The Well-Favored Man

by Elizabeth Willey

  “No. Said he aught of coming here, of himself returning to the living world?”

  I shook my head.

  Prospero spread his hands. “I know not what’s brewing with him. Dewar said he’d had no word—he seemed relieved by that silence, as well he might. Comes Walter.”

  Walter brought a pitcher of cool, light wine, a cup, and a straw. He held it while I sipped. There was an intravenous drip going into my left arm; it was glucosaline solution, Prospero said, and it would stay in until I could eat soup at least—a day or two or three.

  Writing slowly, I told them what had happened with Gemnamnon.

  “So no head, no hide, no dragon’s-rump roasts, no trophies,” Walter said mock-mournfully. “I don’t know, Gwydion, perhaps we’ll have to prosecute you under the Rare Species Protection Code. He was one of a kind, after all.” He grinned.

  So are you, I wrote. You belch somewhat less toxic matter, and thus are more welcome in society.

  Walter laughed. “You’re not in bad shape for all that,” he said.

  Ulrike came in the next afternoon with Josquin, shyly smiling at me.

  “Hello,” she said. “Your horse came back today. I thought you’d like to know that.”

  Thank you. That’s good tidings. I thought he was gone for good.

  “I found him,” she said proudly. “He was in Threshwood, and I was riding Hussy there and we found him by a brook having a drink. He came home with us.”

  Josquin, sitting his chair wrong-way-round at the end of the bed, caught my eye and said, “Indeed, I’ve never seen a nag more grateful to see his stable. He positively fawned on the groom.”

  Good. Was he hurt?

  Ulrike said, “No, not that I could see, he didn’t limp, he was just dirty and his tack was a mess. The groom said he’d look after him.”

  I’m glad you found him. He might have decided to take a holiday.

  Walter came and joined us with a guitar and strummed it softly; Ulrike patted my hand and didn’t say anything more while Josquin gave me his daily dole of amusing gossip and observations on events in the City. Thereafter he visited me every morning for breakfast. Usually Ulrike and Walter dined with me, and Ulrike also came every evening in the last light of the long summer day and read to me for an hour in her soft, clear voice.

  Prospero must not have told them about Mother yet, I guessed. Gaston had asked me to tell them, too, but I clutched a faint hope that Prospero had preempted me. Very likely he still intended to stick me with the job, as he’d had me go tell Gaston.

  I was beginning to understand how Prospero thinks. That was indeed what he intended. He waited until I could eat to tell me.

  “When your tongue’s restored to its accustom’d nimbleness,” he said, carefully undoing bandages, “you must exercise it in vigorous explanation.”

  I waited.

  “Your siblings still must hear the tale of Freia’s restoration,” he went on.

  I sighed.

  “You shall tell them,” he said, and his tone banned contradiction.

  “Ungh.”

  “Good. This looks better, far better—albeit could hardly have been worse. You’re drawing on the Spring.”

  “Ungh.”

  “Yes, it’s coming nicely.” His fingers were gentle and cool on my sensitive face. “Hm. Here was your jawbone broken; ’tis knitting as ’t should. You’re lacking a tooth in here; breaking, tore your gum, and I’d no choice but remove the rest, and stitch the gap and put a placeholder … Here you’ll have a handsome scar a while. Was’t a rock hit you?”

  “Ungh.”

  “Thought so. Such local wounds seemed too particular for Gemnamnon’s gross claws. Ribs and shoulder—they’re cracked, whacked—and there’s naught but suffering them to mend with time. No internal damage—you were lucky, damned lucky—nay, luck was naught of it. You were superb.” He smiled at me suddenly. “Well done, Gwydion.”

  Finally I had done something right, I thought.

  “Essay a word or two. Let not your jaw move overmuch.”

  “Aaah. Hm. Aches.”

  “Aye, so ’twill.”

  “I’m hungry,” I said.

  “Soup,” Prospero replied sternly.

  Dewar called a couple of days after my face-bandages came off. I’d postponed breaking the news to my sisters and brothers until I could speak clearly. I was in my workroom in my dressing-gown, writing up an account of my latest run-in with Gemnamnon in a notebook.

