The Well-Favored Man

by Elizabeth Willey

  She straightened. “Good. I was not sure you were ready, but I see you are. The other matter is, that I would have you keep silent about this until it is done.”

  “As you wish.”

  “I do. Thiorn thinks Gaston should be told.”

  “What do you think, yourself?” It was gratifying to turn the tables and ask her one of her favorite questions.

  Freia walked over to my dresser (making no reflection in the looking glass over it) and studied a vase of velvety-gold-and-cream mothflowers, her back to me. “Find him and tell him afterward, not before. Heaven only knows where he is or what he is doing. He may not care.”

  I was shocked. I didn’t believe Gaston would go off and find someone else. “Mother! Of course he cares.”

  Her voice was very soft, and she shook her head. “He may have found someone else, dear. The Wheel does turn that way. It might be best for him so.”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  Still more softly, “You sound pretty sure.”

  I began again to say, Of course, and I stopped myself. Gaston was the core of her emotional universe. He knew that and provided solid, unquestioning support to her in those matters where her native stubbornness failed her. Gaston wasn’t here, but somewhere in Pheyarcet, and of course she’d have no way of knowing what he thought or felt now. He had taken Ulrike away to hide her while she grew up, and that might portend all kinds of horrible things to Freia.

  Had she opposed the idea of leaving the Spring because she thought Gaston didn’t want her? Because she didn’t think she mattered enough to him, to her father, to anyone? How could she doubt that we loved her?

  I had to reassure her somehow. Of course wasn’t enough.

  “I think you’re underestimating your importance to him. He was shattered, Mother. He still looks wretched when your name comes up, or anything about you.”

  “Have you spoken to him?” she demanded, turning around.

  “No. Not since he was last here. He sent me a note when Ulrike came, via a bird I dispatched to find him. I think one reason he shooed her out of his life was that she looks a great deal like you and he misses you,” I said.

  Freia changed the subject. “I had a look at her. I think she resembles his mother.”

  I rummaged in my mental file of family faces. “Really?”

  “Yes. There’s a portrait of her in Landuc, in the Palace gallery, unless they moved it. Ulrike does have Prospero’s coloring, but for the rest, she takes after her grandmother.”

  “Amorett? Maybe I’ll have a look.” I didn’t think we had a portrait of Amorett here, which was an oversight. I thought I should get one. My mind skipped back to the beginning of the conversation. “Have you spoken with Dewar?”

  She smiled a suppressed, amused smile. Her eyes danced. “A few days past. He appears to be enjoying himself greatly.”

  “They seemed to be going very quickly to me.”

  “It is a very swift Eddy. They are engaged in some stimulating theoretical debate, the two of them. Yes, it will be soon.” Her smile faded, but did not disappear.

  “I’d like to know.”

  “You will,” she promised me, and then she became wholly serious again, drawing herself together, hugging her elbows and looking at me intently. “Finally, in my role as the family oracle.”

  I gestured expansively. “Prophesy away.”

  “Josquin has been about often, with Ulrike.”

  I blinked. “I had not thought of them as an item, but yes, I guess he has. He’s visiting. I thought it would be good for her to meet him.”

  “She is young. She is still not used to society, to … to people. Keep an eye on it.”

  “Uh, all right.” I wondered what I was supposed to do. Keep an eye on it?

  She smiled and disappeared, a mist of colors evaporating. I had a spare hour and a half that afternoon between mediating a dispute among a group of western loggers and a road-planning meeting with a group of herders and farmers, so I used the time to make a Way to Landuc through my Mirror and asked for the portrait of Gaston’s mother Amorett the Fair. It had been moved from its old spot in the family gallery—I suspected when the revelation of Gaston’s marriage to Freia sent him out of favor with the Emperor for a while—and it took a few people scratching their heads to track it down on a back stair. I looked up at it.

  Yes, the similarity was clear. Families are funny things. Amorett even had Ulrike’s slightly hesitant expression and Gaston’s faint smile, Ulrike’s perfectly straight hair in Gaston’s shade of brown, and Ulrike’s physique: slender and graceful. But the resemblance could only be skin-deep; Amorett’s demure mien had, I had heard, belied her capable and ruthless political abilities, and her penchant for scheming and plotting had kept her in royal favor and the royal bed long enough to produce two sons, Gaston and Herne, despite the insult this offered to Panurgus’ Princess Consort Diote. Amorett only lost favor when she went a little too far, after Prospero was born to Diote, and attempted to murder the infant Prince who supplanted her own children. Ulrike, quailing and bashful, was nothing like her where it mattered—which was all to the good.

