mother.”

  “I wish you had too. She was the best the world could offer.”

  “She seems to have worked so hard, so constantly, here.”

  I nodded. “It was her life. Her public life.”

  “What was her private life? Utrachet said she had a garden, that it’s still kept here …”

  “Oh, my. Gardening, research in all kinds of fields, her family, music …”

  “Research?” Ulrike looked up at me, puzzled.

  “She surveyed out to the Border Range, back when the world was new, surveys we still use to measure the Dominion. She did genetic and biological research, too; she loved plants and animals, she designed them and bred them or fashioned them from the Elements. It was she who brought vines to Argylle, when she first came to rule, and planted vineyards and began winemaking. She travelled … gods, she wandered farther afield than many of us, to Noroison, on every Road in Argylle and every little pocket-world between here and the Border … she loved music and dancing, she and Dewar danced beautifully together and sometimes, once in a while, they would sing, or she would sing with Prospero …” I looked at the Key. Smooth, seamless, whole. “She knew more about the way things fit together to make our world than I ever will, I think.”

  She studied Dewar’s Key. “Nobody mentions Uncle Dewar here. Father wouldn’t talk about him.”

  “He was my tutor,” I said.

  “Father did tell me that. Dewar is a sorcerer and he grew up in Phesaotois, and he taught you.”

  The things Gaston had told her sometimes told me more about Gaston than I’d ever known. “He’s also Prospero’s son. There’s more of Landuc in him than Noroison, I think, and maybe more of Argylle than either. He’s a gentle man and merciful, but dauntless; daring, but a careful, cautious planner. He has a great sense of humor,” I had to add. My mouth twitched, suddenly remembering Dewar’s silly pranks on anyone who happened to catch his attention and particularly on his sister. One year he had somehow—I still didn’t know how—substituted live animals and plants for the cooked food under all the covered dishes at a dinner at Walter’s house; the dining room had become a barnyard. Another year, during a particularly riotous party on the Day of Illusions, he had masked all the exterior doors and windows in Voulouy’s house with illusions, so that those inside could not find their way out for hours, until the following dawn.

  “Is he alive still?”

  “I believe so.”

  “Father thought not.”

  I shook my head. “I would like to see him back here. Perhaps Fortuna will turn her Wheel about and bring him home. You would like him. He is a good man. Gaston was always distrustful of sorcery and sorcerers—same as Alexander, but more diplomatic—and I guess with good reason.… Dewar and Freia could put their heads together and come up with very dangerous … exploits.”

  Hesitantly, my sister asked, “Was Mother a sorceress?”

  “Oh, not really. She called it hedge-witchery. She had a few tricks, but she wasn’t interested in the Great Art. Dewar provided that if she needed it, as Prospero provided a certain diplomatic savoir faire and Gaston would provide a sword. Tools to her hand. She was good at hunches, though. Mother was always right.” I smiled.

  She sighed. “Someday maybe I’ll understand.”

  I squeezed her shoulder quickly. “You’re young. You’ll get to know her with time.” I wondered whether Mother knew Ulrike was here now, and what she thought of that.

  Ulrike fingered her Keys. “Have you talked with Father?”

  “He will come when he is ready. I shan’t pester him.” I crossed my fingers again as I spoke. Half-truths, half-lies … they grated on my sense of honor.

  “He wouldn’t talk much about Mother, either …” She sighed again.

  “He loved her too well to talk about her, I think,” I said gently. “Her death was a terrible shock to us. To you it is history. To me it was yesterday, and I still cannot imagine that she is not … travelling again somewhere on the Road.” I looked away, at a tall, dusty clock which was apparently stored here because its works didn’t. The benevolent, serene sun on its face was perpetually half-eclipsed by a smiling round pale moon. I wished it had stopped with both the sun and moon showing wholly, or just the sun, instead of with the moon attempt
ing to supplant the unresisting sun.

  “I’m sorry,” Ulrike whispered.

  “You must drink of the Spring, Ulrike,” I said, closing the cabinet. “Now that you have Keys, it will be—”

  “No!”

  “No?” I looked down at her, nonplussed. “Ulrike, you will not be able to use these Keys here, nor to follow the Road or the Leys—”

  “I … no, please. I … not yet,” she said, chalky-pale again. “Not the Spring. Not … not yet.”

  Why such strong aversion? It was far easier than the Fire of Landuc, I had explained that to her once already. “Have it as you will, then,” I said. “Or not.”

  13

  MARFISA CAME TO ARGYLLE AGAIN, AT my asking, to meet Ulrike. I asked Alexander to come also, but he was busy in Montgard and could not. When I explained why I called him—that we had acquired a new sibling—he was irked.

  “Naturally I would like to visit, to meet the girl,” he said. “Damn. Marfisa—”

  “She said she would be here in a few days,” I said.

  “I cannot easily leave now. You should have told me sooner.” He drummed his fingers. “Well-a-day. It is discourtesy to Ulrike, too. Ulrike. What an odd name.”

  “I rather like it.”

  “It’s a perfectly good name, just a bit odd.”

  “When do you think you will be able to attend here, Alex?”

  He had not specified what business kept him, nor did I ask. With Alexander, it could be anything from war on three fronts at once to a lady about to succumb to his advances. He would weight them equally. Actually, he would place the lady above the war, because wars can be delegated.

  Alexander paused, thinking. “In a month, possibly; realistically, two months.”

  “Mm,” I said noncommittally. I recalled that Montgard’s time spun slowly compared to Argylle’s. “As you wish. I’ll convey your respects and regrets.”

  “You’ve given her Keys, I assume.”

  “Yes. She just has the immediate family for now.”

  “Ask her to Summon me herself. She knows that much?”