  “Gwydion,” he said from the Mirror as the spell completed.

  “Hullo,” I replied.

  He blinked at me. “What hit you?”

  “Dragon.”

  “I can tell it’s a complicated story,” he said after a moment, frowning slightly and then looking down. He bit his lip and went on, “I talked to Gaston just now. He said you’d hunted him out and told him …”

  “Had to,” I said. “Prospero insisted. And they both insist I tell the others.”

  He frowned in truth, his eyes hardening. “She didn’t want that.”

  “So said I, but she’s there and Prospero’s here.”

  “I see your side of it, of course. Father can be a … oh, never mind.”

  I nodded. “How is she?”

  “She’s conscious, but not speaking or responding externally.”

  “So she knows you, but does not show it—”

  “I have not seen her,” he said.

  “Then how—”

  He went on, repressed emotion evident in the coldness of his voice, “They will not allow it. They have accepted Thiorn as a therapist of sorts. She is helping Freia accelerate the relearning. But I’ve not seen her yet myself. Gaston said he’d come, and I know they’ll let him talk to her.” He looked away.

  Poor Dewar. Just as Freia had been barred from Gaston, so now Dewar was barred from her, forbidden to know firsthand how she fared or what she thought of him. I said, “I’d like to see her myself.”

  “I’ll tell them that, but don’t expect anything.”

  “What about doing a Lesser Summoning?”

  Dewar tipped his head to one side and thought about it. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I mean, I don’t know whether she could handle it.”

  “Hm,” I said. “Guess I won’t try. And if anyone else does, I’ll turn them to stone.”

  “It’s probably best not to bother her.”

  When he had released me from the Summoning, I finished my writing and then took out my Keys. I had an unpleasant duty to perform. I’d procrastinated, excusing myself through bodily weakness, but I shouldn’t postpone much longer. I supposed I could tell Walter and Ulrike together, since they were both here, but the others I’d have to Summon.

  This I did. I reckoned that telling them one-on-one, rather than calling a family meeting, meant that they were less able to gang up on me and condemn me collectively, but it also meant repeating the tale until it sounded, to my ears, glib.

  I began with the toughest: Alexander.

  “You,” he said, leaning forward and looking down at me through a fire. “Gwydion, by the Sun, I’m going to castrate that stud of yours—”

  I couldn’t help myself—though it hurt, though I knew it would only make him angrier, I began to laugh, the mood of the moment ruined by my brother’s outrage. Cosmo had not been idle, it seemed. “Must have been the wind,” I said, and forced my laughter to stop. “That’s not what I must tell you—”

  “That mare is worth—”

  “Oh, Alex. The foal will be a fine animal. Let us train it and give it to Ulrike. She has none of her own yet, and it will please her. Or do you find some fault in Cosmo’s bloodline?”

  “Your Cosmo’s bloodline and your own—” he began, and to his credit he stopped himself, because I was ready to interrupt him with harder words. “What do you want to tell me that one of your louse-ridden birds cannot bring?”

  When I finished he shook his head and broke the spell without saying anything. He was s
hocked, and I suspected when his shock receded he’d be more furious than ever before. Phoebe just nodded slowly. “It explains much,” she murmured. Marfisa reacted much as Alexander, with but a hint of visible anger. I had no stomach for a quarrel; I had decided to let them abuse me and excoriate me if they would, but no one did, which was disconcerting.

  I sent Anselm to get Walter and Ulrike and spoke to them in my rooms before dinner. Walter was shocked and then delighted. Ulrike was flabbergasted and at once asked when she would see Freia.

  “Not for a while,” I said, and I repeated my policy statement on Summonings.

  “Good idea,” Walter said, “she’d get no rest with everyone pestering her all the time. Gwydion …” and he shook his head slowly, rather as Alexander had.

  “What?” I asked, irritably.

  “The things you do …” was all he said, and he left, still shaking his head.

  “I do what I have to do,” I muttered at the door.

  “Gwydion, may I tell Josquin?” asked Ulrike softly.

  “No. Let us wait and be sure. I know nothing of this; it is all Dewar’s doing. Anything could go wrong. Tell no one, discuss it with no one.”

