by Sword Stone Table- Old Legends, New Voices (retail) (epub)
Britomart hauled herself to her feet and went over to the river. Its cold waters cleaned her face and hands and woke her up enough to face the task of putting on the armor. She knew how to do it in theory, of course, but theory was different from practice—particularly when that practice involved buckling stiff leather fasteners and hefting heavy plate while also kirtling up your skirts. Britomart cursed more than once, making the roan snort at her for interrupting its peaceful lunch, but at length she was fully dressed in the late queen’s attire.
It was heavy, like carrying one of her little cousins around on her back, but Britomart found she could bear it. She buckled the sword belt around her waist and sheathed the sword in its scabbard, and that weight even felt right. When she turned to look in the river, she saw a wavering version of the reflection she’d seen in the looking glass only the day before: her face peering out from beneath a brightly gilded helm, a shield in one hand and a spear in the other. Britomart had the curious sensation of seeing herself overlain with an entirely separate person.
It felt oddly right.
“I’ve never heard of anyone with a destiny like this before. I have not the least idea what to do next,” Britomart told her watery reflection. It made no reply, though in truth she did not know what she would have done if it had.
The roan nickered at her when Britomart made to mount it in full armor.
“If you don’t like it,” she said, “you can take it up with Merlin.”
If she headed back downriver now, Britomart would reach her father’s castle by nightfall. She would doubtless receive a scolding of a kind she’d never received in her life, not even the infamous time when as a fractious toddler she had refused to properly curtsy to her grandfather. Part of her wished to head back regardless, to the promise of a hot dinner and a warm bed and her mother’s furious fussing. She had the armor she’d seen in the looking glass, after all, and Merlin had never said that this destiny of hers required anything more than finding it and returning home.
And yet. She turned to look at the eastern horizon, where her father’s lands met those that Britomart had heard of but never seen. She felt that restless sensation under her skin again and thought: Well, was this what it was like to have a destiny? A proper one, like something from a storybook. Not one that an odd, old sorcerer pushed you into, but one you couldn’t escape because you felt that tug behind your breastbone, pulling you along to something greater than yourself. Britomart had long known she had a future, of course. Marriage and inheritance, childbirth and the running of a great household and adjudicating boundary disputes and maintaining alliances: these were the things she’d been raised to do. She had neither particularly looked forward to nor especially dreaded it. It was simply what would happen.
There was, Britomart realized, something very attractive about the idea of knowing that there was something ahead of her that was entirely unknown.
Another moment’s indecision and then she made a choice. She headed east.
Britomart rode and slept and rose the next morning to ride again. The roan never seemed to tire as much as it should, nor was the hardtack or cheese in her pack ever quite finished. Merlin’s hand in all of this seemed apparent; though Britomart did not understand quite why he should care so much. She hardly knew the magician, after all. He had been a constant presence in her father’s court during the time of the last war, but that had ended more than ten years ago. Britomart had only hazy memories of it: of the quieter evenings in the great hall with so many of the warriors absent, of the pinched-mouth look on her mother’s face as she made yet another inventory of their stores, of a distant smudge of smoke on the horizon. Merlin had taken no notice of her then that she could recall.
Still, if there was one lesson that Britomart had taken from the stories her childhood nurse, Glaucé, had told her, it was that magic wielders were full of fancy and caprice. She might never know what whim had spurred Merlin to push her out into the wide world rather than send her back to her parents for a good scolding—and perhaps it was better that she didn’t.
There was nothing to tell her that she had passed over the borders of her father’s lands, but Britomart was sure that she must have. Both the river and the bridle path beside it narrowed, and then the bridle path disappeared as the river entered a woodland more dense and still than any Britomart had seen. She had heard garbled tales of this place, she thought, from some of her father’s knights. They called it simply the woods, an area on the border of four kingdoms and very carefully claimed by none of them because it was home to too many of the old magics.
The roan didn’t seem to care where they were, though. It ambled sure-footed over loamy soil and somehow always knew how to find the river and due east if a boulder or a fallen tree meant they had to take a detour.
“Were you always in my father’s stable, I wonder?” Britomart asked the roan as it picked its way through a fern-filled glade. The stables were always kept well stocked, and whenever she wanted to ride out, Britomart always had her pick of some of the best horses in the kingdom. She couldn’t remember ever seeing this gelding before, though. “Or were you conjured up especially by Merlin for me?”
The roan snorted at her.
Britomart made camp that night in the shade of a boulder so massive that it was of a height with some of the wood’s tallest trees. The sight of it made her think fanciful thoughts about a giant’s toys abandoned in the woods once playtime was over. In fact, once she looked at it a little more closely, its sides seemed a little too smooth, its angles a little too precise to be something entirely natural. Yet Britomart found that it didn’t unsettle her any more than did the woods around her. She had her helm and her armor, her sword at her side and her spear within arm’s reach. Perhaps it was foolish of her to put her trust in weapons she had never used, in whose use she was scarcely trained. And yet something told her that as long as she wore them, she was safe.