  Prospero returned from Landuc on the First of Summer. I was on my way down the Spiral to a boating-party on the Wye and met him halfway, at a landing, as he climbed up.

  “Welcome home,” I said. “Auspicious timing! Care to join our party?”

  He smiled. “Ah. I did but now meet Ulrike outside—”

  “Yes, she loves the boats—”

  “—with Josquin,” he said, raising an eyebrow, “a pair of painted ducks in pretty plumage.” The tame fat painted ducks which natter and bob around the Citadel’s Iron Bridge are an indispensable part of Argylle’s summers. I laughed at his analogy.

  “She likes him,” I said, “at least, she talks to him.” What my mother had said about “keeping an eye on it” came back to me; I had not yet puzzled out what it meant. I was not about to chaperone them; I knew Josquin would be as good an escort for her as Walter or I, and she was learning to be more outgoing and less self-conscious from him. “I think he’s a good influence,” I added.

  “ ’Tis well he should be on someone,” Prospero said dryly. “Nay, nay—I mean no insult, and indeed he’s a better name here than in Landuc—”

  “Prospero, really,” I said, amused. “He’s cultivated, good-mannered, well-spoken, and considerate. Do you think he’d lead her on some libertine’s path of corruption? I suspect she’s got enough sense to say No if he tried.”

  He chuckled. “It does seem that Gaston assured that an she know no word but one she know No; yet she knows to No her No sweetly, not contrarily. Has she drunk of the Spring?”

  “She has not—”

  All in an instant as I spoke, Prospero turned ash-pale and his knees buckled; his eyes closed as he fell forward.

  With a horrified gasp of “Prospero!” I caught him and kept him from falling down. I lay him on his back on the landing, frightened, and began to seek his pulse. Why had he fainted—

  Then I felt it too: a terrible surge of power flowing down into the Spring below us, sucking energy out of all of Argylle along the Road and the Leys, from Nodes and Nexuses, the great Source of All Being becoming instead a Vortex of All Being, drawing life back into itself—the tide ebbing and leaving death behind it. My head reeled. I grabbed the banister to keep from tumbling down the stairs.

  The air changed without a wind to stir it, a movementless draft sinking past us. The temperature plummeted and the sunlight that lit the Core seemed to fade and lose its color and strength. Ringing shrilled in my ears. Something crashed to the ground somewhere below, and the sound was strangely muffled. My muscles weakened; I had difficulty holding myself upright on the railing and slowly knelt beside Prospero, who wasn’t moving.

  Dewar was trying something, damn him, and hadn’t warned me!

  “Prospero!” I shook him.

  He was out cold, his pulse gone. No heartbeat. I drew upon the Spring, wit
h a tremendous effort extracting a paltry amount of power from its reversed floodstream, and tried shocking his heart back in motion with small jolts of pure energy. I had read of this technique somewhere in a medical book of Mother’s.

  Once.

  Twice.

  Third time paid. His body jumped and his heart fluttered, then settled down.

  I heard more distant sounds from below, unechoing and dulled. My vision tunnelled and the Citadel dimmed as the air continued growing colder. The banister on which I leaned was oddly unreal, like an object in a dream. Its shape seemed wrong. I tried to focus on Prospero’s face and found that he seemed wrong too—perspective was misaligned; the stairs were strangely flat-seeming, their angles obliquing into nonexistence. Insubstantial—like Freia’s image in my rooms as she disappeared …

  I drew upon the Spring again, and was nearly sucked into it—or so it felt, like putting my hand from a boat into a powerful rushing current that sought to drag me off in its ropy sinews. There seemed to be a cascade of rainbow colors and shapes and shapelessness around me now—of disorganized sounds cacophonous and muted at once, every sound from the rustle of leaves to the splitting thunder of a storm, all equally weighted—emotions in a horrific confusion of terrors and loves and triumphs and rages and longings. The torrent hauled at me too, and I shoved it back from me and resisted, keeping my integrity against its tyrannical demand for me to yield. My eyes and head cleared.