  She nodded obediently and sat staring at her hands. “The Spring …” she said as if a thought had vocalized itself without her noticing.

  “Hm?” But it brought something to mind, something I felt I should be more forceful about. “Rikki, you should drink of the Spring. You should have done so long since.” Our family was so small, so fragile in comparison to Argylle’s extended clans, and it was hard to believe we had gained instead of losing. The gain should be confirmed.

  Ulrike’s fingers twisted together. “I’m afraid to,” she whispered.

  “What do you fear?” I sat down beside her on the divan.

  She continued knotting and unknotting her fingers, but I knew her well enough now to see that she would speak when she had her nerve up. I waited.

  “When … Father took me to Landuc,” she said, almost inaudibly, “I … he led me there … and I approached the Well as he commanded, and afterward … when I was in its fire …” She stopped.

  “Many people have visions,” I said, hoping to help.

  “Father told me that, and explained that I should not be afraid but … but … it was not like a vision …” Ulrike moistened her lips and went on, “it was a voice, a voice that said, ‘Beware lest the sorcerers and the Spring of Argylle use thee as thy mother.’ I saw darkness and grew dizzy and I thought I was falling …”—she was shaking now—“and then it … it stopped and I was back, with Father beside me, and I could not tell him what I had heard, I was reeling so. And he sent me away to Argylle then …”

  “Oh, my,” I said, understanding. “As you thought, to your death. Ulrike, you should have said something. Right away. What a—What did you hear again?”

  “ ‘Beware lest the sorcerers and the Spring of Argylle use thee as thy mother,’” she repeated, gulping. “Gwydion, I do not want to fall in as she did!”

  “No, no, no,” I said, and patted her shoulder. “You won’t. I swear it. In fact I …” I stopped, the phrase turning in my mind, and my stomach lurched. My hands began to shake. “That bastard,” I said softly. “Panurgus.” How had he known?

  “The dead king?”

  “It was a man’s voice you heard?”

  “Just a voice.”

  I said, more to myself than to her, “He thought Dewar would try to use you to bring Mother out again.”

  She went white. I should not have spoken.

  “Ulrike, he would not! Ever! Nothing of the kind! That says more about Panurgus than Uncle Dewar, believe me—Dewar’s a good man, a kind man, and he would never harm you. Nor would he push you in the Spring, nor would anyone else. Believe me. Do you believe me?” She had to believe me …

  Ulrike, after a moment, nodded hesitantly.

  I swallowed and squeezed her hands in mine with gratitude. “Thank you. We are not murderers and necromancers, Rikki. Dewar may be eccentric, but he wanted Freia to be herself, not a bizarre amalgam of herself and someone else. He is above the kind of … perversion that Panurgus suggested. —You do see how that can be read two ways?”

  “Yes …”

  “He meant it thus, certainly,” I said. “Remind me not to subscribe to Landuc’s oracles.”

  25

  ULRIKE DRANK OF THE SPRING THE morning after our talk. I filled the cup for her myself, a special, simple golden chalice kept in the room where the Keys and the frozen clock rested. We did this without audience, the two of us, because she wished it so.

  “Wouldn’t you like to have the others there?” I asked her, puzzled, when she said that.

  “No,” she said, “n-no, I—Just you.”

  “Why not?” I asked. My parents, Walter, Phoebe, and Dewar had been there to embrace and kiss me when I had drunk; Walter had had all his siblings and Freia and Gaston. To do it solitarily seemed furtive, stealthy. I felt that Prospero ought at the very least to be there also. “Why not Prospero, even,” I suggested, “or Walter?”

  “He’s … Grandfather has been so angry …” she said, “so cross lately, I … I . .”

  Prospero had been curt and closed with everyone. “He can be that way,” I said. “As you wish, then, Rikki. But if you want someone else, anyone would be honored. I am honored that you ask me.” I was honored and relieved. The sick idea that I had weighed her murder to give her mother a new life gnawed my conscience. As for Prospero, his distemper was its own reward; he could not complain of the slight when he had been snapping and snarling at the household and family since the day Freia had been freed from the Spring. “What about Alex?” I suggested. She liked him more than I, and it was her day.

