The Well-Favored Man

by Elizabeth Willey

  “Cognac,” he said.

  “Cognac?” I repeated, an odd word.

  “ ’Twas long in my mind—indeed I spoke of it to thy mother, and she thought it full plausible—” a sadness flicked through his voice and he went on—“that Argylle might wisely wed the distiller’s art to its vintners’ natural genius. The soils along the coast, north of Ollol toward Bevallin, are well-suited to a vine called the Ugni Blanc. I had planted some at the Crespie estate, in a corner, to see how they fared—”

  “The sour ones?” They produced a wine popularly described by the staff as pissing-poor. We no longer used the fruit for anything but compost.

  He laughed. “Aye. Have they been pulled?”

  “No. We thought a use might come for them and we never bothered. But the wine they yield, Gaston—” I shook my head.

  “Take that thin stuff and when twice-distilled and aged in good wood you’ll have something would make a Salamander spit, worth twenty times a bottle of middling wine,” he said, in the tone of voice he used for describing a winning strategy on the battlefield.

  My eyes opened wide as the idea made sense. “Whoof! I see. A kind of whisky. Firewater … Oh, no. Aged? No, that won’t do—storage space is exactly the problem—”

  “Eddies,” he said.

  “Eddies?” I repeated, lost.

  “Find thou a quick, steadily-spinning Eddy-world, one where time’s tread goes in, say, a fivefold increase over Argylle’s. There are several I know of, where thy Spring purls and swirls swift.”

  I began to laugh, seeing all the plan: cook it down, age it, and sell it for twenty times the price of a similar volume of wine. And speedily done, thanks to the quick Eddy-aging. Fast money, and a product that couldn’t fail.

  “I see now,” I said, “I see, and I thank you, Gaston. Why did you never start this?”

  He shook his head, a little sadly. “No reason,” he said, “ ’twas an idea whose time I never found, one thy mother and I envisioned would divert us one day. But I gift thee freely with it now. And I look forward to thy success.”

  After that we sat watching the embers of the fire together for a long time until they were no more than a black-crusted glow. The long, drawn-out, mournful calls of wolves were thin lines of sound dividing the night into time. I jumped when Gaston put his hand on my arm, waking me.

  “We’ll talk more o’ the morrow,” he said softly.

  I yawned. “Tomorrow. Yes.”

  The sun warmed me and woke me. I lay still, remembering where I was and with whom, and then took the punch of dread right in my gut. The worst was coming, and I could not postpone nor avoid it.

  Gaston was sitting some distance away, reading in a small book, his back against a tree trunk. I stretched and rolled and got up, stretched again. A bath in the stream seemed like a very good idea. I went over to Gaston and told him I was going to take a swim.

  He nodded. “There’s a pleasant place up near where thou staked thy horse.”

  “Thanks.”

  “ ’Tis right cold,” he warned me, and he wasn’t kidding.

  My eyes closed and my breath caught when I put a foot in the water. It was barely liquid. There ought to have been ice at the banks. After a moment of steeling, in which I reminded myself that it would build my character and clean my body, I took the plunge, splashing in at this deeper spot at once, whooping after I came up for air, then panting frantically as my core temperature dropped.

  Dressed, with my blood racing and my skin feeling three sizes smaller, I went back to Gaston. He had made a pot of strong black tea and rummaged out fruit and cheese and the rest of the bread I had with me. We breakfasted, watching birds flit around in the dark evergreens. The mountain rose beside and above us, higher still. It was a beautiful day, the sky a hard pure blue, the sun kind and ripe.

  I waited until we had put things away.

  “Um,” I said, looking up at a great black-billed raven that watched us narrowly from the crown of a dead tree festooned with lichen.

  “Yes,” Gaston said.

  I looked at him. I did not know where to begin.

  “Tell me about it, then,” he suggested, seeing my confusion, and took me over to his shaded spot, where we sat on tree roots. I picked up a stick and scratched in the rust-colored fallen needles.

  “It’s hard to explain,” I said to the earth. “You’ll find it … upsetting …”

  “Hath aught befallen Ulrike?” he asked quickly.

  “No. No, no, no. She’s fine. It’s about … Freia.”

