The Well-Favored Man

by Elizabeth Willey

  “Within the hour present thy carcass at my rooms here,” Prospero said curtly, gesturing.

  “I don’t—Yes, sir.” Dewar vanished.

  The structure in the Spring vanished too, falling like a silent, luminous waterspout and leaving nothing behind but an afterimage on my eyes. Prospero may have given up sorcery, but that must mean little when he had the Spring at his fingertips, responding to his wishes conscious and covert. I was shaking.

  “Naturally,” Prospero said in a conversational tone, turning to me, “I shall badger thee, O daughter’s-son.” He sat down again.

  There was no refusing him. I omitted Dewar’s more personal remarks to Freia as being immaterial and private, and everything about Ariel, but Prospero still frowned, though he grew calmer. At the end he said simply, “And it sat unshakable in your thought through all the years that nor Gaston nor I might be told? Wherefore this mistrust?”

  “I didn’t want to get his hopes up,” I said. “Nor did Mother. She told me to tell no one anything till afterward, when we knew it had worked. I never thought of the connection between you and the Spring as being dangerous to you.” It nearly had cost a life to redeem Freia’s: her father’s. “I am sorry, sir,” I whispered.

  He sighed, rubbing his forehead wearily. “What havoc’s ever wrought with tenderest intention.” And after a moment, “Poor Freia. What torment to her, what damnable impotence bestowed by greatest power. To see all and naught, blinded of the sight of two best-loved, ignorant whither Gaston and her suckling babe were fled. No deeper hell for a mother could be conceived by the best-schooled devil. Yet if Panurgus be indeed maintained in Landuc’s Well, become Essence of Fire, he could have lightened her.”

  “I believe he would not. He opposed her release. He wanted her to reconcile herself to her position as … as an Essence, as you put it.” If it were indeed a job that must be filled, someone with better aptitude must volunteer knowingly, I thought. Till then, it could stay empty.

  “Mayhap there’s some right of it on his side, but ’twas ill-hap nonetheless.” He stood and headed back to the door and I followed him. He turned on me. “Do you think she’ll be won by this scheme of rescue?”

  “I don’t know enough to guess. But the feeling around the Spring is different now.”

  “Aye. Vacant and purely vital; there’s no heart beats there now.” He locked the door behind us and we went up. Prospero closeted himself in his apartment and I went to my workroom and paced.

  Three minutes before his hour was up, Dewar tapped at my study door, opened it, and closed it behind him rapidly, entering from my workroom where he had availed himself of a Mirror.

  “What did you tell him?” he asked me at once.

  “What I know. Most of it.”

  He looked at me hard and nodded.

  I was still furious with him myself and glared at him. “Dewar, I had to restart his heart.”

  He paled. “I had no idea.”

  “Now you do. He’s down the hall waiting for you. How is she?”

  “We’ll not know for some time,” he said, and left.

  I hoped the discussion wouldn’t become violent. Dewar was an equable fellow, by and large, but Prospero had a hot temper and ample provocation. There was nothing I could do about it. I paced and fumed.

  He had not kept me informed. He had not even told me at the last minute, which would have helped. What had they done? What effects would it have? This was going to be my problem, dealing with the aftershocks of the disruption of the Spring. It bothered me that he had left me holding the empty bag—set me up, practically—and now it would be my job to mend whatever he had broken.

  It hadn’t occurred to me that separating Freia from the Spring that trapped her would have side effects. After all, nothing of the sort had happened when she was consumed by it. She was gone, and there was a pulse of energy, and that was all.

  I was staring out the window, arms folded, when someone came in without knocking or calling. Turning, I saw that it was Prospero.

  We regarded one another for a moment.

  “Dewar will not know,” he said after a moment, beginning to pace himself, “for several days what may be won by this gamble. In his frenzy he’s overlooked that miscalculation o’ the odds means that Freia’s utterly lost beyond any redemption.”

  That hadn’t occurred to me either. My breath caught.

  “He seems fairly sure that the game is worth the candle,” Prospero said.