  “He—I don’t think so,” she said, “he was cross about me keeping his horse …”

  “Hussy? That’s not your fault.” Damn Alex’s temper.

  “He came to get her while you were ill,” Ulrike said, turning an exceptional shade of crimson, “and when we went to the paddock, she, I mean your horse, they—He was very angry.”

  “Oh,” I said, and snickered. “That’s life. She’s a good horse and so is Cosmo. Why don’t you tell Alexander you want the foal? He’ll give it to you if you ask.”

  Her eyes widened, and she looked interested. “I will then. He said all kinds of … bad things about it. He won’t want it, poor thing. But I don’t think he’d like to come to Argylle again, Gwydion; he said he wouldn’t, and I … I ought to drink soon, oughtn’t I.”

  “When?” I asked her.

  “Does it take very long?”

  “Minutes.”

  Ulrike seemed surprised. “It took a long time at the Well.”

  “Our Spring is a less controlled thing,” I said. “There’s nothing to do but drink. Why don’t we go down right now?”

  Her eyes widened and then she swallowed, straightened a little, and squared her slender shoulders. “Yes,” she said. “Right now.”

  She already knew what Prospero had reminded me of recently: you must not hide your fear and paint it over with good intentions to yourself. It cannot be reasoned away, only faced and outfaced.

  So I fetched the chalice and Ulrike a cloak against the chill underground, and we walked down the Spiral and the Black Stair, around and around cased in night-dark stone. At the bottom, I led her slowly to the Spring, letting her feel the space and the solitude. I could feel more than that, the outflow of the Spring itself, but to her this was only empty.

  “It’s so big …” she whispered, and her whisper ran up to the vaulted roof and trembled.

  “Vast,” I said softly, “and unmeasured.”

  “How can it all be hollow under the Citadel …”

  “I do not know. I have wondered that also. It is part of the way the world is. If I ever find out, I’ll tell you,” I added, and pressed her hand on my arm against my side.

  The park bench, incongruous and mundane, elicited no comment from her.
I brought her to the edge of the Spring, which was, as ever, calmly and steadily pouring unseen substance into the world. I wondered whether, had Freia still been within it when Ulrike approached, it would have become excited. Probably not. Mother has better sense than that.

  “Just stand here,” I said, and reached over the Spring with the chalice. I closed my eyes and Summoned the Spring, and suddenly my arm and the chalice were drenched in the geyser of water—real, wet, visible water—which the Spring’s force became.

  “Oh!”

  We were showered by droplets, bathed in light.

  “Drink and know the world,” I offered, and she steeled herself, her narrow jaw clenching for an instant, and took the chalice and sipped. I kept my hand on the cup lest she drop it, but she did not; she sipped, swallowed—it just tastes like very fresh sweet fine water—and then drank all. The geyser still shot up, pattered down on us, misted our hair and dewed our lashes. Ulrike lowered the chalice and looked up at me, and she smiled, her eyes shining.

  On the tenth day after Ulrike drank, I was rudely awakened by someone knocking over a stool in my workroom and cursing fluently. I sat bolt upright, staring, as Dewar came in.

  “Don’t leave furniture in front of a Mirror of Ways,” he snapped at me, rubbing his shin, limping slightly.

  “On the contrary,” I said, “it proves an effective alert of unauthorized usage. What’s wrong with your own Mirrors?”

  “They’re in another room,” he retorted, “and if I come here to talk to you privately, do I want twelve servants and my father to bump into me?”

  “Small chance of that at the break of dawn.”

  He looked out the window, twitching the draperies aside. Sun streamed in. I rubbed my eyes. Farewell to those last tag ends of dreams …

  “Pretty day, too,” Dewar said wistfully, and then grinned, turning from the window. “Did they come here?”

  “Who?”

  He began laughing wildly. He flopped into a chair and got himself under control. “I’m sorry. It’s too funny. I’ll have to go back and pick up Thiorn. I had to tell you. They didn’t come here, of course.”

  “Who?” I demanded, tossing a pillow at him. “Talk!”