Once she’d eaten, Britomart made to bed down for the night, but the sudden rustling of undergrowth nearby stopped her in her tracks. It wasn’t a very loud sound—like the noise a vole might make rummaging for food—but in the unnatural stillness of the woods, it stood out. Britomart reached for her sword, but before she could unsheathe it, a man stepped into the clearing.
Or at least something that looked like a man. He was tall and thin, weeping and wringing his hands like a person in deep mourning. But his eyes were all wrong. They were a flat, milky gray shot through with stark red veins, and the sight of them made Britomart’s stomach lurch.
“You weren’t supposed to be here, but now you are supposed to be here!” the maybe-a-man wailed. “She should have been mine, this isn’t fair, this isn’t how things work.”
Britomart held up her hands, placatory. “Sir, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I mean you no harm. My name is Britomart of North Wealhas, and I—”
“Oh, I know who you are,” the maybe-a-man said, still weeping and shaking his head vigorously. The long, thick braid of his pale hair slapped against his back. “You’re Merlin’s weapon. You’d think, of all beings, he’d understand the danger of swapping around destinies willy-nilly! But no one ever listens to poor old Scudamore, do they?”
Britomart blinked, startled. Merlin’s weapon? She carried a sword he’d helped her find, sure enough, but she’d never so much as unsheathed it. She still felt far more like a girl hanging her mother’s chatelaine from her waist and playing at lady of the household than she did a warrior. Not to mention, she was quite sure Merlin needed no weapon other than the power that sang through his blood—she’d heard the tales of battles he’d fought long ago, at the side of Camelot’s king.
“I’m not anyone’s weapon,” she began, exasperated, and then with a huff removed her helm. The cheek guards made it uncomfortable to talk. “And I don’t know—”
“Oh!” Scudamore’s pale eyes widened; his tears s
topped. This didn’t make him any less unsettling, because now he was smiling. His mouth opened wider than should have been possible, revealing double rows of sharp teeth both top and bottom. “Oh, you’re a human girl. Well, that makes all the difference! A destiny’s a destiny, but there’s no call for me to be jealous when you’re just a girl. A human girl could never take my precious one’s heart from me. Come on, then, time’s wasting.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Britomart said, setting one hand on the hilt of her sword and hoping that she looked appropriately determined. “I have no quarrel with you, sir, and I wish you no harm, but I—”
“What do you think you’re here for, if not your destiny?” Scudamore replied. “You must go fetch her from the fortress, for I cannot go in myself, but if she’s inside the fortress, how can she be my wife? It’s very obvious, girl!”
None of this helped Britomart understand any better what was happening, but Scudamore was looking at her with what she thought must be an expectant expression and pointing into the woods. “Come on,” he said again, “or she will surely die, and soon.”
Britomart could not in good conscience refuse to help in the face of a declaration like that. She couldn’t claim that she knew what she was doing, either, but still she picked up her spear and shield before following Scudamore into the trees. He walked backward, facing Britomart with that horrible fixed grin yet still somehow knowing how to place each foot without stumbling or causing the least rustle of a leaf.
“Maybe it’s good that you came,” Scudamore said. “Because I only just got these hands, you know, and I would hate to singe them trying to retrieve my promised wife.”
“I beg your pardon?” Britomart said, certain she’d misheard, but Scudamore seemed not to hear. Instead he gestured behind him with a flourish at a great boulder. Even larger than the boulder where Britomart had made camp, the black stone was shot through with veins of azurite that gleamed blue in the starlight and was riven down the middle by a great, clean crack.
“On you go!” Scudamore said. “Into the fortress with you, and bring my wife back to me.”
“That is a boulder,” Britomart pointed out carefully.
Scudamore sighed deeply. “They’ll give a destiny to anyone these days, won’t they? Say what you want about that prig Galahad, but at least he knew a destiny when he had one.” He pointed behind him again, more emphatically. “Go into the fortress and bring me back my wife,” he said, speaking slowly and pointedly in the way someone might to an incompetent servant.
There was clearly no point in trying to reason with him further, so Britomart walked past him toward the boulder. Even when she got close to it, it looked nothing like a fortress. The crack, however, was wide enough to walk through if she held her shoulders just right. As Britomart took her first step in, she realized the glow around her came not just from the azurite veins in the rock but from tongues of blue flame that licked and lapped along its flat planes. The farther she walked, the bigger and hotter the flames grew until they formed a solid wall ahead of her.
Britomart thought for a moment about turning back, but that was selfish, unworthy of a daughter of King Ryence. Whatever she might think of Scudamore, he had been clear that someone in here was in trouble, and Britomart couldn’t knowingly leave another person to suffer. She raised her shield, gritted her teeth, and pushed forward.
At first it was uncomfortable, like going inside the keep’s kitchen on a sweltering summer’s day while the bread ovens were still sending out waves of heat. Then it hurt like sunburned skin, and then it hurt like deliberately closing your hand around a hot poker, and just when Britomart thought she couldn’t take it anymore, she’d have to retreat, the heat vanished.