  “I think it is …”

  “I deeply resent, and I suspect your father will be even greater pained, that Dewar, and you by your silence of consent, made this choice for all,” Prospero said. “Did it not occur to you that you hazarded others’ stakes in the play?”

  I rubbed the toe of my shoe along the pattern at the edge of my rug. “Yes,” I said. “In a way we all are interested parties, all of Freia’s children and Gaston and you and Dewar, and in another way … it would have made it harder … harder for her to go through with it and harder for everyone if there had been even small hope …”

  He stopped at the other window, beside me, and leaned on the sill staring out. “Dewar,” he said, “hath told me the … consequence, the function, of her submersion in the Spring. And he admitted that to win her consent he had, in greater and lesser degrees, hoodwinked, bullied, and guided her as a will-o’-wisp might, banked on her trust and drained her will. If he has failed, if he has snuffed her out, I do not know what I shall do, but I know I shall be angry. And I shall bring him, and you, to reckon the debt.”

  I said nothing.

  “Your father shall hear of this forthwith. It matters not a clipped farthing if Freia survives or no; Gaston must know what befell her. Shall be for him to judge whether you should also tell your siblings and when.”

  “He does not need to know!” I said. “It will torment him if he realizes that he left her when he left Argylle and went wherever the hell he went with the baby, with Ulrike. He would never forgive himself.”

  “That is his burden, not yours. You shall find him and tell him.” Prospero turned and fixed his commanding gaze on me.

  I opened my mouth in startled protest. “What! How? He’s been gone for years—”

  “You are a sorcerer; you know as well as I how’t may be compassed.”

  I objected, “Gaston may just kill me if I manage to pull him in before he discovers who Summons him.”

  “Fare the Road then and find him. I care not how you tell him, but he must know of this. It is just.”

  I stared back at him and then had to look down, losing the confrontation. “Yes, sir.”

  “Leave at once. I have told Dewar that he shall cease his shields and bars to Summonings. He asks that we Summon him only if need warrants; I have consented to that. Thus when you find Gaston, you shall tell him Dewar can be bespoke.”

  “That …”

  “Yes.”

  “Gaston …” Gaston would reach down Dewar’s throat and pull him inside-out if this failed, I thought. Freia was Dewar’s sister, but she was Gaston’s wife, and he had wagered everything on her himself before.

  “Assuredly your father’s of an age to face whatever may come,” Prospero said angrily.

  I just nodded, looking down still.

  “And eke your uncle,” he added.

  There was no answer possible to this.

  “If you had but thought a little more, Gwydion,” he said softly, sounding very tired, “I would you had simply … thought a little more.”

  “I did think! I have thought about it until it has worn a rut in my head!” I cried.

  “Then you were not thinking, you were ruminating!”

  I flinched, bit back my answer.

  Prospero looked at me as angrily as I looked at him and then, slowly, forced himself to relax. “Hie after Gaston,” he said. “Safe journey. I’ll take the Chair for you while you’re absent.”

  He closed the door quietly behind him.

  I threw things
into a bag and changed my clothes, fuming still. Then I went to the mews and got two of my black-and-gold war-hawks. Virgil was waiting in a tree near the field where Cosmo was grazing with Hussy; I brought them both to me with a whistle.

  “We’re heading down the Road,” I said, and let Cosmo out through the gate. Hussy trotted over to watch us go.

  23

  GASTON WAS PROBABLY STILL IN PHEYARCET, but to be sure I sent one of my best hawks to seek him through Argylle’s Road and Leys. The other I took with me as I rode toward the Border.

  I rode fast and hard and angry. I rode without paying much attention to my surroundings; I was wholly occupied with my inner monologue dealing with Prospero’s dressing-down and Dewar’s cavalier disregard and Gaston’s possible reactions to the news that his wife was not dead but indeterminate. I resented being told off to break the news to him, for one thing. Dewar should do it. He knew what was going on, for heaven’s sake; I had no idea what they’d done, how they’d done it, or what would come next. Prospero was being unfair to me. There was no way I’d be able to satisfy Gaston with the fragment of the truth I knew.