  Gaston became quite still, waiting.

  “I would never have … I didn’t want to bring it up before, because I thought this was something that could only cause you pain,” I said, “but Dewar … it was because of him that it’s come up at all.”

  Gaston said nothing, and then, “Go on, Gwydion. I’m listening.”

  “Prospero said I must come and talk to you about it,” I said. “I didn’t really want to yet. This is all immaterial really. It’s about Freia, Gaston. When … when Tython cast her into the Spring and the Spring … the Spring destroyed her, she wasn’t … she wasn’t really killed. It … captured part of her, the … the spirit, the mind, the soul, if you will, and she has been … inhabiting the Spring ever since.”

  Perfect stillness beside me. I dared not look at him.

  “I knew about it because when Dewar disappeared later that day, after we came back up and told you, I was worried, he was so upset, so distraught, and then he was very quiet and I knew that he was going to do something. I followed him down to the Spring, and I saw that he’d built a great spell to send himself away. But he hadn’t finished it yet. He told me to listen, to focus on the energies from the Spring. They were different. He called out for Freia then, and she … she appeared there.

  “He talked to her and tried to touch her, but couldn’t. She was a ghost. So to speak. An illusion. She said that she was part of the Spring now, transformed to … to some kind of Essential being, and that Panurgus … who is part of Landuc’s Well in the same way … he said that there was no way to release her save for a living person to step into the Spring and replace her there, providing her with a … a … a body to inhabit. And he would not be saved as she was. I do not pretend to understand it all, Dewar seems to … For someone to die in order for her to live. She didn’t want that. They argued, kind of, and he disappeared …”

  “Ah.” Gaston rubbed his chin.

  “Yes … I just couldn’t … tell anyone. It was pointless. What kind of person … Who in our family could we send to, to death, just to get Freia back? How could we trade life for death that way? I couldn’t … I couldn’t imagine anyone doing it. I knew I couldn’t,” I whispered. “I thought and thought about it. I tried to … get my courage up, a couple of times I went down and walked around and around the Spring … I just couldn’t do it. I should have, and I couldn’t.”

  I swallowed. “Then things just went along, and you went away and never returned either. I stayed in Argylle … recently though when I was coming home from Alexander’s place, I had a … an odd dream …” and I told him about the Battlemaster and the theft of Freia’s genetic codes and Dewar’s guilt in that matter, leaving out Ariel—his familiar was only Dewar’s concern. Gaston nodded slowly as I went on to tell of Thiorn’s offer to help reconstruct a body and transfer Freia into it, of Freia’s hesitant acquiescence, of her Sending to me and our conversation (not omitting what she had said about him), and of the day they had finally done this thing—or attempted it. “And that is where it hangs now, and Prospero insisted I must tell you at once. Dewar has not called me; you can call him—Prospero told him to permit Summonings henceforward. I do not know how … what happened. I fear it must have failed; it seems insane now …”

  “If Thiorn be involved, it becomes both credible and … and possible,” he said, in a measured, level voice.

  “Are you angry?” I whispered, looking at him at last.

  “I would h
ave liked to have known, but I understand that thy motives were much as mine for keeping Ulrike out of sight. Not to burden, not to cumber, not to … impose.” He smiled faintly. “Gwydion, let us not conceal such things from one another in the future. We are capable of bearing anxieties, sorrows, disappointments. All of us.” He reached over and clasped my shoulder, looking into my eyes.

  “I’m sorry. Yes.” I sighed. “I’m afraid it didn’t work, myself.”

  “I would have thee tell thy brothers and sisters.”

  I was not going to be very popular. “I would wait until we were sure. That was what Mother said too.”

  He looked at me. I looked down, feeling my neck grow warm.

  “I’ll tell them, since you request it,” I said to the needles. “But if something … goes wrong, it will be very hard.”

  “Do not undervalue their courage, son. ’Tis difficult, but ’tis merited by their kinship and their trust.”

  “There’s difficult and then there’s …” I couldn’t even think of a word for it—“cruelty, teasing, disappointment …”

  “Nonetheless.”

  I nodded.

  Gaston, his face impassive, stared off into the stainless sky.

  There was nothing more to say.