  Staggering, weakened, I lifted Prospero and carried him laboriously to a sitting room off the landing and put him on a sofa. Walking was lifting my feet and setting them down in an ocean of undertow and breakers pulling me in many different directions at once. Yet there was a feeling of slowing to the cataract—the rush was abating. The light returned and the temperature and moisture of the air increased as I went. There were weak cries and calls from the people of the Citadel, fearful queries.

  Prospero groaned. His head moved to one side. I poured a glass of whisky and held it ready.

  His hands moved hesitantly to his head, held it; his face, still white, contorted. “Aaaaah.” After about a minute, he opened his eyes. “What devil’s work this? Who hath dammed my world into such dead neap-tide? ’Tis unnatural, the Spring’s denatured—what mishap’s this?”

  I feared I knew, but I was not sure. “I don’t know. You had cardiac arrest. Drink.”

  Prospero nodded arid knocked the whisky back in one gulp. “I must go to …” He seemed to run out of breath and took a couple deep slow breaths. “Some meddler’s work. Dewar. I’ll skin him alive and salt him.” He tried to stand and sank back. “Aaagh. Can you feel’t?”

  “Yes. It was like a reverse power surge, but it has stopped. —Prospero, lie down! Please! You must rest!” I grabbed his shoulder and shoved him back, afraid he’d keel over again.

  He subsided, swallowed, glared at me. “Perhaps … perhaps you’ve the right of it for the nonce. Have you your Keys to hand?”

  “Ah, no, not with me …”

  “Fetch them hither. Together we’ll fathom the fouled Spring.”

  Damn. I couldn’t refuse. “All right.” I wished I’d had the foresight to make a Key for the Catacombs. I rushed to my workroom, grabbed my Keys, and did a hasty Lesser Summoning for Dewar. Nothing; a nebulous whiteness indicated he was using a broad array of screening and blocking spells to hide—still! However, the Spring flowed as ever when I tapped it. Everything looked as it ought. As if we’d dreamt and awakened … or perhaps we’d awakened, and dreamed again … I leaned on my worktable and rubbed my eyes. The tabletop was cold, hard, and undeniably real. I felt a chip on its edge I’d made once, dropping a heavy brass astrolabe. Real.

  I could not delay longer; Prospero was waiting. I hurried back to him. “Got them. I tried Summoning Dewar; he’s hidden, as usual.”

  He was massaging his temples, still reclining, eyes closed. “The bastard whelp was at the Spring itself; there we’ll seek him now, and when I’ve laid him by the heels I shall break every meddling finger in both his monkey-hands.”

  This sounded unpleasantly like the sort of threat Prospero would follow through. However, I agreed with the sentiment. Dewar ought to have warned me, at least, even though he didn’t want his father to know what he was about. I was in on this too.

  Prospero was sitting up now. “Another glass. Of the same, and be quick.”

  I poured, though my medical judgement disagreed with his; he was my grandfather, after all. He swallowed it, hissed, and stood cautiously. “My head clanks and cracks like ill-forged metal. Ach. Come.”

  I walked in front of him in case he folded again. The Citadel was strangely empty; voices were buzzing down one of the side corridors, but Prospero shook his head when I looked that way. Best not to deal with anything but the immediate problem for the moment. We made slow progress down the stairs. I quietly opened the door at the bottom, though I doubted we’d find anyone. Prospero pushed past me and strode toward the Spring, seeming fully recovered. He held his hand over it, and it leapt up, splashed insubstantial over and through his fingers, fell back, tinkling watery songs in the blackness. “ ’Tis an alteration I cannot name, but clear and tangible to my hand,” he said.

  There was no one there. It lay as ever, dark, serene, alone.

  Alone.

  Prospero scouted around the pillars, searching. I looked around near the Spring—for what, I don’t know; Dewar was smart enough not to leave anything behind, certainly—and then I sat on the bench. I emptied my mind and reached for the Spring, looking for that feeling of friendly personality that had characterized Freia’s tenancy.

  Nobody home.

  It had been nearly two hours since Prospero had collapsed. He came over and sat next to me.