  I muttered, “Gahrrr,” as Cosmo jumped a hedge. Cosmo’s ears flicked back, but he’d been with me long enough to distinguish a spontaneous remark from a command and changed neither gait nor direction. We were bucketing along an untidy, seldom-used Ley. Virgil was on the saddlebags—actually in one, having loosened the strap and climbed inside—wisely leaving me alone. The hawk flew overhead; I used her to survey the path before me.

  I took just one rest stop on my way to the Border, drawing on the Spring to keep weariness at bay until I was bored with riding and wanted the halt as a change of pace. Cosmo, Spring-fed by nature, could gallop for a year at a time if I demanded it of him; he was pleased to stop too, though. I protected us with a Circle and slept badly within it, plagued by dreams of searching frantically for things in the Citadel, of trying to get to rooms that were not where they were supposed to be, and of being disoriented and lost in the City.

  Ill-rested and ill-tempered, I resumed my journey and crossed into the Border, which I must take four days to pass. I thought up elaborate arguments with Prospero, Gaston, and my uncle as I rode; I defended my actions vigorously and justified them flawlessly; and I planned out a search path for my hawk to follow and another for Virgil and myself.

  There were places where I was more and places where I was less likely to find Gaston. When I emerged into Pheyarcet I sent the hawk off on a route that covered part of them and followed the other route with Virgil, binding them both to seek Gaston until they found him. The hawk carried a note telling Gaston to Summon me at once. The owl, since I followed him, needed r o note; I went with him because, since he was sensitive to my family, he might detect and locate Gaston more rapidly than the hawk.

  I rode through wastelands and cities, devastations and Edens, farmlands and ports. I followed the Road and Leys, crossed and recrossed Nexuses, and passed Nodes. I fumed to myself still. I did not Summon Dewar; he had my Key and he would let me know what was afoot if he had any residue of manners at all. I was curt with my horse and abrupt with my familiar.

  On the ninth day Virgil swerved from the search path and took a Ley-track, a disused and difficult-to-perceive one which had nearly vanished from neglect. With the feeling of triumph that comes when the quarry is sighted, I turned Cosmo to follow him. We crunched through a second-growth woodland that must once have been farms, crisscrossed as it was by stone walls in meandering piles, passing a lone chimney standing in the ruined foundation of a long-gone house. The Ley became a faint cart-track, and the cart-track became a dirt road, and the dirt road became a hard-packed, graded road, smoothly contoured, at which the Ley petered out entirely.

  I reined in and let Cosmo have a drink from a stony brook that chuckled along beside this gravelly, sandy artifact. Virgil waited in a white-trunked, yellow-leafed tree. We were in high, steep mountains.

  “Is he hereabouts, then?”

  A nod.

  “Good work, Virgil.”

  A nod again.

  “Modest you’re not …”

  Cosmo blew loudly into the water, lifted his head, and we scrambled up to the road and walked along it. Virgil hopped from tree to tree, leading at our pace, not his.

  This road led us through more woodland where great trees lay cut and trimmed. Bright-painted machines for harvesting the trees stood idle; I paused for a look at them and went on. I had become familiar with such machines in an Eddy where I had worked for two years clearing forests; the ones I had known had been powered by temperamental steam engines, but these appeared to be internal-combustion. There was much solace to be had in such hard labor—perhaps Gaston was lumberjacking.

  The sandy-gravelly road ended at one covered with hard, oily-smelling, slick black asphalt. The sun was behind me; the air was chill and dry. I rode Cosmo along slowly far over to one side, on the verge of the road where the sudden drop-offs permitted. Virgil led us up and up, climbing and winding along the mountainside. We passed other roads of various sorts leading away into the forest; we were passed several times by motor vehicles, large and small, and once by a helmeted man on a swift blue bicycle, who waved. I waved back, but he was already gone.

  Virgil finally chose one of the tracks that led off to one side. This was barred with a gate obviously intended to exclude motorists; a foot-track led around to one side, and I led Cosmo around the barrier that way. There was a rutted and gullied, but passable, dirt road, and, figuring there were no motor vehicles around I hurried along the middle. The sun was setting now. I would have preferred not to startle Gaston by coming on him in the dark, but it seemed I would have no choice.