Slowly she lowered the shield to find herself in a great hall, one that far surpassed that of her father’s in size and splendor. Britomart craned her neck upward but could not make out the ceiling overhead, if there even was one. The walls were made of the boulder’s black and glittering blue rock but expertly carved with patterns of intertwined figures, arms and limbs in sinuous tangles, faces in profile. Britomart turned in a slow circle. There were no windows or doors, no braziers or candles or fireplaces, yet there was still somehow light enough to see by.
“A fortress,” she said softly to herself, and quite certainly one crafted with magic. It didn’t look like any fortress she’d ever seen before, but then again there were many things she’d seen the past few days that she never had before.
There was one person lacking, however, who Britomart had expected to see, and that was Scudamore’s wife-to-be. The room was empty save for some low benches set around the walls, rushes strewn on the floor, and a dozen or so tapestries hanging overhead. When Britomart called out a greeting, no one answered.
It began to dawn on her that she did not know what or who Scudamore was and that he had vouchsafed no proof of even the little he had told her. There were no doors, and a fortress could easily serve as a prison. Britomart fought back a sudden panic and the even weightier sense that she had been very foolish.
“Patience,” she told herself, looking around the room again. “Think.”
The tapestries drew her closer inspection. They were bright splashes of color in an otherwise dim room, each clearly the work of many months and showing some great feat from the old stories. Some of them showed mighty battles or even—Britomart blushed to see them—acts of love, of a kind which she, as a maiden, was not supposed to know. Each seemed made by a different hand and from different materials, but all bore the same line of text: Be bold but not too bold. Who would decorate an abandoned room in such a way? But then, as she looked, she realized that between the bottom of each tapestry and the floor were seams in the wall: each tapestry hid a door.
Now, Britomart had listened to tales told at her father’s court. Perhaps not as closely as she should have, since she had decided to look in that mirror unbidden, but she had listened. She understood that doors hidden behind tapestries warning against foolhardiness would likely lead to something unpleasant, no matter how well-armed one might be. The chances were high that only one of the dozen doors would lead her to where she needed to go—but how to tell which one? Was there a riddle hidden within the designs, perhaps, or some cipher?
Before Britomart could begin to puzzle it out, she startled at the blast of a trumpet followed by a gust of wind so violent it nearly knocked her off her feet. She planted them and the butt of her spear against the ground, gritting her teeth and feeling her eyes water. But as soon as the wind began, it stopped—and one of the tapestries on the far wall slid to the side, and the door behind it opened.
A procession of…well, Britomart had no better word for them than creatures came gamboling through the door. Each was no bigger than a young child, but their skinny limbs had more joints than did any human youth, and their heads were topped with tufts of moss-green hair. The noises they made were like the cooing of doves, yet when they caught sight of Britomart, they stopped and shrieked in unison.
“You,” said the lead creature in a surprisingly deep voice, “are not Scudamore of the Tower of Glass! We were promised the rending of his limbs and the marrow to suck from his bones!”
“I am not Scudamore,” Britomart said, tightening her grip on her shield and spear. “And I’d thank you to leave me be.”
The lead creature leaned toward her, inhaling deep so that its nostrils flared wide and quivered. “Oh, no, you won’t do,” it said, spitting on the floor with every sign of disgust. “You won’t do at all. Not enough salt and pepper in the world to make you edible.”
“How did she even get in here?” another creature asked. “There are supposed to be wards!”
“Can’t you smell it on her?” a third creature said. “Reeks of destiny and possibility. Your common wards won’t do much against that.”
“This is why I keep saying we need
to form a guild,” the second creature said. “Much less nonsense if you’re in a guild.”
“We never had any of this in the old days,” the lead creature said.
Britomart was starting to get frustrated. It had been a very long week. She beat the butt of her spear against the ground. “Where is the woman I am to save? Take me to her.”
“You don’t—” The lead creature squinted at the spear. Its many chins trembled. “Whose…whose weapon do you bear?”
“I carry the spear and shield and sword of the late queen Angela,” Britomart said, standing as tall as she could.
“I told you!” the third creature shrieked. “Didn’t I say she reeked of destiny?”
“Amazons! I’m not getting involved with Amazons. Knew this job wasn’t worth it,” the lead creature said, putting its hands on its hips. It tossed back its head and let out another cooing, ululating cry. The other creatures joined in, and the noise of it made Britomart’s ears ache. “Through that door, straight along the hallway. You can’t miss it. Just look for the tosspot who’s a terrible boss,” it said to Britomart before turning to its fellow creatures. “Come on, lads, time to go home.”
The creatures swarmed up the walls and disappeared into the darkness overhead.
Britomart stood and stared after them for a moment, then shook herself. That had been very strange, but at least she’d figured out where to go without having to solve any tapestry riddles or fight her way through a horde of creatures who wanted to eat her bone marrow. After all, she was the one who’d decided that a destiny sounded attractive—she couldn’t back away from it just because it turned out to be more than a bit odd. She walked through the doorway and down a narrow hallway.