  Gaston and I took affectionate leave of each other when I set out later in that day. I sent Virgil to seek and bring back to me my war-hawk, which still sought for Gaston, and rode slowly back to the Ley that had brought me here. Gaston did not say what he would do or what he had been doing; it looked to me as if he’d been hiking here, taking in the great natural beauty of the place. I hoped that, as he thought over what I had told him, he would not grow angry with me. He had sent me off with a gentle “Safe journey, Gwydion,” and a firm, affectionate embrace.

  My mission done, the Road held no attractions for me. I plotted out the fastest way back to Argylle. It had occurred to me that Dewar might bring Freia there if she were ill, and if she were all right she’d come there anyway, probably, to see Prospero, her children, Gaston—No.

  Gaston. She would want to see him first. She knew the rest of us were well; we had all been where she could perceive us. Gaston she would want to see at once; Gaston was the trump card Thiorn and Dewar had played to win her out of the Spring again; Gaston was her great anchor to the corporeal.

  I actually slowed Cosmo for a moment and almost turned him to go back and persuade Gaston to come home with me. If I put it so, he might agree … But he also might want to adjust alone, in privacy, to this strange idea of no longer being a widower. And also Freia’s own fear jangled in the back of my mind: suppose he did have someone else, somewhere, now? He would have to settle that for himself. It would be better to leave him as I had, with what I knew, and trust him to do the right thing for himself and his lady.

  So I continued on, not riding so hard as before but still making haste. Dewar had not Summoned me. I was irked about that. When I returned, I intended to Summon him and ask my questions about everything—and have answers. There was no excuse for him to conceal anything now, except that it was a habit with him.

  Virgil and my hawk joined me at a Nexus where I left the Ley and moved onto the Road instead. I passed one night on a beach, camped beside a tiny brook which ran through the dunes to a grey, slow-moving sea, another in a ruin of incalculable age half-buried and artistically overgrown, three nights in forests of differing types, and one in a blinding rainstorm crowded with Cosmo under a tilted slab of rock which formed an improvised cave.

  I crossed the Border in four days, singing most of a long, complicated song cycle from Landuc to myself for amusement, and when we were in Argylle again Cosmo jogged along briskly, eager to get home, at a mile-eating pace.

  In a desert all the colors of fire and stone, we stopped for water and a brief rest. There was a spring that was a Node here, giving water of exceptional purity and refreshment, and there was shade from a wind-carved arch which marked the spring’s location. A few bushes fringed it with greenery.

  I scooped water over my face, drank, and sat down on a rock. Virgil and the war-hawk waited on a pillar of stone. It occurred to me that I should get the other hawk back and send the lot of them home; they travelled faster than I and I had no need of their attendance. I called Virgil to me and told him to go find the other hawk and return to Argylle with her. When he was gone, I commanded this hawk to return to Argylle herself. She would arrive a day or so before I did. I threw her into the air, and she beat a moment and then, catching a thermal, ascended in a slow spiral and finally flew away, a straight line her path.

  Watching her made me wish for wings myself. I had another drink and then mounted slowly and returned to the Road. Direct though it was, it was slower than flying.

  We had not gone two miles and were still in an arid, stony landscape when Cosmo stopped cold and lifted his head, snuffing.

  “What’s up?” I whispered.

  He moved his head from side to side and shivered.

  I looked around, saw nothing; sniffed and smelled nothing; listened and heard nothing. Cosmo was shivering still, motionless, his head seeking. Something was bothering him, and that worried me. I focused on the Road’s force and sank into it, feeling the flow and pulse of energy, feeling a hot spot not far ahead—Nexus or Node, perhaps?

  As I recalled it, the map didn’t show anything but that spring around here. I chewed my lip. This could be a side effect of that upset in the Spring.

  The hot spot was there, a powerful and unfamiliar thing. It neither radiated nor absorbed. It was not a Node, not a Nexus—no, it was more alive than those, like an ignis—or a Salamander. I shuddered. A rogue Salamander, sucked into our world by the Spring’s implosion, would be nearly as difficult to banish as the dragon. Yet it seemed quiet, for a Salamander. It couldn’t be Gemnamnon; Virgil had seen him far, far away in Phesaotois, and I didn’t think he could get from there to here so quickly.