  It was dusk when Virgil suddenly swooped down to my right, off a cliff it seemed, and hooted twice. There was a faint tang of smoke in the air, which before had held only balsam and dry leaves. I slowed Cosmo and stopped, peering into the dimness; there were tall trees at the bottom of this steep bit, it seemed … Yes, the road curved down and around. I nudged my horse to a walk and went slowly down and among the trees. The sound of water and a glimmer of firelight were ahead. I conjured an ignis fatuus to light my way there.

  Gaston had probably heard me approaching half a mile away. He was sitting on a rock by his campfire, waiting for his visitor to come closer. As I discerned his firelit form there, he saw me too, and he rose slowly to his feet, folding his arms, an amber statue in the moving light.

  I drew in the reins when I was about twenty feet away.

  “Gwydion,” he said.

  “Hullo, Gaston.”

  We regarded one another.

  “Thy horse will find the grass upstream more than palatable, I suspect,” he said after a moment.

  I dismounted and led Cosmo off upstream; there was indeed a pleasant open grassy place where I left him after casting a Circle around him for the night. Virgil uhuu’d again somewhere in the darkness. The ignis led me back to Gaston, and then I banished it feeling that it was somehow inappropriate for the silence stirred by owls and insects and distant hunting calls of wolves and the darkness broken by Gaston’s small fire.

  He wore a high-necked knitted pullover of a dark crimson color, intricately stitched—the sort Mother used to make for all of us, knit in Council meetings. Probably it was one of hers. His boots were sturdy walking shoes and a pack leaned against a tree not far from the fire. We looked at one another again for a long moment.

  “I cannot say,” he said finally, smiling slowly, “that I am not happy to see thee,” and he hugged me hard suddenly, as strong and solid and breath-taking as ever. I hugged him. We smiled at each other, and his eyes went over and over my face. “Sit down. Th’art tired. Let us sup first.”

  I sat, I blinked back a couple of sudden tears, I swallowed. Gaston took out food and a couple of cooking-pots, and I bestirred myself to open my saddlebags and wineskin and shared what I had also (including surpassingly excellent smoked sausages which we toasted on sticks a
nd ate with bread soaking up their juices). Gaston made a pot of astringent herbal tea for us to drink with our meal. Whenever our eyes met we’d both smile uncontrollably, until finally he laughed and reached over and ruffled my hair up as if I were eight years old.

  “Gaston,” I said, ducking, embarrassed and pleased and wondering how to tell him what I must.

  “Son.”

  That nearly did make me cry.

  “Handsome earring,” he commented.

  “Got it in a place called Massila,” I said, “when I visited Josquin there.”

  “I know Massila too well to ask what thou didst and how’t liked thee,” Gaston said, hiding his smile in his tea, but his eyes crinkled.

  The full, horrible import of what I had to do struck me. Gaston had, clearly, been putting himself back together, stabilizing and coming to terms with the loss of his beloved Freia, and I was going to undo all that in ten words or fewer.

  “Th’art come for a reason, I guess,” he said then, reading my mind.

  “It can wait until morning. It’s not … it’s not so urgent that it can’t wait.”

  Gaston seemed about to contradict me, to order me to tell him what errand sent me to seek him out. He asked instead, “How didst thou find me?” curiously.

  “Virgil.”

  “Ah.”

  “I don’t think anyone else could have done it.”

  “Thy birds are apt for finding.”

  “Yes. I’ve never understood why no one else has birds.”

  “None hath thine affinity for them,” he suggested, and poured more tea for me. “How goes it with Josquin, then?”

  “Oh, well, very well …” and, reprieved, I launched into family gossip and anecdote. Gaston asked tidings of Ulrike next, and home, and I told him of my sister, of her visit to Alexander, about the dragon, about wine production and our storage problem. He shook his head over Gemnamnon’s destruction in the Border and frowned to hear of Marfisa’s maiming burns. And as for the wine …