  “ ’Tis altered. Someone has wrought some mutation in the very substance of it, and his change rings false to me,” he said flatly. “Yet perhaps not so strange to thine ear as mine. Speak, Gwydion.”

  I felt my face redden and hoped the lantern-light didn’t show it too much. “I agree, it feels different, and I agree, someone has done something, but I don’t know what.”

  He sighed and looked me over. I met his gaze, not daring not to.

  “Do not undertake to lie to me,” he said coldly. “Thou hast nor countenance r or temper for deception, and secrets have been writ large on thy front this half-year and longer. I’ll have the truth, the whole of it, and that instanter. Else shalt learn that I’ve not lost my claws.”

  The Spring enlivened suddenly; a crowned bluish splash erupted around the periphery, extending lines which knotted and intertwined of themselves over the darkness at the center. I felt the compulsion therein embodied press around me, close and claustrophobic. I also felt the pressure of a Lesser Summoning.

  The timing could not have been better.

  “Accept it,” Prospero commanded me. The pressure from the Spring increased. My vision darkened at the edges, and the Spring drew my attention in.

  “Gwydion?”

  Dewar’s voice, then Dewar’s clean-shaven face, looking at me from the webwork in the Spring, which provided the ideal focus for his Summoning. Prospero’s hand closed on my shoulder like a vise.

  “Dewar,” he said very quietly.

  “Hello, Father,” he said. “I think it worked.” The power of the Spring was such that we could see where he was—a white-walled, white-cabineted room, incomprehensible apparatus on metal-topped benches before and behind him.

  “Dost thou? What was’t thou essayed—my death?” Prospero growled, rage hardening his voice.

  “I wish you’d given advance notice,” I said.

  Prospero went on, “What design hast consummated? Speak now!”

  Dewar looked at both of us and nodded. “What have you told him?” he asked me.

  I was insulted by his lack of faith in my discretion. “Nothing.” I bit the word off.

  “Father, Freia was trapped in the Spring,” he said. “We got her out. We think.”

  “Tr
apped? In the Spring?” Prospero looked at it, back at Dewar, and nodded slowly, his jaw tightening. He was still very, very angry. His hand felt as if it might break my collarbone if he got any angrier. “Aye. So. This answer serves for some few riddles.”

  “More than a few,” Dewar agreed, impassive.

  “Thou, thou knew’st of this from its inception.” He looked at me, and I, unable to deny it, swallowed and could not lower my eyes. The Spring was climbing higher, higher, brilliant shafts of color shooting through the water as it twined and braided in a way I’d never seen before. “Why saidst thou naught to me?”

  My voice shook, and I swallowed again before answering lamely. “It wouldn’t have helped, would it?” I said. “Dewar only recently hit on a way of freeing her that looked as if it might work.”

  I found I could not tell him the true reason: that Freia and Dewar both had not wanted him to know. Not with Dewar overhearing, and probably never alone.

  “Would not have helped! What remedy was there, and what matter whether there be remedy or none? I shall permit no bar ’twixt me and matters of my Spring,” Prospero said. His hand tightened. I began ignoring the accompanying sensations. The tower of Spring-force fused into solidity as he continued, illuminating the whole of the Catacombs with white hard light as Prospero’s voice rose steadily, “I care not a tinker’s damn what thou mayst make o’ the rest, but the Spring is mine and I am minded—”

  “Father,” Dewar said calmly, “we didn’t think it would affect you. It didn’t when she was transformed the first time. I am sorry.”

  “ ’Twould not affect me! Why, am I sawdust and wood? Not affect me, and ’twas I opened the very Spring which sustains and bathes thee in its essence! What hast thou done, thou cold-blooded water-witted profligate thieving viper’s son? What means this we? What scorpion-souled ingrate have I taken to my heart to poison me and all my works?” thundered Prospero, standing, releasing me, gesturing and making the Spring’s visible force knit and knot itself higher, broader, more intricately—

  Dewar caught his breath; I saw his throat work. He and Prospero stared at one another, and then Prospero gestured again and Dewar gasped, inhaled deeply once. “I’ll come to you soon and tell you all the tale. Start to finish. Don’t badger Gwydion; he knows only half the story.”