  “Let’s have a look then,” I said softly to Cosmo, and I reached over my shoulder and loosened my sword Talon in its scabbard. He lifted a hoof and put it down irresolutely. I nudged his sides. “Can’t go forward without moving, old boy. C’mon. I’m here, you’re here, and whatever it is isn’t going anywhere.”

  Finally, after a fair amount of soft cajolery, he went stiffly onward. I was tense and cold now myself, and I rehearsed a few spells, quick ones, just in case.

  We came over the lip of a small rise and descended into a high-walled valley. It seemed dim here; the dirt and stones were reddish, unpleasantly like dried blood, and the ground was lifeless and stony—a landscape consistent with a Salamander, which would devour everything down to bare rock. I saw not even a lichen. The sky overhead was brassy. There was no movement in the air, and the only sound was Cosmo’s slow hooves. I breathed as quietly as possible, straining all my senses. The hot spot was just ahead, around the bend in this kinky valley.

  The track the Road followed narrowed as it turned, becoming only a meter wide and barely discernible. I followed the pulse of the Road rather than the visible signs of a passage, looking around still—

  The top of the ridge to my right moved.

  Cosmo stopped again, tossing his head, and stared up at it, and I stared too as the ridge buckled up and acquired protuberances and moved sinuously and rumbled musically, a sound that grew in volume and bounced off the steep valley walls and buffeted me.

  “Uh-oh,” I said very softly to Cosmo.

  24

  A CLOUD OF RED DUST WENT up in the air as the ridge shook itself off and extended wings. I began murmuring the words of spells far more powerful than the ones I’d just prepared in my mind.

  The problem was that the only ones short enough for me to be sure that I recalled them perfectly were insufficient to do any real harm to the dragon dropping down toward the valley bottom. There is a class of very simple and highly destructive spells—the kind that enable the user to level a mountain with a couple of words; but, as Dewar had said when he bailed me out
the first time Gemnamnon and I met for a duel, they also have wide-ranging side effects on the surroundings—the Road, the Leys, the worlds. There is a place I have been with him that is just not there any longer because Dewar used a spell of that sort there. The Road leads up to it and stops, and one is left on the verge of a boiling chaos of disrupted being. It is necessary to use protective spells to get even that close.

  Gemnamnon, leaving a cloudy trail of fine red dust, settled surprisingly softly in the canyon ahead of me. He looked at me from half-lidded eyes as he folded his wings.

  Strangely, calm settled on me. My mind became clear enough for me to visualize certain pages in my grimoires and notebooks on which the spells I needed were written. The only thing lacking was time to prepare them.

  Some part of my mind must have been out of control, though, because for an instant I wondered if Gemnamnon was going to rumble “Draw!” and lumber toward me in the fashion of fairy-tale gunslingers. There was no schoolmarm here, though, nor a saloon, which was too bad. I could have used a drink.

  He regarded me coolly and waited. We both knew what this was about. I suspected I knew more about it than he did. Freia was no longer in the Spring, thus the Spring was no longer interested as it had been in my personal safety and health; Dewar was somewhere else: I would get no aid from unexpected quarters this time. Gemnamnon, I thought, studying his cool purples and silvers and blues, colors stained by the yellow light, must be aware that the Spring was changed recently. He must have tested the Border again and passed through it unopposed. Was he looking for me, I wondered, or on his way back to Argylle? I was not about to ask. What was I supposed to do now? Challenge? Retreat?

  The nearest Ley was a few miles back, and the dragon blocked the Road. Forget flight. As for challenge, he was the invader in my territory. I had no quarrel with him as long as he stayed out of the Spring’s Dominion—Argylle and the Border.

  Still, the Spring was mine, not his. I was a son of Argylle, an initiate of the Spring whose force sustained the world around us here, and he could not touch that. I wasn’t sure if a Spring outclassed the raw Elemental power Gemnamnon represented. Since Argylle’s Gryphon had conquered the dragon in the Border, a neutral arena, perhaps the Spring had a slight advantage. And the thought of that Gryphon brought another thought on its wings: if Freia were still in the Spring, this could not happen. The meeting in the Border would have been the last.